The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (30 page)

There came one more brief and testing assault, on the post of the Chevalier de Guaras, beaten back with an aggressive counter-charge by the Spanish infantrymen, packed shoulder to shoulder, pikes lowered. Then the fighting tailed off for that first day, and there looked like being no night attacks.

‘But they will come,’ said Smith. ‘For now, boys, get some food and sleep.’

With the soldiers, they squatted in the inner yard and ate quantities of bread soaked in wine, and drank as much water as they could hold down.

‘That will suffice for today,’ said one soldier. ‘But for tomorrow, I expect a fine linen tablecloth and a chair, and candlelight, and a couple of roast quail.’

‘Partridge,’ said another. ‘And dark Tempranillo.’

‘Asparagus. In butter.’

‘Ah …’

They were silent a while. Then the first said, ‘But bread and wine it is, boys. It was enough for the Saviour’s Last Supper, and it may be our Last Supper too. Good appetite.’

Prayers arose from both sides at dawn, and then the defenders hurriedly took their posts, relieving the night watch, and formed up. Where manpower permitted, they formed groups of three, with two pikemen protecting a central arquebusier while he reloaded. Broglia also positioned small squads of reserve troops to rush into any breach.

And then the very élite of the Janizaries were coming in. They wore eagle headdresses, carried bullock-hide shields decorated with verses from the Koran, saying that Paradise lay in the shade of swords, and cried out ‘Death to the Infidel!’ They howled to Allah to bring down fire and brimstone upon the unbelievers. For did not the Holy Koran say that he had prepared a place for them? A place of burning …

From the walls of Elmo, the Christians called upon Christ and the Virgin, St James, St George, St John their patron, and St Michael the warrior archangel to fight with them now.

Then the Turks made an unexpected diversion, passing by the bridges and the ditch for the rear of Elmo and the squat cavalier, which guarded the only gate of the fort. As they tried to bypass the northern walls they suffered lacerating flanking fire, and many stumbled and fell, but more ran on. Broglia sent every other man to the rear walls to destroy them.

It was a close-packed and milling confusion. Fire hoops as thick as a man’s thigh, as big as cartwheels, rolled heavily down, slow and blazing and inextinguishable, and black spouts of boiling tar. The robes of the besiegers went up well, men screaming in the midst of the crush, burning like flaring white cypress trees.

‘They burn as nicely as ashwood, these Mohammedan dogs!’ cried a soldier.

Then came volleys of grapeshot and chain shot from the guns steeply tilted on the cavalier roof, and the effect was slaughterous.

‘The more that come, the more we can kill,’ cried the soldiers.

After only a short time, the curved battle-horns of the Ottomans sounded from the heights, and the attackers fled.

A soldier whistled. The ground was strewn with the dead.

‘That,’ said Broglia, ‘was a poor decision. When they come again – unless they are being commanded by a secret sympathiser of ours – they will concentrate on crossing the ditch. A much wider front, where their numbers will tell.’

Broglia was right.

The attack on the cavalier was but a test, and results were poor. Soon the Bekta
ş
is, not the Janizaries, were coming in again, and bring more bridging materials.

In no time at all, every man on the walls was fighting in the midst of furious incoming fire, showers of arrows, and a third bridge was waving about in the air above the Bekta
ş
is’ heads, ready to slam down upon a central section of the wall where the attackers might dash straight across onto the unbroken parapet. Such a bridge would test them sorely, opening up a front behind them where they crammed towards the star points, so they would be truly encircled.

Then Bridier de la Gordcamp crossed himself and arose behind the parapet and turned, fully exposed to the fire of the enemy.

He walked slowly, as if in a dream. He took up a smaller fire hoop in his left hand and in his right he took tongs and he extended the hoop towards a crouched arquebusier without a word. The arquebusier held out his matchcord and Bridier touched the rim of the fire hoop to the smouldering end and the hoop sizzled and sprang into dancing flame. Then he took it in the tongs and stood high on the walls as the bridge wavered in the air before him.

Voices cried out, ‘Brother, stay down!’

But the knight was not within hearing or caring.

An arrow from a compound bow thocked into his shoulder through the chainmail with tremendous force and the fair slender knight turned a little under the force of it. Then he turned back, the arrow stuck deep there. Another clanged off his helmet. He was utterly exposed. The fire hoop burned and smoked enormously, black smoke roiling into the air around him, and through the black smoke Nicholas could still see his face, waiting patiently, his expression as serene as a painted medieval saint. The tongs themselves were heating up fast, and a few seconds later they were burning the flesh of his hand. In his dreamy determination he had not worn gauntlets or he might not have suffered, but there was no time. He waited, the bridge descending above him, and the hot metal burned into his palms as the nails had burned into the palms of Christ crucified. His brother knights watched, paralysed. It was like seeing a child stepping out before a pack of wolves.

The bridge was coming down, casting its shadow over the solitary young knight, just as Bridier leaned back and hurled the fire hoop high in the air. It was a perfect cast, the hoop turning and turning in the air, flinging off burning jellied sparks from its rim as
it spun, any one of which could have stuck to his flesh or hair and burst into an inextinguishable blaze. But he never turned away, he moved not an inch, waiting again as still and silent as an alabaster statue while the fire hoop spun like a Catherine wheel and then hit the down slope of the bridge and rolled forward into the oncoming dervishes.

Then the slender knight drew his long sword from its scabbard in his burnt hands and raised the blade to his lips and kissed it and then leapt onto the forward end of the bridge, following after the fire hoop, his sword cutting through the air like a whip.

Springing up from their stupor came running Smith and Stanley, Medrano and Lanfreducci, and Nicholas and Hodge ran too. Hodge grabbed a short billhook as he ran. Nicholas thought of his Livy, and Horatius keeping the bridge against Lars Porsena and his army, alone with his two comrades. Yet that had been but schoolwork, and this was life and death.

In the black smoke, the figure of Bridier twisted and turned and fought with all the fury of a Mohammedan dervish himself, revolving in the smoke like a demon, fair hair flying. The howling Bekta
ş
is tried again and again to rush him, to over-run him with sheer weight of numbers, but again and again they fell back, blinded by smoke, howling not in religious ecstasy but raw pain as their clothes turned to liquid fire on their flesh, and that Christian sword sliced through limb after limb.

Broglia on the bastion turned the field gun and loaded it with a single fine iron ball, grapeshot being too diffuse at this range. He blasted it across into the far end of the bridge where the infuriated dervishes crowded, and it drove a platter-sized hole straight through one man’s belly before ploughing on into others behind. The gunners sluiced water on the barrel and cleared out the last wadding and loaded another pack of powder and a ball, and Broglia ordered the trajectory lowered to hit the bridge itself.

Bridier cut and thrust and slew, and the bridge being only wide enough for two men at a time, or a twin file of men to surge across in an attack column, none could get past him. Blood coursed over his fine silver breastplate and from around the arrow shaft stuck in his shoulder, he was cut across the cheek and over the eye, yet he seemed oblivious. Nothing could stop him. Nicholas suddenly
realised where he had seen such a thing before. A wall painting in a church, that showed the warrior Archangel Michael treading down Satan on the day of wrath. That same slender figure, with hair as fair as the sun, the expression so lacking in hatred and serene.

Then a pistol cracked out and Bridier was suddenly no such immortal archangel but mortal flesh. He sank to his knees, and a great dervish, naked but for grubby white
ş
alwar
trousers, raised a huge curved sword over the exhausted knight’s bare neck. The sword was descending as Smith and Stanley came racing to Bridier’s side, Smith raising his shield over their wounded brother and fending off the mighty stroke just as Stanley drove his long pike straight through the fellow’s belly. Smith extended his other arm and loosed his horse pistol, at such short range that it blasted the huge Turk back again off the end of Stanley’s pike, and sent him crashing into his fellows behind. Then Smith and Stanley, with Lanfreducci and Medrano close behind them, pressed on forward, trying desperately to drive the enemy from the bridge.

At the Elmo end, the quick-witted Hodge was down on one knee, the billhook rising and falling rapidly. Woodcutter’s son. Nicholas stood over him, shield raised as if shading him from the sun as he worked. Two more soldiers came running up with smoking fire hoops, freshly dipped in tar, understanding that the black smoke would give the battered defenders vital cover at this critical time. They tossed them down over the posts of wooden scaffolding below, and flames roared up. Beneath Hodge’s beefy blows with the billhook, a brummock he’d call it, the first of the bridge’s two thick oak foresprits was quickly being cut through. The broad heavy blade fell again and again as with expert eye Hodge cut hard, left angle, right angle, a notch appearing, another left, another right, a bigger notch, and then straight down in a flurry of blows. Though the sprit was as thick as man’s thigh and seasoned hardwood, yet it was quickly going through.

‘The bridge is going down!’ yelled Nicholas. ‘Pull back!’

A further supportive shot from Broglia’s gun crew and then the knights, dragging Bridier with them, fought their way back, the dervishes snapping at them like a pack of wolves.

Behind the dervishes were coming four men with long muskets, marching in orderly fashion.

‘Take out the Janizary marksmen!’ roared Broglia. ‘Arquebusiers!’

From the north-west star point, some ragged fire came in on the four approaching musketeers, and they had to duck for cover, buying the retreating knights a few precious seconds.

Then the first foresprit suddenly cracked and the entire bridge gave a lurch and sagged to one side. Hodge in a trice was onto the second sprit, attacking it with scowling concentration. The knights came back at a shambling run, Bridier’s arm looped around Stanley’s broad shoulders, more dragged than walked. They hurried onto the stone parapet and down, and the sprit gave as the dervishes swarmed across. A last volley of arquebus fire slammed into them broadside and then the bridge fell seeming slowly into the great ditch below. An explosion of flame as the fire hoops flared up and the tumbling white robes caught alight. The knights stood back from the parapet at the blast of heat and the sound of agonised cries. The sound of the damned being hauled down to hell, the flames gouting up in leaping tongues around them. To complete their damnation, a group of Spanish infantrymen stepped forward and with the utter ruthlessness for which they were famed and feared, tossed down a couple of packs of gunpowder, three or four wildfire grenades and a couple more brass grenades, packed with a lacerating mix of gunpowder, naphtha, nails and shards of flint. All stood back and shielded their ears as the terrific explosion filled the ditch.

Afterwards, Nicholas glanced over the parapet. A field of white flowers mown flat, wide-spattered blood and dark gleaming puddles. A head sliced into two halves like a melon, dispossessed limbs. From both sides of the ditch, from Turks and defenders both, a moment of stunned silence. Nothing but the soft crackle of small fires below, and the drifting smoke between them.

They laid Bridier down and removed his breastplate.

‘Just a scratch or two,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll be back on the wall by nightfall.’

‘Silence now, brother,’ said John Smith, as gently as a nursemaid.

The pistol ball had gone deep in his side, perhaps into his lung, though the blood in his mouth showed no bubbles. The arrow was lodged still deeper in his shoulder, his face and arms were badly cut
about, and his left foot was mangled. His face was paler than ever. They eased him onto a canvas stretcher and took him below.

‘We held the bridge though, did we not?’ he said, with great effort.

‘We did,’ Stanley nodded. ‘We did.’

The other bridges were both so thoroughly blasted by cannon fire that though they still lay across the moat, they were too weakened and shattered for further crossings to be attempted. The Turks pulled back into their forward trenches and there was a brief respite. The knights emerged with big axes and finished the bridges off, sending them collapsing down into the moat and then strewing them with pails of oil and setting them alight so they could not be used again.

The flames leapt up and mingled with the golden sun going down over Malta. The defenders felt some cheer. Yet the Turks knew they had already subjected the enemy to a savage bombardment, as well as a day and a half of furious hand-to-hand assault. They must be badly weakened, and tomorrow they would fall.

‘Tomorrow?’ said Mustafa Pasha. ‘We do not have time to wait until tomorrow.’

He considered.

The plan had been to give this wretched little fort no respite at all, simply to press on hard until it fell. But the loss to the Bekta
ş
is was great, even if they were joyful about the prospect of death, and he had reckoned on their dead bodies filling up the ditch for his Janizaries to cross more easily.

‘How many dead?’ he demanded

‘Some three hundred,’ said I
ş
ak Agha, Commander of the Janizaries. ‘Perhaps four hundred.’