The key positions were not hard to occupy, because there were hardly any men to be found in the city, which was a pity, as he had offered two crowns for every Moor’s head brought to him afterwards. And resistance, once they had occupied them and roused the citizenry to their predicament with drums and trumpets in the main square, turned out to be of a token kind only, for the city was filled largely with old men, women and children.
It was when they discovered this that the army of Malta, regrettably, ran amok. It was not, of course, the fault of the Magistral Knights and the Knights of Grace, the Chaplains of Obedience, the Serving Brothers, the Piliers, the Priors, the Bailiffs or the Knights Grand Cross of the Order. But officered by the Knights were nine hundred soldiers of mixed nationality and a uniform appetite for money and women.
They fired the buildings as they ran through, looking for prisoners and plunder with tree branches dipped in pitch for their torchlight. They fought one another over the silver bracelets on a child’s ankle, or the earrings from an old woman’s lobes, or the coins round a girl’s canvas cap. They stuffed embroidered silks into their shirt-fronts, and rings and aspers and ducats into their pouches. They found opium, and finely chased seals, and hoards of coral and gold and pearl buttons, and spilled open chest and cupboard and market stall to find more. Girdle cakes of barley and millet bounced upset in the flickering dark with the ringing wares of the brassworker, and a basket of wild artichokes rolled with its soft leafy fists among the spilled salt, fat and cheese of the suqi dealer along the warrens of small vaulted passages, with dead men underfoot.
Two crowns for a Moor’s head; and as slaves, the women and children might be worth even more. La Valette, with great trouble, had gathered over a thousand prisoners in the dark square, ready to march them out to the ships which were so mysteriously tardy in coming, when the Moor Ali Benjiora found him: a man he knew well, who had served under him once at Tripoli.
Conspicuous by his height, and his curling white cropped hair and beard, de la Valette bent to hear the man’s words; made him repeat them; and then, raising his voice in the uproar, found and summoned Leone Strozzi. ‘There is an ambush. The Aga Morat’s army, he says, is surrounding us from two sides, half from Tripoli and the rest under the Aga from Djerba: four thousand horsemen in all, with arquebuses and bows. We are to be trapped in the city.’
Strozzi’s eyes, brilliant with excitement, glowered at the Moor. ‘How is this true?’
‘It is true,’ said de la Valette. ‘I know this man and I trust him. More than that, he was shown the troops and told where to find us by someone known to both of us: the French Envoy, Crawford of Lymond.’
‘Then it is true,’ said Strozzi slowly. He looked round. The pillage was almost over, the city was blazing; the worst had been done. More, he saw, looking beyond the smoke and the flames out to sea, his ships had at last come. It was time to cut losses. ‘Retreat! The drums will beat retreat!’ he said with energy; and flung back his bright helmeted head shouting. ‘To the shore! Retreat to the shore! All captives to the shore, and make ready to embark! The Chevalier Justiani, make your signal to the Admiral galley. All boats to the shore …’
He thrust through the uproar, shouting. A moment later the drums started, but even where de la Valette stood, in the square itself, they were hardly audible. The Knights of St John were being called on to retreat, and none of them yet knew it. The Chevalier Parisot de la Valette, opening his purse to reward the Moor Ali Benjiora, was struck by a thought. ‘You came into the city: how did you come in?’
‘Through the gates,’ said the Moor. He slipped the gold into his robe.
‘Through the gates? The commander of the companies guarding the walls let you enter?’
‘What companies?’ said the Moor. ‘There is no one, Hâkim, outside the gates. They all came in, it is said, long since to plunder.’
So for the second time that night, the gates of Zuara stood open to an invader, but this time to a succouring force; a brutal friend who was prepared to let a city die in order to trap its assailants.
Jerott landed on the shore, the other skiffs hard behind him as the Aga Morat with four thousand armed cavalry thundered into the burning city. Facing him, every gate to the sea was flung open, a yawning red mouth in the night, and the black shapes of people poured through; Moorish women and children, wailing and screaming, soldiers cursing, Knights carrying wounded. Shouldering against the tide, sword in hand, Jerott pushed through into the town, seeking for a face he knew in the dashing smoke and the distorting glare of the flames. Then he saw that pillage had stopped; and carnage had begun.
The horses, these brilliantly ridden horses of the Aga Morat’s, were the chief terror, Jerott found. Grazed by the encircling fires, they reared and plunged and kicked, ripping the smoke and pounding flesh and bone in their path. Scimitars flashed, and the blade of long, double-edged daggers, used again and again; and the steely face of small axes, attacking their food. Here and there, and then suddenly everywhere at once, the echoing thud of arquebus fire could be heard. He saw one man’s face, rearing over him, spear ready to lunge, and recognized it as he parried, burying his sword in the man’s unprotected thigh. It was one of the men he had ridden with, on the display-ground at Djerba.
The Knights, on foot, fought back grimly. Their heads shielded by close-helm or salade, armed with breastplate and backplate under the short surcoat, they defended themselves as they could with their great oval shields, their axes, their two-handed swords, staggering to the rush of the horses; driving against the white-turbaned figures. The soldiers, in leather jerkins or brigantines like his own, were running; retreating to the sea gates in haste, their prisoners dashing free as they went.
Parrying, defending himself, assisting whom he could where he could, Jerott fought his way across the square to where the battle was thickest: round the tall flag with the white cross which was the standard of the Order. The sacred standard, his duty to which, in all the years of his training, had become ingrained in his soul: never to fall into enemy hands; never to touch the ground; never to be defiled; never to be abandoned. And beside it, taller than the rest, was a Knight in full armour with his visor lowered, a Knight unrecognizable by anything except the blue panache on his helm.
Fighting towards that, Jerott passed by and ignored the familiar faces which surged thick about him now: Tolon de St Jaille, de Guimeran, le Plessis Richlieu, Justiniani, Sforza, young Strozzi, Piero’s son, the Chevalier Poglieze … Knights of every country, the best of their kind; and brave men. Then the Knight with the blue panache turned towards him, his sword drooping; his gloved hand pushing back his vizor, and Jerott’s sword was already half-way towards the naked face within when it was struck up, sharply, by another blade from below. ‘No, you fool,’ said a hard, emotionless voice he barely recognized as Lymond’s. ‘The man you are killing is Leone Strozzi.’
Continuing to fight, automatically; his eyes on the banner, his ears alert for Strozzi’s commands as, retreating, the Knights began to turn back towards the gates and the sea, Jerott saw that, apart from that one stroke, Lymond was not fighting. Instead, concealed by the darkness and the smoke, he had found a place from which he could watch: and there he stood still, wearing only the arms Abernethy had brought him; a shirt of chain mail over the almond silk trunk-hose he had been wearing at Djerba, now stained and scuffed; a sword-belt; a dagger; a purse. His hair, Jerott saw, was uncovered, although he had been given a morion, and his eyes, ceaselessly roving over the dark receding mainstream of the struggle, were narrowed like those of a marksman waiting for the partridge to rise at the tock of a drum.
So he had not yet found Graham Malett; or Graham Malett had not yet found him.
Soldiers, Knights and Serving Brothers now, fighting for their lives against horses and men, were clear of all the souks of the town. The desperate knots of resistance where the great officers, bound by their vows, preferred death to surrender to the heathen were one by one scattered and hewn
down. The square underfoot, roughly paved with brick and small pebbles set in mortar, was thick and viscous with blood, and trammelled with foot-catching lumber: of hacked bodies and strewn clothes and loose armour plate and ownerless weapons. Outside, along the harbour pool and the shoaling sands of the shore, those who were already free of the town would be streaming, fighting in their heavy armour as they went, making for the boats, which but for Jerott would not have been there.
Because of that, Jerott saw, fighting one-handed shoulder to shoulder with his former brothers across the square beside the standard, unaware of the agony of his unslung wrist, there was at each of the sea gates a jammed mass of their fellows unable to get through; fighting back to the gates under shock after shock of arquebus fire and scimitar and striking hooves as the Aga Morat sent line after line of cavalry bursting through them until soon the gates, fleetingly blocked by the living, would be closed to them for all time by the dead.
Jerott left the standard. Running to the gates, he found Strozzi’s nephew beside him, bound on the same errand: to free by any means humanly possible the block at the gates. For the next few moments, shouting orders, hurling men from him, using his sword where necessary to force their own men into the open on the other side, there was no time to do anything but what he-had been trained, by the Order and by Lymond, to do. Then, as the gates began to clear and the last of Leone Strozzi’s conquering army, dragging its wounded, began to stream through on to the dark sands, Jerott spoke gaspingly to the boy still at his side. ‘Where is Gabriel?’
The black eyes, so like his father’s and his uncle’s, shining with dread and excitement, glanced round, briefly, at Jerott. ‘Dead.… He fell on the way to the city. They say even his body had gone.’
The pain in Jerott’s arm, breaking through his consciousness, suddenly made his head swim. Killed … killed, after all. And not by Francis. Francis who, for the first time in his life, had stood aside from a battle, running no risks, and hazarding no injury which would flaw his efficiency in the one thing he had set himself to do: to kill Graham Malett. Turning, without a word, Jerott abandoned the boy and the crowds fighting out seawards into the boats, and struggled up through the sands, against the reeling mass coming towards him; the last of the rearguard under Strozzi, the blue panache, worn so fortuitously by Leone and not by Gabriel, lit by the flames.
With them came an onrush of Turks; a fresh party of cavalry, thrown into the town and racing over the square to pursue the Knights into the sea. Jerott saw them coming towards him, and knew he was isolated, and they were too many; and he would have no chance. The leader was pale-skinned, not olive like the Turk or tawny like the Moors of the coast. His robe, backlit by the fire, was white and almost transparent, and round his magnificent head he wore a black and gold foulard, wrapped over fold upon fold with a fall of fringe to his breast. He was smiling.
He was smiling still as he galloped past Jerott and reined, just beyond, where the boy Strozzi stood. Jerott, turning, saw the lad’s sword-point fall, and the grim purpose on his young face change, suddenly, to a look of amazed welcome. Then the Turk, with a little flourish of his own damascened blade, leaned forward amiably and plunged it through the boy’s heart.
It was Gabriel.
The boy dropped. Jerott, standing stock still, saw Leone Strozzi turn from the surf of the shore and, sword in hand, begin at a lumbering run to hurry towards them. He saw Graham Malett, still smiling, withdraw his long, smoking sword and turning, broad-shouldered and golden in burnous and turban, look into his eyes. And he felt a hand on his shoulder and a voice which was Lymond’s again; low, level and friendly, say, The standard needs you. This is my affair. Go.’
As Jerott drew breath, the choice was made for him. Struggling over the sand, laden with armour and weapons, Leone Strozzi on foot was no match for the mounted Turks dashing over the beaches towards him. As Jerott, light in his brigantine, threw himself forward; and others of his entourage, running behind, strove to surround and protect him, matches flared in the dark and half a dozen arquebuses spoke. Flinging up his arms, Strozzi fell. Behind him, Jerott saw Tolon de St Jaille falter and then drop, and another behind him cry out. Then he was at Strozzi’s side, kneeling, and saw the blood pouring dark over the sand from the ball in his thigh.
There was a Majorca Knight, one of the most powerful in his Langue, just behind. Between them, Jerott and he lifted the Prior, and with Toreillas carrying him in his arms and Jerott at his side, the other Knights shoulder to shoulder about them, they plunged out into the surf. With the din of the sea in his ears, drowning the musket shot and the cries, the clash of weapons and the pounding of hooves far behind him, Jerott forced his way through the water, using his sword as he went.
It was shallow. The smallest shallops had already come in as far as they dared and had taken off again, laden with soldiers: except for the Knights, most of the fighting men now surviving must be on board. For the bigger skiffs, deep water was needed. Straining his eyes, he could see far out, black against the lit galleys behind, a shape which must be the longboat of the Admiral galley, waiting for them. It seemed to him that he ran alongside the stumbling Toreillas with his burden for an eternity before the water deepened and, pursuit falling off, they forced their way through the current until the sea was waist high.
How many, Jerott wondered, could swim? Very few. Wearing a hundred pounds of plate armour, none at all. Some, with soaked fingers, he saw attempting to unbuckle back- or breast-plate: some succeeded, and at the next, careful burst of arquebus fire fell, sagging, into the sea.
Jerott sheathed his sword. With his good hand under Toreillas’s elbow he guided him from rock to rock and ledge to ledge under the water until finally they were on the last spit of the long underwater shelf, and the longboat was bobbing there at their sides. Jerott waited to see Leone Strozzi and the Majorcan Knight safely aboard, and then, turning, made his way grimly back to the shore.
For a second, as he raced to help Strozzi, Jerott might have seen relief and another, unguarded expression on Lymond’s face. Then, moving faster even than Gabriel’s horse, surging through sand dunes towards him, Lymond turned, ducked as a scimitar skimmed him, and, seizing the man’s stirrups as he fled past, drove his knife into his attacker. He left it there. Then, running hard, Lymond vaulted into the saddle as the other man tumbled out and, gathering the reins, pulled the little horse round on its haunches as a sword flashed red in the air where he had been.
Opposite him, reined in also after that single, opportunist cut of his blade, Graham Malett sat still in the saddle, the fire striking sparks from the gold of his turban, his big-boned classical face as calm as his voice. ‘Francis Crawford, who was once a slight inconvenience … does your life please you at present?’
The blue eyes were wide. ‘It has brought me here,’ Lymond said. He could sense horses behind him. The little mare sidled, under his knees; and Gabriel’s horse edged round also in front of him, keeping his distance. He added, paraphrasing the Qur’ân, ‘Let not pity for me detain you in the matter of obedience to Allâh.’ The sea, where every movement was magnified, was not very far off. He continued edging towards it.
‘You know the Qur’ân,’ said Gabriel. His pace, following, was entirely leisurely. ‘It is a dramatic work. And those of the left hand: how wretched are those of the left hand,’ he quoted, the deep voice enriching the phrases. ‘In hot wind and boiling water and the shade of black smoke, neither cool nor honourable. I am afraid,’ said Sir Graham Reid Malett gently, ‘that you, my dear Francis, are of the left hand.’ He thought, seeking the words, and then added to it, mournfully: ‘And if they cry for water, they shall be given water like molten brass which will scald their faces … Evil the drink; and ill the resting-place … Sour-gutted devils, the Ottomans. A lesson in Western civilization is going to do them no harm.’
They were in the sea. The counter-attack, which had followed the attack on the Prior, had spent itself, although for a while the Knights still on
the shore had made the Aga Morat prudently order his men to withdraw and, dismounting, rake the beaches with fire. Anger on both sides had made the last skirmish a bitter one, and the beaches were black with the fallen. Far off, on a long spit running out to sea, the standard fluttered, with fierce fighting going on about it. The shallops had come in, and about them the sands were emptying as the remaining men ran, under fire, for the sea. Around the two men, there was no sound but the rush of the waves and the splashing hooves of their circling horses. For the moment, they were alone. ‘A lesson in what?’ Lymond said. ‘What a pity your uncivilized cross-kissing colleagues chose another Grand Master.’
‘Grand Master to those old women? Who wants that?’ said Gabriel. He laughed. ‘After this, my dear, Charles will foreclose on Malta, and the Knights will be flung out on their gallant white crosses. I don’t mind sharpening my knife on a dunghill like Scotland or a sandcastle like Malta, for when the time is ripe, I shall rule over an empire. Stop sidling, my swan. I am going to hurt you, but I am not going to kill you, just yet. You are going to provide me with a deal of merriment still. I do not like being inconvenienced. I wish my friends to note what the consequences are.…’
The fires were dying. In the east, a hairline of light over the sea told that dawn was not now far off, but now it was dark, and in spite of the heat of the day the little chill wind of pre-dawning had risen to stir Gabriel’s turban and ruffle Francis Crawford’s damp hair. He had picked one of the trained horses. Used to the trick, it gave no sign as, still moving gently out through the water, Lymond slid his hand low and began to unbuckle the girth. ‘Incidentally,’ said Gabriel softly, ‘there is a marksman on the beach with orders to do nothing at all but keep his weapon trained strictly on you. Tell me: have you burned any straw lately?’
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