The Disorderly Knights (27 page)

Then he knew what it was, and wondered briefly if the superior military expert at the poop was aware of the old Mediterranean trick. Galleys had been brought inland, on rollers, to serve as buttress and platforms for mounting the heavy cannon against the castle.

He worked out distances rapidly. The angle was too acute for the castle cannon to bear, and the hulks were not yet within range for arquebus fire. Arrows would not hurt them, and he guessed they were well soaked against incendiary shafts. But.…

‘Question: Why isn’t the fort at the end of the harbour offering cross-fire?’ said a pleasant voice at his ear. ‘There’s a garrison there: I’ve been watching them. Do you suppose,’ said Lymond, oblivious to Blyth’s uncontrollable dislike, ‘that the Marshal has put two hundred green Calabrian shepherds into it to perform feats of valour if so inclined, and if not so inclined, to insulate Tripoli from their gun-hysteria?’

‘Or maybe the Irishwoman is keeping them busy,’ said Jerott Blyth cuttingly, and went moodily off.

At two paces, he was brought back by a painful grip on his arm. ‘Gently, little monk,’ said Lymond, still pleasantly. ‘Tell me: does your divine calling on earth teach you to swim?’

‘Why?’ said Jerott, not a fraction less sweetly, his long dagger brought lightly, with practised ease, between his fingers.

‘Because an Osmanli boat is approaching us full of armed Janissaries, and of d’Aramon and the saintly Gabriel there is no sign at all. Something has gone wrong,’ said Lymond cheerfully. ‘Allâh’s intervention, no doubt. If you are interested in going ashore, there is only one method, now.’ He had released the knight’s arm and was already stripping methodically to hose and shirt, tossing his doublet
to the deck and unbuckling his dagger. Lymond threw it high, once, and catching it by the handle, began to move silently to the lee rail in the shadows.

The ship was quiet. The look-out, if he had noticed, had not interpreted the coming skiff as Lymond had done. Jerott hesitated and turning, Lymond observed it.

‘Well, well, Mr Blyth,’ he said, sympathy in the light voice. ‘If you won’t fight for money and you’re frightened to fight for Jesus, you might as well come in for the bath.’ He had a wrestler’s grip the young knight recognized, but was far too late to prevent. Beautifully built and hard as iron, Blyth’s compact body hit the sea side by side with Lymond’s; and then he was on his tormentor, lurching wave-slapped through the water, the dagger high in his fist.

Below him Lymond twisted, dived, and as he was turning locked Jerott’s legs in his own and pulled. As the water closed over his head, the black-haired man felt his right arm wrenched free of the knife and when he rose choking to the night air he found both arms gripped tight at his back. His legs, already numb, were still locked and immovable. He jerked once, and was treated instantly to a choking plunge under the water. When he came up from that, he couldn’t speak, and the undisturbed voice in his ear said, ‘Do that once more, and I’ll duck you unconscious. The Turks are on the other side of the galley and can hear splashing quite clearly. Do you hear me?’

Blyth threw up, indiscriminately, the filthy inshore water and his last, meagre meal, but had understood well enough to do it silently. The ruthless hands let him go. ‘All right,’ said Lymond, suddenly bored. ‘Kill me now, sweetheart … if you can catch me, that is.’

Jerott Blyth, cast suddenly free, lunged weakly as his knife arched towards him, handle first, and caught it. At the same moment, in a surge of black sea and a long green wraith of phosphorescence Lymond struck off, the water closing and unclosing in long strokes over his pale head.

The Chevalier Blyth did not pause. The recovered knife fast between his white teeth, he slid fast in pursuit.

*

It had been clear before they left the coast off Tagiura that Galatian would recover. Soon after he was carried ashore at Tripoli the fever left him and he slept instead a great deal—too much for Oonagh who, isolated by her ignorance of the language, waited with angry impatience for his awakenings.

His only residual importance to her was as a speaker of Arabic. He was also, she supposed, her sole prospect of returning to Europe. Of all the people of Gozo only they had been brought ashore to this
double tent with its cushions and fine rugs and silent black servants.

She never went outside. Night and day the tent was guarded by the robed men whose shadows she saw on the silk walls, cast by the interminable sun through the day and the campfires by night. But they were hostages, clearly, not slaves; and Galatian was given anything within reason that he wanted.

It was he who had found out what the salvoes of cannon fire had been, and who had collapsed writhing in petulant despair when, on questioning their servants, he had learned that d’Aramon’s intercession had failed, and that the Ambassador was being kept under restraint for the space of the siege. Even the rigging of his ships was to come down. If d’Aramon had been freed, he explained bitterly to Oonagh, he might even have persuaded Suleiman to countermand his orders. ‘But no, but no, Sinan Pasha must not now be deprived of his conquest,’ he railed, and took to shouting, to her icy mortification, each time he heard French voices in the vicinity.

When finally, late next morning, he was answered, he waited in a frenzy of anticipation for someone of d’Aramon’s party to force their way in. ‘Doesn’t he realize they are prisoners too?’ thought Oonagh. ‘And does he really believe they won’t know what happened on Gozo?’

She endured his presence as she might have endured a sick servant in Ireland whom she disliked, and was paralysed with anger when, having left Galatian asleep behind the curtains of the inner tent in the heavy heat of the afternoon, she heard the soft footsteps of many people approaching, an exchange of Turkish, and then the rattle of the tent flaps being pulled aside. There appeared the broad, moustached face of the guard she knew, axe in belt, clothed in the short-sleeved knee-length robe over a thin, cross-belted jerkin which was virtually a uniform, his feet in kid boots.

There were others behind him, dressed alike. They supplied an escort for a tall man in the black she despised, the white cross plain on his shoulder. Under the African sun, his hair was a cap of gold, and the blood emptied from her skin, leaving a cold imbalance which lasted some seconds. Then she saw, as he stepped into the shadow, that it was no one she knew.

Sir Graham Malett, on his part, saw a great deal that he did not expect that hot afternoon in the Osmanli encampment outside Tripoli. He saw that the Irish prostitute to whom adhered a poltroon Knight of the Order and also Francis Crawford, whose only weakness he had noted this to be, was an ageless black-haired woman with a straight back and accurate, ivory bones pressing hard through the fine skin. Her wrists were like a boy’s, spiked with bone, but below the drawn face and slender neck the breast-line was thickly commodious. From her response to the guard’s words she could know no
Arabic. He said to the black eunuch who had risen as he came in, ‘Is she pregnant?’ and the man nodded, baring his white teeth. In hospital and in seraglio, you learned much. He added a request, to account for the exchange, and smiling more broadly, the eunuch retired.

To Oonagh O’Dwyer he said, ‘Forgive me. I could not announce my visit. I am under duress, as you are. My name is Graham Malett, and I hear that M. de Césel is here.’

She had heard of him, obviously, from Galatian, for she looked at him attentively from really extraordinary green-grey eyes, in that striking pale-skinned face, and said, ‘The Lord guard us. Gabriel, who steered the Prophet’s camel out of—’

‘—Out of Mecca, in fact,’ he caught her up gently. ‘I have a feeling you were about to say Malta.’ He paused. ‘We’ve made a sorry mess there, haven’t we? Did they curse us on Gozo?’

‘Why didn’t you send help?’ said the woman. She had not troubled to rise, nor had she asked him to sit. He looked down at her from his splendid height, hesitated, and then kneeling abruptly, drew off his fine cloak and laid it before her. Beneath, he wore a plain thin doublet and hose, open a little at the neck for coolness. His rough-cropped hair, unregarded, emphasized the good structure beneath. He said, ‘You must hate my cloth. Let us speak as man to woman. How badly hurt is Galatian? Do you know that in Malta he is being talked of as dead?’

He made no excuses nor did he exculpate himself from the Order’s blame. Oonagh said, ‘I do not hate it, nimble angel. I find it beneath even shame. Is the story spread that the Governor of Gozo died at his post?’

Gabriel nodded, kneeling still. ‘The Turks tell a different tale,’ he said.

‘That tale is true,’ said Oonagh indifferently.

‘But he was hurt?’

‘He was untouched on Gozo,’ said Oonagh. ‘He did their bidding quick as a girl; and when they got him at sea … they made him one.’

He did not flinch. On his face could be read what, clearly, was his thought: admiration for her mettle. He said, ‘He will be ransomed, and you with him. There is nothing to fear.’

‘Even though he is supposed to have died on the ramparts?’ she said, her green eyes mocking. ‘He will not be ransomed this year, or maybe the next, nimble angel. And meanwhile—’

He saw in her eyes what she was about to say, and saved her, his own face wiped free of shadow as she brought the matter, however contemptuously, before him. ‘—Meanwhile the child you carry will be born. Is it Galatian’s?’

His deep voice, free of pity, struck at last the chord he sought.
With something of an old elegance and an old mystery, she widened her cool eyes. ‘Are you of the opinion I have a lover for each month of the year? Until this year, I was no man’s but an O’Connor’s. Cormac O’Connor and I were going to conquer Ireland and remake the earth.’

‘What happened?’

‘Ireland belongs to the King of England,’ said Oonagh. ‘’Twas Cormac who had the great idea that the King of France would pay a lot of money to place a puppet Irishman on the Irish throne; and after the great rebellion was over on French money, do you see, the puppet Irishman might have kicked the French out as well … King Cormac, we should have had.’

‘And Queen Oonagh,’ said Gabriel softly. She laughed.

‘You think so?’ And her long fingers traced, line by line, the inviolable seams of age on her face. ‘I think not. He forced his bastard upon me, not his crown. Nor was it free Ireland that he wanted, in the end, but Ireland bowing to Cormac O’Connor. He and his father, young, were royal men,’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer, her eyes far away. ‘But soon wasted.’

‘What stopped him?’

‘A man called Francis Crawford of Lymond,’ said the woman; and the last piece fell into place.

‘I see,’ said Gabriel slowly. ‘A man of destiny who, God willing, will not be wasted.’

There was a long silence; but in the end, she couldn’t resist it. ‘He is in Malta, they say,’ she said.

‘He is here,’ said Gabriel gently, and saw her crimson from breast to brow. ‘He has risked his life twice to save you.’ He waited, and then said into the helpless silence, ‘The child is not Galatian’s.
Are you sure it is Cormac O’Connor’s?
’

Spreading black in her eyes was a memory she had driven out: a poignancy that held hope and horror and apprehension all in her speaking face. At long last, ‘Mother of God, I pray that it is,’ she said, and her voice was harsh.

His own was tender as the great surgeon is tender. ‘Crawford knows you are with child?’

‘No.
No!
’ On her feet suddenly, breathless, she stared at his bowed golden head. ‘Ah,
Mhuire
; and if you tell him, angel or none, here is my curse on you,’ she said. ‘I want no rescue; you know that. Even if that poor ruin’—and she jerked her head to where de Césel lay sleeping—‘is let back, ’twill be the woman who takes the blame, who else? Leave me be … Leave me. I shall do as well here as anywhere.’

‘Lymond won’t leave you.’ Rising, Graham Malett’s face was filled with compassion.

‘Ah, you are clever, are you not?’ she said slowly, and the mermaid’s
eyes searched his. ‘You’d make a monk of him? You’ll never do that.’

‘No. I only wish to see him live to choose,’ said Gabriel quietly. His eyes, steady on hers, held for a long moment; then after hesitating, he raised both hands and rested them lightly on her two thin shoulders. ‘Sin must be paid for, and better in this world than the next. Do you wish to save him?’

For a moment, a bleak smile crossed the pale face. ‘I have no fear that he will suffer in any way except in his conscience, but it would offend me to be a burden on that,’ she said. ‘Is it a seraglio you will arrange for me? I doubt he will feel called upon to release me from that as well.’

‘Have you no fear of the Turk?’ he asked, and she smiled again at the searching blue eyes. ‘I fear very little,’ she said; and it rang true.

‘I shall do all I can for you,’ said Sir Graham. ‘As for Lymond … He may reach you here, but I shall see he does not rescue you. And afterwards.…’

‘Yes?’ she said. Behind her Galatian, whom he had come to see, was stirring. She felt very tired, as if she had travelled far, and calm, as if the worst of her burdens were being supported for her.

Graham Malett’s arms dropped. Gently he took both her hands in his and held them for an instant as in prayer, his clear eyes searching her face.

‘If I tell him you are dead, he will believe me,’ he said. ‘But only if you give me leave.’

Her eyes did not leave his. ‘I am dead,’ she said. ‘Mary Mother, I have been dead these long months.’

VII
B
ut
A
llâh
D
isposes

(
Tripoli, August 1551
)

T
O
the people of Tripoli, the coming of d’Aramon’s ships was a promise of rescue. Far over the bay, they saw the skiff row ashore and return. They saw the French Ambassador and his train leave their brigantine for the vital meeting with Sinan Pasha.