Within the church there was a great deal of light. The sun was bright behind the stained glass, and near a thousand candles had been lit within the last twenty-four hours, when nearly every man, woman and vampire in Mdina had passed through the cathedral to offer special prayers. At this hour of siesta the benches were almost deserted. Only half a dozen kneeling figures could be seen – women wearing theghonnella to hide their features and their feelings. Noell did not kneel, but sat upon the hindmost bench, while Leilah sat beside him. They were both virtual strangers here – he an unbeliever, she still a pagan unbaptised.
‘Have we come to pray?’ asked the vampire lady.
‘1 am too proud to pray,’ he told her. ‘I could not do it in my youth, and if I cannot do it honestly I would rather leave it to those who can.
I will not beg for the protection of my soul, nor the preservation of my flesh. Not now.’
‘We could find more comfortable lodgings to spend our final hour together,’ she said.
‘Dost thou want my blood?’ he asked her, but not bitterly.
‘Nay,’ she said. ‘I have had blood enough, and before this affair is done there will be so much blood spilled upon the sea that the ocean will run red from Sicily to Tripoli.’
‘You must sail away across that bloody sea,’ he told her. ‘When the galleys have broken through, and their vampire knights pour on to the island, you must force Langoisse to set forth for England. Langoisse is insufficiently cooled by his immortality, and I fear that he will bring the Spitfire back to land, to join the hopeless fight. He yearns still to settle his account with Richard, and there’s none in all the world who can turn him aside, save for thee. 1 look to you to save him from his own hot head, and keep his ship for other work.
‘She will go to England,’ Leilah promised. ‘I will make sure of it, even if I must perforce become her captain.’
Noell was silent for a moment, so she spoke again. ‘Langoisse still says that the galleys may not get through, that his broadsides will cripple and destroy them, and keep them from the harbours.’
‘In a battle fought at sea,’ said Noell, ‘a single sailing ship will always outrun a single galley, and may blow it to smithereens with a sufficiency of cannon-shot. But we are talking about hundreds of galleys, which will not even try to fight our ships at sea, but will crowd together, doggedly making for land so that they may discharge their cargoes of horses, men and muskets. The mighty defences around the Grand Harbour will hold them for a while, but galleys will land men at St. Paul’s Bay and at Marsa Xloqq; the fortresses there have not the guns to prevent them. The real battle will be fought when those armies converge on the walls of Mdina, where Durand must hold them, or the day is lost. It does not matter much what will happen then – the Spitfire must go to England, and there thou must make preparation to fight again in defence of that realm.’
‘There is some secret,’ she said, ‘which thou wilt not tell to me, though Quintus knows. It is not entirely for England’s sake that thou wouldst bid me go away, nor only because thou art fearful for my life.’
‘It is in the nature of a secret,’ Noell replied, ‘that it be kept.’
‘Even from me?’ she questioned, making no secret of her own sense of injury in the way she spoke.
‘Even from thee,’ he told her. Then, to avoid the accusation of her gaze, he rose to his feet again, and walked down the aisle toward the altar, where the great silver frontal blazed with the glory of the myriad candles. She followed him, but did not try to catch him up, until he paused beneath the painting of Mary, Mother of Jesus, which tradition ascribed to St. Luke. Noell stared up at the Madonna, blinking his tired eyes. He tried to move his spectacles into a better situation, but still the image was blurred.
‘She has not the beauty of a vampire lady,’ he said, knowing that it was true even though he could not see her. ‘No human woman has. It is a foul trick for fate to play on common men, to give the greatest beauty to a different race, and a race which never could bear children. It is a jest so silly that only the Gregorians seem able to explain it. Pity the common men who will always love thee, my lovely child, and pity the mothers of future men, who can never be entirely loved.’
‘Come home,’ said Leilah. ‘Come home and sleep, for whatever secret thou art guarding will keep better if thou wilt only let it rest.’
She took his arm in hers, and gently urged him back along the aisle. As they left the church, the stiffened silken hoods all turned in measured fashion, as the women interrupted their praying to watch them leave – creeping, thought Noell, in our petty pace… and then he remembered half another line, about the candles which lighted fools their way to dusty death. Behind him, the air was full of candlelight, mingled with the coloured sunbeams streaming through the great windows of pictured glass.
Noell wondered what the world would be like when all men could become vampires, once they had fathered the children on whom they would have to feed. As mothers suckle their infants, he thought, 50 must the infants suckle their parents. It would be, he supposed, a world less strange to itself than it seemed in his wild imagination.
‘Wilt thou kiss me, now?’ asked Leilah, as they stood in the hot sun outside the sanctuary of the church.
‘I will,’ he said, taking her in his arms for what he believed would be the last time. He hugged her close to him, and remembered that he had done that long before she had become a vampire and his lover, when she was only a girl, a stranger in a strange drear land. But he had not kissed her then, poor fool that he was … and he had been too proud in those days to offer his blood to a needy vampire.
He kissed her now, and told her that he loved her.
But when she told him in her turn that she loved him he thought that he might be a poorer fool now than he had been in his long-lost youth, for he was old and infirm, sightless and decayed, and yet could make himself believe such tender words, though they were spoken by a creature as beautiful as the sun.
‘I cannot preserve myself,’ he whispered to her, ‘but I would not mind that, if only I were certain that thou wert safe. Preserve thyself, I beg thee, for my sake as well as thine own, for in thine eyes and in thine heart are all the immortality I need or care to have.’
She wept, then, giving the lie to all who said that vampires could not weep, and to any who believed that those who felt no pain could feel no pity. Indeed, could he have looked deep into her human soul just then, Noell Cordery would have understood that his mistress was filled with such a burden of pity and sorrow as would take three hundred years and more in its discharging, and would never leave her empty, if she lived until the end of time.
FOUR
The great sea battle which was fought to defend the rebel island of Malta against the combined might of Gaul and Walachia was not fought in any narrow region of the sea, but rather took the form of a series of battles scattered in time and space. The greatest and closest conflict, however, took place some three to twelve miles north-west of the island on the day before the invasion.
That wind which the islanders called the gregala, and classical writers Euroclydon, was by now blowing laterally across the course of the war galleys. Their square sails had caught more of the wind in the early part of their journey, and the captains had allowed it to carry them more to the west than might otherwise have been desirable, so that their legions of oarsmen now had their hardest work to do. The Maltese sailing ships, which had more square sail, and triangular sails too, could make more use of the wind, but given its present alignment could not exploit it to the full. Although the wind was brisk, the caravels and galleons of the Order of St. John could not greatly outrace the enemy ships which they sought to destroy.
The biggest galleys were not placed close together in the Imperial ranks, but had galiots and bergantins in between, packed so closely that their oars were oft within a dozen yards of touching. Their captains knew that la Valette would try to run his ships between their lines, slaughtering their oarsmen wit
h the fire of side-mounted cannon, but were determined to prevent it if they could. The galleys had their best cannon mounted forward, and had spurs there which could serve as boarding bridges at the closest quarters, but even though they had little at their vulnerable flanks but oarports and musketeers, still they must protect themselves from fatal broadsides by clever sailing and such armour as ships could mount.
Aboard the Spitfire, in la Valette’s first squadron, Langoisse stood on his bridge, measuring the gaps in the rank of enemy ships which was fast approaching. He was shading his eyes from the sun, but needed no telescope to judge the situation. Leilah was standing by his side, relaxed and patient. Langoisse had such a surge in his veins as he had not felt since the days when first he took to piracy. His years as a vampire had subdued his capacity for excitement, but had not dried it up entirely.
‘God’s blood, my sweet,’ he said to her, when he dropped his arm, ‘we’ve the odds against us this time. But how those frightened vampire knights must be huddling ’neath the decks, waiting for the storms that we’ll unleash!’
She made no reply, but fixed her stern dark eyes upon him, and simply by her staring gave him heart. She looked so young, more like the wondrous slave-girl he had freed than the tall grave woman she had briefly become, before she went to Kantibh to secure what Noell Cordery had asked for, and her own immortality besides.
The fleets were closing quickly, and the leading ships of the knights of St. John could not yet turn aside despite the fact that by turning westward they could better catch the wind. They must keep their bows to the enemy guns, and try to sail through the hail of fire to get amongst the galleys, riding over the oars if they had to. The Imperial fleet outnumbered their own by six or eight to one, and Langoisse knew that their only hope lay in crippling sufficient ships to break the formation and scatter the galleys to the west and to the east. Some would undoubtedly reach Malta no matter what, but if the enemy vessels were sufficiently strung out, and la Valette’s defenders remained in good enough condition to harry them, then the galleys might not be able to mass for a sustained assault upon the Grand Harbour, or for a massive landing of troops at St. Paul’s Bay.
Langoisse called instructions to the helmsman. He did not have to bellow yet, for the noise of the wind in the rigging was muted, and the men waited quietly by their stations. Already they were crouching, because they knew that the fore-mounted guns of the galleys were certain to open fire first. All the men knew this business well, for some had been with Langoisse since his pirate days, and all the rest had served their time as naval men or privateers. He had a few Maltese aboard, but the bulk of his crew was French or English, and Cordery had made vampires of three-quarters of them.
‘Oh for fierce Selim by my other hand,’ murmured Langoisse, glancing again at Leilah. ‘How he’d have loved the fury that’s to come!’
The Spitfire had only one rank of cannon to either side, and they were mostly light bronze guns. She was a small ship by comparison with la Valette’s flagship, the Great Carrack of Rhodes, which had two gundecks to either side and the best iron cannon in the fleet. The flagship was lying back with the other big galleons, in the hope that the more slender vessels could bring the Imperial formation into sufficient disarray to allow the bigger ships and more powerful cannon to pick their targets and work at reasonable leisure.
Some of the ships which trailed in Langoisse’s wake were hardly bigger than arab dhows, and carried only the light swivel-mounted guns which the Spanish called esmerils, but even these vessels might serve to disturb the oarsmen on the smaller galiots and break the ranks of the invaders into more ragged lines. Once those ranks were broken, it was possible that the galleys would get in one another’s way while the raiders wrought havoc. If the oarsmen were only slaves and convicts, they would have little muscle on their arms or stomach for the fray, but Langoisse was too wise not to know that Dragulya and Richard would have searched the whole of Spain and Italy for strong freemen, who would do the job for pay, and grit their teeth under fire.
Langoisse looked down at the waves which lapped the flanks of the Spitfire, and wished devoutly they were higher. A violent storm could do more damage to the enemy’s scheme than all the cannon in his squadron; but the sky was brilliant and cloudless, the sea blue and benign.
As he looked forward again to mark the gap in the enemy line towards which he was aiming, and then looked around to see how the other ships in his squadron were scattering, he felt the thrill of excitement still growing in him, until it seemed that his breast was banded tight by a great shackle. In his earliest days as a reaver he had known this thrill as a kind of fear, but had learned to reinterpret it as exhilaration, and a kind of. bloodlust. Now, it was merged with that other blood-hunger, and he licked his dry lips and thought of the land, and those whores which had sprung up by the hundred in Valetta and Mdina, to make whatever donation of their being the brave men of Malta required.
He drew the sabre from the scabbard at his waist, and raised it high, as a signal to his men. Leilah, beside him, drew her twin pistols, to show herself equally ready.
The bombard mounted in the bow of the nearest galley, which was ahead of them and slightly to starboard, boomed for the first time, and a stone shot splashed into the water a hundred yards away. Langoisse smiled, preferring to regard the shot as one less which might be aimed at the walls of the Grand Harbour or St. Elmo’s fort.
Though they were making no more headway than half a dozen knots apiece the ships closed with what seemed to be great rapidity, and more guns opened up, from the galley which had fired first and from the smaller galiot to the Spitfire's port. When the captains of these two ships had observed that Langoisse intended to go between them they had moved toward one another in the water, so that the passage had narrowed, but Langoisse did not care about that. The Spitfire had impetus enough to splinter their oars, and as long as neither ship could bring its spur to bear on his narrow bows he would be safe.
The galiot was turning as the Spitfire swooped, whether trying to come into his path or get better aim with her guns he could not tell, but she was trying to turn against the wind, and she could not do it. Perhaps her oarsmen were not responding with all due courage to the urging of their foremen, no matter how loudly the drum was beaten, or how frequently the lash teased their shoulders.
An iron cannonball tore at the foremast rigging, and another skittered across the deck, splintering wood, but the galley’s bombard could not touch them now, and it was only the lighter guns that had their reach. Langoisse shouted to his own artillerists, and the Spitfire’s light bow-gun replied, while the musketeers stationed in the rigging began to fire at the oarsmen.
The galiot, which now had no chance at all to intercept the Spitfire’s rush, tried to turn again, and lost all of its forward impetus, so that the galley to starboard was suddenly a whole ship’s length ahead, with the caravel coming up abeam. Langoisse cried out in jubilation at this happy result, and reached high with the sabre while he measured the seconds to time his broadside.
When he howled the order to fire, the starboard gunners leapt to their work. The cannon bucked in a ragged line. The galley’s deck was far higher than the caravel’s, with two ranks of oarsmen two to an oar, and though the musketeers on her deck directed fire down on to the Spitfire’s deck, the cannonballs which smashed into the galley’s body did tremendous damage, much of it dangerously close to the waterline. Langoisse cheered, and Leilah too, though they could see half a dozen of their own snipers and fire-monkeys sprawling wounded. A musket ball tore splinters from the wheel and the helmsman recoiled in fear, but that had been a lucky shot, for that station was the best-protected of all.
Leilah fired her pistols at the galley’s castle as it passed astern, no more than thirty feet distant, and Langoisse looked back for a moment to see how great a disarray his shots had caused. But there was no time for celebration, for the floundering galiot was alongside now to port, and his artillerists had already be
gun to fire. These shots struck higher upon the smaller ship, and probably killed more men though they did less damage to the hull.
Another hail of musketfire came in retaliation, and two more men fell aboard the Spitfire, while Langoisse cursed. These were Italian ships that he was facing, but he saw now that they carried Walachian troopers, who were the best musketeers in the world, by no means to be discounted even when firing from the decks of ships. The Spitfire, much more lightly manned than the enemy ships, could not afford to lose its fighting men at such a rate.
Langoisse damned his luck, but did so under his breath, for what he was truly lamenting was the loss of that hope he had secretly nurtured, that he might be fortunate enough to find the ship which carried the flower of Norman knighthood, so that he might spit his broadsides at Richard’s ancient swordsmen and turn the princeling green with the fear of the sea’s blue deeps.
Again, Langoisse found pause to regret the clement weather, which allowed the flat-bellied galleys to lie level in the water, while the caravel yawed and rolled. He shouted orders to the seamen, and now he had to exercise his lungs to their fullest effect, for the riot of cannonfire was loud. His men knew what to do, and responded quickly to his signals, putting on more sail as they canted to catch the wind.
The second rank of enemy ships was close upon the heels of the first, but not close enough yet to reach the Spitfire with their bombards as she gained speed. Light fire came from the stern of the galiot in the first rank, and the galley which lay to her north-west, but it did no harm, and by the time the ships of the second rank were in range, the square sails were furled again and the Spitfire had come right about to repeat her dash at a gap in the ranks.
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