He said nothing, still staring. He was young, twenty-two or so, and his eyes were good. They stared also. Nothing. No, but … wait. The blue horizon there … what was that? As if flecked with white. As if edged with white horses. But on so calm a day …
Everything seemed to go silent, time stopped. And then they saw them. Sails.
The Spanish soldier crossed himself. ‘They are coming.’
Nicholas couldn’t move. He thought of a hare, frozen under the fixed, yellow-eyed gaze of a wolf.
Then there rose up over the horizon, some twelve miles distant, great sail upon sail. They stretched from left to right, from north to south, a myriad of sails, white and red, green and yellow. They came on slow and steady, the wind but sparsely with them, their lashed slaves rowing hard. More appeared. The horizon was nothing now but a huge crescent of sails and just discerned galleys.
‘Sweet Jesu,’ breathed the soldier. ‘How many?’
‘Hodge,’ said Nicholas urgently, ‘find Smith and Stanley, bring them here.’
Hodge vanished. Nicholas raced the other way, down the stone steps to the street.
An old woman caught the look on his face, and seized his arm. ‘You have seen them?’
Nicholas pulled free. ‘Yes,’ he said.
The old woman dropped her bundle and covered her face with her hands and wept.
He raced on.
La Valette received the message without expression.
The church bells tolled and the startled pigeons flapped up into the blue air. Many citizens sank to their knees and prayed. From below the walls came a groaning and creaking of the mighty capstan at the mouth of Galley Creek, more than twenty men heaving at the windlasses, and the huge chain rose dripping from the seabed like some creature of the deep. Barefoot fishermen rowed out and pushed wooden rafts beneath it in the centre where it sagged, lashing them all together with smaller chains and the strongest ropes.
San Angelo with its moat dividing it from Birgu was a supremely defensible island, linked to the town only by a high arched viaduct. But now Birgu was cut off as well, an island surrounded by high walls, those on the Galley Creek side inaccessible anyway. Only the landward walls could realistically be attacked by infantry, though the massive Turkish guns might reach anywhere. It was infantry that took a town, and it was the landward walls of Birgu that must hold them.
Nicholas raced back up to the walls.
The different langues were despatched to their posts, the Spanish tercios being held in reserve. San Angelo itself was left virtually unmanned for now. The first knights would die fighting for the town.
The langues of Provence, Auvergne and France ranged up along the south-facing walls, looking out over the desolate and unpeopled country. Castile held the mighty bastion next to them, and Aragon, Catalonia and Navarre held the westward curtain wall running up to San Angelo, overlooking Kalkara Creek. The small number of Germans occupied the eastward walls over Galley Creek.
So few of them, stretched so thin.
The Grand Fleet had sailed out of the Bosphorus on 29th March, exactly as Don John of Austria had known. The embarkation of an armada this size could hardly be a secret. Spies raced ahead overland, travelling by relays of horses, beacon fires dancing from one rocky headland to the next.
Mustafa Pasha stood lean on the sterncastle of his flagship, Al-Mansour, stony eyes in the wrinkled sallow face looking westward. The more aristocratic Piyale Pasha, charming and black-bearded, might have seemed his junior, but Suleiman had commanded them to work together as joint commanders.
‘You can only have one commander,’ said Mustafa.
Suleiman looked at him keenly. ‘Would you serve as second?’
Mustafa lowered his eyes. ‘As you decree, Shadow of the Sun.’
Suleiman had viewed the departure of his fleet from the Golden Horn. He felt some regret that he was not commanding himself. But let Mustafa and Piyale first take Malta, then he himself would lead his victorious army on into the heart of Europe. How sweet it would be to ride into Rome.
His eyes surveyed the hundred and eighty-one ships, a hundred and thirty of them oared war galleys, with unlikely names such as The Pearl and The Sun, The Gate of Neptune, The Rose of Algiers, The Golden Lemon Tree. Thirty huge troop-carrying galliots, each carrying six hundred men. Eleven fat-bodied merchant ships laden with supplies. Six thousand barrels of gunpowder, thirteen hundred cannon balls. Six thousand Janizaries, acknowledged even by the Christ-worshippers as the finest fighting troops in the world. Four thousand Bektaşis, willing shock troops, longing for martyrdom. Nine thousand cavalry Sipahis, and many thousands of paid peasant levies, quite expendable.
As the fleet moved majestically down the Bosphorus, from the minarets came the ancient cry of the desert in all its stark certainty.
‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God!’
As if in answer, offshore winds caught the sails of the galleys and they billowed eagerly forward, the green pennants with their embroidered gold crescents streaming likewise from the mastheads.
In time the armada’s vast numbers had been swelled even further by thousands more North African corsairs. Even as they sailed south across the Aegean, outlaws and bandits joined them, slipping out from remote Greek or Levantine inlets, leaving unknown islands, the dens of thieves and robbers, to pursue a richer prey, matters of divinity far from their minds. Christian? Muslim? What did they care? They would sail with the devil himself if there was gold in it. They were cut-throats, opportunists, nationless men, who inspired fables among the vulgar of heroic deeds or fanciful freedoms upon the boundless ocean. They were savages to a man, without kin or country, honour or nobility, the dregs of mankind. They would latch on to the Ottoman fleet like fleas on a dog, bringing nothing but their knives and their murderous hearts.
From the walls of San Angelo they could now see the oars slowly rising and falling, unhurried, implacable. Stanley said they were fifteen miles away, not twelve. They would be here in three hours or so.
‘We should go.’
Yet still they stood, even the two knights, as if fascinated by this vast armada of death that filled the sea from northern to southern horizon. The Grand Fleet of the greatest empire on earth.
‘Your eyes sparkle, Master Ingoldsby,’ said Stanley, glancing at him. ‘As if this were a spectacle sent for our entertainment.’
‘It is magnificent, for all that.’
‘It is coming to kill us.’
The guns of San Angelo roared out three shots in quick succession. Only a moment later, St Elmo answered with three identical shots, and the standard of St John was raised over the battlements. A few minutes after the same volley came from five miles inland: from the ancient walled capital of Mdina in the rocky heart of the island, the small proud city on the hill, with its winding shadowy streets and its frigid nobility in their dark palaces. Valette had little faith in them. They would keep to their own.
The Grand Master understood well what the Turkish strategy would be. Direct attack on all fronts, by land and sea. With such numerical superiority that was inevitable. But the focus of the attack would clearly be the Grand Harbour and San Angelo itself. The Knights were far too few in number to oppose a general landing. It would all be about their resistance to siege from within the fortified town. Until relief came, from God alone knew where.
Nevertheless La Valette ordered the French knight, Marshal Copier, to assemble a small troop of cavalry and reconnoitre the coast. With an Ottoman force commanded by that most cunning of adversaries, Mustafa Pasha, there was no knowing what tricks and diversions might be planned. The Turks knew even now that their mission would not be easy. They knew the Knights of old.
Copier was ordered to harass any landing forces from a distance, but more importantly to glean all intelligence possible, and retreat to San Angelo in good time.