The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (11 page)

‘Strip to the waist.’

Smith and Stanley then prodded their white torsos as they shivered in the wind, flesh like a plucked fowl. Hodge retained a bit of meat. Nicholas was as thin as a pikestaff.

‘Saint John have mercy,’ muttered Smith. ‘Well, leave off your shirts. You’ll heat up soon enough. Take these staves.’

For half an hour on the tilting deck, Smith and Stanley had the boys raising and sweeping the staves over their heads like swords, lifting them one-handed, and finally batting at each other, slash and parry. By the end of that time, the boys’ arms were aching like fury and screaming for rest.

It didn’t help that some of the brawny mariners had come to watch. Ears gleaming with gold rings, mighty forearms inked with strange devices of mermaids and anchors and random symbols of good fortune, they stood nearby laughing and hurling abuse.

‘What ye doing, lads, swatting flies?’

‘They couldn’t fight off a pigmy with a straw!’

‘That’s a pretty couple of lilywhite lady’s maids you’ve got with you there, sir knights!’ called another. ‘But pray, where are their bubbies?’

‘You’ll hear worse insults than that in the heat of battle,’ grinned Stanley.

‘Half an hour by the sun,’ said Smith, scowling at the boys’ exhaustion. ‘When the Turks come to Malta, how long will they fight us? For a morning? For the daylight hours only? No. All day and all night, every day, every night.’

The boys drooped and panted, covered in sweat.

Smith gave them each a chunk of bread and a glug of small beer, and then told Nicholas to attack him with the stave. The boy flailed wide and at the perfect instant, the knight simply stepped backwards. The stave swept past him, Nicholas twisted after it, and Smith tripped him to the deck.

The knight glared down. ‘Which corporeal part of me were you trying to strike, lad?’

Nicholas hauled himself up on all fours, his knees and left hand painfully scuffed where he had hit the planks. The mariners’ uproarious laughter echoed in his ears, until drowned out by the master bellowing at them to get back to work or they’d feel his whip.

‘My upper arm?’ mocked Smith. ‘Which would be armoured anyway. First lesson. A blade will get to your enemy ten times more often with a straight thrust than a wide slash. One step backwards is enough to avoid such a slashing blow, but a long thrust with your weight behind it … Your man will have to take two, three steps backwards. That is far harder. If there’s a wall, breastwork, another man behind him, it’s impossible. You’ve got him.

‘So what if you’ve got no sword? What if it’s dropped or broken?’

The boys were silent.

‘You use anything you can lay your hands on. Your sword is broken? Throw the jagged hilt in your enemy’s face, and then come on after it. You inflict as much damage as possible, as quickly as possible. You go for his eyes, his throat, his stones. You want him out of the fight, and fast. For there will be many more of them coming on behind. You show no quarter, as your enemy will show no quarter.’

Nicholas felt as if his brain was already filling up, but Smith went on relentlessly.

‘There is only one kick you will need. The forward kick, planting your foot square in your man’s chest and shoving him back.’ He demonstrated swiftly on Hodge, who grunted out air and tottered backwards. Stanley grabbed him to stop him toppling back over the rail.

‘Any other kick, you will lose your balance, expose your side, end up facing the wrong way – and with a Turkish blade in your guts. Your feet are for standing on, not kicking. Mules kick. Once in a while you might stamp on a man’s foot. That hurts him. But by that time you’ll be so close to, you’ll know what he had for breakfast.

‘Never, ever, ever use your bare fist. A knight with a broken hand is useless. Guard your hand well. Never throw idle punches like a drunken varlet in the street. Here, boy. Punch me as hard as you can.’

Nicholas, knees still stinging from where Smith had tripped him, needed no second bidding. He punched out hard. Smith could easily have dodged the punch, but he took it full on the breastbone. Nicholas pulled back his bunched fist with a gasp of pain.

‘See?’ said Smith. ‘It hurt you more than me. I’ll have a small bruise tomorrow but no more. Why? Not because you’ve no more meat on you than a sparrow – though you haven’t. But it’s a very, very rare man indeed who can really throw a hard punch. Forget it. It’s a fool’s fighting. Whereas to seize a sturdy oak joint stool and clout a fellow in the sconce. That would show some wit.

‘So: use an object. You hear me? Never, ever use your fist. Always—’ his voice rose to a sudden roar – ‘
seize the nearest object!
’

And at the same time as he bellowed these words, Smith seized
the wooden stave from Hodge’s hands and charged at Nicholas like a maddened bull.

It happened in the blink of a bird’s eye, the twitch of a wren’s tail. The boy had time to glance about – fear did this, they said later, fear slowed the sun on the dial and gave you time. There was only one thing within reach, the corner of an empty hemp sack weighed down under a coil of rope. Nicholas saw the end of Smith’s stave driving hard at his belly and knew Smith would not stop. He meant to injure him.

His only weapon of defence, a scrap of hessian, flew up in Smith’s face. At the same time Nicholas twisted and the stave struck his bare flesh aslant, only lightly grazing it in passing. He fell on the stave and gripped it, until Smith wrenched it back with his far greater strength and left the boy’s hands burning from the friction.

Smith said, ‘See? You fought off an armed man with only a bit of hopsack.’

‘Not just a man either,’ said Nicholas. ‘A Knight Grand Cross of St John.’

Smith cuffed him on the side of his head with a great paw.

The closest he came to praise.

All that day the rules were drummed into them. Never use your fists. Kick but rarely. Thrust, don’t slash. Any hard object can kill a man. Care for your sword. Go for eyes, throat and stones. One backward step may be as good as a shield.

There were harder lessons the next day, and the next. Never leave an enemy merely stunned or injured. Kill him. Never go to the defence of a wounded comrade before one still fighting. He will do the same by you.

And there were the rules of chivalry. Never hurt a woman, always defend her. Nor child nor beardless boy. Never insult or spit on the enemy dead. Always honour and bury your own.

‘Beyond that,’ said Stanley, ‘there are many oaths and vows that bind a sworn Knight. But if you still mean to fight with us at Malta—’

‘We do.’

‘Then you will fight only as gentlemen volunteers.’

‘I will be a Knight of St John after.’

‘It takes years.’

‘I’ve got years.’

It was after dark with the ship sailing slow over a starlit sea before the boys finally devoured their evening ration of bread and cheese and bacon and fell asleep almost instantly. Smith and Stanley let them sleep for ten hours that night, they were so exhausted. They would be just as exhausted tomorrow night, but then they would have only eight hours. The night after, seven. By Malta, they would have learnt to live on five.

They murmured to each other of how they had gone to England for sacks of gold, for cases of guns, for knightly volunteers, and come back with a bundle of swords, a couple of purses, and two errant boys who had hardly raised a sword in their lives. A pretty success. They could guess the Grand Master’s verdict all too well. His words stung in their ears like imagined hail.

Yet tonight the sky was clear and studded with stars, the wind gentle from the west, making hardly a sound in the sails. Only the gentle swish of the bow wave below them.

The knights prayed to God for wind, for storm, for tempest. Anything but this damnable pacific calm, anything to hasten them. For they felt it in their bones.

The enemy was sailing too.

The boys fought with staves, they did endless squats, they pulled themselves up ropes and rigging and climbed to the fighting top, the master’s sour objections being silenced with gold coin. They ate their grim rations like young wolves, and on the fifth day they asked to do more sword-arm raises. Each did twelve.

After a week, Smith showed them how to wear a helmet. First he settled his own rounded morion on Nicholas’s head without its wadding inside, and then struck him lightly on the crown. It rang, and hurt.

‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘A helmet without good wadding or bombast is useless. Stuff it well.’

He packed it tight, set it on the boy’s head again, and struck hard. Nicholas reeled instinctively, eyes tight shut – but barely felt discomfort.

‘And if you’ve helmet on, don’t forget you can butt the other fellow in the face hard enough to blind him. Two pieces of armour, and two only, protect you most. Helmet and breastplate. For the rest, ’tis better your arm or leg does not encounter a Turkish blade. For you know which will come off best.’

‘The blade will come off best,’ said Stanley, ‘but your arm will come off easily also.’

‘Spare us your labouring wit, brother knight.’

‘My wit is mostly ’
armless
. Like a knight careless in battle.’

‘I beg you.’

‘Like a dissolved Parliament, his
members
have departed.’

‘
I beg you
,’ repeated Smith.

Stanley sighed. ‘Had I not been a knight, I would have made a royal court jester.’

There was silence.

Dawn, and the sun coming up to larboard.

‘Out of France,’ said Nicholas wonderingly.

‘Out of Spain,’ corrected Stanley. ‘We sail south and west now. Look hard and you’ll see the snow-capped mountains that stand sentinel behind the Spanish coast. The mountains of Cantabria.’

They were beautiful in the sun. And the very word,
Cantabria
…

‘From their oak forests are made the Spanish galleons at Bilbao, which sail all the way to the Indies and back. Noble mountains, are they not, Master Hodgkin? More wild and sublime than any of your Shropshire hills?’

Hodge grunted. ‘Fatter sheep on the green hills of home, I’ll wager.’

They were rounding Cape Finisterre. Stanley was indicating eastward where Santiago da Compostela lay, the great pilgrim city where St James was buried, when the master called out from the sterndeck, ‘Storm coming in from the west. Hoist in sails!’

Sure enough, on the western horizon there were growing towering clouds, a dark and ominous grey, swollen with rain. The first gusts flurried across the sea, flinging up spray and flattening out the little waves. But the waves would be growing soon.

‘Off the coast of Galicia too,’ muttered Smith, and a look of genuine anxiety crossed Stanley’s bearded face.

‘Is that bad?’ asked Nicholas.

‘Bad?’ growled Smith. ‘It’s worse than the coast of Cornwall.’

Only a few minutes later a wall of wind hit the little ship like
a backhanded swipe from Neptune himself. Every timber creaked and the ship keeled hard to larboard in the blast. The sails cracked like musket shots and the blocks rattled in the rigging. Everything started to tremble, including Hodge and Nicholas.

‘Pull her to starboard, head her into the wind!’ roared the master to Pidhook at the whipstaff. ‘She’s a tilt to the north, bless the devil. We can bring her out from the coast, or at least keep her off it.’

In another instant the air was filled with icy rain driving into them almost horizontally, stinging their noses and cheeks and making them gasp. But it was fear, raw fear that overwhelmed them. Pain was nothing to that. The black, clawed coast looked horribly near through the murk. The boys hooded their faces with their cloaks, though not being able to see the heaving waters around them made them feel instantly sick.

‘Pages, to the pump!’ roared the master. ‘Vizard, check anchor! Legge, wad up the water jars and lock down the hatches! Down below first, landsmen, ye’re nothing but a danger up on deck! Down below now, and no spewing on our cargo either. If you see a sprung leak bigger than an infant’s piss, give us the yell.’

Clutching on tight to rail and rigging, Smith moved aft to where the master stood bow-legged, holding on tight himself as the ship began to rear and buck over the growing waves. He said something, lost in the teeth of the gale, and the master stared at him, rainwater streaming down his face, and then shrugged as if he was listening to a madman.

Smith clawed his way back and loosened a pile of ropes tied round a capstan. He threw one end to Nicholas.

‘Bind yourself tight, boy, round the chest, tight as if your life depended on it! Which it does!’

Shaking with fear, feeling himself white-faced and nauseous, his eyeballs aching, Nicholas tried not to see the size of the waves already running in from the west, like green glassy dunes. To the east, white water breaking on needles of black rock. The ship straining to sail outward, the deck already tipping steeply. He forced his cold, wet hands to tie the thick corded rope around his chest, just below his arms, in a double knot. It was momentarily a relief to have something else to think about. Then the knot was done, and
the ship gave a terrific lurch, timbers audibly screeching above the gale. He pictured nails twisting, boards springing loose … Terror gripped him again. He thought his bowels might empty.

‘And you, Hodge, the other end!’

No less terrified than Nicholas, Hodge did as he was told.

‘Now, about the main mast, both of you, two circuits. It’ll not be used for sail for a while, not on this blast!’

Slipping on the drenched deck, the two boys clumsily circled each other until both were looped fast around the great spruce mainmast, slipping and sliding back and forth, scrabbling desperately with wet leather soles on the sea-darkened timbers of the deck. The ship rocked and reeled, briefly on an even keel and then over again with a sickening lurch, the larboard deck almost down to the water’s edge. Yet they kept their balance and their panic under control, knowing they were bound to the ship with rope thick enough to tow another.

‘Now!’ bellowed Smith, and thrust the staves into their numbed hands once more. ‘Fight! If you were Norsemen of old, you’d do this with daggers to the death!’