Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [119]
Next day, returning to her tent from the permitted exercise in the milder heat of the early hours, Oonagh found a parcel concealed in the cushions where last night her lover had lain, and beneath it, a dagger. Inside the parcel were the cap, the turban, the tunic and belt, the kirtled robe and soft leggings she must wear as an Osmanli; and a note. ‘Dress. The one who calls for you will arrange what you cannot. Afterwards, remember you are dumb.’
Thus simply her greatest fears, the turban, her lack of Turkish, were met. Before she dressed, she went for the last time to Galatian.
He was better; almost ready to walk. If he had been a man still, she thought, none of this would have been possible. Indiscreet, importunate, he would have driven Gabriel, every man, from the door. Yet he had cherished her on that queer and violent escape from her past; had installed her as his own, and fed and kept her since on Malta and Gozo. Even now, the food she ate was given her because of him. She said, seeing him jump as he always did when she entered, ‘You will be safe now, Galatian. Every knight is to be ransomed,’
His heavy face was sulky, sticky already with the heat. ‘There will be prejudice against me. Who knows what lies will have been told?’
If only the man would stand up to what he had done! She tried, in spite of her contempt, to find the right words. But she had not the patience, or the compassion which alone might redeem the Chevalier de Césel now. ‘At least,’ she said, her round vowels honey soft on her despising breath, ‘at least you can fairly put your back into your vows of poverty and obedience, since there never was a knight in the Order so chaste as you will be now. Good-bye, Galatian!’
Another man would have cursed her, or even stirred himself, in spite of the pain, to confront and grip her. The knight of Gozo upbraided her like a disappointed woman, and the short-breathed phrases and unvarying pitch of it buzzed in her ears as she changed.
Gabriel, standing with d’Aramon’s party at the door of their tent, saw the fresh contingent of Moors and Janissaries march off to the shore as the sun began to lose its first white shuddering heat that afternoon. Lymond he picked out beside the big Moor who had ostensibly led the escape from Tripoli. In unaccustomed white with the muslin bound expertly round his head, he looked quite at home; he did not glance over his shoulder. Oonagh he found finally walking behind, young and slight, her skin lightly stained, as was Lymond’s, to deepen the tan. Without the veiling black hair all the Irish breeding of her face was exposed to the light, but no fear showed. Nor was it any spiritual faith which sustained her, as Gabriel well knew, but a fatalistic, mystical trust in Francis Crawford.
Shortly after that, the man sent as Turkish hostage to Tripoli returned to tell Sinan Pasha that his terms were agreed. Marshal Gaspard de Vallier, Governor of Tripoli for the knights, was coming to the Turks’ camp to parley, with only his friend de Montfort to support him.
Long before the Marshal arrived, his harbinger had spread the news that the Christian garrison was rent now from side to side: that against every counsel of prudence and humanity the visit of the Marshal had been arranged, on the rebels’ insistence, so that on this elderly, pitiable knight the strength of Turkish good faith might be tested.
No besieged group in such extremes of disunity could survive, the Turkish officer observed with deference to Sinan Pasha. Whatever the nominal terms of the treaty, in fact the General could make what conditions he chose.
*
Oonagh’s task was to carry food, water, ammunition from the deep entrenchments by the shore to the forward ditches under the chipped and broken walls of Tripoli, and the emplacements where the cannon squatted, braced on the timbers of the beached and over-thrown galleys.
The guns were silent for the parley,