The Disorderly Knights (37 page)

Dragut turned. ‘But you and I,
Hakím
, are barbarians. Or why else are we here?’

Nothing ever shook de Nicolay from a point. ‘And the woman? Is she to suffer this too?’

‘Ah, the woman!’ Now, suddenly, Lymond’s eyes were fully open, and Gabriel, watching without cease, saw his gaze and the corsair’s slowly lock. Dragut smiled.

‘The woman, I fear, suffered something less sweet, as her immodesty deserved. The woman is dealt with. When my men found her, she was sunk entangled in the brigantine rope, and already dead.’

There was a short silence. Under concentrated inspection, not a muscle in Lymond’s bruised body moved. His face became not unpleasingly blank, his eyes open to their fullest extent, a beautiful and unusual blue. And then, lightly, he spoke. ‘Dear me. And who is going to tell the Governor of Gozo?’ he said.

‘
Oh, my son
,’ said Graham Malett quietly, and turned away suddenly, into the dark. The others watched while Dragut’s two henchmen got Lymond on to his feet, and propelled him off to the tents. He walked too, stubbornly, until he got halfway there, and M. l’Ambassadeur du Roi d’Aramon had never been so thankful to see anyone drop to the ground.

*

When Lymond came to himself, he was alone in the stifling tent with Dragut.

Francis Crawford sat up, taking his time. He felt exceedingly sick. The sun was high. He was not bound. He had been washed, patched and dressed in thin garments, possibly of d’Aramon’s. There was a guard outside the tent, but not within earshot. Oonagh was dead.

‘Allâh be praised,
Emír Giaúr
,’ said Dragut equably. ‘We feared thou hadst withdrawn thy soul from this unequal world.’

‘Not so,’ said Lymond, gently surprised, his hands idle in his lap. ‘Many doors open on God. To save a woman from shame can be in no way displeasing.’

‘It may displease the woman,’ said the old corsair blandly. ‘But I speak of thy ill-advised cleverness by the shore. Much ordnance was consumed.’

‘But none hurt,’ said Lymond in the same tone; nor would anyone but Dragut have known that he could not possibly be sure of that.

‘Thou art wise, indeed, in dangerous skills,’ said Dragut Rais, and allowed the conversation unexpectedly to drop, sitting cross-legged in comfortable thought. The silence had assumed incredible proportions when Dragut at last smiled, and stirring, performed the grave salute he had omitted up till now. ‘Thou hast great patience, as I remember,’ he said. ‘May thy woman find peace. In thine own land, thou wilt find fairer.’

Unsmiling, the other man performed the courtesy in return. ‘I did not doubt you,’ he said. ‘Although the Drawn Sword of Islâm is keen and just.’

‘If men of our race had died today, justice would have been done,’ said Dragut cheerfully. ‘They did not. Without proof, none can
convict thee of any crime save the rape of thine own woman. That she died is thy affliction. Thou wilt remain from sight and mind until the Order leaves, and I shall send thee with them.’

‘Should I go?’ Francis Crawford said. ‘Should we all go?’

There was a little silence. Then Dragut said peaceably, ‘You wish me to kill for you?’ Then as Lymond violently said, ‘No!’ he smiled, and continued serenely to speak. ‘There is no place here for such men as these. To me, thou art welcome ever. But an infidel, a
giaúr
, cannot fight for the Sultan.’

‘You do not recommend, then, that I or another should stay?’ Lymond said.

‘No. I do not recommend either,’ said Dragut, ‘that thou spillest thy heartsblood for this order of cravens. To every man, his hearth calls. There thy duty may lie.’

All the little colour there was had left Lymond’s face. He looked suddenly desperately tired, and sick, and in doubt. Without answering he rose and crossed the small tent. There he stopped and spoke to Dragut over his shoulder, obliquely as Dragut preferred.

‘On Thursday, the fifth day of Allâh’s creation, He made the angel Sigad id Din, who brought dust and air and fire and water to Allâh from the far corners of the world, from which Adam was next created. Then Sigad id Din entered Paradise with Adam, and taught him to eat the fruits of the earth.…’

‘True. Thou knowest well our writings,’ said Dragut’s hoarse, level voice. ‘Then Allâh, as thou wilt remember, ordered Sigad id Din to create Eve.’

Lymond, fingering his belt, head bent, said, ‘It was a bad Thursday’s work.’

‘But in the end,’ said Dragut peaceably, ‘the peacock angel was made by Allâh lord over all the rest. Carry with thee this tale. A hunter went killing sparrows one cold day, and his eyes gave forth tears as he went. Said one bird to another, “Behold, this man weeps.” Said the other, “Turn thine eyes from his tears.
Watch his hands
”.

‘I have always thought,’ he added with sudden encouragement, ‘that there are in thee the talents for a wondrous peacock.’

‘My God, in
Scotland
?’ said Lymond, swinging round, all the mockery back in his voice. ‘An army of angels would merely dissolve in the rain.’

‘Then take an army of men,’ said the corsair, raising his thick, greying brows. ‘Or was this not in the first place a part of thy mind?’

‘And Sigad id Din?’ Lymond said.

This time Dragut Rais also got up, smoothing his short coat as he prepared to go at last. ‘I have already spoken,’ he said.

A moment later and he had gone, having achieved all he intended
to do; and Lymond, now lying quietly, his face on his wrists, received the mercy of solitude at last.

For him, the worst battle of Tripoli was fought then, alone on that last morning, when the decision that was to change the course of his life had to be taken, in fatigue and distress and with the echo of his own voice, then and always, bright and cold in his mind.

‘Dear me … dear me … dear me.… And who is going to tell the Governor of Gozo?’

*

Jerott Blyth, told that Lymond could be depressed by the death of a mistress, would have cackled with laughter. As it was, he was in no mood to be merry. For French knights and Spaniards had united at last, and the Order, outraged, had met de Montfort’s shaming message with a unanimous decision … to fight to the death.

Had they done so, Europe might have echoed through the ages with the Order’s martyrdom and fame. As it was, like de Vallier’s resistance, it came far too late. The knights had chosen death with honour on the ramparts, but the garrison refused to obey.

Half that night, harangued, exhorted, threatened, with whip and bastinado freely used, the civilians and soldiers in Tripoli held out for their lives. And in the end the knights recognized defeat. At dawn, de Montfort would return to Sinan Pasha with the report that his condition could not be fulfilled, as the city held no money at all. But that, provided the besiegers allowed the Order’s Brethren and three hundred people besides to march out freely, the knights would surrender, abandoning the Calabrians and all the rebel garrison to the Turks. Meanwhile, they decided the Moors, who had served the Order so faithfully, were to be given horses and such goods as they could carry, and allowed to leave by St George’s Gate at first light to fly to Tunis or Goleta.

By that single act of humanity the defence reaped a strange reward. Some Moors refused to leave the knights they had served so long. Some left and escaped. Some left and were captured by Sinan’s outposts before they could taste freedom. It was these, in their fear, who told Sinan Pasha that the knights’ intention was to fight to the end, immolating themselves and the whole Turkish army in a final holocaust inside the city walls.

Sinan Pasha did not want to waste lives. Nor did he like to be robbed of his plunder. When, against all expectations, de Montfort appeared with his terms, Sinan Pasha received him cordially, and after the mildest haggling, agreed. Not certainly that three hundred, but that two hundred persons to be selected by the Order should be
allowed with all the knights to return free to Malta, and that the Governor should be set at liberty as well.

It was an agreement laced characteristically with malice. When de Vallier, worn and trembling, returned to the castle, escorted with mischievous ceremony to the gates, it was to tell how Sinan Pasha had made his final demand for some kind of payment, and how the Marshal had pointed out that, without authority, he was helpless to comply.

‘I told him,’ said de Vallier slowly, his veined hands shifting among the useless papers on his desk, ‘that I believed and hoped that my brother knights would never agree to his terms, and that I was ready to forfeit my life in that hope.’

He raised his eyes to the driven, sleepless faces about him and Jerott, his tired body propped by the window, sick to the point of vomiting with shame and fury, thought he saw a terrible kind of ragged pride sit on his unshaven face. ‘My Brothers, the Lord has heard our prayers. At these words the Turk bowed his head before a greater will than his. Without further abjuration of mine he returned from his companions to say that, his honour being no less than ours, he would ratify the first treaty as drawn up in his camp. All Christians in Tripoli are to have instant liberty, only laying down colours and arms in the city before they leave. Ships are to be provided. I am here, Brethren in Christ, to lead you, every man, woman and little child of the Faith, to freedom. God in His mercy be praised.’

‘Then God in His mercy has arranged that we should lead them from the rear,’ said Jerott Blyth thinly from the window. ‘The entire garrison of Tripoli has just marched away.’

They all talked at once after the first second until, crowding the deep embrasure, they saw that this, the ultimate irony, was true. The soldiers, the Moors, the Calabrians, the men, women and children of Tripoli had not waited for the Order to give its sonorous command to surrender. They had not even waited for the blockades to be laboriously shifted and the city gates, with grim courage, to yawn. Through the breached walls, bundles underarm, they streamed, over the sandy ditches, past the silent cannon, through the gaps of the crumbling buttress of St Brabe, and down to the shore.

‘
Freedom!
’ de Vallier had called as, mobbed by struggling Tripolitains, he had fought his way from the city gates to the castle. ‘Freedom, my friends! The Turks’ own ships are to come for you. Wait, and you shall hear!’

But since Sinan Pasha might easily change his mind, the occupiers of Tripoli had not waited. In all the ancient African stronghold of Christ, only the foreign knights of the Order remained.

The rest was bitterest farce. Attired in their crumpled robes over their armour, personal belongings flung together, unfed, unwashed
and swordless as requested, the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St John of Jerusalem rallied, bickering a little through strain, under their scarlet flag at the doors of the empty castle, and marched out through the ruined city of Tripoli and through the big harbour gates. There they were surrounded, neatly and thoroughly, by a shrieking body of Moorish cavalry under the Aga Morat from Tagiura, by prior kind sanction, as now was patent, of Sinan Pasha himself.

These, dismounting, closed cheerfully with the stunned Brethren; felled, stripped and robbed them in the rough proportion of eight to one, and laid them in neat rows on the sandy ground, chained like parrots in pairs.

To the impetuous soldiers and citizens of Tripoli, it appeared, the same treatment had already been meted out on the shore. Then, all herded together under the shimmering sun, the hilarious task of selecting victims for punishment was begun.

The sweet death by wild honey which Dragut had once promised Lymond was familiar to Jerott Blyth by the end of that day. He saw de Chabas, an old Dauphine cannonier and battle companion, thrust alive into the sand, nose and fists severed, and stuck full of arrows until he died. His sin had been to shoot off the hand of Sinan’s favourite henchman. Others fared worse. In the end, blinded by heat, aching, sickened by the screaming, Jerott turned his head aside and abandoning all effort to apportion blame and honour wished simply and furiously that he were dead. Gabriel and the Frenchmen in the Turkish camp, he supposed, already were. He wondered, as at intervals for two days he had wondered, what cynical seraglio Francis Crawford had managed to set up for himself, almost certainly unharmed, unmoved and in favour with the reigning power, the willing mistress restored to his bed. The final irony, which struck him just before he lost consciousness, was that the honour and reputation of the Order would today be intact if he and Lymond had not laboured quite so hard that night in the arsenal.

He did not see, later, the crack infantry of the Turkish army—Spahis, Ghourebas, Ulafaje, Janissaries—marching in silent triumph, magnificently trained, below the great banners, drums beating, into the vanquished city, with Sinan Pasha at its head, mounted on an Arabian horse, turban flashing and sleeveless cloak falling stiff over the saddle above the long embroidered robe. The soft-booted feet of the infantry paced in unison, the white dust clouding the air and powdering the robes kirtled above gartered trousers, the laced tunics, the dark, bearded faces—almost every one smooth, fresh and scatheless, and fiery with scorn: the flower of the Sultan’s army and all, save for a few gunners, the armchair conquerers of Tripoli, for which they had not had to strike a blow.

De Vallier watched them, lying on the ground like the rest, manacles
again on his chafed wrists, and tears he could not control ran down his seamed, dust-coated face to the sand. Until, behind the Aga Morat’s dancing horses with their booty-stuffed packs came the French Ambassador’s party, walking between ranks of armed Janissaries; ranks through which the Sieur d’Aramon, reckless of risk, broke when he saw the iron carpet of human debris huddled, prone, raging, unconscious, stretching from his feet to the shore.

D’Aramon paused only to hear the Marshal’s story, kneeling at the old man’s side, his fingers on the clasped hands of the other; then he resumed his place in the derisive procession until, livid with suppressed anger, he was inside the abandoned castle and forcing an audience on Sinan Pasha himself.