The goat’s milk tasted sweet, and the crusted white bread. This land so sun-warmed and earthy, where the blood flowed so hot in the veins — and yet so pious and restrained withal, the widows in black, the maids in headscarves and veils …
Then a church bell began to ring, a steady, insistent tolling. A call to remember why they were here, which was not for young girls in their pale blue dresses.
‘They are mules, these Maltese,’ said Stanley. ‘Look at them. They have not always loved the knights, as we lorded it over them. But now look how they work. Like mules.’
He meant it as a high compliment.
It was only then that Nicholas understood the knights in their pitifully small numbers were not alone. Shoulder to shoulder with them would fight the Maltese people. He felt a lump in his throat. He thought of hurtling cannonballs, fragmenting stone, searing flame, and of Maddalena. Also a surge of pride in being part of this. Men, women and children would fight alongside the knights for their island home, against a fully professional army.
‘Nor will they surrender, as the people did at Rhodes,’ said Smith. ‘They say, We are not Rhodian, we are not Greek, we are not Italian nor Spanish nor Arab. We are Maltese. And we do not surrender.’
They slung great blocks of limestone under wooden beams and hoisted them onto Birgu’s old, battlemented walls to build them higher, or to brace them at weak points. They dug ditches and cleared away what little brushwood remained nearby.
The mighty voice of a foreman roared out, ‘We shall starve them, they will find nothing here to sustain them!’ It was the voice of Franco Briffa. ‘Not a fig, not a twig, not a green leaf, not a drop of clean water, nothing will the worshippers of the devil Mahound find here to sustain them. This island will be to them as harsh and lifeless and lonely as the surface of the moon!’
An old man said, ‘Some say the moon has lakes and seas on it, as you can see at night.’
‘If I say the moon is lifeless,’ said Franco Briffa, ‘then it is lifeless.’
All the huts and dwellings beyond the walls of Senglea and Birgu were razed. The dirt-poor inhabitants, driving forth their goats, leading their children, infants in arms, did not weep or protest. They set down their infants and tethered their goats and went back and razed their huts and dwellings themselves.
‘Well,’ said one woman, looking over the blank landscape, face grim, ‘a poor dwelling it was anyway, and will not not take much to rebuild. When the Turks are defeated.’
These people, thought Nicholas, hefting a load of timber on his shoulder and trudging back up to the city gates. They are made of the same rock as their island.
Word spread like wildfire that Don Garcia de Toledo, the Spanish Viceroy of Sicily, had sailed into the Grand Harbour under cover of darkness, spoken hurriedly with La Valette, and vanished again before dawn.
‘Like a thief in the night,’ said Smith. ‘And did he bring any Spanish tercios with him?’
De Guaras laughed sourly. ‘He left not so much as a perfumed fart.’
Yet Stanley said it was no mean thing for Don Garcia to make the crossing from Sicily to Malta, so late in the day. He was but a servant of King Philip, and Don Garcia would have reminded La Valette that even Spain, greatest of the Christian powers, could put to sea a navy of only thirty-five fully manned war galleys. The navy of Suleiman the Magnificent numbered an unimaginable hundred and seventy galleys or more. If Spain went up against the Turk face-to-face, it would be utterly destroyed. Even if all the Christian powers were to unite under a single banner — not a likely eventuality — they would still be hard-pressed to meet such a force. Philip must guard his own kingdom before he could save Malta. If it were possible, relief would be sent. But for now, the knights must fight alone.
Don Garcia de Toledo had offered to take away as many women and children and elderly as his ship could carry back to the safety of Sicily, though the people had refused in one voice.
‘Wise decision,’ said De Guaras. ‘The people know well that if the Turk takes Malta, he will fall upon Sicily soon enough anyway.’
For a mile out of the city and more, the ground was stripped of cover and scorched black. Last year’s wheat was brought into Birgu and Senglea, and carried down into cool dry underground storerooms, part of a labyrinthine system of tunnels hewn into solid rock beneath the city. They stored further food cargoes captured by the Chevalier Romegas on his ceaseless raids on Muslim shipping. It was not jewels and silks, spices and gold that would avail them now, but barley and raisins, dried fish and salt meat, and Arab medicines of the finest to treat wounds and fevers.
Quartermasters counted in ten thousand bushels of grain, huge rounds of Gozo cheese, dried tunny, olive oil, sacks of sesame seeds and Damascus dates. The vast water cisterns were still almost full from the winter rains, and there were several springs never known to fail within the walls.
All wells and springs without the walls were poisoned with a foul mix of hemp, flax and ordure. Though water was the very stuff of life, there was no hesitation. Nothing would be left for the invader but bare rock and burning sun. This was war. War to the knife.
Sometimes wells were even poisoned with arsenic, or a dead animal.
‘That’ll take some cleaning after,’ said one.
‘But we will have numberless Mohammedan slaves to work for us,’ said another.
From the high battlemented walls of San Angelo, at the northern tip of Birgu, La Valette looked down. San Angelo would take a battering before it fell. Grim fortress walls topped by another, higher inner enclosure, thickly battlemented. It was good to let the eye roam over its massive proportions. Angled bastions, slanted parapets for deflecting direct hits, splayed gun ports, inner defensive lines — the new architecture of defence in the age of gunpowder.
He looked repeatedly towards the eastern horizon, and westward over the island. But he also looked north with a thoughtful expression, at Mount Sciberras, the great bare promontory that formed the opposite side of the Grand Harbour. There had been much talk of building a grand new city there, in a far more commanding position than the little huddled towns of Birgu and Senglea. Or at least an imposing new fort.
But it was all talk, and no money. Nothing had been done. Even the single modest building there now had not been rebuilt or strengthened in any way, and it was there that La Valette’s gaze fell. The small, star-shaped fort of St Elmo. Unlike San Angelo, the little fort on Mount Sciberras was hardly of the latest design.
He sent across work parties to do what they could to strengthen the walls, and ordered them to build an outlying ravelin on its far side, in the unlikely event that the Turks should ever try to attack St Elmo overland.
He also allowed them a few more cannons, though Birgu and San Angelo were already cruelly short of firepower. The might of the Ottoman fist would of course fall upon Birgu and San Angelo. Yet St Elmo guarded the mouth of the Grand Harbour, and before the Turks could anchor their great armada there safely, it would have to be reduced.
Suddenly a cry went up.
‘A ship! A ship!’
Nobody panicked, but many rushed to the walls and strained their eyes eastwards. It had begun.
But it was only a single ship, and it came from the north, from Sicily. A long, low galley with a hull painted blood red and glistening with tallow for more speed, and flying a matching red flag with a white cross. Even its progress around the headland and into the harbour was somehow dauntless, unhurried, unafraid of the hundred galleys coming its way.
A great cheer went up from the walls.
It was the Chevalier Mathurin Romegas, bringing in more supplies, more Muslim captive slaves to work in chain gangs on the walls, and above all, two hundred Spanish tercios: the finest infantrymen in Europe. Don Garcia de Toledo had persuaded King Philip to send reinforcements after all. An absurdly small number, against the approaching Ottoman horde. But spirits greatly rose to see them.