Nicholas ran to Stanley, who was trying to bandage up his shattered right hand with his teeth. He was finished fighting.
‘You fight like a devil still,’ he said. ‘Bandage my fingers. Tie them tight.’
‘Your hand’s ruined,’ said Nicholas.
‘Do as I say,’ he rasped. ‘Tie forefinger and middle tight together, and the other two likewise. I will hold a sword that way.’
So he tied his right hand into a bandaged white claw, and helped him to his feet. Stanley’s left arm hung down loose now, useless, the sling torn away, and Nicholas could see with dismay how badly it was wounded, dark oily blood oozing down over his forearm. But Stanley said no more, took up his sword in the bandaged linen claw of his right hand, and went back to stand beside Medrano, looking out over the piled dead, the groaning dying below.
‘As they say in the Turkish orta,’ said the tall Spanish knight, ‘the body of a Janizary is but a stepping stone for his comrades behind.’
The last thirty or so Spanish soldiers went their rounds. Some collected musket balls where they could find them. They collected the very grains of powder out of the pockets of their fallen brethren. At least, those that were not sodden with blood.
Word went round that Luigi Broglia lay dead in the inner yard, beheaded by a culverin ball. They bowed their heads and crossed themselves.
One by one they must fall.
A knight slumped near, he seemed to be singing a low song. He held out a flask to the English boy and it was full of black gleaming powder still. He gave him a pouch of twenty or thirty more balls and his arquebus. Nicholas did not ask why he could no longer shoot himself. Instead he asked, taking the gun from him, ‘What day is it? Stanley does not know.’
The knight raised his eyes to the sky and they were maddened. ‘Nor do I know,’ he said, and began to laugh. It was fearful that he should laugh so, his head back, eyelids half lowered. The loss of control was shameful. And worse, Nicholas was afraid he might start laughing with him.
‘I do not know!’ cried the knight. ‘How long have we been here, how long have we been fighting! Perhaps a month? A year? Are we old men? Elmo will never be done. We have been fighting here now for thirty years, and our hair is white — but we do not know it because we have no looking-glass!’
Nicholas tucked the arquebus under his arm and went below to drink more water and snatch a handful of bread and wine, and pray for his soul that would shortly stand in its sinful nakedness before the Throne of Judgement. Yet surveying the last of the defenders, he began to understand that those who had survived thus far — maddened and wounded as they were — had also toughened like old leather under the sun. And he too. Already they understood now how to duck and run, how to use cover, how to listen out for the whistle of incoming cannonball, how to spy on cannons and estimate trajectories, all without conscious effort. Many had died in the first few days. But more recently, the Turks had killed fewer, not more.
He reloaded the arqbuebus swiftly and deftly, and looked around. No one had seen him do it, and he mocked himself inwardly for his vanity at wanting to be seen. In this slaughterhouse. But he knew it was very quick.
There came a distant, juddering bang, and the noise of something blustering through the air, and he stepped smoothly into an open doorway. A cannonball from a long-range gun sheared in low over the remains of the north wall and ploughed deep into the ground of the inner yard, gouging a long groove of earth before it, settling up against a barrack-room wall. In the following silence he darted over and touched the cannonball’s iron surface. Still hot. If only they still had men enough to serve their own guns, it might be re-used, and sent back to its makers with vengeance written on it in blood. But a single gun needed half a dozen men. They didn’t have half a dozen men.
At Angelo, La Valette asked about the rumour that Dragut had been injured on Is-Salvatur. Some were even saying he was killed.
‘It is not credible,’ said the Grand Master.
‘It would be by the grace of God,’ said Sir Oliver Starkey.
La Valette said slowly, as if picturing it, ‘The boy swimming past them … he made them work too fast. They misfired, hit their own breastwork, or a barrel cracked …’
Starkey nodded. ‘Dragut has not been seen out on Sciberras for a day or more. No sighting.’
La Valette clasped his hands, as if in prayer that it might be so. It would be their first good fortune in months. Though it was too late now for the news to be carried to Elmo.
The knights tore up the shirts of the dead to wrap around their heads, or to staunch their wounds, the white turning red to match their surcoats. Bearded and exhausted, snatching mouthfuls of bread, minutes of sleep when they could.
‘If a man can stand,’ said Medrano, ‘he is not wounded.’
The Spanish knight, their new commander now, addressed them all in the precious lull, his face lean and intelligent, his eyes hooded and fierce.
There were no more elaborate fire hoops or exploding brass grenades left, and too little powder for cannon, even if they had the crews to serve them. They would fight on with notched and broken blades and muskets, and when the powder ran out, they would use their muskets as clubs. They would fight with stones. They would fight with their bare hands.
‘How bitter it will be for the Turks when they understand that every inch of wall, every stone, must be fought for, bled for. Nothing will be given to them. Nothing!’
The last knights began to nod and raise their weary arms and cheered.
Not an inch of Elmo would be given away, said Medrano. Not one shot-splintered stone. They would fight unto the very last. And the story of how they fought at Elmo would be told forever after, till world end.
13
A bird cried out to sea.
Scribbles of cloud in the fading sky like Arab script.
A lucky Turkish shot took down the banner of St John itself, smashing through the flagstaff. Lanfreducci somehow managed to scramble back up there, insanely exposed, one of his legs a mere burden to him, and raised it up again on a pike, half as high again as it had been before. Shots whistled round him. He grinned and taunted them.
Nicholas could not move, his eyes black and hollow, staring at nothing. Blood and spittle drooling from his lips, leaning on his gun, looking at the ground at his feet but seeing nothing, the ground itself swaying and tilting under him. Then he knelt and fell sideways without a sound. Looking out on nothing but emptiness with the hollows of his eyes. The face of war. Beyond exhaustion, mind reeling, then floating away in white smoke, body incapable of stirring another inch.
Then the call went up, Medrano’s even voice. The Turks were already re-forming.
Around him where he lay, men who looked beyond the last stages of war-wounded, far beyond mere field casualties, were stirring and dragging themselves to their feet where they had fallen.
Wounded man knelt beside wounded man and held a flask of water to parched lips. The wounded drank, hands shaking, neck straining, lips split and bleeding with the sun. Then wounded man helped wounded man to his knees, his feet, leaning on shattered pikestaffs and gunstocks for crutches, thighs bandaged, arms in slings. One man loaded up an arquebus and handed it to another, who took it unsteadily in his left hand. His right arm dangled down useless at his side, hand severed above the wrist.
Stanley was beside him and holding out his great crushed bandaged hand, saying with his sad smile, ‘Come then, little brother. Come with us to our deaths.’