They shook their heads wearily.
‘A cypress leaf has a prick at one end, a French rapier has a prick at both ends.’
Stanley raised his head and stared, mouth agape. ‘Brother John has made a jest!’
‘It’s the delivery,’ said Nicholas.
‘A crude and amateur sort of jest, admittedly,’ said Stanley. ‘Well laboured. But for him to summon enough wit in his battered head to make any jest at all is indeed a historic occasion. O for a bottle of hock to celebrate this remarkable event.’
‘Ah, shut your trap,’ said Smith. ‘Save spit.’
At night they approached the village on the hill that Nikos had spoken of, setting dogs barking and straining on their chains. They skirted round and into a wood of pines, and ever deeper darkness. The leper boy led them. Once they lost him, he had gone so far ahead, scampering over rocks and up steep slopes as if he were in perfect health. And then they heard the silvery tinkle of his bell, and made towards it, and there he was, squatting beside a boulder, unable to smile. But his eyes shining.
‘We must find water,’ said Giustiniani. He mimicked the action of drinking from a flask.
The boy nodded and gestured ahead. They followed him. Always uphill.
And then abruptly downhill again, slithering on steep slopes of pine needles, and a strange coolness in the air, rising up from below. And the sound of water.
He had brought them down into a great gorge, thickly grown, full of boulders and fallen tree trunks. One great black pine was smashed in two by a boulder that lay alongside, hurled into it by the force of the torrent. But the gorge was well hidden and, best of all, held fresh flowing water, even at this time of year.
The gorge deepened and the walls rose either side of them, dank and ominous. The rock was clay and chalk, thick with ferns, slippery as eel-skin, impossible to escape from now. They felt horribly trapped.
‘If the Turks find us here,’ said Giustiniani, ‘if they have dogs, or if some goatherd sees us and betrays us – we are dead men.’
The leper boy gestured onward.
At last the gorge rose up steeply and they had to climb hand and foot the last hundred feet out on to a plateau, their breathing shallow, afraid, clutching on to ferns and roots and dubious rock. Nicholas glanced back at one point. But for a jutting spur it was a sheer drop behind.
They made it out alive. The leper boy managed to climb too, even with his withered and bandaged hands. What it must cost him. Then Nicholas remembered that at least lepers feel no pain in their diseased limbs. A tingling then a numbness are the first signs of that affliction.
They came to a village more like the skeleton of a village. A mill creaked in the desolate wind. They moved cautiously between the huts, hands on their sword hilts. They called out. Deserted.
The well was poisoned and foul smelling. Some carcass was down there, sheep or goat, and fattened flies arose in clouds.
‘Many villages will be like this,’ said Giustiniani. ‘Many Greeks have fled to Crete, or drowned on the crossing. We can expect no great welcome here.’
A bell tinkled. It was the leper boy, summoning them onward.
It was a day of the uncanny. Once there came a loud boom from the mountains ahead.
‘The Turkish guns?’ said Mazzinghi.
Stanley shook his head. ‘Only thunder.’
Yet there was not a cloud in the sky.
In the dusk they came to a small rocky outcrop with a thin cross atop it and a cave below, and in the mouth of the cave sat a starveling figure in goatskins.
They paused. The figure did not move but only stared at them with hollow eyes. Not one of them there did not feel a chill. Then the figure stirred and said, with a voice like the wind among dead leaves, ‘You have come.’
Giustiniani stepped forward. ‘Who are you?’
The skeletal figure raised a stick-like arm, spotted with unhealed sores, and pointed up to the cross on the rocks above. ‘As for my name,’ he said, ‘it was long since taken from me.’
‘You are a healer?’
‘For the healing of the nations and the sins of mankind,’ he said, then took a deep breath, as if already exhausted. ‘And for my soul, I pray.’
‘Have Turks passed this way? Is there fighting?’
Eyes rolled white in his skull. Smith muttered that there was little point in speaking with this creature, more crackbrain than hermit or holy man.
‘We are haunted by dogs, by Turks, by the moon itself. The mountains are against us, the pines groan all night in their sickness.’
Smith was already turning away in disgust.
‘The Turkish cannons roar, they tear open the sky, heaven itself bleeds, red rain rains down.’
‘Peace, old father,’ said Giustiniani more gently, then, catching Stanley’s eye, shook his head and indicated they should press on.
They began to move away, bowing uncertainly, disconsolate, half afraid. Everything they had seen on Cyprus so far had filled them with foreboding, made them feel accursed.
Then the hermit said, ‘The leper boy has come far to see me. Kneel, boy.’
And they watched astonished as the leper boy went slowly back to him and kneeled down, and the hermit laid his hand on the boy’s bandaged head.
‘Whatever healing may come, Lord, send it soon,’ said the hermit softly.
Finally the boy rose again. Then he held his bell up and tinkled it and marched onward.
They slept in a dry gully. The mountains rose ahead of them and a cooler wind came off them. Nicholas drew his blanket round him, against the cool night air, and some nameless fear.
In the morning the leper boy had gone.
‘Look to your weapons,’ said Smith, ‘he may have betrayed us.’
‘He has not!’ said Nicholas hotly. ‘Unlike most men he has no speech, he is wordless and so as innocent as a faithful hound that has no language and so cannot lie.’
Smith looked at him broodingly from under his black brows. ‘I’ll track him,’ he said. ‘Wait here.’
It was half an hour before he returned, and his expression was distant and strange. He sat down as if in no hurry, though they must press onward, ever onward.
‘Brother?’ said Stanley.
‘He lies up yonder,’ said Smith. ‘Half covered in leaves, lying as if asleep. He led us so far, and then went away from us in the night in solitude, to commit himself into the hands of God.’
Nicholas bowed his head.
Smith stood again and briefly laid his huge hand on him.
Stanley said, ‘So that was his healing. Death’s ending, which is the great beginning.’
On the brow of the hill, Smith looked back one last time and said to Nicholas, ‘God will make it right. This life is but a chapter, and there is more to come.’
Nicholas said bitterly, ‘I trust so. Otherwise,’ he held his arms wide, ‘this whole majestic starry universe is not worth a dunghill.’
Then they could see the mist among the pine-clad slopes of the Troödos, as Nikos had said, and they were climbing steeply into mountains higher than any in all of Britain.
There were springs of water, and bramble and ivy, ‘just like Shropshire,’ said Hodge delightedly. And there were wild brown trout in the streams. Hodge took great pride in tickling them and providing good fish for their supper.
‘’S not tickling really,’ he said. ‘It’s more sliding your hand gently under, and’ – he gave a deft flick – ‘scoopin’ ’em out on the bank before they can escape. Like that.’
Giustiniani said they could risk a small cooking fire, and so they ate trout skewered on greenwood twigs over a spitting pinewood fire, and this journey of theirs, hitherto so sad and strange, did not seem so bad. Though ahead of them, as they well knew, lay only the Turkish guns and the agony of Nicosia.
Nicholas wished they could fight up here, in the coolness and the pine-scented air. But it would be down below, there on the burning plain, that they would fight, and some of them would die.
There were thunderstorms, precipitous mountain paths made of nothing but sloping scree above thousand-foot canyons, and a ransacked monastery inhabited by just one old priest. He had nothing to give them, and they nothing to give him, yet he laid his hand on his heart as if to say thank you to them. He never spoke a word, sitting among the smoking ruins.
Smith said, ‘So the Turks have passed this way.’
Then they ascended a last slope on to a saddle of the mountains, with higher peaks rising to left and to right of them. And ahead, out on that burning plain below them, they could just make out a walled city, almost obscured by the great ochre cloud that hung over it.
‘A sandstorm,’ said Mazzinghi, trying to sound wiser than his years. ‘It’s early in the year for it.’
The air shuddered with a hollow distant boom.
‘That’s no sandstorm,’ said Abdul softly.
‘No,’ said Smith. ‘That’s the Turkish bombardment. And that dust cloud there was once Nicosia’s walls.’
Mazzinghi blanched visibly, and Nicholas shivered with a mixture of dread and excitement. But the dread was strong. Dread that he could not take it all again, after those four terrible months of siege on Malta. Dread that he would dishonour himself, crack and run in the hell and din of battle.
He caught Hodge’s eye. What were they doing here, after all?
Hodge read him instantly. ‘We don’t have to be here,’ he said quietly. ‘If we can’t return to England, we could still find somewhere more peaceful than this.’
‘But it’ll be something to tell your grandchildren. How you fought in the Cyprus wars.’
‘They’ll never believe it. They’ll just have me medicined and put in Bedlam.’
‘We’re already in Bedlam!’ cried Nicholas, laughing that wild, sudden laugh when the fit was on him and a silver light shone in his eyes.
He knew why he was here. For the memory of his father. For dreams of a pure cause in an impure world. For days of hardship and grandeur, and pity for those who lived in lesser days.
The older knights were studying the plain before them gravely, as if it were a military map. Nicosia was in a terrible position, on flat low land surrounded by hills.
Giustiniani said, ‘That great engineer Savoragno did his damnedest, pleading with the Venetian senate for more work to be done on the defences, but those wise elders did nothing. He had only enough time and money to reduce the old nine-mile circuit to three, add some ramparts, and eleven decent enough bastions. And that was all.’
‘Now Venice will pay for its parsimony,’ said Stanley.
‘Not if we can help it,’ said Giustiniani. Yet at that moment another great bombardment juddered through the air, mocking his words. Turkish cannon big enough for a man to crawl inside, belching flame and black powder smoke and iron balls of two hundred pounds or more.
Another plume of ochre dust rose slowly into the still-hot air.
Smith brandished his sword. ‘Nicosia, endure! We are coming!’
They descended out of the mountains for a long night and more cautiously the next day, keeping to the edge of woods or ravines thick with undergrowth. Creeping like animals. But Turkish patrols could be anywhere. Indeed, a warier commander than Lala Mustafa would have stationed lookout troops on the heights of the Troödos, but there was no sign of any. An indication of confidence. He commanded an army of tens of thousands, and a fleet that already owned every port on the island except Famagusta. Why should he worry?
And he was right. No Venetian force had come against him, no Holy League. Just a reckless, ludicrous band of seven knights and adventurers. And they had got through so far as much because of Lala’s negligence as their own skill.
Then they were down through the last foothills, past deserted farmsteads and villages, and on to the plain. Nicosia was a few miles off, and the rows upon rows of Turkish tents much nearer.
They dropped down behind some rocks. There was no wind, it was midday. The dusty ground at their feet was soon spotted with their sweat. They might as well have rested in a bread oven.
‘So,’ said Nicholas, ‘how do we break into Nicosia?’
‘Break in?’ said Stanley, a mocking light in his eye. ‘Ah yes. We crawl in through a secret tunnel, do we not, unknown to the Turks? Through an ancient water culvert, perhaps, or even a cavern piled high with Orient treasure?’
Nicholas looked sour.
‘I have been thinking,’ said Abdul.
‘So have we,’ said Smith sharply.
‘Yes, but if you will permit me. As a shifty and unchristened Moor, my mind is doubtless more subtle and devious than yours.’
Giustiniani smiled. ‘Let him speak.’
Abdul said, ‘We need to act the part of those whom the Turks would not kill, but would actively want to enter the city – and whom the Venetians would receive in peace, not shoot dead from the walls as we approach. Now hear my plan.’
A few minutes later, Smith was arguing furiously with Giustiniani. ‘They will take our weapons! Even this jezail, made of the very finest Indian wootz steel, the best rifled musket perhaps in all of—’
The older knight said, ‘Brother John, we have argued enough. I am in command here, and I say we may trust this Moor, at least so far, and I like his plan as the best – or the least foolish – that I have heard. Now be silent and obey.’
Smith dropped his head, teeth grating.
‘Oh, and one more thing. That banner of St John you are carrying. It will have to go.’
Smith looked up again, his eyes blazing. But Giustiniani’s grizzled features were set hard, and he was indeed in command. Smith slowly reached into his knapsack and drew out the furled banner. For a man of his temper, obedience was always far harder than poverty or chastity. He walked slowly away and dug a hole in the shadow of a wall.
They walked in single file across the plain. Giustiniani went first. Smith carried a white sheet knotted to a stave. The noise of the Turkish bombardment falling on the wretched, beleaguered city ahead never stopped. It filled them with foreboding.
So intent were the Turks on their prize, so negligent of the most basic guard duties, that the seven were in among the conical tents before they were challenged.
A single Turkish infantryman turned and stared at them, stony faced, disbelieving. Then he raised his musket, which was unloaded, and called, ‘Halt!’
His finger twitched on the trigger. Then two more infantrymen ran up, and some pikemen, pike-heads lowered at the crazed intruders.
‘Where is your commander?’ asked Giustiniani with such quiet authority that one of the infantrymen immediately ran off.
‘Put your hands on your heads!’ said the first infantryman.
They did so.
Another was loading his musket, ramming down the ball. He raised the muzzle again until it was just a few inches from Smith’s head.
The sweat trickled down.
A burly Turk with a broad gold belt around his middle and a thick black beard appeared before them.
‘Who the hell are you? Who is the Moor? Is he a Christian?’
Giustiniani still spoke quietly, in fluent Turkish.
‘We are come from Venice to order Governor Dandolo to surrender.’
‘How did you come here?’
‘Across the mountains. The Greeks betrayed us, we were set upon in the night and robbed of even our mules. Yet we would not fail in our mission. The moment we awoke and drew our swords, they fled.’
The Ottoman commander approved of this portrait of the accursed and cowardly Greeks. They would rob their own grandmothers. And the surrender of Nicosia would save them a heap of trouble. He eyed them from under bushy eyebrows. ‘You go well armed for mere ambassadors.’
Giustiniani said, ‘It is hard to borrow a sword on a battlefield.’
There was a light in the commander’s eyes. ‘You know this Turkish proverb?’
Giustiniani gave a little bow.
The commander
scowled again. ‘Perhaps you are spies? I will send to the Pasha.’
He ordered his men to march them under close guard to the ground before his tent and sit them in the dust, hands still on their heads.
They sat, eyes blinded by the hot sun. Their swords still at their sides, Smith’s jezail across his back.
‘Now comes the difficult part,’ whispered Stanley. ‘Lala Mustafa is a savage in a silk robe.’
It was a long, long time before the commander returned. No one offered them water.
He stood before them, two Janizaries at either side. Towering men, fair skinned, extravagantly moustachioed. Slavs more than Turks.
‘The Pasha is pleased to learn that Venice has come to its senses,’ he said. ‘You will pass on into Nicosia unmolested, and we expect a written surrender from Dandolo by nightfall. You will leave your arms behind.’
‘That we cannot do,’ said Giustiniani.
The commander’s midnight brows contracted again. ‘You are in no position to refuse.’
‘A word, sire,’ said Stanley.
The commander grunted.
Stanley took a couple of steps closer to him and spoke sotto voce. He stepped back.
The commander scrutinized this broad-shouldered, powerfully built Christian, with his ruddy and sunburned cheeks, tousled fair hair, and laughing blue eyes, taller even than his two Janizaries here. Yes, the women would go for this one. Was he truly only an ambassador?
He smiled. ‘This is very funny.’ Then he laughed abruptly. ‘Very funny indeed! Let me send to the Pasha again.’
They sat for another hour. Even during a siege, Ottoman ritual and etiquette remained famously leisurely.
‘The devil knows how they conquered half the world,’ muttered Smith.
The commander returned once more, and this time he ordered them to stand and pass on into his spacious tent.
The sides were folded up to catch any breeze, and after the oven of the sun-baked plain outside, it felt refreshingly cool. To their astonishment, wordlessly, they were brought sherbet in silver goblets. Iced sherbet. In May. The ice was brought down in straw-packed panniers from the heights of Mount Olympos. By June it would all be melted. But for now . . .
The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea Page 17