The Disorderly Knights (19 page)

Leaving the plain, hazed with their dust, they ran back: back through the smoking ruins of Maltese farm and
casal
; back through Birchircara; back to the weedy rocks sliding under gloved feet, the salt crusting their gauzy brocades, the stinging air cracking gaped lips. They ran to their boats and rowed swiftly, accurately, sullenly (for someone had commanded them not to take risks) back to their ships.

Hearts thudding; parched with excitement, with heat, with relief, the knights followed. Not so fast that they overtook the main body of Ottomans, but fast enough to separate and squash each small company of stragglers, to gnaw at the slippered heels of the army until it slid into the sea.

They had only begun this work when Nick Upton, visible only as shining red skin between steel and steel of his helmet, gave a violent gasp and let all his plated bulk slither sideways, so that his horse stumbled and stopped. His hand quick on the bridle, Lymond twisted Upton’s beast round and supported the man, pinning his own horse hard; feeling the steel burn his hands through Upton’s fine scarlet surcoat with its dusty white cross. Then, as fighting broke out suddenly on their left flank and someone called him, he consigned the great burden, deftly, to other arms, and drew Upton’s men onwards without him. There was no balm he could offer Upton but rest while the fighting continued. And the Turcopilier’s company followed him, their swords bloody, their horses lathered with sweat, and beat the invader to the edge of the sea.

They came back, when it was over, to the same spot: weary, jubilant but with time now for concern. They had unbuckled Nicholas Upton’s armour and he lay still on the ground, great belly upwards, eyes shut, his face puffed and glazed by the sun; his frame shaken by shuddering sighs. Francis Crawford knelt, holding his pulse for a moment; then rising without comment, gave all the necessary instructions. The Turcopilier did not waken when four men heaved his inert body into the sling, nor did his stertorous breathing change on the slow ride back to Birgu. To the knights who rode out from the arched gateway to greet him; to all those who pressed at their sides as they rode up the steep crowned streets of the town, Lymond made the same answer. ‘Sir Nicholas has no wound. He is a fat man over-exerting himself under a tropical sun while carrying
a hundred pounds of plate armour. Blame the sun. Blame the armour. Blame your own numbskull habits. Blame the courage of a man with a heart a good deal bigger than his body ever became. But don’t blame the Turks. The Order of the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta killed this one.’

In fact, Sir Nicholas Upton of England died later that evening, in his white-curtained bed in the hospital, his face turned to the doors of the Chapel of the Most Holy Saint. A moment later the French physician, laying down the silver cup engraved with the arms of de Homedès, rose and went quietly out, while the Prior continued in a low voice to recite the offices, and de Villegagnon, Blyth and the two knights closest to him in his years on Malta knelt beside the Turcopilier and prayed.

The ludicrous death of the fat knight was the only loss that day. Lymond had brought back his company of three hundred and more without greater loss than scars and arrow-pricks; and Gimeran, in ambush across the water among the rocks of Mount Sciberras, had surprised the Turkish Admiral’s galley itself sailing close in to reconnoitre, and had fired on it, causing the crew to drop oars in disorder and eventually to retreat. Sinan Pasha, furious, had ordered a landing on Mount Sciberras to engage the small party of knights, but having done what damage they could, prudently Gimeran’s men had withdrawn, and re-embarking on their skiffs, had crossed safely back to Birgu.

Since when St Angelo, inspired by the Grand Master, had rung with the Spanish knight’s praises. Jerott Blyth, who saw both homecomings and watched Lymond turn away, his men dispersed, after Upton’s sagging stretcher had been borne through the pomegranate-wreathed door of the hospital, overtook him on the way back to Gabriel’s. ‘Well?’

Crawford of Lymond, Comte de Sevigny, who had respected Nicholas Upton, met this studied nonchalance blankly. ‘For all I know, excellent. Hercules, as you observe,
brûla son corps, pour se rendre immortel
. For the rest, you could scarcely claim yet they were blooded. But they lost a prime lot of weight.’

*

Very soon after that a skiff, unseen, put off from the Turkish flagship at anchor in Marsamuscetto Bay; and presently, their jewels bright in the sun, Sinan Pasha and his officers climbed that rocky peninsula where, hours before, Gimeran’s party had stood, and in their turn looked across Grand Harbour to the fortress of St Angelo, high on its sea-girt rock, with the town of Birgu behind.

And, ‘Is
this
the castle which thou toldest the Grand Seigneur
might so easily be taken?’ said Sinan Pasha, white between turban and beard, to the square and silent Dragut at his side. ‘Surely,’ said Sinan Pasha bitterly, ‘the eagle could never have chosen the point of a steeper rock for her eyrie.’

Then the seamed, lashless eyes of Dragut surveyed them; surveyed Salah Rais his fellow corsair and Sinan the Jew his general, and closed as the flat, turbaned face with its grey spade-beard clenched in a smile.

‘Warriors of the Faith, why then are we here?’ said the old man agreeably. ‘The Unbelievers who harry the Edifice of God are within the Fort St Angelo, there before thee. Is thy quarrel with peasants and fishermen? God the Master of Worlds requires thee to cleanse that vile rock of its reptiles. God,’ said Dragut coldly, ‘and the shadow of Allâh on earth, the Sultan Suleiman Khan, son of the Sultan Selim Khan, son of Sultan Bayezid Khan, will meet failure with the righteous anger that slays.’

And in the council of war which followed, under the flagship’s silken canopy, Dragut the Drawn Sword of Islâm and sworn enemy of the Knights of St John, partly prevailed. Tripoli was to be their main objective. Suleiman’s order to his general had been to take Malta and Gozo if he could; but to risk nothing that would endanger the taking of Tripoli.

But first, the Emperor Charles was to be given a last chance. So, sailing beforehand to Sicily, Sinan Pasha had reminded the Viceroy of the treaties binding Charles and himself, and had asked to receive back in good faith the Sultan’s former city of Bône.

Temporizing; all too clearly temporizing until the fine sailing days should pass and the fleet be constrained to set out harmlessly for the Sublime Porte, the Viceroy replied that having no advice on that score, he must refer the case back to his Master.

It was his last chance; Malta’s last chance; Tripoli’s last chance. Silently, the envoy had bowed himself out; silently, Sinan Pasha had heard the news and, lifting anchor that night, had turned south and burned and plundered his way down the Sicilian coast. Suleiman’s orders had been to do nothing on Malta which would weaken the major onslaught on Tripoli. But they were not women, or bath attendants. To land on Malta and return empty handed would demean even these.

Dragut could not persuade them to attack Birgu and St Angelo; not even his tongue or his presence could stiffen Sinan Pasha to that. But he did convince them, at last, that they must march on Mdina, six miles to the north-west, where undefended, the Maltese nobles, their people and their riches would have recoiled in fright. And so, because of the courage of Nicholas Upton and Gimeran the Spaniard, the Chevalier George Adorne of Genoa, Commander of Mdina,
with thirteen thousand refugees, three Knights of St John and almost no other soldiers at all, suffered Sinan Pasha’s attack.

*

For thirty-six hours the little capital Mdina waited, gently mannered, classical in thought and in form; and perched like a rock-dove above the baked plains of Malta, looked for help which failed to arrive.

From the first indication of danger—the distant columns of steel, the hazy columns of smoke—they had done what they could. On the second evening, as prepared as he could ever hope to be, the Governor Adorne, with residents and refugees pressed into makeshift companies under his handful of knights, stood with his men and watched the Turkish army encamp.

Behind him were eight courageous attempts at ambush. Eight times he had sent out a knight with a troop of his ablest men to fire and harry the oncoming Turks. But three leaders were not enough; and he had no more. Bleeding, fly-coated, asleep on their feet, the knights were wholly spent. Sleepless himself for two days and a night and suffering, with them all, the spare allocation of precious water, Adorne began to feel his own grasp slackening. And in the thick-walled little city, with its five hundred square yards of quiet passages, of high walls and crested gateways and the squat Norman-towered cathedral packed with scared, silent people, hope was faltering too. At night, home-made ropes, despite all Adorne’s warnings, trickled over the parapets and hurried shadows, swarming over ungainly, with bundle or baby, dropped to the ditches outside Mdina and ran … ran to disembowelment and slavery, for now the Janissaries were in place, ringing the city, drawing silently closer and closer over the plain. Of the three hundred men, women and children who tried to leave Mdina on these two nights, none escaped.

So, as the last pure light slid under the sea and the fires of Islâm, like marsh magic, danced unbroken below, the Governor Adorne of Mdina sent a first and last appeal to the knights at St Angelo.

And the courier, a grim little Spanish lieutenant he could ill spare, got through. With an arm strapped to his sword belt and a cut in his thigh that showed the white bone when he knelt, the dogged messenger from the besieged capital got to Birgu while the stars were still hung like lamps in the warm, sea-washed night, and presently, standing before Juan de Homedès himself, listened as the Grand Master, calm, dry and sarcastic, reduced to trivia the news he had brought.

‘Insufficient leaders?’ said His Eminence, gently chiding. ‘But surely, great as is our calling, we must in humility remember that the
virtues of courage, leadership, faith, are not ours alone. Look among your native Maltese at Mdina, my child. Such an inducement to valour as they possess must rival our own deepest pledge.’

Monotonously, committed to incredible extension of his endurance, the lieutenant replied to each sally. ‘The Maltese in Mdina are frightened. They are untrained. Under the knights of St John—under a leader such as M. de Villegagnon there—they will fight as well as any in the world. But not alone. No longer alone.’

‘Each of us,’ said the Grand Master, his voice melancholy, his patch staring affrighted at the wall, ‘each of us in this terrible world must learn to fight, and to fight alone. This great Order of ours is the bastion of God in the eastern seas. By condoning the weakness of little men, we deny our sworn support to Holy Church. I can on my conscience send no one to Mdina.’

Soaking through breeches and hose, the dark blood rolled sluggish down the Spaniard’s leg. His face, white beneath the dirt and the sweat, was a mask, but for the persevering, fixed eyes. ‘Send M. de Villegagnon at least,’ he said. ‘Of all men, he will put heart into the city as she dies.’

‘Certainly, if M. de Villegagnon wishes, he may go,’ said Juan de Homedès unexpectedly. ‘Someone, in any case, must take our message back to Brother Adorne and you, my poor man, have done enough. You have persuaded us at least, you may be sure, of your courage and virtue. M. de Villegagnon will go to Mdina. Rest assured. All will be well. See to him, Brother,’ said the Grand Master lightly to the physician among those at his side, and made to rise.

He had underestimated the opposition.

‘Your Eminence.’ Determined and tender, it was Gabriel’s voice. ‘I beg you to spare the matter a moment more of your time. You are condemning M. de Villegagnon as well as the city of Mdina to death.’

The arid face was quite composed. ‘I condemn M. de Villegagnon to nothing. I have said he may go to Mdina if he so desires.’

‘He will obey your slightest wish, I am sure, whether he desires it or not,’ said Gabriel plainly. Unspoken, the words hung in the air. ‘
As will the twenty-five insubordinate knights you mean to send to sure death in Tripoli
.’ Aloud, he added, ‘But if we can spare M. de Villegagnon, we can spare more. I wish to go.’

‘And I! And I!’ At last, skilfully, he had released them. The clamour of voices rose from the two long tables, from Pilier and Grand Cross, from all the Order’s great officers.

Pityingly, Juan de Homedès looked at them. ‘Send the flower of the Order to Mdina? Is that truly your counsel?’

‘No,’ said de Villegagnon strongly. Standing, his vast bulk towering over the forgotten messenger, he spoke at last for himself. ‘No. I will go gladly. But if Mdina is to be saved, it will be saved not by peasants
but by men who fight for religion and honour, by the Knights of St John who adopted these people as their children when the Order made Malta its home. Keep your great officers. Keep your defences. Keep your posts at St Angelo firm. But spare me a hundred knights—knights of no great seniority, but men who would willingly lay down their lives to defeat the Turk, and who would know how to make Islâm pay dearly. Give me a hundred.’

Back in his carved seat leaned the Grand Master, his black hat tall above the grey, passionless face, the patch insouciantly staring. ‘I shall give you six,’ he said with extreme care. ‘Since to travel alone, and at such risk, is a burden I find I cannot lay on you, dear Brother. Take six, to be your companions.’

The sharp intake of shocked breath in the airless room was the only sound that met his remark. Suddenly Gabriel stood. But he was too late. De Villegagnon, looking straight at the Grand Master, had spoken his mind. ‘You are laying nothing on me and on the six men you speak of,’ he said, ‘but death without honour.’

The Grand Master rose. Smoothly, swiftly for so old a man, he rose to his feet, and from his dais looked down on them all, his beaked nose pallid, his sunken cheeks drawn in noble distaste. And this time, in his edged voice, just anger showed plain.