Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [46]
‘And Gozo?’ Even one of his allies, Piero Nuñes, bailiff of la Boveda, was driven to ask. ‘The castle is indefensible. The people must surely be taken off now and sent to safety in Sicily?’
Gozo, Calypso’s island: the small, fertile rock to the north of Malta, looking across the forty-five miles of sea to Sicily, with villages, a small town and a castle, a crumbling ruin on a rock.
The Grand Master was quite explicit in his plans for Gozo. ‘Heathens who have been trounced on flat ground should not be hard to throw off a rock. Men fight better, I have found,’ said the Grand Master of the Noble Order of St John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta, ‘in the presence of their women and children. And I have the greatest trust in my Governor, the Chevalier de Césel … so brave, so skilful that there can be nothing to fear. To abandon Gozo,’ said the Grand Master repressively, ‘would merely ruin the Gozitans and dishonour the Order. Besides,’ he added, offering with bored patience his coping-stone. ‘If the Turks do not come, who will compensate the evacuated people of Gozo for their loss?’
The silence of accomplishment, of bewilderment, of surrender, was all the answer he received.
*
Through the windless airs of the Dardanelles the Mussulman fleet followed the high-banked oars of its flagship: galleys, brigantines, looming galleasses with their thousand fighting-men apiece; their cannon balls and powder and small arms; their stores of food, of water, of canvas and tents; their rolls of linen, their matches, their pots of sulphurous wildfire, their knives, their scimitars, their guns, the heavy cannon; the bamboo rods for the bastinado; the opium for the injured; the sorbet, raisins and lemons; the coffee, the bows and crossbows; the pennants and banners, the date cakes and the barrels filled with sweet grapes from Trebizond.
On the flagship travelled Dragut the corsair, and Sinan Pasha, the renegade Smyrnian Jew, in command. Because the Janissaries were on board, it was as if the Sultan Suleiman were present himself. Over its carved golden poop there stood the Grand Turk’s own private standard: a square of beaten silver, aching-bright in the sun; and above that, the yellow crescent of Islâm and a golden ball, its long, horsehair plume streaming idly behind.
Spahís, corsairs, thieves and robbers, renegade Greeks and Levantines sailed westward with the Osmanli in their great fleet. Enslaved knights of Malta tugged at the oars; whistles shrilled; gongs pulsed with the strokes on, on, on through the lapis-blue water; and at the five appointed times, day after calm day, the adhan, the ritual call to worship, ululated from their packed decks.
The Twelve Thousand, the Followers of the Prophet, were approaching. Not to harbour in France; not to capture Naples; not to seize back Bône; but to drive the Knights of St John and all their works into the sea.
*
From the moment that he hurled himself, in a blaze of anger, on to Malta with his two hundred unfortunate shepherd boys, through all that followed, Jerott Blyth spent a good deal of time, out of curiosity, at Lymond’s side.
No more than Gabriel did he attach any great significance to the encounter. But he wanted to find, and give nostalgic credence to the attraction he remembered as a boy in Scotland, before the years in France and his joining the Order: before Elizabeth’s death.
The Blyths until then had always been lucky. Like the Culters they were well-born, well-favoured, and with money enough to give Jerott the finest tutors and the best training for war. He had not known Lymond well before the battle of Solway Moss against the English in ’42; but he had allowed himself to be entertained, as had they all, by the kind of quick-witted fantasy which was Francis Crawford’s trademark at the time.
For the rest, it was Richard, the elder