says because of a rumor. Don Garcia de Toledo, viceroy of Sicily, was on route with forty-eight galleys. Pompeo Colonna and twelve hundred men, sent by the Pope to relieve La Vallette, eventually reached Gozo. But somehow the Turks got hold of intelligence that twenty thousand troops had landed at Melleha Bay and were on route to Notabile. General retreat was ordered; church bells all over Xaghriet Mewwija began to ring; the people thronged the streets, cheering. The Turks fled, embarked and sailed away to the southeast forever. History attributes it all to bad reconnaissance.
'But the truth is this: the words were spoken directly to Mustafa by the head of the Sultan himself. The witch Mara had sent him into a kind of mesmeric trance; detached his head and put it into the Dardanelles, where some miraculous set and drift - who knows all the currents, all the things which happen in this sea? - sent it on a collision course with Malta. There is a song written by a latter-day jongleur named Falconiere. No Renaissance had ever touched him; he resided at the Auberge of Aragon, Catalonia and Navarre at the time of the Siege. You know the sort of poet who can fall into belief in any fashionable cult, current philosophy, new-found foreign superstition. This one fell into belief and possibly love for Mara. Even distinguished himself on the ramparts of Borgo, braining four Janissaries with his lute before someone handed him a sword. She was, you see, his Lady.'
Mehemet recited:
Fleeing the mistral, fleeing the sun's hot lash,
Serene in scalloped waves, and sculptured sky
The head feels no rain, fears no pitchy night,
As o'er this ancient sea it races stars,
Empty but for a dozen fatal words,
Charmed by Mara, Mara my only love . . .
There follows an apostrophe to Mara.'
Stencil nodded sagely, trying to fill in with Spanish cognates.
'Apparently,' Mehemet concluded, 'the head returned to Constantinople and its owner, the sly Mara meanwhile having slipped aboard a friendly galiot, disguised as a cabin boy. Back in Valletta at last she appeared in a vision to La Vallette, greeting him with the words 'Shalom aleikum.'
The joke being that shalom is Hebrew for peace and also the root for the Greek Salome, who beheaded St. John.
'Beware of Mara,' the old sailor said then. 'Guardian spirit of Xaghriet Mewwija. Whoever or whatever sees to such things condemned her to haunt the inhabited plain, as punishment for her show at Constantinople. About as useful as clapping any faithless wife in a chastity belt.
'She's restless. She will find ways to reach out from Valletta, a city named after a man, but of feminine gender, a peninsula shaped like the mons Veneris - you see? It is a chastity belt. But there are more ways than one to consummation, as she proved to the Sultan.'
Now sprinting from the taxi through the rain to his hotel, Stencil did indeed feel a tug. Not so much at his loins - there had been company enough in Syracuse to anaesthetize that for a while - as at the wizened adolescent he was always apt to turn into: A little later, scrunched up in an undersize tub, Stencil sang. It was a tune, in fact, from his 'music-hall' days before the war, and primarily a way to relax:
'Every night to the Dog and Bell
Young Stencil loved to go
To dance on the tables and shout and sing
And give 'is pals a show.
His little wife would stay to home
'Er 'eart all filled wiv pain
But the next night sharp at a quarter to six
'E'd be down to the pub again. Until
That one fine evening in the monf of May
He announced to all as came wivin 'is sight
You must get along wivout me boys
I'm through wiv rowdiness and noise.
Cause Stencil's going 'ome tonight;'
[In palmier days a chorus of junior F.O. operatives would enter here singing]:
''Ere, wot's this? Wot's the matter wiv Stencil?
Wot's the reason for such a change of 'eart?'
[To which Stencil would answer]:
'Gather round me closely lads
And I the most forlorn of cads
Will tell you all ere I depart:'
[Refrain]
