The Turks had succeeded in mining the walls after all. It was not the renewed bombardment of the guns that had done it. They were merely announcing that they had conquered.
A hundred-yard section of Birgu’s landwall was ruptured wide open by the terrific blast from the mines. Sections of wall split from top to bottom and collapsed slowly forward in billowing waves of rubble and shattered stone. The great heaped earthen ramparts and sacks of bulking behind were blown high into the sky, solid earth reduced in a second to nothing but vapour and dust. Bodies of the slain fell flailing through the night air and came to land in a sickening, inhuman tangle. Others lay still convulsing and twitching, legs and arms snapped under them.
A wall of dust and hurtling masonry came surging up the street towards Nicholas like a great wave forty feet high, billowing overhead. Nearby houses shuddered, roofs caved in, and more cannon balls hurtled triumphantly in. The Turkish guns lit up the night sky in a monstrous bombardment. Once more the city dragged itself upright to fight. But this time it would surely lose.
The old and the sick were already defeated in their hearts. Further up the street, torn at by the hail and the dust as if by a storm wind, an old woman fell back against a doorway and raised her hands to heaven and tears coursed down her face. Slowly she slid to the ground, weeping and shaking her head and crying, no more, no more, her face crumpled like ancient parchment ruined by time.
Mustafa Pasha raised his arms again and again. The cannons roared, the serpent mouths flared, the balls flew, the ruptured walls shivered and shattered further and bodies tumbled.
Another huge blast and Nicholas crawled free, and then another ball roared into the same place, the Mameluke engineers ensuring that strike after strike hit the same spot on the broken walls, so desperately propped and thinly manned, and blasted into the heart of the city. The wall that Nicholas reeled against began to topple and fold forwards, and then the boy and the infant he was dazedly clutching were buried beneath enough masonry to kill a horse, a sudden white tomb of powder and sandstone dust.
The knights limped and staggered to the massive breach, up onto a ramp of rubble twenty feet high, as the Janizary corps charged down the hill from Santa Margherita. Word went out to the infirmary that the Turks had successfully mined and blown the walls. All able to walk must come at last to fight. Blinded men tapped their way with crutches to the walls, determined to die sword in hand.
The opposing forces clambered up from each side, the breach must somehow be held, and there was La Valette himself, the old man unmistakable. There was a pummelling encounter as the two lines clashed, the rent walls either side of the breach manned by Maltese men and boys, screaming women, black hair flying, stones hurling down. The Janizaries crowded forward in far greater numbers than the defenders, yet were still held back by the line of pitiful rubble and the people, heedless and wild with exhaustion. A last few fire hoops and grenades rained down on the close-packed attackers, a surge of white silks and dark skins, as desperate as the defenders now to be in and finish this.
Then a fresh band of knights came in, heavily armoured, led once more by Marshal Copier. The townspeople parted before them as they pounded up the rampart to take their place and fight alongside La Valette himself.
‘Forward! Forward!’ screamed a voice from the heights. It was Mustafa. But his men could not do it. Once more, of the thousand who went into the attack, a third were already killed or wounded beyond fighting. Mustafa held his scimitar aloft as if to slay any who returned, but they would have to fall back in bitterness and shame. They would flee as so many times before, the Maltese running after them in the dark and sinking hatchets into their backs, backs arching, crying out, gross insults hurled over the strewn dead. The rubble mounds slathered black in the night, blood-rusted sandstone when the dawn sun rose.
Then a terrible cry went up that La Valette was hit. The battle-line wavered, Copier himself stopped to help the tottering Master, and was hit in his turn by an arrow to the thigh. The Janizaries sensed that victory was within their grasp and pushed forward with one last mighty heave, maces and swords and axes cutting destruction through the thinned, despairing defenders. Maltese and knights and the last few Spanish soldiers fell back and tumbled down the breach in disarray, Bektaşi howled, Janizaries pushed on, keeping formation. Finally their numbers told.
They were in.
From out of the heart of a tomb of white dust and sandstone in the street behind erupted a plaster-coloured hand. It flattened against the wall, held there. Stones were pulled way and a fallen soldier crawled out dazed, an infant clutched to his chest. The infant was wide-eyed and covered in dust like a homunculus made of all flour, but unhurt except for a small cut on his head, blood seeping through his fine baby hair and turning the white dust red.
But he did not cry. He stared around in his infant amazement at the infinite strangeness of a world that could change so quickly from the sunlight coming dancing through vine leaves to play with him, to burial alive beneath the ruined stones of war. The boy raised him up and wept openly, risen like Lazarus from that abrupt tomb. The boy was bruised and cut about, but his morion was still on his head, or the falling masonry would have killed him.
The boy’s prayers of thanks were as fervent as any in his whole sixteen years, or maybe seventeen. His birthday used to be in August. As if it mattered. He knelt in the ruins of the street and bowed his head and prayed over the infant.
A woman came round the corner, still dazedly clutching her washing linens, silently staring at the mound of rubble where her infant had previously lain in his simple cradle that her husband made from olive wood last winter. Then on her left hand a dust-covered knight or soldier was standing beside her, speaking to her. She heard nothing. There in his arms was her boy, her bambino, her first-born son, dusted all in flour and with a tiny red cut on his head. She heard nothing of the soldier’s words nor anyone else’s, nor even the shouts and screams from behind that the Turks had broken into the town. There was nothing but her son. She took him from the knight’s arms, and the infant looked up at her, wide-eyed with amazement still. She bent down, her headdress falling over him, and she kissed the tiny wound on his head. Then she spat on a corner of her headdress and with infinite tenderness wiped away the little blood. The infant never cried, only gazed up at her, and the knight stared too. Never a word was spoken, but he saw the woman and her child like Mary and the Christ child wounded, and Mary herself kissing and salving his wounds with her kisses.
‘Get back in your house!’ cried Nicholas, coming out of the dream.
She gestured at the mound of rubble and smiled a strange smile.
They were fighting furiously just at the end of the street yet she seemed oblivious.
‘Any house!’ He shoved her into a darkened doorway. ‘The cellar!’
La Valette refused assistance, and demanded that his wounded leg was bound up so he could continue fighting. Copier knelt and tore off his neckcloth and tied him as best he could.
‘We must fall back to San Angelo, Sire!’ cried another knight nearby. ‘Take up the drawbridge, we may still hold out.’
‘And abandon the town to its fate?’ said La Valette savagely. ‘This town of heroes?’
The knight looked ashamed.
‘It is too late anyway. As I joined you here, I gave orders for all the precious icons of the Order to be carried from St Lawrence into San Angelo, the fort to be evacuated, and the drawbridge destroyed. Here is where we take our stand.’ He stabbed the ground with his sword point. ‘Here is where we die, if we must! With our people!’