Men’s plans are not God’s plans.
Hodge dropped down beside Nicholas with a grunt, the sack of balls hitting the ground and the dull leaden spheres rolling away over the stone.
‘For God’s sake boy, pick ’em up!’ roared a nearby soldier.
But Hodge could not. He lay back sickly, lips thin and drawn, eyes barely open, trembling. Nicholas scrabbled around gathering up the musket balls again and passed them up to the soldier on the wall. He ducked as another explosion went off overhead, and more masonry tumbled down and hit the yard below.
‘Master,’ whispered Hodge, ‘I am going.’
‘I’m not your master, Hodge,’ said Nicholas fiercely. ‘Master no more. And you’re not dying. You’re fevered, and tonight you will go-’
‘Fevered and hit too,’ said Hodge. He moved his left arm slightly across the stones, and it was limp, and left a slather of blood in the dust.
Nicholas in dismay sliced open Hodge’s sleeve and saw the horrible sight of a white splintered arm bone gouging up through the torn flesh of his forearm, the flesh around it blown clean away, more white bone showing, and blood leaking everywhere.
‘O sweet Jesus, sweet Jesus, look down …’ gabbled Nicholas, tearing off the band of cloth around his head that kept the sweat from his eyes and trying to slip it under Hodge’s shattered arm. Exhausted and near delirious as he was, Hodge arched his back at the merest touch of the material and screamed. Nicholas felt the agony, his very arm throbbed in unison. And the worst thing, panic began to set in.
The soldier above them gave a grunt and stepped back, the soldier to whom he had given the fresh bag of musket balls. Then he fell across them and crashed down. He was already dead, half his head gone, his helmet rolling clumsily away across the parapet and over the edge. Another man was screaming with madness, and there were more shouts of sheer desperation,
‘They’re coming in! We can’t hold them!’
Nicholas held onto Hodge’s other hand, stricken helpless. A shadow fell across him from behind, and he knew it was a Turk up on the cordon, yet even then he could not look round. Smoke and dust blinded his eyes, his eyeballs stung with grit, his ears were stunned and deaf, his throat like sharkskin as it had been for days now. Yet he could not look up, could not move, and the cries of despair around him seemed even now very far away. There was only him kneeling there in the dust below the half-shattered parapet, and Hodge lying before him, near dying, to be buried here in this stone-hard fly-blown island, forgotten and far from home.
‘O sweet Jesus … ’
Then two more Spanish infantrymen were fighting behind him. It was García and Zacosta, thrusting over the cordon with fantastic savagery, their half-pikes dripping, and there was another man kneeling beside the boys, keeping his head low. It was Lanfreducci. You beg of Jesus, and a mortal man comes. But that is how Jesus answers. With practised skill he held Hodge’s shoulder in one hand, and then swiftly but gently drew his hand up and across, ignoring the boy’s cries, so that the shattered forearm lay across Hodge’s own belly. Then he scooped Hodge up in strong arms, keeping him prone and motionless, and carried him down to the stores for the chaplains to tend. They were so low on medical supplies, they were splinting with scabbards now.
Nicholas ran down after them. His every desire was to go with Hodge, sit with him, be with him. But that was worthless, and not his duty. He was urgently needed on the walls. He seized more bags and powder packs and ran up the steps once more. Sweat immediately began to pour into his eyes again in the atrocious heat, salt to sting his cracked and sunburned face. The sun was a living fire, but it punished all equally. He paused half-way up to tie the cloth around his forehead again, for without it he could barely see to crawl along behind the cordon, handing out the bags and packs.
Behind him came another knight up the steps, his throat wrapped tight with a white bandage, limping badly, his face deathly pale. The rest of his wounds and his half-destroyed body were hidden by his fine suit of armour. He raised his vizor and smiled at Nicholas above him. It was Bridier de la Gordcamp.
‘Brother!’ called one of the chaplains from the yard. ‘You cannot-’
Bridier raised his hand without turning. ‘Later, brother, later.’
The situation on the walls was desperate. The Janizaries were pushing with vast concerted force now to finish this damned fort and be done, knowing that the defenders had been fighting for close on seventy-two hours, with barely a rest. That lunatic counter-attack of theirs must have boosted their morale, yet still they must be near finished.
The heat was terrible, and while they in their white silk robes had it better, the Christians in their suits of armour must surely be dropping of suffocation and thirst if nothing else. A quarter of them were dead already, and the rest must surely be destroyed soon. And yet those dogs of St John fought on, like men who did not know when their appointed time was come.
Not twenty men stood behind the north-west cordon, locked in struggle with the packed Janizary assault. Though distant Turkish snipers might try to pick off isolated defenders, yet guns were in the main useless in this mêlée of swords and half-pikes, deteriorating into the crudest blows with shield boss or butt in the face with armoured head.
Through the ranks of the soldiers and his brother knights, not one of them unwounded, slipped the slender Bridier. He stepped up onto the cordon of barrels and bales, drew his sword and cried out the name of the Saviour. Then before the astonished eyes of all, attackers and defenders both, he flipped his grilled vizor down, dropped in among the Janizaries themselves and began slaying.
For a moment it seemed like he was a man enchanted, or a demon come from below. His armour was of the very finest, of the workshops of Brescia, and even the most powerful cuts and thrusts made no headway against him, while his own long lean blade sliced cruelly through Turkish flesh without ceasing. The attack began to fail, some Turks fell away, some retreated. Then a veteran Janizary sergeant aimed grimly and stabbed the point of his scimitar straight at the exposed underarm of the fair-haired knight and drove it in deep.
Bridier pulled himself back from the scimitar and swung his sword and missed and staggered and fell. Janizaries crowded vengefully forward, but from the roof of the bastion came a command to his own men to duck down, and then a perfectly timed volley of crossbow bolts under Luigi Broglia’s all-seeing direction. They flew in hard and hit the close-packed Turkish soldiery while the prostrate Bridier lay safe below them. Half a dozen more Turks fell. In the pause, Bridier climbed to his feet again, leaning on his sword, and then raised it once more, beyond exhausted, just enough to drive it low into the sergeant’s belly. The Turk leaned forward and vomited blood over the weapon that had killed him. Bridier pulled his sword free and sank to his knees. The sergeant knelt with him, facing him. They appeared like men confessing their last sins to each other.
But it was enough. The drum retreat had already sounded. The Janizary captain across the ditch saw that his sergeant was dead and order among his men once more lost. The shattered, exposed, bitterly contested star point was once more abandoned, and the damned fort of Elmo lived to breathe another hour.
The knights at the barrier cheered their brother Bridier, but the older knights looked grave as they cheered, knowing he must now be wounded to death.
Nicholas wanted to run out to him and help him in, but he froze. With implacable calm, beyond the ditch and safely behind a forward breastwork, half a dozen Janizary marksmen were now taking aim on the lone, broken knight, standing isolated out beyond the defensive cordon.
Bridier turned and walked slowly back towards the heaped barrier of barrels and gabions and stone blocks, his vizor raised, his head hung down, his long girlish locks plastered to his pale cheeks. He could no longer lift his sword enough to sheathe it. Its point dragged in the dust behind him.