The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (20 page)

‘Full-grown and ferocious, now in Hades. You knew his father.’

La Valette’s eyes narrowed.

‘The late Sir Francis Ingoldsby. He fought with you at Rhodes.’

Rare emotion swam in La Valette’s eyes. Nostalgia and memory. He stood before Nicholas, towering over him, and laid his hands on his shoulders. ‘The son of Sir Francis Ingoldsby,’ he said softly. ‘Lord bless you. Have you brothers?’

Nicholas shook his head. ‘Sisters. They are cared for in England. My father died some six months ago. Our estates are forfeit, we are orphans.’

‘This sounds like injustice.’

‘It is. One day I shall right it.’

La Valette nodded. ‘So you fell in with these knights of mine and sailed for Malta. In memory of your father?’

‘Yes,’ said Nicholas, his voice too quiet. Then ‘Yes’ again, more firmly.

‘Two more nights of sleep without fear. Then the storm will break. I trust you will not think you have sailed too far from England.’

‘I will not.’

La Valette addressed them all. ‘Gentlemen, you know how perilous is our situation. The Turk is almost upon us. We hasten to build what defences we can until then. We pray that God help us. The French will not, they ally with Suleiman. Nor the German princes, nor England’s Protestant Queen. King Philip of Spain remains our best hope, but so far he has sent us nothing, though
the Spanish possessions of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples would be the first to suffer invasion should Malta fall. His Holiness the Pope sends us ten thousand crowns, to buy powder and arms. Yet it is men that we desperately need, and do not have. So it seems we fight alone. Brothers-in-arms. All four hundred of us.’

He smiled grimly.

‘Eat well this evening, sleep well tonight. Tomorrow there will be work to do. This novice with you, De la Rivière. The English boys to be billeted.’

As they filed out, La Valette murmured to Stanley, ‘This Ingoldsby will fight hard, I see. He fights not merely for glory, as other volunteers, but for his family honour, and his father’s pride.’

The finest street in Birgu was the Street of the Knights, the auberge of each langue handsomely escutcheoned over the brightly painted doors.

Stanley spoke to a bread-seller on the corner. He jabbered in Maltese and pointed down a narrow side street. Stanley hailed the two boys and led them to the door, drawing out his purse as he went.

A dark, shy-looking woman answered the door, no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Stanley spoke to her in Italian, she said little. Then he handed her a silver coin, and pushed them on in.

Nicholas and Hodge were given a small, windowless room off the tiny courtyard, with two straw pallets on the floor, and plentiful fleas. They dropped their packs and stretched out.

‘Well, Hodge. What do you reckon to Malta so far? Hodge?’

He was asleep.

‘Inglis! Inglis! Up stir your asses! Franco Briffa is returned home!’

Nicholas awoke, scratching. It was dark. A monstrous bull-voice was roaring in the tiny courtyard, just outside their thin door, his language a baffling polyglot mix of heavily accented Italian and snatches of Maltese.

‘Franco Briffa is returned from the bastard sea, with his great friend the bastard Anton Zahra, bringing fresh fish for your Inglis dinner. Appear! Stand before us! Let us see these noble heroes of England!’

Hodge and Nicholas stumbled out of the door, dopey after only two hours’ sleep. It was yet early evening, the air still as warm as an English summer noon, and the little town of Birgu was all astir once more.

Before them, seemingly filling the little courtyard from wall to wall, was a man of some thirty-five years. Of medium height, but barrel-chested, with mighty forearms, thick black hair, huge, black oiled moustache, and large, fiercely burning eyes. Strong white teeth gleamed as he grinned, but instantly vanished when he set eyes on the two skinny, weary, travel-stained young heroes.

‘You are the soldiers come to defend us against the Turk?’

They nodded.

He braced himself and swallowed down his grievous disappointment. ‘Well,’ he said. Then, returning to his customary volume, ‘Well! You are welcome into the home of Franco Briffa.’ He shook their hands violently and clapped them on the back. ‘I never meet an Inglis before now. You are no filthy Protestant like the fat Dutch?
But no, you are Inglis, and gentlemen I see from your hands, at least you are, not him. Now, come and eat sardines, gentleman and his peasant both. And meet my family.’

They emerged into the little courtyard and were seated on low stools. Nicholas couldn’t believe how sweet the air was, scented with orange and lemon blossom – and how warm too. Yet it was night! What on earth would it be like in the day? And to fight in?

The door onto the street was left wide open and people went by, many carrying sacks and stones. Even at this late hour, when all good Englishmen would have been long abed. Some called in greetings. Life was lived in public here.

Franco Briffa lit candles and stuck them in niches. A small fire burned in a brazier, fed with animal dung.

‘So that’s what they use for firewood here,’ muttered Hodge.

Franco Briffa indicated an ancient woman on a stool by the brazier, apparently feeling the cold. ‘My beloved mother, Mama Briffa. My dear wife’ – he seized the shy woman as she entered from the little room opposite, and turned her to face them, her face bowed – ‘Mother of my two wicked sons.
Il bambino
, over there in the cradle. Here is my two young sons, very wicked, they are Mateo and Tito.’ Two young boys, perhaps eleven and nine, stared up at the two foreign soldiers in their house, bursting with excitement and curiosity. ‘And my daughter, my eldest’ – he roared out – ‘Maddalena!’ He glared back at them. ‘You will hearken to me now, yes? Franco Briffa does not lie.’

They nodded, bewildered.

A slim girl of fourteen or fifteen stepped into the courtyard, wearing a simple pale blue dress and a headscarf. He seized her as he had his wife, and turned her to face them.

‘She is pretty, is she not? She is most beautiful, the most beautiful girl perhaps in all Malta?’

She was. Very pretty, her face aglow in the light of the brazier.

‘She takes after her father! No, no, I jest,’ and he pulled his wife to his side under a bearlike arm and crushed her to him. ‘She takes after her
mother
. But she is pretty as a flower, and you are young men, and under our roof, and so I tell you this. If either of you Inglis approach nearer to her than the length of two arms, let alone God save us reach out and touch her – then I, Franco Briffa, will
cut off your testicles and feed them to the pigs.’

Old Mama Briffa cackled on her stool. ‘He will, he will!’

Mateo and Tito giggled.

Franco Briffa added an obscene gesture for illustration, glaring at the two boys fiercely, as if in anticipation, driving his forefinger hard through a ring made with his opposing forefinger and thumb. He seemed very concerned with his daughter’s virginity. Nicholas wanted to protest that his host had no reason to fear that he, an English gentleman, would so abuse his hospitality. But he couldn’t think of the right words.

The girl meanwhile was flushed with embarrassment, which only made her look prettier.

Franco Briffa pushed both wife and daughter firmly away. ‘Now go, women! And you, children, it is time you were in bed.’ Mateo and Tito began to protest passionately, until he roared in their faces. Then he called after the women, ‘Bring us food. Sardines, bread, wine, the very food that Christ and his disciples ate to stay strong!’

The three ate heartily, the women scurrying back and forth to bring them more and more. Nicholas looked fixedly ahead whenever the girl appeared. She would give him dreams. His heart thumped, and he no longer thought back to the barmaid in Cadiz.

Franco Briffa ate most heartily of all, slapping his wife’s bottom whenever she brought out more sardines from the cool dark larder to fry on the fire.

‘Caught this very afternoon by myself and my great friend the bastard Anton Zahra. Are they not the finest you ever tasted? It is the dungfire that flavours them so sweetly.’ He mopped his mouth and refilled their wine cups. Nicholas tried to avoid a refill but failed. The wine was very thin and pale red and not easy to distinguish from vinegar. But a cup or two certainly warmed the stomach. Franco Briffa drank some four pints.

The smoke arose slowly into the square of starlit night above them. Goats bleated, a dog barked. It seemed so peaceful. Yet none could forget the ominous shadow hanging over them, nor that this might be the last such night as this.

At last, nearly dropping off his stool for weariness, Nicholas managed to say, ‘
Grazzi. Hafna tajjeb
.’

Franco Briffa went silent, a hunk of bread halfway to his mouth. ‘What did you say, Inglis?’

Thinking he had made some terrible mistake, Nicholas repeated the words uncertainly.

With violent abruptness, Franco Briffa leapt to his feet and bellowed, ‘Why, it is an astonishment!’

Someone called in through the open courtyard doorway, ‘Quit your shouting, Franco Briffa, you’ll wake the dead from their graves!’

But Franco was impervious. ‘Speak again, Inglis!’

Nicholas said the words once more.

‘An astonishment, I tell you! The Inglis sits in my house for no more than a bat’s fart, eats a little bread, drinks a little wine, and now he is talking already like a native Maltese.’ He seized Nicholas by the arm and dragged him out into the street.

‘Hear the Inglis!’ roared Franco at anyone prepared to listen. ‘It is an astonishment! Come hear him! Speak again, Inglis! Pronounce! Declaim! Listen to him, you fools, and hearken. It is a miracle! He has learnt to speak the ancient tongue of Malta in a half a minute. He is a
genius
!’

People nodded and smiled as they hurried by under their loads. Nicholas’s head swam with tiredness and wine. A floor above, on a tiny balcony, a girl’s faced peeped out. He glanced up. She vanished.

After the great performance, they went back inside and Franco Briffa insisted they had another cup of wine, while he told them how he used to be a bad man, a wild youth. He used to drink and chase whores, but now he was married to his beloved Maria, he drank no more, well, only a little. He drained his fifth pint of wine. Now he worshipped God with all the devotion of his heart, as devotedly as he once drank and chased whores.

‘Not that whores need much chasing!’ he guffawed.

His listeners nodded, half asleep.

‘Well,’ said Franco Briffa, wiping the wine from his moustache. ‘Tomorrow, my Inglis friends, I would hear of your country, infidel and cold and full of red-haired women. After that, I fear, there will be little time for drinking and telling tales.’

Nicholas awoke to the sound of shouts and cries. He knew where he was instantly, and dread seized him. The Turks had come.

He kicked Hodge and ran out into the courtyard. Early sunlight touched the roofs. People in the street were calling. He looked out. But no, it was only a busy day, no one was panicking yet. His head felt cold and sickly from the wine. Everyone, men, women and children, was up and working. Poor they may be, this peasant people, but they were no idlers. And then cursing himself for a fool, he understood. This was not the ordinary business of the little town. Day and night, for days and weeks past, the people had been following the lead of the knights, and making preparations for war. These sacks of earth and sand, these rocks and stones – they were no innocent burden. They were the stuff of war, being carried to the walls.

He felt ashamed. He must go and join them at once.

‘Come and eat first, Inglis!’ cried Franco behind him, reading his mind.

He and Hodge sat on a step in the courtyard, and it was Maddalena who brought them bread and two cups and a jug of goat’s milk.

She wore a red headscarf and this morning a thin gauze veil over the lower half of her face, so that only her dark eyes showed. Like a Turkish girl. Yet he could not avoid noticing the gentle swell of her figure as she leaned down to pour the milk, and as she breathed, the thin veil moved in and out on that tiny breeze, and he could see the full lips of her mouth. She kept her eyes from him all the time, until one last moment when she glanced at him, and he was looking at her, and their eyes met.

She snatched the jug away as if stung and almost ran back inside.

‘The maids here,’ said Hodge, chewing philosophically, ‘are certainly more naturally maids than some of their kind back in England.’

The goat’s milk tasted sweet, and the crusted white bread. This land so sun-warmed and earthy, where the blood flowed so hot in the veins – and yet so pious and restrained withal, the widows in black, the maids in headscarves and veils …

Then a church bell began to ring, a steady, insistent tolling. A
call to remember why they were here, which was not for young girls in their pale blue dresses.

‘They are mules, these Maltese,’ said Stanley. ‘Look at them. They have not always loved the knights, as we lorded it over them. But now look how they work. Like mules.’

He meant it as a high compliment.

It was only then that Nicholas understood the knights in their pitifully small numbers were not alone. Shoulder to shoulder with them would fight the Maltese people. He felt a lump in his throat. He thought of hurtling cannonballs, fragmenting stone, searing flame, and of Maddalena. Also a surge of pride in being part of this. Men, women and children would fight alongside the knights for their island home, against a fully professional army.

‘Nor will they surrender, as the people did at Rhodes,’ said Smith. ‘They say, We are not Rhodian, we are not Greek, we are not Italian nor Spanish nor Arab. We are Maltese. And we do not surrender.’

They slung great blocks of limestone under wooden beams and hoisted them onto Birgu’s old, battlemented walls to build them higher, or to brace them at weak points. They dug ditches and cleared away what little brushwood remained nearby.

The mighty voice of a foreman roared out, ‘We shall starve them, they will find nothing here to sustain them!’ It was the voice of Franco Briffa. ‘Not a fig, not a twig, not a green leaf, not a drop of clean water, nothing will the worshippers of the devil Mahound find here to sustain them. This island will be to them as harsh and lifeless and lonely as the surface of the moon!’