Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [68]
All day, ortas of robed Janissaries, akinji, azabs, had been taking position just outwith Mdina’s cannon range; and slaves, raw-naked to the sun, had toiled under Turkish sappers to build platforms for the great basilisk and the eighty-pound culverins, and to trench the recalcitrant rock beyond the ditch. As far as vision allowed, silken colour, slow-moving in the haze like some lethargic sea-exotica, unrolled at the city’s feet; and the crescent of Islâm, like some heavenly mirage on every shield and banner told that, under the hand of the Most High, the army of the dispenser of crowns was at hand: the flaming sword and victorious blade of Allâh confronted the humble panoply of God.
Then all that could be done for Mdina had been done. Silent under the sun, knights, soldiers, servants, men and women of Mdina and the casals about—even, here and there, the best blood of Malta, the lord of Gatto-Murino, the Inguanez whose crest for a hundred years had been wrought in Mdina’s great gates—persuaded at last by Gabriel’s lucid power to help the hated, usurping knights, lay at their posts.
Beside the ancient cannon, beside the piles of slingshot, the vats of cooking-oil, the sparse bombards made from shredded cotton and chemicals, in their toy armour the defenders lay, watching as the culverins far below one by one crawled to their platforms and, the padding strewn like bandages on the rocks, were assembled each into a dark mouth threatening Mdina’s high walls. Pavilions sprang up, looped with gold, and the horses tethered in the shade of the silk wore housings which flashed jewel-coloured as they moved. Dragut, Salah Rais and the renegade Jew of Smyrna called Sinan, or Devil-Driver, had taken up their command. The time was almost run out.
Jerott Blyth, on his last circuit of the inner wall, found Lymond and Graham Malett together, watching through bracketed hands the distant movements below. For a moment he joined them before, bitterly, he burst through their silence. ‘And we have ten knights to fight against that! The armies of Spain and Italy and all the Low Countries should be arriving unasked to stand here with us. My God, are we merchants, taking a keen risk for commerce, or rich men greedy for land for our sons, or blood-crazed soldiers killing for gold? Or are we preserving the soft white hides of the Emperor’s Christian subjects at the cost of our lives, for the love of Christ and our fellow-men?’
‘Is that why you came to Mdina, Sir Graham?’ said Lymond; and Gabriel turned, his face changed.
It was the first personal challenge that Lymond had issued, and for a long moment Graham Malett studied him without speaking. Then, turning back, he let his eyes range over the swarming turbans below, tumbling like cottongrass in a boisterous wind, and his face was not serene. ‘I came,’ said Gabriel, ‘to help force from the earth, foul body and black soul, the heathen hordes you see there.’
Lymond’s tone remained gentle. ‘An honest ambition. But after supporting the Grand Master so worthily, why deprive St Angelo of one of the few leaders who matter? Mdina is going to fall anyway. I came with de Villegagnon because, for one thing, with fewer suspects to blame, the Grand Master will really require to stretch himself this time. It seems superfluous to make the Order a laughing-stock before it vanishes.’
There was a prickly silence. Then Jerott Blyth said, ‘I forgot, Crawford, you are an admirer of the Turk. Tell us; do you excuse Dragut that?’
There was no need to point. Before each gun-platform on the hot rocks below stood a row of roughly-hewn crosses with a naked, blue-white body nailed fast to each, limbs extended in pitiful parody of the Christian symbol, the heads gone. The men who had slipped over the walls of Mdina last night had found neither safety nor a quiet grave.
Without turning, ‘Worse happened at home, before the Protector’s wars ended,’ Lymond observed. ‘Buccleuch and his friends played football, as I remember, with his English prisoners’ skulls.’
‘These are vermin,