‘Aye,’ snapped Bragadino, ‘and at the Franciscan hospital is a child of two covered with burns from crown to toe, whom I confess it pains me to think of even more than your precious carpets, Signor Spinelli.’
The merchant stamped his slippered foot, until Smith moved him bodily out of the way.
Bragadino looked at them with relief. ‘Gentlemen.’
Signor Spinelli looked at them with disgust, his nose wrinkled.
Bragadino said, ‘We have heard news that Lala Mustafa’s own son has been killed. Do you think this can be true?’
They were speechless for a moment. This complicated things.
‘It is possible, I suppose,’ said Stanley. ‘A long-range shot . . .’
Bragadino turned back on the merchant. ‘But now we cannot surrender, do you understand? If we make terms, they will not be honoured. It is now a personal matter. Lala Mustafa will lie, we will open the gates, and he will kill us all.’
Twice, rumours ran through the frantic city that the Turks had broken in, twice they had to be quashed. There were further rumours that the wells and cisterns had been poisoned. Bragadino went out and drank from them himself to show it for a lie. But still a sense of barely suppressed panic dominated.
Then one of the biggest grain stores in the city went up in flames.
Everywhere, rich merchants and bankers talked of surrender, looking at their fine houses, their glittering wardrobes, the classical statues from Salamis in their courtyards.
‘Think of the women and children,’ they said.
They slept that last night on the walls, huddled in blankets for comfort, not for warmth. The smoke had at last died down. Their lungs burned, they coughed frequently.
‘I think it will come tomorrow,’ whispered Smith, passing Stanley the last of the bottle.
‘Aye,’ said Stanley. He saw Nicholas’s eyes shine. ‘You awake, boy?’
Nicholas sat upright and held out his hand for the bottle. A church bell struck three. After he had drunk he said, ‘Will it be like Nicosia?’
‘Perhaps worse,’ said Smith. ‘Lala Mustafa has lost many more men here than at Nicosia, as well as his son. So if he wants revenge . . .’
There was a long, brooding silence. Then Nicholas said, ‘Still, if we are to die here tomorrow – I am glad of it, though I wish Hodge were with me too.’ His throat was full. ‘I know I had more to do—’
‘We all had more to do, old friend,’ said Stanley. ‘Life is always an unfinished story.’
Nicholas nodded. ‘But I am glad enough to die here as anywhere. I am happy you found me, took me to Malta, and all that followed. Even the pains and the griefs. What it has all been about, I do not know. But you always say it is not ours to understand much, as mortal men. Ours to do and die.’
‘So I do.’
Smith looked over the walls. Beyond the last shreds of drifting smoke there were many lights out on the dark plain.
‘I think they will come just before dawn,’ he said. ‘Maybe two hours from now.’
He was right.
The sky was grey, the sun not yet above the horizon, and it seemed the whole Ottoman army came at once.
Columns surged towards the walls at the fast trot, five thousand skilled musketeers spread out and keeping up a steady rate of fire at the defenders pinned on the walls. As many more archers, Armenians and Syrians, did likewise. Smith’s jezail cracked out and a musketeer spun and fell. Another took his place. Thirty seconds later it cracked out again. Another died.
They began to come over the blackened, foul-smelling moat on wide pontoons, carrying scaling ladders and ropes. They were concentrated particularly on the towers, to try to capture them and silence the murderous enfilading fire of grapeshot and chain-shot.
And then a mine went up.
Not the troublesome mine of the saboteurs, weakening a wall already under attack, but a mine laid over the past two weeks by teams of Ottoman engineers working all day and all night, with the labour of hundreds of roped slaves. And it went off where they least expected it. The south wall.
An entire thirty-yard section of the wall seemed to lift into the air and then settle back into place, albeit leaning forward more than before. An agonised wait, and then the whole thirty yards leaned out further . . . further . . . ripped from its own foundations, and toppled forward into the moat.
A column of two thousand Janizaries was a minute away.
‘To the tower!’ cried Smith.
They ran past a hospital with walking wounded spilling out on to the street, worse wounded under awnings, shielded from the hot sun as they lay dying. Flies were everywhere, fever and a universal stench of death.
‘Remember Malta!’ they cried.
They scrambled up the spiral stairs of the tower and found two gunners lying dead beside a small culverin. The Janizaries were crossing the fallen wall.
‘Pull the gun round!’ cried Smith. ‘Bring me that grapeshot!’
They cleaned the gun out and rammed it with powder and Nicholas brought a fistful of grapeshot, tripping over one of the dead gunners.
‘Cover!’
The breech hole fizzed, the gun bellowed, and the grapeshot tore into the entering Janizaries.
‘Pull her back, reload! Find me more powder!’
Down below, a Janizary officer had already got his men under cover within the walls and sent a party to take the tower.
They heard footfalls on the stairs. Stanley drew his sword.
‘More powder, damn it!’ cried Smith.
‘Patience,’ said Stanley. ‘Occupied at present.’ He gripped the stair column in his left hand and held his sword low. A Janizary’s tall white hat appeared and then ducked back. A moment later a grenade landed between Stanley’s feet.
‘Fire!’
The gun roared and tore into more of the enemy picking their way in. The forward company of Janizaries inside was feeling trapped. Where was the follow-up? And down the street came a company of grim-faced Spanish pikemen.
Stanley fumbled for the grenade. A pistol fired and the ball ricocheted off the wall and clanged off his breastplate. A spear jabbed at him, he swiped it aside and thrust forward. A fellow rolled back down the stairs. He reached for the grenade. The fuse stuttered and went out.
He stared at it, cursed and tossed it down anyway.
A split second later he felt the full blast of the explosion as hot air in his face, knocking him backwards. He sat up and felt his face, his ears. Nothing missing.
‘What are you doing?’ roared Smith. ‘The gun’s cracked, get downstairs!’
They came out into a ferocious mêlée of pikemen and Janizaries. If the whole enemy column had pushed forward they would have carried everything before them, but for some reason the column commander held them back and the forward company, isolated and bewildered, was cut to pieces.
There was a respite. The defenders stood and sagged, leaning on pike butts and spears.
It was hopeless. The wall before them could never be rebuilt in time. The Janizaries could be back in at any moment.
‘Sire, the guns are overheating,’ reported a gunnery sergeant to Bragadino. ‘We must cease fire a while.’
‘Then bring down the guns from the Andruzzi bastion.’
‘Only two still working there, sire. The rest are out of action. Also they are low on powder and no more is being brought up.’
‘We haven’t the manpower to hold them otherwise!’ cried Bragadino.
The gunnery sergeant hesitated, and then said quietly, ‘No, sir. We haven’t.’
Bragadino turned his head and regarded him. No plump merchant this, but a tired-looking, hard-bitten, clear-eyed professional soldier. He carried two wounds on him already, bloody-bandaged knee and thigh. His face and hands were caked black with powder smoke, his eyes reddened, his lips chapped dry and cracked by the heat.
‘Envoy from the enemy camp, sire,’ said a breathless messenger. ‘Do we wish to seek terms?’
Braga
dino hung his head.
Then he raised it again and cried, ‘Would to God I had died here!’
It seemed an ominous cry.
Smith, Stanley and Nicholas, nearly ready to fall to their knees in the street and weep for defeated exhaustion, raised their swords one last time with trembling arms and shot them home in their sheaths.
‘I want to find Hodge,’ said Nicholas.
They went back through the streets towards the Franciscan hospital. Women were weeping, and in the middle of the street there was a powder monkey curled up and still, a young boy, the black shining powder leaking from his leather satchel.
Nicholas cried, ‘No!’ and fell to his knees beside him and rolled him over.
His face was pocked with scabs and young scars. It was little Andreas.
Nicholas raised him up in his arms and wept.
Smith and Stanley stood close either side of him, as if guarding him from greater grief.
18
By nightfall the terms of surrender had been agreed. Bragadino decided that he had no choice, and they must take the risk that Lala Mustafa would keep his word, despite the death of his son.
‘The same self-delusion, the same appeasement,’ said Smith – though he did not blame Bragadino himself. ‘The Crescent has won again, advanced a little further across the world. We have done nothing to stop it, and it has all been in vain.’
Nicholas thought of the ordinary infantrymen, heroes all, and of stout Baglione, and of the little powder monkey, Andreas, buried in a nameless mass grave with a hundred others in the hurried twilight.
It could not all be in vain.
Worse than the despair of defeat was the terrible tension that held the city from sleep all night long. Would the sack come?
At one point they heard a huge roar from across the plain, and thought that the Bektasis were coming. Grown men and women whimpered and knelt, the most irreligious now prayed in the street, crossing themselves feverishly; some lost control altogether, and children looked on wide eyed as the adults around them went mad.
But still the sack did not come. The roar they heard was merely some celebration.
Instead the city was ringed around with a disciplined row of guard tents. The great chain was lifted and the harbour filled with Ottoman galleys. A red crescent flag flew from the towers of St Nicholas Cathedral.
Whether the last grain stores had been sabotaged from within, they never knew. The poorest had been eating asses and cats the last few days. Wine stores were so low, most drank water with vinegar.
‘And some say the whole operation to take Cyprus was because of wine,’ said Stanley. ‘There’s an irony.’
‘How so?’ said Nicholas.
‘Because Cyprus wine is famous, and Sultan Selim is a great lover of it. So, some say, that wise confidant and adviser of his, Joseph Nassi, encouraged the conquest of the island even more forcefully than the Grand Vizier, Mehmet Sokollu.’
‘Joseph Nassi? Who is he?’
‘A rich Jew,’ said Smith. ‘Maybe the richest in all the world. Close friend of the Ottoman court. You may even glimpse him soon.’ He spat into the fire. ‘He is to be the King of Cyprus.’
There was a figure standing at the edge of the firelight. Nicholas saw the long, thin face, lit by the orange glow. He beckoned him over. The man shook his head, so Nicholas went over to him.
‘If you do not mind,’ said Abdul softly, ‘I shall not join you. I do not think your knightly friends trust me stilll. I will go into the mountains, I travel faster alone. I have had enough of sieges for now. I have repaid my debt to you handsomely. I believe I saved your lives once, perhaps twice. May you prove lucky under,’ he coughed, ‘the new Ottoman rule. I have in my possession certain valuables,’ he patted the canvas bag over his shoulder, ‘which will stand me in good stead. Two months ago they were Nicosia’s. A month ago they were Sultan Selim’s, strictly speaking. Today they are Abdul of Tripoli’s. In another two or three weeks, if all goes well, they will be with a banker friend of mine in Aleppo. What a merry-go-round it is!’
‘Then?’
‘Then, I long to go on the haj to Mecca.’
Nicholas stared at him. ‘Are you sincere? I did not think you a pious Muslim.’
‘Not pious,’ said Abdul with his enigmatic smile, ‘nor entirely orthodox, no. But . . . mysteries are many in the world that is. And I would like to see Mecca one time before I die.’
Nicholas nodded. ‘Well,’ he said at last, shaking his hand, ‘Allah go with you.’
‘And God with you,’ said Abdul. Then he gave a strangulated little laugh. ‘Ah, if only men of all creeds and nations could live together in such sweet peace and harmony as we,’ he laid his hand on his heart and fluttered his eyelashes like a dancing girl, ‘then how soon we would all die of boredom!’
And he turned and made for the darkness.
Life was strange. You could not account for it. You could only do what you thought right. A Moor could prove a friend, for a time, and in battle you found yourself killing a man without even judging him.
Abdul turned back one last time. ‘By the way, Master Nicholas of England, did you and your knights never think it strange that our paths should keep crossing? First we met in the prison of Pedro Deza, back in Cadiz, and at Nicosia, and then I appear again in Famagusta. Like your shadow.’
Nicholas looked puzzled. It seemed far fetched, certainly. He shrugged. ‘The Mediterranean is a small world, I am beginning to think.’
‘Think on that way!’ said Abdul. ‘Do not think suspicious thoughts, such as that I was always in the pay of the Great Sultan, and paid to track you across the sea. And to find out about you and your close comrades, those two wandering Knights of St John who seemed to know so much.’
‘You . . .’ He was momentarily lost for words, head spinning. Then he said carefully, ‘If that were the case, what would you do now?’
‘Why, I would make for Aleppo via Constantinople and the Court of the Great Sultan, my beloved master. I always take roundabout routes, they can’t track you so well that way. I would report on all your travels, rich in detail and colour, and conclude with your heroic death at the siege of Famagusta. And then I would collect my handsome reward and go on my way. Whistling a little tune, perhaps.’
Nicholas shook his head wearily. ‘But I do not believe you have ever betrayed us.’
‘You can tell it from a man’s eyes,’ said Abdul, ‘his mouth, his expression, his hands. A hundred things. Liars are not so hard to identify, after all.’
‘Truly you are a man in a thousand.’
‘Do not insult me! Abdul of Tripoli is a man in a million, nay, entirely unique!’ Then he said more gently, ‘God watch over you anyway, Master Nicholas of England.’
‘And you, Abdul of Tripoli.’
Then he was gone.
Nicholas turned back and almost bumped into a figure just round the corner.
Smith.
‘You move quietly for a fellow of such bulk,’ he said.
Smith nodded after the departed Moor. ‘I tell you something even more amusing than the Moor there spying on us all this way, or pretending to. We knew it all along.’
This game of spy and counter-spy. It could drive a man mad.
‘Why did you let him?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Smith, ‘the Moor told us more than you realise.’
The next day the half-ruined city was taken over by an impressively orderly occupation, far different to Nicosia. Huge gangs of slaves worked to clear away the damage, and the defeated saw with a strange dismay that much of Famagusta, especially around the harbour, was barely touched. It would be rebuilt as magnificent as ever by winter, a prized new jewel in the Ottoman crown.
Sultan Selim had acquired a very fine harbour and city, along with the third-biggest island in the Mediterranean.
Bragadino and his immediate counsellors were invited to dine at the palace: until yesterday, Bragadino’s palace. He was now billeted with the ot
hers, on a hard horsehair pallet in a grubby airless room, while Joseph Nassi, the rich Jew, was already in occupation.
‘It is a trick,’ said Smith.
‘I do not think so,’ said Bragadino. ‘Joseph Nassi is a man quite independent of Lala Mustafa, who shows no sign of wanting even to enter the city of the Infidel.’
‘Let us go,’ said Giustiniani wearily, ‘and see what this triumphal Jew has to say to us.’
Nicholas found Hodge in the hospital, washing his arms clean.
He shook his head. ‘Not I. The fighting’s done but we’re as busy as ever here. You go to dine.’
Nicholas said hesitantly, ‘You are not angry?’
‘No. I’m just learnin’ fast, that’s all.’
Slaves had already scrubbed and cleaned the entire building, new tapestries were hung and carpets were laid, another column from Salamis was sent for by ox wagon to replace one that had been shattered by an unfortunate Ottoman cannonball. A galley came into the harbour with fresh furnishings, linens, silks, magnificent gilded lamps and lanterns. And Joseph Nassi’s beautiful wife, Dona Gracia, daughter of a fabulously wealthy Portuguese Jewish banking family.
The party of Christians were invited early to bathe themselves, and fresh robes were laid out for them on velvet-upholstered divans.
Nicholas chose a blue silk robe, belted with a gold sash, feeling sick. In the Franciscan hospital, men, women and children still lay dying of fever and gangrene. Hodge was up to his elbows in blood and filth.
Smith looked blackly rebellious, almost refusing to bathe.
‘Just co-operate,’ said Giustiniani. ‘That is an order, Fra John. We are Venetian counsellors. We are hear to listen and observe. Joseph Nassi is a man of high civilization, confidant of the Sultan, yet also personal friends with Prince William of Orange and the Emperor Maximilian, connections with the Duchy of Burgundy. He is even said to have masterminded the election of the King of Poland. Now suppress your mulish will for once. The time for fighting is over.’
It was not a grand hall, however, but a much smaller chamber where dinner was laid. A table, white linen, silver candlesticks, ivory-handled knives. Dishes of fruit, jugs of wine. Discreet servants, and still more discreet though well-armed guards at the door.
The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea Page 28