William Napier: The Great Siege

After a time, La Valette said quietly, ‘My nephew is dead. Henri Parisot is dead.’ He nodded almost imperceptibly. ‘Also eighteen.’

‘Sire-’

‘They have only gone along the road we all must follow soon. And every knight is equally dear to my heart as if he were my son. The loss of Javier de Mezquita moves me no less than the loss of my beloved nephew.’ His voice was very even and calm. Starkey could not bear to look at him. More quietly still, he said, ‘ A little while, and we shall not see them. And then a little while, and we shall see them .’

His grace and greatness as a leader, his natural authority, his sad nobility, were never more evident to his secretary than then.

He stood and turned his back on Starkey and went over to the window and looked out across the harbour. Dying sunlight bright on half-drowned coloured banners and sundered timbers, flags of gold damask, corpses lining the shore, shields washed new and cleansed.

‘Leave me now,’ he said.

As he bowed out, Starkey saw that the Grand Master’s shoulders were shaking.

Under cover of moonless nights, the women crept out through small postern gates and culverts in the walls, veils over their faces, as much to shield themselves from the foul stench of the dead than out of modesty. The men kept watch from the walls, in case of further attack, while their womenfolk went among the enemy fallen with knives, cutting the throats of any they found still moving. They killed them, they said, for the sake of Christ and their children.

Stanley watched over them. Of all battles fought, this was the most merciless. Yet he could not doubt that at the last, when the Turks captured the town, in their vengeful fury they would kill and crucify every living thing within. He foresaw scenes of women cut in two, boy slingers nailed to parodic crosses all along the walls.

No, this was not a battle that left room for mercy. He cradled his gun and waited.

Two hours or more into the night, he woke Nicholas with a whisper, shaking his shoulder. ‘I need your eyes, boy. Out there, just this side of that sand ridge, see? I thought I saw a spear.’

‘What do you mean?’ he mumbled, still rubbing sleep away.

‘Just watch.’

Nicholas stared another minute, and then to his amazement saw what Stanley had seen. A spearhead, bright in the moonlight, suddenly appeared eerily out of the ground itself, and then vanished.

He stared at the knight, not understanding.

‘Miners,’ said Stanley. ‘Testing their progress. But they have given themselves away, still twenty yards out from the walls.’ He squared his shoulders. ‘Time for the counter-attack, I think.’

The Turks had found mining through the solid rock of the island a terrible labour, and the defenders did not attempt counter-mines. Instead Smith and Stanley led a small, swift party out through a small postern gate to the place where the telltale spear had been glimpsed, and with ferocious rapidity, simply gouged their way down through the earth into the tunnel from above. They dropped down into it and penetrated some way along, until they were surprised by a group of miners.

What an infernal skirmish was fought underground then. In that perpetual subterranean darkness, the Turkish and Egyptian miners fought back with picks and shovels by dim torchlight, choking on fetid air and dust. Eventually they were beaten back far enough for the knights to stack ample explosives about the pit props, set light to the fuses and flee. Moments later, a hundred yards or more of painstakingly built tunnels were detonated to ruins, and many miners buried alive.

Back on the walls, a panting Smith and Stanley grinned when they saw the telltale subsidence in the ground beyond, and clapped each other on the back.

Mustafa heard this latest news in utter silence. He did not even give orders for further tunnels to be built.

The night before, his personal valet had died of camp fever. The night before that, his cook had also died. But they were only servants. The worse news was that a massive resupply ship from Stamboul, carrying much-needed powder, food and medicines, had been sunk by a Christian galley. The galley flew the flag of the Knights Hospitaller, and its hull was painted blood-red.

It was the galley of the Chevalier Romegas.

News came to La Valette that the harbour of Marsamuscetto had been blockaded with tethered logs. To stop the Sicilian and Spanish relief from coming in?

‘Or perhaps,’ said Starkey hopefully, ‘to stop the Turkish galleys deserting? Which would show we are indeed winning, would it not?’

‘Of course we are winning,’ said La Valette. ‘We have been winning for four months. Another month of winning like this, and we’ll be done for.’

Again the Grand Master’s harsh joke spread through the town as fast as a whipped dog. They smiled grimly and fought on.

Tales and rumours had begun to spread out over the wider world also. At last the epic nature and importance of the Siege of Malta began to dawn upon Christian Europe. The French court stirred guiltily, the German princes uneasily, Philip II continued meditating his private plans, though sharing them with none. The merchants of Genoa and Venice looked to their great galleys and counted their guns and wondered. Even Protestant England said prayers for Catholic Malta. Her cold Virgin Queen demanded intelligence from her exceptional network of informers, questioning her spies with sharp, crisp interrogation, in the six different languages she spoke fluently.

Where would the armies of Islam strike next, if Malta should fall? France and Spain, her greatest enemies. No harm in that. Yet what if the Turk should conquer them, and all their possessions besides? The Lowlands of Holland resound with the cry of the muezzin? What if the divided German princes fell one by one, what if Rome was sacked once more, and Genoa and Venice and the Adriatic bowed the knee to Suleiman? Then England might stand alone, a solitary island in the silver sea, the warriors of the Prophet like a pack of slavering hounds upon the French coast, reaching across, straining at their leash, eyes hungrily fastened on the green fields and woods of her beloved kingdom.

Pope Pius IV, who had shown little resolve in the face of threatened catastrophe, led prayers in St Peter’s, saying, ‘Almighty Father, we realise in what great peril Sicily and Italy will be, what great calamities threaten all Christian people if the island of Malta should fall …’

He announced that he would remain in Rome rather than flee, if the Turk should come. But many wondered, was Judgement upon the world?

The politics and prayers were not heard on Malta, exhausted and decimated and deafened by the Turkish guns. None could run the blockades any more. Turkish galleys ringed the island, cannon ringed the last tottering, dust-caked streets of Birgu. Whether or not the Holy Father or the Queen of England was praying for them now, they knew nothing of it. It hardly mattered.

It was August. Perhaps the Feast Day of St Lawrence, the 10th of August, perhaps later. Days had lost their names. There had been no festivities to mark the patron of the Conventual Church. There were no priests left alive. The young priest who had laughed on hearing Nicholas’s confession — Nicholas passed him in the street. He lay under a shroud of dust, his black hair now plaster-white, a thin trickle of blood dried at the corner of his mouth, his young face serene.

Maddalena went through the streets with a pitcher of well-watered wine and a fresh loaf, and found Nicholas on the south walls. He hurried her down to shelter again.

‘I have brought you these,’ she said.

He took them. ‘I am grateful for it. But you must return home, it is safer there.’