William Napier: The Great Siege

‘Why should I be kept safe? You are not. Many are not.’

He looked exasperated.

She shielded her eyes and looked up at the toothed walls. ‘Will they stand? Will we live?’

‘Yes. I think so. But pray for it.’

Suddenly she raised her arms above her head, stretching, showing off her slim figure, and pirouetted, there in the ruined street. She said with a smile, ‘In November it is St Catherine’s Day.’

Girls’ minds were so strange . ‘Your point eludes me.’

‘It is Maltese custom that on the feast of St Catherine of Alexandria, a girl can ask a boy to marry her.’

‘In my country that’s on the 29th of February. Only once every four years. A safer arrangement.’

‘Well, you are in Malta now.’

‘I know that. The cannonballs keep reminding me.’

She looked serious again. ‘It will be over soon.’

He nodded. ‘One way or another. You should go home.’

She hesitated and then at last she said shyly, ‘I think of you … all the time.’

‘I think of you likewise,’ he said softly. ‘Which is why I want you to go home.’

She turned and went. A little way up the street she looked back, but he was climbing up on to the walls again and did not mark her. Only when he reached the parapet did he look back, but she was gone.

All day Nicholas and Hodge had fought on the walls, watched advance and retreat, shaking at the impact of the guns. Day after day. Their shoulders were bruised deep from the arquebus’s recoil, their eyes stung, their ears thrummed and sang. Nicholas’s elbow still ached, especially at night when he tried to sleep.

Boy slingers were shot from the walls. He helped to bury a ten year old. A woman fell into his arms where she worked, and he never knew what had killed her. He could see no wound. A Spanish soldier was hit in the head and leapt up and ran away down the street like an athlete and then fell to the ground dead.

At evening the guns would fall silent and the attacks fall back. Mustafa had ordered day and night — but it was not possible. The guns must be rested.

Smith said, ‘Even Janizaries must rest.’

The late summer sunsets flared more and more resplendent over the island every night, and dawn was like heaven on fire. People said it was all the dust kicked up by the guns. The setting sun bathed the stricken streets in soft gold. The guns fallen silent, old people and cripples and the wounded emerged from the remnants of their houses in their crumpled dust-caked robes, and women and children coming from work on the walls. In black widows’ gowns, heads covered, they moved like mourners through the fallen streets of their poor beloved city. Some picked up strewn rocks and carried them as if in a dream, to mend their hearts with mortar and stone. Some wept as they walked, and some women walked steadily ahead with tears running down their dusty faces, for their children were all dead, yet never making a sound nor giving way to a sob. Silent tears that seemed to run in mere accompaniment to their solemn labours as they gathered stones and worked on into the night.

They heaved and rolled aside half-sunk cannonballs, they drew out the dead from beneath the piled walls and from collapsed cellars, passing out infants, crossing themselves, working in absolute silence. An infant half crushed, its body half white with dust and half black with dried blood, was passed reverently along the line of workers and finally wrapped in a clean cloth and laid on the ground for a mother to find if she still lived. Or if her soul had gone before, then the soul of her child had gone with her. Yes, said the women, there was the mother, she had died flung over her own infant, see how the wall had collapsed over her and crushed them both. She died in the pathetic hope she might shield her infant with her own body from the damage wreaked by Turkish guns so huge they were pulled by eighty oxen. Now mother and child had died and gone together to the otherworld, said the women. As it should be. No infant should go alone.

The sun was glorious over Sciberras and inland, illumining the great cliffs of the west copper and gold, the sea barred with burning orange and the sky like red banners streaming in the windless evening sky.

Down the street came the boy, limping slightly, helmet under his arm, his fair hair haloed by the sun, and even in their grief and exhaustion the women greeted him, the Inglis hero, and smiled. His armour barely shone beneath so much dust, the street golden in the evening and light, dust motes dancing, women cooking the evening meal, children coming out to play with hoops as if the siege was all a dream and over now.

Nicholas stopped and leaned against a wall and rested his head and smiled. There beneath a small vine was a wooden cradle with an infant in it, perhaps three months old, left by his mother as she washed clothes round the corner in St Mark’s Fountain. The infant looked up through the vine leaves and the warm light twinkled on his face as the leaves moved and stirred, and he laughed and reached out to play with them. He couldn’t reach, so Nicholas broke off a leaf with its stem and put it in his pudgy little hand. The baby clutched it wonderingly, his fingers like tiny pink shrimps, and then gurgled with delight at the green waving flag in his hand, and the coming and going of the setting sun beyond the leaves, and the flickering green forest light over his upturned face.

The boy was overwhelmed at the infant’s joy amid the horror. Two dead bodies lay only ten feet away, but the baby was oblivious. Nicholas dropped his helmet to the ground and closed his eyes and tried to let his mind fill only with this sound, these chortles of infant happiness. Like water from a well, washing it all away.

He pictured the Turks encamped on their hills, putting their guns away, cooking meat on their rings of mail. Cookmasters slicing onions and simmering rice, cauldrons steaming over dung-fires: a domestic scene. The end of another working day.

He opened his eyes.

Up on the heights as the sun went down and the sky darkened, there was other activity than slicing onions and simmering rice, cleaning swords and settling down to tell tales.

A tall lean man with the face of a hawk walked among the greatest of the guns and gave quiet orders without cease, and against the blood-red sky off Gallows Point, gunners set to work once more, silhouettes against the setting sun, re-powdering and tamping and wadding. Even if the guns needed resting and cooling, tonight there would be no rest. On Margherita, two men heaved up hundred pound balls into gaping muzzles, carved like the mouths of dragons and serpents.

Nicholas kept quite still, the baby gurgling by his side. But a fine muscle in his right hand twitched.

It was coming again.

He looked down the street to where the much reinforced curtain wall still towered. It could not be. As Smith said, even the Janizaries must sleep.

On the heights they were lighting the matchstocks and passing among the guns, the sun now just below the rimmed horizon of the sea, the sky fading into night, the last birds but shadows of scimitars against the deep blue dusk.

His hand twitched. He stared down at it. No, please God, no, not more. Not now. They could not take any more. They would surely fall, they could not hold them back again now, and everything they had fought for would be wasted and lost, and everyone slaughtered in the town like cattle. Let it be evening. Let it be peace for a while, dear God.

He moved down the street a little way, towards the walls, setting his helmet back on his head.

The infant chortled and the last light went. He lay in darkness and the leaves stopped twinkling at him. He turned and stared with his huge baby eyes at Nicholas passing him, no longer smiling. Staring, waiting.