Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [131]
Then she heard Dragut’s step and rose dry-eyed, her black hair sheltering her inhabited flesh.
‘Come, Cormac’s brat!’ she said aloud. ‘You would not drown for me, and you will be sorry for it; for here I shall shape a scimitar for your fist.’
But when the step passed her door she lay down suddenly, sick, and closing her wide grey-green eyes, the colour of the sea, remembered a scented garden in France, and a quiet room, and Francis Crawford’s soft laughter in her ear, and his hands cool on her skin.
And as the brigantine, stretched light to the wind, parted the dark seas and fled, Oonagh O’Dwyer lay hard-pressed, shuddering, denying her grief under the roof which, by the sacred miracles of Mohammed, Allâh had conquered from God.
X
Hospitality
(Malta, August 1551)
WITH silence for ballast, the three vessels of Gabriel de Luetz, Baron d’Aramon, recrossed the still blue sea to Malta twenty days after leaving it, bearing with them the forty surviving Knights Hospitallers who had sworn, with such fire, to defend the Religion to the death. Behind them under the flag of Islâm lay Tripoli, which had shown the white flag after five days’ assault. And along with them, by Ottoman leave, were the borrowed Ottoman ships carrying the two hundred elderly Tripolitains so mockingly freed with which, it was unfeelingly suggested, the Order could set up an old man’s hostel on Gozo.… It was not a talkative voyage.
*
The chain was across the harbour at Galley Creek when d’Aramon’s galley made to anchor off Birgu. That was the first shock. Then, although in the gathering dusk they could make out the brigantine from Tripoli anchored in the bay, together with another strange boat belonging possibly to the pirate Thompson himself, there was no salute from Fort St Angelo; only a great deal of scurrying visible on the high battlements and a flash of steel, mysteriously, from the wails. The chain remained up.
After waiting, at the Ambassador’s command, the three vessels and the Turkish ships with knights and refugees on board backed and dropped anchor outside the bar. D’Aramon’s nephew said tentatively, ‘It’s late. They dislike admitting ships after dusk.’
‘But the brigantine has arrived. They must know from Malett that we carry sick and wounded and the whole North African Command of the Order.… We have tempted fortune long enough,’ said the French Ambassador, an edge of worry and anger fretting the diplomatic voice. ‘M. de Vallier, can you reach the Grand Master in any way to request him to admit us immediately? We are here by the Turk’s permission and against his instincts. He may well reconsider unless this operation is speedily transacted. And through the Order I am already the better part of a month behind time in resuming my post.’
‘God will reward you,’ said the Marshal automatically, but his straining eyes were on the towers of St Angelo, with Birgu behind. ‘I cannot understand it. For every returning caravan, however ordinary, the guns fire, St Lawrence is lit; the knights wait; the hospital is warned.…’
‘A boat is coming,’ said Jerott suddenly; and as small lights sprang to life all about them in the new-fallen dark, the Ambassador and his suite waited and watched.
It was Graham Malett, Knight Grand Cross, alone, in a boat rowed by Maltese, and as he came aboard, Jerott noticed with a cold paralysis of nerves that the lifelong serenity associated with this one man had broken. Blanched under the sparse lights, Gabriel’s face was set with shock; his eyes darkened from lucid blue to near-black. Crowding with the others into the small poop cabin Jerott heard d’Aramon say, ‘You have bad news,’ without a query, and Gabriel answered, ‘I am sorry. I have startled you.’ And then, after a moment, ‘I do not know how to tell you, or how to defend my brethren to you.’
The Marshal de Vallier’s voice said