Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [99]
The sage’s far-seeing eyes observed him for a moment, then glanced away again. ‘You do not ask about your friend the French Ambassador and his train, or about yourself.’
‘I trust to your good sense not to offend the fransuzja,’ said Gabriel. His Turkish was fluent, thank God; the fruit of all his years with the caravanisti.
There was a long interval, which he took the greatest care not to break. Then Dragut said, ‘You say the man Crawford is your friend, and yet you wish to deceive him. I remember him well as a boy. You desire him for yourself?’
Unshocked, unshockable, the clear blue eyes smiled. ‘No. I desire him, but not for myself.’
Dragut’s head jerked towards the shabby black of the knight’s habit, with its cross plain on the shoulder. ‘For that?’ He did not disbelieve Malett, but although courtesy would never permit him to say so, clear in his eyes was derision at the picture Gabriel had painted, of four hundred men enclosed in celibate life with none of the Moslem’s more prosaic resources. After another pause, Dragut added, ‘I have also no need of a woman, having all the sons I require. Moreover, in my house at present is a woman such as you have never known.’
‘This one is pregnant,’ said Gabriel. He had saved it to the end, the clinching argument which would preserve Oonagh from the public stripping of the slave market, the abuse which would kill her and her unborn bastard, the careless raping and death she might meet unprotected before the market ever began. A handsome, powerful son of good blood, to be brought up in the Moslem faith to fight for the Grand Seigneur, to be trained in warfare and the arts, to grow wealthy and powerful—even to rule—this was the future that Turkey held before the cream of her conquered peoples, the dream of every father as he grew old. When the boy in time died, his wealth perished with him. No dynasties were ever formed in Turkey outside the Sultan’s own; no hereditary power existed; no ducal families to challenge the throne. Only the young and ambitious aliens, converts to Islâm, who infusing their strength and their new blood into the land, would make of Suleiman in time lord of the world.
‘Pregnant? Hâmile?’ said Dragut. ‘Of what stock?’
‘Of the best stock there is. Of a line of black fighting Irish kings,’ said Gabriel, and in his mind’s eye saw all Oonagh had described to him of Cormac O’Connor.
‘I will take her,’ said Dragut. ‘But if the son is yours, do you wish him back?’
‘If the son is fair,’ said Gabriel at length, and for the first time his eyes were lowered against the shrewd gaze of the corsair, ‘if the son is fair, send to me, and I will buy him at any price you name. The woman need not know.’
‘It shall be done,’ said Dragut Rais, the Drawn Sword of Islâm, as across the white glare, in Tripoli, the guns made their first breach.
*
Twenty-four hours later, the Negro and Turkish slaves labouring to rebuild the bastion of St Brabe under a curtain of arrows and arquebus shot refused to do any more, and the order to bastinado went out. Jerott, armourless in filthy shirt and breech hose, heard the screaming above the gunfire and the noise of women shrieking in the castle halls, and anger fuelled his exhausted body like fire.
De Herrera, the Spanish knight, had come to look for the bamboo rods: the thin, whippy peelings used to tap feet and belly, monotonously, over and over until the agonized nerves gave way and the shivering tissues parted into internal haemorrhage and death.
Jerott had tried to stop him and so had de Poissieu, out of commonsense, not humanity. The devastation of the town behind its crumbling walls had turned the castle into a wailing wall of refugees, where Spanish knight and French knight eyed each other sullenly and the Calabrians whispered in corners.
St Brabe was broken. Because of the continuous firing it was suicide to work in the entrenchments behind. All right. What good would it