Mustafa pulled up before them.
‘Where are your stores? Your fattest goats that you have hidden from us?’
A woman spoke for them, in the impudent way of Christian women.
‘We only eat pork,’ she mocked, and spat in the dust.
‘You are a foolish woman.’
She laughed.
Mustafa struck her across the face.
Before him, Nicholas saw Copier lean forward in his saddle, hands gripping the pommel white-knuckled.
The Janizaries suddenly spread wide and began to encircle the settlement.
Mustafa said, ‘Kill her. Enslave the rest. Burn the houses.’
The woman said, ‘You will burn in hell.’
Mustafa turned his stony eyes on her. ‘You will feel the flames of hell before I do.’
Copier drew his sword. The rest did likewise, Nicholas with shaking hand, barely able to believe what was about to happen. Don Mezquita whistled a tune.
Five hundred Janizaries.
Copier turned to Don Mezquita. ‘You, sir. You will not ride with us, but back to Birgu to report.’
Don Mezquita instantly flared with anger, but Copier quelled him.
‘You are under my command, sir, and will follow orders. We will harry the enemy, but you will ride onward and report.’
Mezquita rose up on his stirrups, his mouth twitching with fury beneath his magnificent moustache, whipped his reins down hard on his horse’s withers and rode off at a gallop across the plain, hallooing all the way, desperate for one or two of the Turks to pursue him so that at least he might taste a fight and win glory. None of them did. They simply glanced up and watched with screwed-up eyes as the Christian madman galloped away in a cloud of dust.
‘I was thinking,’ said the Janizary to his comrade, wiping the blood from his scimitar on the woman’s grubby peasant dress and eyeing her headless torso. ‘Since landing on this cursed rock, we’ve not met one coward yet. Even the women.’
The other Janizary looked up and said, almost amused, ‘And now we are under attack.’
Nicholas’s white mare galloped hard, her head straining forward, mane flying. He spurred her on and levelled his cinquedea before him, yelling wildly. The ten of them spread out into a natural line, the two fastest horses pulling ahead by half a length, a length. The Janizaries ahead of them still stumbling about in disbelief, without order and, more importantly, without pikes or halberds. This ghost troop, this small pack of scouts that had trailed them all the way from Marsasirocco, was now on the attack. It was barely conceivable.
Then they crashed into the milling infantrymen and with a locked arm, Nicholas swept his blade low and flat and cut a man deep across his face. He heard a screaming behind him.
Now they were within the circle of Janizaries, losing formation, pulling their horses round to ride back again, to keep free space and use their speed and be able to escape afterwards, after this lightning strike. The trapped peasants of the steading stared about bewildered. They had expected enslavement, beating, but not a battlefield. One or two impetuously ran to their tumbledown sheds for a pick or hoe. One was cut down by a big Janizary even as he ran. Another was pinned against a wall, sliding slowly, a red stain on the whitewash behind him.
A harsh voice was calling out in Turkish, Mustafa on his white stallion. Suddenly it came to Nicholas what his fate might be. He pulled around and made for the voice. Two Janizaries blocked his way. He tried to crash his horse through them but the terrified mare reared and he slipped back, scrabbling at the reins, dropping his sword. One of the Janizaries tried to cut his leg but he rolled off the other side and the beast took the blow. A horse’s scream was a terrible sound.
Unarmed now, he rolled up from the earth with dust in his hands. Use anything, throw anything. Everything moved at slow speed. The Janizaries were onto him, yet he had time. With two handfuls of dust he would take them. He threw one, the fellow turned, thrust his sword at him, Nicholas took one swift step back and it was enough. It was a lazy thrust. At the same time he transferred the other handful of dust to his right for better throwing and cast it, all in one smooth movement, fast as a snake. It hit his man full in the face, he gasped and blinked, the back of his hand to his eyes.
There was a short shadow on the ground beside him, a Turk coming behind to finish him. The blinded man was standing still. Nicholas kicked out hard and caught the fellow in his stones beneath his flowing robes. A guttural grunt. He bent double. Away to his left galloped De la Rivière, hewing down a Janizary caught off guard, and then two arrows flew and thocked into man or horse, and he knew that De la Rivière had gone down. Now he would use his sword, that famous swordsmanship, the finest in France they said. How many Turks would he take with him?
Nicholas shoved his knee hard into the fellow’s bended face and seized his scimitar. By Jesu it was heavy. He kept moving, moving all the time, his feet never still, never a steady target. Behind him was another, and he was cutting across Nicholas’s back even as the boy moved aside without knowing he was there. The fellow he had kicked in the stones fell forward and his comrade Janizary’s own scimitar cut him across the head. There was a moment of shock.
Nicholas had time in that still moment. He swung the heavy curved blade and cut deep into the fellow’s side. There was an instant stench from his split torso, which the boy would learn in time was the stench of ruptured bowels, and the fellow collapsed as if cut in two.
He hauled the reeking scimitar blade free and turned again. Four riderless horses milled about. There were Janizaries bending over fallen men, kicking off tall Spanish morions and performing a couple of quick deft beheadings. They had become trapped. It had been a foolish escapade.
De la Rivière sat still in the dust, head hanging forward like a man in final exhaustion, an arrow in his shoulder. A Janizary stood behind him with his blade at his bare throat, but not killing him, not yet. Mustafa’s harsh voice still rang out, and then Nicholas also saw the novice Faraone. They had stripped him naked. He was young and slim. They goaded him. He wept. Mustafa’s voice came again, and they reluctantly roped him up and rolled him down in the dust beside De la Rivière. Nicholas saw also that Copier lay dead, the greatest loss. The four Spanish infantrymen were dead too, come all the way from the green New World to die here in the Old, the blood-stained Old, on the very first day of Malta’s desperate struggle.
He was the last standing, he still clutched a Turkish scimitar, and he carried not a wound. And he was surrounded.
It was very still. Horses whinnied. His mare was led round the back of the line of troops and he saw that she carried a cut to the belly. It was not so bad. Hundreds of Janizary soldiers circled, and he was at the heart of them. Now he knew what would become of him. He was a boy. They were Turks. No, they would not kill him. They would keep him for recreation and amusement.
Mustafa stepped through the ranks and stood before him.
‘I saw you. You were unhorsed and disarmed, and then you went on to kill one of my men and badly wound another. You are dangerous for so puny an infidel.’
Nicholas said nothing, fingering the sweat-soaked handle of the scimitar, bringing the point round to face his own heart.
‘Ah.’ Mustafa smiled. ‘I see. And I saw you ride at me too. Well. Here I am.’
It took only an instant for Nicholas to choose how he would die. He thought he heard De la Rivière’s weak voice cry out ‘No boy!’ as he charged at the smiling Pasha. And then his world went black.