The Disorderly Knights

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘Insufficient leaders?’ said His Eminence, gently chiding. ‘But surely, great as is our calling, we must in humility remember that the virtues of courage, leadership, faith, are not ours alone. Look among your native Maltese at Mdina, my child. Such an inducement to valour as they possess must rival our own deepest pledge.’

  Monotonously, committed to incredible extension of his endurance, the lieutenant replied to each sally. ‘The Maltese in Mdina are frightened. They are untrained. Under the knights of St John—under a leader such as M. de Villegagnon there—they will fight as well as any in the world. But not alone. No longer alone.’

  ‘Each of us,’ said the Grand Master, his voice melancholy, his patch staring affrighted at the wall, ‘each of us in this terrible world must learn to fight, and to fight alone. This great Order of ours is the bastion of God in the eastern seas. By condoning the weakness of little men, we deny our sworn support to Holy Church. I can on my conscience send no one to Mdina.’

  Soaking through breeches and hose, the dark blood rolled sluggish down the Spaniard’s leg. His face, white beneath the dirt and the sweat, was a mask, but for the persevering, fixed eyes. ‘Send M. de Villegagnon at least,’ he said. ‘Of all men, he will put heart into the city as she dies.’

  ‘Certainly, if M. de Villegagnon wishes, he may go,’ said Juan de Homedès unexpectedly. ‘Someone, in any case, must take our message back to Brother Adorne and you, my poor man, have done enough. You have persuaded us at least, you may be sure, of your courage and virtue. M. de Villegagnon will go to Mdina. Rest assured. All will be well. See to him, Brother,’ said the Grand Master lightly to the physician among those at his side, and made to rise.

  He had underestimated the opposition.

  ‘Your Eminence.’ Determined and tender, it was Gabriel’s voice. ‘I beg you to spare the matter a moment more of your time. You are condemning M. de Villegagnon as well as the city of Mdina to death.’

  The arid face was quite composed. ‘I condemn M. de Villegagnon to nothing. I have said he may go to Mdina if he so desires.’

  ‘He will obey your slightest wish, I am sure, whether he desires it or not,’ said Gabriel plainly. Unspoken, the words hung in the air. ‘As will the twenty-five insubordinate knights you mean to send to sure death in Tripoli.’ Aloud, he added, ‘But if we can spare M. de Villegagnon, we can spare more. I wish to go.’

  ‘And I! And I!’ At last, skilfully, he had released them. The clamour of voices rose from the two long tables, from Pilier and Grand Cross, from all the Order’s great officers.

  Pityingly, Juan de Homedès looked at them. ‘Send the flower of the Order to Mdina? Is that truly your counsel?’

  ‘No,’ said de Villegagnon strongly. Standing, his vast bulk towering over the forgotten messenger, he spoke at last for himself. ‘No. I will go gladly. But if Mdina is to be saved, it will be saved not by peasants but by men who fight for religion and honour, by the Knights of St John who adopted these people as their children when the Order made Malta its home. Keep your great officers. Keep your defences. Keep your posts at St Angelo firm. But spare me a hundred knights—knights of no great seniority, but men who would willingly lay down their lives to defeat the Turk, and who would know how to make Islâm pay dearly. Give me a hundred.’

  Back in his carved seat leaned the Grand Master, his black hat tall above the grey, passionless face, the patch insouciantly staring. ‘I shall give you six,’ he said with extreme care. ‘Since to travel alone, and at such risk, is a burden I find I cannot lay on you, dear Brother. Take six, to be your companions.’

  The sharp intake of shocked breath in the airless room was the only sound that met his remark. Suddenly Gabriel stood. But he was too late. De Villegagnon, looking straight at the Grand Master, had spoken his mind. ‘You are laying nothing on me and on the six men you speak of,’ he said, ‘but death without honour.’

  The Grand Master rose. Smoothly, swiftly for so old a man, he rose to his feet, and from his dais looked down on them all, his beaked nose pallid, his sunken cheeks drawn in noble distaste. And this time, in his edged voice, just anger showed plain.

  ‘Brother Nicholas, hear this. In a Knight Hospitaller of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, whatever his age, whatever his rank, whatever he boasts of experience, I look to find valour. I expect obedience. I demand humility before the inscrutable will of the Lord.… Puling argument I do not attend. If you are affrighted by the prospect before you, with even six of my knights at your side, then I need only raise my voice to call on knights who believe that to die for their Order alone does them honour. I have no time,’ said Juan de Homedès bitingly, ‘for traitorous chatter. If you mean to leave, it had better be now, before daybreak. If you are afraid, say as much.’

  ‘Afraid!’ Not respect for the head of his Order, not discretion, not Christian humility as adjured, made de Villegagnon pause, but the steady message of Gabriel’s blue gaze. Nicholas Durand de Villegagnon, his voice stiff with hurt, answered the Grand Master then. ‘In speaking as I have done, I intercede for the city of Mdina, for the knights and the Maltese within her, and for the six wasted lives being abandoned with mine, that is all. My lord,’ said de Villegagnon, staring straight at the one eye of this Aragonese who was master of them all, ‘I give you proof that fear never made me decline danger. I go to Mdina tonight, and alone. So that the people of Mdina may die knowing’—and he paused, his voice heavy with ill-fitting irony—‘that through their sacrifice, the knights of this Order may remain secure in their castle of St Angelo to face the future with confidence, unscathed.’

  He was allowed to leave, because the Grand Master had always hoped that he would leave; but not, after all, alone. Faster than the precious remnant of darkness, his shield, was melting away, the report of the Grand Master’s pronouncement had spread. Six knights might go with him to beleagured Mdina. And when, corselet shining under his robe, helmet clapped on his rough hair, de Villegagnon strode down the steep ramp to the castle ditch, a handful of corn and an arquebus cord in his hand, and began calling gently to the mares tethered there, a touch on his arm turned him to face, not a riding horse’s soft mouth but a knight of the French Langue, robed but without armour, a horse roughly bridled with cord at his arm, and behind him five other men. ‘There was a ballot,’ said a soft, vivid voice. ‘And you lost.’

  Jerott Blyth. Behind him, three French-born companions of long ago whose grinning faces warmed, suddenly, the raging ice at his heart. And behind them, two men already mounted, one splendid in height, the other lightly made and less tall; both capped in the moonlight with identical silvery hair. One of these was Francis Crawford. The other was Gabriel himself.

  Halting at de Villegagnon’s side, the Grand Cross bowed his golden head; and as if rebuked, de Villegagnon’s bearded chin dropped, too, on his chest, and one by one, those of all that remained of the rest.

  ‘Almighty God,’ Graham Malett prayed, his palms tight on the mare’s makeshift reins, his soft, deep voice reaching only the little band of whom he had made himself one. ‘Preserve these your children who go with no thought of self to succour the weak in their hour of desperate need. We pray for this Order, that what we do may diminish none of its glory, and what we leave undone may be forgiven it and us. Guide us, and when we have gone, guide those that remain, who do what they do, O Lord, from most piteous love of Thee and Thy Son. Into Thy hands we commend our spirits: under Thy foot we lay, joyfully, our mortal flesh.’

  The soft, fivefold ‘Amen’ lay like a presence in the air as they stirred, scattered and mounted. No Moslem watcher from Mount Sciberras saw the seven dark heads swimming the canal, nor the seven wraiths skirting the shore, the hot, salty air thrown back in the nostrils from the high walls of Birgu; nor did any stop them as they threaded through the dark night to the plain where Mdina’s high citadel lay.

  For to no seasoned Turkish captain, not even to Dragut himself, did it occur that any man, unless he came with an army, would desire to enter
Mdina now.

  IV

  The Rape of Galatian

  (Mdina and Gozo, July 1551)

  SOMEWHERE on that arrogant ride to Mdina, as he listened to Ottoman voices at prayer, crouched, his mare’s nostril’s closed in his hand, or sprang from tussock to tussock of dusty grass so that not even the click of unshod hooves would offend the listening night, Jerott Blyth pondered on why they had come.

  In the old capital where St Paul had walked, the chief city of Malta, shrine of her ancient laws and offices, they were to lay down their lives fighting the Turk. This, as knights of the Religion, was their duty. His three colleagues from the French Langue were there for that reason alone, he believed. He, who had joined the Order because a girl died, had come, he knew, for reasons that had little to do with the Turk. He thought of the Grand Master who, listening to his sorely honest account of his purpose in joining the Order, had said, ‘Followers of Christ come to Him for strange reasons, my son. We do not choose the man who is already whole. We choose the man who knows his soul may be made pure in the service of God, and who will strive to this end.…’ And that same Grand Master had allowed six of these seven men to ride to Mdina tonight in the hope that they would die, and in the knowledge that if Mdina fell, the shout of treachery might safely be raised.

  Gabriel.… Why had Gabriel come? At the last moment he had stepped forward, laying his hand on the Frenchman chosen, and had said, ‘No, Brother. You will live to make a better sacrifice than this.’ And bare of armour as Lymond rashly was, without his beautiful Milanese cuirass or the famous helmet with its white plume, Gabriel had left St Angelo to join de Villegagnon with the rest in the ditch. Gabriel, who had buttressed the aged Grand Master with his own strength, was going to throw away his life at Mdina when the Grand Master, as he must have known, would have used force if need be to stop him. Why?

  Why? It was then that Jerott’s eye fell on Francis Crawford, who had a knack for leading, and who, Jerott thought, from a spoiled child’s relish for gambling, had appointed himself, unasked, to the tiny squadron; and illumination struck him at last. Was it for Lymond’s sake, for Lymond and the Religion, that Gabriel had come to Mdina?

  On that same foolish journey, Lymond kept his own counsel. The skills learned on rock and on marshland in Scotland endowed him with silence and speed, and Graham Malett hardly saw him although, ignorant of the road, Lymond himself never lost Gabriel or de Villegagnon from sight.

  Dodging by instinct, weaving, turning, too fast for caution in a race with the night, the seven men fled to Mdina: seven vulnerable men; the army Adorne was awaiting. And as, far to the east, the first slow rise of light spread on the sea, the Governor, sleepless on the high wall of the capital, saw something move in the ditch.

  The bowman at his side had raised his elbow. A growing shudder of anger had begun softly to run through the guard when, in the darkness below the lip of the trench, a light sparked. It glimmered, faltered and flared; and in its yellow glow, grotesque, bearded, positive as a mask, was the face of the Chevalier de Villegagnon, the white cross at his shoulder. The army had come.

  On the ramparts, dizzily staring, they were too wise to cheer. Swiftly, as they had practised, the lower cannon were rolled back from the gunports and new rope, cream against ancient cream, flung through the loopholes to the knights waiting below. They climbed like lizards, seaman that each of them was, and George Adorne, an agony of emotion behind his stiff face, counted as they tumbled inside.

  Seven. The pause after the seventh man lengthened into a question that Adorne could not bear to put. It was Gabriel who, with a flicker of apology to de Villegagnon—a flicker that took in, Jerott saw, the whole waiting throng about them—said, ‘The army follows, my friends. We are here to tell you that Mdina will be saved.’

  And so, on the morning of the third day, the bells rang in Mdina. The people shouting and crying for joy mobbed the foolhardy knights who had brought them promise of rescue, and a great column of fire, lit on the Rock of St Paul in the faint light of dawning, told the Grand Master watching from the walls of St Angelo that de Villegagnon and the six had safely arrived.

  Inside Adorne’s palace, with the escorting crowds locked cheering outside the gates and the tapers smoking, tired yellow in the growing light within, the Bailiff turned, his arms outstretched, to clasp his rescuers, and the fatigue, the despair he had beaten down for three days in this moment of release and privacy, stole his voice and left the tears to stand, foolishly, in his smiling eyes.

  De Villegagnon took his hands and held them. There was a growing pause, during which no one spoke. Then as the Governor, in that rigid grip, began at last to guess the incredible truth, the Chevalier broke into harsh speech.

  ‘The people must not despair, but it is your right to know the truth. The Order lies at St Angelo to defend Christendom, and cannot spare but these seven men. We are here to die at your side in the breach … and by our joint resistance, yours, ours, and that of the people beyond these gates, to make the fall of Mdina renowned in the world.’

  ‘Forgive us,’ said Gabriel gently in the half-light, as Adorne, released, slowly slipped to his knees, his two hands pressed to his face. ‘We are not four hundred, but seven. We bring you, none the less, the prayers of Christendom and all the power of our faith. Miracles have been done with far less.’

  And across the Bailiff’s bowed and silent head, ‘What miracle is the Grand Master praying for, do you suppose?’ inquired Lymond’s mild voice.

  *

  Mdina, isolated on three sides by a sheer drop and on the fourth by a ditch, owed its high sandstone walls to the Romans, and they had been little tended by anyone since. Proof against small slings, against arquebus shot, against scaling, these walls would crumble like powder before the cannon the Osmanli army was dragging, piece by piece, over the rocks from their ships.

  Very soon, the Turkish gun-carriages had shattered on these bony tracks, with their ancient ruts chiselled by dead hands in the rock. So, fragment by dismantled fragment, the guns which would destroy them were being carried to Mdina on the naked backs of their Christian slaves, column after column winding through the baked plain; and their chant, rising and falling in the shimmering air, crept through the tight ways of the little city until the Bailiff’s trumpeters, high on the walls, raised their silver mouths and piped brisk confidence over the plain.

  The bells had stopped, but in the certain hope of rescue and the miraculous fleshly presence of de Villegagnon and his band, the people set to work to hold Mdina until the Order came.

  Behind the flaking walls a ditch was dug, and in the rear of this a second wall was raised: a wall of earth and crumbling stone, a heap of friable rubbish ravished in this land of naked soil from the homes which stood that morning on this site. Craftsman, artisan, nobleman, judge—each family in that fated quarter of Mdina wrecked its house, and the dark, stocky women of Malta, the veiling stuck with sweat to their cheeks, carried the precious rubble cradled in their white skirts to the new wall. And as each section of entrenchment was finished, planks were dragged in for platforms and epaulments on which artillery could rest and arquebuses fire over the ditch.

  It was while supervising this, his own powerful shoulder to the baulky wheel, shouting drolleries and encouragement in his deep voice, the guinea-gold hair bronze with sweat, that Gabriel looked up to find Lymond before him.

  ‘I believe,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘that some of your inimitable eloquence would be balm on the western escarpment. The holy Augustinian brethren of these parts are threatening to slay us with thunderbolts if we knock their church down.’

  Gabriel straightened. ‘Explain to them,’ he said.

  Lymond shook his head slowly. ‘I fear,’ he said, ‘that only someone on the most intimate terms with the Deity will answer.’

  ‘Then I shall go … since that is what you would expect me to say,’ said Gabriel, and a sudden, sweet smile crossed his face and was gone. He moved to leave, but at Lymond’
s shoulder hesitated, his face troubled. ‘I wish … you did not need to mock,’ he said, and rested his fingertips briefly, as once before, on Lymond’s arm. ‘For of all men, my God could love you; and I, too.’

  At the brief council of war held when the wall was almost completed, no trace of this encounter was visible to the naked eye, or even to Jerott Blyth’s lively intuition. From the fire, the bells, the loose mares in the ditch, the Turks must surely know, said Adorne tentatively, that some help had come.

  ‘Of course.’ De Villegagnon was impatient. ‘But they don’t know how much. And they may suspect from the signal fire and the trumpets—we hope they will—that more is on the way.’

  ‘I wonder if anyone has escaped over the wall since we came,’ said Lymond ruminatively. ‘Unhappily, not very likely. They are all waiting now to be succoured, except perhaps.…’

  ‘The Osmanli get their information by torture,’ interrupted Gabriel sharply.

  ‘… Except perhaps the Augustinian monks?’ finished Lymond hopefully, in an inimical silence, and added undisturbed, ‘Who would like to chalk a cross or two on black cloth?’

  Gabriel smiled. ‘The sheep-soldiers of Yarrow? I have heard of that,’ he said, and as Adorne looked his question, amplified. ‘We are ten knights, but the Turk will only count crosses. Dress every man, woman and child as a warrior. Helm the grandmothers; silver-paint muslin if you have no armour. Let’s have sticks for arquebuses, rods for crossbows.…’

  ‘… Logs for cannon,’ said de Villegagnon, with a lift of his magnificent beard. ‘Agreed most heartily. All that you say, I give in your charge, and M. Crawford’s here.’ He paused. ‘I need not tell you that the Turk is not easily frightened, Sir Graham. Silver paint and sticks cannot overcome scimitars.’

  ‘Then place your faith,’ said Graham Malett, ‘in the Eight-Pointed Cross,’ and again, spoke to Lymond alone.