The Disorderly Knights (28 page)

They did not return. Nor did the Turkish sappers and cannoneers working among the rocks in the lee of the castle slacken their labours. The hulks were heaved into position above the seashore; trenches were opened and cannon mounted in a triple battery of twelve pieces each, pointing straight at the castle walls. Out at sea, a heavily armed Ottoman boat could be seen visiting each of the French boats in turn; immediately afterwards, the standing rigging of each of the three slithered down.

Just before that, Jerott Blyth, clinging with aching arms to the underside of a Turkish galleass, observed the release of the pirate Thompson. He did not help.

Jerott Blyth had done his duty before in uncongenial company and as a Knight of the Order he realized that the corsair had done the Order a great service and was suffering for it. But by now he knew that he not only disliked Lymond, he was afraid of him: afraid of what his loose tongue might do to the Order and, more important he sometimes thought even than that, might do to Gabriel. So he allowed Francis Crawford to board this Turkish galleass on his own.

Granted that, together, Lymond and Thompson knew the workings of a Mediterranean cruising ship inside out, it was still quite a feat to release a man chained by the ankle with fifty others in the hold of a strange ship at night. The knifing of the right man for his clothes, the axe for the shackles, the small, whistled signals that located Thompson: that was Lymond’s share. But how, at the right time, was Thompson inspired to go berserk, biting and kicking fellow-captives and guards, shouting and profaning in hideous Arabic until removed kicking under special guard to a prison-storeroom on his own?

There, soon, he had Lymond’s knife, slid through a grating, and
his next visitor was his last. His fetters split, his clothes covered by the guard’s turban and robe, he joined Lymond in the dark passageways and together, unseen, they slipped silently into the dark water where Jerott waited.

Topped by a streaming bundle of white, Thompson’s bearded face surfaced beside him, split by a glittering smile, halved by the weapon held in his teeth. He bade the knight a polite good evening in Arabic, Spanish and French, and then swam off without pausing for answer to where Lymond had already struck out for the nearest spit of land: the tongue where the fort called the Châtelet was so unaccountably silent. After a moment, with more effort than he would have liked to admit, Jerott caught them up.

‘And how,’ he inquired sarcastically, ‘were you proposing to break into a fortress of the Knights of St John without being shot?’

‘Christ, you’ve a tongue in your heid,’ said the man Thompson in equally muted register round the blade of his knife. ‘And what’ve
you
come for? Tae hud wir jeckets, maybe?’

‘You are addressing,’ said Lymond, ‘a Knight of the Order who is about to arrange dry board and bed for you. Be quiet. He’s only here out of pique as it is.’

‘I thought it wasna for my bonny blue een,’ said the pirate philosophically. ‘Damn me if I do any more dirty jobs for that lot. Ye get nae thanks for it in this world, and I’ll be surprised if they havena blackened my character in the next. There’s a brigantine out there with a queer look tae it?’

Jerott saw Lymond’s head turn, and raised his own head a fraction to look. It was very dark in the bay, away from the rocking lanterns of Sinan’s fleet. Against the black water between the swimmers and the dim walls of Tripoli only patches of deeper black showed where, here and there, the empty ships of the Tripolitanians lay at anchor where neither the owners dared venture to claim them, nor the Turks to sail them off under the long, wide-angled guns of the castle. Dimly, as his eyes got used to the dark, Jerott saw that one of them was indeed a brigantine and that, impossibly, there was a movement of some kind on the seaward board of the ship. Presently it ceased, and from its flanks a smaller shape slipped away.

‘A skiff,’ said Lymond, ‘Making for the Châtelet, and high in the water. They’ve been loading, not unloading.’

‘Could they fire from her on the shore guns?’ Instinct and training had instantly driven all but this problem from Jerott’s mind.

‘They’d be blown out of the water before they’d done enough damage to matter.’

‘Well,’ said Thompson easily. ‘If they’re planning to up sail and escape through the whole Turkish fleet, they’re mad.’

‘Or men who know nothing of war and are frantic with fear,’ said
Lymond. ‘Look at the Châtelet. No one is covering their return. Whatever they are doing, it must be without the Governor’s sanction. Is there a Seagate on this side?’

‘Yes,’ said Jerott. They had been in the water a long time. With all the warmth of summer in it, he was not cold, but he felt the strength seeping from his muscles in the cunning way of the sea. He said, ‘There’s a military serving brother called des Roches in charge. I know him. We’ll have to hope the guard holds his hand until I get close enough to explain.’

‘You will,’ said Lymond comfortably. ‘They’ve got the gate open, awaiting the skiff. I think you’ll find both the guard and M. des Roches are quite safely missing as well. All we have to do is walk in.’

And so it turned out. After a momentary confusion at the gate, where they entered unchallenged and then created hysteria by inquiring politely in Jerott’s impeccable Spanish for the Commander, des Roches hurried to them with a genuine welcome and bore them to his rooms for towels, clothing and food. When their story was told, Jerott asked about his garrison.

‘I have none,’ said des Roches. As a serving brother, a man with no claims to nobility, attached to the Order with no other profession than war, he was straightforward to deal with: a tough, well-trained Frenchman with high colour and a frizzled chestnut beard. ‘I have a litter of shepherds sent over from Malta by the Order, none of whom has ever seen an arquebus before, let alone a cannon.’

‘The Calabrians,’ said Jerott, and Thompson and Lymond, he saw with irritation, exchanged solemn nods.

‘The Calabrians. The captain does his best, but we’ve wasted most of our shot and I’ve stopped the firing. The damage is done. We can’t reach the emplacements over there with the size of guns we have now; and if we attract one shot in return, the whole garrison will drop dead from fright. I’ve already lost some who escaped back into Tripoli; they’ve put them on some simple guard duty at the castle. It’s exposed here, you understand, under the guns of these ships.’

‘And the brigantine?’

Des Roches, looking inquiry, was not aware of a brigantine. Jerott explained what they had seen. Halfway through, the Commander turned abruptly and began marching up and down the small room, his hands tight clasped behind his back, listening until Jerott had finished. Then he spoke standing foursquare, his arms still tightly held. ‘I knew nothing of this. But you are right, I am sure. They prepare a way of escape. There is, as you know, no chance of sailing to freedom with the fleet waiting outside. It is suicide. But I cannot remove that hope. For if I do, I swear to you, these boys will surrender.’

‘But if they desert you.…’ began Jerott.

‘They pay the price of death at the Turk’s hands. And the fort is still intact, to be manned by better men.… War is a hard game,’ said des Roches abruptly. ‘Were I to beg them not to sail for their own sakes, they would not believe me. Seeming ignorance is better. Come, let us sleep while we may.’

Then he stopped, the breath pinched in his throat. Yellow, orange, flame in the black night, came the blaze of the first cannonade, followed by the ear-deadening shock of sound. Pushing through a wayward fabric of running, gesticulating men, des Roches and his three visitors reached the roof of the fort and looked towards Tripoli.

Jarred with light, the white walls, the flat roofs, the spire and minaret, the castle and arch flickered in gunfire which lit all the translucent water of the bay and defined the scattered, vacant vessels black and stark against the blaze of the batteries. From the castle, pathetically, came a crackle of arquebus fire and, caught in the light, the frail sparkle of arrows, falling harmlessly on the hulks that formed a bulwark for the entrenched Turkish cannoneers.

The shore batteries had begun and for two days and nights were barely to stop.

In the demoniac light, Lymond’s face was lividly blithe. ‘Well,’ he said, and looked with raised eyebrows from one man to the other. ‘
Déjà la nuit en son pare amasse un grand troupeau d’étoiles vagabondes
. Du Bellay, by courtesy of Sinan Pasha. Shall we go?’

‘No,’ said Jerott Blyth.

‘Eh.…’ said Thompson; and Lymond stopped. ‘Yes?’

‘Yon’s a nice little brigantine,’ said Thompson. ‘They poor Italian laddies couldna take a boat out to her now, in all this light, and they’ll no can swim. It’d be a pity to waste her.’

‘My dear seawater pickpocket,’ said Lymond patiently. ‘Even you couldn’t sail that brigantine single-handed through a hundred and thirty enemy vessels without causing a little outburst of petulance at least.’

Beatific in the hiccoughing light, the pirate’s brosy, black-bearded face split in a grin. ‘Will ye wager?’ he said. ‘There’s no telling at sea. This isna my fight, Francis Crawford. My trade is the sea, and I’ve lost one boat already through this poor, peely-wally Order. I’m making sure of my own while there’s time. Forbye.…’

‘Forbye,’ he repeated, looking Jerott Blyth up and down carefully and returning his bold gaze to Lymond, ‘some of youse might be glad of a wee boat before you’re all done.’

Five minutes later he had gone—where, no one could say; and the dark knight was left with Lymond alone.

‘All right,’ Lymond observed. ‘Go to hell your own way. Blyth, your Archangel Gabriel won’t hurt for five minutes. Either he’s dead along with d’Aramon and the rest, or Sinan’s waiting to see what the
bombardment will do. With or without me, you can’t stop those guns, and it’s far too late to do any good here. They’re going to need a garrison of experienced men later on, not one man now. All that being so, is there any religious objection to entering Tripoli that I haven’t thought of?’

A moment’s real reflection had told Jerott already how it would look if, instead of reporting to de Vallier in the besieged town, he joined the French knights in the Turkish camp. It made capitulation no easier. He said sarcastically, ‘And what of the Irishwoman? She can wait five minutes, maybe, but will the Turks?’

‘I haven’t, naturally, given the matter a thought,’ Lymond said; and with very good reason, Jerott did not say any more. When, presently, with one of des Roches’s men as sponsor and guide, they made their way safely into Tripoli under the shattering roar of the guns, and from there to the castle down stolid, uneven, thread-like alleys between the sealed houses, Jerott knew that professionally Lymond was an impeccable ally; and that there was nothing else about him that he cared for at all.

*

By the time the morning heat was rising white off the desert, they were embroiled in the back-breaking work which was to occupy them for two days. Within the castle of Tripoli were the permanent garrison of twenty-five elderly Knights of the Order and a hundred Moors, Mohammedans but no friends of the Turk, who served the Order as soldiers. To these and their slaves had been added the twenty-five young rebel knights released from the prisons of St Angelo, and those Calabrians who had fled from the Châtelet and who now, exposed to gunfire much worse, were too scared even to go back.

The Governor, de Vallier, sunken-faced from strain and sleeplessness, cried when two brisk young men from Malta were brought to him and Jerott Blyth, who had thought until then of little but the saving of Gabriel, transferred his shame-faced anger, with fine lack of logic, to Lymond. The sole comfort then was the news, brought by a fugitive camel-driver, that d’Aramon and all his suite were still safe. Sinan Pasha wanted no war with France. He merely wished to keep France neutral, by force if need be, until the surrender of Tripoli was accomplished.

As time passed, another gift of grace became apparent. The Turks were aiming all their fire, big and small, at the bulwark of St James, the best of the castle. Thick, well-mortared and terraced within, the wall received shot after shot without cracking or crumbling, and no sooner did a gap appear than it was stopped up by slaves working in the security of the great bulwark.

Labouring there with his fellow knights, with Moors, Turkish prisoners, commanding, cajoling, directing; masked with red grit and sweat, Jerott saw nothing of Lymond, whom he knew to be working on the other buttresses where no money had been spent, and where the old stone, dry and naked of mortar, was no more than a crazy fabric which the most skilled engineer could do little with now.

The Calabrians had been put as far from the gunfire as possible, and set to shovelling earth against the battered wails. Lymond moved there also for a while, and then returned to the bulwark of St Brabe.

Jerott wondered, cynically what he had expected to do. The problem with the Calabrians—the fundamental problem that had isolated them ever since they arrived—was lack of communication. When they troubled to listen, the lads could understand Italian’s Italian; but no one at Tripoli except their own captain could make anything of the thick Calabrian dialect which was all that they knew.

After a day and two nights of continuous bombardment, during which they had done all they could to strengthen the town and the castle, and the slaves at the St James bulwark, working in shifts, were keeping pace evenly and without trouble with the damage, Jerott handed over his post to de Poissieu, one of the young French knights, and walked all round the fort.

The sun was reaching its height. Moving out from the shade of the awnings, slung between rooftop and roof of the high leaning alleys; crossing the sand-filled, ruptured paving from near-darkness into sunshine, it was like stepping into fresh, stinging hot water. After a while, beneath the breastplate he wore, in common with all the knights, over the black vest of his habit, he began to feel the heat as a weight on his sodden shoulders and limp legs, and his eyes, straining against the white glare, reflected through his nerves like a mirror the violent headache he had—they all had—from the ceaseless, relentless, inexorable pounding of guns.