The Disorderly Knights (22 page)

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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.

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?’

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