The Disorderly Knights (13 page)

From a breathless sky, the sun beat on the soft yellow rock; the long spit on which the knights had reared their tall, elegant houses, face to face in a network of alleys that climbed the steep ridge on either side from the water’s edge, where the Maltese lived still, in cabin and hut. Emptied by the hour of siesta, Birgu presented itself boldly to the observer climbing silently between the splendour of grille-work and portico, cartouche, shrine and balcony; beneath the banners drooping still from the sunlight into the shadowy canyons where he walked.

First the private houses with their marble steps and beautiful knockers; the coat of arms fresh, the saints in their flowered niches bright with gold and enamel. Then the Auberges, Inns of the Eight Langues into which this Order of international knights had long ago been divided, so that each race could sleep and eat with its fellow
nationals and speak, in the Inn at least, the same common tongue.

Since 1540, the English Langue had been nominal only. There were ten English knights left on Malta, of whom Nick Upton was one. In London there were, openly, none. When King Henry VIII of England renounced the Pope, he renounced the Order of St John of Jerusalem as well; seized the Order’s rich Priory at Clerkenwell and all their possessions.

In Scotland the Priory was untouched, but only two of her knights remained in the convent: Jerott Blyth, at present in Sicily and now ranking as French; and Graham Malett, Knight Grand Cross and friend of the French, whose integrity that afternoon in support of de Villegagnon must sway even the Grand Master to believe that Malta and Tripoli would be attacked, and Malta and Tripoli must be saved.

Now, as Lymond, observing, quartered Birgu, only the Maltese stirred.

Between the palaces of the knights and those that served them; the convents, the elegant homes belonging to officers of the Church and the town; between the bakehouse and the shops of the craftsmen, the arsenals and magazines, the warehouses, the homes of merchants and courtesans, Italian, Spanish, Greek; past the painted shrines and courtyards scraped from pockets of earth with their bright waxy green carob trees, a fig, a finger of vine, a blue and orange pot of dry, dying flowers and a tethered goat bleating in a swept yard, padded the heirs of this rock, this precious knot in the trade of the world. Umber-skinned, grey-eyed, barefoot and robed as Arabs with the soft, slurring dialect that Dido and Hannibal spoke, they slipped past the painted facades to their Birgu of fishermen’s huts and blank, Arab-walled houses or to sleep, curled in the shade, with the curs in a porch.

A great Church and a race of defenders had come to bless the peasants and noblemen of Malta, who possessed a rock and the language Christ spoke. Bitterly silent both about the privileges they had lost and the laws they were now to fulfil, the Maltese were apt to recall that the Church was already theirs long before the knights came; and that before the knights came, they had no need of defenders.

At the highest point in the little walled town, overlooking the canal which separated Birgu from the big white fortress built on the point, Lymond paused to look, the high trill of caged singing birds the only sound in the heat.

Over there, in the high fort of St Angelo where the Grand Master lived, the knights and their suites would withdraw in time of siege. The cisterns in St Angelo would be their only water supply; the stone-lidded grain tanks their main source of food; the slaves in the rock dungeons verging the canal their charge and their danger.

In the long journey from Marseilles Lymond had not wasted his time. He knew that Malta had no rivers, no wells and only one or two sweet-water springs, of which Birgu had one. He knew that, scattered pueblos apart, the only other city of substance, poorly fortified, was the old walled capital of Mdina, guarding a broad, dusty plain nine miles northwards. He knew that Malta’s spoonfuls of Sicilian topsoil sustained cotton and melons, figs, vines, olives with difficulty; and that her corn, her biscuit meal, her meat, her wine, her powder all came from Sicily, or Naples, or Candia. Without her own ships, or the Emperor’s fleet, a long siege would fall hard on the island.

Thinking; analysing; ignoring his soaked clothes and the baked stench of goat and stale food and human clothing, of oil and strong cheese and salt fish and the pervasive, peppery veiling of incense, he turned and looked between the fretted white houses to where Galley Creek, dazzling silver and blue, joined the long deepwater fjord of Grand Harbour.

Opposite and very near, on the piled rock of L’Isla, the scattered white houses hugged patches of green; the silver-grey of olives, the dense green of pine and carob, the serrated embroidery of date palms. It was a long way from the chameleon summer of the Scottish Border; from the costly and courtly graces of the Loire. In this community of dedicated knights, in this historic, tarnished Order, set among brothels and a devout, sullen archaic race of Phoenicians on their rock halfway between Europe and Africa, he had unravelled first all that was stupid and petty and high-handed about these complacent aristocrats, toughened and coarsened by endless coarse war; their intelligence besotted with the syrups of religion and by the anaesthesia of the Order’s thousand rigid rules.

But then, equally of purpose, he had left the hospital and the Church till the last. Now he turned and walked back to Holy Infirmary Square and the big building fronting the street and running down to the rocks at its back where, by permission of the French Pilier, who was also Grand Hospitaller of the Order, Lymond was admitted to the halls of mercy of Birgu.

They showed him everything. He saw the kitchens where sweating men, desiccated with heat and work, ladled chicken broth from the copper vats into silver bowls; the dispensary with its rows of majolica jars, its apothecaries and quiet novices working without siesta, powdering and mixing to the chant of prayers. He walked past the rows of beds, past knights sick of wounds and crushed limbs, of dysentery and enteric, of pox and sweating disease. He passed through the rooms where Maltese lay uncomplaining, and Moors; slaves and free men; poor and rich; of any faith and no faith. In poverty, in chastity, in obedience, the knights and novices toiled, in
their thin hospital robes, side by side with the surgeons, and did not even look up.

Then he left, and walked down through the sloping town square to the slumbering quayside and along the water’s edge until he came to the steps, flight on flight to his left, leading up to the Order’s Church of St Lawrence. He climbed these and went in.

Black vault in the white glare of the day, it gave him nothing at first but incense and coolness and a murmurous silence. Far within, something sparkled in a chance ray of the sun. Then he saw the pricks of tiered candles, the flowers and the flags, the painted ceiling, the gold altar canopy, the statues, the shrines and the tombs. And on the ranks of toffee-brown pillars, the Cross of the Order twinkling, pinned to the marble.

The church was full. On the diced marble floor there was no room even to kneel. And Lymond stayed there longest of all, without speaking, without moving; scanning the bowed heads among the gold and the marble; the raised faces showing age and patience, fear, compassion, timidity, conviction, strength. Of the five hundred Knights of the Sovereign Order of St John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, of Malta, most of those living today in Birgu were here, praying for deliverance; praying for the survival of the Faith; praying for strength to endure.
Malta fidei propugnaculum
; Malta, Bulwark of the Faith, was before him, here.

As silently as he had come, Lymond left. Walking back to Gabriel’s house through the graveyard and the steep sandy lanes, he marshalled dispassionately his information and his emotions on what he had seen. Centuries ago, appealing for a new Crusade, the cry had been ‘
Dieu le veut!
’—God desires it.

But which God? Francis Crawford inquired pensively of each silent street of closed doors. For if your Moslem is also devout and self-denying, loyal and fervent, courageous and tolerant, and believes that to dispatch a Christian in battle will send him straight to the Red Apple of Paradise, then in the forthcoming attack, with no professional, no ideological flaw on both sides, sheer weight of numbers must tell.

He said nothing of all this to the Chevalier de Villegagnon, whom he found already returned in Graham Malett’s house. But presently Gabriel himself came in and, halting in the doorway, looked first at Lymond and then at his fellow knight. ‘Have you told him?’

The Chevalier, rising, shook his head and Gabriel, gentle irony in his voice, addressed Lymond direct. ‘You are to appear, M. le Comte, along with the Chevalier here in an hour’s time before the Grand Council to corroborate M. de Villegagnon’s report from France. You will see us, as I am sure you would prefer, at our worst.’

Durand de Villegagnon, a deeply passionate man behind a shell of
militarism and law, looked uneasy. Lymond did not. He said, ‘I try to rely not on feelings, but facts. At the cost, for example, of sundry murmurs from my insessorial arches, I have been surveying Birgu—all of Birgu. The Conventual Church and the hospital, as well as the magazines.’

‘And you would not mind being carried into either?’ said Gabriel gravely.

‘Not with eternity in Paradise assured for every Ottoman wound.’

‘Someone,’ said Gabriel, entering the room fully at last and kneeling, from habit, before the old and much-travelled shrine, ‘once called us mercenaries of the spirit. True, of course. But we are all in life risking one thing to gain another. Is it better to fight for vanity, ambition, money, revenge, pique …?’

‘Would you fight to cleanse the Qur’ân from the earth if the reward for death were the torments of Hell?’ Lymond said.

There was a long pause. De Villegagnon, heated, drew breath to reply and thought better of it. Outside, as the violence of the sun subsided, life began to stir in the narrow street. The shadows moved. ‘I,’ said Gabriel at length, looking directly at Lymond, his eyes calm as a child’s, ‘have always sinned and never, consequently, deserved more than a hope of Paradise. But if I had, and by fighting the Turk I must give it up … then my answer is, yes. For those that follow me, that they might taste Heaven, I would fight, as I mean to fight; and suffer, as I should be made to suffer. No man could do more.’

‘One man did not do as much,’ said Lymond tranquilly, and saw Gabriel’s fair skin stained red from neck to brow. But instead of replying he crossed himself, and turning to the crucifix on the altar, bent in prayer.

In a grip that bruised, de Villegagnon drew Crawford of Lymond from the room and in the dim white hall confronted him, outrage in his voice. ‘What devil possessed you? The like of that man is not to be found in Europe, and you shame him before his own shrine?’

Mild surprise on his face, Lymond turned. ‘I think Graham Malett can fight his own battles,’ he said. ‘It merely seemed as well to discover whether we are fighting for power or for Holy Church. For on our convincing the Grand Master on that one issue, the whole future of the Order in Malta and Tripoli quite certainly depends.’

And, ‘He is right,’ said Gabriel later when, brusquely, de Villegagnon conveyed explanation and apology together. ‘On your integrity and mine, on the integrity of la Valette and de Lescaut and all the Knights of the French Langue—on our unshakeable faith in the Order will this outcome depend.’

*

‘It is obvious to a child,’ Grand Master Juan de Homedès was saying without moving, without turning his thin neck, his thin temples, his thin nose and eyeless socket clothed in a patch above the black and silver Aragonese beard, ‘to a bantling, that Dragut has no ill intent towards Malta and Tripoli. It is France he visits with so vast a fleet—where else? D’Aramon, the French Ambassador to Turkey, awaits them, we know, with muleloads of gold. They wintered once before at Toulon—they do it again. Your master the Constable of France is mistaken, M. le Chevalier de Villegagnon—and so are you.’

In rank as great as a Cardinal Deacon; peer to princes; ‘cousin’ to the kings of Europe and answerable only to the Pope, the 48th Grand Master of the Sovereign Order of St John and Prince of Malta was an arrogant old Spaniard, dedicated to Christ, nepotism and the Emperor Charles V. In the byways of Rome he would have been a holy old man, no better and not much worse than the rest of the College of Cardinals. On Malta he was still holy and old, but he was also a selfish and unduly vain patriarch in a post requiring a saint; and he was dangerous.

Within the thick, chaste walls of the hall, lukewarm as the sun beat down outside on the white fort of St Angelo, the thirty members of the Grand Council—Bishop, the Prior of the Church, the Piliers of the eight Langues, several Priors and Conventual Bailiffs and four Knights Grand Cross—sat at two long, parallel tables, linked at top by the desk of the Vice-Chancellor, who with two priests at his side was their Secretary.

Beside the desk, and raised above it on a dais, was the canopied throne of His Eminence Grand Master de Homedès, the red silk banner of the Order with its plain, eight-pointed Cross hung above. Every man present, including de Villegagnon, erect in the space between the double rows of knights and facing the Grand Master, wore black. And alone of all the men present, the two priests and Lymond, waiting outwith the rectangle at de Villegagnon’s back, did not qualify for the holy white Cross.

Malta and Tripoli have nothing to fear. It was all de Homedès would say. In vain de Villegagnon repeated the warning sent by the Constable de Montmorency out of the esteem and affection he bore to an illustrious Order which the Grand Master de l’Isle Adam, his uncle, had governed in most perilous times. In vain did Gabriel, with courteous good sense, remind the Grand Master that according to the Order’s own brigantine, sent to Morea, all the rumours of the Levant agreed that Dragut had armed for an attack on the knights.

Lymond, who happened to know that d’Aramon’s mission, far from welcoming the Turk to Toulon, was to return to Turkey and persuade the Sultan to relieve the Emperor Charles quietly of Bône,
North Africa, could not say so. And de Villegagnon, questioned narrowly and more acidly still about the true French relations with Turkey, could only reply too coldly, too loudly, that if the Turk was acting at the instance of the French King, none knew of it; but that Bône was taken from Suleiman, over the Emperor’s pledged word and with the knights’ help, and that Malta would suffer for it.