William Napier: The Great Siege

The two strangers continually addressed his father as Brother Francis, which baffled and intrigued Nicholas at once. As if his father was a monk or a friar! His father never talked about his own early life. It was a mysteriously forbidden subject. He married late, a much younger girl, the daughter of an old friend of his, and they were blissfully happy for nine years, until she died in childbed. Nicholas was eight when she died, and even now could not think of her and speak at the same time. Her golden hair, her radiant smile …

He made no sound now, hardly able to hear himself breathe. Yet the strangers knew he was there. The door was abruptly flung open and Blackbeard seized him by the collar of his jerkin, hauling him inside and slamming the door again behind him.

His father rose up from the table with a thunderous expression.

‘How dare you, boy! How dare you eavesdrop like some petty sneakthief on a private conversation, and one of such consequence. I’ll give you such a beating, you disobedient wretch!’

Blackbeard let the boy go and he slumped, head bowed in shame.

Sir Francis was just raising his fist to strike him when the fairhead murmured,

‘Ay, I was young too once, and thrilled by tales of voyages and adventures.’ And he laid his hand on Sir Francis’s arm.

Sir Francis scowled at him, then slowly, very slowly, the thunder subsided from his face and his arm fell.

‘You are a confounded disobedient dog, and obedience is one of the truest virtues. Have you learnt nothing in all your schooling?’

Nicholas’s face was red with shame. ‘I am heartily sorry, sir. My curiosity was greater than my judgement.’

‘Hm.’ He stumped back to his chair. ‘Prettily said, if not done.’

‘Is the boy discreet, brother?’ asked the fairhead.

‘Is he?’ His father glared at him. ‘Well, boy? Are you?’

‘Have you ever known me not, sir?’

Sir Francis rubbed his white beard. ‘You mean we let him stay and hear?’

Blackbeard spoke for the first time, his voice a bearlike growl. ‘If only all stayed to hear what we say. All of Christendom. Our news is bitter, and time is damnably short.’

‘Very well.’ Sir Francis nodded. ‘Sit, boy. Listen and learn, and speak not a word. Not now, not hereafter, not to any living soul. Or countless lives will be sacrificed for it.’

Then the three men resumed speaking, as if Nicholas were invisible.

The fairhead said, ‘If Christendom would stop tearing itself apart for just one moment — like a dog tearing open its own stomach — and stop, and look up towards the eastern horizon — then it would see a far, far greater danger approaching like a whirlwind. A danger that will make all arguments between Catholics and Protestants, Greeks, Calvinists, Anabaptists and whatever other sectaries seem lunatic in their pettiness. For this is a danger that will, if it is not faced and conquered, destroy all of Europe. It is a danger that has never ceased to menace Christendom since that damned Mohammedan creed first arose like a demon out of the sands of Arabia, a thousand years ago. It will never cease to threaten us. It is the religion of perpetual warfare. The religion of the Barbary corsairs, the Moors, the Saracens, of Saladin, of the drug-maddened Assassins in the Alborz mountains of Persia. It is the perpetually drawn Sword of Islam. Now that sword is wielded by the most fearsome enemy we have yet faced. Suleiman the Magnificent. He who calls himself the Lord of All Under Heaven.’

‘And this single battle,’ added Blackbeard, ‘this one last, desperate stand against the numberless army of the Ottomans, will decide the fate of Christendom for ever.’

The fire gave a loud crack, and Nicholas jumped.

Blackbeard remained unmoved.

Sir Francis said, ‘The Christian powers will send no aid?’

The fairhead smiled bitterly. ‘They are too busy fighting each other, as usual. The German Protestant princes, and of course this fair realm of England, regard us as wicked Catholics. Why would they help us? Italy is torn apart by perpetual war, and the competing ambitions of the French, the Spanish, even the Papal States. The great republics of Venice and Genoa, their treasuries overflowing, still care only to amass more gold. If we receive any help at all, it will be from King Philip of Spain. But he has troubles of his own. The Protestants are stirring to revolt in the Spanish Netherlands. English privateers — as they are called — relentlessly harry his treasure ships. His mad son, Don Carlos, is a perpetual torment to him.’

‘Mad ever since he fell down the stairs, going to a midnight assignation with a porter’s daughter,’ said Blackbeard.

‘So there he sits in his gloomy palace of the Escorial and dithers. We cannot rely even on him. And so we wait, we four hundred knights, on our barren rock, for the wrath of the entire Ottoman Empire to fall on us. And soon.’

‘And if Malta falls,’ said Blackbeard, ‘then you know what will follow. The Rock of the Mediterranean guards those straits for the whole of Western Europe. The war galleys of the knights plough those seas unceasingly, to the terror of the Barbary corsairs, and even Suleiman himself.’

Sir Francis nodded. ‘But if Malta falls …’

‘If Malta falls,’ said the fairhead, ‘and our Great Harbour is lost, then Suleiman is free to roam westwards as he wills. He can fall on the Italian coast, the Spanish, the French-’

‘The French!’ roared Blackbeard with sudden violence. ‘The French deserve all they get!’

The fairhead nodded at his comrade. ‘My Brother John here does not care for the French.’

‘Those mincing treacherous milk-livered cotqueans! Only twenty years ago, that woman of a king, their Francis, made secret alliance with Suleiman, to spite the Emperor Charles V and the Hapsburgs. Do you not recall?’

‘I remember it,’ said Sir Francis. ‘All of Christendom was disgusted.’

‘The French,’ concluded Blackbeard, and made an extraordinary noise, somewhere between a snort and a growl. Nicholas thought of the she-bear devouring the little boys in the Book of Kings. ‘Don’t speak to me of the French , nor expect any aid from that quarter. They are born cowards and collaborators all.’

‘Is Grand Master Jean de la Valette not a Frenchman?’ enquired Sir Francis.

‘No,’ said Blackbeard. ‘He is a Knight.’

There was a silence, and then the fairhead resumed.

‘The delicate matter of France aside,’ he said with the lightest irony, ‘if our island fortress of Malta should fall — as fall it surely will, without aid, in only a few days — then the Grand Fleet of the Turks will be free to pass westwards, even beyond Gibraltar. To roam the Atlantic, to capture the Spanish treasure fleets returning from the Americas laden with the silver and gold of the Indies. To sail onward to the New World, even, and plant the Green Banner of Islam on the American shore. It is only twenty-five days’ sailing from Cape Florida to the Scillies on a good wind, after all. And northwards too, up the English Channel, the Scheldt, the Rhine … the Thames? Before long, the minarets of the Mohammedans might soon appear in place of the towers of Christianity, in Antwerp, and Cologne, and London. The unearthly cry of the muezzin will be heard drifting over the spires of Oxford …’

Sir Francis grimaced. ‘You have a poet’s fancy.’

‘Perhaps. But you understand me? If Malta should fall, the balance of power in Europe will be for ever changed. Suleiman will have complete mastery of the sea. And he who rules the sea, rules the land.’

Sir Francis Ingoldsby brooded long and deep. ‘It will take time for me to raise any small aid-’

‘Time we do not have!’ cried the fairhead in a sudden passion, stepping forward. ‘Forgive me, Brother Francis. But day and night the forges of the Ottomans are ablaze, the great furnaces fed by the forests of Armenia and the Crimea. The waters of the Bosphorus glow red with their flames, the arsenals are stacked high with cannon, cannonballs, powder barrels. The greatest of their guns, the monstrous basilisks, could bring down the walls of Krak des Chevaliers!’