The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (45 page)

Among the townspeople there was murmuring and lamenting, but no revolt. They had always been governed by distant aristocrats, Maltese and Spanish and now Hospitaller. And the Grand Master had now decreed that they must fight.

With all their ancient peasant fatalism they sighed, ‘So be it,’ and set to sharpening their billhooks and scythes.

Out across the island, over the arid plateau, in the coastal ravines and in the shadows of the devastated and fire-blackened villages, the people of Birgu heard rumours that their brothers were already waging war. The magical, talismanic name of Tonio Bajada, folk hero to some, bandit to others, was leading a group of partisans, harrying the Turkish patrols wherever they could. Rumour said that another band of partisans had caught one Turk, isolated from his squad, cut off his head and replaced it with that of a pig. They had left him sitting up against a dry stone wall for his comrades to find. Minutes later the Turkish patrol came by, and their howls of execration were a delight to the ear.

In another village, still sparsely inhabited, they caught an Italian renegade who was working for the Turks, keeping lookout on the headland. They tied him to the tail of a mule, and some children beat him to death with sticks. Even as he lay dying in a pool of his own blood, he told them, ‘If not today, tomorrow will be your last.’

‘Yah! Yah! Yah!’ the children sang round him.

‘This will be a most brutal encounter,’ said Franco Briffa, head
bowed. ‘I will kill Turks with my bare hands if I have to. They have come to my island, I did not invite them, and they have come bearing arms. Yet already my islanders are turning brutal, recounting such tales with glee, of pigs’ heads, and desecrations, and child executioners. Already my friend, the bastard Anton Zahra, talks of how he is longing to take Mohammedan scalps, and show them to his grandchildren one day. Even if we do survive’ – he looked up and fixed his eyes hard on Nicholas – ‘like any who engage in killing, we will leave something of our Christian souls behind us. In ashes and tatters.’

La Valette had been uncharacteristically hesitant about giving another defensive order, in case it struck dread into the people. But then he decided it must be done, and he ordered all streets nearest to the landwalls to be barricaded at regular intervals, and cul-de-sacs formed as entrapments. The people understood immediately what it implied. The Grand Master and the knights were expecting the Turks to break in through the walls soon enough, and desperate hand-to-hand fighting to take place in every street.

They did not lose heart. Nicholas and Hodge watched, deeply moved, as the people of this poorest, most barren of islands dragged forth from their houses what little furniture and possessions they had, chairs and tables and ancient linen chests, smashing some of them into spars and timbers. Then they nailed them up into makeshift fencing, preceded by sets of three or four spars lashed together in the centre with strong rope to form a kind of jack or caltrop, of the kind used to trip up horses in former times. Some even took picks and poleaxes to their own outhouses and piggeries and stableblocks, and dragged the stones into the street to make further barricades. They created narrowing funnels into squares and courtyards without exits. They worked through the heat of the midday sun, half naked and sweating, coughing, plastered in dust, without one murmur of complaint.

Knights watched them at these peasant labours, and said among themselves that these low-born people over whom they had haughtily ruled for decades, barely noticing them, were in some ways as brave as crusaders. They began to say that it would be an honour to fight for them.

‘To fight with them, you mean,’ said Stanley. ‘To fight alongside them.’

Nicholas was in the courtyard, sewing up his battered leather jerkin. He glanced up and there was Maddalena standing before him, her hands folded. She was annoyed that he had not paid her more attention.

‘In my country,’ she said, ‘girls must insult the boys they like very strongly. It is a custom.’

He looked down again at his work. ‘Flirting, we call that,’ he said. ‘The village girls do that in my country too.’

‘The more they like him, the more they must insult him. In the street, before all his friends. Especially the boy they would like to marry.’

‘So what would you say to me?’

She clapped her hands. At last she had his attention. ‘I would say you are puny and feeble, and as thin as an anchovy!’

‘Thank you.’

She giggled, the tip of her tongue between her teeth. ‘Your clothes are dusty and torn like the clothes of a vagabond—’

‘I
am
a vagabond.’

‘And your nose is red because of the sun, and peeling like the bark of a sickly tree – but otherwise your fair skin is pale like a woman’s. Like a spoilt princess’s in a palace.’

‘Hm.’

‘And also your nose has a white scar down the side, where the Turks slit it when you were captured. And you have bruises all over you and scars like an old fighting dog.’

He looked up. ‘But that means I’m brave, doesn’t it?’

‘In my country, it is not the custom for a girl to say nice things to the boy she likes. We should be cold and haughty, and throw insults in his face, to test him.’

He tried to take her by the hand, but she slipped away and twirled, laughing again.
Flirting
.

‘When a girl insults a boy like this,’ she said, gesturing dramatically, ‘if he becomes indignant and angry and sulks, then we know he is a weak man, with the heart of a little boy still. A real man will just laugh at the insulting. He will toss back his head, and put his
hands on his hips like this’ – she tossed back her long hair which she knew to be so lovely, and imitated what she thought was a manly stance – ‘and he will laugh aloud. Because a real man has greater things to become angry about. We say,
an eagle does not catch flies
. A real man does not trouble himself with petty things.’

‘Such as what women say to him.’

‘You are wicked!’

He laughed. She wanted to kiss him again. He was an eagle. But her mother came with the washing, and they looked away from each other with faces lowered, and did not see her mother suppress a smile as she reached down into her basket.

‘Nicholas,’ said Maria, ‘go and find the boys. They are playing out in the street somewhere. It is time to eat soon.’

Nicholas found Mateo and Tito play-fighting in the dust, rolling into a pyramid of small cannonballs, and yelled out to them. One of them had a little dagger, and when Nicholas yelled out, he cut his brother on the arm and the other boy howled. Nicholas seized them both by the scruff of their tattered shirts and dragged them to their feet. He kicked the wicked little dagger from the first’s hand, none too gently, and trod on it.

Tito nursed his cut arm.

‘Little idiots,’ rasped Nicholas. ‘You think the medical chaplains haven’t enough to do without stitching up urchins like you?’

He grabbed Tito’s thin arm and examined it. It could have been worse. ‘Now home and ask your mother to douse it in vinegar,’ he said.

‘Will it hurt?’ said Tito, looking up at him wide-eyed.

‘Like hell,’ said Nicholas unsympathetically.

‘Will I die?’

‘One day.’

‘But we are going to have to fight, aren’t we?’ said Mateo.

‘No you are not.’

‘We are. We are too few. Or we will be made slaves in Algiers, and I have heard stories of that.’

Not as bad as the truth, Nicholas hoped. Stories of boys as young as these two, held in the boy brothels of that fetid pirate port, their arms and legs amputated, for the sick pleasures of their captors.
Boys held in Istanbul in ‘peg-brothels’, waiting for their customers, seated naked on wooden pegs for … ease of access.

‘Come home,’ he said.

‘Can I have my knife back?’

He kicked it over to him.

Mateo said, ‘I’ll need it when the Turks come.’

‘Home,’ he said again wearily. ‘And stay home.’

After supper Nicholas went up onto the walls again, and found Smith and Stanley beside the Post of Germany. They were listening to the Turks singing and chanting in the forward camp, not four hundred yards off. They could have tried firing cannonballs into them from the bastions even now, but La Valette had said hold. Time enough to fire when they came.

‘They are singing like they sung before Elmo,’ said Nicholas. ‘The night before they attacked.’

Smith nodded. ‘It will start very soon.’

The voices of the imams rose and fell, the guttural flowing Arabic phrases for the ninety-nine names of God. The stars shining, the fires burning. It had a strange beauty.

Later Nicholas heard a faint lone voice in a forward trench, and to his surprise, almost amusement, the sound of a stringed instrument. Some homesick soldier singing an old song.

‘A poem by Ibn Zaydun,’ murmured Stanley. ‘A poet of Moorish Andaluz, centuries ago.’ Nicholas looked at him startled, but he did not explain further. Rather he translated.

‘
Two secrets in the heart of Night

We lay, until the light

Of interfering Day

Gave both of us away
.’

Smith harrumphed, but Stanley’s expression was distant.

‘Aye,’ he said softly, head tilted back against the low ramparts, eyes half closed. ‘They are men much like us. They bleed red when cut, they grieve to grow older, they sing verses, they fall in love … Hard it is to fight them, when you understand this much.’

It was as an hour before dawn, only four or five hours after midnight, when Mustafa first unleashed hell.

The biggest Turkish guns, the bronze basilisks, had not been used on Elmo. They were not needed, and they consumed gunpowder with a gargantuan appetite. But they were used now.

They could hear the rumble of gunfire in Syracuse and Catania, one hundred and twenty miles to the north. It seemed like the whole world was trembling. Fourteen batteries of sixty-four guns opened up simultaneously, along with four monstrous basilisks each firing a ball weighing a scarcely believable two hundred pounds. They had reduced the Walls of Theodosius, that defended Constantinople for a thousand years. It was foolish to think they might be held back by the small walls of Birgu.

Yet the blood of Elmo had bought the defenders so much precious time, an entire month, that these modest curtain walls were now massively reinforced along their entire length. Mustafa had no doubt that his basilisks would soon bring them crumbling to the earth. But La Valette, ceaselessly walking on his rounds of inspection, instilled confidence in every defender’s heart.

‘Let the Turkish guns fire,’ he said. ‘Our walls can take it.’

Mustafa also had the master gunners of the leaner, longer-range culverins triangulate their guns to fire clean over the top and hit the town itself at random.

‘Churches, fine houses, knightly auberges, paupers’ hovels, dog kennels!’ he said. ‘Flatten them all!’

And from the forward trenches came the muffled thunk of
fat-bellied mortars, belching out coarse-shaped, short trajectory missiles high into the air, crashing to land with equal, random destruction.

Cannonballs from the culverins bounced clear down narrow streets until they smashed into low walls, demolishing mean house-fronts in seconds. Pigs squealed, geese honked and raised their wings, a barrel of wine burst open on a cart and flooded a street claret-red, the cart exploding in splinters. The pigs twirled their tails and drank the spilled wine, then ran off screaming down the street as another ball crashed into a nearby well and destroyed it.

Women and children gathered at the base of the shuddering walls, handing up stones in lines to continue the bulking. La Valette ordered the rest of Birgu’s Mohammedan prisoners up from the dungeons of Angelo, to work on the most exposed parts of the walls at the end of a whip. Messages were sent back from the Turkish trenches to tell Mustafa. He dismissed the news with a single wave of his hand, and told them to keep firing. It was war. Men died.

In desperation, two of the Turkish captives were seen to raise their still-manacled hands, loosened only enough to let them lift rocks, and cry out the ancient formula of Muslim belief, the Shahada,
Lâ ilâha illallâh, Muhammadu rasûlullâh!
to show that they were brothers in the faith. But a work-gang of Maltese women heard them and believing that they were crying out secrets to the enemy, reacted in fury. Like maddened bacchantes, throwing back the veils in which they worked even now, and hitching up their long black skirts, they clawed their way up the wreckage of rubble and scaffolding to where the two unfortunates stood, and dragged them down to the square below. There they beat them to death with fistfuls of rocks. Children beat their bloody corpses afterwards with canes, and a wandering madman thrust sharp wooden sticks into their mouths and drove them hard down into the back of their throats to stop their traitorous speech.

It was a cruel fate that the culverins kept succeeding in hitting the Sacred Infirmary, which soon threatened to be rendered a bloody chaos. Panicked medical brothers hurried to and fro bearing bowls of water, bandages, flasks of turpentine, tripping, slithering and yelling out. One of them already wore his own wounded arm in
a sling. But among them strode the tall, imperturbable figure of Fra Reynaud, determined that through sheer willpower, the chaos should not take hold. He forbad a single brother to raise his voice, though the wounded being stretchered in through the door in a stream made noise enough. Groans and screams rose to the high rafters.

Explosion followed explosion, almost as if the Turks knew where the infirmary was in the town and were targeting it deliberately. Jars of precious ointments trembled and jerked off the shelves, smashing to the ground, until Reynaud ordered all breakables stored on the flagstone floors, wadded with whatever they could find. Supplies were low enough, they could not afford to lose more. Then began the grim business of triage, moving from bed to bed, each already occupied by a dying man, determining who might be saved and who was already lost. A chaplain followed in Reynaud’s wake, administering Last Rites to those deemed beyond help. Dust cascaded down from the ceiling, already zigzagged with cracks, settling on bloody wounds, helping them clot. A woman screamed. She had gone into labour early, having seen her husband killed in front of her.