Will I die? he asked inwardly. Lord, will I die today? Or will I live to see England again? My sisters? Even my estate restored?
The answer came as usual. A silence, filled with a presence, and with wordless consolation.
Minutes later a cry went up from the bastion. A new flag was flying on the lookout of San Angelo.
Many rushed to the top, straining to see, desperate for the rapturous sight of the black, two-headed eagle on a yellow ground: the standard of Christian Spain, showing that the longed-for relief of King Philip had come.
The flag showed a ship and a lightning bolt.
‘The banner of Saint Elmo,’ said Lanfreducci.
Stanley stared and then said, ‘They are telling us it is the Feast Day of Saint Elmo.’
Neither knight allowed a hint of disappointment in his voice.
Stanley stared around. ‘June 3rd.’
Eleven days.
The Turks were moving guns about busily, carefully. They were not attacking yet. Everything suggested absolute determination to finish this. When they came in, it would be very hard.
Commander Luigi Broglia moved about busily too, as yet unwounded, marshalling soldiers and guns, an energetic and expert leader of men. At last the eight-barrelled organ gun had been made serviceable, a small-bore field gun that nevertheless wreaked bloody attrition on close-packed men. He set it low on the bastion, ready served.
Even among the dark pools of dried blood, the mangled bodies dragged into shade and roughly covered with sacking for decency, and the severed limbs, discreetly gathered up by the medical chaplains, Broglia retained his optimism.
‘I admire good spirits in a man,’ said Smith. ‘But Commander Broglia, do you not think there comes a time when sunny optimism, in certain circumstances, can seem like nothing but sunstruck lunacy?’
Both ducked as a cannonball whistled in. An initial ranging shot, but a good one. It struck the parapet of the south wall and sent splinters flying. They would be coming soon. Smith held his sword unsheathed.
Broglia grinned. ‘Ah, Fra Gianni Smit! Come come, my morose and melancholy English Brother, be of stout heart! And I will be of stout belly, though I fear it is diminishing daily on our paltry rations.’
There was something grotesque about Broglia’s high spirits amid the strewn limbs, the sun-crusted pools of blood, the flies sipping and fattening at their margins, and worst of all, the ubiquitous, slaughterhouse stench rising from the moat beyond. Yet Smith couldn’t help but smile likewise, revealing a split gum and a gap where yesterday two teeth had been.
‘Ecco!’ cried Luigi Broglia. ‘Just so! Coraggio e Allegrezza, Courage and Jollity, the ancient motto of the Broglia family, ever since I made it up five seconds ago!’
Smith went up to the north-west cordon. A soldier was just lugging a fresh earth-filled gabion onto the pile, heaping it as high as a man’s head, when a single shot rang out and he fell back. Shot clean through the heart. Behind their breastworks, fresh and well slept, handsomely breakfasted and full of confidence, with limitless supplies of powder and balls at their disposal, the Ottoman snipers were working.
Cursing, Smith clambered up after him to bring him down where he sprawled.
‘Brother!’ cried out Stanley. For the soldier he had gone to rescue was dead already.
Then a second shot rang out — timed with ruthless perfection — and it hit Smith sidelong the moment he was exposed, by damnable luck at the join of breastplate and backplate, passing clean through and slicing up into his belly. He fell back, clutching himself, exhaling hoarsely.
‘No!’ cried Stanley, coming at the run.
Not even Smith could take such a second wound. He lay in Stanley’s arms. ‘Brother, my brother,’ he murmured, his eyes closing. ‘’Fore God, I am undone.’
9
‘Your time is finished here,’ said Stanley to Nicholas urgently. ‘You and Hodge and my brother John. You have shown yourselves not boys, but men. Now, though the cause is far greater — yet the life of this my brother John Smith matters to me as much as the war itself, though it should not. As much as you do to each other. I charge you with this. Do not fail me, brave Hodge and Ingoldsby.’
Nicholas scrambled into the tiny rowing boat below the rocks, Hodge close behind him. They looked over their passengers, taking up their oars, Hodge rowing with his right arm only. Smith, barely conscious, but still clutching his precious jezail. Two badly wounded soldiers, and two dead bodies sewn into rough shrouds, one of them Bridier. Though it wasn’t fighting, yet here was a job to be done.
‘We’ll get them there,’ said Nicholas, pushing off the rocks. ‘If that Sacred Infirmary cannot cure them, nothing can. Then I will come back.’
‘You will not,’ said Stanley. ‘The Turk must surely blockade us fully soon. But you will be under La Valette’s orders. Now row. With all your might.’
Their hands blistered, eyes stung with sweat, rising up from the rowing bench with the force of each pull, legs straining as much as their arms, they rowed. The weight of the boat was considerable, two rowers but seven men, dead and alive. From the half-delirious Smith and the wounded soldiers came dazed groans, and worse, the stench of sickness and the fetor of decay. Yet they crossed over the eerily silent half mile of harbour in minutes.
As they neared the Birgu shore, hands came down to help. Questions assailed them on every side, until a quiet but commanding voice took charge. It was Fra Reynaud, who had tended Nicholas before in the infirmary. He protected the boys from the jabbering questioners, had the three wounded lifted carefully onto the wagon, and ordered the shrouded bodies taken to the cool crypt beneath the Conventual Church.
‘The Chevalier Bridier,’ said Nicholas, still gasping from rowing, indicating the lighter body.
Fra Reynaud looked grave.
‘He fought and died like a … like a-’
‘Like a Knight Hospitaller?’ said Reynaud.
Nicholas nodded, eyes almost closed.
‘You come with me.’
‘No need.’
Reynaud was astonished. ‘You are quite unhurt?’
‘Yes.’
He reflected. ‘You were not meant to die there. Your story will go on. For those left at Elmo …’ He looked just once, swiftly, across the water. ‘Maybe their earthly pilgrimage will end there.’
Nicholas and Hodge could now see Elmo and the Ottoman camp as Birgu saw it. The camp so vast, proud, magnificent, its numberless cohorts spread out at ease across the mountainside, vast enclosures of horses and draught animals, its great field-hospital pavilions so tall and airy, its war banners gleaming in green and gold. And at the tip of the headland, a hundredth of its size, what looked like little more than a circle of smouldering rubble.
La Valette would see them that evening. They returned to the house of Franco Briffa. Franco was away with his brother Luqa, fishing down on the rocks below the town, while they still could. Maria wept when she saw them and bowed her head and showed them to their room. Hodge lay down and closed his eyes.
‘And the cake,’ mumbled Nicholas, his tiredness now breaking over him like a great grey wave, ‘the cake was very good.’
Maria smiled through her tears. ‘Maddalena will return this evening too.’
He lay back and slept almost immediately, woke some hours later, slept again. Dreamed of Elmo, of the horror. Woke and thought of how he would never more see smiling Ned Stanley. Of how they were still fighting over there, at this very minute, while he slept in a bed in a comfortable cool white chamber. Numb with sorrow, guilt, exhaustion, he slept more.
When he woke it was dark, and Hodge was making a strange noise, breathing like an old man with congested lungs. He peered over to him and saw with a chill and sinking heart that he was sweating heavily. He placed his palm over his friend’s forehead and it was steam-hot and clammy.