William Napier - The Great Siege

The boy did not wait to finish him, but hauled Stanley along by his belt. Twenty yards away came on a dozen men at the run to kill him, fresh and eager. And yes, those were severed heads that the Bektaşis clutched, their bloody fingers plaited in dark matted hair, babbling and singing of Allah and his works.

He raised Stanley under the armpits now and hauled him, heels in the dust. They went down half crawling, half falling over the heaped sandstone boulders below, a bloody dagger clamped between Nicholas’s front teeth, the Janizary’s hot metallic blood running from the blade over his own lips like those of some Carib cannibal. They flopped into the lapping shallows and Nicholas heaved the knight out on his back into a larger deep-water inlet, the pursuers gathering immediately above them. None had musket balls left in their pouches, they had wasted them all in joyous firing into the air at the fall of Elmo, or he and Stanley would have been dead by now. They jabbered on the rock and began to clamber down, blades glinting.

There was the flat timber from the smashed fishing boat where he had observed it and planned it days before.

A skin-and-bone Bektaşi scrambled down to him, eyes rolling, naked but for a sheen of Christian blood in which he seemed to be slathered from crown to toe, as if he had anointed himself in bloody baptism. Nicholas pushed Stanley back against a rock, eyes closed but mouth open, still breathing, and turned on the dervish as another jumped into the water the other side of the rocks. Nicholas waded forward and smacked the knife out of the Bektaşi’s hand with his forearm and then grabbed him by his bony shoulders and unbalanced him by pulling him abruptly forward into the water. The dervish came up spluttering, the blood of his enemies washing from his dark skin. It was horrible to feel the weight of the fanatic buoyed in the water, as light as a child. For many years he had fasted his frame down to nothing but skin and bone for the love of Allah, and so it was with ease that Nicholas gripped his head under the chin and smashed it back against the boulder once, twice, three times, until even his fanatic arms had no strength, and his skull no longer knocked on the stone but made a wet, soft noise. The dervish never gave a blow with his long thin axe.

The other was swimming round to him but frenziedly, flapping like a dog. Nicholas swam out to him and took the dagger from between his teeth and raised it high and stabbed down into the floundering swimmer’s skinny back. The dervish’s head went below the water. He stabbed and stabbed and stabbed until the white sea foam turned pink in the sinless moonlight, and he knew he had lost all restraint and become merely murderous and all his boyhood innocence was gone.

The air was filled with shouts, they were calling urgently for musketeers to come up and kill these two fugitive wretches. But he paid no more heed to the bloody wreck of Elmo behind him, nor the blood-stained promontory of Sciberras. He pulled Stanley out into the water and draped him on his back over the middle of the spar. The spar sunk down only a little, Stanley’s fair locks trailing in the water, his beard beaded with pearls, eyes closed, but breathing, still breathing.

Then he pushed the weight out over the water, and gripped the near end, and began to kick.

At any moment, another might have been swimming beside him, slicing into him. Or musket balls peppering the water around him, and then his world going red and then black. But it never happened. He never knew why.

The Birgu shore seemed as far distant as some uncharted coast of the Americas.

He would never know how long he kicked, panted, rested, sometimes flopped over onto his back and lay floating in the salt sea of the great harbour, unable to move either himself or his friend another yard. And then after perhaps five minutes, the stars moving visibly overhead, and shouts and cries still coming from the inferno of Elmo, he would roll over again on his front and rest his chin on the half-submerged spar of timber, seawater flowing over his face, and kick forward that way, arms draped without strength, turning his face aside to take breath, stopping more and more frequently, kicking less and less, drifting often.

Lights twinkled on the Birgu shore, but they seemed more like a taunt than comfort. So far away.

Where the water streamed past the jagged ends of the spars as they inched forward, he saw clouds of glowing green phosphorescence. Drowned stars.

The five hundred yard crossing took him perhaps two or three hours. At any time a sharp-eyed sniper on Is-Salvatur might yet have tried to hit him in the water by moonlight. But he felt strangely past caring. He rested and kicked and rested. What would be would be. He could do no more.

A little later as he lay on his back, and Elmo looked a little further off, the high walls of San Angelo loomed a little nearer, he sucked in air and began to feel light-headed. Almost as if he might start to laugh. He knew it was only exhaustion.

On the heights of Sciberras there was immense activity by torchlight and lantern light and the bright aid of the moon. Not at Elmo, but westward at the vast Ottoman camp, and around the trenches and gun platforms. They were already being dismantled. He tried to see with his tired, salt-bleared eyes. The tents and pavilions were being taken down, the great guns roped and craned onto the massive wheeled wagons. He could hear the oxen bellow and low as they were driven into their teams and the thick leather yokes set on their muscled backs once more. He could hear the roll of the heavy ironbound wheels, perhaps even the ground and the water trembling under that massive weight. And many men marching away by orange torchlight, a drum sounding, standards raised high in the night. Then he could have laughed.

They were breaking camp already. The moment Elmo fell, Mustafa Pasha had given the order. They were already pulling back off Sciberras, returning past the low-lying Marsa, and over the Corradino Heights to Santa Margherita and the ruins of its ancient monastery. They were coming back to Birgu, the greatest prize, and the key to the island of Malta.

It could be as soon as dawn tomorrow that the great brazen guns would begin to roar again. Elmo would lie deathly quiet, smouldering, forgotten. And he and Stanley had escaped the quiet of that grave, to swim back into the cannon’s mouth once more.

He could have laughed.

With the last defenders tortured to death or beheaded, none having uttered a word under torture, Mustafa Pasha rode back to make a final survey of the paltry ruins. As he sat on his white horse in the moonlight, he revolved in his mind the figures: eighteen thousand cannonballs used, some seventy thousand pounds of gunpowder. About a fifth of their supplies. Cannonballs could be retrieved and re-used, some of them. But they had no access to more gunpowder except from Stamboul herself, nearly a thousand miles away. Worst of all was the cost in Turkish and allied dead. The siege of Elmo alone had consumed nearly a quarter of his forces. Some eight thousand dead or wounded beyond fighting more. Against some two or three hundred defenders. It was scarcely credible.

Then he lifted up his stony eyes and gazed across the Grand Harbour.

From Birgu rose a great curtain of silence, high into the starlit sky. In response to the tragic spectacle of valiant Elmo, valiant beyond words, now fallen at last, and with the banner of a false and arrogant religion polluting its walls, there came only a grave and mighty silence.

In the heart of the night, many brothers and citizens gathered on the walls of the city to witness the death of the little fort that had died for them. And as often with the death of a loved one, relative or friend, silence was the truest expression of grief.