The culverin was cleaned, swabbed and reloaded with lightning efficiency, and served with another fist-sized four-pound iron balclass="underline" quite enough to hole a small rowing boat with a single good shot, and take a rower’s leg off with it. From his pavilion on the all-commanding heights of Sciberras, Dragut ordered another team down to the shore. Half a dozen Janizary marksmen, each served by two more re-loaders. Over two or three hundred yards was a long range. But then they were very good marksmen.
From the walls of Birgu, some people could hardly bear to watch. They held their hands to their mouths, gnawed their fists. It was like watching war for the sake of amusement, as mere bystanders, and they were ashamed.
The two rowers floundered at the oars for a few seconds at the shock of coming under fire. At such a low trajectory, a short ball could easily have bounced onward over the surface of the sea and smashed into them still. Mercifully this first shot was wide before the bows. The next shot would be on target.
They had just regained their control and were rowing hard again, rising up on the oars, when a cracking volley of half a dozen long Turkish muskets rang out over the still, tense water.
They were very good marksmen.
Paolo turned his head suddenly as if looking out to sea, and when he turned back his brother saw with sick horror that half his face was gone. Another ball had struck him in the upper arm. He fell forward.
‘No!’ cried Marco, reaching for him. ‘Paolo!’
The Janizary marksmen were already levelling the next six muskets handed to them.
On the walls, people whimpered. Franco Briffa turned his back and sank his chin into his chest. In the close-knit community of Birgu, the two fishermen were like brothers to him.
Nicholas could barely tear his gaze away. But as well as the grim execution being done out there to the two poor valiant Maltese, his eyes darted back and forth across the calm water. The distance, no more than five hundred paces … on the diagonal, from the low walls below Angelo across to the rocks below Elmo, eight hundred paces, nine? The sea warm and flat calm. No powerful tides or contrary currents here, not like the strong Severn flowing down to Shrewsbury from the dark mountains of Wales, where he had swum since he was a small boy. Sea-water stings the eyes, is denser, lifts you more. How deep would a cannon ball or musket ball sheer through that water?
With a ruthlessness that seemed almost gleeful, the battery at Is-Salvatur loosed another six musket balls, peppering the side of the boat but seeming not to strike Marco, and then there came a third tight volley, followed almost immediately by another boom of the culverin. The little rowing boat spun on the surface of the water and the bow was blown away in a shower of shattered timber. Marco, the brass case clamped between his teeth, was seen to dive off the fast disappearing boat, curving down into the sea.
He surfaced again and seized hold of Paolo and cried out his name, and saw that he was dead already. He let him go with speechless grief and began to swim the last hundred paces to the rocks below Elmo. For a moment there was hope. But the Turks would not give up now. This had become a small but significant skirmish, this one man’s life of considerable significance.
Musket balls spattered into the water around Marco’s head. The watchers on the walls in their agony saw the drift of smoke from Is-Salvatur, heard the report of the volley a moment later. There was a deathly stillness, and then a low, collective groan, the keening of a crowd already in mourning. The fisherman Marco lay on his back in the sea, face lit by the setting sun, his legs curving down into the depths. Between his teeth still glinted the brass letter-case.
There was a heart-searing cry and it was Franco Briffa, animal, inarticulate, knowing he could do nothing. Then he swore that he would kill many a Turk with his bare hands in the doomed days to come.
There was a single splash from the walls below Angelo, and someone, a single figure, was swimming out after Marco and Paolo, into the murderous heart of the Grand Harbour. People murmured and stared.
Few of the Maltese swam, and fewer knights and soldiers. Now another was going out to him, and he swam smooth and fast. A solitary hero or madman.
He was slim. His hair was fair.
They began to say it was the Inglis, the Insulter of the Pasha, he who had already fled from Elmo. There came a girl’s cry from the walls, and a girl racing down the steps below Angelo. There she saw a pair of battered leather boots pulled off and dropped in the dust, and on the low wall she found a torn patched shirt that she knew, and she took it up and held it to herself weeping, as if it was the most holy relic of a saint. As if it was the hair shirt of the Baptist himself.
‘Is that him?’ said La Valette. ‘My eyes tire.’
‘I cannot see, Master.’
La Valette demanded urgently, half turning, ‘You, Fra Girolamo, tell me — is it the boy?’
‘I believe so, Sire.’
‘He has gone out there to die,’ said La Valette. ‘The Maltese are dead already.’
Nicholas swam out fast to where the last few broken splinters of the boat still floated, and then came to the body of Marco, lying back, staring into the sky. He swam in close behind it, using the corpse as a shield. No shots came from Is-Salvatur, but the marksmen were surely watching, waiting. There could be no doubt of that. He tried not to think of the people also watching him from the walls, or of the girl. He tried not to think of why he was doing what he was doing, or what would come of it, of tomorrow, or the next minute. There was only now.
The afternoon sun burned down hard, low and blinding if he looked westward. The rocks below Elmo were a warm gold, and from up above he could hear the sound of relentless and desperate gunfire from the dying fort. That was where he was taking the message. That was where he was returning. Do not think. Do not ask.
He kept his head high in the cover of the floating body, treading water, listening. How long did a dead man float? The moment he heard a crack it would be too late, the musket ball would already have ploughed into him. Or they might blast a culverin ball at him. A culverin ball at a single swimming man.
Marco’s eyes were open and he was quite dead. The boy reached up and twisted the brass case out from his teeth and tucked it tight into his waistband under water. He hoped the wax seal was good. Then he took hold of the dead man’s shirt collar and began to drag him slowly back to the Birgu shore.
By the time he came near Kalkara Creek, there were as many as fifty people there, weeping but cheering him on. No shots were fired from the Turkish side, and now he was out of range. They had failed to get the message to Elmo, but a slain gallant son of Malta had been brought home with utmost bravery and daring. Dragut must be cursing. The strange little drama, a family’s tragedy, had been a commanding triumph for neither side.
Nicholas stopped twenty yards out and trod water. He was exhausted, his muscles burned. People crowded the shore, two or three fishermen waded in, everyone shouted praise and cried vengeance. He did not take in the words. He turned the body of Marco around, head towards the shore, and gave him a gentle push. Then he turned and swam out again. Cries went up behind him as they hauled in the dead body of the fisherman. A girl’s voice cried out, No! No! as he swam away. The people on the shore carried Marco to his mother where she lay kneeling and howling and taking up handfuls of dust, and they laid him at her feet, the very tableau of Mary and the dead Christ that they saw daily in the crude, heartfelt carvings in their mean island churches and chapels.
Nicholas did not see or hear. His attention was all turned towards the battery of Is-Salvatur.
In the glorious light of the setting sun, the people watched and thought they were witnessing something out of ancient myth. A dragon stood guarding the evil shore opposite, a fire-breathing dragon, and the fairheaded boy, as thin as a child, swam nearer and nearer beneath its black mouth. Prayers went up from a thousand witnesses. His courage was dauntless, the strength of his heart was beyond reckoning.