Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [54]
As soon as the day’s trial became unbearable, Galatian would come to her. Not to watch the sails, not to order the cannon, not to check his defences or his stores or to comfort his people … he would come running to her. She heard his hurried footsteps now, climbing the stairs, the rattle of the doors … and here he came. Paler than usual, his colourless hair stuck to his cheeks, his face familiarly suffused, he stopped when he saw her, half-transparent against the blue sky, and called her to come.
She heard him. She even started indifferently to walk towards him when suddenly she veered instead to the right, to the flight of steps which led down from the battlements to the street far below.
The noise had stopped. Below, from all those anguished, frightened throats, there came no sound but the routine sob of a child and the piping of young voices, pressing questions unanswered. Then she saw that every face was upraised to the watch on duty on the high battlements bridging the square. Turning, Oonagh fled to the parapet wall and looked.
The fleet of Suleiman the Magnificent, rank upon rank of silken sails flashing with gold, the crescent banners like cirrus against the blue sky, was still there, far in the distance beyond the sentinel hills. But it had not swung in the wide, so-familiar arc across the blue sea to Gozo. Instead it was moving, bright scimitar of the prophet, to the distant, rich, Viceregal shores of Sicily.
By her side, his craving forgotten, the Governor of Gozo in silence watched too. And out of that moment, that second chance, that respite from masochistic self-contempt, Oonagh saw something again clearly, with the hard, half-mystic certainty she had once had before she parted from Cormac.
Something should be done for these people, these children. Galatian de Césel would never do it: she was his drug and his curse but, failing her, he would find others no less willing in her room. Could she not teach him other comforts, though? The comfort of planning, of action; the great panacea of success. On this stricken island there was no one who could lead, no one who knew what a leader should be like … except Oonagh O’Dwyer, who had stood at O’Connor’s right arm, and his father’s before him.
‘Praise be!’ said Oonagh suddenly, her eyes cool and reflective as they used to be, the fall of her black hair resting kindly on her uncouth maturity. ‘I wonder what your captains will say to this, my brave child? … I will have the Council room made ready for you.’
And he nodded, automatically, without touching her, his eyes on the dwindling surge of bright sails.
*
From Birgu to St Angelo; from L’Isla to the revived villages on each ledge of crumbling rock where the families, running back with their bundles, their babies, their goats, crowded the worn, white-walled chapels, the bells jangled in the suffering heat of the air, rejoicing in the miracle of their preservation. Like pale ejaculations of surprise, the mattocks hung in the unfinished trenches; the armourers’ shops lay cold; the boats rolled idle with their empty casks on the shore of the Marsa. In the chapter hall of the fortress St Angelo, Grand Master de Homedès, relaxed on his crested throne, allowed himself to be mildly sarcastic at his Councillors’ expense.
His knights heard him, torn between relief, uneasiness and, on the part of de Villegagnon, la Valette and those whom Gabriel led, with an apprehension verging on horror. Durand