All the people looked on at this strange sight, falling quiet. It was the Inglis boy, the Insulter, come back from Elmo to dance in the street like a prince with the daughter of Franco Briffa. She was still a maiden pure, you could tell, but in the expression of each of them there was such a love that burned, and in the deadly seriousness of their young eyes, his a Northern sea blue and hers the colour of Malta honey.
Franco Briffa also saw, and his jaw fell open. These two loved like none other. ‘Dios mio,’ he muttered. There had never been such love as theirs. Some looked on and remembered the love they had known when they were young, and some longed to know such love, and some felt the most aching regret that they would never know such a love as this of these two stately dancers, the slim Malta girl and the bloodstained boy, dancing in the Street of the Knights, as if no one else lived in the world with them but they alone.
Only hours later, soon after sunrise the next day, guns booming, banners flying, casting giant crinkled shadows over the sea before it as it came, the Ottoman fleet sailed safe at last into harbour in Marsamuscetto. The Turkish force, with all its supplies, munitions and material, was now on the very doorstep of San Angelo and Birgu.
Another departure was little noted, and went without gun salutes and fanfare. A small galley departed for Tripoli, bearing in a casket the corpse of Dragut Rais.
Nicholas slept a day and a night in the Sacred Infirmary, given drugged wine, barely conscious of the chaplain physicians ministering to him. When he came to, Smith and Hodge were by his bedside.
‘You’re …’
‘Both still in the land of the living,’ said Smith, a faint smile showing through his black beard. ‘God wanted me here still.’
‘Right as rain,’ said Hodge equably. His arm was still in plaster.
‘But what about-’
‘He’s fine,’ said Smith gently. ‘He needs a lot of rest. But he’ll mend. He’s made of ox leather and oakwood. Here’ — he fumbled for something in his jerkin — ‘you know that in the days of ancient Rome, a man who saved the life of a fellow citizen, such as Coriolanus, was crowned with the oak-leaf cluster. Well, I could find no oaks on this blasted island. So,’ he tossed something into Nicholas’s sheeted lap, ‘I give you this.’
It was a lemon.
‘I am honoured,’ said Nicholas gravely.
‘The honour, though, is all real,’ said Smith, and he was serious again. ‘You saved Stanley’s life.’
‘He wanted to remain at Elmo. To die there.’
‘He was wrong. As was I. We are needed here.’ He looked about the beautiful hall of the infirmary, but seeing things far off. ‘Or we soon will be.’
Fra Reynaud said he could leave that evening.
‘You had more than one interesting wound that could have killed or unlimbed you had it been half an inch different. That musket ball that ploughed across the back of your skull when you were swimming. Impressive. Perhaps you ducked just in time.’
Nicholas felt gingerly. There was a wide crust of scab across the back of his head.
‘How you went on from there, I do not know. But I have seen many wounded men perform miracles of endurance. You are among them.’
He felt himself colouring with pride, and to cover it he asked, ‘What else? My elbow?’
‘Otherwise cuts and bruises. A wide cut to your flank that you probably never even noticed.’
He shook his head. ‘No, I-’
‘Sewn with six stitches and healing well. And your elbow, another very lucky strike indeed. Another half inch in and you’d have lost your arm. As it was, the ball took a flap of skin with it, a chip or two of bone, and drove another chip far under your skin as it passed. Still there.’
‘Really?’
‘Butcher surgeons always go digging around trying to get things out of a man’s flesh,’ said Fra Reynaud dryly. ‘Often better to leave them in. Many’s the time I’ve wrapped up a knight with a musket ball still in him. It does no harm. It’s your bone, isn’t it? It’ll dissolve away eventually, I expect. No point digging you up and you losing more blood, is there?’
‘But — it can strengthen a man to lose blood, can it not? Balance his humours? I thought Galen-’
‘Galen,’ said Fra Reynaud with a sudden flash in his eyes. ‘Hippocrates. Don’t speak to me of the Greeks, the theory of humours, miasmas, all those notions of theirs.’ He leaned close to the boy and whispered, as if passing on the direst heresy, ‘All the best of the Hospitallers’ knowledge of medicine, we learnt from the Saracens.’
Then he stood swiftly, appeared to give just the faintest wink, and departed.
‘Fra Reynaud!’ he called after him.
Reynaud stopped. ‘I am busy, boy.’
‘Just one thing. What is the date?’
He looked back. ‘You have no idea?’
‘None.’
‘It is now the Eve of St John, the 23rd of June. Elmo that should have fallen after two or three days at most, stood for one day short of a month.’ He smiled.
Nicholas’s head sank back. Thirty days. Sweet Jesu, it felt like it.
He walked south through the narrow, deep-shadowed streets of the little town, and to the steps below the great curtain wall, three times the height of Elmo’s defences. Vast quantities of earthen sacks, backed with huge timber props and well-placed stones, bulked up the walls from behind, so that even a direct hit with the biggest ball in the Ottoman artillery might be absorbed and do little damage. Such was the hope.
From the top of the walls, he greeted the soldiers there and they did not know he was from Elmo so he said nothing. Looking out towards the stony heights south, golden in the setting sun, he saw a horribly familiar sight. Great gun emplacements and platforms being erected, well shielded and protected, and the smaller guns being craned into place already. Between the guns and walls, ominous gouges and mean trenches beginning to run through the rocky ground, where the Turkish forward troops and the miners were creeping up to the base of Birgu’s walls. Over before Senglea, it was just the same. They ran through the earth like the cracks of some slow motion, infinitely sinister earthquake.
That evening there washed up on the shores of Kalkara a horror unspeakable.
Word was sent to La Valette, and he came running down to the harbour wall. There floating below were three great crucifixes made from lashed spars, and tied to them in savage mockery of the Passion were the naked bodies of three Hospitallers from Elmo. They were headless, mutilated and degraded beyond recognition.
The people of the town looked down aghast at the nightmare scene, their hearts chilled within them. Was this the fate that awaited them when the Turks came? Was this what they would do even to their children? What kind of an enemy were they facing? Even the warm and passionate blood of Malta ran cold. How could they fight such devils, and so many? Their faith faltered.
La Valette himself seemed frozen in horror for a moment. He was heard to mutter just two words under his breath. ‘Christ re-crucified. ’
Then he gave angry orders that the foul flotsam should be brought up with all care and reverence, the bodies untied from the spars and washed and censed and prepared for burial. The spars should be burnt.
His white silent rage was terrible to behold. His lips worked as he watched the blue bodies carried away, signs of the cross carved into their bare chests with daggers.
Then he gave a further order. None dared to question it, for to do so was to break their vow of obedience, though it went against the old rules of chivalry. Some said that this was no longer a war that could be fought to the old rules of chivalry, and others said that without such rules to ennoble and purify it, the business of war was but the business of butchery, and there was no choosing between good and evil.
They brought up the eight Turkish prisoners that they had already captured in the last few days in sallies from Birgu, careless scouts, and one prospective miner who had foolishly been surveying the walls a little too close. They came up from the deep dungeons of San Angelo, blinking even in the dimming twilight. The guards led them in chains up to the gun platform and unchained and beheaded them, despite their pathetic last pleas, and then their still-turbanned heads were rammed into the mouths of the guns there and fired across the harbour towards the Turkish encampment.