The Disorderly Knights (49 page)

There was a small silence.

‘There is, I think,’ said Gabriel, in his rich, gentle voice, ‘nothing that any of us would ask better to do.’

*

‘
Why?
’ said Adam Blacklock later, when for the first time he and Guthrie were thrown together alone. ‘Why the hell did he do it?’

‘Do what?’ said the philosopher without excitement. ‘Throw down the gauntlet to the St John’s men? He had to make his position clear, or they’d feel in conscience bound to convert or crusade or otherwise reserve their armchair in heaven. Why take Gabriel at all? He had to, my minikin fiddler with chalks; he had to, or he would have lost all his best men including Jerott Blyth who one day is going to be nearly as good as himself. Don’t worry,’ said Alec Guthrie comfortably. ‘Don’t worry. Of all men Graham Malett knows how to exercise patience and tact.’

‘Of c-course,’ said Adam Blacklock gloomily. ‘But does Lymond?’

*

The last comment was made by Lord Culter when, riding to St Mary’s in the first winter frost, he haled his brother swearing from the tiltground to entertain him before the fire. Sitting down, ‘I don’t care a damn,’ said Richard Crawford calmly, ‘if it’s three o’clock and you’ve only got another bloody hour of daylight.
You
don’t need the practice and the ground’s like iron. You can lower their dignity some other way. What’s the rush anyway? You can’t fight anywhere till the spring.’

‘We shan’t be ready till the spring,’ said Lymond grimly. He picked up the helmet he had hurled down on entering and gave it to his steward, who unasked had brought in mulled wine; then sat opposite his brother and running a metal-blackened hand through his hair said in a different tone, ‘What a hell of a welcome. I’m sorry. But there’s so much still to do outside before the weather closes, and we have to tackle all the dreary minutiæ on weapons and theory where all your knightly warriors start losing their tempers and you have to go through a deadly routine of light relief with competitions and war jokes and community singing, and long, long stories of rape and battle and Generals I have Known.’

‘You’re lying in your teeth,’ said Richard cheerfully. ‘You’ve hand-picked that little band of sophisticates, and you know it. Gabriel alone is pretty well worth paying to hear. Has he been back?’

‘Twice. He had Joleta to see, and Sandilands has got him a house in Edinburgh, in one of the Order’s tenements. He’ll soon be able to spend most of his time at St Mary’s.’

‘I’m glad.’ After a moment, as Lymond said nothing, Richard added, ‘So is your doting mother. You certainly won’t have noticed, but he is what you have always needed: your perfect complement at last. You may match up to this man, Francis, but you’ll have to stretch yourself for the first time to do it.’

‘Too late. You find me on the recoil,’ said Lymond briefly. ‘How’s Mariotta?’

‘Don’t be a fool.’ Richard wasn’t to be put off. ‘For God’s sake, Francis, don’t throw this chance away. Meet him halfway at least. He had Joleta
in tears
over having quarrelled with you, and he worships her and she him.… Incidentally, my friend, what was that disagreement about? Lady Jenny said the furniture was matchwood, and Joleta wouldn’t explain.’

‘She needed a lesson,’ said Lymond shortly. ‘So do you. I changed the subject a moment ago because if one more person thrusts the Archangel Graham Malett down my throat I shall vomit.’

‘I daresay,’ said Richard Crawford in the mildest tone he possessed. ‘After all, he is the first master you have ever had.’

And was silent, abashed, as Lymond, his eyes wild with anger, rose to his feet like a cat and twitching the glass from his brother’s lax hand, tossed wine and vessel into the fire.

‘Drink to it, you and he,’ he said.

*

In March, on her bed beside the spilling fountain in the corsair Dragut’s beautiful seraglio, where the filigreed walls with their prayers to Allâh opened on the sunlit aviaries and the parks beyond, watered with cisterns and planted with pine and cypress and weeping willow and the blazing flowers of Africa, Oonagh O’Dwyer gave birth to her son.

Patience was something her Irish soul would never learn. But through the eternity of that winter, destitute in luxury, solitary amid hundreds, she clung to one thing. This was by her own will. Her own decision that she had cast off Cormac O’Connor, the debased son of kings, whose hectoring, black-visaged face she would see again in her child and his. Her own assent had freed Francis Crawford to return to Europe and his own arrogant destiny.

Dragut, old and princely corsair, had troubled her little and she
had learned to respect him, and after Galatian, the pathetic weakling, to find no hurt to her pride in serving him. She had soon found that he was little in the palace, wintering near the Sultan and putting to sea at the first sign of fighting weather. In the seraglio she slept in silk and had pages and slaves black and white to fill every wish; and occasionally Güzel would come, whom she had never seen unveiled: Güzel the jewel of Dragut’s old age, who alone went with him to Djerba, to Constantinople, to the winter palace at Aleppo; who spoke English and wherever she moved, in little clouds of serving boys, with her women, her slaves, her poets and singers, her artists and guards, her musicians and dancers, was surrounded, always, by laughter.

It was Güzel the anonymous, with her fleeting, uninformative visits, who had kept Oonagh’s tough pride alive; prevented her from hammering the foul feet in her belly which thrust jumping through her tender skin day and night; the great skull and round buttocks and tight fists that squeezed and pressed the mills of her life into whining disorder; the interloper who deprived her of rest, of thought and of all delicate things.

Then, as the fretting crystals over her bed stirred in the first breeze of March, she felt her burden eased. She ate, and walked, and planned for when the swollen by-blow would be gone, and her mind and body her own. When the welcome, murmuring ache began she was inspired, relieved, exhilarated, and bore it in triumph until dusk. But when the gentle, timeous aches became elastic agony, and her monstrous young raped mind and spirit from her again, she wrestled alone in the dark under her silken sheets until, at the moment when suddenly she was afraid to be solitary, Güzel’s voice said in Arabic, ‘Now!’

And the room sprang into blazing light; and the commotion of many voices, the hiss of steam, the chink of china and silver, the grip of kind hands and the tone of friendly cheer, encouragement and delight suddenly warmed and melted her cold heart.

Time, excited, agonizing, magnificent time flew, to the lilt of Güzel’s voice. The frenzy mounted, mounted and exploded in a vast, irresistible burgeoning. From between Güzel’s ringless, capable hands came a string of brief, mellow cries; silence, and then a small, clear renewal of complaint, and two feet, blue-mottled morsels of flesh, kicked lost in the limitless air.

Oonagh’s child had been born. It was a son, small-boned and perfect, with skin as white as new milk within a day of its coming, and hair downy gold as a chick’s. It could not, in a thousand miraculous nights, have been begotten by Cormac O’Connor.

‘
May God grant thee prosperity
,’ wrote Dragut Rais to Sir Graham Malett in Scotland, fingering the smile in his grizzled beard as he
paced up and down in front of his scribe. ‘He that fulfils his oath is thrice blessed. The woman from Ireland, on being brought to birth of her child, has through the goodness of Allâh been granted a fair son with hair gold as corn.

‘His breeding being therefore ignoble, I offer the child to thyself for the paltry sum of a thousand écus. Less I could not take for the trouble we have had to safeguard his life, his mother wishing him dead. Should misfortune divide thee from thy purchase, we shall permit her to kill him, since only Alläh knows in whose tent he was engendered. The woman I sell.’

The reply came when the baby was seven weeks old, naked in its basket of cotton, with new-grown golden lashes round newly-smiling blue eyes. The packet enclosed ten thousand écus. ‘Keep the woman and treat her well,’ the message enjoined, ‘with this money for her well-being and as the price of the child. Rear the boy, I beg you, by the God we each serve, until I may come for him, or make further petition; and may the Most High reward you.…’

And firmly and clearly, Graham Malett had signed.

VI
T
he
H
and on the
A
xe

(
St Mary’s, 1551/2
)

C
AREFULLY
as a Hospitaller nursing his sick, Gabriel said no word to Francis Crawford of the birth of the child called Khaireddin; nor did he take any steps to send word to Cormac O’Connor, although he knew where he was. The only person he told, because he was closer to her than to any other alive, was his sister Joleta, as she sat brushing the brilliant hair back from her flushed skin, snatching periodically as tantalizingly he held her long ribbons just out of reach.

‘
Brute!
Give me them! So he still thinks the woman died at Tripoli?’ said Joleta, who as Lymond had found was not easily shocked.

‘Yes. And it is better that he should. There is work for him here that matters much more. In any case, I believe the attachment was only a chance one: he did not look to me passionately involved. He could be, so easily, and with the wrong person. I wish you were on better terms with him, Joleta.’

Her colour high, she snatched at the ribbons again, and when she missed, flung down her brush. ‘I have tried. I went down to that arctic encampment to apologize, and had to wait three hours to
see
him. He said I impinged on his Happy Hour.’

Startled, her brother loosed a shout of deep laughter. ‘His
what
?’

‘His Happy Hour. When he dries the tears of all the sad soldiers he chastised in the morning. Melancholy Man into Sanguine Man in an hour. He’s good, isn’t he?’ said Joleta suddenly, her eyes bright.

Gabriel nodded, watching her.

Aware of it, she bent, in a stirring of gauze, to retrieve her hairbrush and, straightening, met his gaze with her own. ‘Is the baby his?’

There was a pause. Then Gabriel said, ‘It isn’t Cormac’s. That is certain. Nor is it de Césel’s: it must have been conceived in France, before the lady and the Governor met. My charming Francis’s behaviour in France last year was notorious, as you know; and Oonagh O’Dwyer was one of the favoured many. But even Cormac
O’Connor, as jealous an unseated princeling as any I know, does not accuse her of being any other man’s mistress. Yes, the child is of Francis Crawford’s blood, and the only one, I suspect.… He has taught you a lesson, has he?’ said Gabriel gently. ‘That not everyone is prepared to be entranced?’

Joleta sat upright, her blue eyes huge. ‘He is the most conceited.…’

Gabriel laughed. ‘Because he finds your friendship so easy to resist? Your charms, sweetheart, are ageing, or you haven’t properly tried. Convert him for me,’ said Graham Malett, and leaning forward, slipped the lovely ribbon under her hair, and closing it round her throat, drew his sister forward and kissed her. ‘Convert him. But don’t, Joleta, tell him of Khaireddin out of pique. Or I shall be angry.’ And he kissed her again.

It had been a hideous winter. In place of the normal season in Scotland, the weather stayed open only till December, when the last of the knights from Malta arrived.

Then the frost came, from a metallurgical sky, and by dawn the last of the leaves, dry and fluted as walnuts, lay in unstirring heaps on the white roof of the forge.

An oven cracked, and the man responsible was flogged, for Lymond had made his provisions against the weather, as against everything else. What he could not protect were the knights with their thin blood, coddled with long years of Mediterranean sun. Even Gabriel was livid with cold, out night after night training and being trained Until his child-like skin was roughened and raw with open sores, and his dry, calloused hands bled. In the end, since Gabriel himself would not, Adam Blacklock went to Lymond and said, ‘S-send me tonight. Sir Graham has had enough. In any case, he has nothing, surely, to learn about strategic night work.…’

‘Not in winter. Not in Scotland. Whereas you know about both; which is why you are not going. Has Sir Graham complained?’

‘No.’ Lymond, bright-edged at the top of his training, would be unaffected, thought Blacklock, if a new Ice Age arrived. He went on, his long, spaniel’s face expressionless, ‘He won’t refuse, until he comes down with pleurisy. And if he does, you’ll lose the goodwill of half of your men.’

‘So I might,’ said Lymond, taking thought. ‘But I understood his portable altar had the matter in hand.’

The artist said nothing. Lymond, who was in his own room dressing to go out himself, paused, still holding the sword-belt Salablanca had handed him, and enveloped Adam Blacklock in an exceedingly shrewd blue gaze. ‘But you don’t think it a good idea,’ he added.

‘On several counts.… No,’ said Blacklock.

‘Well, thank God it was you,’ said Lymond. ‘If Jerott Blyth had
brought me the self-same appeal I should have been strongly tempted to kick him out by the window. As it is, you may tell Sir Graham, Jerott, the other officers and as many of the camp as may care to take notice, that we
les executeurs de la justice de Dieu
hereby exempt the Chevalier from night exercises from now onwards, and from all other protracted training in the field. Plummer will lead tonight.’

‘He won’t like that,’ said Adam drily. ‘Lancelot likes his comforts.’

‘Then he will require to place the blame, won’t he,’ said Lymond encouragingly, ‘where the blame is due?’

The changed conditions, though a matter of bitter self-recriminations by Graham Malett himself, led to an instant improvement in his well-being, and the hard training did the rest to restore the tone he had lost since leaving Malta. With the challenge to his endurance withdrawn he also felt able, for the first time, to leave St Mary’s as he had expected to do from time to time, to visit Joleta and Torphichen and establish some sort of centre at his chambers in Edinburgh.