Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [69]
‘Rats don’t pray. And cowardice doesn’t commend itself to Turks. Neither do they have the best example before them. Is it true that the knights sometimes fire their captives alive through the cannon?’
It was true. No one spoke. They were all tired and wrought-up with strain; they had, after all, only that afternoon and evening, probably, to live. Gabriel closed his eyes; then as Jerott made a troubled movement towards him, opened them with an obvious effort and after a moment addressed Francis Crawford in a quiet, steady voice.
‘Forgive me. I have lost you and my own integrity both. You are right. I have betrayed the Order: vaingloriously thrown away what was not mine to lay down.…’
Lymond stirred and the fair knight, as if he had touched him, snatched away, averting his head. ‘It is hard always to take the safe, the sane, the old man’s path,’ said Graham Malett. ‘I hoped—it is not always wise to hope—for a miracle.’
‘Who doesn’t? But in miracles, as in hell, there is no order of rule. I recommend,’ said Lymond pleasantly, ‘that as Mdina is watching us, we all look enthusiastic about fighting instead. Handkerchief, Sir Graham?’
His eyes still wet, Graham Malett turned his back. Jerott didn’t. With a swing of his muscled shoulder he brought the flat of his hand hard towards Lymond’s cheek, and Lymond chopped it downwards halfway with a blow that nearly broke the bones of his fingers, and said crisply, ‘If your godly offices stretch to praying as well as posturing, you’d better start reciting, Brother. Dragut has come out.’ And as the call to arms rang out and from wall and tower and makeshift mound the masqueraders sprang to their posts, Francis Crawford rallied his knights. ‘Come, comrades! Come, Brethren, and pray. Let us obtain, by our faith in the Sacred Sacraments, that contempt for death which alone can render us invincible.’
And, arrived at his post, the men allotted him in position about him, Francis Crawford laid his long yew bow against his foot and expertly strung it as the robed ranks below unrolled smoothly to a gong clearly heard and deployed behind the sinuous earthworks. There was a pause; and then with a hiss, as of a ship paying off to the wind, the arrows rose like vapour between the citadel and the sun, and began to fall on the town. Then presently the first cannon fired. Mdina’s pretence, her show of false strength, was going for nothing. This was the preliminary to an attack in real earnest. And against scimitars, silver sticks, as de Villegagnon had said, were of little use.
A long time after that, when they were all a little deaf from the close-range bombardment, and the sandy grit was silting their mouths, de Villegagnon dodged past, vast, light-footed despite his armour, and pausing, said, ‘Where is Gabriel?’ And Lymond, lowering his arm, said in an unexpected voice, ‘I thought he was with you,’ and laying down the bow, still more unexpectedly, left the wall at a run.
About to follow, Blyth was brought up short by de Villegagnon’s bark and returned hurriedly to his post. Two of their ablest leaders vanished was enough.
In all the prolific measures to prevent ingress, no one had thought to make it impossible to escape from Mdina. When Lymond reached him, Gabriel had made fast a rope and in a moment more was half over the inner, makeshift wall over the ditch. Then Lymond’s hand closed over his, and the Knight Grand Cross looked up.
He had changed his dress. Stripped to plain tunic and hose, his cropped hair disordered, his face set, he gave a moment to dislodging Lymond’s grip then, failing, flung his whole weight on the rope and on Lymond so that, for a second, the younger man was dragged head first in his wake. Then, going with the movement, without releasing his grip, Francis Crawford also swarmed over the wall and, arresting with arm, body and knee, locked Graham Malett to the