Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [48]
Nick Upton pulled in a stool beside the four and lowered his great bulk. ‘We shouldn’t need bottles, Sir Graham. The underground cisterns will be enough.’
Graham Malett’s eyes met Lymond’s, and it was Lymond who answered the Turcopilier. ‘Not if the cannon vibration cracks the rock,’ he said briefly. ‘You’ll need seawater too, all the barrels you can spare. Sinan Pasha likes to use limpet fireworks, I believe, against men in armour. What about fire weapons of your own? Wildfire? Trumps?’
‘We’ve enough saltpetre,’ said Upton. ‘Pitch, turpentine, sulphur, resin, oil.…’
‘Where?’
Jerott didn’t see the point until Gabriel said, ‘In one of the warehouses you saw on the quay. We’ll need hides, Nick; as many as you can raise, and some of those barrels of seawater.’ For the warehouse, as Jerott realized, was itself a living bombard, which soaked hides at need might protect.
The discussion went on. Wheat, barley, oil, fish, cheese, wine and biscuit in the rock vats. Too late to lay mines, with only six feet of topsoil over the sand, and limestone below. Weapons checked—partisans, pikes, glaives, battleaxes and daggers and the knights’ own two-handed swords; powder, balls and arquebuses, bombards and fireworks; the cannon and mortars at St Angelo itself.
The most easily quarried stone and earth to be brought to build up the outer walls of Birgu. There was no time to deal with Mdina, the other city, and de Homedès had refused guns, troops and defences to Gozo. Horses, to be placed at Mdina to keep contact with the north of Malta, Gozo and thence Sicily. Planks and brushwood to hide snipers. Some of the Order’s remaining galleys to be accessibly sunk; the rest to be taken into the canal joining the fort of St Angelo with Birgu. The chain to be checked and maintained between St Angelo and L’Isla.
St Angelo, the only strong fortress and home of the Grand Master, would hold all the knights and, surrounded on three sides by sea and on the fourth by its narrow canal, would be their last stronghold. Birgu, and Mdina six miles away, the only towns, would have to hold all the refugee Maltese who, with their beasts and belongings, would be expected to stream for shelter as soon as the attack came.
Dragut, for this his fifth attack on the Maltese islands, would not risk sailing into the tongue of the sea, chain-stopped, between the St Angelo and L’Isla peninsulas. Instead, as before, he was likely to choose one of the sea inlets on either side—Marsasirocco on the south-west, or Marsamuscetto, the long inlet to the north hidden from Birgu and St Angelo by the spine of Mount Sciberras.
If Dragut chose this last place to anchor, he had only to climb Mount Sciberras to have the knights’ headquarters below him, in full view across the water. He had only to drag his ships and his cannon across the neck of land between Marsamuscetto and Galley Creek to be able to sail right across to Birgu, within the chain at the neck of the creek.…
Plainer and plainer, as the talks progressed, was the knights’ vulnerability. And plainer the queer congruity between Gabriel and Lymond: not in style or in temperament, but in coolness and, above all, in a sense of balance. Malett, the older man, with the peace of maturity within him, had a physical magnificence which had helped, Jerott knew, to create his legend, but which was only the vessel for his special brand of power.
Beside him, they all looked pale. Even de Villegagnon with his honest passions and his brilliant career seemed slow-witted and crude; Nick Upton looked a sheepish, fat schoolboy and Lymond an ashen-haired, soft-voiced clerk, pattering solutions in court. Only Gabriel, Jerott noted, talked of the Maltese as if they were flesh and blood. Only Gabriel spoke of the hospital, and those who must serve there; and only Gabriel referred with simplicity to their strongest defence: their dedication to God.
And there only did Jerott’s new-found enigma