The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea (25 page)

‘In Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
,’ he declared, ‘we have read that at a certain dangerous siege, he drove the townspeople out between him and the besieging enemy.’

Giustiniani was lost for words. Dandolo was no Julius Caesar, and his account was garbled anyway. Did he mean the siege of Alesia?

Dandolo pressed on. ‘There are more than a thousand unchristened Jews still living in this city, eating our food, drinking good clean water. And so we have decided that they shall be driven out
before our walls, as a form of protection. That will fox that brute Lala Mustafa!’

‘Sire, that is barbarous!’ cried Giustiniani. ‘And pointless besides. A man like Lala Mustafa will have no hesitation in mowing them down with grapeshot, and using the corpses for sandbags.’

‘Then upon his conscience be it. It is a necessary policy and we have made our decision. Open the sally port! Drive them forth!’

Guards drew back the final crossbars and the low entrance gate to the long dark tunnel of the sally port creaked open. Like all sally ports, just wide enough to admit a man at a time.

‘If you drive them out, we go with them,’ said Giustiniani.

Dandolo smiled. ‘Go with the
Jews?
’

‘Just so.’

‘Well,’ murmured the Governor. It was not a prospect that displeased him. All troublemakers together . . . ‘Off you go, then.’

The knights were speechless, even hesitant. Their estimation of Dandolo, which they had thought could sink no lower, had just sunk lower.

But there was a blur on the steps leading up to the walls. It was Nicholas. He had run to retrieve the Standard of Malta.

‘What’s up?’ said a pikeman, looking puzzled.

‘We’re going,’ he gasped. ‘Dandolo’s throwing us out.’

Word flew like a hawk. Even as the first Jewish elders were being poked and prodded into the tunnel, Paolo dal Guasto appeared before Dandolo.

‘Sire, if the knights are driven out of the city too, I cannot be sure of the loyalty of my company of men.’

Dandolo’s expression set frosty again. ‘Do I understand you correctly, Captain? You are threatening mutiny?’

‘Not threatening, sire. Predicting.’

Dandolo’s mouth worked furiously, his lips writhed.

On the stone steps to the right, there were four of Dal Guasto’s men, uncouth common soldiers, and their crossbows were already loaded. Then one of them – Dandolo’s heart missed a beat – one of them actually raised his crossbow, slow and silent, and aimed it directly at him.

For several moments, Dandolo could not speak. Then he said quietly, ‘Close the gate. Let them be.’

The soldier slowly lowered his crossbow. The Jews shuffled backwards out of the tunnel, to the amusement of onlookers.

Dandolo pulled his horse around and trotted swiftly back to the palace.

Nicholas dropped the standard and grinned.

At that very moment, with cruel irony, a huge marble cannonball came in on a neighbouring bastion, an exact hit, shattering into a hail of hot shards as marble was meant to. Two soldiers huddled just below the parapet were hit, one screaming and writhing.

It was the Turks saying good morning.

And then all along the Turkish line, the cannons opened up. The ground trembled, the noise was deafening, enough to make a man shake at the knees, to sink down in a corner and cover his head, ears ringing. Two hundred black mouths belching black smoke and fire, two hundred balls of iron and stone and marble hurtling through the air to rain down with ferocious destructive power upon the nearly broken city. Women and children wailed. A few skin-and-bone mules tore free from their tethers.

‘The very rats in the sewers will be pissing themselves!’ roared Smith.

‘This is the main attack,’ said Stanley. ‘After this, the Janizaries will be coming in.’

‘God damn the Christian kings!’ cried Giustiniani. ‘Boils and plague on ’em! Where is Don John now, where is the fleet of the Holy League? Why is Cyprus abandoned like this?’

But there was no more time for words. They ran to the bastion where the two soldiers lay stricken, others gathering round.

In the street below there was already mass panic. Someone said the Turks were already through the Famagusta Gate, others denied it. Fighting broke out.

Stanley knelt by one of the wounded soldiers. ‘Can you walk, man?’ But it was foolish to ask. ‘Hodge, lad, take him behind the knees there.’

The other soldier pulled himself upright and leaned heavily on Nicholas, bleeding so heavily his own shirt was drenched. He glanced down. The fellow was wounded in the stomach, almost black blood leaking from his midriff.

‘Hold up, friend,’ he said. ‘These are Knights of St John. Famous medics.’

The soldier stared at him for a moment, unfocused, and then coughed a single, violent cough. A hot blob of blood struck Nicholas on the shoulder and then the man slumped. He was dead.

He laid him down.

‘The nearest hospital, for God’s sake!’ Stanley was shouting. Another soldier shrugged. Field hospitals had not even been set up.

‘The city is lost!’ someone cried from the street below. ‘The day is come, the heathen are upon us! Fly for your lives!’

The people were fleeing into the heart of the city, taking to roofs or cellars like maddened animals. An old man, stark naked, crawled into a barrel and started to giggle. But Nicholas had seen such sights before. The madness of war. Now it was time to steel yourself. Nothing was normal. He wound up his shirt front tightly and wrung out the dead man’s blood. It trickled to the dusty ground, still warm.

‘Below!’ cried Smith, sword in hand. ‘To me!’

All was chaos, but at least the rumours about the Famagusta Gate were false. As cannonballs hurtled in overhead, the ground shaking with huge thumps, and walls and buildings behind them collapsing with a slow, distant rumble, they formed up before the great eastern gate of the city. Paolo dal Guasto was already there with his company, pikes at the ready.

But the gate, at least, had been heavily bulked, on Dal Guasto’s initiative. On the outward face the stonework was all shock-absorbing slopes and angles, and the huge oak gates themselves were covered with overlapping plate metal. Behind that, most simple but most effective of all, was the bulking. A mix of bales of straw, barrels full of sand, stone blocks and sacks of earth, as deep as a barn full of hay. Unlike impressive stone walls, such soft bulking actually absorbed the hammer-blows of cannonballs rather than resisted them. No cannonball on earth could go through it.

Smith grunted approval. ‘The Turk will have to start building defences for himself, right up against the walls, before he can begin
lifting and carrying away all this. Like a peasant carting bales of hay from the meadow.’

Stanley joined them. There was blood on his sleeves, and another dead soldier back in the street behind. He had died without even a taste of opium. There was none in the city.

Giustiniani said, ‘It’s mining that brings down cities.’

There was a lull in the bombardment again while the Turkish guns cooled. They crept up on to the walls once more. Stanley peered out, and told the younger three to do likewise.

‘What are we looking for?’ asked Mazzinghi, whispering unnecessarily.

Stanley grinned. ‘You’re looking for where there’s nothing.’

Smith started almost immediately. ‘There, damn it. Just off to the left.’

They all looked. There was one section of the wicker breastwork and earth rampart where a gun barrel poked out, but no gun team was working to cool it with buckets of warm water. Cold water could crack the barrel, even a piece of bronze weighing more than a pair of oxen. It was as if this gun hadn’t been fired. As if it was merely for cover.

And then Nicholas saw a man with a spade.

Smith was already unslinging his jezail.

‘Take us to the countermining tunnels,’ said Stanley. ‘Fast.’

Dal Guasto wore a look of shame on his face.

Stanley said, ‘Don’t tell me . . .’

Dal Guasto said, ‘The Governor thought we had not the manpower to countermine. He said our walls were impregnable anyway.’

Smith lowered his jezail in sheer despair. This siege was almost over. And the end would not be good.

They had come too late. Always too few, always too late.

‘Truly,’ murmured Smith, shaking his head, ‘truly my Lord Niccolo Dandolo, you are a dunce and a dog’s arsehole.’

They threaded their way back into the city, the four knights in a silent daze. Past the haggard gaze of the last few groups of soldiers, past the heaps of the slain, past the emaciated faces of the townspeople. The general stench of decay and exhaustion told their story.

‘Nicosia is lost. We must plan for Famagusta.’

‘Aye,’ said Smith, ‘we know when Lala Mustafa will be in now.’

‘When?’ said Mazzinghi.

‘Just as soon as the mines have been blown and the last stones have fallen back to earth.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Giustiniani, bowing his grizzled old head. ‘My brothers, my brave souls, we have come on a suicide mission. Just in time to see Nicosia fall. And if we ourselves are only taken captive in chains, we’ll be lucky.’

‘If we become separated,’ said Stanley, ‘we should head towards the Governor’s palace. The last act will be there.’

‘There are three courses open to us, I think,’ said Giustiniani. ‘We can lie down and play dead, and hope to escape. A fairy-tale escape, in truth. The Turks will just throw us alive on to a pyre. We can fight to the death, heroic to the end, achieving nothing for the world. Or we surrender and live to fight another day.’

‘Never,’ said Smith.

‘Fighting to the death is wasted,’ countered Giustiniani. ‘We are needed at Famagusta – if we can get there, after this, somehow.’

‘It is over for us,’ said Smith, buckling his plate tighter.

And then the mines went up.

Nicholas had never seen or heard anything like it, nor ever would again. The final assault on Birgu at Malta had been nothing compared to this: destruction so total and unopposed.

In a matter of seconds, so perfectly organized was the Ottoman assault, all three of the city’s great gates, Famagusta, Paphos and Kyrenia, were sent sky high. It was as if an earthquake had been cross-bred with a volcano.

The arch where they sheltered trembled with the explosions. Nicholas looked up to see the very keystone above his head shaken and half dislodged. But Stanley yelled, ‘Stay where you are! Cover your heads! Do not step out from the arch!’

All the massive bulking behind the gates, that barn-deep mass of material which no cannonball on earth could have ploughed through, was hurled clean into the air. For the expert Armenian and Mameluke sappers had tunnelled precisely underneath it,
barely a foot below, the thin ground above their heads held up by little more than pit props. Then they had rammed the tunnels tight with as many as two hundred barrels of highest-quality gunpowder, lit the long matchcord soaked in pitch . . . and run.

Bales of hay and sacks of straw too heavy for a man to lift were sent spiralling into the air as if in slow motion, coming back to land some time later, thumping down on to rooftops or in distant squares. Some bales simply detonated, the air filled with dried grass and grass halms, and the sweet scent of summer hay meadows, along with the black, bitter tang of gunpowder. A drum of marble from some ancient column was tossed up and then crashed down on to a pretty little fountain in a street behind. A barrel rolling as fast as a horse could gallop smashed into a fellow trying to run away.

And then there came a great roar of thousands of men, rushing all three gates simultaneously, spears and scimitars ready for close-quarter work. Men who had waited for weeks under the blazing sun, bored, restless, sometimes falling sick, for the fall of this stubborn city which had so foolishly refused surrender. Now it was time for just punishment.

‘Not Janizaries!’ came one last desperate cry from a wall. ‘Bektasis!’

Irregulars, dervishes, fanatics. God-crazed connoisseurs of opium, rape and slaughter.

Only moments later, as the six of them raced down a narrow alley, heading for the Governor’s palace and the last stand, there was another gigantic explosion. A deafening eruption of timber and stone. It must have been a powder store. Why hadn’t the powder been brought up to the walls for use? But now either some last desperate defender still in his wits had put a flame to it to destroy it, and deprive the Turks of the use of it, or it had been detonated by some stray pot-bomb or spark.

They would never know. The alley collapsed around them, silently, for they were already deafened, and they were lost to each other in a sandstorm of limestone dust.

Later Nicholas tried to find his way to the palace again, alone, ears ringing, swordless, wanting only to be reunited with his comrades so he should not die alone. Amid the dust clouds and chaos he wandered like a wraith, amid the terrible randomness of the city’s sacking. As if he were marked like Cain, it seemed no man, not even a Mussulman, dared to raise his hand against him. He reeled rather than walked, his own blood now around his neck, and a strange shaking weakness in his left arm that he did not investigate further.

He saw a little girl of no more than six or seven, stone dead but still standing as if stuck to the wall. He thought of his sisters, and pulled her from the wall and laid her down and cursed that he had no covering to give her, looking over her heartful and speechless. He didn’t even stir when another cannonball, fired pointlessly now the city was taken, smacked into a wall only feet away and covered him afresh with dust.

In a nightmare without sound, he saw people wandering about as slowly as himself, but purposeless. He saw a Turk come up behind a woman walking along with her head down, thoughtfully, and run her through. Once she was down, the Turk knelt and started to rummage under her skirts.

Wait, wait, he said to himself, dust gritty between his teeth. Make it to the palace. Find them. Fight another day.

He saw terraces and balconies pointlessly raked by point-blank gunfire, and from the Tripoli bastion, Turks fired down canisters of shot into the crowded, wailing square. He saw them cut off an old woman’s head and toss it in her serving maid’s lap, and other images that engraved themselves indelibly in his mind and memory, and would waken him from nightmares, sweat soaked and panting, for many years to come.