Knights watched them at these peasant labours, and said among themselves that these low-born people over whom they had haughtily ruled for decades, barely noticing them, were in some ways as brave as crusaders. They began to say that it would be an honour to fight for them.
‘To fight with them, you mean,’ said Stanley. ‘To fight alongside them.’
Nicholas was in the courtyard, sewing up his battered leather jerkin. He glanced up and there was Maddalena standing before him, her hands folded. She was annoyed that he had not paid her more attention.
‘In my country,’ she said, ‘girls must insult the boys they like very strongly. It is a custom.’
He looked down again at his work. ‘Flirting, we call that,’ he said. ‘The village girls do that in my country too.’
‘The more they like him, the more they must insult him. In the street, before all his friends. Especially the boy they would like to marry.’
‘So what would you say to me?’
She clapped her hands. At last she had his attention. ‘I would say you are puny and feeble, and as thin as an anchovy!’
‘Thank you.’
She giggled, the tip of her tongue between her teeth. ‘Your clothes are dusty and torn like the clothes of a vagabond-’
‘I am a vagabond.’
‘And your nose is red because of the sun, and peeling like the bark of a sickly tree — but otherwise your fair skin is pale like a woman’s. Like a spoilt princess’s in a palace.’
‘Hm.’
‘And also your nose has a white scar down the side, where the Turks slit it when you were captured. And you have bruises all over you and scars like an old fighting dog.’
He looked up. ‘But that means I’m brave, doesn’t it?’
‘In my country, it is not the custom for a girl to say nice things to the boy she likes. We should be cold and haughty, and throw insults in his face, to test him.’
He tried to take her by the hand, but she slipped away and twirled, laughing again. Flirting.
‘When a girl insults a boy like this,’ she said, gesturing dramatically, ‘if he becomes indignant and angry and sulks, then we know he is a weak man, with the heart of a little boy still. A real man will just laugh at the insulting. He will toss back his head, and put his hands on his hips like this’ — she tossed back her long hair which she knew to be so lovely, and imitated what she thought was a manly stance — ‘and he will laugh aloud. Because a real man has greater things to become angry about. We say, an eagle does not catch flies. A real man does not trouble himself with petty things.’
‘Such as what women say to him.’
‘You are wicked!’
He laughed. She wanted to kiss him again. He was an eagle. But her mother came with the washing, and they looked away from each other with faces lowered, and did not see her mother suppress a smile as she reached down into her basket.
‘Nicholas,’ said Maria, ‘go and find the boys. They are playing out in the street somewhere. It is time to eat soon.’
Nicholas found Mateo and Tito play-fighting in the dust, rolling into a pyramid of small cannonballs, and yelled out to them. One of them had a little dagger, and when Nicholas yelled out, he cut his brother on the arm and the other boy howled. Nicholas seized them both by the scruff of their tattered shirts and dragged them to their feet. He kicked the wicked little dagger from the first’s hand, none too gently, and trod on it.
Tito nursed his cut arm.
‘Little idiots,’ rasped Nicholas. ‘You think the medical chaplains haven’t enough to do without stitching up urchins like you?’
He grabbed Tito’s thin arm and examined it. It could have been worse. ‘Now home and ask your mother to douse it in vinegar,’ he said.
‘Will it hurt?’ said Tito, looking up at him wide-eyed.
‘Like hell,’ said Nicholas unsympathetically.
‘Will I die?’
‘One day.’
‘But we are going to have to fight, aren’t we?’ said Mateo.
‘No you are not.’
‘We are. We are too few. Or we will be made slaves in Algiers, and I have heard stories of that.’
Not as bad as the truth, Nicholas hoped. Stories of boys as young as these two, held in the boy brothels of that fetid pirate port, their arms and legs amputated, for the sick pleasures of their captors. Boys held in Istanbul in ‘peg-brothels’, waiting for their customers, seated naked on wooden pegs for … ease of access.
‘Come home,’ he said.
‘Can I have my knife back?’
He kicked it over to him.
Mateo said, ‘I’ll need it when the Turks come.’
‘Home,’ he said again wearily. ‘And stay home.’
After supper Nicholas went up onto the walls again, and found Smith and Stanley beside the Post of Germany. They were listening to the Turks singing and chanting in the forward camp, not four hundred yards off. They could have tried firing cannonballs into them from the bastions even now, but La Valette had said hold. Time enough to fire when they came.
‘They are singing like they sung before Elmo,’ said Nicholas. ‘The night before they attacked.’
Smith nodded. ‘It will start very soon.’
The voices of the imams rose and fell, the guttural flowing Arabic phrases for the ninety-nine names of God. The stars shining, the fires burning. It had a strange beauty.
Later Nicholas heard a faint lone voice in a forward trench, and to his surprise, almost amusement, the sound of a stringed instrument. Some homesick soldier singing an old song.
‘A poem by Ibn Zaydun,’ murmured Stanley. ‘A poet of Moorish Andaluz, centuries ago.’ Nicholas looked at him startled, but he did not explain further. Rather he translated.
‘Two secrets in the heart of Night
We lay, until the light
Of interfering Day
Gave both of us away.’
Smith harrumphed, but Stanley’s expression was distant.
‘Aye,’ he said softly, head tilted back against the low ramparts, eyes half closed. ‘They are men much like us. They bleed red when cut, they grieve to grow older, they sing verses, they fall in love … Hard it is to fight them, when you understand this much.’
4
It was as an hour before dawn, only four or five hours after midnight, when Mustafa first unleashed hell.
The biggest Turkish guns, the bronze basilisks, had not been used on Elmo. They were not needed, and they consumed gunpowder with a gargantuan appetite. But they were used now.
They could hear the rumble of gunfire in Syracuse and Catania, one hundred and twenty miles to the north. It seemed like the whole world was trembling. Fourteen batteries of sixty-four guns opened up simultaneously, along with four monstrous basilisks each firing a ball weighing a scarcely believable two hundred pounds. They had reduced the Walls of Theodosius, that defended Constantinople for a thousand years. It was foolish to think they might be held back by the small walls of Birgu.
Yet the blood of Elmo had bought the defenders so much precious time, an entire month, that these modest curtain walls were now massively reinforced along their entire length. Mustafa had no doubt that his basilisks would soon bring them crumbling to the earth. But La Valette, ceaselessly walking on his rounds of inspection, instilled confidence in every defender’s heart.
‘Let the Turkish guns fire,’ he said. ‘Our walls can take it.’
Mustafa also had the master gunners of the leaner, longer-range culverins triangulate their guns to fire clean over the top and hit the town itself at random.
‘Churches, fine houses, knightly auberges, paupers’ hovels, dog kennels!’ he said. ‘Flatten them all!’
And from the forward trenches came the muffled thunk of fat-bellied mortars, belching out coarse-shaped, short trajectory missiles high into the air, crashing to land with equal, random destruction.