The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (49 page)

In the evening, La Valette heard the roll of the dead from Sir Oliver Starkey.

‘The Chevaliers Federico Sangrigorio; Giovanni Malespina; Raffaele Salvago …’ The list went on and on.

At one point La Valette interrupted, ‘Do you have news of the English boy? The Ingoldsby boy?’

Starkey scanned the list for his countryman. ‘No, Sire. He is still with us. I know he fought at Senglea—’

‘Did he?’ La Valette clenched his mouth.

‘He came back almost last, with the Marshal Copier himself, moments before they blew the bridge.’

La Valette’s eyes gleamed. ‘Continue.’

‘Javier, the nephew of Don Pedro Mezquita.’

‘What age was he?’

‘Eighteen. Don Pedro was wounded trying to save him. Slain Janizaries lay around the boy like mown flowers.’

La Valette buried his face in his hands for a moment and then looked up again. Starkey had never seen him look so tired. How much longer could a man of his years go on, barely sleeping, barely eating, grief-stricken to the heart but refusing to weep? Starkey wished he could take some of the burden from him. But La Valette would not share it. The grief and the burden would lie on his old shoulders until the end.

‘The young always die soonest,’ said La Valette softly. ‘With their brave, reckless hearts. And?’

‘Don Federique de Toledo.’

‘Slain?’

‘Yes, Sire. A grenade misfired, he lost his hand, and still he fought on until he collapsed from loss of blood. The medics could not save him.’

‘Age?’

‘Also eighteen.’

The son of Don García de Toledo, Viceroy of Sicily. How would that help or hinder the relief plans? It was a sad loss. They were all sad losses.

Names piled on names. Starkey’s voice grew more and more strained. At last he hesitated. He could not finish.

After a time, La Valette said quietly, ‘My nephew is dead. Henri Parisot is dead.’ He nodded almost imperceptibly. ‘Also eighteen.’

‘Sire—’

‘They have only gone along the road we all must follow soon. And every knight is equally dear to my heart as if he were my son.
The loss of Javier de Mezquita moves me no less than the loss of my beloved nephew.’ His voice was very even and calm. Starkey could not bear to look at him. More quietly still, he said, ‘
A little while, and we shall not see them. And then a little while, and we shall see them
.’

His grace and greatness as a leader, his natural authority, his sad nobility, were never more evident to his secretary than then.

He stood and turned his back on Starkey and went over to the window and looked out across the harbour. Dying sunlight bright on half-drowned coloured banners and sundered timbers, flags of gold damask, corpses lining the shore, shields washed new and cleansed.

‘Leave me now,’ he said.

As he bowed out, Starkey saw that the Grand Master’s shoulders were shaking.

Under cover of moonless nights, the women crept out through small postern gates and culverts in the walls, veils over their faces, as much to shield themselves from the foul stench of the dead than out of modesty. The men kept watch from the walls, in case of further attack, while their womenfolk went among the enemy fallen with knives, cutting the throats of any they found still moving. They killed them, they said, for the sake of Christ and their children.

Stanley watched over them. Of all battles fought, this was the most merciless. Yet he could not doubt that at the last, when the Turks captured the town, in their vengeful fury they would kill and crucify every living thing within. He foresaw scenes of women cut in two, boy slingers nailed to parodic crosses all along the walls.

No, this was not a battle that left room for mercy. He cradled his gun and waited.

Two hours or more into the night, he woke Nicholas with a whisper, shaking his shoulder. ‘I need your eyes, boy. Out there, just this side of that sand ridge, see? I thought I saw a spear.’

‘What do you mean?’ he mumbled, still rubbing sleep away.

‘Just watch.’

Nicholas stared another minute, and then to his amazement saw what Stanley had seen. A spearhead, bright in the moonlight,
suddenly appeared eerily out of the ground itself, and then vanished.

He stared at the knight, not understanding.

‘Miners,’ said Stanley. ‘Testing their progress. But they have given themselves away, still twenty yards out from the walls.’ He squared his shoulders. ‘Time for the counter-attack, I think.’

The Turks had found mining through the solid rock of the island a terrible labour, and the defenders did not attempt counter-mines. Instead Smith and Stanley led a small, swift party out through a small postern gate to the place where the telltale spear had been glimpsed, and with ferocious rapidity, simply gouged their way down through the earth into the tunnel from above. They dropped down into it and penetrated some way along, until they were surprised by a group of miners.

What an infernal skirmish was fought underground then. In that perpetual subterranean darkness, the Turkish and Egyptian miners fought back with picks and shovels by dim torchlight, choking on fetid air and dust. Eventually they were beaten back far enough for the knights to stack ample explosives about the pit props, set light to the fuses and flee. Moments later, a hundred yards or more of painstakingly built tunnels were detonated to ruins, and many miners buried alive.

Back on the walls, a panting Smith and Stanley grinned when they saw the telltale subsidence in the ground beyond, and clapped each other on the back.

Mustafa heard this latest news in utter silence. He did not even give orders for further tunnels to be built.

The night before, his personal valet had died of camp fever. The night before that, his cook had also died. But they were only servants. The worse news was that a massive resupply ship from Stamboul, carrying much-needed powder, food and medicines, had been sunk by a Christian galley. The galley flew the flag of the Knights Hospitaller, and its hull was painted blood-red.

It was the galley of the Chevalier Romegas.

News came to La Valette that the harbour of Marsamuscetto had been blockaded with tethered logs. To stop the Sicilian and Spanish relief from coming in?

‘Or perhaps,’ said Starkey hopefully, ‘to stop the Turkish galleys deserting? Which would show we are indeed winning, would it not?’

‘Of course we are winning,’ said La Valette. ‘We have been winning for four months. Another month of winning like this, and we’ll be done for.’

Again the Grand Master’s harsh joke spread through the town as fast as a whipped dog. They smiled grimly and fought on.

Tales and rumours had begun to spread out over the wider world also. At last the epic nature and importance of the Siege of Malta began to dawn upon Christian Europe. The French court stirred guiltily, the German princes uneasily, Philip II continued meditating his private plans, though sharing them with none. The merchants of Genoa and Venice looked to their great galleys and counted their guns and wondered. Even Protestant England said prayers for Catholic Malta. Her cold Virgin Queen demanded intelligence from her exceptional network of informers, questioning her spies with sharp, crisp interrogation, in the six different languages she spoke fluently.

Where would the armies of Islam strike next, if Malta should fall? France and Spain, her greatest enemies. No harm in that. Yet what if the Turk should conquer them, and all their possessions besides? The Lowlands of Holland resound with the cry of the muezzin? What if the divided German princes fell one by one, what if Rome was sacked once more, and Genoa and Venice and the Adriatic bowed the knee to Suleiman? Then England might stand alone, a solitary island in the silver sea, the warriors of the Prophet like a pack of slavering hounds upon the French coast, reaching across, straining at their leash, eyes hungrily fastened on the green fields and woods of her beloved kingdom.

Pope Pius IV, who had shown little resolve in the face of threatened catastrophe, led prayers in St Peter’s, saying, ‘Almighty Father, we realise in what great peril Sicily and Italy will be, what great
calamities threaten all Christian people if the island of Malta should fall …’

He announced that he would remain in Rome rather than flee, if the Turk should come. But many wondered, was Judgement upon the world?

The politics and prayers were not heard on Malta, exhausted and decimated and deafened by the Turkish guns. None could run the blockades any more. Turkish galleys ringed the island, cannon ringed the last tottering, dust-caked streets of Birgu. Whether or not the Holy Father or the Queen of England was praying for them now, they knew nothing of it. It hardly mattered.

It was August. Perhaps the Feast Day of St Lawrence, the 10th of August, perhaps later. Days had lost their names. There had been no festivities to mark the patron of the Conventual Church. There were no priests left alive. The young priest who had laughed on hearing Nicholas’s confession – Nicholas passed him in the street. He lay under a shroud of dust, his black hair now plaster-white, a thin trickle of blood dried at the corner of his mouth, his young face serene.

Maddalena went through the streets with a pitcher of well-watered wine and a fresh loaf, and found Nicholas on the south walls. He hurried her down to shelter again.

‘I have brought you these,’ she said.

He took them. ‘I am grateful for it. But you must return home, it is safer there.’

‘Why should I be kept safe? You are not. Many are not.’

He looked exasperated.

She shielded her eyes and looked up at the toothed walls. ‘Will they stand? Will we live?’

‘Yes. I think so. But pray for it.’

Suddenly she raised her arms above her head, stretching, showing off her slim figure, and pirouetted, there in the ruined street. She said with a smile, ‘In November it is St Catherine’s Day.’

Girls’ minds were so
strange
. ‘Your point eludes me.’

‘It is Maltese custom that on the feast of St Catherine of Alexandria, a girl can ask a boy to marry her.’

‘In my country that’s on the 29th of February. Only once every four years. A safer arrangement.’

‘Well, you are in Malta now.’

‘I know that. The cannonballs keep reminding me.’

She looked serious again. ‘It will be over soon.’

He nodded. ‘One way or another. You should go home.’

She hesitated and then at last she said shyly, ‘I think of you … all the time.’

‘I think of you likewise,’ he said softly. ‘Which is why I want you to go home.’

She turned and went. A little way up the street she looked back, but he was climbing up on to the walls again and did not mark her. Only when he reached the parapet did he look back, but she was gone.

All day Nicholas and Hodge had fought on the walls, watched advance and retreat, shaking at the impact of the guns. Day after day. Their shoulders were bruised deep from the arquebus’s recoil, their eyes stung, their ears thrummed and sang. Nicholas’s elbow still ached, especially at night when he tried to sleep.

Boy slingers were shot from the walls. He helped to bury a ten year old. A woman fell into his arms where she worked, and he never knew what had killed her. He could see no wound. A Spanish soldier was hit in the head and leapt up and ran away down the street like an athlete and then fell to the ground dead.

At evening the guns would fall silent and the attacks fall back. Mustafa had ordered day and night – but it was not possible. The guns must be rested.

Smith said, ‘Even Janizaries must rest.’

The late summer sunsets flared more and more resplendent over the island every night, and dawn was like heaven on fire. People said it was all the dust kicked up by the guns. The setting sun bathed the stricken streets in soft gold. The guns fallen silent, old people and cripples and the wounded emerged from the remnants of their houses in their crumpled dust-caked robes, and women and children coming from work on the walls. In black widows’ gowns, heads covered, they moved like mourners through the fallen streets of their poor beloved city. Some picked up strewn rocks and carried them as if in a dream, to mend their hearts with mortar and stone. Some wept as they walked, and some women walked steadily ahead with tears running down their dusty faces, for their children were
all dead, yet never making a sound nor giving way to a sob. Silent tears that seemed to run in mere accompaniment to their solemn labours as they gathered stones and worked on into the night.

They heaved and rolled aside half-sunk cannonballs, they drew out the dead from beneath the piled walls and from collapsed cellars, passing out infants, crossing themselves, working in absolute silence. An infant half crushed, its body half white with dust and half black with dried blood, was passed reverently along the line of workers and finally wrapped in a clean cloth and laid on the ground for a mother to find if she still lived. Or if her soul had gone before, then the soul of her child had gone with her. Yes, said the women, there was the mother, she had died flung over her own infant, see how the wall had collapsed over her and crushed them both. She died in the pathetic hope she might shield her infant with her own body from the damage wreaked by Turkish guns so huge they were pulled by eighty oxen. Now mother and child had died and gone together to the otherworld, said the women. As it should be. No infant should go alone.

The sun was glorious over Sciberras and inland, illumining the great cliffs of the west copper and gold, the sea barred with burning orange and the sky like red banners streaming in the windless evening sky.

Down the street came the boy, limping slightly, helmet under his arm, his fair hair haloed by the sun, and even in their grief and exhaustion the women greeted him, the Inglis hero, and smiled. His armour barely shone beneath so much dust, the street golden in the evening and light, dust motes dancing, women cooking the evening meal, children coming out to play with hoops as if the siege was all a dream and over now.

Nicholas stopped and leaned against a wall and rested his head and smiled. There beneath a small vine was a wooden cradle with an infant in it, perhaps three months old, left by his mother as she washed clothes round the corner in St Mark’s Fountain. The infant looked up through the vine leaves and the warm light twinkled on his face as the leaves moved and stirred, and he laughed and reached out to play with them. He couldn’t reach, so Nicholas broke off a leaf with its stem and put it in his pudgy little hand. The baby
clutched it wonderingly, his fingers like tiny pink shrimps, and then gurgled with delight at the green waving flag in his hand, and the coming and going of the setting sun beyond the leaves, and the flickering green forest light over his upturned face.