Copier’s cavalry troop unrolled their blankets and ate dry rations and slept. Faraone kept the first watch.
Nicholas had brought neither food nor blanket. He huddled against a south-facing wall, belly rumbling, and slept little. Vagabond again.
At dawn the one hundred and eighty galleys raised anchor and sailed south once more.
‘Playing games,’ muttered Copier.
‘At least they’re not anchoring off Gozo,’ said De la Rivière. ‘You think relief may yet come?’
Copier said nothing. Who could tell?
He despatched two of the Spanish soldiers back to Birgu to tell La Valette the fleet was sailing south again, probably for Marsasirocco.
‘You know the Grand Master dislikes probablies,’ said Don Mezquita.
Copier grunted. ‘Very well. Just say they’re sailing south.’
Copier was right though. The Grand Fleet returned to the broad bay of Marsasirocco and anchored and began to disembark. The Marshal led his troop right out onto the high promontory of Delimara and looked down. They were perilously near the Ottomans, but like a gnat near a lion. The vast force would not trouble itself with them.
The Ottomans were landing on a flat, easy coast now, below the mysterious stone tombs of Tas-Silg, the burial chambers of a nameless people who had lived in the ancient past before Christ, before history.
Copier and his men could only look down helplessly from the heights as the army took shape.
The level of organization in this vast operation was astonishing. They watched longboats being lowered, men wading through the shallows with timbers and planking, ropes and hatchets, swiftly building a landing stage. Oxen driven ashore, wooden wheels bound in iron bands rolled up onto the planked sand, great gun carriages speedily assembled from beautifully carpentered parts, and the numerous guns themselves, sixty-pounders, eighty-pounders, and a few monsters of burnished bronze. Saltwater streamed from the sweating men, but not a drop touching the precious weapons, worth a small kingdom. Whole regiments of Janizaries and Sipahis came ashore, then waited patient and orderly under brightly coloured parasols, as if on a holiday.
It was the parasols that finally did it for Marshal Copier. Growling furiously into his beard about insolent swine, boy-lovers, nancying ashore with parasols, like ladies of the court, he quickly unshouldered his musket. De la Rivière’s mouth twitched with amusement, but he said nothing about the waste of a shot. Copier loaded where he sat in the saddle, none too easily, and loosed off the ball at the forty thousand men below. They never even knew where it hit. A few looked up at the bang. Perhaps a few even smiled. None stirred a hair.
‘Harassing the enemy,’ said Copier, reading his brother knight’s mind. He reshouldered the musket, the barrel hot to the touch. ‘That boulder there. How many men could shift it?’
‘Twenty? Thirty?’
‘Ten,’ said Copier. He turned in the saddle and glared back at Nicholas, still hovering some two hundred paces off. ‘Boy! Move up your white English arse, at the gallop!’
Now Nicholas came close and looked down. The sight below was awe-inspiring, beautiful. The Ottoman army. He had dreamt of it, but never in such richness. The plumes of peacock and white egret feathers, the tall standards of horsehair and beaten silver, the gold tassels and red fezzes and green pennants incribed with the names of Allah. Ad-Darr, Al-Qahhar, Al-Mumit. The Afflictor, The Subduer, The Bringer of Death.
Moustachioed Janizaries in trousers and long coats, cavalrymen in light mail, religious zealots in white or green, pashas in robes of apricot and gold, semi-naked dervishes in animal skins, conical caps in duck-egg blue, white headdresses with ostrich plumes, Janizaries shouldering long muskets inlaid with arabesques of ivory, circular shields of wicker and brass, pointed shields from Hungary, curved scimitars and compound bows from the Asian steppes, flags of shot silk decorated with evil eyes, scorpions and crescent moons, flowing Arabic characters, bell tents, music and drums.
Among the massing ranks of the soldiers, the armaments and the wagons, strode a tall dark figure in swirling black robes. Even from here, Nicholas could discern a master among men. It was Mustafa Pasha. He carried a short whip in his left hand, and in his right, a scimitar ready-drawn.
‘Dismount!’ cried Copier.
They were uneasily aware that if the Turks should make speed up the slope before them, they would be cut off from flight in a minute.
‘Shoulders to the rock! Now heave!’
It was farcical. The boulder moved not an inch. Pedro Mezquita murmured something about Sisyphus and inspected a broken fingernail. And ahead of them, the Ottoman vanguard was already beginning to move inland, threatening to cut them off. Humiliated, the troop remounted and spurred their horses. The grand army of the Sultan had indeed landed unopposed, singing songs of victory, and there was nothing they could do. They were, as always, too few.
‘Always outnumbered, always outgunned!’ Copier bellowed into the wind as they galloped. ‘Almighty God damn the Kings of Christendom for milk-faced pigeon-livered slaves!’
Mustafa Pasha sent out an advance party of unarmoured slave-runners to reconnoitre the country and identify resources. They returned shamefaced, to say they had seen some partridges, a few quail.
Mustafa’s eyes gleamed like cold wet stones in his flat Anatolian face.
‘You found no livestock?’
‘No, Pasha. There was none. Everything slaughtered or gone.’
Pasha struck the slave-runner across the face with his short whip. The man remained motionless, the blood bubbling along the wound on his cheek.
‘You found none. You did not look hard enough. And forage?’
The slave shook his head. ‘They have destroyed everything and left us only a wasteland.’
Mustafa Pasha nearly struck him again and then his arm dropped.
‘The first well we come to,’ he said to a nearby Janizary officer, ‘this cur drinks it.’
‘Sire.’
He turned away. He was beginning to hate this island already. But the infidels’ stubbornness and opposition would only make their punishment worse in the end. He watched the unloading. Coming up now were bundles of tied stakes for entrenchments. But they could also be used for the impalement and crucifixion of the Christians.
He took a deep breath. The omens remained good. It was the month of Shawwal, in year 972 of the Hegirah of the Prophet. For the Christians it was 1565, dated from the birth of the Jewish teacher Jesus, whom they worshipped in their blasphemous idiocy as Allah Himself. Surely they would learn. Surely his own scimitar would teach them the error of their ways.
The Ottoman army marched forth, the small band of Copier and his cavalry shadowing them all the way, sometimes no further off than half a mile. The Turks would only exhaust themselves giving chase, and the troop would soon be back within the walls of Birgu.
Yet they had to watch from a distance, in agony, as a five-hundred-strong marching Janizary vanguard, with the dark figure of Mustafa at their head on a nodding white stallion, ungelded and mettlesome, occupied each village in turn. They fired what buildings remained, cut down the last few trees and added them to their enormous store of siege materials in the following wagons. The precious rare timber of the island turned against it. Copier’s rage grew.
They reined in beneath the flickering shade of a small lemon grove on a hill, no more than a hummock, and quieted their horses. Don Mezquita said with his aristocratic drawl, ‘I’m all for a splendid cavalry charge. Grand Marshal?’
Before them on the burning plain, Mustafa and his Janizaries surrounded a cluster of village houses and a farmstead.
The inhabitants did not conceal themselves. Twenty or so, they came forward, neither fleeing nor bowing. The women in dresses, veiled, the men in high-belted white trousers, barefoot, their heads turbanned. The younger children standing staring at the approaching soldiers, flies settling round their mouths and noses, naked among the slain animals.