The Disorderly Knights (31 page)

Aloud, he said, ‘I don’t know. It seems unlikely. He is nothing if not professional. May I have leave to hunt also, sir?’ said Jerott suddenly. ‘I may be able to follow his mind. And on my Religion and my honour, I shall deal with you honestly.’

For a long moment, incredulously, he thought that the old man was going to refuse. Then the Marshal nodded, and with a wave of distaste, removed Blyth and the subject from the room. Jerott did not know, as he set off swiftly through the old castle, stopping at post after post, that he was being followed. His whole attention was on discovering the whereabouts of the Calabrians. Within a very few minutes he had satisfied himself that every man of them had gone.

Of all people, these country lads would never make for the Turks. For them there was one hope, revived now for the first time since the glare of the shore guns had ceased: the brigantine. To sail her, more than eight men were needed. Therefore the Châtelet must be involved: some kind of rendezvous between the soldiers in des Roches’s isolated fortress at the end of the spit, and the few men in Tripoli. Somewhere, these men must be waiting with stolen munitions for the signal to join forces; perhaps men from the Châtelet were coming to help carry the powder and guns.… Where would they meet?

In Tripoli, the deserted city, whose walls now offered only token resistance, where there were no women to scream and point, no knights to hinder them. And in Tripoli, he knew exactly where.

To run, in the July night, was to slide through a glutinous coating of sweat, tracking down neck and spine and buttocks. For the sake of nimbleness and silence Jerott wore no mail, but had snatched up a dark jerkin to throw over his chemise; his sword belt and dagger he wore always. Because he had no need to avoid guards and gates and because, when he wanted to, he could move very fast indeed, he reckoned on reaching his destination very soon after the escaping Calabrians and long before de Herrera’s men, grimly exhausting every possible refuge back at the castle.

If he had any doubts, padding through the uneven streets between the darkened houses, with abandoned awnings above broached with stars through their tatters and the rustle of rats and starving dogs in the thick blackness underfoot, he dismissed them. Whoever unlocked the arsenal doors had first killed the guard for the keys, and on that ring, he knew, was the key which had freed Lymond … Lymond, who alone of the garrison had been at pains to cultivate the exiles, who had just publicly championed the helpless. He ran through the
empty slave market avoiding the dealers’ empty platforms under the dark arches by memory, and out into the open.

Ahead, the square turret of the Lentulus Arch reared against the wide sky in a glimmer of Corinthian marble; and not far away, he could see the double row of pillars and the wreck of a tower which de Vallier had said had once been a mosque.

Beside it was the building he wanted, its strange big windows shuttered, and no lights to be seen. Slipping from wall to wall, he started to cross to it, blending into the dark, waiting for the sentry who would almost certainly be there. Then he saw him. There was only one, a shadow that had bulk, that breathed heavily against the distant flat popping sounds of desultory fire from the other side of the wall and the hush and hiss of the sea against the rocks outside.

The old tricks were often the best, especially with untried men like these. Jerott, groping, found a pebble at his feet and leaning forward, threw it as far as he could. It fell beyond the dark shadow with a thin chink, and the shadow moved once, and was still.

So was Jerott. Instead of stepping into the starlight as he had expected, his back presented to Jerott’s ready blade, the watcher was still there,
facing him
.

To move was to be seen. Blyth stayed where he was, the sweat cold on the roots of his hair, the sword-hilt wet in his hand, and after a moment of incomprehension realized that the dim blur ahead of him which was the unknown man’s face was now clearer; that in fact the guard, in conduct very far from that of a Calabrian peasant, was quietly approaching
him
.

The man had seen him; he knew he was alone. There was one corollary: the knife. As he saw the shadow lift its arm, Jerott flung himself sideways and forward, and a moment later with his left hand grabbed a muscular body wrapped in unexpected folds of cotton. With his right, he brought his sword down hard. There was a spark of fire, and his arm jarred. He had been parried by a dagger, a dagger which disappeared as Jerott, changing his grip, wrenched the fellow’s right arm behind his back and adroitly kicked his feet from under him. The man crashed backwards taking Jerott with him, sword in hand. He did not guess the other man had shifted his knife already from right hand to left until the hilt hit the bone of his wrist with a crack as he rolled on top of his victim. Then Jerott Blyth dropped his sword and clutched for life at the upraised fist holding the dagger below.

Apart from the chink of metal and the soft flurry of their movements, there had been little sound. Neither spoke: Blyth because he could not afford to draw the attention of the men inside the building; his opponent for most cogent reasons of his own. Holding the other man’s wrist stiffly at a safe distance, Jerott twisted violently to avoid
being kicked off; tried and failed because of the man’s robes to force him into any kind of lock; and after devoting a hard-pressed second to wrenching a gouging hand from his face, lost his grip, rolling over and over under the thickset body to come up, in a total exercise of strength, with his own knife at last in his hand.

At the same time, automatically, the forefront of his brain was assembling a number of extraordinary facts. This was a robed and bearded man, not a peasant boy in shirt and breeches. What he had just knocked off was a turban, and what lay under his hand was a naked scalp, from which dropped the slave’s single, degrading hank of hair. It passed through his mind while he drew, fighting for his life, on the long, long training in close combat which he possessed embedded in his bone; and in three sudden, definitive movements he had the Moor disarmed and his knife at the dimly seen throat. At his shoulder a damnable, familiar voice murmured, ‘How brave and clever, Jerott, my heart. Now let him go.’ And a sword, delicately used, pricked Jerott Blyth’s back.

Sick with effort, his chest heaving, every joint in his tired body sore, Jerott turned, and smiling, Lymond put a strong hand through his arm. ‘Come, children,’ he said.

The chicks were dead. Inside the hut the hot reek told it, and the silence, and the single bleared candle on the floor whose light wavered on the daffodil down in puffs and drifts all about it and on the benches above, picking out the waxy loop of a beak, the brown, half-open thumbnail of a wing, the skeleton claws. On one side they had been pushed back, in a tumbled ridge, to make way for boxes and sacks stamped with the mark of the Order. Beside them lay a young man with a large bruise on his ruddy skin, and cord round his legs and wrists. He was one of the Calabrians.

‘From the arsenal?’ said Jerott at length, his gaze on the boxes.

The big Moor, turbaned once more, his back to the closed door, was silent, his face expressionless, but Lymond answered. ‘Of course. His friends will be back soon. They’ve gone to join forces with the garrison at the Châtelet. Then they hope no doubt to load guns and powder and matches from here into a small boat and make for the brigantine and the untrusty sea, no keeper of calms. Unfortunately’—he did not glance at the furious boy on the floor—‘as I have already told our friend, the trip will be useless.’

A flood of Italian, nearly incomprehensible even to Jerott who knew Italian very well, conveyed disbelief and denial as well as uproarious fury. Jerott knew how the boy felt. Having, at some cost to themselves, spared the time to free Francis Crawford, it seemed unfair that Francis Crawford, along with his henchman freed from the bastinado, should then do his considerable best to undermine their little plot.

Jerott doubted if he himself would have had the stomach for it. Lymond clearly had no qualms. He said with gentle cheerfulness, ‘We shall see. Giulio here says his friends will already be aboard the brigantine, ready to sail. I’m sure he’s right, except that they’ll find there’s nothing to set sail with. As you would know too, if you’d been watching, the sails, oars, cables and everything else that make a ship move have been dismantled from the brigantine in the last two days.
And
from every smaller boat in the harbour. She’s an empty shell, my friend. Your lads might as well take their guns to a floating tomb. Not,’ said Lymond peaceably, ‘that they’re going to have the chance of taking the guns anywhere, for you and I in just a moment are going to blow them up.’

Jerott wished he had killed that damned Moor. He pulled himself together and said sarcastically, ‘Of course, if you want to cut your own throat. You know these fellows killed a man to open the magazine and get you out of your cell. And you’re being blamed for it. Surely the first thing to do is to report this, have the ordnance taken back to the castle, and have a strong party waiting for the Calabrians when they come back for the guns as they’re bound to do, whether they get out to the brigantine or not. In their own eyes they’re dead men unless they fight back. They don’t know de Herrera has picked on you.’

‘It’s my French accent,’ said Lymond idly. He was listening, Jerott realized, for any sound outside the hut. The Moor had slipped off again, no doubt to resume watch. Then, bringing his attention back suddenly, ‘Look,’ said Lymond. ‘Nine times out of ten you may be right in extremity to make a public example by frying someone’s liver in front of the vulgar—I won’t argue. But here leniency is the only answer. You are threatened physically in that there is a breach in St Brabe whose extent no one yet knows; and unless the defences behind are properly manned there may be a break-through. You are threatened politically by the Spanish knights’ fear of Turkish vengeance and the fact that, if they can find any easy way out, the blame has a good chance of being pinned on the French. Add to that mess two hundred peasant boys to be guarded day and night because they renegued and having absolutely nothing to lose by murdering the entire garrison and you get not only disaster, but a silly disaster.’

‘What, then?’ said Jerott. Lymond was speaking Italian, of a rough and ready kind but plainly, and probably understandable enough to the boy on the floor.

‘So the Spanish knights are never allowed to discover what has happened. We return to the castle with our friend here, leaving a lit fuse to take care of the powder: poor little fried chickens, my dear. The Calabrians between here and the Châtelet, in the Châtelet or at sea can’t help but see it, whatever they imagine caused it. No ship;
no weapons. They’ll have to come back, if only to find out what has happened. And if they find no one suspects them, what can they do but return docilely to their posts and hope to God no one notices their feet are wet?’

Switching suddenly to English, he added something to that fast summing-up. ‘De Vallier and des Roches must be told, of course. And trouble may well boil up among the men themselves once the firing restarts. But at least if the Spanish don’t know, we’ll avoid open insurrection and mayhem at this exact juncture, and have a chance of keeping them on our side.’

‘And who,’ said Jerott, ‘is supposed to have knifed the sentry and taken the powder?’

‘Salablanca,’ said Lymond calmly. ‘Our big friend outside. That was very nicely fought, by the way. He is no novice in any sense of the word at in-fighting.’

‘I’m flattered,’ said Jerott sarcastically. ‘And a big, strong man, too. He carried all this alone?’

‘No. His brother and a handful of slaves helped him. They’ll be assumed, I hope, to have died in the fire.… In fact, they’ll make for the Turkish camp.’

‘So you have been unlocking a few more fetters,’ said Jerott blankly. He had his sword again, he remembered, and his dagger. The Calabrian would help him.

‘I’ve saved you two hundred soldiers,’ said Lymond. ‘In exchange for six slaves, one of them dying.’

‘You’d have been a damned sight better letting them escape,’ said Jerott sharply, ‘and get themselves
and
the munitions
and
the boat blown out of the water by Osmanli guns. Then they’d be no further encumbrance on us as prisoners or as potential rebels.’

There was a brief pause. ‘That, I am sure,’ said Lymond, ‘is what any man in the Order would have done. I am not a monk.’ He was kneeling, a light flaring between his fingers, and looking up from the slow match, so efficiently led from powder to fuse, Jerott saw something grim in the underlit face. ‘Let’s get to the castle,’ said Lymond, and rising, crossed to the prone man and cut his bonds. ‘Do you understand? The powder will burn; your friends cannot leave by ship. If they come back now, no one will know what you have done. Go quickly and tell them so.’

The youngster was perhaps seventeen, certainly not more; and he could hardly sit, far less stand. Lymond propped him, adroitly, while the blood returned to his cramped limbs: the lashing had been sailors’ work. But in spite of the pain, he was talking before he was upright.

Jerott grinned. What he could make of the language was picturesque even for that lusty countryside. ‘He says he doesn’t believe you. He says you are destroying the guns that would have saved their lives
and will betray them now to the Governor to save your own skin.’

‘Well, it was worth trying,’ said Lymond calmly. All that hate seething on his arm had not, it appeared, upset him. ‘We’ll take him with us to the castle. When he sees we aren’t proposing to sell him by the slice, he may change his mind. The Moor can take the message meantime—the other lads will trust him. Come!’

The peasant backed and muttered. ‘He doesn’t trust you at the castle either,’ said Jerott, who was beginning to feel a little more cheerful. ‘He wants to go to the Châtelet after all.’

‘Thank you,’ said Lymond, staring at him, ‘for the interpretation. Don’t you think we had all better get wherever we are going, before the whole bloody building blows up?’