The Disorderly Knights
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 surrender, on certain gentlemanly conditions, to the commander of Allâh’s Deputy on Earth. Hearing of it, she laughed and addressed the poor ghosts at her side. ‘Chastity, Obedience and Poverty,’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer. ‘A knight engages, when fighting for Jesus Christ against the enemies of the Faith, never to shrink from battle, never to lower the flag of the Order and never to retreat, to surrender or demand quarter. A knight also,’ she went on, rolling malevolently in her soft Irish voice the austere periods of the vow, ‘or any other man for that matter, need not dream of laying down conditions, honourable or otherwise, for surrender, unless he has at least offered a brave defence.… what have you defended in the vale of Calypso, Galatian? Your chastity?’
And seized, like a fool, with the uncontrollable impulse to laugh, she leaned her brow for one indulgent second against the cold wall and sealed her mouth with the hard fingers of both hands, not to disgrace herself.
The answer which the priest, returning, gave Galatian stirred even that helpless monk with its disdain. Far from agreeing to preserve the Governor’s liberty and gear and the property of the Gozitans, Sinan Pasha replied that unless the Hakim Governor gave himself up instantly, he would be hanged at the gate.
Hastily, the priest was returned to Suleiman’s general. Would Sinan Pasha, commander of Suleiman, Lord of Lords, permit the Governor his liberty at least, and promise the freeing of two hundred of the island’s greatest men?
Dragut’s hand, not Sinan Pasha’s, lay on the returning, curt answer. Provided there was instant surrender, forty of the greatest men of Gozo might go free. And, added the message repressively, if the negotiator returned, he would hang.
Then Galatian de Césel issued his only direct order: that the gates be opened to the Turks.
Senselessly, Oonagh O’Dwyer had run to her room as Moslem dress, light silks flying, appeared suddenly under her window, and the distant faces became characterful and distinct. She could see the heavy, oiled black moustaches, the trailing scarves, the jewelled daggers, the axe shining in the belt, the cocked tail of the turban over its kavúk, the high boots, thick with dust, into which the wide trousers were tucked. A man in a knee-length embroidered coat over chain mail paused on the steps by the house, wicker shield lowered while he studied it, and she backed from the window and ran.
Upstairs, Maria’s sister found her, for, since the boats, the Hakim’s pregnant woman was no longer given the Hakim’s blame. So Maria’s sister offered the Irishwoman a share in her most precious possession: a single, frail hope of escape.
Outside the citadel there was a hiding place: a tunnel leading underground to the abrupt, semi-conical height of il-Harrax Hill, where no one could find them. But first one must escape from the fortress on its steepest side, the side which would now, if the Fates were kind, be unguarded by Turks. And that meant crossing the whole of the citadel from south-east to north-west.
Galatian’s whereabouts at that time were unknown. It is not on record that his mistress even hesitated. Oonagh, struck with the nausea of reaction; with the final stark impact of Galatian’s cowardice, stumbled from the side door of the house with her rescuer; she who had been the swiftest rider in Ireland, the quickest wit, the most icy in vengeance, and ran from door to door, from lane to lane, from hide to hide until, with the screaming thick in her cars, she came to the well, the archway, the quick turn which led to the steep narrow steps to the battlements.
Here was a huddle of buildings, a wall, some steps, a gun-platform. And here, looking straight to il-Harrax, was a long, shuttered building whose door opened briefly to admit them. It was crowded with people: silent, white-faced people awaiting their turn to run across that sunlit platform outside, to seize the invisible rope, and to drop out of sight down the rock face. ‘They are plundering now,’ said her friend in her ear. ‘They’ll be too busy to watch.’
Her mind disentangling the Maltese idiom, Oonagh was, she found, staring also at a moving shadow in the steep lane below. A shadow which hid in other shadows, which hesitated, shrank and waited, trapped, in a distant doorway until a group of Janissaries, pushing an unclothed woman before them, disappeared in the dust.
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 him unconscious; and Jerott Blyth waited without sympathy for him to recover.
The Turks had hardly gone from Mdina when Lymond had disappeared too. ‘Where is he now?’ Gabriel had said harshly, and Jerott Blyth had replied with exaggerated unconcern, ‘Retrieving the Irish amie, I should suppose,’ and then retreated into silence before Gabriel’s visible dismay.
His skin paler, ‘Of course.…’ had said Graham Malett, going on rapidly. ‘Tell Nicholas I’ve gone. It’s hopeless. Francis must know it. No one can be saved from Gozo now. He must be stopped.’
‘Not by you, sir!’ It sounded firm; in fact a kind of horrified disbelief sharpened Jerott Blyth’s voice. ‘Are we nursemaids! He knows his own mind. Why should we stop him? Nothing here draws him or requires him now.’
‘But I do, Jerott,’ Gabriel had quietly replied. And had added, ‘I will not add criminal waste to wanton wilfulness. He must be stopped.’
‘Then I will stop him,’ Jerott had said, and white with anger, had set off.
Tracking over the used grey grass and the knotted pink and chrome sandstone where Lymond on foot had struck out from Mdina, sighting him miraculously at length when all his energy had gone and pushing out, somehow, the extra effort needed to match, to excel, to overtake that cracking pace, he had come, parched and stumbling, to this northernmost shore. Here, green through the blistering haze, was Comino; and there, across the blue straits, the long ridge of Gozo itself.
In all the crazy, sun-beaten journey they had met no one. All north Malta had fled to the west, or was in hiding. Scrambling over the great stony ridges and down into the valleys hatched with terracing, Jerott passed their empty pueblos, square box-houses blending into the hillside, with their melon-patches bright green about them. Here some hens scratched. There, frightening him with the dull clank of its bell, a goat watched him, ears drooping, from the twisted branch of a tree. He passed white waxy stephanotis, its scent staining the air, and pink Fiori de Pasqua among the olives and carobs; and the prickly pears, yellow-green, beige, Indian red on their angular stalks, masked him from the man he was following, though not from the sun.
Then he was here at Marfa, on the grey grass and the tired grey sand above the northernmost beach, where the pitted yellow-grey sandstone ran out under the water like petrified sponges, water-moiled and ribboned with weed. There was one boat only in the harbour of Marfa, and by the time Jerott came, plunging downhill into sight, the one boat was launched and Lymond, the sun blazing on his unprotected head, was thigh-deep, ready to heave himself in.
Then Jerott, easing his powerful shoulders under the soaked shirt, had bent to scoop up a rock, weighed it for an instant, poised and threw it. He aimed for the back of the other man’s head and did not greatly care how hard it struck. A moment later Lymond slid to his knees, his hands tracking down the skiff’s sides, and Jerott, splashing through the shallows, had heaved him on to the hot, salty thyme. The boat, when he turned back to sink it, had already drifted far out of reach. Chest heaving, flesh viscous with sweat, Jerott Blyth flung himself beside his briskly felled victim and waited while the sea sucked on the sandstone and the crickets shrilled, high and pulsating; the only stirring of life on all that bare strand.
Then Lymond opened his eyes and rolled over, assessing Blyth’s presence, and the far-off boat, and the aching wound in his scalp. He said, ‘Gabriel sent you?’ and as Jerott assented he added, icy rage in his voice, ‘What a pity Sir Graham could not be present himself.’
‘A great pity,’ agreed Jerott grimly. ‘He may see a soul worth redeeming where I may see only trash.’
Lymond sat up, his back rigid, perspiration in great tears on his lashes and jaw. ‘And my God, you’re revelling in it all, aren’t you, out of sheer, schoolboy spleen. And how bloody offended you would be if I asked you how you’d feel if Elizabeth were there, and I’d stopped you reaching her. Even whores have souls, you know, Brother.… Why are we waiting, then? This is one game you have resoundingly won.’ And standing upright, he turned back the way he had come.
He was the first soul Gabriel had called to them who, resisting, had hit back, and hitting back, had struck so sorely home. Only at Gabriel’s order would Jerott have stirred a finger to save him: for Oonagh O’Dwyer he had no thought at all. And, indeed, the smoke haze spreading across the blue channel told that it was already too late.
V
Hospitallers
(Birgu, August 1551)
TWO days after this, the French Ambassador to Turkey, sailing from Marseilles to resume his office at Constantinople, was informed by a fishing boat that the Ottoman army had overrun Gozo.
The spokesman, whose name, oddly, turned out to be Stephenson, had a strange story to tell, and after listening to him with much interest, Gabriel de Luetz, Baron and Seigneur d’Aramon et de Valabrègues, invited him to sail to Birgu in his company.
Since Messieurs de Villegagnon and Crawford of Lymond had met him at Marseilles, M. d’Aramon had been a month at sea, and if he carried gold for Suleiman, it would be too tardy by now to finance the present Maltese attack. Lingering in Algiers, calling at Pantellaria, he diplomatically wasted time.
Three ships wouldn’t save Malta. They would only endanger the King of France’s tenuous friendship with the Turks, not to mention his substantial trading concessions. M. de Luetz, Baron d’Aramon, temporized; and only when he was fairly sure that Sinan Pasha had left Malta not to return, did he allow his captain to approach the Grand Harbour. Then he saw that the scarlet flag of the Order flew still over St Angelo, and despite his training, water stood, surprisingly in his eyes. Soon the welcoming salvoes broke over the still water, and in salute the Ambassadorial ships replied.
Close to St Angelo, d’Aramon observed more. The white walls of the fort were untouched. Birgu stood beyond, its stone unblackened by fire; and across Galley Creek, L’Isla was unmarked. Then the Order’s boat drew swiftly alongside, and in it were de Villegagnon, the Chevalier de la Valette and Sir Graham Malett, the red sun coppering his hair.
Again, la Valette was unharmed, though de Villegagnon had a fresh scar and ‘Gabriel’, the man whose nickname, he remembered, was his own, wore a thin dressing over the bone of his cheek. They exchanged greetings with grave courtesy; then d’Aramon, ushering them into the poop pavilion where his own entourage waited, heard the story of the landing, of the repulse by Nicholas Upton and Gimeran, of the defence of Mdina under de Villegagnon, and of the sack of Gozo. During the whole invasion, the knights’ only loss by death was Nicholas Upton; the only knight the Turks carried off was Galatian de Césel, Governor of Gozo.
That uncertain story, brought back quavering by a pack of senile old men, was corrected by the Grand Master himself. At supper at St Angelo, with the chai
n lifted and the galleys anchored snugly in Galley Creek, surrounded by the names all Europe knew; the incense in his nostrils from their black robes, the Eight-Pointed Cross repeated over and over in the candlelight, the Ambassador heard how Galatian de Césel had defended the citadel of Gozo with his life; how, so long as he was living, the people of Gozo, in obedience to his orders and in imitation of his example, had repulsed the attacks of the infidel with valour until at length their brave Governor had been killed on the ramparts by a cannon ball. Then the people, losing their leader and their courage at once, had been obliged to capitulate. The Grand Master, crossing himself, folded his hands in stricken prayer and M. d’Aramon, repeating the gesture, watched the other faces about the board with his shrewd, sun-pursed eyes.
The story didn’t ring true. More, there was an air of unrest among the Order itself, noticed as soon as la Valette came aboard, which made him uneasy. He would not press the knights of France to divide their loyalties, and he expected no disclosures. But in all the detail, the tales of the grain ships sent for, the parties already on Gozo repairing the wrecked citadel and burying the dead, the soldiers working side by side with the Maltese to mend the shattered casals, the crowded hospital and the food, water, medicines taken daily to Mdina and the burned townships—he could not learn how many knights there had been at Gozo, or even Mdina, and why the whole Osmanli army had been able to move from Marsamuscetto to Mdina and from Mdina to Gozo unmolested.
Walking back afterwards with the Grand Master to his lodging, which with an attention he found almost too overwhelming, was in the Grand Master’s own suite, the Ambassador said, ‘I have a supplicant for you, Your Eminence, from the fishing barque whose false message from Messina caused the Turks to abandon the Mdina siege. The captain of the vessel was taken hostage, it seems, by Sinan Pasha. His lieutenant intercepted me outside Pantelleria in order to beg you to pay his principal’s ransom.’