Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [67]
The bells had stopped, but in the certain hope of rescue and the miraculous fleshly presence of de Villegagnon and his band, the people set to work to hold Mdina until the Order came.
Behind the flaking walls a ditch was dug, and in the rear of this a second wall was raised: a wall of earth and crumbling stone, a heap of friable rubbish ravished in this land of naked soil from the homes which stood that morning on this site. Craftsman, artisan, nobleman, judge—each family in that fated quarter of Mdina wrecked its house, and the dark, stocky women of Malta, the veiling stuck with sweat to their cheeks, carried the precious rubble cradled in their white skirts to the new wall. And as each section of entrenchment was finished, planks were dragged in for platforms and epaulments on which artillery could rest and arquebuses fire over the ditch.
It was while supervising this, his own powerful shoulder to the baulky wheel, shouting drolleries and encouragement in his deep voice, the guinea-gold hair bronze with sweat, that Gabriel looked up to find Lymond before him.
‘I believe,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘that some of your inimitable eloquence would be balm on the western escarpment. The holy Augustinian brethren of these parts are threatening to slay us with thunderbolts if we knock their church down.’
Gabriel straightened. ‘Explain to them,’ he said.
Lymond shook his head slowly. ‘I fear,’ he said, ‘that only someone on the most intimate terms with the Deity will answer.’
‘Then I shall go … since that is what you would expect me to say,’ said Gabriel, and a sudden, sweet smile crossed his face and was gone. He moved to leave, but at Lymond’s shoulder hesitated, his face troubled. ‘I wish … you did not need to mock,’ he said, and rested his fingertips briefly, as once before, on Lymond’s arm. ‘For of all men, my God could love you; and I, too.’
At the brief council of war held when the wall was almost completed, no trace of this encounter was visible to the naked eye, or even to Jerott Blyth’s lively intuition. From the fire, the bells, the loose mares in the ditch, the Turks must surely know, said Adorne tentatively, that some help had come.
‘Of course.’ De Villegagnon was impatient. ‘But they don’t know how much. And they may suspect from the signal fire and the trumpets—we hope they will—that more is on the way.’
‘I wonder if anyone has escaped over the wall since we came,’ said Lymond ruminatively. ‘Unhappily, not very likely. They are all waiting now to be succoured, except perhaps.…’
‘The Osmanli get their information by torture,’ interrupted Gabriel sharply.
‘… Except perhaps the Augustinian monks?’ finished Lymond hopefully, in an inimical silence, and added undisturbed, ‘Who would like to chalk a cross or two on black cloth?’
Gabriel smiled. ‘The sheep-soldiers of Yarrow? I have heard of that,’ he said, and as Adorne looked his question, amplified. ‘We are ten knights, but the Turk will only count crosses. Dress every man, woman and child as a warrior. Helm the grandmothers; silver-paint muslin if you have no armour. Let’s have sticks for arquebuses, rods for crossbows.…’
‘… Logs for cannon,’ said de Villegagnon, with a lift of his magnificent beard. ‘Agreed most heartily. All that you say, I give in your charge, and M. Crawford’s here.’ He paused. ‘I need not tell you that the Turk is not easily frightened, Sir Graham. Silver paint and sticks cannot overcome scimitars.’
‘Then place your faith,’ said Graham Malett, ‘in the Eight-Pointed Cross,’ and again, spoke to Lymond alone.
*
They knew how long they had, exactly, by the dragging march of the Turkish cannon. As the sun rose to its zenith the slave voices, echoing in tired unison, came clear up to the city, and the white caravan of lethal steel, the stone and iron balls linen-wrapped against the blistering heat showed clearly,