The Disorderly Knights (29 page)

Here and there, against the city wall, the slaves were still at work, naked ebony backs whitened with sweat and dust beside the stocky olive torsoes of the Osmanlis, their single lank lock swaying from shaven foreheads, the chinking of the iron chains that linked them by the ankle, two by two, surfacing quietly like continuous, gentle tambourines above the thunder of sound. In the second’s space that came, now and then, between shots you could hear a child crying within one of the shuttered houses, its voice muffled by the thickness of sandstone. The alleys, crowded usually with water carriers, mules and merchandise, slaves and servants, beggars, goats, poultry, children, were empty; the street of the cook shops was shut.

As he stepped out into the open, past the ruined temple next to the big Roman archway, Jerott saw lying among the rubble the marble
head of a boy, the rimmed almond eyes open to the sun, and wondered what the battered, fought-over houses of Tripoli would have to show of grace fourteen hundred years hence. He spoke to all the knights at the walls without seeing Lymond; the few Calabrians he had seen working on the western bulwarks had now gone. It was a Genoese knight, his face drawn stiff by the sun into lines of fatigue, who said, ‘Your nimble friend, I believe, is in the hot-house.’ It seemed ridiculous, but there was nothing but weariness in the other man’s face. With no enthusiasm at all Jerott walked towards the square, anonymous building the knight had indicated, and pushed open the door.

The first thing that struck him was the heat. Thick as a blanket, airless, stinking, it closed in on him at the door and his overloaded lungs heaved; streamers of light flashed behind his dazzled eyes, and he halted, for the moment quite blind.

Out of the darkness, against a background of men’s voices and a soft multiple fluting that bothered him by its familiarity, Lymond’s voice said, ‘Chevalier!’ paused, and added something in Italian in which Jerott Blyth, who knew Italian, recognized perfectly a very coarse joke pertaining to himself. There was a general laugh, a spontaneous, wholly uncultivated laugh of genuine amusement. Jerott’s sight cleared. Lymond had the Calabrians with him. Eight of them, half-naked in twisted white breechcloths and ragged vests, were scattered about the long hut, their unshaven, grinning faces turned towards him. Peasants. He looked round, noting the great apertures in wall and roof, glazed in and covered now with dirty blankets; even so, the heat through the glass was stifling. Along the walls and down the centre, on long benches of rough wood, were laid dozens of trays, and on the trays something moved.

Jerott Blyth took a step forward, and as he did so, Lymond moved forward and touched him. Something small and cold pricked down the young knight’s classical jawbone to land almost weightlessly on his chest: the soft piping enveloped his head. His quick temper already up, Blyth took a swipe at it.

‘Ah, be kind to them,’ said Lymond mildly, on a wave of sniggering laughter. ‘They think you’re Mother.’

The minute, gauzy objects crawling over his elbows, slipping inside his armour, bumping down the planes of his sweating face, were new-born chicks. Yellow, beady-eyed, nodding, they filled every bench; Lymond’s hands, as he stood before him, were full of them. ‘Hatching chickens without hens,’ he explained. ‘An old Moorish trick. The people would have let them all die in their fright, but these fellows know about birds. They may not understand guns, but they’ll help the garrison to survive, all the same. Are you going back? I’ll come with you.’

He looked as fresh as the night he had swum from the French galley. Brushing the young birds from his clothing, Jerott wondered hotly what work, if any, the man had done this last day and night, and then saw that the well-shaped hands restoring the nestlings were as raw as his own. Lymond was a first-class mercenary: it did no good to overlook that.

On the way back Jerott said, ‘It doesn’t take eight men to hatch and rear a handful of hens.’

‘They feel safer there,’ said Lymond. ‘It insulates their fear from the rest. And it gives them a meeting-place.’

‘For rebellion,’ said Jerott.

‘Of course. There are two ringleaders in there; the rest are just boys. There may be some other dare-devils left in the Châtelet too—I don’t know. As a matter of principle, I prefer to guess at any given time where my conspirators are.’

‘They seem to trust you,’ said Jerott carefully.

‘They don’t trust you, at any rate,’ said Lymond. ‘Defence work finished?’

Jerott said curtly, ‘I’m going to suggest to de Vallier that half the knights should come in and rest. The older ones are exhausted with lack of sleep. They won’t be much good against a fresh attack otherwise. The labour teams are already working and resting turn about.’

He was shouting, because of the gunfire. Inside the castle, the noise muffled by the thick walls, Jerott sneezed; shivered as the shadows enclosed his sodden body, and said, ‘Thank God they’re firing at the St James, anyway. We can hold on for a bit at least.’

‘
We
,’ said Lymond in the same deceptively mild voice, ‘can hold on indefinitely.… Why has the rumour been put about that this is an indefensible city?’

‘Dear Heaven,’ said Jerott piously. ‘You’ve just spent thirty-six hours propping up the St Brabe wall.… The mortar’s mouldered from the magnificent walls with sheer age, and our Most Christian Emperor Charles has done nothing whatever for years to restore it. We have.…’

‘You have stores for weeks, endless underground water, wells, fountains; thirty-six pieces of artillery in excellent working order, lance-grenades,
pots-au-feu
, a complete arsenal of gunpowder; and ditches, terraces and walls that may not be every pioneer’s dream, but except for the St Brabe, could stand against anything the Turks have so far. Added to that, you have some of the best cannoneers in the world. Why wasn’t the St Brabe mended and the defences put in order before we came?’ said Lymond abruptly.

A first-class professional all right. The question was not one Jerott intended to answer. Lymond answered himself.

‘Excuse one: because de Vallier expected big reinforcements from
Malta and Sicily to fight the Turks off. Excuse two: because he thought d’Aramon would persuade the Turks to go away. Excuse three: because he couldn’t get his Spanish knights to do what he wanted anyway, because the Spanish knights want to surrender rather than be blown to bits and then tortured to death by the Turks. So far Allâh, aided by Fustern and Guenara, would appear to have a slight superiority over God, even when aided by Gabriel.’

‘Blaspheme if you must,’ said Blyth wearily. ‘You’ll get your wages all right. You’ll survive.’

‘I’m not going to die of laughing at any rate,’ said Lymond, and Blyth nearly lost his temper again. Until, surprisingly, he remembered Oonagh O’Dwyer.

Jerott Blyth himself was a thoroughly competent commander. The list he put before de Vallier of the work done and still to be done, the assessment of man power and stamina, the list of the weak to be rested and the strong to be conserved, was the result of long training, high skill, and a love of his work that lessened, he knew, the love he should pour upon his Maker.

He thought de Vallier distracted. No more than any of them had the old man slept these last days, and the strain had begun long before that. A man who had seen long service in his time, and whose honest, plodding piety had put him at last among the contenders for Grand Mastership, Gaspard de Vallier found his triple duty—devotion to God, to the advancing techniques of war and to the frightening web of intrigue his great Order had become—increasingly hard to encompass. Now, hardly looking at Jerott; the wet, loosened skin of his face folded deeply round cheekbone and chin, he gave automatic assent to all the dark knight proposed, and only moved his blood-veined gaze upwards when a tap at the door ushered in de Herrera, his acting Treasurer, with a question.

‘Put her in irons,’ said the Governor of Tripoli wearily; and when the Spaniard had gone, rose and moved to the deep window, shuttered to keep out the noise. ‘Open it.’

Surprised, Jerott stepped forward, and pushing the great bars, let the heavy wood swing back. Magnified, sudden as an attacking animal, the noise of the big-bore Turkish cannon roared at them. Smoke, grey-yellow and acrid, moved across the window space. Beyond, measured out against the castle wall, arquebusiers and archers, turn about, kept up the warning spray that forced the Turkish cannoneers at least under cover. Beyond, the sea sparkled like tissue beneath a sky of unsullied blue. A brigantine, her decks white and empty, idled in the bay. ‘Our friend from Caraillon has deserted,’ said the Marshal de Vallier; and as Jerott, obeying his look, reclosed the shutters, the room darkened to the dim amber of the oil lamps as if the light had failed with the words.

He knew the man the Marshal meant; a French knight from Provence long settled in Tripoli. He knew also the gossip: that the man had long since forgone his vows of chastity under the strong African skies, and had a mistress, a Moorish woman in the town. He was not alone there.

‘The woman has told you?’ he asked at length.

‘She was made to tell us. It seems,’ said the Marshal without expression, ‘that he has been a practising Moslem in secret for some time.… He took a horse, and gave the guard some excuse to let him out at the desert port … but he took no food or water.’

‘The Turkish camp,’ said Jerott.

‘Yes,’ said the Marshal. There was a long silence. A long silence, and, slowly it came to Jerott, too much of a silence. He brought his dark, unseeing gaze up, and found the Governor’s tired eyes fixed on his. ‘Now open the shutters,’ said Gaspard de Vallier. Jerott opened them.

Heat, sun, the dazzle of sea, the white walls, the silver armour of the knights: silence.

Silence. The guns aimed at the St James bulwark had stopped firing.

Jerott turned. Behind him the old man hadn’t moved; only his tired eyes followed Jerott’s stride back to the desk. When he got there, Gaspard de Vallier spoke. ‘Tear up your list, my son,’ he said, ‘And order every man you can spare to the wall of St Brabe.’

*

In the stir of late afternoon, as the blessed shadows moved and lengthened infinitesimally towards the sea, and the sun striking the skin out of doors was more easily to be borne than the thick, airless heat of the tents, the guns started again. The meticulous rumble came distantly and pleasingly to the Turkish encampment, where the fringed awnings winging between palm and palm enclosed rugs, cushions, low tables, jewelled turbans and
caftáns
in shadow, like some ancient mosaic set in the white gravelly sand of the plain. Sinan Pasha and his officers reclined to take sherbet and sweet grapes as their cannon opened fire on the weak rampart of St Brabe.

‘We have wasted too much time on what we now know to be impregnable,’ said Dragut in his less than careful Turkish, breaking almond paste in his fingers to offer to the knight at his side. ‘Our ships will also fire tonight on the fort at the port entrance they call the Châtelet.’

Gabriel, his face thinner but no less open, no less composed, shook his head, refusing the sweetmeat. ‘How long, then, before the city will fall?’

The old corsair, his beard moving as he chewed, looked at the creeping shadows. ‘
In-shallâh
.… Tonight or tomorrow, perhaps. By then not the guns of Islâm but the poison of the infidel will have done its work. In two days, the city will be ours.’

‘And the knights?’

‘That depends on the terms of surrender. The lord Sinan Pasha is displeased.’

‘Then the people of Gozo? They have no share in the terms.’

‘They will be sold in the slave market,’ said Dragut Rais with finality. ‘Save, of course, the great
hakîm
, your governor, who will share the fate of the knights.’

‘And the woman?’

It was a long pause. They had almost reached this point a dozen times before, but it had been unseemly that it should be said aloud, however well aware Dragut might be of what the Chevalier was asking.

The sage’s far-seeing eyes observed him for a moment, then glanced away again. ‘You do not ask about your friend the French Ambassador and his train, or about yourself.’

‘I trust to your good sense not to offend the
fransuzja
,’ said Gabriel. His Turkish was fluent, thank God; the fruit of all his years with the caravanisti.

There was a long interval, which he took the greatest care not to break. Then Dragut said, ‘You say the man Crawford is your friend, and yet you wish to deceive him. I remember him well as a boy. You desire him for yourself?’

Unshocked, unshockable, the clear blue eyes smiled. ‘No. I desire him, but not for myself.’

Dragut’s head jerked towards the shabby black of the knight’s habit, with its cross plain on the shoulder. ‘For that?’ He did not disbelieve Malett, but although courtesy would never permit him to say so, clear in his eyes was derision at the picture Gabriel had painted, of four hundred men enclosed in celibate life with none of the Moslem’s more prosaic resources. After another pause, Dragut added, ‘I have also no need of a woman, having all the sons I require. Moreover, in my house at present is a woman such as you have never known.’

‘This one is pregnant,’ said Gabriel. He had saved it to the end, the clinching argument which would preserve Oonagh from the public stripping of the slave market, the abuse which would kill her and her unborn bastard, the careless raping and death she might meet unprotected before the market ever began. A handsome, powerful son of good blood, to be brought up in the Moslem faith to fight for the Grand Seigneur, to be trained in warfare and the arts, to grow wealthy and powerful—even to rule—this was the future
that Turkey held before the cream of her conquered peoples, the dream of every father as he grew old. When the boy in time died, his wealth perished with him. No dynasties were ever formed in Turkey outside the Sultan’s own; no hereditary power existed; no ducal families to challenge the throne. Only the young and ambitious aliens, converts to Islâm, who infusing their strength and their new blood into the land, would make of Suleiman in time lord of the world.