Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [66]
Dodging by instinct, weaving, turning, too fast for caution in a race with the night, the seven men fled to Mdina: seven vulnerable men; the army Adorne was awaiting. And as, far to the east, the first slow rise of light spread on the sea, the Governor, sleepless on the high wall of the capital, saw something move in the ditch.
The bowman at his side had raised his elbow. A growing shudder of anger had begun softly to run through the guard when, in the darkness below the lip of the trench, a light sparked. It glimmered, faltered and flared; and in its yellow glow, grotesque, bearded, positive as a mask, was the face of the Chevalier de Villegagnon, the white cross at his shoulder. The army had come.
On the ramparts, dizzily staring, they were too wise to cheer. Swiftly, as they had practised, the lower cannon were rolled back from the gunports and new rope, cream against ancient cream, flung through the loopholes to the knights waiting below. They climbed like lizards, seaman that each of them was, and George Adorne, an agony of emotion behind his stiff face, counted as they tumbled inside.
Seven. The pause after the seventh man lengthened into a question that Adorne could not bear to put. It was Gabriel who, with a flicker of apology to de Villegagnon—a flicker that took in, Jerott saw, the whole waiting throng about them—said, ‘The army follows, my friends. We are here to tell you that Mdina will be saved.’
And so, on the morning of the third day, the bells rang in Mdina. The people shouting and crying for joy mobbed the foolhardy knights who had brought them promise of rescue, and a great column of fire, lit on the Rock of St Paul in the faint light of dawning, told the Grand Master watching from the walls of St Angelo that de Villegagnon and the six had safely arrived.
Inside Adorne’s palace, with the escorting crowds locked cheering outside the gates and the tapers smoking, tired yellow in the growing light within, the Bailiff turned, his arms outstretched, to clasp his rescuers, and the fatigue, the despair he had beaten down for three days in this moment of release and privacy, stole his voice and left the tears to stand, foolishly, in his smiling eyes.
De Villegagnon took his hands and held them. There was a growing pause, during which no one spoke. Then as the Governor, in that rigid grip, began at last to guess the incredible truth, the Chevalier broke into harsh speech.
‘The people must not despair, but it is your right to know the truth. The Order lies at St Angelo to defend Christendom, and cannot spare but these seven men. We are here to die at your side in the breach … and by our joint resistance, yours, ours, and that of the people beyond these gates, to make the fall of Mdina renowned in the world.’
‘Forgive us,’ said Gabriel gently in the half-light, as Adorne, released, slowly slipped to his knees, his two hands pressed to his face. ‘We are not four hundred, but seven. We bring you, none the less, the prayers of Christendom and all the power of our faith. Miracles have been done with far less.’
And across the Bailiff’s bowed and silent head, ‘What miracle is the Grand Master praying for, do you suppose?’ inquired Lymond’s mild voice.
*
Mdina, isolated on three sides by a sheer drop and on the fourth by a ditch, owed its high sandstone walls to the Romans, and they had been little tended by anyone since. Proof against small slings, against arquebus shot, against scaling, these walls would crumble like powder before the cannon the Osmanli army was dragging, piece by piece, over the rocks from their ships.
Very soon, the Turkish gun-carriages had shattered on these bony tracks, with their ancient ruts chiselled by dead hands in the rock. So, fragment by dismantled fragment, the guns which would destroy them were being carried to Mdina on the naked backs of their Christian slaves, column after column winding through the baked plain;