The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (47 page)

Then the relentless barrage of guns started up again from the heights of Santa Margherita behind them, hitting beleaguered Birgu, and Nicholas saw the very surface of the water in the harbour tremble at that monstrous sound, like water in a cup. The guns drowned out the soft noise of the approaching galleys, and the barrage continued as the deafening background music throughout the chaotic fighting of the next hour.

The Turkish galleys surged forward at ramming speed, appearing suddenly very stark and clear out of the last veils of mist, and crashed hard into the spiked palisade amid a furious exchange of gunfire from the galleys and the walls behind. Yet the vessels could not crash through the barrier, and were now dangerously held and exposed, when their whole plan had depended upon being able to slip in fast, scale the walls and attack.

The defenders rose up from their cover and those that had arquebuses fired a murderous close-range volley, and then all gave a cry and waded out to the palisade.

The Turks saw immediately that they must attack with all force or back-row in dismal retreat, and with their characteristic bravery and zeal, they attacked. Janizaries stood and stripped almost naked, realizing their fine robes would only be a hindrance, while light-clad marines and grinning Barbary corsairs, well used to such fighting, plunged off the sides of the galleys and swam up to seize hold of the palisade, trying to haul themselves up and over. But the defenders were already out there, the palisade their defensive wall, to which they clung like monkeys in a tree. Guns were useless in the watery, close-packed mêlée. It was sodden and bloody fighting, hatchet and club, dagger and sword.

Some Turks tried to swim around the palisade underwater, but were clearly visible from the walls of St Michel above, and shot in the back as they swam. They turned over, the air stopped in their lungs, and floated dead in spirals and coils of their own dilute blood.

Others came with hatchets and hacked busily at the ships’ ropes that held the rough palisade together. There came a single cannon shot from the Corradino heights beyond, perhaps trying to show support and hit Fort St Michel, but it misfired badly and hit one of the Turkish galleys. By double misfortune it ruptured the galley’s powder store, and the entire sixty-foot vessel reared up like a mule as its stern was blown apart like a black exploding star. Some men closest were deafened for life, staring around open-mouthed and dazed in the soot-laden air, treading water, until the splintered timbers began to rain down about them, some big enough to brain a man.

Nicholas squatted on a cross-bar of the palisade and clung left-handed to a well-roped stave, the sword of Bridier de la Gordcamp in his right. He saw a shaven-headed corsair, a gold ring in his nose, make for the ropes with a hatchet, and swung ape-like down on top of him, driving the sword through the back of his neck. The fellow turned in the water, even as he was dying, and struck out with the hatchet. Nicholas blocked it with his left arm and fell into the water beside him. He came up spluttering and the fellow was dead, his hatchet turning and sinking slowly to the bottom of the creek. Nicholas tried to haul himself back onto the parapet but a very fat Turk, as at home in the water as a whale, dragged at his legs and tried to drown him. He revolved underwater, refusing to panic, sword still in his hand, and drove it long into the Turk’s broad belly, a white bloodless mound seen underwater. The gush of blood and matter was horrendous, and Nicholas erupted out of the water gagging and spitting, hurriedly clambering back onto the palisade, shaking with disgust. The slaughtered Turk floated just below him, obscenely ripped, eyes open.

All along the length of the palisade it was the same grim tale of stabbing, hacking, splashing, floundering, screaming, drowning, the once crystal-clear blue water now pink and foaming, the galleys crowded and bumping helplessly behind. The Turkish attack on Senglea had stalled.

In his pavilion, Mustafa heard of Mezquita’s cavalry sortie and of the palisade and the stalled attack on Senglea in almost the same instant. Only moments later, another obsequious and trembling
messenger came to tell him that one of the four biggest basilisks on Margherita had exploded, killing the entire gun team of master and eighteen men. Evidently it had been damaged by the Christians, but the master had not realised, nor seen the damage before reloading and firing.

Mustafa’s mouth worked furiously beneath his moustache. The days went by, the guns roared on, from the heights of Sciberras and Corradino lookouts reported that Birgu appeared to have been half demolished already. And still the Christians fought back unrelentingly, with one trick and ruse after another. There was even some roving regiment of boy slingers working on the walls of the town. In the name of Shaitan and all his devils.

In his dreams now, Mustafa saw himself receiving from the Sublime Porte the silent but eloquent gift of the Black Kaftan. The Sultan’s way of saying that he was relieved of his command, and must return immediately to Stamboul, where worse might await him.

‘Ready the Janizaries for the frontal assault,’ he snapped.

‘Honoured Pasha,’ said I
ş
ak Agha, ‘the main walls of Birgu, though ruptured and part-fallen, still present a formidable obstacle. The townspeople within must be helping, they rebuild them all the time, as fast as we—’

‘Do not insult me with your objections. Ready them. What of the mining engineers?’

‘They dig through solid rock. It is slow. They work day and night.’

‘Tell them to work harder. Tell them the walls of Birgu must fall soon.’

A curved Ottoman horn sounded across the waters before Senglea, and some of the attackers fell back and swam to the galleys, leaving the left-hand section of the palisade unmanned. The defenders were barely aware of what happened or why, as they moved along to help their struggling comrades further down, where the attack still came on thick and fast. They fought desperately, vastly outnumbered but with the single advantage of defence, holding their position with bitter determination, clinging exhausted and soaked to sodden timbers, eyes half blinded with sun and salt and sweat,
flesh turning white and ridged in the water. Wave after wave of corsairs continued to come at them.

Then bow guns roared from the galleys not fifty yards off, a dozen guns in grim unison, all aimed at that unmanned section, some of them so skilfully levelled that their shots were perfect
tiro di ficco
, the Portuguese speciality denoting a ball that bounced shallow over the water and hit the hull of a boat low and hard, with devastating effect. Now it did the same to the wooden palisade. It was a cunningly judged manoeuvre. Iron balls passed over the water faster than the eye could see, left a single slash of white foam across the surface, and then the hastily improvised spars and staves of the barricade were smashed in pieces, flying into the air, a hail of splinters, long timbers wheeling and turning and falling, the defence in ruins.

Nicholas clutched an upright pier, shuddering under the impact, and glanced round in dismay, hair plastered to his cheek. He understood at once. The palisades had been smashed down just below the most damaged section of Senglea’s walls.

The galley drums beat, the slaves heaved under the lash, the oars creaked against the roped tholes. Gunners rammed fresh powder and ball into the muzzles. Even in the few moments it would take to cross the water, they could loose another volley.

Firing as they came, demolishing the very last of the palisade that held them back, or even firing directly into the walls of Senglea, the low galleys surged forward. The corsairs attacking the rest of the palisade fought with renewed ferocity, hacking and slashing blindly. The last surviving defenders gulped deep breaths and hurled themselves from the tottering barrier into the water. Formation lost, many more were killed as they fled. It was impossible to get back onshore fast, even though it was but five yards behind. There were too many dead bodies, thickly strewn. The once clear sea was a swamp of saltwater and blood and corpses, already softening and bloating under the sun.

The bedraggled remnant crawled out onto the narrow stretch beneath the walls, smashed and jagged behind them like the teeth of some aged giant. Nicholas was one of the very few young enough, with enough strength remaining in his aching limbs, to haul and clamber up the walls into Senglea. Clutching the great sandstone
blocks, his skin cracked and stinging with salt, he wondered if he had been wounded anywhere. He paused to glance back, vaguely conscious of random arrows clacking into the stones around him. Only twenty feet below, corsairs were seizing kneeling men by the hair, pulling back their heads and cutting their throats. He flopped over the wall and fell at the feet of an armoured soldier who shoved a half-pike under his chin.

‘For God and Sant’Iago,’ he gasped.

One hundred and twenty fresh fighting men from each galley leapt directly onto the collapsed rubble of Senglea’s wall further along, and stormed into the little settlement.

A beacon fire was lit on the bastion of St Michel, and La Valette ordered axemen on the Birgu side to be ready to destroy the pontoon bridge that crossed Galley Creek.

‘Senglea will soon be lost,’ he said, his face grey. ‘God help the defenders.’

The last of them there must get back across the pontoon ahead of the Turks, or they would be caught there and massacred.

The Turks surged victoriously over the bare promontory of Senglea, firing the few mean huts and the windmills with glee, and hacking down anyone who opposed them. They opened the gates of the settlement to their forward trenches and gunnery teams, who dragged in smaller guns by hand immediately, and set them up on the east side of Senglea, turning on Birgu at short range just across Galley Creek. After nightfall they would drag up the bigger guns.

The panicked defenders felt as if all Christendom had shrunk back to just Malta, and now Elmo and Senglea were lost too, all that remained of the island was huddled Birgu itself. A trapped animal, surrounded by hostile guns: the last redoubt and stand, the tattered remnant of the once vast domain of the Knights of St John. A few mean streets, churches, a fort, a half-wrecked hospital. Barely two hundred knights still able to fight.

The forces over-running Senglea were jubilant and numerous but ragged in formation. Suddenly the gates of the tiny single-square fort of St Michel slammed open, and out marched a small but close-packed column of armoured men. Perhaps no more than thirty in number, they bristled with pikes and swords, and in a cold, efficient silence, they began to slice through the milling, rejoicing Turks and corsairs.

At their head was a heavily armoured knight who sliced and slashed with wordless slaughter, uttering never a sound, a terrifying steel automaton amid the flames and gun smoke. It was the Marshal Copier himself, and by his side fought Henri Parisot. Seemingly invulnerable, Copier cut down half-naked Turks to left and to
right, moving slow and implacable amid the carnage, his fine fluted greaves and cuisses gleaming silver and red, his olive-wood peg-leg thumping over the dusty ground. Steadily the column cut a swathe across Senglea promontory. The Turkish commander, Yacoub Agha, saw what was happening and called his men back into some kind of formation. The last few ragged defenders, Nicholas running among them, all youthful dreams of glory gone, had their chance to dash for the pontoon bridge on the eastern side, and flee across to Birgu.

The armoured knight and his closest comrades held the head of the pontoon now, and the Turks came against them in far stricter order. Behind them, St Michel was already fallen, the last defenders there beheaded and tumbled over onto the rocks below for the gulls. The standard of Suleiman flew from the bastion.

The moment St Michel was fallen, her captured guns were turned back to fire across at San Angelo, and long lean rowing boats nosed out round the end of Senglea. Well bulwarked with pavisades of wool and cotton bales, men crouching behind them, muskets smouldering, they made for the great chain across Galley Creek. Now La Valette could see them himself, he needed no reports. The battle spread out below him. Birgu, the last isolated outpost on the tiny island that still held out against the might of the Ottoman Empire, was now truly under attack from all sides.

He knew who that was coming round to the chain. It was Candelissa, the Greek renegade, and his band of cut-throats. They held half the Aegean throttled in a reign of terror, and none were more savage in their cruelties. If anyone on some small, sparse island resisted paying them their ‘taxation’, Candelissa had no hesitation in having the population of the entire island killed. Their heads were collected in sacks and sent to Topkapı Sarayı for the Sultan’s approval. They had opposed his God-appointed rule, and were therefore heretics as well as rebels. It amused Candelissa to have the sacks of heads carefully labelled by age and sex. ‘Old men.’ ‘Crones.’ ‘Women expectant.’ ‘Suckling infants.’

La Valette sent out his orders.

Standing at the back of his galliot, Candelissa cried to his corsairs that Birgu itself was already taken from the landward walls, and they would soon be in for the loot. A lookout heard his lie
from the battlements of San Angelo, and La Valette promptly had a gigantic banner of the Cross raised over the post of Germany at the landward end. The corsairs saw it going up and looked puzzled.

A Spanish soldier with a fine musket said, ‘I could hit the swine even from here, Sire, I’m sure of it. Top him off like a nettle in the field.’

‘No,’ said La Valette. ‘I want them in closer.’

Candelissa and his men could do nothing against the great chain or the massive posts at either end, sunk into the rock and thickly mortared. The Sultan’s flagship herself couldn’t drag them free. His galliots drifted uncertainly. No one fired down on them from San Angelo above.

‘The scum are almost out of gunpowder!’ yelled Candelissa. His men grinned.

La Valette looked across to the ruins of Senglea.