Every house, every stable, every donkey shack within fifty yards of the walls was pulled down and razed that night, the material carried to the walls for precious bulking. Some of it was used to refill the tunnel they found under the traitors’ house, a foul damp burrow badly propped and leaking sand. A poor thing, but stretching underneath the walls of Fort Andruzzi, in concert with a heavy barrage from beyond, it might have played a crucial part.
Even a fine acacia tree was cut down, along with two merchant houses with splendid courtyards and upper galleries, an ancient Byzantine chapel, first hurriedly deconsecrated by a priest. He carried away the icons by torchlight, his face wet with tears.
Groups of merchants in fine robes and gowns looked on, muttering among themselves.
Nicholas awoke with a Franciscan friar bending over his leg and bathing it.
‘My foot has gone,’ he mumbled. ‘Blown away. I am lamed for life.’
The friar looked up. He was slightly hunchbacked, with a snub nose, and amazingly bushy grey eyebrows which curved up at the ends, making him look like a comical demon.
‘Both feet still present,’ he said, ‘though one a little cut about and worse for wear. Brain soused in opium, though. I’d sleep if I were you.’
It was dark when a visitor came. Stanley himself.
‘I brought you an orange.’
Nicholas turned his head on the pillow. ‘Opium.’
‘You’ve had enough to fly to the moon and back.’
The knight squeezed the fruit to a pulp in his bare fist and the juice poured into a silver goblet.
‘Show-off,’ murmured Nicholas.
Stanley grinned. His hands were black with powder and burns, and his knuckles grazed and bleeding.
‘I don’t mind the gunpowder so much,’ said Nicholas, ‘but I’d rather not taste your blood.’
‘It’ll be good for you. The blood of English earls runs in these veins.’
He held up the boy’s head and put the goblet to his lips. The juice was sharp and sweet and delicious.
He lay back. ‘More.’
‘I’ll bring more.’
If I can find more, he thought. The city was already feeling its isolation, cut off from the surrounding countryside and no ships coming or going in the harbour. And the Ottoman guns had already destroyed two grain stores.
‘What happened at the bastion?’ asked Nicholas.
Stanley set down the goblet. ‘Your heroic little endeavour did some good. The arch came down, a few enemy were killed, just when we were hard pressed. Baglione was hurt in the fighting, though.’
‘Badly?’
A second’s hesitation. ‘He will mend, I’m sure. The Turks pulled back disheartened. Though I know you are strong enough to want the truth, and not heroical bombast. What really saved us, while we hacked and bludgeoned away there, was the work of Bragadino in the city. The moment the Janizaries gave us respite, we looked around and there were – I do not exaggerate – a thousand, two thousand, of the townsfolk in perfect columns, bearing sandbags, earth sacks, pushing barrows. They filed in one by one and filed out again, obedient as nuns. Bragadino supervising. Each one left and then came back and rejoined the queue with another sack. Cushions full of stones and sawdust. Pillowcases stuffed with straw. Anything.
‘The people worked the rest of the day, in rotation. Perhaps one in every ten citizens was there, helping bulk up the broken Martinengo bastion. The work will go on all night, and by dawn that shattered wall will not matter so much any more. For Martinengo will just be a great, squat, solid block of . . . stuff. We can’t use it any more, alas. But neither can the Turk take it. And it was this – the citizens and peasants and humble sacks of sand – that have really saved us for now.’
Nicholas said, ‘I am glad of it. Hanging there from my fingertips, I felt no hero. I felt like a Bedlam fool.’
Stanley grinned. ‘I’ll get you some more oranges.’
Outside, he paused for a while. Yes, he had told Ingoldsby the truth. It was an insult not to. But not the whole truth.
Not the dismal rumour that more and more of the town’s citizens, especially the wealthier and more influential of them, were talking about negotiated surrender.
The sturdy peasants and plain townsfolk would have none of it. They lived with death every day, and hated the Turk more than anything. But the wealthy merchants, many of them Venetian or Levantine, said they had no quarrel with the Sultan Selim. What matter who governed, as long as they could continue their trade in peace? And they wept to see their fine city houses and courtyards reduced to rubble and dust. Their wives harangued them further.
‘Surely,’ they said, ‘some accommodation can be made?’
Oh for a city full of Malta peasants, thought Stanley. They were a people made of rock.
There was one other strange turn that day. An Ottoman ball had gone into the house where the fifty Muslim pilgrims of the haj were sheltering, and it killed two of them. Some time later, the leader of the group came to Bragadino, and pleaded to be released.
‘Released? In the middle of a siege? Released where, man?’
Then he told their story. They were Muslim converts, from Wallachia. Only two generations ago, their families had still been Christian. But they were so oppressed and impoverished by the relentless taxes and punishments of their Muslim overlords that eventually, ‘God forgive us, we abjured the Cross and bowed to Mecca. As so many have done before us.’ And before the Governor’s astonished eyes, he crossed himself.
Bragadino decided to trust them. In a few days’ time, he promised them, under cover of darkness, they would file silently aboard a galley in the harbour under the command of Romegas himself, slip past the Turkish patrols, and sail into the west.
Night time. Torchlight and cooking fires, dogs barking, muted talk. Eating and drinking, grimy faces, bowls and goblets slurped and guzzled. Water still plentiful, drunk by the quart.
No news from the lookouts on the walls, no sign of activity around the Turkish guns.
Suffering Christ, they might even get some sleep.
Two soldiers rigged up a pipe and pumped from a cistern, a cool gout of water at head height. Exhausted and filthy soldiers stripped and stood naked beneath it.
Women passing by screamed and giggled, half hid their faces with their headscarves and turned the other way. But not before having a swift look.
One well-built handsome Spaniard, muscular chest coursing cold water, scooped back his thick black hair, shook his beard and grinned at the women and called out, ‘I am glad we give you something to smile about, fair ladies, in these straitened times!’
They passed on with heads lowered, giggling like schoolgirls. More than one of them would dream of him tonight.
Priests of the Greek Church, Armenians, Dominicans and Franciscans, friars and nuns, said nothing to condemn such bawdiness, or the scenes they saw in taverns, stables, back alleys. In extremis, men and women would take what comfort they could.
They forgot their doctrinal differences and worked on through the long hot night.
They tended the wounded, drugged the dying, and buried the dead.
17
At dawn, word came that Astorre Baglione, Famagusta’s single finest military commander, had died in the night of his wounds. His last words were, ‘No surrender!’
Moments later, a huge bombardment opened up on the north-west corner of the city, against the sloping walls of Fort Andruzzi.
Dust went up. Flakes fell.
Nothing else.
Towards noon they stopped firing and the guns were rested.
Smith smiled grimly. ‘Think on it well, Lala Mustafa, you dog. It won’t always go your way.’
Bragadino looked grey. The responsibility was almost too much, even for so strong a man. His refusal to surrender had already sent a thousand soldiers to their deaths, perhaps another five hundred civilians. Ten thousand more, old men, women, children, depended upon him. And now he had lost Baglione.
‘He was my best commander. I have the military experience of any gentleman, but Astorre Baglione was my stay and staff. I will need your advice now.’
‘That’s why we’re here,’ said Giustiniani. ‘With our memories of Malta.’
There was another long, exhausting assault all afternoon until nightfall by countless regiments of Janizaries, infantry and dismounted Sipahis fighting as infantry as well. At one point Bragadino estimated there were as many as ten thousand men coming against them. They brought up protective barriers, huge bundles of brushwood which they rolled into the fast-filling ditch, scaling ladders, ropes and grappling hooks.
‘If the moat is completely filled,’ said Giustiniani, ‘or strongly bridged, they could bring up siege towers.’
But they had enough on their hands as it was. Turks swarmed up the walls; many were cut down by enfilading fire from the towers, but they quickly learned that the Martinengo bastion itself was now unable to offer return fire. They scaled the walls nearest to it, and scores of men came up over the battlements. Only rapid reply by Bragadino saved the day, with two whole companies of pikemen already stationed there on the wide walls, able to encircle them and then cut them down.
There were no more sorties from the defenders. They were fighting to the point of exhaustion and beyond just to hold the walls.
At dusk the Turks pulled back.
Bragadino ordered a count.
Half an hour later came the sombre tally.
Of the four thousand men he had had under his command a week ago, over two thousand were now dead or severely wounded, beyond fighting. He had around 1,800 fighting men left, and few of them were unscathed.
Hard to estimate the Turkish losses. Four, five thousand at least.
‘But that still leaves us facing an army of sixty or seventy thousand,’ he said. ‘Pietro Giustiniani, what would you judge?’
‘As I have always judged,’ said Giustiniani. ‘We can still hold out a while. We can inflict great losses on the Turks, to the bitter end, forcing them to accept a victory at high cost. But we cannot win. We can only pray for relief.’
‘Yet no relief is coming. What then?’
‘Just possibly we could hold out until the onset of winter. Then they would have to abandon the siege anyway.’
‘Winter? It is still August. You truly think we could hold them back another three or four months? Another one hundred and twenty days’ assault like today?’
Giustiniani sighed and did not reply. Both men knew they could not.
Nor was it only the day.
Lala Mustafa knew all about the power of sheer exhaustion to win battles and sieges. He sent his engineers and sappers forward at night, and they filled the moats with more bundles of brushwood and timber, drenched in heavy oil. They lit them just before dawn. With the wind on their side.
‘Plague on them,’ said Smith. ‘On it all.’
A warm, soft wind came from the west, the gentlest zephyr. Their worst possible enemy now.
The oil-drenched brushwood burned green and slow, giving off thick black coils of smoke, a roiling tarry curtain that rose as high as the walls of Famagusta and then drifted gently, blindingly, into the smarting eyes of the defenders.
Worse still, they began to smell the aroma of burning human flesh. The hundreds of corpses down in the moat were roasting, human fat seeping forth and feeding the oily flames.
Lala Mustafa, master of tactics, then threw everything into the mix.
Cannons roared against the south wall, and huge two-hundred-pound cannonballs began to curve in over the battlements and pulverise the city yet further. The streets gradually filled with dust as well as lung-searing smoke, people lost their bearings along with all hope, and the sound of the guns booming yet again was almost enough to drive them out of their senses.
Lala Mustafa piled on dread upon dread. Safe behind the vast veil of smoke, he had Sipahi drummers parade below the battered west wall on their biggest horses, and the trembling people heard, in between the booms of the guns, the harmless yet more nerve-racking boom of great goatskin kettledrums played to an ominous, relentless rhythm.
Hodge and Nicholas huddled below the ramp on the west wall with the four knights. Nicholas’s leg was still bandaged where it had been deeply cut as he detonated the pot-bomb beneath the arch. But he was young and in the last few days he had healed fast. All had kerchiefs around their mouths, eyes tight shut. Fists around the hilts of their weapons, but nothing to fight except this blinding smoke and growing terror.
‘Come at us again, damn you,’ murmured Stanley. ‘We are ready for you. Smoke will not take a city.’
Smith began coughing violently.
Stanley said sharply, ‘Do not encourage them, Brother.’
Smith, red eyes streaming, looked ready to strike him. ‘There must be something we can do!’ he spluttered at last.
‘Blow the smoke back in their faces? Cut it to pieces with our swords?’
‘Can we not try to blow up our own moat?’ wondered Nicholas. ‘Just with grenades, dislodge the tinder, scatter it . . .’ He tailed off.
Stanley shook his head, hesitated, then told him. ‘We do not have enough grenades or powder left.’
The smoke thinned for a moment and Mazzinghi saw something.
‘They’ve brought up a wooden catapult in the old style, and another . . . four, five in all.’ He dropped down again. ‘I pray they don’t start catapulting in putrefied bodies. I hate that.’
‘You’ve never experienced it,’ said Smith.
‘No, I’ve read about it. The Turks did it at Constantinople.’
‘It’s not as bad as you think,’ said Stanley.
‘No?’
‘No. It’s worse.’
‘You are a great consolation.’
‘Here’s a real consolation. A besieging army is far more likely to get sick than people in a fortified city, with fresh wells, water cisterns, latrines . . .’
‘But they are all being smashed to pieces even as we speak.’
Stanley had no reply. The young knight was right.
A massive stone cannonball came in from the south, whining unseen through the clouds of smoke so that no one could even cry out a warning, One in the air! It smashed home not fifty yards from them, still unseen. The west wall juddered to its foundations, and Mazzinghi threw himself flat. Then he sat upright again, looking ashamed, shaking.
For all his bravado, he was frightened. The bravado was an act. That only made his bravery all the greater.
They heard the muffled release of a catapult beam and then the mighty thump against the padded crossbar.
‘Report!’ cried out Giustiniani. ‘Anyone?’
Now a distant screaming was added to the din of cannonade and kettledrum, and strident Janizary trumpets not far off through the smoke.
They could not abandon the walls, the attack might recommence at any moment. Smith said they’d send the Bektasis again. ‘Coming dancing barefoot and burnt across the flaming moat, inhaling the smoke like incense. As happy as drunken stoats.’
Then a messenger was running along the walls, head and face heavily wrapped in wet cloths, his lungs seared.
‘What are the catapults for, man?’
He knelt, wheezing, eyes streaming.
Another catapult thumped. Then another. Through the smoke and din, they saw flashes of light, and in the city below, Nicholas thought he saw the bright lick of flame.
‘Incendiaries!’ gasped the messenger. ‘Some sort of sack, filled with metal fragments, perhaps salt of magnesia, and tar and Greek fire and the bleeding Jesus knows what—’
‘Mind your blasphemous tongue,’ said Smith.
The messenger wheezed at him, wiped his eyes, then stood and ran on at a crouch.
Their facecloths were drying out and no sign of the water boy.
‘I’ll go,’ said Nicholas.
‘I too,’ said Hodge.
Two more catapults thumped, sounding as if the
y were right up to the edge of the moat and still unseen through that pitch-dark pall. Down the steps and into the narrow street, the smoke was thinner and they saw buildings aflame. The nearest well was shattered, filled with stone, and near it lay a dead boy still holding a pail. Nicholas took the pail from his stiff fingers and he and Hodge ran. They found a marble fountain in a ruined courtyard, sweetly decorated with nymphs and dolphins, laid the pail on its side and half filled it, ran back.
There was a wooden warehouse aflame, a roaring inferno, too hot to approach. Another near by, already burning down to a smouldering ruin, a stench like burnt sheep.
‘Listen, Nick,’ said Hodge, gasping. ‘You take the water. It is more than I can stand to be up there, doin’ nothing. I am for the Franciscans in the hospital, where I can do some good. I know a little medicine, and if nothing else I can mop up the blood.’
Nicholas clapped him on the shoulder. ‘We will meet later.’
Clawing his way back up the half-shattered steps one-handed, pail in the other, lungs poisoned, leg still hurting, he felt the city hot behind him. The incendiaries were taking hold.
They dunked their facecloths in the water, retied them, drank the rest.
‘This smoke must clear!’ said Smith, almost shouting.
‘Be thankful,’ said Stanley. ‘The chronicles also say the Turks at Constantinople used flame throwers mounted on siege towers, trumpets the size of cannon belching out flames fifty feet long and as hot as hell itself.’
‘Fool,’ said Smith. ‘Now you’ve said it, you’ll probably bring it. And you’ll be the first one to burn up like . . .’
He started to cough again violently.
Giustiniani got to his feet, keeping low. ‘Time to get below,’ he ordered. ‘We’re dying up here, and we need to report to Bragadino.’
They found him in the hall of the palace. His left hand was wounded and bandaged. Three men were speaking to him at once. He looked exhausted beyond death.
A plump, hysterical merchant held his arms wide and cried, ‘The entire warehouse! Filled with priceless carpets of Tabriz and Kurdistan! I am ruined!’
The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea Page 27