He stood while his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the little chapel. It was empty, and blissfully cool. He approached the high hanging crucifix over the altar. The stones beneath his feet were slathered in blood. In his exhausted delirium he thought it was Christ’s blood, streaming down from the crucifix, to cleanse Elmo and all the word of its manifold and numberless sins.
A figure lay at the foot of the cross, motionless, suited in armour. His hands were clasped in prayer.
It was Bridier.
Nicholas knelt by his side. He would have wept, but he was beyond tears. He laid his bare hand on the fallen knight’s breastplate, like the rest of his armour dented and dusty and cracked and half ruined. What blows it had taken. At last the steel was cooling, after the hot fury of battle and the Mediterranean sun. Bridier’s cheek too was cold, alabaster-cold to the touch. He scraped back the plastered hair from his cheek. His eyes were still open, but the light was out in them and the soul was gone. Very gently Nicholas drew down first one eyelid and then the other with the trace of a forefinger and Bridier slept in the arms of God. Never had he seen an expression so at peace.
With his very last strength he must have left the field hospital and crawled into the chapel, unseen by any. He had crawled up the aisle to the foot of the cross, dragging himself with his bare hands, his blood shining behind him on the stones. Neither wine nor opium for him. Only the wine of faith, the opium of the divine. His life was done, only his soul mattered now. Here he had made his last confession, begged for God’s mercy on his sinful soul, and quietly died.
Nicholas laid Bridier’s sword down beside his lifeless body. Untenanted flesh. All flesh is grass.
Someone came into the chapel. It was Edward Stanley.
‘That is of no use to him now,’ he said gently. ‘No swords where he has gone.’
Nicholas stared dumbly down. He was so tired.
Stanley said that the Chevalier Bridier de la Gordcamp had had the tranquillity of a great soul, a noble heart. Such a man never loses his temper or becomes angry, not even in the heat of battle. He is only an instrument in the hands of God, a feather on the breath of God, and he accepts everything appointed for him as God’s will.
‘Our brother Bridier died on the fourth day,’ he said. ‘Yet Christ rose again from the dead on the third day, in glorious foreshadowing. Or rather, the precedent light to this shadow. There is a pattern to everything. Now take up his sword.’
Stanley himself took up the body of the knight, and walked away down the aisle.
He laid him in a side room of the cluttered, fly-blown chamber that served for a hospital, where the chaplains would do their best amid the attacks and the explosions to wash him down and scent him and wrap him in linen cloths in the hope that he and all the dead might yet have a decent and Christian burial. Deo volente. Then Stanley removed Bridier’s armour, piece by battered piece, inspecting it closely. At last he passed Nicholas his helmet, his two arm vambraces and mailed gauntlets, and his sword-belt and scabbard.
‘I am to fight?’
‘No. You are exhausted.’
‘We are all exhausted. You know I fight well, how fast I am.’
‘You may need to fight to save your life soon. But now you are returning to Birgu with Hodge and my brother John.’
Nicholas bit his lip.
‘Yet this armour may save you. It is meant. Bridier had your frame to an uncanny degree. And he gave you his sword.’
‘Only to guard till evening.’
‘No. He knew he was dying. He meant you to have it.’
Nicholas eyed the edges, badly toothed and dented.
‘Find a whetstone, do what you can to the edge. Wear it with pride.’ He smiled a soft smile, his eyes shining with a proud sorrow. ‘I do not need to tell you to be worthy of it. You are worthy already.’
8
The death of Bridier affected them all deeply, for in it they saw the longed-for type and template of their own. Already their numbers were deeply winnowed. Whatever they did cost lives, whether they counter-attacked, fell back, dug in. De Guaras was sorely wounded to the head, and wore a bandage tight around his temples, deep dyed. Smith was badly hurt though he denied it angrily, still unable to rise from his pallet. Bridier was dead, Lanfreducci’s arm wound was not healing well, though he hid it as best he could.
The one shred of good news for Nicholas was when Hodge suddenly appeared at his side. He looked very pale, but not fevered. His injured left arm was in a thick stiff plastercast made of cotton bandages and white clay.
‘What … How fare you?’
‘Alive,’ said Hodge. ‘So it seems.’
‘You’ll not go back to Birgu?’
‘Will you?’
Nicholas shook his head. ‘Not yet.’
‘Then me neither. Bugger Birgu.’
Of the fifty knights, twenty were dead or wounded beyond fighting, and of the one hundred soldiers who supported them with such stubborn and dogged courage, fewer than sixty still stood. They were less than a hundred. Maybe a thousand Turks had died before the walls of Elmo, maybe more. But there remained tens of thousands more.
Yet they fought on. Another day, another night. Another day, and the assault seemed to falter a little, as a bewildered Ottoman high command pulled back to count their losses, and to consider. Day followed night followed day, the days lost their names, the dead piled up, and they fought on. They slept a few minutes at a time, whether light or dark. Small, delicate tasks became difficult, as if their very fingers longed for rest. The buckling on of armour, the reloading of an arquebus took longer and longer. Yet they fought on, more and more exhausted, uncertain even how long they had withstood the army of Suleiman the Magnificent …
In the gathering dark they huddled in the inner courtyard and ate what rations they could of bread and biscuit and salt pork, and drank watered wine. They could hear the distant shouts and orders of the Turkish medical corps, coming forward as darkness fell to rescue the wounded. They did not fire on them.
‘Not out of mercy,’ growled Zacosta. ‘Out of bone tiredness.’
‘He hates those Mohammedan dogs,’ said García, jerking his head at his comrade. ‘They raped his sister.’
Nicholas looked horrified.
García nodded gravely. ‘They mistook her for a camel.’
Zacosta gave him a thump.
These soldiers’ humour took some getting used to. Yet perhaps it was the best defence against despair.
And then in the midst of their laughter, another of the soldiers came running from the south wall to say a longboat was coming in below Elmo. Perhaps a messenger from La Valette, it was hard to see in the moonless night. The Turks could not seal off the crossing from Birgu to Elmo even now. They couldn’t seal off the Grand Harbour without first taking Elmo. And after ten days — ten days — against all expectation, they still couldn’t take Elmo. The paradox was becoming agonising.
A second soldier came panting into the courtyard. His face gleamed in the firelight, his eyes danced. Nicholas held his breath. Relief forces from Sicily?
‘Speak, damn you,’ said Zacosta.
‘Our brothers have come out to us,’ said the soldier. ‘Fifty or more reinforcements!’
All of them, soldiers and knights, dashed to the south wall and looked down, and their hearts swelled in their chests. Climbing up the steep rocky coast beneath the walls of the fort, unseen by any Turks, was a column of fifty, perhaps sixty more veteran tercios. They trod softly, their boots bandaged in cloth, every inch of steel about them dulled with mud.
‘God be praised,’ breathed Stanley.
‘And La Valette,’ said De Guaras. ‘He has not abandoned us yet.’
They hurried to open the gates.
Although the reinforcements might seem pitifully few, when faced with an army of thousands, none of them felt that way. Instead a newly indomitable spirit stirred within them, steeled once more for the fight. Perhaps it was La Valette’s plan, for the Turks to waste themselves and bleed away bewildered before this wretched little fort, while Elmo itself was constantly resupplied from Birgu under cover of darkness, without the Turks even knowing. If so, it showed masterful tactics.