Romegas himself had a long fine nose, a straggly beard, deep-set eyes circled with dark rings, like a man who slept little, and as Nicholas observed him making his way up to the palace of the Grand Master, Romegas’s hands shook badly.
Saluting the march past, Stanley said sidelong to Nicholas, ‘Do not think that his hands shake for fear. Since he joined the Knights at the age of fourteen, Romegas has shown himself the most fearless of any. He is of the noble house of Armagnac — and a proud Frenchman.’
‘A Gascon,’ said Smith. ‘It’s different.’
‘Once his galley was capsized and he survived underwater for twelve hours with his head in an air pocket. Something happens to a man who has looked death so close in the eye. He becomes more free. Romegas’s hands shake only because of nervous damage. But he has destroyed more than fifty Ottoman galleys, liberated more than a thousand slaves. It was he who captured the Ottoman treasure ship the Sultana and set in train this great assault on our island.’
‘Not that Romegas would apologise to anyone for that,’ said Smith.
‘No indeed.’ Stanley smiled faintly. ‘To have provoked Suleiman to outright war is probably his proudest achievement yet.’
The Spanish tercios followed Romegas, wearing their breastplates and tall morion helmets for show, and carrying their long, lethal pikes. They had a strange, almost sinister air, these hard-bitten veterans, sons of the high, bleak plains of Castile and Estremadura. Conquistadors, with faces darkened by a tropical sun, eyes distant and cold, and souls as hard as iron. They came from the New World, where they had been fighting the Christless Indians, seeing and committing who knew what atrocities there. Yet they would fight ferociously, these men, and even the heat of a Mediterranean summer might seem easy to them after the burning sun of the Peruvian Andes, or the humid jungles of Panama with its swamps, fevers and the cries of its nameless night creatures.
‘This is a war that involves the whole world,’ said Stanley softly, as if in slow realisation. ‘A war of all four continents. These soldiers returned from the Americas, paid with Inca silver, to fight in Europe against an army of Africans and Asians, and an Empire that rules to the borders of Tartary and Persia.’
‘And all focused on this tiny island in the sea,’ said Smith. ‘Like a glass focusing the sun, and burning a hole through parchment.’
La Valette promptly dictated the new arrivals their stations, and then had them help to arm the walls and bring up supplies. Not barley and dates now, but grimmer materials. Bandages and wadding, splints, flasks of alcohol. Spare recoil ropes for the culverins, arquebus balls in cases and cannonballs stacked in neat pyramids. Assembled pot guns that threw brass bombs full of Greek fire, clay pots of naphtha and fire hoops pasted with evil concoctions that would adhere to clothing and flesh and not cease from burning even underwater: pitch and tar, phosphorus and magnesium, even date wine and honey to make the stuff stick.
The knights knew every secret of siege warfare, and how to fight when hopelessly outnumbered, using the utmost aggression and every destructive martial device known to man.
The Spanish infantrymen and the knights set up high trajectory mortars to arc over the walls like arrows, needing no risky sighting or aiming. La Valette also gave orders for huge casks of water to be set up at regular intervals around the walls of Birgu and Senglea, both for drinking and for extinguishing the deadly fires that would soon be burning.
‘Before long,’ the soldiers joked, with the black humour of soldiers in all ages, ‘we’ll be tossing dead bodies down on ’em. That always causes a stink.’
La Valette disliked such jesting. They must all be worthy of their cause, even these rough-hewn soldiers. He had them go through the town and pick men of likely age, and give them rudimentary fire-arms training.
Their commanding officer was a Captain Miranda, a huge, powerfully built fellow with a great black moustache and lantern jaw, who looked like he might best even John Smith in a fight. He lined up his hasty citizen militia and told them,
‘If one of my men gets his head blown off, and drops his gun or his sword in the dust, you’re onto it in a trice. You hear me? Peasants and fishermen you may be, but you know how to spear a tuna. Well then, you can spear a Turk. We are short of everything in this coming battle. Have no respect for the dead. They will be past caring. Take up their weapons and keep fighting. It is your only hope. That and the mercy of God.’
La Valette heard the words of this Captain Miranda and liked what he heard. He ordered him to prepare a company of thirty of his soldiers to be sent over the water to St Elmo and join the station there, under the command of the stout Italian, Luigi Broglia.
‘But not yet,’ he said. ‘There remains work to do here. The moment the Grand Fleet is seen, your men will row over. You will remain here with the rest.’
He also asked for any volunteers among the knights. There was reluctance. St Elmo was a poor second to the main battle.
At last Stanley said, ‘Sire, for St John and St George, I will go.’
‘Then I too,’ said Smith.
Nicholas and Hodge counted themselves in also, and La Valette addressed them gravely, as only he could.
‘Be ready to cross over the moment the Turks are seen. It is the great battle between the Cross and the Koran which is now to be fought. We are the chosen soldiers of the Cross, and if Heaven requires the sacrifice of our lives, there can be no better occasion than this. Hasten to the sacred altar, my brothers, and be blessed with that contempt for death which alone can render us invincible.’
The waiting was the worst. No surprise it drove men mad. One hanged himself in the market square, with a note pinned to his breast asking for Allah to admit him to Paradise. Passers-by spat on the corpse of the traitor.
It made no sense. Even the Maltese people began to crack.
‘Let it come soon,’ murmured Stanley. ‘Please God.’
The sun burned down on an empty sea.
In the town, rumours flew. Spies were widely suspected. A fellow walking on the walls at night was said to be signalling to the enemy. He protested that it was only the moonlight glinting on his belt buckle, but he was beaten anyway. The next morning a Jewish family were dragged into the street and accused of allying with the Turks. Some kicked dust in their faces, and one or two even picked up stones.
La Valette had been laying the keys to the city on the altar in the Church of St John, praying to the patron saint of the Order for their protection. Hearing the news he came running, as easy as a man thirty years his junior, face black as thunder. Without a word he fell upon a man raising a stone and cuffed him to the ground with a terrific blow. Others instantly dropped their stones and lowered their faces, stepping back.
‘Ay, you cowards of men!’ said La Valette. He raised up the family of Jews where they knelt in the dust, still praying their Hebrew prayers.
‘What is your name?’
‘Isaac, Lord.’
‘Father Isaac. Your family is safe. These scoundrels will not touch a hair of your head. Go home.’
To the mob already beginning to disperse, towering over them, he said, ‘You fools! You look like none so much as those baying brutes who stoned St Stephen, our first martyr, so righteous in their own eyes. Any spies or traitors in this city are my business. Now depart!’
3
On the morning of the 18th May, Nicholas was on the walls with Hodge when a Spanish soldier ahead of them suddenly stood very stiff-backed, staring out to sea. He was as still as a hunting dog on the trace.
They raced to his side. ‘What? What?’