From the north wall a cry went up. An immense column of Janizaries was moving fast and wide round the back of Elmo, a captain at their head bellowing out to the engineers to get that gate down now, they were coming in. The miners worked frenziedly, packing up another pile of powder below the hinges of the right gate.
With the Janizaries came a rabblement of Bektaşis, daggers clutched in their fists, howling the ten thousand names of God, eyes bloodshot and deranged. Some split off and came rushing the bridges to distract the last of the defenders from the main gate.
‘Kill! Kill! Kill in the name of Allah!’
At last their time had come.
‘What is my strength, that I should hope?’ murmured Stanley. ‘And what is mine end, that I should prolong my life?’
It was the final moments of Elmo.
‘The last stand!’ bellowed Captain Miranda with bitter humour, crawling out into the yard dragging a stool with him. He could no longer stand. He dragged the stool up in front of the wooden gates and hauled himself into it, and then there he sat — Nicholas would never forget the sight of it — amid the blackened ruins of the fort, eerily lit by the dancing orange flames that still burned. Miranda drew his great two-handed sword from his scabbard and held it out in front of him. Since he could no longer stand, both his legs wounded and half eaten away with black infection, he would fight his last battle sitting down.
His men, García and Zacosta, stood beside their captain to the last. The night sky serene above them. All around the inner yard, and on the walls above, men lying dead under wooden beams, men slumped over barrels stuck with feathered arrows, men standing impaled by spears, men burned beyond recognising, half buried in rubble and shattered stone.
Fewer than thirty remained to fight, some gathering close round the seated Miranda, and others pulling back to the steps of the little chapel with Medrano, their backs to the wall, there to finish their lives and the human pilgrimage.
Fra Giacomo, the only chaplain who still lived, burned the few sparse tapestries, icons and furnishings within the chapel, so that the heathen should not desecrate them. Then he kneeled before the altar, his back to the doorway through which they would come, and bowed his head in prayer.
Another muffled explosion, and very slowly, as if in a dream, amid soft billows of pale dust, the gates fell in and hit the ground, and the Janizaries swarmed over them.
Miranda was shot dead in his chair, still swinging his sword. García was hurled to the ground but picked himself up and managed to seize a pike, before he was beheaded with a scimitar. The others were cut down on the steps of the chapel, and Fra Giacomo slain where he knelt, his lips moving in prayer to the last. One by one they perished.
Medrano died lighting a beacon fire to tell Birgu that Elmo was lost. But as he lay dying on the bastion top, he saw the fire blaze up, and saw the Janizaries let it burn. Let them know across the water that Elmo was lost. Let them know that now it was Birgu’s turn.
The flag of St John, what remnants remained of it, was hauled down and the crescent moon of Islam raised in its stead, to a mighty cheer of Allahu Akhbar!
A Bektaşi dervish hurled himself down onto Stanley from the walls above, a twenty foot drop, and both tumbled into the dust. They rolled together until the knight caved his windpipe in with a blow of his forearm, and leapt to his feet again, unhelmed. Then several shots were fired and either a ball itself or a chip of stone struck the side of his head and he careened running into Nicholas against the wall. He slumped back, eyes closed.
Holding his sword in his right hand, Nicholas hooked the knight’s right arm over his shoulders and put his left arm around the knight’s waist and seized hold of his broad leather sword belt for better grip, dragging him back into the shadows of the colonnade below the south wall. Stanley’s head was rolling alarmingly, he was badly concussed and muttering. Blood streamed from his head wound over Nicholas’s shoulder.
Nicholas dragged him to the foot of the steps under the colonnade, expecting at every moment to feel long cold steel thrust into his backbone, and he prayed with desperation, sweat pouring down his face, prickling his armpits, trying to ignore the dull throbbing ache of his deep-bruised left elbow. The knight might have weighed twice as much as him in full armour, yet he dragged him along, gasping, muscles tearing.
‘Move your legs,’ he hissed.
Stanley mumbled, ‘This is the beginnings of sorrows …’
Nicholas kicked him violently in the side of his calf and Stanley began to take some of his own weight on listless legs.
The boy glanced back out into the moonlit yard and saw Zacosta struck down and on his knees, gouting blood, yet still sweeping his sword wide and low before him, cutting clean through a Turk’s leg just above the foot. He toppled forward and five more swords were raised over him.
He looked away. They came to the foot of the steps and somehow, God alone willing, he half walked, half dragged the bewildered Stanley up them. They emerged onto the height of the ravaged south wall and without a moment’s hesitation, knowing that this was probably when they would be killed, Nicholas broke into a low shuffling run, dragging along the man beside him, thigh muscles screaming, to hurl themselves over the wall. Yet the Janizaries were there already.
Fighting against every base natural instinct to turn Stanley as a shield, he thrust his right side forward and stabbed at a Janizary, who laughed and said something in mocking Turkish about how he was too burdened to fight a good fight. But if Nicholas let Stanley drop, he would never get him up again. The Janizary switched left and right, eyes gleaming, the sea brilliantly moonlit behind his dancing silhouette, and then Nicholas lunged so fast and unexpectedly that he drove the sword point low under the Turk’s waist-sash and he gulped and bent double. He pulled his reeking blade free and left him there, and hauled Stanley onward, the knight muttering that he was blinded by the moon.
Something thumped them from behind, Stanley taking the blow. It was a musket butt, the concussed knight felt little. Nicholas, already bent at the knees, swivelled round as hard as he could, sword out wide, and sliced into the fellow’s hamstrings. There was no time to finish him, but he hoped that would stay him enough. They staggered to the brink of the parapet flattened by cannon fire, he dropped his sword to the ground, more dangerous to take than to leave, and dragged them both over the edge.
Like a drunk man, Stanley hit the steeply sloping rocky ground twenty feet below and rolled on down without apparent injury, coming to rest entangled in the last clumps of brushwood before they gave out to bare sea-washed rock. Nicholas screamed out in agony, he couldn’t help himself, landing with hands outstretched, palms scraped raw, one knee feeling as if it had fully shattered, hipbone bashed, feet curled up and red with pain. But of course the Turks had the fort surrounded by men, and some were already running over to where they lay to finish them.
Stanley flopped over onto his back, his wounded arm useless, gazing up at the dark Mediterranean summer night with his blue English eyes, murmuring softly to himself words Nicholas could no longer understand. The air was filled with the sweet aromatic smell of crushed thyme, the first sweet smell they had known in weeks, and Stanley smiled.