Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [98]
‘Put her in irons,’ said the Governor of Tripoli wearily; and when the Spaniard had gone, rose and moved to the deep window, shuttered to keep out the noise. ‘Open it.’
Surprised, Jerott stepped forward, and pushing the great bars, let the heavy wood swing back. Magnified, sudden as an attacking animal, the noise of the big-bore Turkish cannon roared at them. Smoke, grey-yellow and acrid, moved across the window space. Beyond, measured out against the castle wall, arquebusiers and archers, turn about, kept up the warning spray that forced the Turkish cannoneers at least under cover. Beyond, the sea sparkled like tissue beneath a sky of unsullied blue. A brigantine, her decks white and empty, idled in the bay. ‘Our friend from Caraillon has deserted,’ said the Marshal de Vallier; and as Jerott, obeying his look, reclosed the shutters, the room darkened to the dim amber of the oil lamps as if the light had failed with the words.
He knew the man the Marshal meant; a French knight from Provence long settled in Tripoli. He knew also the gossip: that the man had long since forgone his vows of chastity under the strong African skies, and had a mistress, a Moorish woman in the town. He was not alone there.
‘The woman has told you?’ he asked at length.
‘She was made to tell us. It seems,’ said the Marshal without expression, ‘that he has been a practising Moslem in secret for some time.… He took a horse, and gave the guard some excuse to let him out at the desert port … but he took no food or water.’
‘The Turkish camp,’ said Jerott.
‘Yes,’ said the Marshal. There was a long silence. A long silence, and, slowly it came to Jerott, too much of a silence. He brought his dark, unseeing gaze up, and found the Governor’s tired eyes fixed on his. ‘Now open the shutters,’ said Gaspard de Vallier. Jerott opened them.
Heat, sun, the dazzle of sea, the white walls, the silver armour of the knights: silence.
Silence. The guns aimed at the St James bulwark had stopped firing.
Jerott turned. Behind him the old man hadn’t moved; only his tired eyes followed Jerott’s stride back to the desk. When he got there, Gaspard de Vallier spoke. ‘Tear up your list, my son,’ he said, ‘And order every man you can spare to the wall of St Brabe.’
*
In the stir of late afternoon, as the blessed shadows moved and lengthened infinitesimally towards the sea, and the sun striking the skin out of doors was more easily to be borne than the thick, airless heat of the tents, the guns started again. The meticulous rumble came distantly and pleasingly to the Turkish encampment, where the fringed awnings winging between palm and palm enclosed rugs, cushions, low tables, jewelled turbans and caftáns in shadow, like some ancient mosaic set in the white gravelly sand of the plain. Sinan Pasha and his officers reclined to take sherbet and sweet grapes as their cannon opened fire on the weak rampart of St Brabe.
‘We have wasted too much time on what we now know to be impregnable,’ said Dragut in his less than careful Turkish, breaking almond paste in his fingers to offer to the knight at his side. ‘Our ships will also fire tonight on the fort at the port entrance they call the Châtelet.’
Gabriel, his face thinner but no less open, no less composed, shook his head, refusing the sweetmeat. ‘How long, then, before the city will fall?’
The old corsair, his beard moving as he chewed, looked at the creeping shadows. ‘In-shallâh.… Tonight or tomorrow, perhaps. By then not the guns of Islâm but the poison of the infidel will have done its work. In two days, the city will be ours.’
‘And the knights?’
‘That depends on the terms of surrender. The lord Sinan Pasha is displeased.’
‘Then the people of Gozo? They have no share in the terms.’
‘They will be sold in the slave market,’ said Dragut Rais with finality. ‘Save, of course, the great hakîm, your governor, who will share the fate of the knights.’
‘And the woman?’
It was a long pause. They had almost reached