The Disorderly Knights

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘What?’ said Jerott Blyth sharply, and took a step into the room. The older man by the altar did not stir. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘To rescue the woman?’

  ‘To save what I may,’ said Lymond. ‘Including a rascally hero called Thompson. Even, perhaps, to fight for Tripoli too.’

  The silence this time stretched on and on. A burst of soft Arabic sounded in the street outside; a dog barked; voices, somewhere in the house, spoke in Italian above the chinking of pots. ‘Then I go with you,’ said Gabriel at last.

  Jerott thought, It is the death-knell of the Order; a gesture of self-destruction worse than Mdina. And fell into a surge of renewed hatred for Lymond, who had robbed their greatest hope so lightly of peace. He opened his mouth, but Gabriel was before him.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Acquit me this time of easy heroics. The Grand Master has begged an emissary of France, no friend of his, to plead for the Turk’s clemency for the Order, since the Order cannot fulfil its duty to defend itself. If he succeeds, he will need the Religion’s help to negotiate. If he fails—’

  ‘—He will become the fresh scapegoat,’ said Lymond, ‘Of course. But would you bear witness for him against your own Grand Master?’

  ‘If we lose Tripoli,’ said Gabriel, his beautiful voice grating, ‘I will call the Order from the ends of the earth to sit in judgement on this sorry son of Christ’s church.’

  ‘Upon which all the Spaniards will come and vote for Juan de Homedès’, said Lymond unspectacularly. ‘Nothing but death, I fear, is going to rid you of your saintly leader, and a good many of his little flock are going to trot before him to the grave. What you need,’ said Francis Crawford, his blue eyes guilelessly wide, ‘is an assassin.’

  It was almost imperceptible, the change in Jerott Blyth’s face, the shadow of anxiety on Gabriel’s. ‘But I,’ added Lymond with continuing calmness, ‘am not the man.’

  *

  After only two days on Malta, M. d’Aramon’s two galleys left again, on the heels of the Ambassador, taking with them two knights of the Order, Graham Malett and Jerott Blyth, and, to the Grand Master’s anger, an unwanted observer in Crawford of Lymond.

  Among those who wished them Godspeed was de Villegagnon, withdrawn from long vigil in St Lawrence’s, where he had prayed beside Gabriel most of that night. ‘You will know,’ he said abruptly to Lymond, ‘that I am not permitted to leave. And indeed, I may serve the Order best here. I commend your courage in doing what there is no call to do. I do not hope that even if God grants you life, you will come back to us.’

  ‘I do not come to Malta for wealth or honour, but to save my soul,’ said Lymond, quoting, his voice amused. It had been the inscription on one of the Turkish bracelets they had found after Mdina.

  ‘You were perfectly honest about your reasons for coming to Malta. This I grant you,’ said de Villegagnon. Under the tanned skin he had flushed, but his voice was level. ‘You have earned your wages as a captain of mercenaries. I only wish our own hands had not been tied. There might have been more for you to do.’

  ‘But in my other capacity, you must own I have been kept quite busy,’ said Lymond. ‘My post as an independent witness of the Order’s troubles with a strong bias towards the French.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Then de Villegagnon said, neither confirming nor denying the implicit accusation, ‘I am not in the running to become Grand Master.’

  ‘But la Valette is, I believe,’ said the independent witness. ‘And Leone Strozzi, who is in French pay. And de Valuer, Governor of Tripoli, placed there I understand precisely to put him out of the present Grand Master’s way. And of course, Graham Malett. Except that so long as Juan de Homedès leads an all-Spanish cabal in Council, no French man or French ally has a chance.’

  After a while, ‘Gabriel told me,’ said the Chevalier de Villegagnon heavily, ‘that you believed you had been brought here to rid us of the Grand Master by force. You accuse us now of inducing you to do so by guile. In the first assumption you are wrong. In the second.…’

  The big knight paused. ‘If to inform the world of the arrogance, avarice and cruelty of a would-be Christian is to do wrong, then the blame is mine. I have heard you talk to the knights, I have seen you watch and listen, and I have heard the questions you do not ask. You know as well as any of us where we are weak. I am not asking you to help as a kingmaker,’ said de Villegagnon bitterly. ‘I ask only that all who would save Christendom should help us make this breach whole.’

  Face to face they stood wrapped in violence, deaf to Jerott Blyth standing burning at Lymond’s side, and Gabriel waiting quietly at the door. Lymond, for once a fraction less than cool, wore an expression de Villegagnon could not interpret, and looked for a long time as if he wished to give no answer at all. At length, ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘I know perfectly well what you want. You are to be honoured for it. But I am not at all sure that Christianity’s best hope is not that the Order of St John of Jerusalem should disappear from the earth.’

  VI

  God Proposes

  (Tripoli, August 1551)

  IT took the men, women and children of Gozo three days to reach North Africa, for the Ottoman fleet, Turks and corsairs together, was big: a hundred and thirty sails, Oonagh guessed, although it was hard to count. After the first hours she was little on deck.

  She and Galatian, she found, were not on the flagship but with Dragut, whose brother had burned like a dog on Gozo seven years before.

  It was not a coincidence. For her, the squat old warrior with the powerful, peasant face showed only contempt. Towards Galatian he showed a child’s capacity for taunting. With exaggerated respect, he had him freed when he complained of his fetters, and had the wounds rubbed, not with oil but with salt. When he was thirsty, he was given a sherbet of aloes; when he called Oonagh’s name, and cried, they bandied among themselves, audibly, tales Oonagh had never heard of his supposed amorous prowess since taking his vows.

  Afterwards, she realized such things must be common gossip among the Gozitans brought back so often on these raids. And when the Governor whined, Dragut said, with sudden violence, that the dog should suffer no longer from this unseemly itch, and Galatian was taken from her sight. When he returned, bloodsoaked on a litter, Galatian de Césel, Knight of St John, had embraced chastity at last.

  It was Galatian’s servant, Maltese and therefore an Arabic-speaker, who told her that they had stopped off Tagiura, twelve miles east of Tripoli. Wandering in France and Ireland, fighting for the sovereignty of her nation and ultimately of Cormac O’Connor her lover, Oonagh had yet heard of the great corsair Barbarossa who had extended the Sultan’s empire over North Africa and the Mediterranean, to be made at last Beylerbey of Africa, with two thousand soldiers and orders from Constantinople to levy whatever army he might need from corsair, Berber, Moor or renegade and give them the standing of Janissaries.

  So, with bitter fighting over the years, the great seaports of Africa had been torn between Turkey and Spain; now the Emperor’s and Christian: now Suleiman’s and an infidel strength. Tagiura, rich oasis so close to Tripoli, was Turkish, and the Aga Morat, lord of Tagiura, was Barbarossa’s successor and an officer in Africa for Suleiman the Magnificent, King of Kings. As the silken fleet floated inshore under the wide skies of sunset the batteries echoed from ship to tawny-green shore, and the banquet for Sinan Chasse Diable and his two naval commanders went on, they said, all night.

  Oonagh saw nothing of it. Sometimes, at night, as she nursed Galatian in his fever, she thought she heard, stifled by decking, the whimpering of the people of Gozo, spread through the battered holds of the fleet. On Dragut’s galleass there were none save herself and Galatian, with a servant apiece. Attending her patient with diamond efficiency, neither pity nor distaste crossed her face, reduced against its bone by heat, and strange foods, and pregnancy. Like a sea animal she could and did close in upon herself against affliction and shock, assimilate the suffering and show meanwhile an uncaring face. />
  For Galatian she felt only contempt. As suddenly as it had come, her own fever had gone. She felt an arid, fighting spinsterhood upon her, and glanced, with new purpose, at the fleshy, alien faces about her.

  If Galatian lived, he would be ransomed back and she might be saved. If he died, she would accept her fate and wrest some pride out of it. Even while carrying the thick-skinned spawn of Cormac O’Connor. Francis Crawford had in any event passed her by, lightly and coldly as, of course, she desired.

  For a few days, the fleet rested at anchor; then Sinan Pasha sent a message to Tripoli: a white-robed Moor on one of their small, swift horses bearing a white flag. Before the gates of the city he dismounted, and planting a cane in the pallid sand in front of the ditch, fastened to it the Osmanli call to surrender.

  Surrender yourselves to the mercy of the Grand Seigneur, who has ordered me to reduce this place under his obedience. I will allow you the liberty of retiring wheresoever you shall think fit with your effects; but in case of your refusal, I will put you to the sword.

  The following day, the courier returned to Tagiura with the reply of Gaspard de Vallier, Marshal of Tripoli and Knight of St John, affixed to the same cane.

  The Government of Tripoli has been entrusted to me by my Order; I cannot surrender it up to anyone but to him whom the Grand Master and the Council of the Order shall nominate; and I will defend it against all others to the last drop of my blood.

  *

  On the brief journey from Malta to Tripoli, Jerott Blyth was able without undue trouble to avoid conversation with Francis Crawford. But during these same two days, from Gabriel who had seen service there, and Nicolas de Nicolay who had charted it, Lymond learned all he could about the knights’ African home.

  There was little that was good. Built almost at the end of the green and fertile strip of North Africa, Tripoli stood behind walls, on a plain, with five hundred miles of sand and salt marsh stretching to the east towards Egypt. To the west lay a succession of corsair strongholds, alternating with outposts of Spain. To the south lay the desert, broken by the blue ridge of the mountains of Gharian, a Berber stronghold. Beyond that was the Sahara, through which Tripoli offered one of the narrowest crossings. For Tripoli was the centre for three great African caravan routes, and at the mouth of the shortest and safest sea route to Europe, through Malta and Sicily. Because of this, Charles V had issued his ultimatum: If you wish to receive Malta as a home for the Order, you must defend Tripoli for the Empire.

  It was a command of heroic proportions. The rough map scratched on the ship’s rail by Nicolay’s dagger showed a rocky corner, jutting out from the palm groves and enclosing a harbour, sheltered in that land of errant winds by a spit of rock with a fort on it where the corner, attenuated, ran out finally into the sea.

  In the angle between spit and bay sat the city, ringed by sloping stone walls and washed by the sea on south and west; and within the city but cut off from it in turn by its own walls and battlements, was the square edifice of the castle, on its seaward side commanding the whole bay of Tripoli, and on its landward, overlooking the great wall and gates giving on to the eastern plain.

  But the old castle of Tripoli, Roman, Byzantine, Spanish in turn, was a huddle of courts, rooms, passages and inadequate battlements for which neither Charles nor Juan de Homedès had opened their purses.

  And its Governor, Gaspard de Vallier, was an old man: a knight of the Auvergne Langue who, having achieved the prime dignities and posts of the Order, presented a challenge to the Grand Master de Homedès, and thus had been removed here. Speaking of all this to Lymond, ‘Everything depends on the Ambassador,’ Gabriel had said. ‘If he cannot persuade Sinan Pasha to give up the siege, then Tripoli will almost certainly fall.’ He then stopped a moment and added, ‘The lady … is she young? As young as yourself?’

  Lymond, Jerott noted with satisfaction, did not take it at all well. He said, ‘She is sufficiently young for the seraglio, if that’s what you mean.’

  Gabriel said gently, ‘They are well treated, you know. The Osmanlis believe in marrying the wives and daughters of their conquered. The mixed blood is their strength. You would do better to look for your pirate friend. They may take de Césel and the woman ashore, but they will leave the other captives with the fleet.’

  ‘He saved Mdina with his false dispatches from Sicily. The Lord, surely, will look after his own?’ said Lymond, causing another burst of anger, as doubtless he knew, not in Gabriel but in Jerott listening beyond. But it was Gabriel who bent forward and, leaving Lymond leaning back on the rail, the sea racing behind his bright, sardonic face, drew Jerott beside them. ‘Come and be baited in comfort,’ said Graham Malett.

  Jerott Blyth shrugged his shoulders. ‘Let him joke. Mr Crawford is here, I believe, to display his heroism in reclaiming a woman bold enough to escape from his bed. We are here to save souls.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Lymond. ‘I thought that when you ran crying with your troubles to Mother Church, they put you under oath to fight. I run risks to improve my lot in this life; you to ensure your comforts in the next. You are under orders; I am not. The Turk worships and kills just as you do: what offends you in him?’

  Just in time, Gabriel said ‘Jerott!’ and added less urgently, ‘I invited you to air your anger, not to resort to force.’ And to Lymond, a smile in his eyes, ‘You love malice, do you not, and to trifle with blasphemy? Most of us came to the Order for an unworthy cause. Jerott lost a bride; you need not remind him. I’—he hesitated—‘had a power I was reluctant to use in case I became led astray. Some, like Strozzi, came I believe to train in the finest school in the world out of personal ambition. But when you say the Order should die, you are not thinking of that, or of the poor, silly leadership we have, or of our human frailties. You are not thinking of Galatian de Césel or Juan de Homedès, but of the weapon we make.’

  ‘Against the Turk? He would like the whole world Turkish,’ said Jerott. At Gabriel’s reproach he had flushed. ‘Can’t you see our muézzins climbing St Giles’s steeple five times a day: Allâhu ákbar! Lâ ilâha Allâh! Lâ ilâha ílla’llâh!’

  Determinedly patient Graham Malett’s voice cut off the warble. ‘Consider that, unlike us, Francis has come fresh from Europe, and you will see. The struggle for power in Europe and Asia is being fought between four powers—England, France, Turkey and the Empire. This Order serves God. It also serves per se any power which for reasons good or evil wishes to destroy the allies of Turkey. Juan de Homedès is Spanish. He fears for the Order’s possession of Malta, so he supports the Empire in her war against Turkey’s ally France, Christian nation against Christian nation. We drive the Turk out of Bône not because we wish it, but because the Emperor chooses it, and we bring down on ourselves, not on Charles, the vengeance of Suleiman.’

  ‘Thus, note, playing into the hands of the King of France,’ said Lymond cheerfully. ‘Because the Order, being badly led, badly organized and thoroughly demoralized, cannot defend itself let alone Tripoli, and has forced the Emperor to lock up half his sea and land forces in southern Italy and Sicily to protect the Emperor’s lands from a possible break-through by the Turks, once Malta is overthrown. Since he is also being held in north Italy by France, attacked in Germany by the Duke of Guise and at war with Turkey in Hungary, the failure of the Order in the Mediterranean is about the best thing that the Kingdom of France ever witnessed. You are now what every sect potentially becomes when it loses leadership,’ said Lymond calmly. ‘A tool.’

  ‘So we allow the Osmanlis to sweep the world,’ said Jerott Blyth, his eyes bright.

  ‘You either get out, and let the so-called Christian nations, instead of cutting each other’s throats, unite and destroy the religion they all oppose; or you make yourselves so strong that you can dictate your own terms.’

  ‘Under Juan de Homedès?’ said Gabriel. His eyes had for a long time, never left Lymond’s.

  ‘No. Nor under Graham Malett,’ Lymond said.

&nbs
p; The blood, spreading under the golden skin, over the royal bones, stained Gabriel’s face, as few people had ever witnessed it. Through it, Gabriel smiled steadily still, unaware of Jerott’s hard fists at his side. ‘You are hard,’ he said. ‘Who, then?’

  ‘Until Juan de Homedès dies, no one,’ said Lymond. ‘After that, the list surely is very short. De Villegagnon is a born soldier and seaman but not truly a man of God, I think. Strozzi is strong but ambitious, with a personal vengeance to fulfil. Romegas is resourceful and gallant but without great personal power. Which leaves—’

  ‘La Valette. I thought you had hardly spoken to him,’ said Sir Graham. His colour was still high.

  ‘I have heard of him from every knight I could reach,’ said Lymond. ‘It is sometimes better than meeting the man himself.’

  ‘And Graham Malett, Grand Cross,’ said Jerott’s voice at his shoulder. ‘What faults has the Master discovered in him?’

  But Gabriel himself answered, his colour gone, leaving his face rather pale. ‘For love of me,’ he said, ‘I can ask men to do all that I wish. I could grow to love this power too much.’

  ‘You hear,’ said Lymond placidly, into Jerott’s icy face. ‘We all love him too much.’

  For the second time, swiftly, Gabriel caught Blyth’s arm as it began to swing. Lymond did not move. ‘Be still. Are you children?’ said Gabriel, angered at last. ‘Be still: your own destiny is behind you. There is Tripoli, there on the bow.’

  They turned. Ahead, a white crescent of walls and towers within the single arm of the bay, lay the castle and city of Tripoli with the white Cross of St John minute on the ramparts. And outwith the spit, rocking gently at anchor in deep water, harnessing the sea with frail canopies and gilded tassels and long, reeling banners of scarlet and gold, were the Sultan Suleiman’s ships.