The Disorderly Knights

by Dorothy Dunnett

  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.

  ‘Because of it,’ said the big knight, straight in his robes, his high black hat tight in his hand, ‘I have left France, abandoned my King, jettisoned my career, to range myself under the banner of this threatened Order, on this warning alone, without waiting for your Serene Highness’s citation. I can do no more to express my unshakeable belief that the warning is true.’

  ‘You have said, I think,’ said the Grand Master’s dry voice, in the old-fashioned Spanish he commonly used when Latin tired him, ‘that Tripoli is poorly fortified, low in ammunition and garrisoned, as I think you put it, by a few sick old gentlemen retired there for the air. It is also’—carrying on over the indignant murmur of Spanish voices—‘surrounded on three sides by desert and enemy states. You think that Gozo castle should be demolished and the Gozitans sent to Sicily rather than defend their island. You think the two hundred troops the Viceroy, wisely or unwisely, promised you at Messina should be sent to Tripoli with an army of my young knights from Malta to replace the present weak garrison, while the Viceroy is pressed to send more soldiers and ships which in turn would leave Naples and Sicily bare. Does that seem to you just? And if the Viceroy sends no more than these two hundred men—and he will not, M. de Villegagnon, for I shall not ask it of him—does it seem right to leave Gozo empty, and Malta denuded, to half-strengthen Tripoli?’

  ‘Call in the knights from the provinces,’ said Gabriel. ‘M. de Villegagnon had no need to suggest that. It is obvious.’

  ‘And fortify Malta.’ The French voice, its accent dulled with long years on the island, was Jean de la Valette’s, Parisot to his friends; his grizzled face impatient, his shattered leg stuck incontinently at an angle below his parted black robes. ‘We need mercenaries, cannon, bulwarks … a better fort at St Elmo, and one at L’Isla to cross fire with St Angelo across Galley Creek. If we work fast, there is time to do something.’

  ‘But no men, Chevalier; and no money.’ The dry voice of de Homedès was tinged with triumph. ‘Yo lo siento. As with you, the fate of this island keeps me sleepless at nights. Last year, as you know, the crops in Sicily failed. The Order was forced instead to pay for imports from France, from even further afield. We are not rich, We had no reserves. We had to pawn our plate to send even our last emissary to England. The Treasury, Brethren, is empty. We cannot raise or pay mercenaries; we cannot finance even the summons of our knights from their commanderies. By increasing our tax on these properties we might later gather a little reserve for this purpose; but that cannot help us now.’

  ‘And will the Grand Master say,’ said de Villegagnon, the veins throbbing in his thick neck and all his lawyer’s caution melting slowly in the stifling candour of courteous authority, ‘how the rest of the Treasury money has been spent?’

  The protest which ran round the room, he ought to have recognized, was not wholly disagreement and not wholly shock. It was, however, an expression of rightful alarm that, against all the rules of their devotion and their way of life, de Villegagnon should have spoken openly to the Grand Master thus. Through it all Gabriel’s easy bass-baritone spoke. ‘There are channels for accounting which are none of your business, Brother Nicholas, as they are none of mine, but which all the Order’s officials are familiar with to the point of nausea. In any case, don’t let your distress lead you into side issues. We are all sleepless, with prayers as well as with sailing. We can only align and disperse solutions until we reach the right one.’

  ‘I need no protector, Brother Graham.’ The Grand Master’s face under the black hat was thinly fleshed with his anger, but his voice was unchanged. The black patch, unvarying, was bent on de Villegagnon. ‘And I find you too ready to make M. de Villegagnon’s apologies. To have mistaken the King of France’s intentions as he has done implies a naïveté beyond understanding, or a knavery beyond any apology. The Constable’s message, I am sure,’ added de Homedès, who had played this game, monotonously, many times before, ‘arose from the warmest wishes for our well-being. But the Constable is not France. The King is France, and with him the de Guise family, one of whose spies you have brought here, M. de Villegagnon, into this citadel!’

  It was neatly done: so neatly that, without hesitation, thirty-five pairs of eyes, old, young, mature with long prayer, seamed with years of sailing on bright water, lucid with sanctity and young terrors overcome, slewed round to Lymond.

  There had been almost no warning. But an instant before the Grand Master’s accusation was achieved, Lymond’s own face changed from the odd, waiting expression it had worn all day. Alight with surprise and with discreet laughter he said, half under his breath, ‘Christ! The three mutes with the bowstring!’ Then, as two or three of the knights began, in the surge of talk, to jump to their feet, Francis Crawford pulled himself together and moving forward, addressed de Homedès, his voice clear and precise.

  ‘I beg your pardon. Perhaps I may set your minds at rest most quickly by saying that I have no intention of leaving this island until the attack is over—if it comes. How could I, anyway? The brigantine that brought me has gone, and the Order controls the harbour in Malta. Even if I were an agent of France—which I am not—I could do nothing but report, if I live to report, how the Order bore itself under threat of the Turk. And the Order, I take it, has no objection to that?’

  By the time he ended, he had silence to speak in. Gabriel’s voice followed immediately. ‘The Sieur de Villegagnon has laid down his career. Both he and M. de Lymond in coming here have offered their lives. We risk being called un-Christian if we ignore these facts.’

  ‘We risk being called gullible if we look at no others,’ said the Grand Master. ‘What, for example, is to prevent this young man from betraying all our defences, should the Turk land?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Lymond mildly. Gestured still nearer, he had moved a pace or two into the centre of the hall and stood relaxed, his head bare, his hands, holding his hat, lightly clas
ped at his back. He wore no sword. ‘Nothing. Except that if the Turk lands, the King of France’s warning is substantiated. And if the warning is genuine, why should I be otherwise?’

  The eye patch stared at Francis Crawford’s emotionless face. ‘Shall we say,’ said the Grand Master at length, his hands flat on his knees, ‘that the Grand Turk is not wholly as yet under France’s control, and that the King of France might desire an agent at hand in case affairs take an unlooked-for turn?’

  ‘Let us say so, by all means,’ said Lymond gently. ‘So long as Malta is fortified against exactly such a danger, I should willingly place myself under irons for the length of any attack. All of my French colleagues would no doubt tell you the same. On her present resources, Malta can withstand only the briefest of sieges without outside help. You intend to bring Holy Church naked within reach of the infidel. For that, I salute your faith. Allow us to bolster it further with such measures as are within our means.’

  There was a short silence. In one unexceptionable speech, M. de Villegagnon’s companion had delivered a number of plain truths, of which the plainest was a challenge as well. ‘Unless your fortify, you will fail. And you will not be permitted to blame that failure on your French knights or on me.…’

  The Grand Master stirred. Under the grey brows his good eye shone, sharp and bright. ‘I would remind you, sir,’ he said, ‘that alone of all those here present you have made no vows and are under no restraint. As to your … detention, I may well take you at your word. As far as your colleagues, as you term them, are concerned, I should attempt no such impertinence. I trust they will forgive you yours.’