The Disorderly Knights (18 page)

He had satisfied them, but he had not turned them from their new thought. De Villegagnon voiced it again. ‘Lead us,’ he said.

For a moment Graham Malett was silent, collecting his thoughts. Then with unaffected patience he answered. ‘The Grand Mastership is dissolved only by death; and new Masters are made by the full Council, the Emperor and the Pope. This is an old, sick priest, given way a little to selfish concerns; unable now to bring balanced thought to his problems; unable to find comfort in prayer. To begin with, pity him.’

‘Pity us!’ retorted Jerott bitterly.

‘Why?’ said Gabriel swiftly. ‘Because you are in your twenties and young and importunate, and the Order is four hundred years old and patient? The Order has survived weak leadership before. It will again. If we have complaints—’ he held up his hand against the comment—‘the time to make them is after we have driven Dragut from Malta, and the place to make them is in full Council, in the presence of the Viceroy. I beg you …’ he looked round, half rueful at his own rhetoric, half in pain with the sheer urgency of his wish to persuade, ‘I beg you, do nothing now. Can you not see? The best leader in the world could not in the last weeks have forced the Emperor to give us ships and troops. The best soldier in Christendom, given our defences as they have stood this last month, could do little now to improve them. There is nothing material to be gained by rebellion now, and
every possible loss, physical and spiritual. We should be accused of personal ambition, subversive nationalism, panic and cowardice in the face of danger, How could you deny it? Jerott—Nicholas—Brother Nick—dearest children in Christ.… Did you not say once, as I said, “
I vow to God.
 …” ’ And the tall, fair-haired knight quoted suddenly in his remarkable voice.

‘I vow to God, to Saint Mary, ever a Virgin, Mother of God; to St John the Baptist, to render henceforth and for ever, by the grace of God, a true obedience to the Superior which it pleases him to give me, and who will be the choice of our Religion.’

Sir Graham Malett paused, and in the shared silence added the words heard for the first time by each of them on the day of his initiation. ‘ “Receive the yoke of the Lord, because it is sweet and light … under which you will find repose for your soul.” Receive with humility, Jerott, the lessons you are taught, and do not lightly forget that we have a Leader who will not fail us.

‘Let us go to Church,’ said Gabriel quietly. ‘And then work as we may on the defence of our island, to the last shred of our strength.’

*

On the morning of the 16th July, before the sun was more than a mellow radiance outside the white, sleeping walls of Birgu, the bells of St Lawrence started to ring and after them, erratically, slow, swift, shrill, sonorous, the jangling bells of every church on the island. The sound wrangled through the dark Arab windows: the grilled windows of the knights, the open shutters and the dark courtyards, and danced in the slumbering air.

Jerott Blyth, asleep dirty-handed where he had thrown himself in Gabriel’s fine guest-chamber, looked across to where Lymond slept, worn as they all were with heavy, self-disciplined labour, his bleached head still on the pillow.

Then he realized that Lymond, too, was awake, and tensed. As he watched, the other man rolled to his feet and made for the door, snatching a cloak, for decency’s sake, as he went. Jerott followed; and saw.

The bells were not for Mass. They were for the bright armada of Suleiman, sail on silken sail, moving past the mouth of Grand Harbour to anchor in Marsamuscetto Bay.

*

Before Lymond left with the others, Gabriel stopped him, a hand laid for a second on his shoulder.

Against the desires of the Grand Master, who wished the Order secure in the fastnesses of St Angelo and Mdina, presenting a barren country and a blank wall to the invader, Gabriel, de Villegagnon and la Valette in Grand Council had won their way. One swift and violent blow was to be struck at Dragut’s hordes as they landed: one sally to let the Sultan feel the knights’ steadfastness and anger.

It would only by a miracle cause Sinan Pasha and Dragut to draw off. But it would perhaps remind them that this would be no easy siege, and that two months only of fine weather remained in which to win the island and sail home in safety to Constantinople. One blow; and then, retiring to Birgu and its fortress, the knights would await what God ordained for them.

And the sally was to be a double one. Under the Commander de Gimeran of Spain, three hundred arquebusiers and a hundred knights on foot were to take skiff from Birgu across the Grand Harbour to Mount Sciberras, the rocky tongue separating the long water inlet of the Order from the Bay of Marsamuscetto, where the Ottoman fleet lay at anchor, to reconnoitre and do such damage from land as they could.

The other party, of thirty knights and four hundred Maltese on horseback, under Turcopilier Nicholas Upton, with Lymond at his side, were to ride round Galley Creek and crossing the neck of the Mount Sciberras peninsula, circumvent the end of Grand Harbour to reach Marsamuscetto Bay by land, to harry the Turkish landing parties as they arrived.

In the roaring chaos of the town square where the refugees, goats, hens, children, bundles of food and jars of water squeezed against the blazing stone of the houses to make room for the gathering knights, Gabriel moved his gaze from the dancing, sun-hazed droves of thick-bodied horses, the dazzle of plate-armour and helmets swinging with plumes, the shifting bright disks of shields of Auberge and Order, and the jerking pennants, congested with quarterings. ‘Since you wear no armour and subscribe to no symbol of faith, would a soldier’s advice offend you?’ said Gabriel to Francis Crawford. ‘You have not, I think, fought the Turk before.’

Always, though taller than most, Graham Malett gave away the advantage of height. Now, holding his linked hands, he presented Lymond with a lift into the saddle and also a space in which to frame his reply. And Lymond, who had no need of either, found, thoughtfully, the courtesy to use both and said at length, looking down, ‘On the contrary. My experience has been in fighting
with
them. A kind of
bourgeosie de robe
.’

‘Of course,’ said Gabriel. ‘I should have realized. With Turkish prisoners freed from Spanish ships. I wished to warn you about the
scimitar cut, and also that your men may find it disconcerting when the Janissaries scream.’

No more than amused at the tact, ‘I scream too,’ said Lymond gravely. ‘And louder. But it is kind of you to advise.’

Graham Malett said suddenly, ‘Let me find you a breastplate at least, man. Their arrows.…’

‘My dear Sir Graham.’ said Lymond ‘I shall be behind a bulwark of three thousand pounds of plate steel, as worn by the Order. If their arrows go through all that, they deserve to succeed. My personal cargo is a twenty-five-pound helmet, a brigantine jacket and a sword, and I need only fall off my horse to dispatch someone flattened to his houris in Heaven. As for the Cross … my habit is to fight for the Saltire.’

‘Then St Andrew and St John both guard you,’ said Gabriel quietly, and let him go.

*

In Boghall Castle, Biggar, Scotland, Joleta Malett, who had been on edge all day, apologized for inattention to Lady Fleming for the third time and added, in extenuation, ‘I feel there’s something wrong. I don’t know what. When I felt like this, it used to be Graham who was in danger.’

And Tom Erskine, Scots Privy Councillor and Ambassador, whose news from France was recent and specific, said, ‘A professional soldier, monk or not, is always in danger. Try to forget. He has not become what he is by being vulnerable or stupid.’ And thought uneasily that the same thing applied to Francis Crawford, who had also chosen to defend Malta on grounds known only to himself, which might procure him no dispensation in heaven at all.

*

The temperature was in the nineties; the sky removed a man’s breath from the lip of the lung with its invisible heat. The northerly wind which had blown the fleet of the Faithful from Sicily had gone, and below the brassy blue arc of July the arid sandstone rocks, the crumbling houses, the stony terraces vibrated like blows on the nerves of the sight.

In their riveted armour, with the long, quilted leather jacks to protect from bruising beneath, the knights riding from Birgu round Grand Harbour were assaulted like an enemy by an element more formidable still: the single, burning sun which took from every chance encounter with salade, knee-plate or harness, with shield-buckle and sword, its penalty of blistered flesh. Fair skins blazed;
sweat, crusting thick with salt in straining eyes made worse the suffocating blindness brought on by heat and pressure, by the nervous stress, never lost, never admitted, of the hour before the attack.

This, through all the four hundred years of her history, was the Order’s penance, willingly undergone, below suns hotter than Malta’s. This was how they fought; this was how they suffered; this, when they rode out to face the fanatical scimitars, was the other enemy they must overthrow. By Lymond’s side Nick Upton, vast as a staved barrel, whom neither tiltyard nor rowing bench could diminish, said in his direct English voice, ‘You’ll find us none so monkish on the field of battle.’

‘I have nothing against monks,’ said Lymond, his gaze scanning the rocks and dry cactus ahead; his senses attuned to noise far away from their galloping horses.

The bulbous, kindly face, fretted by the tongues of the Venetian helmet, turned again, jerking to the horse’s gait. ‘Are ye a Protestant?’ inquired Upton in a mild shout.

Diverted, Lymond this time looked round. ‘Because I haven’t clamoured to become a novitiate?’

The Turcopilier gave no direct answer. Instead he said, ‘Gabriel thinks a lot of you.’

‘I thought I talked too much for his comfort,’ said Lymond. ‘But I hear he has a ravishing sister. I must mend my ways.’

A surprisingly sweet smile crossed the Turcopilier’s face. ‘Nothing on earth can surprise or defeat Gabriel,’ he said. ‘As you will find out. But he would gladly welcome you—we all should—to our Church.’

Ahead, minute in the shining air, was a sparkle of sunshine on jewels and drawn steel. ‘O England, thou garden of delights,’ said Lymond, lyrically intent. ‘Set aside these thoughts of religion, and let us go and chase Turks.’

*

The Janissaries screamed: that was true. Not when they were hit; not when the two-handed sword slit through the puffed silk of the turban, nor when the fire-hoops of wood rubbed with brandy touched the light robes of muslin and silk and flared orange in the white sunlight—robe, sash, beard, eyebrows and turban a white cypress of flame. Then they called on Allâh, rapt in ecstasy, and died fixed on certain Paradise and an eternity in the light. But before they were attacked; when the parties moving inland from Marsamuscetto with their superb hackbuts from the Hungary wars, their bows, their scimitars, their jewelled daggers, raced onwards from the firing of a hovel, the burning of stored corn and carob seeds, the tearing
down of a lemon grove or a vine to see the knights approach—then the Jannissaries gave their high, wailing cries and gleaming teeth and black eyes, streaming herons’ plumes and black moustaches under the golden crescent and three-cornered silk banners, airy as their white robes in the cruel heat, the Janissaries charged, and the dark Imams urged on the Faithful.

With Upton, tireless in full armour, swinging sword and axe in the lead, knights and Maltese came across band after band on that ride, burning, destroying, plundering the poor wreckage of the empty pueblos on their way to the plains of Curmi to muster for battle. Because of Upton, the Ottoman landing parties came to Curmi not in well-groomed companies, but angry and harried by stinging attacks, by the small, orderly army of Upton’s light horse.

And the knights endured remarkably well. Rarely conscious of them as faces, Upton was yet aware that both they and the Maltese like a single arm obeyed his desires; that no order of his remained ambiguous, that no slip went unrectified; and later, drawing them together among the low hills at the edge of the great plain, where to cries and drumbeats the white figures streamed and mingled, he realized that throughout he had directed through the mouth and limbs of the Scotsman, in his plated jerkin, riding back and forth at his side. And naturally, as it seemed to him, in acknowledgement of this powerful staff work at his shoulder, he said to Lymond, ‘We can do no more, once they have mustered, unless.…’

‘Unless we give the illusion of charging?’ said Lymond, answering the bold thought.

The lunacy of the notion was plain: Nick Upton wanted to feel his hands on a Turk. But there was some sense in it, too. Behind them were thirty knights and four hundred Maltese; in front, the rallying-ground of twelve thousand Turks. Not all had landed; not all had reached the plain; not all were as whole or as single-minded as when leaving their ships. It was possible that, without horses and heavy cannon ashore, they might not relish yet a pitched battle against the whole strength of the Order, as it might appear. The Order they would rightly expect to remain tight in St Angelo until besieged. The Turk might run. He might equally stand fast and attack. Nicholas Upton had no intention of crossing that plain, but he stood a good chance, if his bluff were called, of being chased all the way back to St Angelo.

Before odds so great, there was no advantage in too much delay or too much thought. Shouting as loudly as their dry throats would allow, and followed by a thunderous torrent of brown figures screeching, ‘Allâh! Allâh!’ in the very timbre of Barbary; deployed to look like more than they were and the vanguard of more still, the Knights of St John pounded down the low hills.

They were seen. For a moment, swirled like pond life under a cataract, the Turkish troops leaped patternless about the wide plain. Then, perceptibly, they began to move purposefully, to coalesce, to stream slowly, scimitars flashing, in a single direction. Nicholas Upton put out an arm and, obedient, the cavalcade behind him reduced speed. There was no need to hurry; only to give the illusion of haste. The Turks were running away.