Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [90]
His only residual importance to her was as a speaker of Arabic. He was also, she supposed, her sole prospect of returning to Europe. Of all the people of Gozo only they had been brought ashore to this double tent with its cushions and fine rugs and silent black servants.
She never went outside. Night and day the tent was guarded by the robed men whose shadows she saw on the silk walls, cast by the interminable sun through the day and the campfires by night. But they were hostages, clearly, not slaves; and Galatian was given anything within reason that he wanted.
It was he who had found out what the salvoes of cannon fire had been, and who had collapsed writhing in petulant despair when, on questioning their servants, he had learned that d’Aramon’s intercession had failed, and that the Ambassador was being kept under restraint for the space of the siege. Even the rigging of his ships was to come down. If d’Aramon had been freed, he explained bitterly to Oonagh, he might even have persuaded Suleiman to countermand his orders. ‘But no, but no, Sinan Pasha must not now be deprived of his conquest,’ he railed, and took to shouting, to her icy mortification, each time he heard French voices in the vicinity.
When finally, late next morning, he was answered, he waited in a frenzy of anticipation for someone of d’Aramon’s party to force their way in. ‘Doesn’t he realize they are prisoners too?’ thought Oonagh. ‘And does he really believe they won’t know what happened on Gozo?’
She endured his presence as she might have endured a sick servant in Ireland whom she disliked, and was paralysed with anger when, having left Galatian asleep behind the curtains of the inner tent in the heavy heat of the afternoon, she heard the soft footsteps of many people approaching, an exchange of Turkish, and then the rattle of the tent flaps being pulled aside. There appeared the broad, moustached face of the guard she knew, axe in belt, clothed in the short-sleeved knee-length robe over a thin, cross-belted jerkin which was virtually a uniform, his feet in kid boots.
There were others behind him, dressed alike. They supplied an escort for a tall man in the black she despised, the white cross plain on his shoulder. Under the African sun, his hair was a cap of gold, and the blood emptied from her skin, leaving a cold imbalance which lasted some seconds. Then she saw, as he stepped into the shadow, that it was no one she knew.
Sir Graham Malett, on his part, saw a great deal that he did not expect that hot afternoon in the Osmanli encampment outside Tripoli. He saw that the Irish prostitute to whom adhered a poltroon Knight of the Order and also Francis Crawford, whose only weakness he had noted this to be, was an ageless black-haired woman with a straight back and accurate, ivory bones pressing hard through the fine skin. Her wrists were like a boy’s, spiked with bone, but below the drawn face and slender neck the breast-line was thickly commodious. From her response to the guard’s words she could know no Arabic. He said to the black eunuch who had risen as he came in, ‘Is she pregnant?’ and the man nodded, baring his white teeth. In hospital and in seraglio, you learned much. He added a request, to account for the exchange, and smiling more broadly, the eunuch retired.
To Oonagh O’Dwyer he said, ‘Forgive me. I could not announce my visit. I am under duress, as you are. My name is Graham Malett, and I hear that M. de Césel is here.’
She had heard of him, obviously, from Galatian, for she looked at him attentively from really extraordinary green-grey eyes, in that striking pale-skinned face, and said, ‘The Lord guard us. Gabriel, who steered the Prophet’s camel out of—’
‘—Out of Mecca, in fact,’ he caught her up gently. ‘I have a feeling you were about to say Malta.