The Ottoman guns roared, almost in unison, a single, rolling thunder, and then hard cracks as the balls struck home against the sloped walls of Castile. Men ducked swiftly back behind the battlements as shards of stone flew up amid vast plumes of smoke and dust. They were using cannonballs of marble. Younger knights sprang up again too soon, but older hands dragged them back down and told them to keep their heads covered, faces lowered. Marble cannonballs fired with such force could send up burning splinters weighing a pound or more, hundreds of feet into the air. Then they came down again.
In the hot still air the clouds of dust formed great shielding curtains, impenetrable to the eye. And beyond the clouds of dust arose a fanatic howl, filled with madness, rage and longing.
‘Bektaşis,’ said Smith. ‘Deranged with Allah and hemp.’
The Turks were only loosing one barrage. Now their infantrymen were already running at the walls with ropes, grapples and scaling ladders, still unseen beyond their own screen of dust, scimitars flashing and turning in the air.
La Valette raised an arm.
‘Arquebusiers!’
His arm dropped.
At no more than fifty paces, the enfilading volley was devastating. The smoke roiled and the dust swirled, yet immediately La Valette had the second rank of arquebusiers step forward and loose their volley, though they could barely see their target. Another deafening roar, and many more screams below. There came a third volley, and then the guns were rested and the crossbowmen took over, loosing another three volleys of bolts into the ranks of Bektaşis, then cranking back and reloading a fourth time and waiting for the dust to settle.
‘Free fire!’ called La Valette.
They waited to aim clear and pick off individuals. Slowly the dust settled.
There were not enough attackers left standing for the fifty crossbowmen to shoot. A single fanatic, his white turban dyed red, stood and swayed, waving his scimitar, eyes to the sun in the east already blinded, chanting the names of Allah. In a second he was stuck with more than half-a-dozen hurtling bolts, and went to Paradise.
‘Hold!’ said La Valette.
A waste of bolts.
The dust finally drifted away on the summer air.
All down from the heights of Santa Margherita, and below the bastion of Castile, lay a mown field of red bodies. Here and there came a groan, a twitching limb. An arm was raised. La Valette signalled to the crossbowman nearest and the wounded man was killed. After that, the defenders did not even bother to shoot the last few wounded. They would die soon anyway in this heat. They saved their bolts for later.
Not one attacker had come close to scaling the bastion walls. Emerging through their own blinding dust clouds, the Bektaşis had found the great walls of Castile barely grazed, let alone cracked or ruptured enough to permit an incursion. As Stanley thought, this was nothing but a test. Knights and soldiers looked down soberly on the field of tangled Ottoman dead. None celebrated. This was a very small beginning indeed. And if the Turk could be so prodigal with so many of his own troops, there would be many more to come.
Mustafa was incensed. There was no weak spot, or if there was, it certainly wasn’t Castile. Birgu was a fortified town of grim strength in every yard of its towering curtain wall.
He wheeled his horse and rode south, covering three rough miles in a quarter of an hour. His horse was nearly lamed.
He stood at the door of the chapel and regained his composure before entering.
Da la Rivière was an ugly sight, for all the washing and bandaging. But he remained conscious. The naked boy now twitched and jabbered to himself on the floor. The fairheaded one, the whiteskinned snake, looked him insolently in the eye.
Mustafa said to them, ‘The capital of this island is Mdina. This is an Arabic name, the Arabic for “city”. You know this, in your hard Christian hearts. And Arabic is a holy language, the holy language, the language of the Prophet and the Koran. This Malta was an Arab island once, a Muslim island, and Mdina was a city of Islam.’
‘Things change,’ whispered De la Rivière, his voice as dry as sand.
Still insolent, still defiant. Curse him. Would these knights never yield?
‘It will be a Muslim island again!’
‘How was the assault on Castile?’ asked the boy.
Mustafa did not even strike him. It was useless with such a one.
He ordered all three dragged outside.
The naked acolyte was mad. The knight was almost dead with his injuries, he would not make it through another night. Mustafa ground his teeth. Though the fairhaired boy was the most insolent, the most unbreakable of all, with his eyes like blue ice … it would have to be him.
A Janizary dragged Faraone forward and drew his scimitar. The boy’s lips moved but they could hear no words.
‘He is only a boy,’ whispered Da la Rivière.
‘Old enough to die,’ said Mustafa.
The scimitar flashed down, and Faraone’s head rolled in the dust. Nicholas had never seen a sight so pitiful. But he did not look away. He commended his soul to heaven.
De la Rivière was beaten slowly to death with fine rods. It took a long time. He never begged for mercy nor made a sound, but Nicholas knew he was praying in his heart. Perhaps in those last minutes, God in his mercy reached down and took away his pain. And that moment before, when he had broken under torture, in the chapel, and cried out … He had been acting all the time. The slim, aristocratic Frenchman, the elegant swordsman — he was made of something harder than steel.
Even Mustafa had enough chivalry in him to allow a man a last few words. The beating paused.
‘For our three deaths,’ De la Rivière said, his mouth drooling spittle and blood, but smiling, teeth gleaming through the blood. ‘You have lost two hundred men or more. At Castile. This is how it will go with you. A prophecy of what is to come.’
The soldiers raised their rods to finish him, but at last Mustafa stayed them. The courage of this flint-hearted infidel touched even him. Let him die a man’s death, at least. He gave the order, and a scimitar blade came down.
Mustafa bent his dark eye on Nicholas.
‘Alone of all his tribe,’ he sneered.
‘Be quick about it then,’ said the boy.
The Pasha smiled. ‘It tastes foul in my mouth. But it is you who will ride back alive to your comrades, and tell them all. Wear this around your throat and my men will not molest you. Let your comrades know everything. Be sure to tell them of the horror that awaits.’
Nicholas took the decorated green cloth with distaste, tempted to drop it to the ground. But he would never pass by the enemy watchmen without it. He knotted it round his neck.
His horse was brought over, the wound in her belly sewn with strands of her own mane and daubed with turps and earth. He mounted up.
‘I wonder if we will meet again before you die,’ said Mustafa.
‘Once is enough, I think. You filthy mule-fucker.’
Then saving his spurs on the animal’s wounded flank, he lashed the reins and trotted north.
Mustafa cursed himself for not cutting off a hand or a foot.
His head still hurt, his vision shimmered, and not only from the afternoon heat haze on the earth. When he reached a spot of shade beneath a carob, he dismounted and was suddenly overwhelmed with grief and revulsion. The dead boy Faraone, an innocent heart, and the horrible torture of De la Rivière. The butchered peasant woman … He leaned and spewed, bilious spew upon the baked ground. His stomach was void, his throat more parched than ever. Mustafa had refused him even a mouthful of water. Only this accursed Mohammedan token about his throat. It burned his skin.