Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [51]
‘And leave Malta undefended?’ said Jerott Blyth, grimly mimicking outrage.
‘Is he sending any at all?’ inquired de Villegagnon heavily. Lymond had not spoken.
For the first time Gabriel’s eyes, as if he were weary, dropped to his closed hands. ‘There are in the prisons of Malta,’ he said, ‘twenty-five young knights, thrown there by de Homedès for insurrection. They are to be released to lead the expedition to Tripoli. You and I are not to go.’
There was nothing to say.
None of them went down to the quayside to see the two hundred blundering youngsters pushed aboard the two galleys taking them to foreign deserts and death. Instead, they worked with Nick Upton, with straw and seawater as de Villegagnon had said, to make Birgu and St Angelo as secure as insane improvidence would allow, against the followers of Allâh’s Deputy on Earth. And even the Spanish knights worked, sweating, at their sides.
*
Below the seven heavens—the green heaven of emerald, the heaven of silver; the heaven of red coral, the heaven of pearl, the heaven of red gold, the heaven of yellow coral and the seventh and last heaven of light—the armada of Islâm like a carpet of blossom swam over the seas to the east, and the grain of rock which was Malta came slowly plainer and close.
On the flagship, the spider shadow of the rigging was the only shadow there was. Struck by the African sun in its beaten gold, the brazen light shifted and blazed on jewelled turbans and scimitars, on enamelled clasps and brooches, on the shields of the Janissaries—dark, moustached faces above snowy caftans—forbidden to marry and dedicated to war; the rustle of their heron’s plumes drowned in the grunting pulse, day and night, of the drums.
And beside the Imams, in their dark robes and round-jowelled, chalk-olive faces, Dragut Rais stood, grizzled, scarred, hard-ribbed under his silk robes as a cask of tanned hide, and gazed ahead, his grey moustaches drooping to his grey beard; his flat, Anatolian peasant face blank.
Three times he had sacked Gozo, and once Malta herself; the old hound, the living chart of the ocean. Plucked from his mother’s cabin, schooled in Egypt by arrogant Turkish benevolence, a Mameluke, a trained bombardier, a gunner on corsair ships, he had risen at length to own his own galliot, to sail with Barbarossa, to command his own squadron. And when, six years ago, Barbarossa died, worn out by his harem and by harrying Christians and merchants alike in the robbers’ paradise of the African coast, Dragut had become his heir.
Corsica, Naples, Sicily, Djerba: his successes were legend while he lived. And now, no longer prince of corsairs, independent privateer of the Middle Seas, he had been placed by Suleiman at the right hand of Sinan the Jew, the Sultan’s general; and Sinan had orders from the King of Kings himself to defer to Dragut’s experience.
And ahead lay Gozo, where seven years ago the brother of Dragut Rais had been killed, and the Governor, so far from delivering the slain man for embalming and the rituals of his own faith, had burned the corpse like a dog.
Unstirring, Dragut Rais stared over the sea; and the islands grew plainer and close.
III
The Voice of the Prophet
(Maltese Archipelago, July 1551)
FROM the Governor’s castle on Gozo, her black hair hot on her shoulders, Oonagh O’Dwyer watched the striped sails, the twinkling ships come.
High on its acropolis above the capital Rabat, the Gran’ Castello, her lover’s citadel, guarded the centre of Gozo, a three-mile span of sharp hills and patchwork plains, of carob trees and low, square houses and stone terraces with the fishing nets drying and the gourds seated, green and yellow and fat as aldermen on their walls.
To the south, beyond the sentinel cone of an extinct volcano, lay the short sea channel to Malta. Within the fortress walls on