Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [74]
The struggle between her pride and her will was infinitesimal: Oonagh O’Dwyer was a brave woman and had in her time been a great one. Noiselessly, without a glance at the woman who had brought her there, so near freedom and life; without a word to the others, the lucky ones who were on their way to escape, the Irishwoman slipped from the doorway and, with an agonizing care to avoid disclosing her refuge, made her way from corner to corner and down the steep steps to where, on his way to cowardly freedom, Galatian de Césel lurked.
She saw his eyes devour her, joyously, as she approached him. Signing danger, she seized his hand and he let her hurry him, soft-footed, back the way he had come, further and further into the citadel. When at length she stopped, he said pathetically, ‘Have the Turks found out and stopped it? There’s an escape passage over there.… Oonagh, help me reach it! We’ll be free!’
‘Free of what?’ said Oonagh; and her cold stare, which he had never seen, raked him from head to foot. And seeing in the street a Believer passing, his caftan jewelled and his red scimitar hilted in gold she jerked Galatian in a single, shrewd movement into the sun, calling. ‘Hakim! Governor! Behold the Hakim, lord!’ And the Turk with the scimitar, turning, smiled gently, showing all his stained teeth, while from the houses others came running.
They made him, who had wanted to bargain with them, carry his own chests and furniture on his naked shoulders from the stripped rooms he had shared with his mistress, all the way to the ships. Then they peeled from him all his remaining rags and chained him naked on his back on the rambade, like a slave. Above him, Oonagh was set to sit with her wrists tied. By Dragut’s orders she had been neither ravished nor unclothed, though neither would have mattered to her in the remote fastness of her thoughts.
Three hundred lived by escaping to il-Harrax. A thousand died. And six thousand three hundred men, women and children of Gozo were put aboard the Ottoman fleet, to be sold, at best, to slavery.
The forty greatest men on the island, whose freedom Dragut had so gravely promised, had proved, in bitter pun, to mean the forty most aged; since the oldest, Dragut mildly explained, should be looked upon as the principal. So, drawing away from the harbour, the sweet wind full in their sails, the Faithful called their farewells to the deserted island of Gozo, lying broken and smoking beneath the bright sun, with the reek of the unburied mixed with the thyme. And forty old men, sick, shaking, shocked near death and far beyond thought, stood silent there on the rocks and watched them draw off.
Into Oonagh O’Dwyer’s quiet mind, as she gazed unseeing at the white flesh of Galatian there at her feet, stole the words of a gravestone, seen once since she came, all enchanted, from France to Calypso’s isle, and never forgotten.
Ask thyself, cries Maimuma from the grave, if there is anything everlasting, anything that can repel or cast a spell upon death. Alas, death has robbed me of my short life; neither my piety nor my modesty could save me from him. I was industrious in my work, and all that I did is reckoned and remains. O, thou who lookest upon this grave in which I am enclosed, dust has covered my eyelids and the corners of my eyes. On my couch and in my abode there is naught but tears; and what will happen when my Creator comes to me? …
‘But there is more,’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer suddenly, roused to thought by a memory of her own. ‘There is more, old woman, surely, unless my senses are lying? Where is that busy, bowelless gentleman now?’
*
Drenched in seawater and bleeding roseately from the stone which had felled him, Francis Crawford lay at the feet of Brother Blyth, who had knocked