Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [72]
She had fought for action, for the simplest defence, the most rudimentary precautions, in vain. Luke, speaking up from ten years in the knights’ service, had supported her, but the flicker of energy she had thought to rouse in Galatian had soon died. She took two helpers into their confidence: Luke, and Bernardo da Fonte, husband of her tirewoman Maria and a Sicilian whose voice counted among the few traders of the island. With their help she managed, in Galatian’s name, to force some order out of the muddle. It might, she knew, stiffen for the moment the failing courage of the people and stave off the panic she knew must eventually come. It would do no more.
In the end, movingly, it was the people who stood firm when the first call for surrender arrived. When outside the gates the gong dimmed into silence and was followed by the peremptory Arabic of the standard-bearer, it was the people, depleted through the generations by the attacks of corsair and Turk, who screamed him down from the walls and spurned him recklessly with stones.
Then the Osmanli cannon opened up. The noise, drowning in its thunder the crash of breached masonry, was bedevilled with dust which rose in mantled clouds, silting into children’s hair and the tender passages of nose and throat. Then through the haze they appeared, thicket upon thicket of attenuated silver crescents: Janissaries, Bostanjís, Spahís, blades raised, ready to pour from Rabat, up through the breached citadel wall and over the rocks to the Gran’ Castello itself.
The smoke cleared for a moment, then the 80-pounder spoke again with its iron ball. It hit the wall foursquare as Oonagh watched. For a moment the stone deliberated; then the whole centre of the old masonry buckled and fell, a wilderness of severed life underneath.
And the people, for whom the alternative was slavery, ran to the breach, not from it. A single man, rallying at that moment, could have marshalled them; could have flung them the clubs, the crossbows, the old swords all rusting in the armoury so that for an hour, the broken wall could be held, rebuilt, trenched—some pretence of resistance arranged. Luke, a common soldier, could not command them. Da Fonte the Sicilian, one of themselves, could not make himself heard. And Galatian de Césel, whose name they were clamouring, was here, adhesive as a frightened cur, on the pretext of quenching her fear.
From his grasp she saw Luke, his jerkin torn, run to the one intact cannon standing still by the breach. She saw him fire, and fire again, and heard the studied wail of the Janissaries turn to screams as the balls cut through the packed advance. The wave of robed, scrambling figures halted, hesitated, dropped; and as the smoke thinned it showed the red and white carpeted path of the shot. Then the whole Turkish battery spoke. When the smoke cleared this time, the walls of the citadel were down, and the men, women and children in the lanes and houses behind them were dead. Where the gun had been, and the English gunner, was nothing.
No one took his place. But one man, crazily, stepping out of the fumes and the bloody rubble, scrambled over the wrecked battlements, stumbled down the steep hillside beyond, and like an engine, marched straight for the Ottoman army. Even from the palace you could name him: Bernardo da Fonte, an arquebus tight in one fist, a crossbow in the other. At a good place he stopped, laid down the crossbow and with deliberation fired first one weapon and then the other into the enemy. Then, sword in hand, he raced into the dazzle of converging scimitars. Oonagh stayed, Galatian’s arms around her, to see so much. Then, thrusting him abruptly away, she went to look for Maria da Fonte.
She found her, with her two daughters, on the threshold of their home. Before he had walked out to kill and be killed, her husband had used his sword with insane mercy. Maria and the children were dead.
By the time Oonagh returned to the palace, a priest had already gone at the Council’s behest to indicate