From the Turkish main camp over at Marsa arose vast sounds of shouting and rumbling, a great weight being hauled over the stony ground. And then across the harbour, the besieged saw trains of oxen, horses and mules, and hundreds, even thousands, of naked men, sweating in the flickering orange torchlight, men and beasts all alike under the lash, whipped onward, dragging behind them over the hill some mighty load. Finally their burden appeared, little by little. A beaked prow rose up into the starlit sky, high over the hill and then tipped down again. The dark hull of a galley, dragged along on greased timber rollers. They were dragging their boats overland from Marsamuscetto, directly into the Grand Harbour, evading the guns of San Angelo altogether. Then they could row out from the Marsa and attack Senglea and Birgu unopposed.
Flanking them marched hundreds of Janizaries, resplendent in damask and gold and silver, scimitars encrusted with semi-precious gems, beads of coloured glass and turkey-stone, muskets superbly damascened, and carrying high above their heads green banners embroidered with the sacred letter Aleph.
They were to attack on two sides at once. From land and sea.
La Valette clenched his jaw and called himself a fool. At his age. There was only one way into the harbour? But no, boats could always be carried overland, with enough manpower and determination. Had the Turks not done the same at Constantinople, a hundred years ago?
It was then that La Valette showed what a commander can be. His moment of paralysed shock lasted no longer than a bird’s call. ‘Hit back, hit back,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Every time, in every place, hit back.’
Then he rapped out his orders.
‘Mezquita to assemble a cavalry column with grenades! Ride out on the guns of Santa Margherita. The citizens to make up a volunteer force of the best swimmers, to cross the harbour under cover of night, and harry the Turkish column coming over with the boats. We will not sit and wait for them. We will attack on all fronts!’
The gates of the post of Provence thudded open and Don Pedro de Mezquita with forty armoured knights rode out at full gallop, swords raised over their heads. The Turkish gunners gaped. So confident had they been, so unsuspecting of anything so crazed as a counter-attack by the vastly outnumbered defenders, that they hadn’t even any armed infantrymen around to protect them.
The knights were upon them in a moment. Many fled in the darkness, and many more were cut down by the scything blades of the furious cavalry charge. Gunners collapsed back against their own guns, feeling the heat of the massive brazen barrel burning through their robes, as huge half-armoured chargers reared terrifyingly above, and long cavalry swords drove into them. Other cavalry men milled about before the guns and tossed grenades with smouldering fuses into the barrels. One or two even dismounted and began to pack the guns with all the powder they could find, while others wedged great rocks into the muzzles and hammered them home with mallets.
Don Mezquita himself had galloped up high onto Santa Margherita’s top, alone and exposed, to keep lookout.
‘Remount NOW!’ he cried, galloping back.
A large column of well-armed Ottoman musketeers was already swarming out towards them, the glow of their matchlock ropes like dancing fireflies in the dark.
A young knight — it was Henri Parisot himself, La Valette’s nephew — hurriedly lit the fuse at a gun’s breech. He then hauled himself up onto the gun barrel itself, about to explode, using it as a mounting block to get back on his horse.
‘A somewhat risky manoeuvre!’ called Don Pedro. ‘I advise you to trot away quite briskly from that gun now.’
The young knight spurred furiously and the horse veered sharply away just as the gun exploded. The great bronze barrel reared and then slewed hard to the right, spewing up dust and stones over the fleeing Parisot. When it had settled again, a black hairline crack had appeared along its side. Other grenades were detonating in the barrels with muffled booms, and then came a more ominous volleying crackle of musketry behind them, not three hundred yards off. All ducked in their saddles.
‘Open the gates!’ yelled Mezquita.
He needed to give no order to his cavaliers. They galloped back down from Santa Margherita in a cloud of dust and even as the gates were slammed shut behind them, the wood splintered with the incoming musket fire.
They dismounted and celebrated wildly in the street. Not a man was hurt. They must have slain forty or more trained gunners. As to how many Turkish guns they had successfully spiked, it was not certain. Perhaps no more than three or four. But the effect on the spirits of both besiegers and besieged was invaluable.
When they next looked out, the guns were being rapidly checked, or withdrawn to the armouries at the main camp for repair, and a sizeable detachment of well-armed infantrymen was now permanently stationed on Santa Margherita.
Any further cavalry sorties would be purely self-sacrificial.
The native Maltese volunteers knew exactly where to swim across the harbour, but they were few in number, just eight men, since so few of Malta’s fishermen had that strange art of moving through water like a fish. Those that could came up silent and dripping from the still water, daggers between their teeth, unseen and unheard by the enemy.
How many of the Turks hauling the boats they fell on and slew before they themselves were killed was never known. None of those men ever returned. It was a suicide mission. But for a while, from the tower of San Angelo where he kept watch in hawk-like vigil over the unfolding siege, La Valette could see clearly that the ominous procession of hauled galleys had slowed and stopped, and the column of orderly marching Janizaries broke into panic as they came under ferocious and unexpected attack from maddened knifemen, vaulting out of the dark from behind the heaped rocks.
Again, the moral effect of such an attack was considerable. The Turks had now been twice surprised and dismayed by the defenders’ aggression. Not for one second, though they were a force of many thousands, would they be safe from these Christian wolves, pouncing out of the night and falling on them with cold bloodlust, as careless of death as their own Janizaries.
The Grand Master said to Sir Oliver Starkey, ‘They were brave men.’
‘Sire? You mean — the natives?’
‘I do.’
‘The poor, low-born, barefoot, ragged-trousered native militia?’
La Valette looked at him. Starkey was making a mocking point. ‘I concede it,’ he said at last. ‘They fought and, I think, died, as bravely as any high-born knight of Europe. This peasantry that we rule over here — sullen, uncommunicative, dirty, dishonest, superstitious, forever quarrelling and fornicating among themselves as they are — I am beginning to think that they are not all bad.’
Starkey smiled to himself. From La Valette, it was high praise indeed.
But there could be no extended rejoicing or self-congratulation. Despite the defenders’ gallant sacrifices, by the following afternoon the Turks had thirty or forty lean galleys jostling together at the far western end of the harbour, well out of reach of the guns of San Angelo.
La Valette ordered the post of Senglea to ready themselves. He sent reinforcements across the pontoon bridge of boats behind the great chain, though only a hundred. No more could be spared. They were to hold out in St Michel, Senglea’s tiny fort. Marshal Copier commanded, and among the reinforcements went Henri Parisot and Nicholas.
‘If the pontoon falls,’ said Nicholas, ‘I can swim back again.’
Parisot grinned. ‘You seem to like being at the heart of things.’
5
At dawn they heard the sound of drums across the still water. Nicholas awoke in a panic before understanding where he was, and threw off his blanket. He had been dreaming he was trapped at Elmo, but with his sisters.