The Last Crusaders: The Great Siege (39 page)

He reeled in agony and stepped back, the Janizary raising his mace for another swift and decisive blow. Nicholas raced up and thrust from behind and his blade glanced off. Beneath the Turk’s scarlet waistcoat was evidently a very fine steel breastplate. The Janizary turned, his eyes dark-browed and flashing with strange pleasure. He stepped back and forth. Nicholas hesitated. Here was one of the finest soldiers in the world, veteran of a hundred battles
on three different continents. Guns roared about his ears, desperate cries that sounded like the last cries of men. Perhaps this was the end.

Stanley had collapsed back against a wall, clutching his hand to his chest, his face a rictus of pain.

Nicholas weaved left and right and then wide aside and raised the sword before his eyes as if sighting down a musket barrel. He saw the mace rise high in the air, but by that time he had already thrust forward and the blade was through and a foot of it out of the back of the Janizary’s throat. He pulled it cleanly out again and the man fell, blood pumping rhythmically from the front of his throat, and Nicholas finished him with another sharp stab straight through his broad forehead.

Onward surged the mix of Janizaries and less disciplined auxiliaries, Moors and Algerians. A dark fellow straight out of Ethiopia or the Nubian desert, barefoot and wearing bells on his anklets, a white wrap around his forehead and a loincloth, naked otherwise, came at him babbling and whooping. Nicholas wrong-footed him, leaping high onto the barrier and stuck the lean point of his sword straight through his heart. He pulled it free and leapt back again like a cat, the fellow falling dead against him, almost knocking him down.

‘Bravo!’ cried Lanfreducci.

He steadied himself. Never stop moving, never stop to admire your handiwork, fight on. Hit first, hit hard, and carry on hitting. Remember Smith’s lessons. Never look back. And get over there to Stanley.

Another younger Janizary, in a green tunic and white hat, carrying a long musket, died at a long broadsword backslash from Lanfreducci, and another Nubian, finely arrayed in leopard-skin topped with a leopard-skin hat stuck with orange feathers, was torn open by a close-range blast from a squat-barrelled arquebus packed with the devil knew what, for it was no clean ball that made that carnage. He flopped limp over the barrier and Nicholas pushed him clear, his tattered lungs dragging out on the sandbags. The attack began to falter, the shouting died down, the survivors retreated back across the bridge. There were more distant shouts of the Ottoman captains, lambasting their fleeing men.

Nicholas ran to Stanley, who was trying to bandage up his shattered right hand with his teeth. He was finished fighting.

‘You fight like a devil still,’ he said. ‘Bandage my fingers. Tie them tight.’

‘Your hand’s ruined,’ said Nicholas.

‘Do as I say,’ he rasped. ‘Tie forefinger and middle tight together, and the other two likewise. I will hold a sword that way.’

So he tied his right hand into a bandaged white claw, and helped him to his feet. Stanley’s left arm hung down loose now, useless, the sling torn away, and Nicholas could see with dismay how badly it was wounded, dark oily blood oozing down over his forearm. But Stanley said no more, took up his sword in the bandaged linen claw of his right hand, and went back to stand beside Medrano, looking out over the piled dead, the groaning dying below.

‘As they say in the Turkish
orta
,’ said the tall Spanish knight, ‘the body of a Janizary is but a stepping stone for his comrades behind.’

The last thirty or so Spanish soldiers went their rounds. Some collected musket balls where they could find them. They collected the very grains of powder out of the pockets of their fallen brethren. At least, those that were not sodden with blood.

Word went round that Luigi Broglia lay dead in the inner yard, beheaded by a culverin ball. They bowed their heads and crossed themselves.

One by one they must fall.

A knight slumped near, he seemed to be singing a low song. He held out a flask to the English boy and it was full of black gleaming powder still. He gave him a pouch of twenty or thirty more balls and his arquebus. Nicholas did not ask why he could no longer shoot himself. Instead he asked, taking the gun from him, ‘What day is it? Stanley does not know.’

The knight raised his eyes to the sky and they were maddened. ‘Nor do I know,’ he said, and began to laugh. It was fearful that he should laugh so, his head back, eyelids half lowered. The loss of control was shameful. And worse, Nicholas was afraid he might start laughing with him.

‘I do not know!’ cried the knight. ‘How long have we been here, how long have we been fighting! Perhaps a month? A year? Are we
old men? Elmo will never be done. We have been fighting here now for thirty years, and our hair is white – but we do not know it because we have no looking-glass!’

Nicholas tucked the arquebus under his arm and went below to drink more water and snatch a handful of bread and wine, and pray for his soul that would shortly stand in its sinful nakedness before the Throne of Judgement. Yet surveying the last of the defenders, he began to understand that those who had survived thus far – maddened and wounded as they were – had also toughened like old leather under the sun. And he too. Already they understood now how to duck and run, how to use cover, how to listen out for the whistle of incoming cannonball, how to spy on cannons and estimate trajectories, all without conscious effort. Many had died in the first few days. But more recently, the Turks had killed fewer, not more.

He reloaded the arqbuebus swiftly and deftly, and looked around. No one had seen him do it, and he mocked himself inwardly for his vanity at wanting to be seen. In this slaughterhouse. But he knew it was very quick.

There came a distant, juddering bang, and the noise of something blustering through the air, and he stepped smoothly into an open doorway. A cannonball from a long-range gun sheared in low over the remains of the north wall and ploughed deep into the ground of the inner yard, gouging a long groove of earth before it, settling up against a barrack-room wall. In the following silence he darted over and touched the cannonball’s iron surface. Still hot. If only they still had men enough to serve their own guns, it might be re-used, and sent back to its makers with vengeance written on it in blood. But a single gun needed half a dozen men. They didn’t have half a dozen men.

At Angelo, La Valette asked about the rumour that Dragut had been injured on Is-Salvatur. Some were even saying he was killed.

‘It is not credible,’ said the Grand Master.

‘It would be by the grace of God,’ said Sir Oliver Starkey.

La Valette said slowly, as if picturing it, ‘The boy swimming past them … he made them work too fast. They misfired, hit their own breastwork, or a barrel cracked …’

Starkey nodded. ‘Dragut has not been seen out on Sciberras for a day or more. No sighting.’

La Valette clasped his hands, as if in prayer that it might be so. It would be their first good fortune in months. Though it was too late now for the news to be carried to Elmo.

The knights tore up the shirts of the dead to wrap around their heads, or to staunch their wounds, the white turning red to match their surcoats. Bearded and exhausted, snatching mouthfuls of bread, minutes of sleep when they could.

‘If a man can stand,’ said Medrano, ‘he is not wounded.’

The Spanish knight, their new commander now, addressed them all in the precious lull, his face lean and intelligent, his eyes hooded and fierce.

There were no more elaborate fire hoops or exploding brass grenades left, and too little powder for cannon, even if they had the crews to serve them. They would fight on with notched and broken blades and muskets, and when the powder ran out, they would use their muskets as clubs. They would fight with stones. They would fight with their bare hands.

‘How bitter it will be for the Turks when they understand that every inch of wall, every stone, must be fought for, bled for. Nothing will be given to them. Nothing!’

The last knights began to nod and raise their weary arms and cheered.

Not an inch of Elmo would be given away, said Medrano. Not one shot-splintered stone. They would fight unto the very last. And the story of how they fought at Elmo would be told forever after, till world end.

A bird cried out to sea.

Scribbles of cloud in the fading sky like Arab script.

A lucky Turkish shot took down the banner of St John itself, smashing through the flagstaff. Lanfreducci somehow managed to scramble back up there, insanely exposed, one of his legs a mere burden to him, and raised it up again on a pike, half as high again as it had been before. Shots whistled round him. He grinned and taunted them.

Nicholas could not move, his eyes black and hollow, staring at nothing. Blood and spittle drooling from his lips, leaning on his gun, looking at the ground at his feet but seeing nothing, the ground itself swaying and tilting under him. Then he knelt and fell sideways without a sound. Looking out on nothing but emptiness with the hollows of his eyes. The face of war. Beyond exhaustion, mind reeling, then floating away in white smoke, body incapable of stirring another inch.

Then the call went up, Medrano’s even voice. The Turks were already re-forming.

Around him where he lay, men who looked beyond the last stages of war-wounded, far beyond mere field casualties, were stirring and dragging themselves to their feet where they had fallen.

Wounded man knelt beside wounded man and held a flask of water to parched lips. The wounded drank, hands shaking, neck straining, lips split and bleeding with the sun. Then wounded man helped wounded man to his knees, his feet, leaning on shattered pikestaffs and gunstocks for crutches, thighs bandaged, arms in
slings. One man loaded up an arquebus and handed it to another, who took it unsteadily in his left hand. His right arm dangled down useless at his side, hand severed above the wrist.

Stanley was beside him and holding out his great crushed bandaged hand, saying with his sad smile, ‘Come then, little brother. Come with us to our deaths.’

He heaved himself to his feet on his arquebus, butt in the dust, one hand gripping Stanley’s rock-like arm. He took a breath and stood swaying a moment until enough blood coursed again through his veins.

He followed after Stanley to the steps.

De Guaras was lying in the dust of the inner yard, trying to push himself up where he lay on his belly, only to collapse again.

‘Brother,’ said Stanley gently, halting beside him and seeing the extent of his wounds. ‘Lie still.’

‘I cannot,’ he gasped, almost sobbing. Bravest of the brave, weeping in the dust. ‘God forgive me but I cannot. My strength is all gone, my sword arm …’

‘Here,’ said Nicholas, and he pulled up a lump of shattered stone and put it at De Guaras’s head, and drew a cloth over it and the knight’s face so that he should have shade a few minutes, as he died there.

‘No,’ said De Guaras, pushing the cloth away again. ‘Let me burn. Let me not be covered, not even from God’s midday sun. Let me die hearing my valiant brothers fighting to the last.’

Then he held Nicholas’s hand and Stanley’s and there was no more to be said, not another word.

Nicholas lifted his arquebus onto his shoulder and followed Stanley over to the foot of the steps. He looked up. Eighteen steps to the parapet. He thought of the climb up the Stiperstones and Long Mynd, and the rapturous views west over the mountains of Wales. But that climb of his boyhood, made so many countless happy times, was as nothing to these eighteen steps. These would exhaust him beyond any hill in England. Yet he climbed slowly up, legs burning, head thumping, to crouch behind the low barricade at the top.

In the door of the bastion behind appeared another figure. It was Captain Miranda, head bandaged, arm and leg bloody. But
the worst wound was in his side, hidden and cinched in beneath a tightly laced jerkin.

He growled, ‘All that’s holding my guts in is my belt.’

Men leaned on their elbows, sighted with tired eyes, past all anxiety in a world falling almost silent around them with tiredness.

The Turks were coming again.

They could not go on.

They would go on.

The Janizaries came running with eager tread, a new regiment, like men just sprung from bed, in their first youth, at dawn. They came brimming with murderous energy, some grinning beneath their black moustaches. Surely they would be the ones who finally stormed this wretched fort, and won the glory!

The knights waited, the distance closed.

Here came death, beautiful under the sun, in ranks of fanatic hordes from a foreign land. The knights swooned and dreamed. Here came death in white silk robes, scimitars sailing overhead, crying of Allah and Paradise. And the knights too, bowed down beneath the burden of their wounds and their exhaustion, longed for the Paradise of their faith. They dreamed of green grassy ways and the shade of fruit-laden trees, the golden city of Zion amid the gardens, and their wounds cleansed and healed, their love unto death requited.

The air was splintered with cries and howls. Shots rang out. The bridges were crammed, fresh scaling ladders knocked against unmanned walls to the south. The cannonade of Smith’s horse pistol rang out, in the hands of Miranda now, and a besieger flew back off a ladder, hitting the rocks hard below.

Medrano alone saw that another, smaller group of Turks, carrying heavy backpacks, were moving out wide and at a run, towards the rear cavalier and the gate. There was not one defender left there to shoot them down.

Nicholas raced over to the south wall and raised his sword, his every fibre burning and crying out, and was fighting again.

He stepped aside and brought his sword down hard onto the nearest Turk’s shoulder. A clumsy stroke. The Turk turned it easily with a swipe of his small round shield and stuck his scimitar
in Nicholas’s breastplate. But even in his last exhaustion, the boy stepped back with his instinctive grace of movement and the sword point did no more than punch the air from his chest, its power lost.