The Disorderly Knights (38 page)

It was the time then for plain speaking. ‘The world will learn,’ said the French Ambassador without preamble, ‘of this act of injustice and of the tainted coin of the Ottoman oath. By treaty these men and two hundred more were to go free and unmolested provided they laid down their arms. This was done, yet they lie, robbed, naked, suffering insult, torture and death at your gates. My lord and most Christian Majesty the King of France,’ said M. d’Aramon distinctly, ‘will require reprisals for each of his subjects so treated. The Order will exact the same for its knights. From henceforth, each of your officers, when captured, may look to pay the price in blood for this treatment.’

To de Seurre and others of his party, waiting in silence, the childish battle seemed endless. With the forced artistry of any man dealing long at the Supreme Porte, d’Aramon moved from threat to compliment, from compliment to appeal, from appeal to coaxing. And at length, as Sinan had probably intended all along, for the price of all the remaining royal treasure in d’Aramon’s galley, the General undertook to set free most of the knights and two hundred of the others arrested, provided that he chose these himself.

So, enthroned under the light canopies in the dreadful heat of the afternoon, Dragut and Salah Rais at his side, the Turkish General sat outside Tripoli and made his choice while the Ambassador watched.

Under the pointing finger the Marshal was liberated, to be lifted gently by de Seurre and d’Aramon’s nephew and helped to walk. One by one likewise the older French knights were unbound, whose injury might with justice mean reprisals. Two from Germany were freed; four from Italy. Then, moving away from the ranks of the Order, Sinan began to select from the men, women and children of Tripoli and the castle the oldest, the weakest, the poorest, as he had done at Gozo. And in due time, these were all taken away.

The screaming of the hundreds still left behind woke Jerott Blyth in the end to sun, to noise, to the sharp bonds on his hands and feet,
to empty sand on either side of him ending, farther off, in scattered figures like his own—de Poissieu, who had so often urged a fight to the death; the youngest and fittest of the French; some Italian knights from Charles V’s own states; and every knight of the Order belonging to Spain.

De Herrera’s fears had been fulfilled. The full venom of the Sultan was to fall on the subjects of the Emperor, his greatest enemy in Christendom.… Then Jerott saw that Gabriel knelt beside him.

‘Lie still, my son,’ said Graham Malett, and guided the other man back to lie in the shade of his own body. ‘D’Aramon is begging for your life. Sinan Pasha is threatening to keep back twenty knights who have roused his displeasure, to sell into slavery or to convert. If it’s any comfort to you,’ he added, in the loved and familiar tones of sanity and unshakable confidence, ‘you must have done an extraordinary amount of damage before they felled you, in order to qualify.’

‘I killed somebody, I think,’ said Jerott thickly. He was thinking: total contribution to the Religion, one man. It was like being sent to Purgatory for crushing an ant. ‘Are you all right? And everyone?’

‘You’ve had a bad crack on the head,’ said Gabriel gently. ‘Don’t you know? Your helmet has gone. D’Aramon and half a dozen of us are here to witness the … formal surrender. The rest have gone aboard the Ambassador’s galley. Your friend is among them, I believe. Or
was
among them.’

‘
Lymond?
’ Jerott sat up, his ears drumming, his eyes blind, and after a moment was able to see clearly Gabriel’s lightly-sunburnt, clean-shaven face, with the short, straight nose and the fine mouth in repose. Malett smiled.

‘M. le Comte de Sevigny. No aspersions on his extreme ability: he was captured by pure accident while trying to free his lady friend. Luckily, I believe Dragut recognized him, and for past services appears to have overlooked this adventure. He is free, as we are. As you will be—somehow.’

‘
Was
among the French party, you said,’ repeated Jerott with a kind of monotonous persistence. His head was splitting. ‘Where is he now, then?’

‘No one,’ said Graham Malett gravely, ‘should ever be certain of reading that young man’s mind, but if I were permitted to wager, I should expect to find him at this moment in the bay of Tripoli with a pirate called Thompson, preparing a deserted boat most effectively for sail.’

Afterwards, Jerott was to realize that in that short exchange Gabriel had shielded not only his body from the sun. Behind him, during this brief interval, the last shrewish discussion had ended between Sinan and d’Aramon on which Jerott’s life and the lives of
the men lying around him must hang—men who, less fortunate, were watching in spite of themselves the angry face and sharp gestures of the Jew.

Then d’Aramon alone, his face stark with strain, left the canopy and moving towards the scattered men on the ground, halted and raised his voice. In French, Spanish and Italian he spoke seven words only.

‘Brethren of the Order, you are free.’

By nightfall of that day, the 20th August, the Turkish ships lent by Sinan had taken on board the chosen two hundred, and most of the forty surviving knights of the garrison had embarked, Graham Malett and Jerott among them, on d’Aramon’s own three boats.

D’Aramon himself was not there. Stiffly, he sat flanked by his entourage at Sinan Pasha’s side in the great hall of Tripoli castle, lit from arch to arch as the knights had never dared light it, while outside turbaned Janissaries moved about the courtyard and battlements so lately crowded with six hundred Christian knights and soldiers and refugees; and hackbuts and cannon, destined to fight for the Religion, thundered and cracked in victory paeans to the skies.

On Sinan Pasha’s far side, close to the other leaders, Dragut, Salah Rais, the Aga Morat in shining tissues and winking gems, sat de Vallier, the vanquished Marshal, with his entourage; commanded like the Ambassador to do honour to the treaty in this celebration banquet of Islâm. As the curds and steaming mutton went round; the fruit, the fowl, the almond paste and the Fezzan dates passing before the Governor untouched, Nicolas de Nicolay wondered if the old man was struck even yet by the orderliness of this conquering army, to whom drunkenness was a sin; whose soldiers might rape, loot, torture, kill under orders but were forbidden, marching, to trample on roses; who neither lightly shouted nor lightly swore but five times a day gave recognition and thanks prostrate to their God. And the French King’s cosmographer thought of all he had seen crossing Tripoli that day—the turreted walk still fair and strong, with double ditches and false breaches; the wells and fountains, the food, the munitions, the artillery—and wondered how the world, bemused already by quarrelling reports, would judge the Order which had bloodlessly abandoned it.

They did not hear, through that interminable feast, the firing of the only guns still defending the Religion. At the little fort called the Châtelet, at the mouth of the bay, the Serving Brother des Roches alone had defied the call to surrender, and the thirty soldiers of the garrison who had replaced the Calabrians had rallied to support him.

It was, of course, suicide; but self-immolation with a purpose, selfless and gallant. Possession of the Châtelet meant virtual
command of the harbour, given possession also of the castle. Des Roches had three times refused Sinan Pasha’s command to deliver the fort intact. Instead, he was forcing the Turkish fleet to level the building about them.

The roof had partly gone, ten men had died and ammunition was running low when, just after dusk, a low black boat arrived soundlessly at the sea gate of the fortress, guided by the finest sea-robber in the region, and with him a man des Roches, hastily summoned, recognized. Amid the smell of cordite, the dust of crushed stone and mortar, the fumes of burning wood, the crash of the attacking batteries and the splintering explosion of the massive balls, the Châtelet was silently evacuated and the little garrison, spent, lacerated and dazed still with their own good fortune, delivered in the concealing darkness to d’Aramon’s own galley.

Thompson and Francis Crawford, with due modesty, came aboard last, swamped with low-spoken congratulations, and dropped with the others to concealment below, while the boat was lashed to the blind side of the galley’s decks. No one had seen. With d’Aramon’s own skiffs immobilized and the Tripoli shore guarded, no boat could have put out unseen that night … except one supposedly empty, already rocking deep in the empty bay, with the pirate Thompson aboard.

Jerott saw the two men briefly, Lymond’s pale hair gleaming in the flickering lamplight, but he was talking quickly to others: to the lieutenant of the boat in Captain Coste’s absence; to some of the senior knights. Then Graham Malett, from his fine height commanding the room, crossed to Lymond from where he had been speaking to des Roches. The two men briefly conferred. There was a swirl of movement, then men came running, and from the next hold came the sound of the storerooms being opened up.

With difficulty, Blyth burst through at last into the enchanted circle. ‘
What
…?’

‘Dear Jerott,’ said Lymond warmly. ‘Aren’t you at the banquet? After we saved the castle intact for them? They’d give you a bagnio and three tails for that if they knew. Wouldn’t you like three tails? I think we should go, Malett.’

‘Yes.…’ And as Lymond wilfully had not done, Gabriel swiftly explained. ‘In return for his services, Thompson is to have some of our seamen and stores, and is going to try to sail the brigantine out tonight to Malta, with news of the fall. Crawford and I will go with him.’

And as Jerott started to protest he said calmly, ‘My child, the Grand Master must know. The Turk may fall upon Malta next. We do not know. And he will believe me. If we do not escape, then nothing has been lost. But the fewer who try it the better.’ His
tranquil smile deepened. ‘We shall meet in Malta, Jerott. Pray for us all. God has been good tonight.’

‘Thompson has been rather splendid too,’ said Lymond cordially. and waved a cheerful farewell.

A little later, setting course east to hug the far shore of the bay, remote from all the moored Turkish fleet, from the little company of French boats and the borrowed vessels with the freed two hundred on board, a black bulk slid silently from the anchorage and set off under the opaque black sky. Jerott, straining his eyes, thought he could just see the green sparkle of her oars, and knew that in a little, they could have her sails up, and the south wind would send her home.

No one else saw her. At the end of its long, dark spit, the Châtelet burned, red flames glowing behind the broken black teeth of its walls, and the attacking guns had fallen silent round its pyre. Within the bay, the rockets and gunfire had ceased although the castle still blazed, and lights in Tripoli itself showed where parties of soldiers, methodically searching lane by lane, were stripping the houses.

In the castle hall, the banquet was drawing to a close, and soon d’Aramon and de Vallier with their exhausted train would be allowed to retire for what little night was left before their embarkation at dawn.

And below, in the guts of the castle, among the corridors and mosaics where the stifling battle with fire had been fought such a short time ago, the prisons were full of the people of Tripoli and Gozo who had not been released; who might, some of them, be ransomed; but whose fate tomorrow or the next day was almost certainly to be whipped out through the purlieus of the castle and driven to the slave market to be sold.

Among them, but in a room apart because of his rank and ill-health, was Galatian de Césel, Governor of Gozo, who would see no Christian face for many years to come. And at his side, carried off and concealed so smoothly, so plausibly by the casual duplicity of Dragut and the gentle persuasiveness of Graham Malett, was the woman from whom Francis Crawford had been saved.

Oonagh O’Dwyer heard the cannonades; breathed like poison the air of scornful triumph; saw and was scarred by the routine, contemptuous conduct of the victors. Silenced, snatched from her rope that night before Lymond could return, she knew it all for a trap. She and Lymond had never been intended to escape, only to be separated so that she might convincingly appear to die. Only through the unexpected strength of Lymond’s swimming had they travelled farther and run into more danger than anyone meant.

They were parted. The gentle, iron-willed man called Gabriel had achieved what after all he had never relinquished: an unblemished,
perhaps a noble future for another man. Lymond was free, as she herself wished, and had nothing now to tie him to these shores, to womanhood, to human failings and pleasures. Lymond was dedicated. And she … she was the sacrifice.

Then she heard Dragut’s step and rose dry-eyed, her black hair sheltering her inhabited flesh.

‘Come, Cormac’s brat!’ she said aloud. ‘You would not drown for me, and you will be sorry for it; for here I shall shape a scimitar for your fist.’

But when the step passed her door she lay down suddenly, sick, and closing her wide grey-green eyes, the colour of the sea, remembered a scented garden in France, and a quiet room, and Francis Crawford’s soft laughter in her ear, and his hands cool on her skin.

And as the brigantine, stretched light to the wind, parted the dark seas and fled, Oonagh O’Dwyer lay hard-pressed, shuddering, denying her grief under the roof which, by the sacred miracles of Mohammed, Allâh had conquered from God.

X
Hospitality

(
Malta, August 1551
)

W
ITH
silence for ballast, the three vessels of Gabriel de Luetz, Baron d’Aramon, recrossed the still blue sea to Malta twenty days after leaving it, bearing with them the forty surviving Knights Hospitallers who had sworn, with such fire, to defend the Religion to the death. Behind them under the flag of Islâm lay Tripoli, which had shown the white flag after five days’ assault. And along with them, by Ottoman leave, were the borrowed Ottoman ships carrying the two hundred elderly Tripolitains so mockingly freed with which, it was unfeelingly suggested, the Order could set up an old man’s hostel on Gozo.… It was not a talkative voyage.