He heaved himself to his feet on his arquebus, butt in the dust, one hand gripping Stanley’s rock-like arm. He took a breath and stood swaying a moment until enough blood coursed again through his veins.
He followed after Stanley to the steps.
De Guaras was lying in the dust of the inner yard, trying to push himself up where he lay on his belly, only to collapse again.
‘Brother,’ said Stanley gently, halting beside him and seeing the extent of his wounds. ‘Lie still.’
‘I cannot,’ he gasped, almost sobbing. Bravest of the brave, weeping in the dust. ‘God forgive me but I cannot. My strength is all gone, my sword arm …’
‘Here,’ said Nicholas, and he pulled up a lump of shattered stone and put it at De Guaras’s head, and drew a cloth over it and the knight’s face so that he should have shade a few minutes, as he died there.
‘No,’ said De Guaras, pushing the cloth away again. ‘Let me burn. Let me not be covered, not even from God’s midday sun. Let me die hearing my valiant brothers fighting to the last.’
Then he held Nicholas’s hand and Stanley’s and there was no more to be said, not another word.
Nicholas lifted his arquebus onto his shoulder and followed Stanley over to the foot of the steps. He looked up. Eighteen steps to the parapet. He thought of the climb up the Stiperstones and Long Mynd, and the rapturous views west over the mountains of Wales. But that climb of his boyhood, made so many countless happy times, was as nothing to these eighteen steps. These would exhaust him beyond any hill in England. Yet he climbed slowly up, legs burning, head thumping, to crouch behind the low barricade at the top.
In the door of the bastion behind appeared another figure. It was Captain Miranda, head bandaged, arm and leg bloody. But the worst wound was in his side, hidden and cinched in beneath a tightly laced jerkin.
He growled, ‘All that’s holding my guts in is my belt.’
Men leaned on their elbows, sighted with tired eyes, past all anxiety in a world falling almost silent around them with tiredness.
The Turks were coming again.
They could not go on.
They would go on.
The Janizaries came running with eager tread, a new regiment, like men just sprung from bed, in their first youth, at dawn. They came brimming with murderous energy, some grinning beneath their black moustaches. Surely they would be the ones who finally stormed this wretched fort, and won the glory!
The knights waited, the distance closed.
Here came death, beautiful under the sun, in ranks of fanatic hordes from a foreign land. The knights swooned and dreamed. Here came death in white silk robes, scimitars sailing overhead, crying of Allah and Paradise. And the knights too, bowed down beneath the burden of their wounds and their exhaustion, longed for the Paradise of their faith. They dreamed of green grassy ways and the shade of fruit-laden trees, the golden city of Zion amid the gardens, and their wounds cleansed and healed, their love unto death requited.
The air was splintered with cries and howls. Shots rang out. The bridges were crammed, fresh scaling ladders knocked against unmanned walls to the south. The cannonade of Smith’s horse pistol rang out, in the hands of Miranda now, and a besieger flew back off a ladder, hitting the rocks hard below.
Medrano alone saw that another, smaller group of Turks, carrying heavy backpacks, were moving out wide and at a run, towards the rear cavalier and the gate. There was not one defender left there to shoot them down.
Nicholas raced over to the south wall and raised his sword, his every fibre burning and crying out, and was fighting again.
He stepped aside and brought his sword down hard onto the nearest Turk’s shoulder. A clumsy stroke. The Turk turned it easily with a swipe of his small round shield and stuck his scimitar in Nicholas’s breastplate. But even in his last exhaustion, the boy stepped back with his instinctive grace of movement and the sword point did no more than punch the air from his chest, its power lost.
In the same instant, never hesitating, never stopping, whilst the Turk drew back his sword for another stroke, the boy spun and drove his sword forward under arm, and the Turk was skewered, falling back off the ladder. His fall dragged the boy with him. He twisted and slammed against the broken parapet and only held onto his weapon by a whisker, the hilt so slippery with blood. Another Turk hacked down to slice through his arm but he rolled away and the Turk was in over the parapet and standing before him hollering. They ducked each other’s blows and the Turk slithered and slipped and the boy slipped too in the shambles of the strewn and crumpled bodies. Sitting up, Nicholas aimed at the fellow’s armpit where it was uncovered by breastplate, and stuck his sword awkwardly in. A horrible stroke, a crude stabbing, like that of a backstreet thug.
The Turk howled with pain and his sword fell. He clutched his armpit, blood seeping through the white silk, and Nicholas was back on his feet and had stabbed him long through the throat and out the back of his neck before he could do more. Then he knew that these were no longer the best regiments they were sending in. So much for his white Janizary silk. This man had fought with all the experience of a ploughman or wagoner, conscripted only last week.
What butchery it was. The fellow lay back gargling blood. Nicholas turned and almost toppled off the wall, so clumsy with exhaustion, but still fighting, still killing. Anointed in fresh gore with each new enemy, each new encounter, morion and breastplate and blade agleam with a new red sheen of slaughter every time.
A lull. García gave the English boy a glug of wine from his flask. It was nearly gone. The boy went back to the south wall and waited. He was a boy with a man’s heart.
Zacosta shook his head. ‘How can men fight in this heat?’
García said, ‘They’re not fighting, they’re dreaming. None of them knows any more who he is or where he is.’
‘Or what he’s fighting for.’
‘That least of all.’
Nicholas knew. He fought for one thing and for one thing only. He had forgotten that this was a Holy War, or he only remembered nightly when he came to pray, to ask for God’s blessing, and forgiveness for blood shed. He no longer thought of this as some vast historic struggle between rival Empires, enemy civilisations, Cross and Crescent, true faith against false. Such abstractions meant little in a charnel house like this. They melted away in the red heat of battle. He no longer fought even for his father’s memory and his family’s pride. His father was dead: he had seen him die and spoken with him as he died, and he saw his face and heard his voice still daily. But let the dead bury the dead. It was the way of all the earth. One day he would return, to find his sisters, fight to win back the name and honour of his family.
But for now, he thought of one thing only, as he fought, reloaded, fired, struck, stabbed, buffeted, reeled back. A thing still closer to his heart. He fought not for his father or his sisters or his name, not for St George or England, the Knights or the Cross. He fought for her. Maddalena. He fought ferociously, and for the simplest reason. The harder he fought, the longer Elmo held, the longer it would be before the Turkish guns turned back on her.
They attacked Elmo by night, the exhausted sleeping knights stumbling to their feet to a weary trumpet call. The Janizaries’ white robes gleaming by moonlight, sweat-slicked skins orange by torchlight. The attackers fired flares and firebombs and in a scene from hell, wheeled up a wagon holding a brass barrel with a long spout that looked like some gleaming brass-winged insect, hugely fat-bellied. They lit a touch-hole and the spout shot forth thirty-foot flames in an angry animal roar. Two knights were caught by that burning tongue and turned into living torches, yet even in their death trance they ran out across the bridges and hurled themselves burning into the midst of the enemy, who were aghast at such colossal courage even in the agony of death. The defenders were equally astounded that they still had strength in their arms, blood still swelling their hearts.