The Disorderly Knights (14 page)

‘Because of it,’ said the big knight, straight in his robes, his high black hat tight in his hand, ‘I have left France, abandoned my King, jettisoned my career, to range myself under the banner of this threatened Order, on this warning alone, without waiting for your Serene Highness’s citation. I can do no more to express my unshakeable belief that the warning is true.’

‘You have said, I think,’ said the Grand Master’s dry voice, in the old-fashioned Spanish he commonly used when Latin tired him, ‘that Tripoli is poorly fortified, low in ammunition and garrisoned, as I think you put it, by a few sick old gentlemen retired there for the air. It is also’—carrying on over the indignant murmur of Spanish voices—‘surrounded on three sides by desert and enemy states. You think that Gozo castle should be demolished and the Gozitans sent to Sicily rather than defend their island. You think the two hundred troops the Viceroy, wisely or unwisely, promised you at Messina should be sent to Tripoli with an army of my young knights from Malta to replace the present weak garrison, while the Viceroy is pressed to send more soldiers and ships which in turn would leave Naples and Sicily bare. Does that seem to you just? And if the Viceroy sends no more than these two hundred men—and he will not, M. de Villegagnon, for I shall not ask it of him—does it seem right to leave Gozo empty, and Malta denuded, to half-strengthen Tripoli?’

‘Call in the knights from the provinces,’ said Gabriel. ‘M. de Villegagnon had no need to suggest that. It is obvious.’

‘And fortify Malta.’ The French voice, its accent dulled with long years on the island, was Jean de la Valette’s, Parisot to his friends; his grizzled face impatient, his shattered leg stuck incontinently at an angle below his parted black robes. ‘We need mercenaries, cannon, bulwarks … a better fort at St Elmo, and one at L’Isla to cross fire with St Angelo across Galley Creek. If we work fast, there is time to do something.’

‘But no men, Chevalier; and no money.’ The dry voice of de Homedès was tinged with triumph. ‘
Yo lo siento
. As with you, the fate of this island keeps me sleepless at nights. Last year, as you know, the crops in Sicily failed. The Order was forced instead to pay for imports from France, from even further afield. We are not rich, We had no reserves. We had to pawn our plate to send even our last emissary to England. The Treasury, Brethren, is empty. We cannot
raise or pay mercenaries; we cannot finance even the summons of our knights from their commanderies. By increasing our tax on these properties we might later gather a little reserve for this purpose; but that cannot help us now.’

‘And will the Grand Master say,’ said de Villegagnon, the veins throbbing in his thick neck and all his lawyer’s caution melting slowly in the stifling candour of courteous authority, ‘how the rest of the Treasury money has been spent?’

The protest which ran round the room, he ought to have recognized, was not wholly disagreement and not wholly shock. It was, however, an expression of rightful alarm that, against all the rules of their devotion and their way of life, de Villegagnon should have spoken openly to the Grand Master thus. Through it all Gabriel’s easy bass-baritone spoke. ‘There are channels for accounting which are none of your business, Brother Nicholas, as they are none of mine, but which all the Order’s officials are familiar with to the point of nausea. In any case, don’t let your distress lead you into side issues. We are all sleepless, with prayers as well as with sailing. We can only align and disperse solutions until we reach the right one.’

‘I need no protector, Brother Graham.’ The Grand Master’s face under the black hat was thinly fleshed with his anger, but his voice was unchanged. The black patch, unvarying, was bent on de Villegagnon. ‘And I find you too ready to make M. de Villegagnon’s apologies. To have mistaken the King of France’s intentions as he has done implies a naïveté beyond understanding, or a knavery beyond any apology. The Constable’s message, I am sure,’ added de Homedès, who had played this game, monotonously, many times before, ‘arose from the warmest wishes for our well-being. But the Constable is not France. The King is France, and with him the de Guise family,
one of whose spies you have brought here, M. de Villegagnon, into this citadel!
’

It was neatly done: so neatly that, without hesitation, thirty-five pairs of eyes, old, young, mature with long prayer, seamed with years of sailing on bright water, lucid with sanctity and young terrors overcome, slewed round to Lymond.

There had been almost no warning. But an instant before the Grand Master’s accusation was achieved, Lymond’s own face changed from the odd, waiting expression it had worn all day. Alight with surprise and with discreet laughter he said, half under his breath, ‘Christ! The three mutes with the bowstring!’ Then, as two or three of the knights began, in the surge of talk, to jump to their feet, Francis Crawford pulled himself together and moving forward, addressed de Homedès, his voice clear and precise.

‘I beg your pardon. Perhaps I may set your minds at rest most
quickly by saying that I have no intention of leaving this island until the attack is over—if it comes. How could I, anyway? The brigantine that brought me has gone, and the Order controls the harbour in Malta. Even if I were an agent of France—which I am not—I could do nothing but report, if I live to report, how the Order bore itself under threat of the Turk. And the Order, I take it, has no objection to that?’

By the time he ended, he had silence to speak in. Gabriel’s voice followed immediately. ‘The Sieur de Villegagnon has laid down his career. Both he and M. de Lymond in coming here have offered their lives. We risk being called un-Christian if we ignore these facts.’

‘We risk being called gullible if we look at no others,’ said the Grand Master. ‘What, for example, is to prevent this young man from betraying all our defences, should the Turk land?’

‘Nothing,’ said Lymond mildly. Gestured still nearer, he had moved a pace or two into the centre of the hall and stood relaxed, his head bare, his hands, holding his hat, lightly clasped at his back. He wore no sword. ‘Nothing. Except that if the Turk lands, the King of France’s warning is substantiated. And if the warning is genuine, why should I be otherwise?’

The eye patch stared at Francis Crawford’s emotionless face. ‘Shall we say,’ said the Grand Master at length, his hands flat on his knees, ‘that the Grand Turk is not wholly as yet under France’s control, and that the King of France might desire an agent at hand in case affairs take an unlooked-for turn?’

‘Let us say so, by all means,’ said Lymond gently. ‘So long as Malta is fortified against exactly such a danger, I should willingly place myself under irons for the length of any attack. All of my French colleagues would no doubt tell you the same. On her present resources, Malta can withstand only the briefest of sieges without outside help. You intend to bring Holy Church naked within reach of the infidel. For that, I salute your faith. Allow us to bolster it further with such measures as are within our means.’

There was a short silence. In one unexceptionable speech, M. de Villegagnon’s companion had delivered a number of plain truths, of which the plainest was a challenge as well. ‘Unless your fortify, you will fail. And you will not be permitted to blame that failure on your French knights or on me.…’

The Grand Master stirred. Under the grey brows his good eye shone, sharp and bright. ‘I would remind you, sir,’ he said, ‘that alone of all those here present you have made no vows and are under no restraint. As to your … detention, I may well take you at your word. As far as your colleagues, as you term them, are concerned, I should attempt no such impertinence. I trust they will forgive you yours.’

He raised his voice. ‘M. de Lymond, since you have chosen to come
to this island, you may not expect to leave it without our permission. M. de Villegagnon, we thank you for bringing our dear friend the Constable’s dispatch. You have both our permission to retire.’

With nothing settled, nothing planned, these two dangerous men were being dismissed. De Villegagnon, his hat crushed to his thigh, said brusquely, ‘Jean! Graham!’ and took two impolitic steps towards the dais. One of the priests by the Secretary’s table stepped in front of him; one of the Spanish Piliers, getting up in a hurry, knocked sideways his heavy chair with the painted crest on the back. De Villegagnon had probably no physical coercion in mind: his only idea was to approach de Homedès, man to man, and persuade. But the tension in the room, the taut consciences, the sour presence of prayer-drugged fear, dragged the situation suddenly out of shape. Lymond’s eyes met Gabriel’s and both men moved not forward, but back, towards the double oak doors from the hall, both with the same thought: to fling them wide and halt the scene quickly, by making it public.

Lymond, nearer the foot of the room, reached the doors first. But as he touched them, the timber shook with invisible assault; loud voices sounded outside and a guard shouted in protest. The handle rattled. Then, as Lymond fell back to where the knights stood, arrested in turmoil, the door burst open to admit Jerott Blyth.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Lymond mildly into the sudden extreme quiet. ‘Sicily haven’t sent their two hundred men.’

Blyth looked round. Visibly, a little colour returned to his handsome face, white with rage. His fists unclenched, hesitated, and then raising one, he removed his bonnet. Behind the long tables the knights lingered, shuffling, and then with a scraping of chairs slowly resumed their seats, leaving de Villegagnon again alone on the floor, his back to the Grand Master’s dais, staring as the Grand Master was staring at Jerott Blyth’s disordered dark figure.

It was de Villegagnon, his own anger forgotten, who echoed Lymond’s words. ‘They haven’t sent the two hundred?’

The small, dark knight stalked, without speaking, from the closing doors to the foot of the dais. Arrived there, he hurled his battered black bonnet at the foot of the steps and folded his arms.

‘They have sent them,’ he said, ‘I have come with them. Had they sent two hundred sheep, you could have eaten them. Two hundred goats, and you could have milked them. Two hundred cannon balls, and you could have killed Turks with them. What they
have
sent,’ said Jerott Blyth, forgetting Latin, Spanish and decorum in his anger, ‘are
rabbits
!’

‘They promised us soldiers,’ said de Villegagnon, his voice echoing in the silence.

‘They have sent us shepherd boys,’ said Jerott, the excitement
suddenly dead in his blood. ‘Youths from the hills of Calabria. Woodsmen and goatherds, tenders of vineyards. Men wise in the stars and the weather and in growing grapes and melons and pomegranate trees. Boys who have been ill with fright all the way from Messina; children who have never seen a Turk; youths who have never held a sword or a gun. ‘
These
,’ said Jerott, his voice shaking again, ‘are to be the defenders of Christ’s Church against the heathen in Tripoli.’

By then, moved as he was, he must have realized that his eloquence had struck no echo here: that he was to be permitted no fuel for his anger. The Grand Master had had enough of wayward emotion. Icily thanked, icily reprimanded, icily dismissed, Jerott Blyth found himself in the street without having heard a voice raised in comment; nor did he realize until joined almost at once by de Villegagnon and by Lymond, also dismissed, into what kind of crisis he had burst.

They did not know that the struggle within the Grand Council in which all three had precipitated went on all afternoon; that as the door closed behind the Chevalier de Villegagnon, the Grand Master had at last smiled. ‘Either this Frenchman is the Constable’s dupe, or he has a mind to make us his.’ And against all argument, de Homedès’s premise was unshaken. The Sultan Suleiman would never expend his wealth to take a barren rock such as this. And there must be firm news to the contrary before he would authorize a
grano
to be spent. The Turkish fleet was aiming at Italy, and the possessions of the Emperor Charles. And all this solicitude from France was no more than an attempt to denude Sicily and the Italian States of their defences by concentrating them uselessly on the knights.

To la Valette’s renewed urging that he should garrison Tripoli with young knights under a wise and experienced Grand Cross, to put fortifications in order and evacuate useless mouths, de Homedès replied sharply that he had no intention of bolstering Tripoli at Malta’s expense. By removing the older knights, they would merely deprive Tripoli of so much experience, as well as that stout, old-fashioned military spirit which never surrendered. The knights must stay.

‘And Gozo?’ Even one of his allies, Piero Nuñes, bailiff of la Boveda, was driven to ask. ‘The castle is indefensible. The people must surely be taken off now and sent to safety in Sicily?’

Gozo, Calypso’s island: the small, fertile rock to the north of Malta, looking across the forty-five miles of sea to Sicily, with villages, a small town and a castle, a crumbling ruin on a rock.

The Grand Master was quite explicit in his plans for Gozo. ‘Heathens who have been trounced on flat ground should not be hard to throw off a rock. Men fight better, I have found,’ said the Grand Master of the Noble Order of St John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta, ‘in the presence of their women and children. And I have
the greatest trust in my Governor, the Chevalier de Césel … so brave, so skilful that there can be nothing to fear. To abandon Gozo,’ said the Grand Master repressively, ‘would merely ruin the Gozitans and dishonour the Order. Besides,’ he added, offering with bored patience his coping-stone. ‘If the Turks do not come, who will compensate the evacuated people of Gozo for their loss?’

The silence of accomplishment, of bewilderment, of surrender, was all the answer he received.

*

Through the windless airs of the Dardanelles the Mussulman fleet followed the high-banked oars of its flagship: galleys, brigantines, looming galleasses with their thousand fighting-men apiece; their cannon balls and powder and small arms; their stores of food, of water, of canvas and tents; their rolls of linen, their matches, their pots of sulphurous wildfire, their knives, their scimitars, their guns, the heavy cannon; the bamboo rods for the bastinado; the opium for the injured; the sorbet, raisins and lemons; the coffee, the bows and crossbows; the pennants and banners, the date cakes and the barrels filled with sweet grapes from Trebizond.