Along the walls the knights were looking out. It was crucial to see the plan of attack.
‘Charge and die,’ muttered Smith, ‘they’re fanatics.’
‘No,’ said Medrano softly. ‘It’s more planned than that. They’re bringing bridging platforms.’
Nicholas couldn’t swallow, and his ears rang dizzyingly from the five-hour bombardment. He gripped the arquebus he held ready-loaded for Stanley, the wooden stock absorbing his sweat, as he looked out and saw, through that immense curtain of dust and smoke, the first ranks of the Bektaşis come howling through. A surge of white robes and turbans and flashing blades, thousands of them it seemed. They moved out wide around the far end of the Janizaries’ forward trench, to attack Elmo on her northward side.
‘Not foolish at all, you see,’ said the sinuous Medrano. ‘To our north, they cannot be fired on from our brothers in San Angelo. Fort Elmo itself protects them.’
Stanley grinned. ‘Very fort-unate for them.’
‘Please,’ said Smith. ‘Not now.’
‘Move forward!’ roared the voice of Luigi Broglia. ‘Barricades on both eastward points, where the parapets are already shot out. Gabions and cordonniers chest high, they’ll be across in minutes. Arquebusiers, not till I give the word! And the King of Spain’s daughter to any who destroys a bridge!’
Medrano was right. As the Bektaşis came nearer, they could see teams of twenty or so carrying narrow wooden footbridges at the run, and others carrying long firwood scaffolding poles.
‘Arquebusiers, at the ready! Shoot the porters, anything to slow ’em down! Brothers, look to your fire hoops! Fire the bridges if you can. Arquebusiers — fire!’
The guns cracked out, yet made dismayingly little impact on the vast surge of attackers a hundred paces off or more. Here and there one fell beneath the winnowing volley of loosely arcing arquebus balls, but numberless more came on behind. Nevertheless it was good to have begun, as Broglia understood. His men needed action. Now their fear and trembling began slowly to subside, their battle fury to arise, even as they scrabbled about the mundane task of cleaning out and reloading their gun barrels. Keep ’em busy. God knew they’d be busy enough in the hours to come.
Yet reloading was a slow business. By the time they were ready for a second volley, the Bektaşis were only the other side of the ditch and screaming at them. Nicholas peered out and stared aghast. The cut-throats aboard the Swan had been one thing, and that glorious cavalry charge of Copier’s. But these …
He saw eyes reddened and rolling with hemp-induced madness, he saw that some wore not white robes but torn and ragged animal skins, and engraved steel helmets instead of turbans, bearing in flowing Arabic lettering protective Koranic runes and ancient Dervish charms. They carried scimitars and small round shields, their lips shone with spittle, and their dark faces were raised to the sun in ecstasy. Some wielded short curved knives in their fists, scything them through the air and then down into the flesh of their own arms and torsos, slashing themselves like the priests of Baal in their demonic rapture. Cutting their own flesh, as if in ravenous preparation for cutting the flesh of others.
Nearby, Bridier de la Gordcamp, still smiling his soft smile, said, ‘Thou shalt be cut down, O Madmen; the sword shall pursue thee …’
Nicholas felt hot fear then. Spiritual madmen were ever the most terrifying, and they were so close and so many. How could he and Hodge ever survive this? It would be a massacre. They would fall in minutes. Suddenly it was all very close, and very real. He saw their flashing eyes, their white teeth, their smiles, and he had to fight very hard within himself at that moment not to give in to the deep cowardice that lies in the hearts of all men, even the bravest; to leap up and cry out, and throw down his weapon and flee, and hurl himself from the fortress walls and try to swim to safety. But he mastered himself, and even managed a slap on Hodge’s shoulder.
‘Ready, Master Hodge?’
‘Ready, Master Ingoldsby,’ said Hodge with a croak.
The two boys waited in agony. Their only task now to clean and reload guns as fast as humanly possible. Their nostrils filled with the sharp, biting odour of burning matchcord.
The Bektaşis howled and milled and jostled, eager to be across and finish this. The second volley slammed into them at brutal range, and thirty or forty were hit, some toppling forward into the ditch, red staining their white robes, some falling back into their brothers’ arms as if merely weary. Nicholas’s eye caught one whose left arm seemed simply to explode in a cloud of red. Yet there was no reaction among them. There was no cover, and no plan, but to wait for the bridgers to cross the divide.
The simple but tough wooden walkways rose high in the air, ropes attached to the forward arms, and began to fall slowly over the broad ditch, the front measured to hit the corners of Elmo’s fort. They were dropping two bridges at once and then they would be across.
A distinctive shot rang out, and a man on the lead rope tumbled back and fell. It was Smith’s shot. The bridge skewed slightly.
‘Again!’ cried Broglia. ‘Send those bridges into the ditch, or fire ’em up! Don’t let ’em land!’
Then many things were happening at once.
Either in their battle madness, or more mundanely, shoved from behind by their eager comrades, some of the front ranks of the Bektaşis lurched forward and tumbled into the broad ditch. From the outer side it was but a drop of eight feet or so, although the walls of Elmo across the ditch arose a good twenty feet or more, sheer and shadowed. One or two cried out as they fell, and legs were broken, ankles twisted. But most rolled and were on their feet nimbly enough, and seeing this, many more began to jump down after them. Even those who were injured staggered upright again, their pain numbed with hemp and opium. Besides, pain was but a foretaste of death, and death of Paradise, and the fountains, the maidens, the wines promised by the Prophet, which intoxicated and hurt not. Then forward, with that black angel Azrael, Malak al-Maut, at their side. For was not the Angel of Death truly the greatest friend of mankind? Their Guide to Heaven. The Angel of Mercy in disguise.
Few of the Bektaşis had brought scaling ropes or grappling irons, but those that had now threw them. At the same time the first bridge crashed down upon the north-east corner of the fort, and then the second upon the north-west.
A quick-witted Ottoman commander ordered wooden scaffolding poles and ropes passed down to the men in the ditch, who might at least begin to erect some kind of supports before they were shot down. Amid the gunfire and the arrows, they set the scaffolding poles upright and tethered them tight with crossbars, and soon a structure arose. Though the knights did their best to fire on them and kill them before they could finish the work, yet they themselves were already too thinly stretched to permit a sustained volley, and pinned down by withering crossfire from beyond the ditch.
‘Janizary snipers still in the forward trenches!’ roared Smith. ‘Watch your left!’
Almost as he said it, one of the Spanish infantrymen grunted and clutched his left shoulder. A Janizary sniper had hit him full on. He lurched into Nicholas and sank down. Nicholas knelt swiftly beside him.
He blasphemed, and blood seeped out between his fingers.
Nicholas said, ‘Lean on me to the hospital.’
‘Shit no,’ said the soldier, ‘it’s my arm that’s shot, not my leg. I can get there well enough.’
He flexed his left hand and his fingers moved freely, though more blood was pumped from his wound at the movement.
‘Not paralysed yet,’ he muttered. And he crawled back from the cordon and in through the low door of the central bastion and was gone. Yet he was the kind who would be bandaged and back soon enough. The Spanish tercios were the finest infantrymen in Europe, finer even than your Swiss pikemen. No wonder the vast empires of the New World had fallen to them.