Cannonballs from the culverins bounced clear down narrow streets until they smashed into low walls, demolishing mean house-fronts in seconds. Pigs squealed, geese honked and raised their wings, a barrel of wine burst open on a cart and flooded a street claret-red, the cart exploding in splinters. The pigs twirled their tails and drank the spilled wine, then ran off screaming down the street as another ball crashed into a nearby well and destroyed it.
Women and children gathered at the base of the shuddering walls, handing up stones in lines to continue the bulking. La Valette ordered the rest of Birgu’s Mohammedan prisoners up from the dungeons of Angelo, to work on the most exposed parts of the walls at the end of a whip. Messages were sent back from the Turkish trenches to tell Mustafa. He dismissed the news with a single wave of his hand, and told them to keep firing. It was war. Men died.
In desperation, two of the Turkish captives were seen to raise their still-manacled hands, loosened only enough to let them lift rocks, and cry out the ancient formula of Muslim belief, the Shahada, Lâ ilâha illallâh, Muhammadu rasûlullâh! to show that they were brothers in the faith. But a work-gang of Maltese women heard them and believing that they were crying out secrets to the enemy, reacted in fury. Like maddened bacchantes, throwing back the veils in which they worked even now, and hitching up their long black skirts, they clawed their way up the wreckage of rubble and scaffolding to where the two unfortunates stood, and dragged them down to the square below. There they beat them to death with fistfuls of rocks. Children beat their bloody corpses afterwards with canes, and a wandering madman thrust sharp wooden sticks into their mouths and drove them hard down into the back of their throats to stop their traitorous speech.
It was a cruel fate that the culverins kept succeeding in hitting the Sacred Infirmary, which soon threatened to be rendered a bloody chaos. Panicked medical brothers hurried to and fro bearing bowls of water, bandages, flasks of turpentine, tripping, slithering and yelling out. One of them already wore his own wounded arm in a sling. But among them strode the tall, imperturbable figure of Fra Reynaud, determined that through sheer willpower, the chaos should not take hold. He forbad a single brother to raise his voice, though the wounded being stretchered in through the door in a stream made noise enough. Groans and screams rose to the high rafters.
Explosion followed explosion, almost as if the Turks knew where the infirmary was in the town and were targeting it deliberately. Jars of precious ointments trembled and jerked off the shelves, smashing to the ground, until Reynaud ordered all breakables stored on the flagstone floors, wadded with whatever they could find. Supplies were low enough, they could not afford to lose more. Then began the grim business of triage, moving from bed to bed, each already occupied by a dying man, determining who might be saved and who was already lost. A chaplain followed in Reynaud’s wake, administering Last Rites to those deemed beyond help. Dust cascaded down from the ceiling, already zigzagged with cracks, settling on bloody wounds, helping them clot. A woman screamed. She had gone into labour early, having seen her husband killed in front of her.
‘A wall is down on Senglea!’ someone cried. ‘The wall over French Creek, opposite Corradino!’
‘Rubbish,’ Reynaud said evenly, never lifting his head, attention fixed on the scalpel in his hand and the dying knight beneath. ‘Hysterical rumour. And do not raise your voice, Brother.’
The knight’s belly was ruptured within by shrapnel from a devilish exploding ball. Reynaud placed his fingers on the knight’s sternum and sliced quickly downward through the skin and muscle layer as far as the umbilicus. He carefully opened the cut. The belly’s organs were further encased in a translucent layer called the peritoneum, and now beneath it he could see the welling blue-black shadow of the blood that filled his abdomen. Cut open the peritoneum and that blood would flood out like water from an overfilled bucket. And a good operation should lose your patient no more than four ounces of blood. The knight was wounded deep in the spleen or liver or both.
Sweat dripped from the chaplain’s face onto his hands. He drew the cut to and sat back and covered the man’s belly with a cloth that seeped red instantly.
‘In the name of Christ,’ he said gently, ‘your time here is done.’
The knight closed his eyes. ‘I am glad of it, Brother.’ A minute later he died.
Reynaud stood. ‘Carry him out. Then see to that man there. And do not be too tight with the tourniquet. Enough to give the blood time to clot, that is all. Apply egg white, and bring me more alcohol. Now, Brother. This will hurt. Bite down. The stick is soaked in Alicante wine, so savour it.’
As the day went on, the medical chaplains began to see more and more burns victims. Burn wounds were the worst, the skin falling away like the skin of rotted fruit, flesh slithering off the bone, and the smell horribly like cooked meat. It had been a long time since Fra Reynaud had been able to eat roast pork. Fires raged from Ottoman incendiaries, firebombs, even mortar balls evilly laced with Greek fire that erupted in great clouds of inextinguishable flame as they struck home.
Reynaud called for more precious ointment of aloe and onion to reduce burns and blistering, and for an amputation, a caudle of alcohol, opium and hemlock. He sawed fast through a man’s leg bone, cut away the muscle and fat to leave a bone stump but with plenty of loose skin, applied a styptic, and tied up the skin and laid over it a wet ox bladder which would shrink as it dried. The fellow would probably live, though he’d be unlikely to run again.
He called for a count of how many ounces of opium remained to them. The count was not good, but his face remained impassive. He also demanded regular reports from the walls, and his firm, clear voice rang out across the infirmary ward at intervals.
‘The walls are still holding well! This town has not gone the way of Jericho just yet! So work on, Brothers, work on, and keep a steady hand.’
Word went round that a deserter from the Ottoman camp had revealed Mustafa’s terrifying intentions: not to enslave, but to slay every living thing within the town — every man, woman and child, every dog and chicken — except La Valette. He would be taken in chains before the Grand Sultan himself, and tortured to death at his pleasure.
Hearing that they were under sentence of death only steeled this steely people further.
La Valette vowed publicly that he would never be taken alive. ‘Though I plan to take some considerable killing.’
Such grim humour and granite resolution were much to Maltese taste. They began to say that this Grand Master of the Knights was not all bad.
‘Perhaps,’ said Franco Briffa, ‘he is the kind of cold-eyed bastard you want in command, during a little crisis like this.’
‘This deserter from the Ottoman camp,’ queried Smith. ‘Deserting already? Seems unlikely.’
‘It does,’ agreed Stanley.
‘Has anyone seen this deserter? How did he enter the town? What is his name? His reasons?’
‘Brother John,’ said Stanley, his ingenuous blue eyes wide with shock. ‘Surely you are not suggesting that there is no such deserter, and that this reported sentence of death we are all under, knights and citizens both, is merely a rumour circulated by the Grand Master himself, to put more strength in our backbones?’
Smith grimaced.
Stanley laughed.
Darkness falling on the second day revealed a new front of attack, and it seemed momentarily to strike dismay into even the heart of La Valette. It was a front he had truly not foreseen.
The Turks had observed that while the walls of Birgu still remained steadfast, cracked and battered but far from fallen, the walls of Senglea over French Creek were indeed beginning to crumble. They would be coming in over the water after all.