Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [70]
Had it been the outer wall of Mdina, they would both have been killed. As it was they tumbled, grappling still, head over heels down the grit and boulders and loose limestone blocks which the wrecked houses of Mdina had yielded half a day before until, slashed, flayed, squeezed blue with belabouring, they rolled together into the ditch below.
For a long moment, neither moved. In the deep trough it was dark, shaded by the wall. Ahead the outer escarpment towered, shielding them from view of the Turks. Incredibly, eyes strained towards the threat over the wall, none in Mdina had seen them drop.
Lymond was the first to awake. In a little while, Gabriel stirred. Slowly, patiently, the Grand Cross gathered his muscles, moved, straightened, and doggedly got to his feet. Beside him, tumbled prone on the earth, Lymond lay perfectly still. For a moment Gabriel stood, his hand inside his jerkin, his eyes dazedly searching the strewn stones about him; then taking breath, he wheeled round to run.
An arm shot out. His ankle was caught and held with the same manacled finality as the grip on his wrist, and falling headlong, he rolled over to find Lymond’s cold stare fixed on his face. ‘Are you sent me,’ said Sir Graham Malett, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, ‘by God or the Devil?’ He made no effort, now, to rise.
‘What were you doing?’ Lymond’s voice gave nothing away, but his eyes, accustomed to judgement, searched every line of the tired, steadfast face below him. From below the right eye to the jawbone, Gabriel’s face was streaming with blood. His clothing, ripped like Lymond’s, was blotched with it; you could see his chest heave, suddenly, as he said, ‘They torture their prisoners. I could ask no one else to endure that.’
Lymond said, ‘You meant to be caught?’ And as Gabriel did not answer, ‘I see. My gratuitous remark about the Augustinians. But did it not occur to you that if Dragut tortured you for the news that vast reinforcements were on their way here, he might further torture you for the truth? You are neither immortal nor, forgive me, very like a Maltese peasant.’
‘Under God, I feel no pain,’ said Graham Malett, his eyes unseeing on the blue of the heavens as he lay. ‘St Angelo I had deserted; Mdina I could no longer serve. By sacrifice, one may sometimes buy a miracle.’ He spoke as if alone, as if the voice beside him were that of some dread and disembodied conscience, familiar to him all his days.
There was a long silence, which Lymond let pass uninterrupted. Then he said, ‘Sometimes the sacrifice is not required. Il y a des accomodements avec le ciel. Look. I believe your miracle has happened.’
Slowly, the older man turned his head. Outside the great outer wall, the whicker of arrows, the drums, the gong beats, the cries, the shrill trumpets, had stopped. Instead, many voices shouted and others commanded; the earth shook with the movement of massed feet, and high above the noise sounded the chime which had rung in their ears all day, to halt at last in a silence worse than screaming, before the bombardment began: the sound of the great cannon being dismantled again.
From the packed walls of Mdina, from score upon score of parched, anxious, disbelieving throats a cry went up; then shout after shout of hysterical joy. From first one church, then another, the shaking carillons sprang. In the great ditch below, Graham Malett, drawn to his knees by the sound, dropped his disfigured face in his hands and chokingly prayed in a whisper.
The miracle had happened. The Turk was abandoning the siege.
Neither praying nor weeping, Francis Crawford stood absently nursing his bumps, and considered. ‘If I were Dragut Rais, and Mdina lay ripe under my hand, what would frighten me off? Perhaps a mass attack from St Angelo. But he has no reason to fear one. What, then? What about false intelligence of another sort, Brother?’ said Francis