In a small but concerted pike charge, masterminded by Medrano, the Turks were driven off again, with great slaughter.
The stench from the ditch below was almost enough to knock a man senseless. The flies buzzed and gorged and laid their eggs day and night, through all gunfire. It was terrible to sleep through such a stench, it infected one’s very dreams. But when the sun came up at dawn and burned down on the rotting bodies, it was worse.
It was the Valley of Gehenna spoken of in the Scriptures, said Fra Giacomo, outside the walls of Jerusalem, where the wicked in ancient times offered up their own sons and daughters in sacrifice to their false gods.
‘See,’ he said. ‘See where Suleiman the Magnificent and the Lords of the Ottomans have offered up their children to their false god likewise, and lain them out upon the altar of death. How the sacrificed sons of Suleiman are to be pitied. How the stench of his vainglory and wickedness rises to Heaven.’
The cannons continued to roar all night, but no more attacks came.
In the leaden light before dawn, they saw with grieving eyes and heavy hearts that a green banner of Islam hung limp but unmistakable on the roof of the ravelin. Turkish snipers, well defended, now looked down on them from less than fifty yards away.
It was a cruel error. Desperately short of men, Medrano had left a single watchman there, and at dusk some knights had checked and seen him lying patiently on lookout. In fact he was already dead with a shot to the heart.
The Turks had followed up under cover of darkness. Mustafa Pasha sent out a small team of his élite night warriors, who wore black robes, and nothing on their feet but black cloth wrappings so that they might move silently over any terrain. They blackened their faces, and carried no weapons but black-metalled knives. And in the night they had successfully climbed the outer walls of the little ravelin, ready to cup the mouths and slit the throats of any weary watchmen leaning on their pikes there. But there had been no need. As the Janizary musketeer had boasted, he had taken out the single watchman there with a single shot.
The Ottomans were now in possession of an outlying corner of the fort itself.
The knights could also see their slain comrade, the watchman, one of the tough veteran Spanish soldiers. One of the last. As a powerful signal that this was indeed guerre à l’outrance, Mustafa had ordered him tied by the ankles and then suspended head down, sliced throat exposed, and hung out over the wall of the ravelin so that the last of the stubborn defenders could see what fate awaited them.
Yet the sight of the atrocity made none quaver with the fear that Mustafa intended. Some wept, some sickened, some grimaced. But all felt the steel of righteous vengeance in their bellies.
From Angelo, La Valette could discern the green banner through an eyeglass.
‘Take it back, my Brothers,’ he urged under his breath. ‘Fight.’
‘Sire,’ said Oliver Starkey at his side, quiet and steady. ‘They have fought as few men have ever fought before.’
La Valette lowered the eyeglass. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know it.’
He ordered a last desperate attempt to help them.
He spoke to a master gunner on the east wall of the castle and asked him if he could fire a shot high over the Grand Harbour and hit the Turkish lines.
The master gunner shook his head. ‘As I said to you before, Sire, at this range we might hit anything.’
‘Try it, man. Do your best. God will guide.’
The master gunner was as experienced as any, and yet the first shot he fired curved right as it flew over the harbour and struck an unmanned section of Elmo’s wall itself. A few yards’ difference and it could easily have killed the defenders.
A look of agony crossed La Valette’s aged face. Then he turned away.
‘We cannot help them,’ he said. ‘They are truly on their own.’
In the brief silences between the roaring of the guns, there came another sound. Far quieter, but to the ears of siege veterans, far more ominous. The steady, rhythmic chink chink of pick axe on solid rock. The Turkish miners were at work down in the great ditch below, now working quite free of enemy fire, since they had possession of the flanking ravelin. The defenders could no longer fire down on them, only hear them at their relentless task. Soon the walls would be down.
Yet they could only imagine what it must be like to work down there in that reeking netherworld, amid the heaps of dead bodies and the clouds of flies. The flesh of the dead around them turning green and then black with putrefaction, sliding off bones like soft cheese.
‘They’ll blow them in a day or two,’ said Zacosta. He grimaced at Nicholas. ‘Do not be taken alive by these unbelieving dogs, lad. Find some way. For they have a taste for boys, for fairhead boys like you. Or they will torture you for information, with the very worst tortures they can devise. They will torture you simply for amusement. In celebration of Elmo’s fall.’
‘Hold your tongue, man,’ growled Stanley nearby.
‘You know I speak the truth,’ said Zacosta.
Nicholas glanced at Stanley, his ravaged and sunburnt face, lips and cheeks blistering through the black mask of powder soot. He said no more.
At dawn the snipers on the ravelin began to fire down on them in earnest, at the slightest movement behind the cordons. They bulked up the defences as best they could, but the ravelin’s height placed then at a grim disadvantage.
Sheltering behind a low barricade, the ridge splintering in a ceaseless hail of bullets, Medrano shouted to Stanley, ‘The Venetians at Padua, half a century ago — 1509, the Italian Wars. Under severe siege. They mined their own walls!’
Stanley frowned.
‘When the French took them, the Venetians lit the fuse.’
‘Padua fell?’
‘For sure Padua fell. But a lot of Frenchmen died taking it.’
Stanley shouted, ‘It would be good if we’d thought to mine the ravelin so.’
Medrano’s lean face split in a rare grin.
‘We did?’
‘It’s beyond the next star point, right below the ravelin.’
Lanfreducci insisted on going.
‘You can hardly walk, Brother.’
The Italian just grinned his broad, handsome grin. ‘But I can crawl excellent well. And this is a job for a crawler.’
‘It’s a very long powder trail,’ said Medrano. ‘It may not go, and if it does, it’ll take minutes. Meanwhile the snipers will be after you all the way as you crawl out below the parapet.’
‘It’s in God’s hands,’ said Lanfreducci.
A sniper observed the wounded knight clawing his way behind a near-flattened section of parapet almost immediately, and took aim. That sixth sense of the veteran soldier told Lanfreducci that a musket muzzle was aimed straight at him, and he curled himself into a ball behind a single earth-filled barrel. His face creased in agony as he bent his wounded leg, and he could feel fresh blood seeping from the split crust. But he hauled it in close by the ankle, numb below the knee, all pain above it, and lay there curled up as best he could.
A sniper musket wavered over the ravelin wall. He held his fire.
A few moments later a helmeted head appeared round the side of the barrel and a single sniper bullet put a hole clean through it.
The helmet rolled away. It was a feint, a helmet of one fallen, held out by the trapped knight.
As the sniper angrily set himself to reload, and called up his fellows to take the shot, the Italian set off crawling like a lizard along the wall, weight on his forearms, working forward rapidly, one leg dragging behind him.
Now he would not stop. A musket cracked out, yet it missed him. He crawled on. The Turks knew now that something was up. He must be stopped. Another musket shot, and a small plume of blood rose from his shoulder, but he crawled on without slackening his pace one iota. Then a dreadful sound: the spattering bark of a cannon loaded with grapeshot.