Instead of answering directly, Nicholas only said with slow reflectiveness, ‘I came here for reasons I do not fully understand.’
‘I fear to die,’ said Hodge bluntly. ‘I do not wish to. I dream of home.’
‘Hodge,’ said Nicholas, turning to him. ‘I will go home with you when this is done.’
Hodge looked at him and said nothing. He knew it was a promise that his master and companion could not keep.
Even La Valette’s flint heart was moved when he understood what was coming next. The citizens of Birgu, the women and children and the innocent, would not be under attack tomorrow. Instead, against all his best predictions and the dictates of military science, the Turks would fall first upon Elmo. Presumably so that they might have free access to the northern harbour of Marsamuscetto. And all Elmo’s defenders would be killed. Within two or three days.
For some reason he thought of that ardent-hearted, insolent English boy. The Ingoldsby boy, only son of his old comrade-in-arms, Sir Francis Ingoldsby. They had fought side by side on the walls of Rhodes over forty years ago. Now his son would fight on the humbler walls of St Elmo of Malta. It was a strange sad tale, how the last of the Ingoldsbys died. But all of them. It was a sad loss. They had already gone to their deaths.
He sent orders for there to be no idling on Birgu’s landward walls. Everything must be brought up for bulking and repair. This respite would be brief indeed, and it was bought with their brothers’ lives, across the water. Let them use it well. The Turks would be back into the main attack within three days.
As he watched the torchlit advance from the walls of San Angelo, looking out across the Grand Harbour, a stooped, hesitant figure beside him said, ‘I fear they are in terrible danger, our Elmo volunteers.’
It was his Latin secretary, Sir Oliver Starkey. La Valette grimaced into the dark. The scholarly Starkey had never quite understood the exigencies of war.
‘The profession of our oath,’ said the Grand Master, ‘is to sacrifice our lives for Christendom. Those at Elmo must hold it as long as they can.’
Starkey glanced at him in the darkness, and saw that familiar face worn and lined with suffering and — far more wearing — ceaseless responsibility for other men’s lives and deaths. It takes courage to die. But it takes still greater courage to send other men to their deaths. In La Valette’s features were all the signs of sorrow strongly mastered, and also a strange serenity. They said that some men and women found serenity in the most adverse of circumstances, especially the great of soul; that serenity is the attribute and accompaniment of true power. Certainly to think the Grand Master a man lacking in passion was grossly to misunderstand. He was a man of the deepest passions, most powerfully mastered and directed. You could feel that power in his presence. Like a flow of lava just below the surface of the earth.
‘But they will all die there,’ said Starkey sadly.
‘Yes,’ said La Valette. ‘They will all die there.’
2
In the pavilion of Mustafa Pasha, there had been a brief council.
‘I dislike the main fleet being anchored in the south, in this Marsasirocco,’ Admiral Piyale had declared. ‘Better to keep our forces together, better to anchor in Marsamuscetto, close to our main encampment.’
‘But you feared the havoc the east wind, the gregale, would cause,’ said Mustafa.
‘I believe it will not,’ said Piyale shortly. ‘I believe I was misinformed.’
Mustafa’s eyes glittered with cold amusement. It was as he had said to the aristocratic young admiral, but Piyale had refused to listen to him. Now he was humbled before him, and Mustafa was content.
‘And what of that small fort on the headland?’ said the Pasha.
Piyale said, ‘We will have to reduce it.’
Mustafa nodded. ‘We will flatten it. It takes a decade or more to make a good fortress, but this one is of a sorry build, and can only be thinly defended. It will be taken in a day or two.’
Seeing that they were shortly to be under attack, there was no sleep that night in Elmo. The place was a frenzy of activity. And though he never lost his cheery smile, Luigi Broglia suddenly showed himself a very determined commander indeed.
He appointed Medrano to succeed him should he be killed.
‘Broglia will survive longer than any of us,’ said Lanfreducci. ‘That belly of his would stop a ball from a basilisk.’
The jokes grew blacker and blacker, and ever more frequent. Imagining the very worst horrors, and laughing at them, inured a man to real horrors when they came. Between the joking, every man prayed with all the serious fervour of his faith.
‘Dear Christ and Blessed Virgin,’ prayed Nicholas. ‘Be with us in our fighting, and in our dying. May we fight with justice and honour.’ He paused. There was no praying for health and long life, nor even an easy death. The suffering were closest to Christ, and the suffering of the dying purged their souls in preparation for the sweet afterlife. A worldly fool prayed for an easy and painless life, a simple peasant prayed to the Almighty Creator to look down and cure his rheumatic aches. But he added, ‘If it be God’s will, may Hodge survive. May he make it safe back to England after. Amen. ’
And like all those who worked and prayed, he felt the presence of the Father and the Son and all the Saints, looking down in sorrow and compassion upon this bitter and bloody little human drama.
From the ramparts of Elmo, fewer than fifty knights and a hundred infantrymen watched in awe as the Ottoman siege train moved out onto Mount Sciberras. The bump and rattle of war wagons on the stony ground sounded across the peaceful waters all night long. Wagons piled high with tents and provisions, cannonballs and best corned gunpowder, lead musket balls, arrows, helmets, entrenching tools, picks, shovels, staves, ropes, iron bars, timbers, pre-assembled wooden frames for breastwork, lightweight latticed fences for cover and shade, hides, woollen sacks, sail canvas, casks of flour, rice, lentils, dried fruit and dried meat.
All drawn by donkeys and mules, horses and oxen, vast numbers of draught animals, all needing to be fed and watered. The iron laws of the material world applied to the Ottomans as much as to any Christian army. Every 1,000lbs of ordnance required a pair of draught animals to shift. So those 20,000lb basilisks alone each required a team of a staggering forty beasts. All requiring fodder, on this bare, stark, grassless island providing none. Could the very size of the Turkish forces prove a weakness? How many provisions had the Ottomans brought, even in that huge flotilla of ships? How long could they hold out?
But it was foolish to hope. The organisation of Suleiman’s armies was legendary. They would be able to wage full war all summer, there was no doubt of that. Three or four months. Against them, Elmo could only stand for three days at best, and then Birgu, by some miracle, perhaps a couple of weeks. And then the slaughter would be terrible.
No, it was foolish to hope. The men of Elmo breathed deep on the morning air and squared their shoulders. Nobility is greater than survival, went the Hospitaller saying, as honour is greater than wealth, and virtue than cleverness.
This Great Siege was not a war that could be won. It could only be a glorious war of sacrifice. And in their sacrifice, the dying knights and the people of Malta might yet bring all of Europe to unity and to arms, to rouse itself against the oncoming Armies of Islam.
Every arquebus was brought up to the walls and stacked, pouches were filled with powder and wallets filled tight with lead balls. Helmets, shields and armour were checked, swords, halberds, half-pikes and glaives given a final whetting, the sharpened edges stropped off and hardened on taut leather belts.