The Disorderly Knights

by Dorothy Dunnett

  *

  They knew how long they had, exactly, by the dragging march of the Turkish cannon. As the sun rose to its zenith the slave voices, echoing in tired unison, came clear up to the city, and the white caravan of lethal steel, the stone and iron balls linen-wrapped against the blistering heat showed clearly, like packaged ants, as the end approached.

  All day, ortas of robed Janissaries, akinji, azabs, had been taking position just outwith Mdina’s cannon range; and slaves, raw-naked to the sun, had toiled under Turkish sappers to build platforms for the great basilisk and the eighty-pound culverins, and to trench the recalcitrant rock beyond the ditch. As far as vision allowed, silken colour, slow-moving in the haze like some lethargic sea-exotica, unrolled at the city’s feet; and the crescent of Islâm, like some heavenly mirage on every shield and banner told that, under the hand of the Most High, the army of the dispenser of crowns was at hand: the flaming sword and victorious blade of Allâh confronted the humble panoply of God.

  Then all that could be done for Mdina had been done. Silent under the sun, knights, soldiers, servants, men and women of Mdina and the casals about—even, here and there, the best blood of Malta, the lord of Gatto-Murino, the Inguanez whose crest for a hundred years had been wrought in Mdina’s great gates—persuaded at last by Gabriel’s lucid power to help the hated, usurping knights, lay at their posts.

  Beside the ancient cannon, beside the piles of slingshot, the vats of cooking-oil, the sparse bombards made from shredded cotton and chemicals, in their toy armour the defenders lay, watching as the culverins far below one by one crawled to their platforms and, the padding strewn like bandages on the rocks, were assembled each into a dark mouth threatening Mdina’s high walls. Pavilions sprang up, looped with gold, and the horses tethered in the shade of the silk wore housings which flashed jewel-coloured as they moved. Dragut, Salah Rais and the renegade Jew of Smyrna called Sinan, or Devil-Driver, had taken up their command. The time was almost run out.

  Jerott Blyth, on his last circuit of the inner wall, found Lymond and Graham Malett together, watching through bracketed hands the distant movements below. For a moment he joined them before, bitterly, he burst through their silence. ‘And we have ten knights to fight against that! The armies of Spain and Italy and all the Low Countries should be arriving unasked to stand here with us. My God, are we merchants, taking a keen risk for commerce, or rich men greedy for land for our sons, or blood-crazed soldiers killing for gold? Or are we preserving the soft white hides of the Emperor’s Christian subjects at the cost of our lives, for the love of Christ and our fellow-men?’

  ‘Is that why you came to Mdina, Sir Graham?’ said Lymond; and Gabriel turned, his face changed.

  It was the first personal challenge that Lymond had issued, and for a long moment Graham Malett studied him without speaking. Then, turning back, he let his eyes range over the swarming turbans below, tumbling like cottongrass in a boisterous wind, and his face was not serene. ‘I came,’ said Gabriel, ‘to help force from the earth, foul body and black soul, the heathen hordes you see there.’

  Lymond’s tone remained gentle. ‘An honest ambition. But after supporting the Grand Master so worthily, why deprive St Angelo of one of the few leaders who matter? Mdina is going to fall anyway. I came with de Villegagnon because, for one thing, with fewer suspects to blame, the Grand Master will really require to stretch himself this time. It seems superfluous to make the Order a laughing-stock before it vanishes.’

  There was a prickly silence. Then Jerott Blyth said, ‘I forgot, Crawford, you are an admirer of the Turk. Tell us; do you excuse Dragut that?’

  There was no need to point. Before each gun-platform on the hot rocks below stood a row of roughly-hewn crosses with a naked, blue-white body nailed fast to each, limbs extended in pitiful parody of the Christian symbol, the heads gone. The men who had slipped over the walls of Mdina last night had found neither safety nor a quiet grave.

  Without turning, ‘Worse happened at home, before the Protector’s wars ended,’ Lymond observed. ‘Buccleuch and his friends played football, as I remember, with his English prisoners’ skulls.’

  ‘These are vermin,’ Gabriel said, his fair-skinned face taut. ‘A plague which would infect the whole civilized world, killing all the good and gentle and virtuous things you and I know. Would you quarrel over the death of a rat?’

  ‘Rats don’t pray. And cowardice doesn’t commend itself to Turks. Neither do they have the best example before them. Is it true that the knights sometimes fire their captives alive through the cannon?’

  It was true. No one spoke. They were all tired and wrought-up with strain; they had, after all, only that afternoon and evening, probably, to live. Gabriel closed his eyes; then as Jerott made a troubled movement towards him, opened them with an obvious effort and after a moment addressed Francis Crawford in a quiet, steady voice.

  ‘Forgive me. I have lost you and my own integrity both. You are right. I have betrayed the Order: vaingloriously thrown away what was not mine to lay down.…’

  Lymond stirred and the fair knight, as if he had touched him, snatched away, averting his head. ‘It is hard always to take the safe, the sane, the old man’s path,’ said Graham Malett. ‘I hoped—it is not always wise to hope—for a miracle.’

  ‘Who doesn’t? But in miracles, as in hell, there is no order of rule. I recommend,’ said Lymond pleasantly, ‘that as Mdina is watching us, we all look enthusiastic about fighting instead. Handkerchief, Sir Graham?’

  His eyes still wet, Graham Malett turned his back. Jerott didn’t. With a swing of his muscled shoulder he brought the flat of his hand hard towards Lymond’s cheek, and Lymond chopped it downwards halfway with a blow that nearly broke the bones of his fingers, and said crisply, ‘If your godly offices stretch to praying as well as posturing, you’d better start reciting, Brother. Dragut has come out.’ And as the call to arms rang out and from wall and tower and makeshift mound the masqueraders sprang to their posts, Francis Crawford rallied his knights. ‘Come, comrades! Come, Brethren, and pray. Let us obtain, by our faith in the Sacred Sacraments, that contempt for death which alone can render us invincible.’

  And, arrived at his post, the men allotted him in position about him, Francis Crawford laid his long yew bow against his foot and expertly strung it as the robed ranks below unrolled smoothly to a gong clearly heard and deployed behind the sinuous earthworks. There was a pause; and then with a hiss, as of a ship paying off to the wind, the arrows rose like vapour between the citadel and the sun, and began to fall on the town. Then presently the first cannon fired. Mdina’s pretence, her show of false strength, was going for nothing. This was the preliminary to an attack in real earnest. And against scimitars, silver sticks, as de Villegagnon had said, were of little use.

  A long time after that, when they were all a little deaf from the close-range bombardment, and the sandy grit was silting their mouths, de Villegagnon dodged past, vast, light-footed despite his armour, and pausing, said, ‘Where is Gabriel?’ And Lymond, lowering his arm, said in an unexpected voice, ‘I thought he was with you,’ and laying down the bow, still more unexpectedly, left the wall at a run.

  About to follow, Blyth was brought up short by de Villegagnon’s bark and returned hurriedly to his post. Two of their ablest leaders vanished was enough.

  In all the prolific measures to prevent ingress, no one had thought to make it impossible to escape from Mdina. When Lymond reached him, Gabriel had made fast a rope and in a moment more was half over the inner, makeshift wall over the ditch. Then Lymond’s hand closed over his, and the Knight Grand Cross looked up.

  He had changed his dress. Stripped to plain tunic and hose, his cropped hair disordered, his face set, he gave a moment to dislodging Lymond’s grip then, failing, flung his whole weight on the rope and on Lymond so that, for a second, the younger man was dragged head first in his wake. Then, going with the movement, without releasing his grip, Francis Crawford also swarmed over the wall
and, arresting with arm, body and knee, locked Graham Malett to the rope. For an insane moment, Malett strove to fling him off; and in that moment, plunging with its double burden against the piled earth and rubble, the frayed rope gave way.

  Had it been the outer wall of Mdina, they would both have been killed. As it was they tumbled, grappling still, head over heels down the grit and boulders and loose limestone blocks which the wrecked houses of Mdina had yielded half a day before until, slashed, flayed, squeezed blue with belabouring, they rolled together into the ditch below.

  For a long moment, neither moved. In the deep trough it was dark, shaded by the wall. Ahead the outer escarpment towered, shielding them from view of the Turks. Incredibly, eyes strained towards the threat over the wall, none in Mdina had seen them drop.

  Lymond was the first to awake. In a little while, Gabriel stirred. Slowly, patiently, the Grand Cross gathered his muscles, moved, straightened, and doggedly got to his feet. Beside him, tumbled prone on the earth, Lymond lay perfectly still. For a moment Gabriel stood, his hand inside his jerkin, his eyes dazedly searching the strewn stones about him; then taking breath, he wheeled round to run.

  An arm shot out. His ankle was caught and held with the same manacled finality as the grip on his wrist, and falling headlong, he rolled over to find Lymond’s cold stare fixed on his face. ‘Are you sent me,’ said Sir Graham Malett, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, ‘by God or the Devil?’ He made no effort, now, to rise.

  ‘What were you doing?’ Lymond’s voice gave nothing away, but his eyes, accustomed to judgement, searched every line of the tired, steadfast face below him. From below the right eye to the jawbone, Gabriel’s face was streaming with blood. His clothing, ripped like Lymond’s, was blotched with it; you could see his chest heave, suddenly, as he said, ‘They torture their prisoners. I could ask no one else to endure that.’

  Lymond said, ‘You meant to be caught?’ And as Gabriel did not answer, ‘I see. My gratuitous remark about the Augustinians. But did it not occur to you that if Dragut tortured you for the news that vast reinforcements were on their way here, he might further torture you for the truth? You are neither immortal nor, forgive me, very like a Maltese peasant.’

  ‘Under God, I feel no pain,’ said Graham Malett, his eyes unseeing on the blue of the heavens as he lay. ‘St Angelo I had deserted; Mdina I could no longer serve. By sacrifice, one may sometimes buy a miracle.’ He spoke as if alone, as if the voice beside him were that of some dread and disembodied conscience, familiar to him all his days.

  There was a long silence, which Lymond let pass uninterrupted. Then he said, ‘Sometimes the sacrifice is not required. Il y a des accomodements avec le ciel. Look. I believe your miracle has happened.’

  Slowly, the older man turned his head. Outside the great outer wall, the whicker of arrows, the drums, the gong beats, the cries, the shrill trumpets, had stopped. Instead, many voices shouted and others commanded; the earth shook with the movement of massed feet, and high above the noise sounded the chime which had rung in their ears all day, to halt at last in a silence worse than screaming, before the bombardment began: the sound of the great cannon being dismantled again.

  From the packed walls of Mdina, from score upon score of parched, anxious, disbelieving throats a cry went up; then shout after shout of hysterical joy. From first one church, then another, the shaking carillons sprang. In the great ditch below, Graham Malett, drawn to his knees by the sound, dropped his disfigured face in his hands and chokingly prayed in a whisper.

  The miracle had happened. The Turk was abandoning the siege.

  Neither praying nor weeping, Francis Crawford stood absently nursing his bumps, and considered. ‘If I were Dragut Rais, and Mdina lay ripe under my hand, what would frighten me off? Perhaps a mass attack from St Angelo. But he has no reason to fear one. What, then? What about false intelligence of another sort, Brother?’ said Francis Crawford to the air. ‘What about a little message from the Receiver of Sicily, ostensibly for the Grand Master, saying that Prince Doria with the Emperor’s sea power has sailed to the rescue? That would fit. If I were Dragut, that would tear me away. And if I had neglected St Angelo and run from the shadow-threat of Mdina, if my Spahís were restless for booty, if I were the Drawn Sword of Islâm, whose brother lay in ashes on Gozo … where next would I strike?’

  And, ‘Gozo,’ Lymond repeated, committing the words above Gabriel’s bowed head, and suddenly swore. ‘Gozo Island, of course. The sacrifice is to be made after all for the Order, by Oonagh O’Dwyer and the women and children of Gozo.’

  The result was the same, although his trick had succeeded and Gabriel’s failed. Long before Gabriel had awakened, Lymond had guessed his intentions; had found them confirmed in the paper half-slipped from Sir Graham’s tunic as he lay, stunned still, after their fall. One side was written in Turkish. On the other, Gabriel’s big, well-formed writing conveyed a message in English. The Turkish siege was untenable. The Grand Master had sent word to Mdina. The whole force of the Order was on its way from St Angelo to trap Dragut like a rat between Mdina and Birgu. If it wished to survive, the Turkish army must fly.

  The lies looked convincing. The Turkish side was more forcible still. Yet, aware now of Gabriel’s calibre, Francis Crawford could not bring himself yet to acknowledge it, or his own malicious intent. The paper was crushed in his tunic. Gabriel, he hoped, would assume it lost in the fall. ‘Da mihi castitatem et continentiam … Give me chastity and continence,’ said Francis Crawford between his teeth, looking down at the Grand Cross of Grace at his feet. ‘But pray God, not just yet.’

  *

  So the plan, prepared so lightly that evening in Sicily, became history. So the Receiver of Sicily’s spurious letter announcing rescue fell into Sinan Pasha’s hands as designed, and rather than leave his ships unmanned in Marsamuscetto and his cannon stuck at Mdina, the Turkish general decided to abandon the siege.

  But on Gozo, the scrap of land to Malta’s north, there were good farmsteads and one or two well-plenished palaces, defended only by the Governor de Césel’s hilltop citadel, commanding the town of Rabat at its foot. Pleasing at once himself, his troops and Dragut, Sinan Pasha withdrew to his ships and set his tiller for Gozo. And this time, nothing stood in his way.

  From the battlements of the citadel, her back to the square and the church, Oonagh O’Dwyer stood and watched Rabat become Turkish. Like husked seed the coloured turbans poured between the tall, flat-roofed houses, the felt caps and camel-hair cloaks of the dervishes wild in the van, and the walls rattled with the roll of the kettledrums and the screams of Allâh! Allâh! Al-hamdu lillah! as the Lions of Islâm broke through.

  The nearer streets filled. You could see white teeth, flying caftáns, sashes ridged with daggers, the flashing mace, the crowded silver parings of the scimitar, the lacquered coins that were shields. Faces fair and dark: Circassian, Syrian, Greek and Bosnian, Armenian, Croatian as well as Turks; children of the House of Osman; soldiers of Suleiman the Lawgiver, forbidden to trample on roses.

  She moved round to the east. Below the citadel walls the whips cracked and the slaves ran as the culverins bit by bit assembled, grew, took shape, and bent their black mouths on the fort. To the west, and there below the steepest cliff of the fortress spread the other claw of the army, between themselves and the broad escarpment of il-Harrax on its strata of rock to the north-west.

  They were encircled. And there were no Knights of St John on Gozo save Galatian de Césel, its Governor. There were four rotting cannon but only one soldier to fire them: an Englishman called Luke.

  Oonagh never knew his other name. Irked by the deadweight of Galatian’s fright and apathy, she had been roused to fury when, after the supreme effort of collecting and dispatching two boatloads of women and children to St Angelo, St Angelo had turned them back.

  She had fought for action, for the simplest defence, the most rudimentary precautions, in vain. Luke, speaking up from ten years
in the knights’ service, had supported her, but the flicker of energy she had thought to rouse in Galatian had soon died. She took two helpers into their confidence: Luke, and Bernardo da Fonte, husband of her tirewoman Maria and a Sicilian whose voice counted among the few traders of the island. With their help she managed, in Galatian’s name, to force some order out of the muddle. It might, she knew, stiffen for the moment the failing courage of the people and stave off the panic she knew must eventually come. It would do no more.

  In the end, movingly, it was the people who stood firm when the first call for surrender arrived. When outside the gates the gong dimmed into silence and was followed by the peremptory Arabic of the standard-bearer, it was the people, depleted through the generations by the attacks of corsair and Turk, who screamed him down from the walls and spurned him recklessly with stones.

  Then the Osmanli cannon opened up. The noise, drowning in its thunder the crash of breached masonry, was bedevilled with dust which rose in mantled clouds, silting into children’s hair and the tender passages of nose and throat. Then through the haze they appeared, thicket upon thicket of attenuated silver crescents: Janissaries, Bostanjís, Spahís, blades raised, ready to pour from Rabat, up through the breached citadel wall and over the rocks to the Gran’ Castello itself.

  The smoke cleared for a moment, then the 80-pounder spoke again with its iron ball. It hit the wall foursquare as Oonagh watched. For a moment the stone deliberated; then the whole centre of the old masonry buckled and fell, a wilderness of severed life underneath.

  And the people, for whom the alternative was slavery, ran to the breach, not from it. A single man, rallying at that moment, could have marshalled them; could have flung them the clubs, the crossbows, the old swords all rusting in the armoury so that for an hour, the broken wall could be held, rebuilt, trenched—some pretence of resistance arranged. Luke, a common soldier, could not command them. Da Fonte the Sicilian, one of themselves, could not make himself heard. And Galatian de Césel, whose name they were clamouring, was here, adhesive as a frightened cur, on the pretext of quenching her fear.