The Disorderly Knights (32 page)

Whether the boy understood every word Jerott doubted, but he had certainly got the sense of what Lymond said. Ceasing to rub his cramped limbs, he launched himself like a dog at the door. And instead of letting him go, swifter even than the boy, in a single blur of movement, Lymond stopped him. Gasping, the lad wrenched desperately in his grip, trying to kick himself free. Lymond, holding him, suddenly turned his head listening, and then said sharply over the scuffling, ‘We have company. You’ve been followed, Blyth. De Vallier doesn’t trust you either, it seems.’ And at the same moment, silent as an owl’s flight, the door opened beside them and the Moor slipped in. ‘We heard them. How many?’ said Lymond, and the big man spoke low. ‘
Veinte, señor. Debemos pronto.…
’

‘To get out. Quite. By the window, Jerott. There’s a big one opening at the back. We can’t fight twenty men, and we’ve got to get this lad out of sight—No, you fool!’ to the struggling Calabrian. ‘Look. If you’re found anywhere near here, you’ll be connected with that ammunition. You can’t hope to get to the Châtelet now; the Moor’ll do that errand. You’d better come back to the castle with us.…’

And as the Calabrian, with a sudden, desperate movement, twisted and half-jerked himself free, Lymond said resignedly ‘Hit him, somebody. We’ll take him unconscious if we have to.’

Whatever they had expected, the boy silenced even Lymond this time by his response. For now, pushed to it at last, hopelessly late, he began to talk. In the hut among the frail dead fledgelings he commanded utter silence; so absolute you could hear what Lymond had heard: the obscure shift of men gathering at a little distance—proably, Jerott thought with half his mind, the market. The explosion wouldn’t harm them at that distance: there wasn’t enough powder. Lymond said in Italian, carefully, ‘Say that again,’ and the hoarse voice, thick with fear, almost unintelligible in dialect, spoke again, while above his rough head the eyes of Jerott, Lymond and the Moor met and held.

The little explosion promised by the quiet fuse burning at their feet was only the forerunner, paltry as the new-hatched younglings, of the end of Tripoli. Before leaving the castle magazine the Calabrians had lit a slow fuse much bigger and longer and more important. It was timed to reach the first keg of powder once the rebels were safely afloat. It had been burning now for the better part of an hour. And the key to the locked iron grille which alone gave access to the arsenal had been thrown in the sea.

Lymond asked only one question. ‘How much time have we left? How much time before the arsenal blows up?’ And by that he meant the whole castle of Tripoli.

‘It must be three-quarters consumed,’ said the boy, and a shade of pride entered the sunburnt face. Lymond flung him from him.

‘Let him take his chance,’ he said. ‘He knows now how to save himself. Salablanca, hide, and get to the Châtelet with the news if you can. If not, Allâh speed you. Jerott.… Your conscience is God’s. If you support me in this fiction, go to the market, tell them you have seen slaves here inside; tell them you’ve overheard them admit the arsenal has been fired. Before you’ve got halfway through that, I’ll have this blown up. Then do what I’m going to do … 
run like hell
.’

‘I’m going back to the castle,’ said Jerott, his voice strained as he flung back the heavy shutters giving on to the lane at the hut’s back and prepared with the others to jump.

‘Bravo!’ said Lymond sardonically and Jerott felt his anger rise and flood the vacant places of his fear. For Lymond had only said, run, and the implication of choice was worse than an insult: it was the last animal smear on his honour. Through all that was to cóme that night, Jerott Blyth behaved like a madman, hugging that single word to him.

No one spoke now. One by one they dropped to the ground and Jerott raced to his brother knights as Calabrian and Moor melted into the hot night and the lit taper in Lymond’s hand arched back through the window and began to eat through the wooden cask. Then he lost sight of them all. As de Herrera met him, sword drawn in the shadows, and he shouted the news, the hatching hut at his back blew up in a corymb of vermilion and gold. Before the detonations ended, Blyth was running towards the castle, his message delivered, and after only a moment’s hesitation the Spanish followed. For of all the knights, the Moors, the soldiers and slaves, all the worthy merchants and traders, the priests and serving brothers and Tripolitains, men women and children in the castle, only they and the three men who had found other business so tactfully behind, knew that in fifteen minutes the siege would be over. And that
neither Islâm nor the Order would be masters of Tripoli, for Tripoli would not exist.

*

It was a case where numbers could not help, only skill. There was enough powder in the arsenal, Jerott knew, to destroy not only the castle but the city itself. There was no use shouting warnings, for there was nowhere to run to in time, and panic would only hinder the small chance they still had. Only they, on the perimeter when they got the news, had been safe, and they had thrown safety away.

He kept grim faith with his implied promise to Lymond. In the handfuls of words he flung to de Herrera as they ran, he said nothing of the Calabrians. And soon none of them spoke at all but merely ran, their throats parched, stumbling through the dark, broken lanes, ricocheting from wall to wall in the thread-like maze of alleys which lay between themselves and the castle.

To men who knew Tripoli well, in daylight, it was perhaps ten minutes’ work. To Jerott Blyth and his fellow knights, it was a gasping nightmare of missed turnings and blocked passages and sudden, blind walls. A rotting barrow of fruit, jammed in an archway, held them up for precious seconds; and soon after that, hurling himself round a corner under a dark bridgeway blocking the stars, he found himself in someone’s courtyard, blundering between lemon trees into a dry fountain, his feet clattering on the tiles. Outside again, casting about, his foot struck a tin bowl and he knew he was in the silversmiths’ alley, and had been here before—my God, was he running in circles? And time—time was slipping away.

Then, at last, heart-bursting minutes later, they saw ahead the corner bastion and the high, dark outer wall leading to the main gate of the citadel. Ears straining, eyes aching, Jerott and his fellow knights crossed the open square to the big doors like beings demented and, cursing the guard for their questions, burst through into the castle. Then Jerott cried out.

Ahead, towers, walls, battlements sprang black across the sudden, burning orange of the night sky. A second later there was a roar; then another, and another, while the flaming air shook and writhed. For a moment, none of the little band moved or spoke. Then de Herrera beside him drew in a breath like a sob, and gripping Jerott’s shoulder, launched forward again.

What they saw was gunfire. The Turkish battery had opened up again.

Afterwards, Jerott remembered bumping into a number of people without explanation; passing de Vallier himself standing looking oddly after them, and running very fast through a number of courtyards,
up and down stairs and then through an endless series of connecting rooms and down a stair, which led to more stairs, until they were in the long series of chambers and passages belonging to the Roman bath-house.

They were then, Jerott knew, in precisely no less and no more danger than they had been up above in the open air. It only felt, if possible, worse. In any case they had now no chance at all, for he reckoned, and guessed that the others knew also, that the time was up. Henceforward, every second of life was won from chance. And every door, every vast iron hatch between themselves and the burning fuse was closed and barred.

It was that discovery which nearly defeated their courage. Their strength, though they hardly knew it, was already spent. Then de Herrera said sharply in a high, exhausted voice, ‘Will you let one heathen destroy the Religion in Tripoli?’ and flung himself like a maniac on the heavy bolts of the next door. After that, they wrenched each open between them, silent but for their sobbing breath, and the slowest was left behind to slam them shut, to bring no transfusion of air to the speed of the fuse.

At the last door even Jerott hesitated. The lit match must now be so near the powder that a breath would dispatch it. The opening of this door in his hand was his entrance card, at twenty-five, to heaven or hell. The bolts were drawn. He remembered to pray for the first time, briefly and even with shame, and drew the door open.

In the quiet space before the great door of the arsenal the yellow lamps shone peacefully on the obliterated, weaving wall-dancers who in a thousand years had seen and suffered worse than this. The oak door unlocked by the Calabrians was ajar, unguarded: what need of a guard when the massive grille door inside was shut and its key at the bottom of Tripoli Bay?

But before it, two men were working; working feverishly, their movements surging in lamplit rings through the water spreading slowly across the tiled floor. Above the trample of soldiers’ feet at his back, above the rampaging screech of a file, a familiar voice unfamiliarly crisp said, ‘Blyth. I want a locksmith, a crossbow and bolts, some cloths and a lot more water. We have perhaps five minutes. Axes are causing too much vibration, and the file won’t be in time.’ And as de Herrera, behind, relayed the orders, Lymond added over his shoulder, ‘Two of you come in. The rest stand by for orders. The corridor doors can remain open. We have tried drenching the floor, but the slope of the arsenal has sent it back to us. We have failed to reach the fuse with damp cloths on a rod: it is at the far side of the cellars and the other stores are in the way. I am about to try shooting soaked cotton.…’

And Francis Crawford, wasting no further time or words on them,
finished binding his dripping, lightly wrapped arrows, and stretching the small Moorish bow in his hand aimed swiftly, and sent the laden shaft through one of the spaces in the grille. It floundered unbalanced through the air, above the stacked barrels and boxes, the stands of armour and spears, the stacked arquebuses and axes arranged in blocks throughout the wide vaulted cellars, with loading alleys cross-hatched between. Far across the room, from some bay invisible behind the crammed stands, a thread of smoke, thinly moving, was just visible in the dim lamplight within. And beyond the smoke, where like a monstrous clutch of marble and iron the cannon shot stood in pyramids against the far wall, a touch of rosy light appled the balls.

There were six arrows. Jerott Blyth watched them all leave the bowstring and spring through the latticed door. He also watched each in turn fall blundering against some cask or crossbar, or overshoot to drape the cannon-ball stacks. The last one alone fell into the invisible chasm where the smoke rose, but too far to the right. The thread of grey wavered in its slow passage and went on, like the fin of some frail fish, towards the shining wall of packed crates filling a third of the arsenal on their left: the gunpowder.

And all the time, below him, the dark hands of the man patiently filing never ceased although the thick bar still held, and would hold, Jerott guessed, for ten minutes yet. It was, he saw, with no more capacity for surprise, the Moor Lymond had saved. And there were only three minutes of life left for them all.

At his back, jogging footsteps. The extra water casks had been fetched. Hoarse voices; splashing, pattering, fumbling. Cloths had been drenched and rushed in, and more arrows. He watched Lymond catch and fit them, wordlessly, his face totally without expression, his whole gimcrack battery of flourishes swept clean to concentrate on speed, on deftness and on—Jerott realized—his sense of hearing.

Suddenly Lymond threw down bow and arrow and turning, snatched. It was the crossbow arriving, and with it a man whose sobbing breath rang through the cellar as he threw himself on his knees before the iron lock, flinging aside the sweating Moor, and began with shaking hands to probe.

Lymond said only two words to the locksmith, but they filled the anteroom where, quite silent now, de Herrera and his men stood, ankle deep in useless water. ‘How long?’

The smith did not look up, nor did he answer immediately. As life went ticking by, and the tang of burnt fabric filled the motionless air, there was no sound but the frantic rattle of his instrument. Then he said, still working, ‘Five minutes, sir. It can’t be opened in less. Is it enough, sir?’ And as he spoke there was a little eddy, and the smoke, leaning forward, kissed the wall of stacked wooden boxes.

In front of the door, every man drew his breath. ‘The smoke is a little ahead of the flame,’ Lymond said. ‘But it’s passing out of the long alley running from left to right in front of us, and has got to the junction of the alley at right angles to it, fronting the gunpowder. I’m afraid we must risk this thing.’

‘The crossbow?’ de Herrera’s voice was odd. The machine in Lymond’s hands was wound and set.

‘If the cannon balls fall the right way, they may crush the life out of the fuse before they break open the gunpowder. If they broach the gunpowder first, it’s the end. Anyone play pelota?’ said Lymond, a last, faint, grim smile on his lips; and for a second, a living flash of recognition and greeting and, he supposed, farewell, passed from his blue eyes to Jerott. Then he aimed, wound, and shot.

It was true. Accurate as a child’s ball at a party, the heavy bolt hissed between shelving and pillars, clearing all the useless paraphernalia of war, and crossed the space where the long, charred trail of the match must be lying, to strike an outer ball less than halfway up the pyramid, with an echoing clank.

The ball started, in a cloud of white chipped splinters, and ramming its neighbours to the right, caused them in turn to start, pouting; to eject, miraculously, one of their number like a lumbering truant, bouncing and ricocheting to the floor. A frisson ran over the rest. Every ball, itself revolving, began to trickle from coign to coign, to hop, to rush, to spin until, buckling, the whole loosened, thundering pile dissolved into a colliding universe of spheres and showered bounding to the floor of the arsenal.