Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [120]
Lymond, she saw, worked at the Moor’s side, thus relieved of the need to use much of his Arabic, and did so as if he had handled culverin all his life. He probably had, she thought; and wondered how he felt, repairing the mouth that had blown death into this stronghold, and might do so again.
A strange feeling began to grow on her that afternoon. As she darted from rock to rock and foothold to foothold with the leather flasks, the satchels, the sackloads of powder, she felt neither sickness nor strain. All her despised feminine feebleness had vanished, and in its place she had something as near happiness as she had probably ever attained.
When at last the light mellowed in the quick African twilight, she was dazed, realizing that the time of waiting was past. By then she had eaten, grinning wordlessly at the mimed cameraderie of sweating men, coarsely moustached, whom she had seen just now prostrate themselves in silent worship as nobly as the robed knights in St Lawrence. They treated her, now they had leisure, with a sly, teasing roughness to which her own hard fibre responded. She was not afraid. Dusk hid her identity; her wit had no frontiers. Then it was dark.
Lymond came for her very soon, laconic in Arabic, signing to her what to do. He had contrived some task at the waterfront, as he had had to do. They had spoken no word of English since they set out. Even now, holding her elbow as she stumbled over the tumbled rock, he said nothing that any man could not hear. Then, momentarily hidden by an escarpment, he pulled her down to her knees, and laying quick hands on her glimmering robes, began to peel them from her down to her shift. Then from his own clothing he pulled something dark and tossing it to her, left her alone with it while he stripped. Underneath he wore the same dark, tight tunic that she had just slipped on. It was, she recognized suddenly, something of Gabriel’s. Then he took her arm.
At the edge of the still, dark pool that was the sea, at the brimming edge of freedom where no boat was to be seen, she spoke the first words of the few they were to exchange. ‘I cannot swim. You know it?’
In the dark she saw the flash of his smile. ‘Trust me.’ And he drew her with a strong hand until the green phosphorescence beaded her ankles, and deeper, and deeper, until the thick milk-warm water, almost unfelt, was up to her waist. She heard him swear feelingly to himself as the salt water searched out, discovered his burns. Then with a rustle, she saw his pale head sink back in the quiet sea and at the same moment she was gripped and drawn after him, her face to the stars, drawn through the tides with the sea lapping like her lost hair at her cheeks, the drive of his body beneath her pulling them both from the shore. They were launched on the long journey towards the slim shape, black against glossy black, which was the brigantine, with Thompson on board.
She never knew how long a swim that was, for she had one task: to make his work possible. Her body limp, her limbs brushing the surface of the sea, she took air at the top of his thrust; learned after the first gagging mistake to close every channel to the sudden dip, the molesting wave that slapped suddenly over her cheek. The hard grip under her armpits never altered, nor did Lymond’s own breathing for a long time vary at all.
Above the little plash and hiss of their moving, there was a deepening silence as the bustle of the shore fell away. The guns were silent yet. Above them, lit by a single, anxious lamp, the white speck of surrender hung