The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (43 page)

All the people looked on at this strange sight, falling quiet. It was the Inglis boy, the Insulter, come back from Elmo to dance in the street like a prince with the daughter of Franco Briffa. She was still a maiden pure, you could tell, but in the expression of each of them there was such a love that burned, and in the deadly seriousness of their young eyes, his a Northern sea blue and hers the colour of Malta honey.

Franco Briffa also saw, and his jaw fell open. These two loved like none other. ‘
Dios mio
,’ he muttered. There had never been such love as theirs. Some looked on and remembered the love they
had known when they were young, and some longed to know such love, and some felt the most aching regret that they would never know such a love as this of these two stately dancers, the slim Malta girl and the bloodstained boy, dancing in the Street of the Knights, as if no one else lived in the world with them but they alone.

Only hours later, soon after sunrise the next day, guns booming, banners flying, casting giant crinkled shadows over the sea before it as it came, the Ottoman fleet sailed safe at last into harbour in Marsamuscetto. The Turkish force, with all its supplies, munitions and material, was now on the very doorstep of San Angelo and Birgu.

Another departure was little noted, and went without gun salutes and fanfare. A small galley departed for Tripoli, bearing in a casket the corpse of Dragut Rais.

Nicholas slept a day and a night in the Sacred Infirmary, given drugged wine, barely conscious of the chaplain physicians ministering to him. When he came to, Smith and Hodge were by his bedside.

‘You’re …’

‘Both still in the land of the living,’ said Smith, a faint smile showing through his black beard. ‘God wanted me here still.’

‘Right as rain,’ said Hodge equably. His arm was still in plaster.

‘But what about—’

‘He’s fine,’ said Smith gently. ‘He needs a lot of rest. But he’ll mend. He’s made of ox leather and oakwood. Here’ – he fumbled for something in his jerkin – ‘you know that in the days of ancient Rome, a man who saved the life of a fellow citizen, such as Coriolanus, was crowned with the oak-leaf cluster. Well, I could find no oaks on this blasted island. So,’ he tossed something into Nicholas’s sheeted lap, ‘I give you this.’

It was a lemon.

‘I am honoured,’ said Nicholas gravely.

‘The honour, though, is all real,’ said Smith, and he was serious again. ‘You saved Stanley’s life.’

‘He wanted to remain at Elmo. To die there.’

‘He was wrong. As was I. We are needed here.’ He looked about
the beautiful hall of the infirmary, but seeing things far off. ‘Or we soon will be.’

Fra Reynaud said he could leave that evening.

‘You had more than one interesting wound that could have killed or unlimbed you had it been half an inch different. That musket ball that ploughed across the back of your skull when you were swimming. Impressive. Perhaps you ducked just in time.’

Nicholas felt gingerly. There was a wide crust of scab across the back of his head.

‘How you went on from there, I do not know. But I have seen many wounded men perform miracles of endurance. You are among them.’

He felt himself colouring with pride, and to cover it he asked, ‘What else? My elbow?’

‘Otherwise cuts and bruises. A wide cut to your flank that you probably never even noticed.’

He shook his head. ‘No, I—’

‘Sewn with six stitches and healing well. And your elbow, another very lucky strike indeed. Another half inch in and you’d have lost your arm. As it was, the ball took a flap of skin with it, a chip or two of bone, and drove another chip far under your skin as it passed. Still there.’

‘Really?’

‘Butcher surgeons always go digging around trying to get things out of a man’s flesh,’ said Fra Reynaud dryly. ‘Often better to leave them in. Many’s the time I’ve wrapped up a knight with a musket ball still in him. It does no harm. It’s your bone, isn’t it? It’ll dissolve away eventually, I expect. No point digging you up and you losing more blood, is there?’

‘But – it can strengthen a man to lose blood, can it not? Balance his humours? I thought Galen—’

‘
Galen
,’ said Fra Reynaud with a sudden flash in his eyes. ‘
Hippocrates
. Don’t speak to me of the Greeks, the theory of humours, miasmas, all those notions of theirs.’ He leaned close to the boy and whispered, as if passing on the direst heresy, ‘All the best of the Hospitallers’ knowledge of medicine,
we learnt from the Saracens
.’

Then he stood swiftly, appeared to give just the faintest wink, and departed.

‘Fra Reynaud!’ he called after him.

Reynaud stopped. ‘I am busy, boy.’

‘Just one thing. What is the date?’

He looked back. ‘You have no idea?’

‘None.’

‘It is now the Eve of St John, the 23rd of June. Elmo that should have fallen after two or three days at most, stood for one day short of a month.’ He smiled.

Nicholas’s head sank back. Thirty days. Sweet Jesu, it felt like it.

He walked south through the narrow, deep-shadowed streets of the little town, and to the steps below the great curtain wall, three times the height of Elmo’s defences. Vast quantities of earthen sacks, backed with huge timber props and well-placed stones, bulked up the walls from behind, so that even a direct hit with the biggest ball in the Ottoman artillery might be absorbed and do little damage. Such was the hope.

From the top of the walls, he greeted the soldiers there and they did not know he was from Elmo so he said nothing. Looking out towards the stony heights south, golden in the setting sun, he saw a horribly familiar sight. Great gun emplacements and platforms being erected, well shielded and protected, and the smaller guns being craned into place already. Between the guns and walls, ominous gouges and mean trenches beginning to run through the rocky ground, where the Turkish forward troops and the miners were creeping up to the base of Birgu’s walls. Over before Senglea, it was just the same. They ran through the earth like the cracks of some slow motion, infinitely sinister earthquake.

That evening there washed up on the shores of Kalkara a horror unspeakable.

Word was sent to La Valette, and he came running down to the harbour wall. There floating below were three great crucifixes made from lashed spars, and tied to them in savage mockery of the Passion were the naked bodies of three Hospitallers from Elmo. They were headless, mutilated and degraded beyond recognition.

The people of the town looked down aghast at the nightmare
scene, their hearts chilled within them. Was this the fate that awaited them when the Turks came? Was this what they would do even to their children? What kind of an enemy were they facing? Even the warm and passionate blood of Malta ran cold. How could they fight such devils, and so many? Their faith faltered.

La Valette himself seemed frozen in horror for a moment. He was heard to mutter just two words under his breath. ‘
Christ re-crucified
.
’

Then he gave angry orders that the foul flotsam should be brought up with all care and reverence, the bodies untied from the spars and washed and censed and prepared for burial. The spars should be burnt.

His white silent rage was terrible to behold. His lips worked as he watched the blue bodies carried away, signs of the cross carved into their bare chests with daggers.

Then he gave a further order. None dared to question it, for to do so was to break their vow of obedience, though it went against the old rules of chivalry. Some said that this was no longer a war that could be fought to the old rules of chivalry, and others said that without such rules to ennoble and purify it, the business of war was but the business of butchery, and there was no choosing between good and evil.

They brought up the eight Turkish prisoners that they had already captured in the last few days in sallies from Birgu, careless scouts, and one prospective miner who had foolishly been surveying the walls a little too close. They came up from the deep dungeons of San Angelo, blinking even in the dimming twilight. The guards led them in chains up to the gun platform and unchained and beheaded them, despite their pathetic last pleas, and then their still-turbanned heads were rammed into the mouths of the guns there and fired across the harbour towards the Turkish encampment.

Curious what this seemingly random cannon fire might be, the Turks sent down slaves to see, and minutes later they dredged from the waters of Marsa the eight tattered heads and brought them to Mustafa’s pavilion. He set down his cup and nodded. He understood.

La Valette further ordered there to be no public display of grief for the fall of Elmo nor for the mutilation of these knights. ‘Neither
grief nor surrender,’ he said harshly to the captains of the langues, his fists clenched on the tabletop.

Since all proceeded as appointed by Heaven, why should they grieve? Their brother knights had done their duty, they had fought most valiantly, and died in the service of Jesus Christ. Grief and tears were a womanish insult.

‘Let the bodies be laid to rest with all due dignity,’ he said. ‘Then let us return to our posts, and be ready to fight and die as they did.’

The bodies of the unknown knights were placed in caskets and laid to rest in the crypt of the Conventual Church, to be properly buried at a later date. A less urgent time.

Meanwhile the Feast of St John the Baptist, the patron of the Order, proceeded with all due and solemn ceremony. No gunpowder was wasted in fireworks, but bonfires were lit and church bells pealed, and a general air of rejoicing began to fill the streets. For the Baptist had announced the coming of Christ, and with the coming of Christ they were saved.

Nicholas went out into the evening streets, wearing the fine sword of the Chevalier Bridier de la Gordcamp once more at his side, and gravely conscious of it. The little town was alive with light and life, and even though the vast Turkish encampment that now spread out threateningly across the whole of the heights of Santa Margherita was many times larger than Birgu and Senglea combined, and existed solely for the destruction of the town, hearing the distant shouts and sounds of rejoicing within the Turks must have wondered what these people under desperate siege were made of.

The Feast of St John, as La Valette intended, restored order and confidence after the horror of the crucified knights.

The indefatigable priest, Roberto di Eboli, preached a sermon to a packed town square, his voice even and resonant, his dark eyes burning with the faith, and his words put new strength into the people’s hearts. He spoke of the loyalty unto death of the Baptist
himself, and of that evil eastern tyrant, Herod. He conjured for the illiterate people vivid images of how the Baptist had been captured by that accursed Oriental potentate, and mutilated and beheaded, and they felt how eerily full of meaning and symbol it all was, on the very night that the three crucified bodies had washed ashore from Elmo, similarly mutilated and killed by this new and godless eastern tyrant, Suleiman and his hordes.

Someone tapped Nicholas on the shoulder. He turned, a smile already spreading over his face, and there was Stanley. Pale and gaunt, but a bony, sinewy strength still in his tall broad frame. He was freshly bathed and his beard neatly shaven, and he wore the long black robe of the Hospitallers, emblazoned with a great white cross on the chest, that made him look startlingly like the monk he was. It seemed wrong to embrace a monk, so Nicholas seized his hand. Stanley clapped him on the back.

‘My one regret,’ he said, ‘is that though I am told you saved my life, I have no recollection of any of it. By the way, Dragut is dead.’

Nicholas looked startled.

‘His mortal remains gone to Africa, his soul down below. Apparently there was a hubbub at that battery on Is-Salvatur, as they tried to hit some impudent Christian swimmer crossing the harbour right under their noses. Dragut took charge, and in the haste their gun misfired and he was struck in the head by a piece of stone. He died soon after.’

Nicholas clenched his fists in front of him.

‘It could be said,’ Stanley whispered, ‘that the swimmer killed him.’

‘Well, I …’

‘But that seems an exaggeration, does it not?’ His eyes twinkled. ‘We should be listening to the words of Fra Roberto.’

Roberto di Eboli said, ‘The martyrs of Elmo too were beheaded for their faith, crucified for their Lord, on the very Eve of St John. In everything there is a pattern, to those that see with their eyes unclouded, and understand with their hearts. In everything there is the Hand of God.’

He spoke of how the Baptist today sat at the right hand of God the Father himself, as you could see in many of the paintings in the
churches, his lean figure and coarse camelhair garment unmistakable. And most inspiringly of all, he reminded the people on this lonely and beleaguered island that all of Christendom this night was celebrating the same Feast with them. From Norway to Spain, from Spain to the borders of Russia, their fellow Christians were lighting bonfires in the streets to celebrate the Baptist, patron of the Knights Hospitaller. Looking down from the walls of heaven tonight, the angels would see all of Christendom as nothing but a great starry floor of bright and burning bonfires.

A new fire was kindled in their hearts at that wonderful image. The people cheered, their dread and loneliness falling away, the sound of their cheering like the cannon’s roar.

A French knight, the Chevalier St Aubin, out patrolling near the Barbary Coast, had tried to run the Turkish blockade recently and failed, and so fallen back after gallant engagement to harry the Turkish ships as best he could in a single galley. The Chevalier Romegas, too, still roamed the seas like a wolf.

So it was with surprise and delight that another Christian vessel managed to arrive in the Grand Harbour that night, flying the flag of St John. On board were a number of knights and soldiers come from Europe, including a young French knight, Henri Parisot, La Valette’s own nephew.