Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [116]
For a second, her mind filled with questions, she missed it. Then she realized what he had implied and said soberly, ‘When?’
‘It can’t stand.’
‘None of us knows the Lord’s will,’ said Gabriel’s quiet voice; and the sun blazed on the deep carpet and was extinguished again as he came in. ‘Are you so sure?’
‘My God, of course it’s going to fall,’ said Lymond, exasperated. ‘Despite the knights running in and out of the chapel like hysterical mice. Sedition, suspicion and rivalry conditioned by passionate worship in church or out of it, or on a cannibal isle for that matter—they smell just the same.’
‘You are not afraid, we know, of blasphemy,’ said Gabriel wearily. ‘The blame for that is the Order’s. If Tripoli falls, it will be no more than another failure of the same kind. I am right, am I not? We have driven you from us? You mean to take the lady home, and you will not return?’
There was a pause. Watching the two men, both fair, both self-contained and prodigally gifted, Oonagh sensed that the query was more pressing than even it seemed; that more was at stake than the impugnment of what was the greatest Order of Chivalry the world had ever known.
Lymond knew it too. He said slowly, ‘The only redress at present lies with the knights. Nothing more can be done until de Homedès is dead or discredited. That is not my affair.’
‘No.… You will never return,’ said Gabriel with bitterness, and was silent.
‘I have to leave first,’ said Lymond mildly. ‘When Dragut is in Tripoli, ask me again. Oonagh.…’
‘It is time for me to go. I am in your hands. Tell me when you are ready to leave,’ she said. And after a moment, ‘’Twill be a queer thing, to fight on the same side at last.’
‘We were always on the same side, you and I,’ said Lymond. ‘Only, mo chridh, you did not always know it.’
*
It was not enough, to sleep in separate tents with only twenty yards between them on this, perhaps their last night on earth. For how could such a masquerade deceive the Turks? Even muffled in robes, with her black hair wound under a turban—though she might pass for a boy, would her sunburnt skin pass for theirs? She had none of their language. If they were sent to their posts early, she had the whole day to live through without detection before they could slip into the sea—she who knew nothing of cannon.
Galatian was restless, as if he knew. And when at last, in the inner room, he had dropped into uneasy sleep, Oonagh O’Dwyer lay listening to the guns and thinking of Lymond, whose future she had lightly extinguished, as Graham Malett had forecast. And out of friendship, his kiss had told her. Out of friendship only. She had said to Gabriel, against her will, ‘Shall I see him again?’ And Gabriel had said shortly, ‘He is not a child. If he wishes, he can no doubt find means of coming to you.’
But so far he had not wished, and she lay alone, under the fine lawn sheet Gabriel had got for her, her day clothes, full of grit and soaked already with sweat, discarded beyond. She could feel her body, only slightly rounded as yet, smooth under the cloth; her swathing hair was silk under her cheek. All to waste? All to waste?
When, late at night, the shadow darkened the starlight behind her silent shrouds, and the door, whispering, admitted a deeper shadow, soft-footed and deft, it found her already perfect as a flower brought to its full-breathing height. This was no frantic helpless Galatian; though speed was their master and silence, because of the sick man sleeping so near, a desperate essential. A stray beam from the closing curtain struck silver, once, from his fair head as finding her, he knelt. He said, ‘Mo chridh …’ once, in the same whisper she had heard already that day. Air breathed on her aching body; and then she was no longer alone.
She sobbed once, under her breath, when Galatian, half-disturbed