Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [113]
‘No one will surrender,’ said the Marshal sharply. It was what Blyth wanted to hear him say. But watching the Spanish knights, he did not miss the glance they exchanged. The Marshal said, ‘We shall do as our Brother suggests and disperse these men quietly among those we can trust. In the meantime—’ his tired gaze softened—‘you have all done more than any man could require of you, and you must be yearning to rest. You have leave to retire. Your posts will be held for you. Tell this also to the men who helped you.… Where is M. Crawford, for example? I trust he has taken no hurt. We owe him much.’
‘He is well, but tired, like ourselves,’ said Jerott. Answered like that, there might be no more questions meantime—not that he cared, but he was too damned tired to trouble; to tell them that Lymond wasn’t in Tripoli at all. That after the fire, he had recovered to find that Francis Crawford and the Moor he had rescued had both gone, with a small band of freed slaves. And gone, he had realized blankly long ago, straight to the Turkish camp.
IX
The Invalid Cross
(Tripoli, August 1551)
‘THE guns have begun again,’ Galatian had said in the darkest part of the night when, thought forcibly suspended, she had willed herself to sleep despite the heat and the sand flies and the thickening opacity of her body through which, dully distorted, came the effervescence and pangs and plebeian protests of abdominal routine abused. Unthinkingly strong all her life; her flesh a mere vessel for the violent, untamed artistry of the mind, Cormac O’Connor’s mistress had never suffered this indignity, or troubled to imagine it. But, keeping herself alive on goat’s milk and fruit, and feeding too on the strange and deep resources of near mysticism which sometimes before she had called upon at need, she bore the days better than Galatian, who feared everything and voiced his fear. When just after dawn, the curtain trembled and Graham Malett quietly entered, she felt, however, nothing but relief.
In this strange world she was not foolish enough to expect security. But in Malett she had come to recognize wisdom, of the detached kind that pleased her best. He had, she discovered, a humbly used skill in social salvage which he used with delicacy. In the short periods he spent with her, his lack of sentiment, the absence of prying, moral or otherwise, his complete disinterestedness, were dearly appreciated opiates for her pride. Like all of d’Aramon’s delegation, he came and went now at will. Sinan and Dragut gave them all at least a limited trust. On the surface they were treated as guests, although in fact nothing could have penetrated the guard surrounding the Turkish encampment, either from within or without. So, when the knight lowered his head and came in, Oonagh, who slept as she walked, in the clothes she had worn at the surrender of Gozo, rose and went to him. ‘There is news?’
Cool-skinned, even in the milk-warm airlessness of after-night, he bent from his splended height as he sometimes did and kissed her brow, before settling her gently on the cushions again. Then he knelt, the white cross glimmering on his thin dark jerkin, and said, ‘The news is bad. The Turkish battery is in full use again. Instead of taking advantage of the lull, as we had hoped, the Order has had to face a revolt inside the castle. It is over, but it may recur.’
‘How do they know? Another spy from Tripoli? I hope he survived.’ The last renegade to reach them had been clumsy. The Turkish outposts seeing him running from the city had shot him before he could speak. She remembered that he had once been a knight, like Graham Malett, and regretted her words when she saw his face tighten a little under its deep tan. But