The Disorderly Knights

by Dorothy Dunnett

  For a long moment, alone among the silent men at the table, Gabriel’s strained gaze sustained Francis Crawford’s. Then Sir Graham stirred, glanced quickly round and said, his voice almost normal, ‘God forgive me. I have embarrassed you, and myself too, come to that. What can I do? Gentlemen, I propose to take you back home for the finest wine my cellar can afford. After all, it may be the last chance we shall have to drink it. Nick—you can do nothing till morning. Come, man, and bring your lists with you.’

  The passion which had brought Graham Malett to plead with a stranger was now well concealed. With talk sober but easy, Gabriel made the burden of that evening a light one; and later, when they were dispersing to sleep and Lymond and de Villegagnon had already gone, he put his light hand, restraining, on Jerott’s arm.

  ‘Wait a moment, if you will have patience with me. I think you are a friend of Mr Crawford’s?’

  ‘I knew him once,’ Jerott said.

  Gabriel smiled. ‘Don’t be hard on him. He is young. And he has been embarrassed quite enough. Jerott.… you seemed to know of some wish he had to reach Gozo. Don’t tell me why. But,’ said the great Graham Malett, making a quick, rueful face and holding up in two fingers a folded fragment of paper, torn and dirtied with much handling, ‘this note came this evening from Gozo for Mr Crawford of Lymond, and I am sure he would be much happier if he thought it came through you rather than through me. Someone in Gozo, it seems,’ said Gabriel gravely, ‘heard with half the population this morning of his arrival from Sicily, and sent a hurried message to him addressed through me. Unfortunately, the superscription had been torn off and I have had to read it to discover its destination but, I promise you, I forget already all it contains.’ And handing the dirty note with gravest formality to Jerott Blyth, the merest glint of amusement in his eyes, Gabriel bowed and wished him good night.

  At a taper halfway up the stairs, being human, Jerott bent his handsome black head and read, quickly and surreptitiously, the note Gabriel had given him. It was inscribed inside to the Comte de Sevigny, which was acid enough in itself. As for the note, it said merely:

  Do not come. I do not wish to see you. There is no danger I face greater than the miseries I have passed. If you believe any share of the blame may be yours, then serve me now at least by leaving me in peace.

  There was no signature, but the thick, forceful writing was a woman’s.

  Presenting this missive a little later to Lymond, Jerott Blyth to his own surprise found himself incapable of a straight lie. When the other man, having glanced at the note, said, ‘Oonagh O’Dwyer. How did this come to you?’ the knight told him.

  Lymond’s fair brows rose. For the first time it occurred to Jerott that he would be an uncomfortable enemy to make. Then suddenly the other man laughed and said, ‘Gabriel’s thoughtfulness is unending. Or did he think I would suspect him of writing it himself? Recruiting ardour could do no more.’ And then the whole thing was overlaid and forgotten in the morning news from St Angelo.

  The Calabrians had revolted. Two hundred young men from the mountains of Italy, sitting sullenly in the straw of their stifling hostel, refused blankly to embark and fight the battles of the Order of St John in Tripoli. The Chevalier de Villegagnon brought the news, grimly, and Gabriel himself went to speak to them. For a moment only, the storm of complaint was quieted; but before he left, all Birgu heard the calls of ‘sacrifice!’ and the blare of country voices, hotly renewed.

  When he did leave, Graham Malett took the captain of the Viceroy’s bucolic army with him, direct to the Grand Master. There it all poured out as the young Italian, sweating with heat and stress, defended his men. They were shepherd boys and labourers. They had never seen a gun, held a sword in their fists. They didn’t see, said the captain, a rising querulousness fighting through the deference, why they should go where the knights wouldn’t go, to defend the knights’ property and die in the knights’ place.

  Benign and barren of sympathy as the limestone of Malta, the one-eyed Aragonese face of the Grand Master de Homedès studied the young man. Tripoli, said the Grand Master, speaking in honour of the situation in appalling Spanish-Italian, was perfectly secure without his poor two hundred Calabrians. Did the captain really think the Order would abandon one of their own Marshals, their knights and their soldiers, in a fortress which could not defend itself? The Viceroy’s army was simply required to travel to Tripoli because the Viceroy himself had commanded it; and the Grand Master was content, as the captain himself should be (if he wished to keep his post), to carry out the Viceroy’s orders.

  That worked for precisely five minutes, or as long as the captain took to get outside the audience chamber and face his men. The next moment, his Serene Highness was startled to see the doors of his chamber burst open before he had so much as left his chair of eminence, and three distracted men hurl themselves to their knees by his dais. Bathed in hysterical tears, the deputation begged his Highness to have pity on them and not to send them to butchery which, they pointed out with surprising cogency through their sobs, was what their ineptitude would mean to everyone they fought alongside, as well as themselves.

  Then the guards got them out, and the Grand Master nearly succeeded in solving the problem by having the ensign in and promising him the command if he persuaded the two hundred to sail, when the captain, scenting treachery, got himself admitted again, the tears dried on his cheeks, and declared himself ready to march with his men if the Grand Master would send with them some of his knights, ‘to teach and comfort us,’ he ended with pathos.

  ‘And so?’ said the Chevalier de Villegagnon sharply when Gabriel, returning, called them together to convey the news.

  ‘Tripoli is a defenceless husk,’ said Graham Malett. ‘As you all know. These children are right; it will be butchery. The Council advised the Grand Master, out of sheer humanity, to send at least a hundred knights with the Calabrians to Africa.’

  ‘And leave Malta undefended?’ said Jerott Blyth, grimly mimicking outrage.

  ‘Is he sending any at all?’ inquired de Villegagnon heavily. Lymond had not spoken.

  For the first time Gabriel’s eyes, as if he were weary, dropped to his closed hands. ‘There are in the prisons of Malta,’ he said, ‘twenty-five young knights, thrown there by de Homedès for insurrection. They are to be released to lead the expedition to Tripoli. You and I are not to go.’

  There was nothing to say.

  None of them went down to the quayside to see the two hundred blundering youngsters pushed aboard the two galleys taking them to foreign deserts and death. Instead, they worked with Nick Upton, with straw and seawater as de Villegagnon had said, to make Birgu and St Angelo as secure as insane improvidence would allow, against the followers of Allâh’s Deputy on Earth. And even the Spanish knights worked, sweating, at their sides.

  *

  Below the seven heavens—the green heaven of emerald, the heaven of silver; the heaven of red coral, the heaven of pearl, the heaven of red gold, the heaven of yellow coral and the seventh and last heaven of light—the armada of Islâm like a carpet of blossom swam over the seas to the east, and the grain of rock which was Malta came slowly plainer and close.

  On the flagship, the spider shadow of the rigging was the only shadow there was. Struck by the African sun in its beaten gold, the brazen light shifted and blazed on jewelled turbans and scimitars, on enamelled clasps and brooches, on the shields of the Janissaries—dark, moustached faces above snowy caftans—forbidden to marry and dedicated to war; the rustle of their heron’s plumes drowned in the grunting pulse, day and night, of the drums.

  And beside the Imams, in their dark robes and round-jowelled, chalk-olive faces, Dragut Rais stood, grizzled, scarred, hard-ribbed under his silk robes as a cask of tanned hide, and gazed ahead, his grey moustaches drooping to his grey beard; his flat, Anatolian peasant face blank.

  Three times he had sacked Gozo, and once Malta herself; the old hound, the living chart of the ocean. Plucked from his m
other’s cabin, schooled in Egypt by arrogant Turkish benevolence, a Mameluke, a trained bombardier, a gunner on corsair ships, he had risen at length to own his own galliot, to sail with Barbarossa, to command his own squadron. And when, six years ago, Barbarossa died, worn out by his harem and by harrying Christians and merchants alike in the robbers’ paradise of the African coast, Dragut had become his heir.

  Corsica, Naples, Sicily, Djerba: his successes were legend while he lived. And now, no longer prince of corsairs, independent privateer of the Middle Seas, he had been placed by Suleiman at the right hand of Sinan the Jew, the Sultan’s general; and Sinan had orders from the King of Kings himself to defer to Dragut’s experience.

  And ahead lay Gozo, where seven years ago the brother of Dragut Rais had been killed, and the Governor, so far from delivering the slain man for embalming and the rituals of his own faith, had burned the corpse like a dog.

  Unstirring, Dragut Rais stared over the sea; and the islands grew plainer and close.

  III

  The Voice of the Prophet

  (Maltese Archipelago, July 1551)

  FROM the Governor’s castle on Gozo, her black hair hot on her shoulders, Oonagh O’Dwyer watched the striped sails, the twinkling ships come.

  High on its acropolis above the capital Rabat, the Gran’ Castello, her lover’s citadel, guarded the centre of Gozo, a three-mile span of sharp hills and patchwork plains, of carob trees and low, square houses and stone terraces with the fishing nets drying and the gourds seated, green and yellow and fat as aldermen on their walls.

  To the south, beyond the sentinel cone of an extinct volcano, lay the short sea channel to Malta. Within the fortress walls on this hill, around and below her, all those who could of Gozo’s seven thousand people thronged and shouted. The thin scream of upset children, like a mortal orchestra of gut and wind, took all the sense from the ears. This balcony, overlooking the cathedral and square, was empty. Her personal quarters, hers and Galatian’s in this the Governor’s house were still undisturbed.

  He was not there. What did a Governor do to protect fisherfolk from the fire, the arrows, the cannon, the scimitars of twelve thousand Turks? Whatever it was, thought Oonagh O’Dwyer with no emotion at all, Galatian de Césel would not attempt it.

  Years in Ireland as mistress of Cormac O’Connor, heir to one of the great native houses, rebel, fighter, outlaw, struggling by any means fair or foul, to throw the English out of his native country—years of battle in Ireland and, exiled, out of it: years of supporting the coarsening fibre, the blurred ideals, the ambition of the thick, loud-voiced, black-haired man who had been the dark Fraoch of her spirit, had sent her finally, soiled and disillusioned, to look for freedom, space, sun, escape, loving wisdom if such were to be found; kindness and friendship if it were not.

  At Marseilles, in the courtly, middle-aged Spaniard she remembered meeting once in Ireland, Galatian de Césel with the clear oval face and fair moustache, the perfect linen, the quiet silks, the dark, monkish robes of the Order he wore over his jerkin at Mass—in this man she found shelter. Kindly, he offered her passage, without payment, to his island of Gozo where, after a brief visit home, he was now returning. There were convents there; and one or two who would welcome her, for his sake, to their homes on Gozo and on Malta. And while there she could think, and plan, and decide where her future should lie.

  And so, on board his galley, with the forked banner of his house streaming from the mast, she had lain passive in the sun as the years of brutish stress slid away and Cormac’s shadow lessened and shrank; and the shadow of Francis Crawford of Lymond, who with such damnable detachment during his sojourn in France had shown her Cormac for what he was, and what he should have been. Lymond had been the agent, for his own ends—always for his own ends—who had divided her at length from the O’Connors and their fate in order to preserve the safety of the child Queen Mary. She wished to forget him.

  Galatian had made it easy to forget. His kind touch brought her solace. The passing caresses reassured her even when, becoming gently constant, they stirred her to realize that, pathetically, he was craving more than her presence. She pitied his innocence and his lonely disciplines and out of pity, that momentous dark night, she had moved a little closer, as he touched her arm at the ship’s rail, until her smooth shoulder lay under his hand.

  His fingers had stopped, stricken, piteously unsure on her bare skin. Then suddenly as some desperate child’s, his hand had plunged on, down and down, over the warm swell of her breast where, cupped and shaking, it rested.

  She had not expected it. With a thud like a bolt in her buried flesh, need struck her, parted as she was for the first time from Cormac’s brutal assuagements, and, unasked, her flesh sprang stark to his palm. Galatian de Césel moaned, a queer, desperate sound, and pulling his hand free to grip her, trembling, by her side, hurried with her, stumbling, to her cabin below.

  They did not even reach it. In the darkness outside her door he started to sob, and a moment later, there in the heaving alley, they were charged with one another. He cried, she remembered, throughout.

  Afterwards, lying on her pallet with his sleeping weight on her breast, Oonagh had framed silently, with compassion, the words she would use to comfort the tortured conscience she must face when he woke. But she drifted into sleep before he stirred, and awoke to his gentle urgency about her and presently, under his melting skill, her own breath suddenly lapsed. She met him, flesh to flesh in convulsive want, and raging, he took his fill of her again.

  It was so all night and beyond, on that sultry voyage when, like drunkards, their only refuge day and night was the unmade pallet below the galliot’s decks. But long before that, she knew that this had happened many times before; that Galatian de Césel was not a chaste nor a timid nor a fatherly knight, but a knight whose desperate hunger no religion could quiet.

  Towards the end of the long journey spent, so much of it, in Galatian’s clasp, Oonagh knew also that she was pregnant; and not by this monkish lover. A thick, black-headed Irish hog-child lay in her belly, to grow in dark and silence under the warm sun of Malta and ruin her new life.

  Defying, for once, the furious fatalism that was part of her nature, she did what she could about that, but only made herself ill. She arrived at Gozo hardly seeing it, and was installed in the white-walled chamber off Galatian’s room where, racked by more absences than she could bear, she realized that to keep him she must be well, and beautiful, and stirring to his easy flesh. For what he gave her so intemperately, she could not now do without.

  Her pretence succeeded. For a month, inexhaustible, he stayed with her, and she hid that she was sick. Until last week when handling her, blindly ripe to his kindling, he became aware, as no monk should have been aware, of her sunken face and the first soft engorgement of her breast against his.

  He had not risked his soul with a curse but freeing himself, had rolled from her bed. ‘You can’t blame your Irish bastard on me!’ he had exclaimed loudly and clearly at her door, and she heard it repeated, with open laughter, through the house and then the streets of the citadel.

  But that day she had nothing left but a desire for oblivion. She had lain still on her bed, and after a while—after an age—after the whole afternoon had gone by, he had flung open the door, driven, as she had known he would be, by the pulse that they shared. But from then to now, he had used her often uncourted as Cormac had done; and she had not known until much later that he was burying not only his fever; but the knowledge of the fate approaching them all. She learned soon enough. They were to be sacrificed victims of Islâm, offered up by the knights to save their own skins; and de Césel, in his warm refuge, was afraid.

  The knights, in their holy convent at Birgu, knew she was there. She had seen some of them: Jerott Blyth, who had been kind on Messina and to whom she had talked, stupid with sun and luxury, of Lymond.

  At Birgu where they had first landed, she had seen the Grand Master, ancient and one-eyed, and the
battle-scarred older man they called la Valette, and had heard of the quiet man with the beautiful voice and the guinea-gold hair, Graham Malett; and she had thought, fleetingly, that there was a man she could trust. Then the news came, as news always did, flying the short miles from St Angelo to the north and across the brief, teeming channel to Gozo, that the Chevalier de Villegagnon had come from France with warning of the Turkish armada, and that a Scotsman called de Lymond was at his side.

  Then she had remembered her unwise talk with Jerott Blyth, and indolence and self-loathing burst into anger against this casual, indifferent man passing by, like some damned bailiff, to inspect the finished transaction. She was going to hell, it seemed, her own way; and she wanted none of Francis Crawford’s cutting rebukes.

  When later she heard that Jerott, who knew them both, had been on the boat they had glimpsed crossing that day from Cape Passero, she had written Lymond not to come. It would, she thought a little hysterically, be the last straw to be quixotically rescued by force from threatened Gozo, while her protector perished and the knights, in all their chaste ardours, found themselves saddled with a loose woman; and a pregnant loose woman at that.

  Muffled through the thick walls of the house, the Rhodes clock on the battlements behind struck the quarter, as it had in all the long years of the knights’ wandering since Rhodes. From the square below; from the narrow lane whose opposite walls she could nearly touch from her balcony, came the high, Oriental sound of wailing; an instant, childlike reaction from the men, with their barrel chests and curly mat of black hair, as well as from the veiled heads and squat shapes of the women. Drawing back, Oonagh O’Dwyer left the window and moving down the white marble steps to the landing, crossed the width of the house to open the back postern, crazily unguarded, and climb out on to those wide, commanding battlements where the rusted guns stood in their emplacements, and the Rhodes clock counted the hours.