The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (29 page)

‘Damn!’ he bellowed, turning away from the splinters, but too late. A sliver had lodged in his cheek – but no real damage done.
He glanced back. A flurry of panic around one of the guns. He clenched his fist and dropped back down behind the wall. He’d hit.

‘You’re cheek’s bloody,’ said Stanley.

Smith grubbed in his beard and pulled out a half-inch splinter and tossed it over his shoulder at the Turks. ‘The other fellow’s worse off.’

‘How that’ll mar your boyish looks,’ said Stanley.

‘You’ll not praise me for my marksmanship? That was a master engineer I just trimmed of his head.’

‘I won’t. You might grow proud.’

‘Coming in again!’ came Miranda’s cry. ‘On target now!’ Knights bowed their heads and crossed themselves. The air erupted.

The Ottomans knew exactly what they were doing. The basilisks were not used. There was no need against so feeble a target. But the biggest field guns alone threw balls of eighty pounds, striking the walls of Elmo in a relentless barrage, and soon the lime and sandstone walls began to flake and crumble. With expert eye, the master gunners had ordered concentration on the points of the stars themselves as the weakest salients.

But the noise was the worst. Nicholas and Hodge were sent crawling about giving out cotton wadding for ears. Still, by the time the hand-to-hand fighting came, they would all be half deaf.

It seemed like hours that they huddled in what shade they could, taking the inescapable punishment, the untroubled sun rising above them in the clear blue sky. Peek out over the eastern walls and the sun glittered on the sea, you could snuff the sea breeze, and there were still birds flying and dipping out there, catching sardines, as on any other day. Then look back west and there were forty thousand men come all the way over that Orient sea to kill you.

It was late afternoon when the guns fell silent. Perhaps Mustafa hoped that the day would be cooling now, but no luck. It burned as hot as ever. The two forward corners of Elmo were beginning to collapse into rubble ridges, overtopping the deep defensive ditch below. Yet that ditch at least still seemed like as much of an abyss as ever. It was their first and now best line of defence. A mere ditch. But the Turks would have to bring up wagonloads of fascines and
infill to get across that barrier, or else wrestle with unwieldy bridges and scaffolding. The defenders would yet have time to wreak some damage on them.

It seemed only seconds after the great guns fell silent that a great wave of sound arose as if from the ground itself, rising and rising in volume behind the hanging white curtain of dust and smoke. It was the Bekta
ş
is coming in first, thirsting for Christian blood and crying the names of God.

Along the walls the knights were looking out. It was crucial to see the plan of attack.

‘Charge and die,’ muttered Smith, ‘they’re fanatics.’

‘No,’ said Medrano softly. ‘It’s more planned than that. They’re bringing bridging platforms.’

Nicholas couldn’t swallow, and his ears rang dizzyingly from the five-hour bombardment. He gripped the arquebus he held ready-loaded for Stanley, the wooden stock absorbing his sweat, as he looked out and saw, through that immense curtain of dust and smoke, the first ranks of the Bekta
ş
is come howling through. A surge of white robes and turbans and flashing blades, thousands of them it seemed. They moved out wide around the far end of the Janizaries’ forward trench, to attack Elmo on her northward side.

‘Not foolish at all, you see,’ said the sinuous Medrano. ‘To our north, they cannot be fired on from our brothers in San Angelo. Fort Elmo itself protects them.’

Stanley grinned. ‘Very
fort
-unate for them.’

‘Please,’ said Smith. ‘Not now.’

‘Move forward!’ roared the voice of Luigi Broglia. ‘Barricades on both eastward points, where the parapets are already shot out. Gabions and cordonniers chest high, they’ll be across in minutes. Arquebusiers, not till I give the word! And the King of Spain’s daughter to any who destroys a bridge!’

Medrano was right. As the Bekta
ş
is came nearer, they could see teams of twenty or so carrying narrow wooden footbridges at the run, and others carrying long firwood scaffolding poles.

‘Arquebusiers, at the ready! Shoot the porters, anything to slow ’em down! Brothers, look to your fire hoops! Fire the bridges if you can. Arquebusiers –
fire!
’

The guns cracked out, yet made dismayingly little impact on the
vast surge of attackers a hundred paces off or more. Here and there one fell beneath the winnowing volley of loosely arcing arquebus balls, but numberless more came on behind. Nevertheless it was good to have begun, as Broglia understood. His men needed action. Now their fear and trembling began slowly to subside, their battle fury to arise, even as they scrabbled about the mundane task of cleaning out and reloading their gun barrels. Keep ’em busy. God knew they’d be busy enough in the hours to come.

Yet reloading was a slow business. By the time they were ready for a second volley, the Bekta
ş
is were only the other side of the ditch and screaming at them. Nicholas peered out and stared aghast. The cut-throats aboard the
Swan
had been one thing, and that glorious cavalry charge of Copier’s. But these …

He saw eyes reddened and rolling with hemp-induced madness, he saw that some wore not white robes but torn and ragged animal skins, and engraved steel helmets instead of turbans, bearing in flowing Arabic lettering protective Koranic runes and ancient Dervish charms. They carried scimitars and small round shields, their lips shone with spittle, and their dark faces were raised to the sun in ecstasy. Some wielded short curved knives in their fists, scything them through the air and then down into the flesh of their own arms and torsos, slashing themselves like the priests of Baal in their demonic rapture. Cutting their own flesh, as if in ravenous preparation for cutting the flesh of others.

Nearby, Bridier de la Gordcamp, still smiling his soft smile, said, ‘
Thou shalt be cut down, O Madmen; the sword shall pursue thee
…’

Nicholas felt hot fear then. Spiritual madmen were ever the most terrifying, and they were so close and so many. How could he and Hodge ever survive this? It would be a massacre. They would fall in minutes. Suddenly it was all very close, and very real. He saw their flashing eyes, their white teeth, their smiles, and he had to fight very hard within himself at that moment not to give in to the deep cowardice that lies in the hearts of all men, even the bravest; to leap up and cry out, and throw down his weapon and flee, and hurl himself from the fortress walls and try to swim to safety. But he mastered himself, and even managed a slap on Hodge’s shoulder.

‘Ready, Master Hodge?’

‘Ready, Master Ingoldsby,’ said Hodge with a croak.

The two boys waited in agony. Their only task now to clean and reload guns as fast as humanly possible. Their nostrils filled with the sharp, biting odour of burning matchcord.

The Bekta
ş
is howled and milled and jostled, eager to be across and finish this. The second volley slammed into them at brutal range, and thirty or forty were hit, some toppling forward into the ditch, red staining their white robes, some falling back into their brothers’ arms as if merely weary. Nicholas’s eye caught one whose left arm seemed simply to explode in a cloud of red. Yet there was no reaction among them. There was no cover, and no plan, but to wait for the bridgers to cross the divide.

The simple but tough wooden walkways rose high in the air, ropes attached to the forward arms, and began to fall slowly over the broad ditch, the front measured to hit the corners of Elmo’s fort. They were dropping two bridges at once and then they would be across.

A distinctive shot rang out, and a man on the lead rope tumbled back and fell. It was Smith’s shot. The bridge skewed slightly.

‘Again!’ cried Broglia. ‘Send those bridges into the ditch, or fire ’em up! Don’t let ’em land!’

Then many things were happening at once.

Either in their battle madness, or more mundanely, shoved from behind by their eager comrades, some of the front ranks of the Bekta
ş
is lurched forward and tumbled into the broad ditch. From the outer side it was but a drop of eight feet or so, although the walls of Elmo across the ditch arose a good twenty feet or more, sheer and shadowed. One or two cried out as they fell, and legs were broken, ankles twisted. But most rolled and were on their feet nimbly enough, and seeing this, many more began to jump down after them. Even those who were injured staggered upright again, their pain numbed with hemp and opium. Besides, pain was but a foretaste of death, and death of Paradise, and the fountains, the maidens, the wines promised by the Prophet, which intoxicated and hurt not. Then forward, with that black angel Azrael,
Malak al-Maut
, at their side. For was not the Angel of Death truly the greatest friend of mankind? Their Guide to Heaven. The Angel of Mercy in disguise.

Few of the Bekta
ş
is had brought scaling ropes or grappling irons,
but those that had now threw them. At the same time the first bridge crashed down upon the north-east corner of the fort, and then the second upon the north-west.

A quick-witted Ottoman commander ordered wooden scaffolding poles and ropes passed down to the men in the ditch, who might at least begin to erect some kind of supports before they were shot down. Amid the gunfire and the arrows, they set the scaffolding poles upright and tethered them tight with crossbars, and soon a structure arose. Though the knights did their best to fire on them and kill them before they could finish the work, yet they themselves were already too thinly stretched to permit a sustained volley, and pinned down by withering crossfire from beyond the ditch.

‘Janizary snipers still in the forward trenches!’ roared Smith. ‘Watch your left!’

Almost as he said it, one of the Spanish infantrymen grunted and clutched his left shoulder. A Janizary sniper had hit him full on. He lurched into Nicholas and sank down. Nicholas knelt swiftly beside him.

He blasphemed, and blood seeped out between his fingers.

Nicholas said, ‘Lean on me to the hospital.’

‘Shit no,’ said the soldier, ‘it’s my arm that’s shot, not my leg. I can get there well enough.’

He flexed his left hand and his fingers moved freely, though more blood was pumped from his wound at the movement.

‘Not paralysed yet,’ he muttered. And he crawled back from the cordon and in through the low door of the central bastion and was gone. Yet he was the kind who would be bandaged and back soon enough. The Spanish tercios were the finest infantrymen in Europe, finer even than your Swiss pikemen. No wonder the vast empires of the New World had fallen to them.

Then the outlying ravelin over to the right was under severe attack, there was enough scaffolding in the ditch for Bekta
ş
is to begin climbing, and more still pressed over the two bridges. With typical ruthlessness and unpredictability, half a mile behind the fray, Mustafa Pasha then sent out the order for the Turkish guns to begin pounding the unmanned south-west salient of the fort simultaneously. There were no Ottoman troops attacking there yet – and if there were, well, a few such losses would be well worth the
demoralizing force of the renewed cannon fire. Let the attack come from all sides. Soon they would be exhausted. Let those crawling dogs of the Jewish Christ know there was to be no respite. Not enough for them to take a breath.

And indeed, many a knight’s head turned, with an expression of dismay, as the guns roared out and the first balls began to strike and reduce the third of Elmo’s four star points.

‘Ignore it!’ yelled Broglia. ‘Hold the cordon!’

Attacked from all sides, with the unnerving feeling that they were almost surrounded, they huddled down behind their hastily made cordons of chest-high gabions, heavyweight wickerwork baskets filled with earth, reloaded their guns and bows, and unleashed merciless volley after volley of arquebus balls and crossbow quarrels. From the remaining walls they fired down into the ditch at those who had tumbled and were trapped there, trying to scale the wall with their bare hands. It was like shooting rats in a tunnel, and there was no glory in it, except the glory of victory, and the knowledge that the Turks would count their losses heavily tonight.

From the opposite salient too, there came vicious flights of enfilading fire, and from the upper bastion in the west wall, the fort’s only commanding position, field guns began to gout flame and fire into the main body of the Turks clamouring across the ditch. Broglia had one small field gun, no higher than a man’s waist but heavy to move, dragged across to the opposite salient and loaded with grapeshot. At a single cry his men ducked down below the cordon in perfect unison, and the gun was fired across at head height.

The damage wreaked on the enemy was atrocious. Five hundred lead pellets flailed into the mass of humanity as the Bekta
ş
is surged over the walls and packed onto the tiny rubble-strewn star point. Within half a minute, that point was so laden with the dead that others trying to come on behind were climbing over them, or shoving them back into the ditch. No need to bring up infill of wicker and bound brushwood. The ditch was already filling up with the Ottoman dead.

Nicholas kept moving, ducking, bobbing. Out in the forward trenches, the Janizary snipers were expert at picking out a man who stayed still too long, aiming in on him, and taking the killing shot in their own good time. Yet as he moved among the men of Elmo,
he sensed an exhilaration of spirits. Some punched the air with their fists in between taking their shots, or shouted words of triumph. The Turks fell below like mown wheat. And the defenders were barely scathed.

They could do this. They could hold Elmo.