The Disorderly Knights (35 page)

*

In later, soberer weeks, when bitterly she began to wonder if ever she had had the means to attract, she was to wonder if in that brief passage Lymond had hoped for oblivion, as she had once received it from him. For that afternoon de Seurre, a Knight of the Order and d’Aramon’s other captain, walking like a drunk man through the joyous clamour of the alien camp, had brought them the news that the white flag was flying from Tripoli. Galatian, she remembered, had laughed. And Graham Malett, without a word, had risen and walked out of the tent.

Shortly after that, the guns stopped and they learned that two of Sinan Pasha’s officers had transmitted the Turk’s invitation to send deputies to the camp to treat. A little later, she and d’Aramon, Nicolay, de Seurre and Gabriel, watching silently in the background, saw the knights arrive, close-guarded by marching Janissaries. They had sent Commander Fuster of Majorca and the Chevalier Guenara, both Spanish, both enemies of France. Gabriel alone made the sign of the cross as they passed and Guenara, noticing, hesitated and would have stopped if the escort hadn’t jolted him forward with some brusqueness. The Order, she supposed with remote pity, had never stood lower than that.

Soon they heard the terms. The knights were willing to surrender the city and castle of Tripoli provided that Suleiman’s general would give the Governor, the knights, the garrison and the natives life and liberty, with ships to carry them and all their belongings to Malta or Sicily. And Sinan, black eyes cold, his dark Jewish face watchful, had laughed, and when he had done laughing had said, paring his nails, that he might begin to consider their wants when he had been reimbursed by the Order for all Osmanli expenses of the expedition. The knights were to pay the soldiers of Islâm for their trouble at Mdina, Gozo and Tripoli.

Even Fuster and Guenara could not conceivably agree; no man could. It was precisely why Sinan had asked it. It was Gabriel who waylaid Dragut, while tempers were rising, and as a businessman might, laid before him the facts Sinan Pasha had ignored. To prolong the siege might allow help to reach the city. Desperation itself might drive the knights to a last, costly stand. More: by ruining the walls, Sinan would expose himself when in possession. The knights might retake the city before its defences could be repaired,
since the season was near when no blockade was possible by sea.

He added one thing more; and how much it cost him, no one was allowed to know. ‘In any case,’ said Malett, Knight Grand Cross, to the Turkish corsair Dragut, ‘once the treaty is signed, his excellency the General is master, and can keep it or not as he feels inclined. In his place, none need deign to quibble.’

And Dragut, clapping the knight companionably on the shoulder with his broad palm, had gone off to intercept Sinan Pasha, who by Suleiman’s orders must regard his advice. The delegation, chivvied from the General’s tent at sword-point, waited drawn-faced under the canopies while Dragut and Sinan Pasha conferred. Granted leave, unexpectedly, to approach them, the Baron d’Aramon and de Seurre found that, for the moment, the barrier of suspicion and hatred had dissolved in their fear.

It seemed then unlikely that either knight would reach Tripoli again unless, shamefully, they agreed to the Turkish terms. Out, disastrously, came all that had happened at the castle since the Calabrians’ attempt on the arsenal. Spreading the disaffected among the loyal garrison had only spread the sedition until, fired with promise of support, the young peasants had at last abandoned their posts, seized their commanding officer and threatened his life unless he forced the Marshal to surrender Tripoli to the Turks and save all their lives.

The Marshal, learning on the steps of his church that his soldiers refused to fight and mobbed by shouting mutineers, had fought his way to a hasty council of war where, once again, French and Spanish interests split the Order from end to end. In vain de Poissieu, spokesman for the French, maintained that the St Brabe breach could yet be guarded by good entrenchments, provided the soldiers did their duty. He was shouted down with all the old arguments, by de Herrera and the rest. It would suit France to prolong a hopeless fight. ‘Under your protection, M. l’Ambassadeur, what can they lose?’ said Fuster bitterly to d’Aramon now. ‘Whereas we, the Emperor’s subjects, can expect no quarter, as you see.’

In his wisdom, d’Aramon met this with silence; and, because above all things, the two delegates needed to talk, the tale was resumed. It had been decided to risk a daylight inspection of the breach provided the rebels returned to their posts. But even the promise of double pay, in the end, could not weigh against de Herrera’s repeated insistence that they were being duped: that the Governor had no intention of surrendering, and would rather be killed in the breach.

At length, while the rebels huddled together, sheltering from the unceasing guns, Guenara himself had gone to the breach, since no French knight would be trusted.

‘And?’ said d’Aramon without expression, reflecting nothing of the Spaniard’s low-spoken violence.

‘It was without prospects,’ said Guenara shortly. ‘All that is left of the wall on that side would have been down before night. If we had tried to make de Poissieu’s brilliant entrenchments we should have simply thrown away lives. The rebels understood that.’

‘They forced you to surrender?’ The irony in de Seurre’s voice was barely concealed.

Fuster’s, in turn, showed his resentment. ‘They demanded that the white flag be shown instantly. Or they would let the infidels inside themselves.’

‘So falls the Order in North Africa,’ said the French Ambassador; and this time, the distaste showed.

A little after that, the deputies were sent for again by a thoughtful Sinan Pasha, Dragut at his side. The treaty as suggested by the Marshal de Vallier would after all stand, and Sinan Pasha himself was ready to swear by the Grand Seigneur’s head to observe it.

On the Turkish side, he had only one condition to make. The General wished the Marshal de Vallier to come in person, to discuss the sea transport required for the great evacuation. An officer must be sent as hostage for the Turkish ships’ safe return. At the same time Sinan Pasha would send a Turkish officer as hostage to Tripoli in the deputies’ care.

The change of heart was too sudden, the terms too suave. Yet, what could they do? Bolstered only with pride, Fuster and Guenara at length left, with the so-called prisoner whose presence meant nothing in the Oriental philosophy of expendable life. ‘You fools!’ said the Chevalier de Seurre to the air as he looked after them. ‘If you bring de Vallier here, you are digging his grave.’

So much only Gabriel had waited to hear. Returning to his tent he walked like a blind man, ignoring Lymond, deftly busy within, and dropped on his knees before the cheap, wrought altar, his head bent.

The other man also, it seemed, had heard the news. He finished the neat package of clothing he was making, and was proceeding with meticulous care to sharpen two most handsome Turkish daggers before he broke the silence, still without looking up. ‘And is this the soldier rebuking the monk or the monk rebuking the soldier?’ he said.

But, saint or fighting man, Graham Malett’s face was invisible between his robed arms, and though his praying hands locked suddenly white on the altar, he said nothing at all.

Next day, returning to her tent from the permitted exercise in the milder heat of the early hours, Oonagh found a parcel concealed in the cushions where last night her lover had lain, and beneath it, a dagger. Inside the parcel were the cap, the turban, the tunic and
belt, the kirtled robe and soft leggings she must wear as an Osmanli; and a note. ‘Dress. The one who calls for you will arrange what you cannot. Afterwards, remember you are dumb.’

Thus simply her greatest fears, the turban, her lack of Turkish, were met. Before she dressed, she went for the last time to Galatian.

He was better; almost ready to walk. If he had been a man still, she thought, none of this would have been possible. Indiscreet, importunate, he would have driven Gabriel, every man, from the door. Yet he had cherished her on that queer and violent escape from her past; had installed her as his own, and fed and kept her since on Malta and Gozo. Even now, the food she ate was given her because of him. She said, seeing him jump as he always did when she entered, ‘You will be safe now, Galatian. Every knight is to be ransomed,’

His heavy face was sulky, sticky already with the heat. ‘There will be prejudice against me. Who knows what lies will have been told?’

If only the man would stand up to what he had done! She tried, in spite of her contempt, to find the right words. But she had not the patience, or the compassion which alone might redeem the Chevalier de Césel now. ‘At least,’ she said, her round vowels honey soft on her despising breath, ‘at least you can fairly put your back into your vows of poverty and obedience, since there never was a knight in the Order so chaste as you will be now. Good-bye, Galatian!’

Another man would have cursed her, or even stirred himself, in spite of the pain, to confront and grip her. The knight of Gozo upbraided her like a disappointed woman, and the short-breathed phrases and unvarying pitch of it buzzed in her ears as she changed.

Gabriel, standing with d’Aramon’s party at the door of their tent, saw the fresh contingent of Moors and Janissaries march off to the shore as the sun began to lose its first white shuddering heat that afternoon. Lymond he picked out beside the big Moor who had ostensibly led the escape from Tripoli. In unaccustomed white with the muslin bound expertly round his head, he looked quite at home; he did not glance over his shoulder. Oonagh he found finally walking behind, young and slight, her skin lightly stained, as was Lymond’s, to deepen the tan. Without the veiling black hair all the Irish breeding of her face was exposed to the light, but no fear showed. Nor was it any spiritual faith which sustained her, as Gabriel well knew, but a fatalistic, mystical trust in Francis Crawford.

Shortly after that, the man sent as Turkish hostage to Tripoli returned to tell Sinan Pasha that his terms were agreed. Marshal Gaspard de Vallier, Governor of Tripoli for the knights, was coming to the Turks’ camp to parley, with only his friend de Montfort to support him.

Long before the Marshal arrived, his harbinger had spread the
news that the Christian garrison was rent now from side to side: that against every counsel of prudence and humanity the visit of the Marshal had been arranged, on the rebels’ insistence, so that on this elderly, pitiable knight the strength of Turkish good faith might be tested.

No besieged group in such extremes of disunity could survive, the Turkish officer observed with deference to Sinan Pasha. Whatever the nominal terms of the treaty, in fact the General could make what conditions he chose.

*

Oonagh’s task was to carry food, water, ammunition from the deep entrenchments by the shore to the forward ditches under the chipped and broken walls of Tripoli, and the emplacements where the cannon squatted, braced on the timbers of the beached and over-thrown galleys.

The guns were silent for the parley, but the drilled and naked servants of the guns were using every second of the respite like fairy gold, to cleanse, oil, replace, restock. All afternoon the work went on under the eye and tongue of their captain, and she wondered that she had ever been afraid of detection. These men were too busy for that. Only the captain, treating her as the mute lad of the Moor’s styling, had taken a moment now and then to finger her as she passed and repassed until, suddenly alive to the risk, she arranged her route differently.

Lymond, she saw, worked at the Moor’s side, thus relieved of the need to use much of his Arabic, and did so as if he had handled culverin all his life. He probably had, she thought; and wondered how he felt, repairing the mouth that had blown death into this stronghold, and might do so again.

A strange feeling began to grow on her that afternoon. As she darted from rock to rock and foothold to foothold with the leather flasks, the satchels, the sackloads of powder, she felt neither sickness nor strain. All her despised feminine feebleness had vanished, and in its place she had something as near happiness as she had probably ever attained.

When at last the light mellowed in the quick African twilight, she was dazed, realizing that the time of waiting was past. By then she had eaten, grinning wordlessly at the mimed cameraderie of sweating men, coarsely moustached, whom she had seen just now prostrate themselves in silent worship as nobly as the robed knights in St Lawrence. They treated her, now they had leisure, with a sly, teasing roughness to which her own hard fibre responded. She was not afraid. Dusk hid her identity; her wit had no frontiers. Then it was dark.

Lymond came for her very soon, laconic in Arabic, signing to her what to do. He had contrived some task at the waterfront, as he had had to do. They had spoken no word of English since they set out. Even now, holding her elbow as she stumbled over the tumbled rock, he said nothing that any man could not hear. Then, momentarily hidden by an escarpment, he pulled her down to her knees, and laying quick hands on her glimmering robes, began to peel them from her down to her shift. Then from his own clothing he pulled something dark and tossing it to her, left her alone with it while he stripped. Underneath he wore the same dark, tight tunic that she had just slipped on. It was, she recognized suddenly, something of Gabriel’s. Then he took her arm.

At the edge of the still, dark pool that was the sea, at the brimming edge of freedom where no boat was to be seen, she spoke the first words of the few they were to exchange. ‘I cannot swim. You know it?’

In the dark she saw the flash of his smile. ‘Trust me.’ And he drew her with a strong hand until the green phosphorescence beaded her ankles, and deeper, and deeper, until the thick milk-warm water, almost unfelt, was up to her waist. She heard him swear feelingly to himself as the salt water searched out, discovered his burns. Then with a rustle, she saw his pale head sink back in the quiet sea and at the same moment she was gripped and drawn after him, her face to the stars, drawn through the tides with the sea lapping like her lost hair at her cheeks, the drive of his body beneath her pulling them both from the shore. They were launched on the long journey towards the slim shape, black against glossy black, which was the brigantine, with Thompson on board.