Lanfreducci turned and swung his great two-hander over his head in the face of the approaching horde and cried out, ‘For San Marco and the Two Kingdoms!’ and a ball cut through his mail and grooved his upper arm. Another kicked up dust between his feet and he turned and ran on, cursing this first time in twenty-eight years he had ever shown his back to the enemy.
Somehow they all got home alive, Lanfreducci and De Guaras both hit but neither fallen.
Panting and grinning, Lanfreducci tore off his bloody tabard and breastplate and padded shirt and stood there on the walls, naked to the waist, his great muscled chest bare, his handsome face thrown back, his thick dark hair curling down his neck, teeth gleaming in the moonlight. Entirely exposed to the Janizary muskets and utterly unafraid, laughing down at them … Nicholas saw him then as some ancient hero, Hector or Sarpedon on the walls of Troy, casting mockery down on the foe, magnificently careless. Not even glancing down at his own bloody arm, the Italian knight took a strip of clean white linen in his teeth and tore it in two and tossed the narrower strip to Nicholas. He extended his muscled, blood-slathered arm.
‘Tie me up tight but not too tight, boy. You know the drill.’
Nicholas did his best.
‘Hm.’ Lanfreducci eyed the reddening dressing. ‘Not so bad. You are the English boy, the Insulter? You tie a good bandage. You’ve done this before.’
‘First time.’
Lanfreducci grinned. ‘Well, good enough for first time. Come, let us drink some wine, and the wound in my arm may have some too. We have earned it, little English brother. They say your father was a Hospitaller, is this so?’
Exhausted and still terrified and now elated all at once, Nicholas bowed his head, near overwhelmed with emotion, as the Italian knight laid his good arm over the boy’s thin shoulders and they went down to the inner yard to drink wine.
A hospital chaplain came to urge Lanfreducci inside the store too, to lie down so he could dress his wound.
‘’Tis done, Fra Gianni,’ said the knight. ‘But a splash of brandy …’
He drank wine while his arm was doused in brandy, and showed no reaction until the chaplain had gone back inside. Then he screwed up his face. ‘By the arse of Mohammed, that stings.’
Nicholas grinned.
‘So you wish to become a brother too, to follow after your father?’ said Lanfreducci. ‘You know about the rule of chastity?’
He looked away. ‘I will not be a knight, I think.’
‘Then why are you here? There is no compulsion. And you know we are in terrible danger.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘Indeed, most of us here will die.’
He passed Nicholas the cup of wine and he drank.
‘I suppose,’ said the boy, wiping his mouth, ‘I think I won’t die. And I am here because of my father.’
Lanfreducci nodded in the darkness. ‘The Blessed Virgin look over you, boy. There is no need for you to fight. Bring up water, wine, casks of powder. Bulk the walls. Help the chaplains here. Tie a good bandage. Keep your head down, and keep away from the front line. My heart would be heavy if boys like you died here.’ And he hugged him hard.
They might snatch a couple more hours’ sleep before dawn. But first Nicholas needed a word with someone.
‘Stanley?’
‘Hnn.’
‘Stanley.’
Stanley snorted and stirred. ‘What is it, boy?’
Nicholas hesitated.
‘For all the saints. Be quick. I was dreaming of roast beef.’
‘It’s about Lanfreducci.’
‘What of him?’
‘Forgive me, only I need to ask you … he’s not … he’s not, is he?’
‘Not what?’
‘A … un sodomità?’
Stanley said in a tight voice, ‘Lanfreducci?’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’ He gave a strangulated laugh. ‘No, the Chevalier Francesco di Lanfreducci is most certainly not un sodomità.’
‘Only — he kept putting his arm around me, and then he hugged me.’
‘Ay. And soon enough he’ll be telling you he loves you,’ growled another voice out of the darkness. It was Smith. ‘It means nothing, boy. He’s just Italian.’
‘In fact,’ said Stanley, ‘Brother Francesco is one of our order who is most troubled by the vow of chastity.’
‘He’s not troubled by it at all,’ said Smith. ‘He’s quite happy with his mistress over in Birgu.’
‘Mistress?’ said Nicholas.
Stanley nodded, looking serious. ‘We are knights, boy, not saints. Though it is a shameful thing for a knight to break a vow. Yet the Chevalier Lanfreducci fights as valiantly as any knight in the Order — you have seen — and besides, it must be said, he has the looks of some ancient god, and the women will pursue him to exhaustion, like hounds after their quarry. And he is too lazy and smiling and-’
‘And Italian,’ said Smith.
‘And Italian,’ said Stanley, ‘to say no. Hence the mistress — the very pretty mistress, I acknowledge — in Birgu.’
‘And the one in Naples,’ said Smith.
‘And in Messina,’ said Stanley.
‘The two in Messina.’
Stanley looked over his shoulder. ‘Two?’
‘Ay. The Contessa as well.’
Stanley looked back, reflective, his eyes distant. ‘Well,’ he said. Then he focused on the boy again. ‘Unseemly talk for your ears, boy. Get some sleep. And have no anxieties about Lanfreducci that way. He is not interested in you for your — fleshly configuration. But you might pray for his soul. He needs it.’
7
From San Angelo, La Valette and Starkey looked out at the beleaguered fort, silently smoking in the night.
‘The banner of St John flies yet,’ said Starkey, ‘though they have fought there two days and two nights.’
‘And will be fighting all tomorrow too, no doubt of that,’ said La Valette. ‘Against entirely fresh troops. But they have withstood well so far, and Birgu is grateful for it. Not a minute has been wasted.’
In a courtyard in a quiet backstreet, a mother said to her daughter, ‘What is it, child?’
The girl said nothing.
‘Is it the English boy?’
Then tears came to the girl’s eyes, and she stood and ran into an inner room.
‘You know it is the English boy,’ said Franco Briffa, throwing another wad of dried brush in the brazier. ‘Leave her be.’
The woman bent over her sewing again. ‘How it hurts to be young and in love.’
‘Love,’ sighed Franco. ‘Ay, I remember that word. But as to its meaning …’
His wife smiled in the firelight and pricked him in the leg with her needle. Franco chuckled.
The Turks fell on Elmo again the next day, and the defenders fought from dawn till dusk, and then the next. The high confidence of the first day and the blistering counter-attack began to wane. In their weariness they began to make misjudgements, and Smith stood to move along the line just as new gunfire poured in upon them at close range.
He was struck in his broad bullneck by a musket ball. He fought on, blood slowly drenching his throat and shoulder, before he suddenly weakened and tottered, and then said with great dignity, ‘Brothers, I must leave you,’ and went below.
Stanley rammed a fresh musketball home with vehemence. ‘He’ll live,’ he said. It sounded as much a prayer as a prediction.
Nicholas glanced after Smith, Sir John Smith, the indestructible, knight of both England and Malta … And Hodge, too, was not well. He drank excessively, and ate little, and looked wan, and struggled to bring the smallest sacks of powder and ball up the steps to the walls. But Nicholas would not let Hodge die. He had decided that they would fight the good fight as long as they could, but then somehow make their way back across the water before Elmo fell, to Birgu, alive, to fight again.