‘Run, brother, run!’ cried his comrades.
The marksmen took aim at his back, not forty paces off.
Knights began to climb up onto the cordon to dash to his rescue. But that was precisely what the Janizary captain had foreseen. Such foolish nobility in those Christian dogs. Yet such nobility, a true Muslim might yet admire it, even though it must be destroyed. He dropped his arm, and his marksmen’s muskets cracked out a hard unwavering volley.
Two of the marksmen had aimed at the cordon iself, and their shots smacked into the gabions and the stones and sent chips flying amid the whine of ricochet. The knights ducked down.
The other four marksmen had aimed for Bridier’s heart.
The young French knight, almost the last flower of a thousand years of Frankish chivalry, barely twenty years of age and beautiful still like a boy, took a staggering step forward. Then with great effort he raised his head and gave his brothers a sad smile and they knew he had already been shot several times and enough had gone through his armour to kill him.
They could hear the Janizary captain’s cry clear across the field. Shoot him down! Shoot him down! This enchanted one could not be allowed to live.
A different shot rang out, and Nicholas turned his head sharply. It was Smith’s jezail, but Stanley taking the shot, putting one of those precious lethal stuardes straight through the Janizaries’ forward breastwork, to their astonished horror, and sending one of their invaluable highly-trained marksmen staggering back and dropping in the dust, clutching his belly.
The momentary confusion among the other marksmen was enough for Bridier to be brought home, arms reaching out for him, half lifting, half dragging him over the broad cordon to safety. An arrow clanged off Stanley’s plated arm even as he dropped back, laid the jezail down and drew off Bridier’s helmet.
The young knight breathed with deep pain. Blood dappled his face and ran from his ears and a thin trickle from the corner of his mouth. By God’s grace alone did he still breathe at all. His sword lay at his side and still he wore that serene saint’s smile.
‘I am struck very near the heart, I think,’ he whispered.
Stanley said, ‘It’s a mighty heart.’
‘Leave me be. Prepare to fight again.’
Then the burly Chevalier de Guaras said, in the old-fashioned idiom, as seemed only right before this unearthly knight from out of the old tales and chronicles, ‘By the fair fame of France I shall not quit you.’ And he pulled him upright.
Bridier de la Gordcamp looked at the thin English boy who knelt in the dust nearby, and perhaps saw something of himself there in that young, torn, passionate face.
‘Here, boy,’ he said weakly. ‘Take my sword, guard it. Bring it to me in the evening.’
Nicholas took up the fine long sword.
‘God bless you, little brother,’ murmured Bridier.
Then De Guaras took him on his shoulder and carried him below.
The crude, four-bed hospital was filled with the wounded and dying, the air filled with their groans. Flies buzzed expectantly, and the stench was terrible. Smith, his neck bandaged, lay on his side on a pallet on the floor, and breathed badly.
‘Leave me here at the door,’ said Bridier.
De Guaras ignored him. ‘In the name of pity, see to our brother.’
The chaplain did not even turn, and his arms were red to the elbows. Another knight bucked underneath him as he tried to draw free an arrowhead from his guts, the cavity of his abdomen welling out blood. ‘As soon as I can.’
‘Now!’ shouted De Guaras. ‘This brother of ours, this hero-’
Only then did the chaplain glance back over his shoulder. It was the imperturbable Fra Giacomo. ‘All heroes here, brother. Do not shout, not even in this extremity.’
Bridier clutched De Guaras about his thick wrists. ‘I sit and sun myself here, Fra Melchior, and bide my time. Now go and fight for the faith.’
How they fought through a fourth afternoon under that burning sun, they hardly understood nor remembered. Many were wounded, and more fell not to rise again. Yet still the Turks could not break in. Towards evening the attack faltered, and finally the mournful blast of the Ottoman curved battle-horn sounded over the wreckage of the field, and the Janizaries pulled back. From now on into night, they would fire only from a distance, sniper and cannon.
‘We will bring up field guns and blast that wretched cordon to pieces across the ditch,’ said Işak, Agha of the Janizaries. ‘It is only a cordon, in the name of the angels. It is only a rough mound of earth and stones that holds us back. It is a disgrace.’
The captain nodded. ‘Yet they rebuild it every time.’
The Agha refused to hear. ‘Then at dawn the infantrymen will go in again, and surely they will finish it.’
Nicholas drew out Bridier’s sword from the shadows inside the door of the bastion where he had carefully stowed it, and went down to the hospital.
Inside it was so dark, and his eyes so blinded with glaring day-long sunlight and smoke and dust, that he could see nothing for a long time. Then a throaty voice said, ‘He is not here.’ It was Smith. ‘Bridier. He is gone.’
Nicholas was all confusion. He knelt at Smith’s side. ‘How is it?’
‘I have been better. The ball’s stuck in my throat, and the chirurgeon says’ — he gasped, went on — ‘says, he cannot dig it free without making me bleed like a stuck pig.’
Nicholas felt close to tears. A man like Smith could not die.
‘Stanley keeps trying to dose me with more opium, but I know his game. He thinks to send me to sleep so I can be shipped back over to Birgu and out of the fight. But he’ll not.’
He laid a great hand on Nicholas’s head. It felt like his father’s.
‘But your gallant friend needs to go over, boy.’
‘Hodge!’
Only then did he see the racked, stretched body of his companion through all. Hodge on his back, delirious, drenched in sweat, muttering, eyes roving through the darkness of the roof above. Then Nicholas wept without shame, kneeling at his side. ‘Hodge.’
Hodge did not know him. Hodge knew nothing, but in his fever-dream saw only the woods and hills of Shropshire, the hedgerows white with may.
‘The chaplains in the Sacred Infirmary will mend him,’ said Smith. His voice was thick with pain, his throat with blood and swelling. But he must tell him. ‘You go back too, boy. You return. This will be the last boat. It’ll not come again. Go with Hodge. Your time is done here.’
Nicholas said nothing, bent and kissed Hodge on his burning forehead, prayed that God have mercy on Smith’s soul as he stepped past him, and went out.
He still held Bridier’s sword. Where had he gone? Cast himself off the wall into the sea below? So as not to be a burden to his brothers even in death. The boy stood in a daze. Weak with hunger but sick at eating. A Spaniard infantryman went by him. It was García.
‘You sicken, boy?’
Nicholas shook his head dumbly.
‘Battle sickness. The stench, the flies, the ruin of men’s flesh. Hope bleeding away too. Drink my wine.’
Again he shook his head.
‘Drink it. To show you’re not a damned Mohammedan dog if nothing else.’ García shoved his wine cup to Nicholas’s lips and almost forced it down his throat. It had a bitter tang.
He coughed and swallowed, wiped his mouth and said, ‘There’s opium in it.’
‘Ay. Just enough so you sleep through the night. Else the horrors of your mind will frighten sleep away.’
The drugged wine warmed him and softened something hard and painfully knotted within him.
Barely conscious of his way, he went over to the little chapel of St John, up the three shallow steps. There on the stone lintel was blood. Blood was everywhere. The whole of Elmo was bleeding.