Shadow of God (48 page)

When they reached the bottom of the earthwork, they turned to the right and headed for the St. John’s Gate at the Post of Provence.
Some of the Turks, thinking that the knights were in retreat, suddenly took heart and rallied to their positions. A counterattack began.

Tadini watched over his shoulder as the Turks pressed onward toward the city walls. His men wanted to return to the battle and engage the Turkish soldiers approaching the walls.

“Jean, ride the column and move the men back into the fortress. Do not engage the enemy further.” Tadini raised his painful right arm and signaled his men to retreat. He wanted no unnecessary loss of life. His objective had been accomplished; the cannons were silenced, and he had miraculously lost none of his knights.

As the Turks chased after Tadini’s men, musket fire rained down from the walls. The knights rode back toward the St. John’s Gate, leading the Turkish army past Aragon and England. Knights on top of each of the battlements found easy targets as they fired down upon the Turks. A withering crossfire was set up between the Bastions of England and Aragon. Even the archers on the walls joined the attack, filling the sky with their arrows. As the knights reentered the fortress, hundreds of Turks lay dying and wounded in the rubble and the ditches.

When they entered the safety of the gates, Jean pulled up alongside Tadini.

“What did you say?”

“What?”

Jean repeated himself. “What did you say to me? Out there. I couldn’t hear you.”

“Oh, out there! I asked you why you knocked me down. You ruined my aim.”

“Your aim?”

“Yes, my aim. I was about to behead three Turks with one stroke of the saber. I had them all lined up. They thought they were going to kill me, but I was really getting ready to do all three of them at once.”

Jean’s humor had not yet returned to him. His heart was racing and his face was flushed from the chase and the danger. Tadini seemed cool and unconcerned.

“I thought I saved your life,” Jean said as they slowed their horses to a walk.

“
Grazie amico,
but I was never in danger. Never.” With that, Tadini waved to Jean and trotted his horse to the head of the column. He patted his horse’s flank and waved to the cheering crowd.

Tadini’s men walked through the city to the cheers of the citizens and their fellow knights who had witnessed the splendid show from the protection of the ramparts. It was as if the people had gone to the theater and now applauded the players. Swords and pikes were held aloft by the returning knights, displaying the severed heads of the enemy, some still wearing their turbaned helmets. The once-proud egret’s plumes that adorned the Turkish caps now sagged with drying blood and fell into the dirt as the knights cast the terrible souvenirs from their lances and sabers. The horses trampled several of the heads, skittering sideways in an effort to find firmer footing. Some of the Rhodians picked the heads from the dirt and hurled them over the walls at the Turkish troops below.

In the next few days, the knights sent more sorties out against Piri Pasha’s sector at the Post of Italy; against Achmed Pasha at Aragon; against Ayas Pasha at Germany. The knights suffered very few wounded or killed, while the Turks continued to sustain terrible losses. After each sortie, the knights would return to the fortress carrying the heads of their victims, or dragging the bodies of their prisoners behind them. The heads were displayed upon the battlements for the Turkish armies to see. The prisoners were placed upon the rack and tortured until no more information could be obtained. Then they were killed, and their bodies thrown over the ramparts to rot in the stifling summer sun.

Rhodes
September, 1522

By early September, now more than six weeks into the siege, five-sixths of the perimeter walls of the fortress had been undermined. The Turkish sappers and miners had created fifty separate tunnels dug at different angles to the walls. They radiated from the walls of the city like the legs of a spider. Inside each of them, men were at work twenty-four hours a day. Light and dark were meaningless, for the workers never saw the sun.

On the knights’ side of the walls, Tadini’s men had dug a subway that extended around the entire perimeter of the fortress. His tunnels would intersect the Turkish tunnels at every point of contact with the city walls.

In a tunnel opposite the Bastion of Provence, several of the Turkish sappers stopped their forward movement. The small space made it impossible for anyone to move ahead. The tunnel now extended from the safety of the covered ditches to the earth directly under the wall itself. The miners had been digging for weeks. At first, when they were still out in the open ditches, they had come under continuous fire from the knights. But, soon they had managed to build a cover to their own ditches, made of wooden beams, animal hides, and earth. As they dug closer to the fortress itself, the heavy weapons fire had lessened because the cannons of the knights could not be aimed to fire downwards at such
a steep angle. Immediately below the walls, the miners were under fire only from occasional arrows and a steady enfilade from the muskets. When they were deep inside the tunnels, they could work without the fear of being shot.

But, of fear, there was still plenty. The men sweated in the narrow confines of the tunnels. They were unable to stand up, and barely had room to turn around. They dug small amounts of dirt and rock, putting the rubble into bags, which they passed to the man behind them. Sometimes they worked in total darkness. The air quickly became fetid and rank. The men choked on the dust they created as they dug. Without warning, sections of the supporting walls would collapse, causing panic among the miners. Wooden boards were passed from man to man to shore up the fallen walls. The men lived with the constant fear of being buried alive, either from a cave-in or from a counter-mine set off by the enemy.

The miners crawled like worms in the darkness. Sometimes they had a candle or an oil lantern to light their way. Most often it was easier to dig in the darkness, feeling their way as they went. The engineers calculated distances and directions. At times they were dead on in positioning their tunnels. But, some tunnels were way off, the mines exploding harmlessly outside the walls rather than bringing down large sections of the fortress. At the entry to the tunnels, the officers stood guard and beat the men back into the shafts with the sides of their scimitars when they tried to leave. The miners were almost all slaves, sent to do the hardest and most dangerous work. As they extended the tunnels under the walls, they knew that on the other side knights were listening to detect their movement. At any moment they might feel the terrible impact of a counter-mine detonation collapsing the earth around them. The lucky ones would be killed outright by the blast. But other poor souls would be buried alive, suffering a prolonged and agonizing death by slow suffocation. For them, the only solace would be having the time necessary to pray to Allah for the salvation of their souls.

Slowly, in the cramped confines of his tunnel, eighteen-year-old Ismail, a Bosnian slave, tapped away with his pick. The miner directly behind him did not know Ismail’s name. Ismail did not
know his. There was no time for friendship; no time for histories. Each man hoped to live through the next few minutes; the next few hours; the next shift, which would get him out into the air again, to breathe and see the light.

Ismail scraped away a few large rocks, hardly bigger than his fist. He placed the rocks into the bag that he dragged behind him, then scooped up some more of the wet, cold earth. He pushed the earth into the bag with his hands. He had no shovel, only the small hand pick. After the bag was full, he tied it in a loose knot and shoved it behind him. Another bag was handed forward, and the full one was passed down the line to his waiting workers. His mind teemed with thoughts of the terrible death that might await him. With every handful of earth, he knew he might be blown to bits or buried alive.

He tried to take himself away by thinking of his family, of his life before the Sultan’s army had made him a slave. He remembered working in the hot sunshine of Bosnia, sweating over his crops. Now the cold sweat of fear covered his body. He had not felt the sun shine upon his body for weeks. At times he could recall the smell of the freshly cut wheat and taste the cool water that his sister would bring in a wooden bucket. Then, like the collapse of earth around him, his mind would snap back to this place of darkness and dirt. He would never see his family again, of that he was sure. With that thought, he began to cry quietly as he dug beneath the fortress walls.

Sometimes there could be two hundred men in the human chain that moved the earth and rock. Each man had a story; a past; just like Ismail.

Measurements were taken and calculations made to see how far the tunnel extended, to locate its position under the fortress. The Turkish engineers waited outside the tunnels for more figures to arrive to add to their drawings. More measurements were made, and the calculations tallied. Soon they could send the sappers in to set the charges.

But, would soon be soon enough? Would there be enough gunpowder in the charge? Were the fuses properly timed? Would the miners and the sappers get out alive?

Ismail crept slowly forward, measuring his progress in inches. He shored up the tunnel with more wooden boards harvested from the countryside. He would press up a wide roof beam to keep the soil from pouring down upon him, and wedge the supporting side posts against the wall. Then he pounded the wooden supports into place with the handle of his pick. This he did very carefully. Ismail was a mole in the darkness, and chances were he would never live to see his work completed. Still, he scraped and tapped his pick into the soil and rock and removed yet another handful of debris. As long as he continued to dig just one more handful of earth, there was hope. He moved forward another inch, and tapped and tapped and tapped.

Only yards away, on the fortress side of Ismail’s tunnel, in a small opening dug in the earth, another group of men gathered in the dimness. The space was big enough for several men crouching low. Candles burned on the floor, while the men listened in silence. In this space was Tadini’s secret weapon. It was a drum covered with tightly stretched parchment. Glued to the drum’s parchment were tiny silver bells. The drum was set firmly against the outermost wall of the enclosure.

Gabriele Tadini breathed slowly. He whispered into the ear of Jean de Morelle. “Listen, Jean. Do you hear anything?”

Jean shook his head. He heard nothing but his own breathing, and perhaps his own heart racing with the fear being buried alive.
How does Tadini do this every day and every night? He must be mad. And yet he enjoys it. Look, he is smiling. Waiting for his prey.
Tadini was, indeed, smiling in anticipation. He was waiting for his little bells to tell him when it was time to blow up the charges set in the wall of the tunnel.

The knights were dug in under the walls near the Bastion of Provence. On Tadini’s instructions, there were tunnels such as this one all over the fortress. Rhodes was a honeycomb of tunnels and listening posts. The slaves on the side of the knights fared little better than those of the Sultan. They worked long hours in dark, dangerous holes. Only in their case, they often had the company of
Tadini, himself, setting up his sound detectors and checking on their progress.

“That’s right,” whispered Tadini. His voice was so low that Jean could feel Tadini’s lips touch his ear as he spoke. “You hear nothing! Long before we can hear the digging with our ears, the little bells with hear them for us. The bells react to the slightest vibrations from their digging, which we cannot feel. And that,
mon ami
, is the few seconds advantage that will allow us to blow the dogs to hell before they can do it to us.”

Tadini moved back a few feet and dragged a charge of gunpowder closer to the wall. Then he checked the vents. Jean turned to watch, fascinated with the skill of this Italian, now a brother Knight Grand Cross. He even had forgotten for a moment how hard it was to breathe. But, the dust and debris floating in the air made him want to cough and clear his throat. He suppressed the urge, fearful of giving away their position.