The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (33 page)

But it was enough. The drum retreat had already sounded. The Janizary captain across the ditch saw that his sergeant was dead and order among his men once more lost. The shattered, exposed, bitterly contested star point was once more abandoned, and the damned fort of Elmo lived to breathe another hour.

The knights at the barrier cheered their brother Bridier, but the older knights looked grave as they cheered, knowing he must now be wounded to death.

Nicholas wanted to run out to him and help him in, but he froze. With implacable calm, beyond the ditch and safely behind a forward breastwork, half a dozen Janizary marksmen were now taking aim on the lone, broken knight, standing isolated out beyond the defensive cordon.

Bridier turned and walked slowly back towards the heaped barrier of barrels and gabions and stone blocks, his vizor raised, his head hung down, his long girlish locks plastered to his pale cheeks. He could no longer lift his sword enough to sheathe it. Its point dragged in the dust behind him.

‘Run, brother, run!’ cried his comrades.

The marksmen took aim at his back, not forty paces off.

Knights began to climb up onto the cordon to dash to his rescue. But that was precisely what the Janizary captain had foreseen. Such foolish nobility in those Christian dogs. Yet such nobility, a true Muslim might yet admire it, even though it must be destroyed. He dropped his arm, and his marksmen’s muskets cracked out a hard unwavering volley.

Two of the marksmen had aimed at the cordon iself, and their shots smacked into the gabions and the stones and sent chips flying amid the whine of ricochet. The knights ducked down.

The other four marksmen had aimed for Bridier’s heart.

The young French knight, almost the last flower of a thousand years of Frankish chivalry, barely twenty years of age and beautiful still like a boy, took a staggering step forward. Then with great effort he raised his head and gave his brothers a sad smile and they knew he had already been shot several times and enough had gone through his armour to kill him.

They could hear the Janizary captain’s cry clear across the field.
Shoot him down! Shoot him down!
This enchanted one could not be allowed to live.

A different shot rang out, and Nicholas turned his head sharply. It was Smith’s jezail, but Stanley taking the shot, putting one of those precious lethal
stuardes
straight through the Janizaries’ forward breastwork, to their astonished horror, and sending one of their invaluable highly-trained marksmen staggering back and dropping in the dust, clutching his belly.

The momentary confusion among the other marksmen was enough for Bridier to be brought home, arms reaching out for him, half lifting, half dragging him over the broad cordon to safety. An arrow clanged off Stanley’s plated arm even as he dropped back, laid the jezail down and drew off Bridier’s helmet.

The young knight breathed with deep pain. Blood dappled his
face and ran from his ears and a thin trickle from the corner of his mouth. By God’s grace alone did he still breathe at all. His sword lay at his side and still he wore that serene saint’s smile.

‘I am struck very near the heart, I think,’ he whispered.

Stanley said, ‘It’s a mighty heart.’

‘Leave me be. Prepare to fight again.’

Then the burly Chevalier de Guaras said, in the old-fashioned idiom, as seemed only right before this unearthly knight from out of the old tales and chronicles, ‘By the fair fame of France I shall not quit you.’ And he pulled him upright.

Bridier de la Gordcamp looked at the thin English boy who knelt in the dust nearby, and perhaps saw something of himself there in that young, torn, passionate face.

‘Here, boy,’ he said weakly. ‘Take my sword, guard it. Bring it to me in the evening.’

Nicholas took up the fine long sword.

‘God bless you, little brother,’ murmured Bridier.

Then De Guaras took him on his shoulder and carried him below.

The crude, four-bed hospital was filled with the wounded and dying, the air filled with their groans. Flies buzzed expectantly, and the stench was terrible. Smith, his neck bandaged, lay on his side on a pallet on the floor, and breathed badly.

‘Leave me here at the door,’ said Bridier.

De Guaras ignored him. ‘In the name of pity, see to our brother.’

The chaplain did not even turn, and his arms were red to the elbows. Another knight bucked underneath him as he tried to draw free an arrowhead from his guts, the cavity of his abdomen welling out blood. ‘As soon as I can.’

‘Now!’ shouted De Guaras. ‘This brother of ours, this hero—’

Only then did the chaplain glance back over his shoulder. It was the imperturbable Fra Giacomo. ‘All heroes here, brother. Do not shout, not even in this extremity.’

Bridier clutched De Guaras about his thick wrists. ‘I sit and sun myself here, Fra Melchior, and bide my time. Now go and fight for the faith.’

How they fought through a fourth afternoon under that burning sun, they hardly understood nor remembered. Many were wounded, and more fell not to rise again. Yet still the Turks could not break in. Towards evening the attack faltered, and finally the mournful blast of the Ottoman curved battle-horn sounded over the wreckage of the field, and the Janizaries pulled back. From now on into night, they would fire only from a distance, sniper and cannon.

‘We will bring up field guns and blast that wretched cordon to pieces across the ditch,’ said I
ş
ak, Agha of the Janizaries. ‘It is only a
cordon
, in the name of the angels. It is only a rough mound of earth and stones that holds us back. It is a disgrace.’

The captain nodded. ‘Yet they rebuild it every time.’

The Agha refused to hear. ‘Then at dawn the infantrymen will go in again, and surely they will finish it.’

Nicholas drew out Bridier’s sword from the shadows inside the door of the bastion where he had carefully stowed it, and went down to the hospital.

Inside it was so dark, and his eyes so blinded with glaring day-long sunlight and smoke and dust, that he could see nothing for a long time. Then a throaty voice said, ‘He is not here.’ It was Smith. ‘Bridier. He is gone.’

Nicholas was all confusion. He knelt at Smith’s side. ‘How is it?’

‘I have been better. The ball’s stuck in my throat, and the chirurgeon says’ – he gasped, went on – ‘says, he cannot dig it free without making me bleed like a stuck pig.’

Nicholas felt close to tears. A man like Smith could not die.

‘Stanley keeps trying to dose me with more opium, but I know his game. He thinks to send me to sleep so I can be shipped back over to Birgu and out of the fight. But he’ll not.’

He laid a great hand on Nicholas’s head. It felt like his father’s.

‘But your gallant friend needs to go over, boy.’

‘Hodge!’

Only then did he see the racked, stretched body of his companion through all. Hodge on his back, delirious, drenched in sweat, muttering, eyes roving through the darkness of the roof
above. Then Nicholas wept without shame, kneeling at his side. ‘
Hodge
.’

Hodge did not know him. Hodge knew nothing, but in his fever-dream saw only the woods and hills of Shropshire, the hedgerows white with may.

‘The chaplains in the Sacred Infirmary will mend him,’ said Smith. His voice was thick with pain, his throat with blood and swelling. But he must tell him. ‘You go back too, boy. You return. This will be the last boat. It’ll not come again. Go with Hodge. Your time is done here.’

Nicholas said nothing, bent and kissed Hodge on his burning forehead, prayed that God have mercy on Smith’s soul as he stepped past him, and went out.

He still held Bridier’s sword. Where had he gone? Cast himself off the wall into the sea below? So as not to be a burden to his brothers even in death. The boy stood in a daze. Weak with hunger but sick at eating. A Spaniard infantryman went by him. It was García.

‘You sicken, boy?’

Nicholas shook his head dumbly.

‘Battle sickness. The stench, the flies, the ruin of men’s flesh. Hope bleeding away too. Drink my wine.’

Again he shook his head.

‘
Drink it
. To show you’re not a damned Mohammedan dog if nothing else.’ García shoved his wine cup to Nicholas’s lips and almost forced it down his throat. It had a bitter tang.

He coughed and swallowed, wiped his mouth and said, ‘There’s opium in it.’

‘Ay. Just enough so you sleep through the night. Else the horrors of your mind will frighten sleep away.’

The drugged wine warmed him and softened something hard and painfully knotted within him.

Barely conscious of his way, he went over to the little chapel of St John, up the three shallow steps. There on the stone lintel was blood. Blood was everywhere. The whole of Elmo was bleeding.

He stood while his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the little chapel. It was empty, and blissfully cool. He approached the high hanging crucifix over the altar. The stones beneath his feet were
slathered in blood. In his exhausted delirium he thought it was Christ’s blood, streaming down from the crucifix, to cleanse Elmo and all the word of its manifold and numberless sins.

A figure lay at the foot of the cross, motionless, suited in armour. His hands were clasped in prayer.

It was Bridier.

Nicholas knelt by his side. He would have wept, but he was beyond tears. He laid his bare hand on the fallen knight’s breastplate, like the rest of his armour dented and dusty and cracked and half ruined. What blows it had taken. At last the steel was cooling, after the hot fury of battle and the Mediterranean sun. Bridier’s cheek too was cold, alabaster-cold to the touch. He scraped back the plastered hair from his cheek. His eyes were still open, but the light was out in them and the soul was gone. Very gently Nicholas drew down first one eyelid and then the other with the trace of a forefinger and Bridier slept in the arms of God. Never had he seen an expression so at peace.

With his very last strength he must have left the field hospital and crawled into the chapel, unseen by any. He had crawled up the aisle to the foot of the cross, dragging himself with his bare hands, his blood shining behind him on the stones. Neither wine nor opium for him. Only the wine of faith, the opium of the divine. His life was done, only his soul mattered now. Here he had made his last confession, begged for God’s mercy on his sinful soul, and quietly died.

Nicholas laid Bridier’s sword down beside his lifeless body. Untenanted flesh. All flesh is grass.

Someone came into the chapel. It was Edward Stanley.

‘That is of no use to him now,’ he said gently. ‘No swords where he has gone.’

Nicholas stared dumbly down. He was so tired.

Stanley said that the Chevalier Bridier de la Gordcamp had had the tranquillity of a great soul, a noble heart. Such a man never loses his temper or becomes angry, not even in the heat of battle. He is only an instrument in the hands of God, a feather on the breath of God, and he accepts everything appointed for him as God’s will.

‘Our brother Bridier died on the fourth day,’ he said. ‘Yet Christ
rose again from the dead on the third day, in glorious foreshadowing. Or rather, the precedent light to this shadow. There is a pattern to everything. Now take up his sword.’

Stanley himself took up the body of the knight, and walked away down the aisle.

He laid him in a side room of the cluttered, fly-blown chamber that served for a hospital, where the chaplains would do their best amid the attacks and the explosions to wash him down and scent him and wrap him in linen cloths in the hope that he and all the dead might yet have a decent and Christian burial.
Deo volente
. Then Stanley removed Bridier’s armour, piece by battered piece, inspecting it closely. At last he passed Nicholas his helmet, his two arm vambraces and mailed gauntlets, and his sword-belt and scabbard.

‘I am to fight?’

‘No. You are exhausted.’

‘We are all exhausted. You know I fight well, how fast I am.’

‘You may need to fight to save your life soon. But now you are returning to Birgu with Hodge and my brother John.’

Nicholas bit his lip.

‘Yet this armour may save you. It is meant. Bridier had your frame to an uncanny degree. And he gave you his sword.’

‘Only to guard till evening.’

‘No. He knew he was dying. He meant you to have it.’

Nicholas eyed the edges, badly toothed and dented.

‘Find a whetstone, do what you can to the edge. Wear it with pride.’ He smiled a soft smile, his eyes shining with a proud sorrow. ‘I do not need to tell you to be worthy of it. You are worthy already.’

The death of Bridier affected them all deeply, for in it they saw the longed-for type and template of their own. Already their numbers were deeply winnowed. Whatever they did cost lives, whether they counter-attacked, fell back, dug in. De Guaras was sorely wounded to the head, and wore a bandage tight around his temples, deep dyed. Smith was badly hurt though he denied it angrily, still unable to rise from his pallet. Bridier was dead, Lanfreducci’s arm wound was not healing well, though he hid it as best he could.

The one shred of good news for Nicholas was when Hodge suddenly appeared at his side. He looked very pale, but not fevered. His injured left arm was in a thick stiff plastercast made of cotton bandages and white clay.

‘What … How fare you?’

‘Alive,’ said Hodge. ‘So it seems.’

‘You’ll not go back to Birgu?’

‘Will you?’

Nicholas shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

‘Then me neither. Bugger Birgu.’

Of the fifty knights, twenty were dead or wounded beyond fighting, and of the one hundred soldiers who supported them with such stubborn and dogged courage, fewer than sixty still stood. They were less than a hundred. Maybe a thousand Turks had died before the walls of Elmo, maybe more. But there remained tens of thousands more.

Yet they fought on. Another day, another night. Another day,
and the assault seemed to falter a little, as a bewildered Ottoman high command pulled back to count their losses, and to consider. Day followed night followed day, the days lost their names, the dead piled up, and they fought on. They slept a few minutes at a time, whether light or dark. Small, delicate tasks became difficult, as if their very fingers longed for rest. The buckling on of armour, the reloading of an arquebus took longer and longer. Yet they fought on, more and more exhausted, uncertain even how long they had withstood the army of Suleiman the Magnificent …