‘Well, they’re hoping that at least you don’t fly,’ said Lymond amiably. So far from accepting the weapon de Villegagnon had offered, he had remained standing, gazing over the rambade. Behind them, in the absence of reassurance, the rowers faltered, and abandoning the big beechwood sweeps, had broken into a cacophony of Arabic and dockyard French. The Master, taking responsibility on himself, exposed his head with sudden valour on the poop and yelled, ‘Do not shoot! We stop!’
‘Tell him,’ said Lymond mildly to the bo’s’n, above the subdued clatter of M. de Villegagnon handing out crossbows on the coursie, ‘that the Baron d’Aramon is still at Marseilles.’
Across the glassy water over which, now bright and plain, the pirate boat was approaching, the frantic information was relayed. It had a cool reception.
‘If that is so, throw your weapons in the water!’ came the fishing boat’s response.
‘Neat,’ commented Lymond, and looked down for agreement at the railed platform where de Villegagnon now stood. But le Chevalier, at forty-one the survivor of more sea-fights than most, had already smelt the element of farce. And pinning his dignity to his instincts he rose to his full six feet four and, throwing his weapon uncharged to the deck, said, ‘I think, sir, that you know this boat?’
Without turning, Lymond grinned. ‘I know the joiner who fashioned the cannon. Thompson!’ He cupped his hands round his mouth. ‘Holà, Tamsín! Sing the next verse in French if you dare!’
Visibly, on the approaching boat, the oars paused. Then a sharp voice, in very plain English, said, ‘Who the hell’s that?’
‘The guns—my God,’ said the Chevalier de Villegagnon suddenly. ‘The guns are painted rouleaux of wood.’
His smile deepening, Lymond hailed the pirate again. ‘Francis Crawford. Have you still got my agate seal?’
A burst of magnified laughter jolted its way across the narrowing gap. ‘I lost it at knuckle-banes in the old jail at Cork. Is yon hoited bairn’s bath-boatie yours?’ Close enough to see, the beery, black-bearded face under its cap radiated malevolent good nature over the corsair’s rail. The wood and canvas guns, a little damp at the edges, were being neatly run in.
‘It’s yourself!’ shouted the man in the cap, evidently locating Lymond at last, and downing his hailer, he placed both broad red fists with purpose on the ship’s wide deal rail. ‘Christ,’ said Lymond amused. ‘He’s going to make a most superior etching in wood.’
But Tamsín, alias Thompson, or the liveliest Scottish pirate un-hung on the roads between Argyll and Ireland, the Baltic, the Straits, or anywhere else for that matter, achieved faultlessly a leap over joppling deep-sea water that M. de Villegagnon did not care to contemplate, and landed head over heels on the Sainte-Merveille as his own ship, docile to anticipated order, retreated and kept her place a discreet distance off.
‘Francis Crawford!’ intoned Mr Thompson beatifically from the planks where he sat, and surging to his bare feet, wide-legged as a horse gypsy, embraced Lymond violently on either cheek. ‘Continental habits!’ shouted Mr Thompson, spitting neatly over the side, and stepping back, surveyed his friend. ‘Man, you’re a fine sicht. Hae ye a wife yet? I’ve got a lassie back there in Algiers that would dae ye a treat.’
‘How much?’ said Lymond instantly.
With an absent hand, Thompson pulled off the vile, salt-encrusted beret and scratched underneath. ‘Tell you what. Ye dinna want all they arblasters. Throw in the hackbuts and six oarsmen, my choice, and ye can have her. She’s rare at—’ said Mr Thompson, who believed in a specific bargain.
The Chevalier de Villegagnon, unstirred as a rule by frivolities, suddenly found in himself an impulse to laugh. ‘Thompson’s oath?’ Lymond was saying, looking interested.
In a lightning movement involving his nose, his thumbs and his breast, the pirate ratified the data. ‘And other things too. It’s a bargain,’ he said.
‘Thompson, you’re a great friend,’ said Lymond soberly, and shook him by the hand. ‘It’s just that my other wives would object. Come and meet M. de Villegagnon of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, who nearly blew your cannon into sawdust a moment ago.’ And the man of commerce and the man of God, united in their devotion to chicanery at sea, clasped willing hands.
Much later, as the two ships, moving side by side, flawed a faultless opaline sea at the end of the long, hot day, and the masthead light pricked yellow in the invisible shrouds, the pirate Thompson scrubbed his full stomach, sighed, and said, ‘Francis Crawford and I, we learned our seamanship the hard way, chained to the same rowing bench in a French ship, Brother. But we bear ye no ill will for that, him and me. Them that put him there … they’ve paid for their mistake. And me—I’ve taken full payment too for the slight to my name.’
‘Thompson, boy; no man living has a worse reputation, or better deserves it,’ said Lymond calmly. ‘Spanish ships; Portugese ships; Venetian ships; Flemish ships … hovering round the Head of Howth; waiting for a galleass with malmsey or silver to run into Waterford.… How often have you been in Waterford jail, man?’
Grinning, the pirate shook his head while Lymond continued his disquisition. ‘And Cork: we heard about that. He sailed into Cork on Christmas Day with a full cargo of wines and figs and sugar and sold them.… Where in God’s name did you pick those figs, Tamsín? The Mayor and Council of Cork must be simple.’
‘They asked the Lord Deputy’s permission, and the Lord Deputy said they could buy, so long as the goods didna seem to be stolen,’ explained Thompson.
‘This,’ said Lymond to de Villegagnon, ‘was after he and Stephenson his mate had been jailed a dozen times for piracy—Where’s Stephenson?’
‘On board. He’s sailing the old tub,’ said Thompson. ‘The secret was, it was Christmas Day, man. Peace upon earth, ye ken; and grannie coming for supper. They fairly needed those figs. Ye havena heard the great thing I’m starting with Cormac O’Connor?’
The silence lasted no more than a breath, and Lymond did not move, but it was enough to make Nicholas Durand de Villegagnon look up from his seat and say, ‘Cormac O’Connor’s just been at the French Court. You’re talking of the big Irishman, heir to Offaly, whose father’s been in London Tower for rebellion against the English?’
‘The same. Ah, he would be in France all right,’ said Thompson cheerfully. ‘He’s dead keen to persuade someone to chase the English out of Ireland for him. That’s what he wants the money for.’
‘What money?’ said Lymond. ‘Remembering that M. de Villegagnon is a pillar of the Church, and ought not to have more laid on his conscience than you’ve put there already.’
‘Och, away,’ said Thompson comfortably. ‘It’s only the insurance brokers that lose, and they’re the lads who can afford it, anyway.’
‘Oh God,’ said Lymond. ‘Don’t tell me. O’Connor approaches a circle of merchants, insures their cargoes against loss by pirates at double the proper value; the ships are duly waylaid and emptied by you, and the merchants claim the insurance while you and O’Connor share the cargo.’
‘You’ve got your ear to the ground all right,’ said the pirate without rancour. ‘Just that. O’Connor’s man George Paris does the travelling, and we market the cargoes. I bartered the last one for a grand lassie in Algiers … but I told ye about that. And where’s Cormac now?’
‘Lying incapable, I am happy to say, at Châteaubriant,’ said Lymond briefly. ‘He had an accident.’
‘I heard about that,’ said de Villegagnon. ‘Over that black-haired mistress, I understand.’
‘Oonagh? Had he Oonagh O’Dwyer with him?’ Thompson was interested, but not surprised. ‘I told him she’d be his death one day.’
‘Unhappily,’ said Lymond, ‘she was not. She has left him; and I hope the string and clapper arrangement he calls a mind has been permanently put out of action. I can’t rejoice in your choice of partner.’
‘Evidently not!’ said Thompson, utterly unperturbed. ‘And where’s the lassie, then? S
he’s not on board?’
‘No, you marinated tomcat,’ said Lymond, exasperated at last. ‘I hadn’t got a God-damned fig left to barter with.’
Soon after that, the two ships drew together and Thompson unwillingly took his leave. To de Villegagnon he said, ‘Ye’ll no credit it, but I’m proud to know ye. Hard experience was all the teacher I had, but to learn the way of the sea, there’s no school better than Malta.’
To Lymond he spoke in an undertone, the still lamps in the rigging showing briefly the thick nose and the clear, seaman’s eyes. ‘I’m no friend to Cormac, though I do business there when it suits me. Are ye for the sea-lanes yourself?’
Glimmering in the wide dark, Lymond’s head moved in negation. ‘I want to fight in Malta. I want to meet a man called Gabriel. And if I leave Malta, it’ll be to go back to my own army in Scotland.’
‘And your own ships?’ asked the pirate Thompson softly.
‘If I had a captain who would accept my command.’
There was a long silence. Then, ‘Since we were galley-slaves, no man has commanded me,’ said the man Thompson thoughtfully. ‘But that’s not to say I won’t come to it yet.’
Again there was a pause. Then in the darkness Lymond suddenly smiled, and clasping the older man briefly on the shoulder, stood aside to let him swing over the rail. For a moment longer, on both sides, voices were raised in farewell; then the night echoed to the pipe of the whistle, the repeating of orders, the creak of timber and the rhythmic swish as the oars took their swing; and the Sainte-Merveille and the pirate ship, drawing apart, slid phosphorescent into the night on their different tasks. And by the time the new day’s sun hung low and red in their faces, the Chevalier’s ship was well on the way to Sicily.
Nothing more stopped them. De Villegagnon, with grave concerns of his own, found his paid companion sober, self-contained and less than talkative, and was reassured. They reached Messina at the end of their voyage after sundown, pushed at last by a faint following wind which took them through the darkly fretted Tyrrhenian Sea, the white feather of Stromboli hanging in the blue sky to port. Then, rounding the point, they hit the stream in the Straits an hour after low tide, and cutting through the patched and eddying water off the Porto di Messina, entered the green elbow of the harbour itself.
Inside, rocking cheek to cheek with their yellow lanterns, their serried windows and gunports, lay merchant ships, ferries on the Calabrian run, the armed Imperial boats which Prince Doria had left there and, as d’Aramon had said, the Great Carrack of Rhodes and nearly all the small fleet of the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem, stirring like a poppy-field on the black water, the scarlet silk of their banners blooming lamplit like coals in the dark.
Earlier that day, when the first watch-tower had located them, and the small, fast boats from Messina had skimmed alongside to hail and identify, de Villegagnon had broken out on the Sainte-Merveille his blue personal standard with the three golden chevrons; and almost before the buffered sides of the galley touched the quay, a courier from the Emperor’s representative in Sicily, his escort and lamp-bearers beside him, was waiting to come aboard. Late as it was, his Excellency the Viceroy of Sicily desired M. de Villegagnon to call.
Lymond, it appeared, knew Messina well enough to find his own entertainment for the evening. Clothed in light braided silk, bought in France, he set off unescorted into the dark while the Chevalier de Villegagnon, dressed at last in his black robe with the Eight-Pointed Cross on his breast, walked ashore with his entourage and was led to the Viceregal house.
When confined to a seaport town awaiting action, there are relatively few resources open to an Order which may not gamble, may not indulge in excessive liquor and may not exorcise its impatience in the ordinary way at an écu a night, as each of the humblest of their seamen was able to do. Either staying aboard, or with friends or, if they could afford it, at an inn, the knights passed their time in prayer, in argument, in rehashing old sea fights and designing new.
Jerott Blyth of Nantes, France, whose father came from the west coast of Scotland, was at the cathedral when Lymond finally tracked him down. Waiting in silence, his head gold as the angel harbingers of grace all about, the stranger was unnoticed by the handful of knights kneeling with Blyth, and Blyth himself, his handsome black head bent, his only ornament the gold ring belonging to the dead girl he was to have married, looked distant and unlike the intelligent, talented and spectacularly wild young gentleman he had been. Lymond waited, unexpectedly patient, until the other man rose, genuflected and turned. The flood of candlelight did the rest.
It was nine years since their last meeting; and they had been boys in Scotland then, though old enough to fight side by side for their country. Of the two, Lymond, as he probably knew, had changed most since then. Nevertheless it was for only seconds that Jerott Blyth, Chevalier of the Order of St John, stood, short, vivid, vital, and stared at the self-possessed stranger before him. Then he said slowly, ‘Francis Crawford!’ And darting forward, seized those cool, relaxed hands.
It took a moment only to discover that Crawford of Lymond was in Messina with de Villegagnon, and leaving for Malta tomorrow. It took little longer for Jerott Blyth and his friends to carry Lymond off with them to the big white house of the Receiver of the Order in Sicily where, in moderation, they ate and drank; and where Jerott demanded the history of nine years’ separation at once.
Lymond told it without detail and added, immediately, the news which was taking de Villegagnon to Malta. ‘The Constable of France swears the whole Turkish fleet is on the move. It may well be against Malta,’ he said. And as the other men, drawing breath, looked towards Jerott, Lymond added, ‘Will de Homedès fight?’
‘What with?’ said Jerott Blyth bitterly.
‘Then will the Viceroy here send him help?’
‘And risk a Turkish attack on Naples and Sicily? The Chevalier de Villegagnon has one of the most persuasive tongues in the Order,’ said Jerott. ‘But if I were a gambling man, I should wager my purse against your pin that he’ll get neither ships nor men out of either the Viceroy or his master, our dear Emperor Charles.’
‘It’s men you want, surely, not ships?’ said Lymond, and watched them reluctantly agree. The flotilla now leaving Turkey was insuperable. With not only his own fleet but Dragut and all the North African corsairs under his banner, Suleiman was now supreme in the Mediterranean, failing the conjunction of the whole fleets of the Order and of the Empire, which Charles would never allow. What was needed were men and guns to raise bulwarks in Malta, at Gozo, in Tripoli, and defend them against a siege. And defended they had to be, said the Rule of the Order, through the voice of the Emperor Charles, the Order’s landlord on earth.
‘And we are men,’ said someone in Gascon, standing up.
‘Not to the Grand Master,’ said Jerott Blyth sardonically. ‘You and I are not even Knights of the Order—we are renegade French, liable to lead the Sultan personally into the Grand Master’s room. Try sailing back to Malta without orders, and you’ll find yourself despoiled of the Holy Sign as a prevaricator for offending our lord and master Charles.’
But after the meal, when the discussion, furiously raging, was beginning to spend itself, Jerott drew Lymond aside and said quietly, ‘I have not heard the full story, I know; but I must ask this. Have you in mind that, one day, you may join us?’
Francis Crawford looked up from his clasped hands and smiled. ‘The Constable would give a good deal to know,’ he said.
Disappointment, unconcealed, was clear in Blyth’s magnificent eyes. ‘Then this is an intellectual gambit, nothing more? A specific for the Crawford career?’
‘Not entirely.’ That was direct. ‘It was made easy for me to come, because I am temporarily an embarrassment in some quarters. I wished to come for a number of reasons. I am prepared, Jerott, in your language to serve the Order this summer. I have spent the winter, God knows, playing enough. Next winter, perhaps, I may serve best where I may embar
rass most; if so, my time here will not have been wasted. In the meantime—’ he smiled again, fleetingly—‘your truly dedicated brothers are free to convert me if they can.’
And Jerott Blyth, who was dedicated not to the Order but to the memory of a girl, accepted and passed over Lymond’s knowledge of it, and said impulsively instead, ‘You must meet Gabriel. He has heard of you. Did you know his sister was going to Scotland? I spoke of you—’
He broke off. Lymond said after a moment, amused, ‘You’ve said too much, Jerott. Better go on.’
‘—to a woman who heard me mention your name,’ said Jerott slowly. ‘She had just come from Marseilles. Her name was—’
‘Oonagh. Oonagh O’Dwyer,’ supplied Lymond as quietly.
‘She was your mistress?’
‘No …’ said Lymond. ‘Or at least, not as you mean. She was the mistress of Cormac O’Connor, the Irish rebel. She has left him now, to some degree my doing, and I’d sooner she didn’t suffer by it, that’s all. She’s probably with another man now, not half her worth. Is that what you were avoiding saying, in your delicacy?’
‘Not only for your sake—for the sake of the Order,’ said Blyth with more than mock ruefulness. ‘She’s living with de Césel, the Governor of Gozo.’
‘Valiantly vowed to Obedience and Chastity,’ said Lymond. ‘She would find a special kind of amusement in that. Will he be kind to her?’
‘It’s a question,’ said Jerott Blyth angrily, ‘of whether she will be kind to him. We’re a seedy, spiritless fraternity, as will be clear. A weak Grand Master and his clique may do with us as he wants. The best of us have been lost already through the Order’s mistakes, or through being dragged into Imperial wars under pressure, or because we’ve marched off home to our Commanderies, and de Homedès has had neither the guts nor the money to summon us back. And yet, believe me … there are great noblemen and great seamen among us still, serving their turn in the Hospital and ready to fight the Turk with their bare hands in between. We are the bulwark of Christendom. If we go, do you think the poor, ailing Emperor and his turkey-cock Doria and a scattering of ill-organized ships can take our place? The Sacred Law of Islâm would span the known world.’
The Disorderly Knights Page 8