Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [40]
Over there, in the high fort of St Angelo where the Grand Master lived, the knights and their suites would withdraw in time of siege. The cisterns in St Angelo would be their only water supply; the stone-lidded grain tanks their main source of food; the slaves in the rock dungeons verging the canal their charge and their danger.
In the long journey from Marseilles Lymond had not wasted his time. He knew that Malta had no rivers, no wells and only one or two sweet-water springs, of which Birgu had one. He knew that, scattered pueblos apart, the only other city of substance, poorly fortified, was the old walled capital of Mdina, guarding a broad, dusty plain nine miles northwards. He knew that Malta’s spoonfuls of Sicilian topsoil sustained cotton and melons, figs, vines, olives with difficulty; and that her corn, her biscuit meal, her meat, her wine, her powder all came from Sicily, or Naples, or Candia. Without her own ships, or the Emperor’s fleet, a long siege would fall hard on the island.
Thinking; analysing; ignoring his soaked clothes and the baked stench of goat and stale food and human clothing, of oil and strong cheese and salt fish and the pervasive, peppery veiling of incense, he turned and looked between the fretted white houses to where Galley Creek, dazzling silver and blue, joined the long deepwater fjord of Grand Harbour.
Opposite and very near, on the piled rock of L’Isla, the scattered white houses hugged patches of green; the silver-grey of olives, the dense green of pine and carob, the serrated embroidery of date palms. It was a long way from the chameleon summer of the Scottish Border; from the costly and courtly graces of the Loire. In this community of dedicated knights, in this historic, tarnished Order, set among brothels and a devout, sullen archaic race of Phoenicians on their rock halfway between Europe and Africa, he had unravelled first all that was stupid and petty and high-handed about these complacent aristocrats, toughened and coarsened by endless coarse war; their intelligence besotted with the syrups of religion and by the anaesthesia of the Order’s thousand rigid rules.
But then, equally of purpose, he had left the hospital and the Church till the last. Now he turned and walked back to Holy Infirmary Square and the big building fronting the street and running down to the rocks at its back where, by permission of the French Pilier, who was also Grand Hospitaller of the Order, Lymond was admitted to the halls of mercy of Birgu.
They showed him everything. He saw the kitchens where sweating men, desiccated with heat and work, ladled chicken broth from the copper vats into silver bowls; the dispensary with its rows of majolica jars, its apothecaries and quiet novices working without siesta, powdering and mixing to the chant of prayers. He walked past the rows of beds, past knights sick of wounds and crushed limbs, of dysentery and enteric, of pox and sweating disease. He passed through the rooms where Maltese lay uncomplaining, and Moors; slaves and free men; poor and rich; of any faith and no faith. In poverty, in chastity, in obedience, the knights and novices toiled, in their thin hospital robes, side by side with the surgeons, and did not even look up.
Then he left, and walked down through the sloping town square to the slumbering quayside and along the water’s edge until he came to the steps, flight on flight to his left, leading up to the Order’s Church of St Lawrence. He climbed these and went in.
Black vault in the white glare of the day, it gave him nothing at first but incense and coolness and a murmurous silence. Far within, something sparkled in a chance ray of the sun. Then he saw the pricks of tiered candles, the flowers and the flags, the painted ceiling, the gold altar canopy, the statues, the shrines and the tombs. And on the ranks of toffee-brown pillars, the Cross of the Order twinkling, pinned to the marble.
The church was full. On the diced marble