St Brabe was broken. Because of the continuous firing it was suicide to work in the entrenchments behind. All right. What good would it do, said Jerott passionately, to kill the defenders publicly while the defences were giving way? Why in heaven’s name didn’t they do something positive? Re-site, re-angle the guns: counterattack. They had gunpowder, they had sachetti, they had trumps. Why not use fire on the Janissaries: grenades, pitch, catapults.…
‘Because they would use fire in return, and fry us in our shells,’ de Herrera had said briefly. ‘So far they have been careful because they wish to capture the castle intact.’
‘They will. They’ve only to wait,’ Jerott had said, his face bloodless under the cracked brown skin and the dirt. ‘They’re having Tripoli handed them on a salver.’ De Herrera had pushed past; and presently the screaming began, and there was nothing Jerott and his handful of French companions could do but go from post to post round the walls and battlements and into the halls and the sick quarters exhorting, cajoling, heartening, replacing weak links with stronger, sanctioning renewal of water, matches, shot, arrows and bolts, and listening all the time to the murmur of sedition.
When, at last, the brutal heat of the sun waned, to be replaced by the treacherous shadows and night, Jerott, irritated by a delay in the supply line, went himself to the magazine to find the reason and have a trolley loaded with sacks of shot.
He was not allowed inside. Striding along the dark corridors, through uneven passages, his way barred by great oaken or iron doors that had to be unshackled and dragged ajar by the serving brother at his side, Blyth reached the open space before the big underground magazine, whose veering oil lamps were hung on Corinthian columns and whose decaying walls were blotched with terracotta and chrome and the oval eyes and tight curled hair of Roman heterae. It had been a bathing-place, someone said. It was now a guardroom.
Three Knights of the Order were there; one by the door, the other two supervising the removal by Turkish slaves of a load of corn powder. The slaves were naked to their shaved heads. The guards did not leave their flanks until the double doors, of iron and then of timber, were shut and locked behind them. One of the knights went with the supplies. The other two remained, looking at Jerott. Both were Spanish, old fighting companions of Guenara’s; both were fully armed with helm, breastplate, dagger and sword.
In the uncertain state of the garrison, it seemed a wise precaution. A pack of frightened soldiers could hold them all to ransom with a few sacks from here. It seemed a wise precaution until Jerott was informed that although his needs would be met, he might not enter.
‘Why?’ Hard, brown, his black hair in a soaking swathe across one grazed cheek, Jerott Blyth had his bare sword in his hands when he added softly, ‘And by whose orders?’
‘Control yourself, Brother. The Marshal has agreed that lest the French knights be tempted.…’
‘Tempted to do what? Start a real defence against the Turks? By God, if I’d thought of it—’
‘You are profane,’ said the older of the two knights sharply; and Jerott opened his mouth, and then discovering the sword in his hand, shot it back into the scabbard with his head bent. He took a deep breath and said, ‘Forgive me. But there is sufficient distrust in this garrison, surely, without causing more?’
‘These are the Marshal’s orders.’
‘The Marshal would never have thought of this idea unaided. Do you know that all the doors between here and the upper floors are shut and barred, and that supplies are taking twice the time they should to reach the guns?’
He could not shake them. ‘There are sufficient reserves on the surface to keep all guns fully supplied. It is your job to ensure that these reserves are maintained.’
‘Without being allowed into the magazine?’ Jerott was sarcastic.
‘The officers and soldiers at present raising the stores are under your orders. You have only to command.’
‘Oh. They will obey, will they?’
‘So long as I tell them to,’ said the senior of the two knights. What he knew of him, Jerott had liked. But religion and politics were now in opposition, he suddenly realized. And politics had won. He could go to the Marshal, but what good would it do? The Marshal was hamstrung too. He turned away, and in sudden fear, raised his clenched fist and drove it home against the cold, leering flakes of fresco on the wall. ‘What can I do?’
‘Pray,’ said Lymond’s voice mildly in the gloom; and he saw him, just ahead, mocking, holding open the thick passage door for him to walk through. ‘I came through an hour ago full of plans for an enchanting little shop of special grenades. They won’t let me in either. Quite rightly.’ Like Jerott, he had stripped to essentials. Down one arm was a series of frayed blisters from an arquebus or cannon barrel, and his shirt front was patched with brown blood, but he sounded still inhumanly fresh. ‘Someone else’s,’ he explained when Jerott pointed to the stains, and left it at that. But as the next door closed behind them and the passage lightened, he added, ‘The Calabrians, however, are allowed into the magazine. Interesting, isn’t it?’
‘My.…’ said Jerott, and stopped.
‘God,’ supplied Lymond. ‘I told you to pray. They haven’t removed anything—yet, if that’s what’s worrying you. I’ve been watching them ever since I found out.’
‘Why? What can they do except murder us?’ asked Jerott blankly.
‘What our panicky Spanish friends hope that they’ll do, I imagine, is force us to surrender. That’s all they want, isn’t it?’ said Lymond. And after a moment he said with genuine disgust in his voice, ‘I tell you, if there were a few more of you and you weren’t so damned holy, you could kick out both the Marshal and the Spanish crew calling the tune, get the Calabrians on to your side and let them reduce us to a heap of sand before we had to give in. And we wouldn’t have to give in.’
Jerott stopped. ‘You tried on Malta to get Gabriel to revolt. He told you why he wouldn’t, and I’m telling you the same. It would be open revolt against the Order. It would mean the end of us. I’ve taken an oath to obey. I’ll do everything humanly possible to change this policy of suicide, but if they won’t agree, I’ve no option but to obey. Don’t you understand?’ He pushed the thick hair out of his eyes and glared, his sight thick with tiredness, at the bland, importunate face. ‘You follow the common laws of warfare, Crawford. Our service is to Christ.’
In the long, tolerant silence that followed, he became aware, outside his fury, of a sudden unpleasantness, an acridity, a thickening odour in the stone passage where they stood. He took a single step craning, towards the bend of the passage and daylight. A wisp of smoke coiled round and met him, and he hesitated, a question in his eyes, and looked towards Lymond.
Francis Crawford’s blue gaze stared coolly back. ‘The bodies of the bastinadoed slaves, burning,’ he said.
VIII
Fried Chicken (The Yoke of the Lord)
(Tripoli, August 1551)
THAT night, for two hours, the Turkish cannon stopped firing again. As the great silence fell, and continued, the beleaguered garrison guessed that the halt was an enforced one. Constant firing in midsummer could play havoc with the guns. Almost certainly they were being rested, regreased and repaired, and the gunners were being given a respite.
They could afford to rest. Through the broken wall of St Brabe lay the first opening crack in the castle’s defences. And the frightened slaves and dispirited soldiers who held the trenches behind, driven there under threat of torture, presented the slightest of obstacles. The greater the suspense the greater the likelihood that the defence would break down of its own accord. The Provençal knight with his Moorish mistress must have painted a shamingly accurate picture of the ancient Order’s stand for their religion in Tripoli.
Meanwhile, at their posts, one in four of the defenders slept heavily in exhaustion in spite of the crack of the hackbut and the hiss of falling shafts that continued, in flocking bursts in the lukewarm darkness under the vast, g
littering stars, to keep the over-eager on each side circumspect.
Jerott Blyth, so tired that he knew he was a hazard to the defence and to himself, dropped beside the men at the shore culverin and was wakened, by his own orders, at the end of an hour, sick and clogged with inadequate sleep. He made his rounds, his senses still sluggish, attempting to see that the older knights, the wounded and the less able were relieved, and only realized as he went into de Vallier’s room to make his report that he had not seen Lymond. He mentioned it. Nerveless creature that the other man was, he was one of their most priceless assets at this moment with his hard expertise, and his harder detachment.
But the Marshal only gazed at him with his eyes filmed with recent sleep and said wearily, ‘He is under lock and key. I do not know whether this man is a traitor or not, but he is an individualist, and in war the two are the same.’ He paused, and added, ‘He countermanded the orders to bastinado the Moor, and when de Herrera interfered, he held him at sword point until the man was released.’
Jerott knew the Moorish prisoner he meant—a powerfully made man, second-generation exile from Spain who had fought for Turkey in North Africa until his capture by the knights. Since chivalry had obviously nothing to do with Lymond’s action, Jerott said only, ‘Why?’
The Marshal shrugged. ‘We are all under stress. But we cannot have authority undermined at the moment when we are enforcing it. The Moor took his brother’s place under the whip: it is not unknown. The Scottish gentleman thought it a needless waste of manpower. In any case, the Moor and his brother have escaped, and are probably hiding in the town, where they will almost certainly be killed by the cannon fire; so your friend has deprived us at one stroke of the services of two slaves and himself.’
In any man but Lymond, you would define that as crass incompetence allied to sentiment. Jerott said, ‘I suppose I relish the gentleman no more than you do. But I can’t see him unfaithful to the people who are paying him. And we can’t afford to be without him, sir.’
‘If I release him, the Spanish knights will kill him; or at the very least I shall have a revolt on my hands. He used rough measures. In public,’ said de Vallier, and dropped the pen he was agitating as the big door crashed open. ‘Dispense Vd.… Forgive me, sir,’ said his Acting Treasurer, his dark face drawn with sleeplessness and anger as the thick, hot air of the passage came with him into the lamplit room. ‘If you speak of Señor da Laimondo, there is no need to release. He has escaped. Also, the arsenal has been broken into, and the guard slaughtered.’
Nothing about that made sense. As Jerott stared, the Marshal said, ‘Search for him. What ordnance has been taken?’
‘We do not yet know. The outer door is open, but the iron grille has been relocked and the key is missing.’ There were men behind him in the passage; comrades, Jerott guessed, of the dead man. Whatever his reasons this time, Lymond’s chances of survival were frail. The Marshal was enjoining silence and care, to avoid panic. True, the news that an unknown quantity of arms and ammunition was missing would hardly brace the garrison’s confidence. A good deal more coldly than before, de Vallier was addressing him. Brother Jerott must now admit that his compatriot at the very least was a Turkish agent or sympathizer, intending either to lead a revolt or coerce them into surrender?
Brother Jerott thought of de Herrera, who was moving out, talking urgently, his hand on his sword. But he could swear there was genuine rage in his face. Besides, it was a Spaniard who had been killed. He visualized the team he had just seen, the murder party, splitting up and silently searching the castle through the hot night, the torch flares moving from rampart to rampart, the discreet questions which would elicit—which were bound to elicit—the direction of any small unexplained bustle, any unaccountable throb of running footsteps in the uncanny, exhausted silence.
Aloud, he said, ‘I don’t know. It seems unlikely. He is nothing if not professional. May I have leave to hunt also, sir?’ said Jerott suddenly. ‘I may be able to follow his mind. And on my Religion and my honour, I shall deal with you honestly.’
For a long moment, incredulously, he thought that the old man was going to refuse. Then the Marshal nodded, and with a wave of distaste, removed Blyth and the subject from the room. Jerott did not know, as he set off swiftly through the old castle, stopping at post after post, that he was being followed. His whole attention was on discovering the whereabouts of the Calabrians. Within a very few minutes he had satisfied himself that every man of them had gone.
Of all people, these country lads would never make for the Turks. For them there was one hope, revived now for the first time since the glare of the shore guns had ceased: the brigantine. To sail her, more than eight men were needed. Therefore the Châtelet must be involved: some kind of rendezvous between the soldiers in des Roches’s isolated fortress at the end of the spit, and the few men in Tripoli. Somewhere, these men must be waiting with stolen munitions for the signal to join forces; perhaps men from the Châtelet were coming to help carry the powder and guns.… Where would they meet?
In Tripoli, the deserted city, whose walls now offered only token resistance, where there were no women to scream and point, no knights to hinder them. And in Tripoli, he knew exactly where.
To run, in the July night, was to slide through a glutinous coating of sweat, tracking down neck and spine and buttocks. For the sake of nimbleness and silence Jerott wore no mail, but had snatched up a dark jerkin to throw over his chemise; his sword belt and dagger he wore always. Because he had no need to avoid guards and gates and because, when he wanted to, he could move very fast indeed, he reckoned on reaching his destination very soon after the escaping Calabrians and long before de Herrera’s men, grimly exhausting every possible refuge back at the castle.
If he had any doubts, padding through the uneven streets between the darkened houses, with abandoned awnings above broached with stars through their tatters and the rustle of rats and starving dogs in the thick blackness underfoot, he dismissed them. Whoever unlocked the arsenal doors had first killed the guard for the keys, and on that ring, he knew, was the key which had freed Lymond … Lymond, who alone of the garrison had been at pains to cultivate the exiles, who had just publicly championed the helpless. He ran through the empty slave market avoiding the dealers’ empty platforms under the dark arches by memory, and out into the open.
Ahead, the square turret of the Lentulus Arch reared against the wide sky in a glimmer of Corinthian marble; and not far away, he could see the double row of pillars and the wreck of a tower which de Vallier had said had once been a mosque.
Beside it was the building he wanted, its strange big windows shuttered, and no lights to be seen. Slipping from wall to wall, he started to cross to it, blending into the dark, waiting for the sentry who would almost certainly be there. Then he saw him. There was only one, a shadow that had bulk, that breathed heavily against the distant flat popping sounds of desultory fire from the other side of the wall and the hush and hiss of the sea against the rocks outside.
The old tricks were often the best, especially with untried men like these. Jerott, groping, found a pebble at his feet and leaning forward, threw it as far as he could. It fell beyond the dark shadow with a thin chink, and the shadow moved once, and was still.
So was Jerott. Instead of stepping into the starlight as he had expected, his back presented to Jerott’s ready blade, the watcher was still there, facing him.
To move was to be seen. Blyth stayed where he was, the sweat cold on the roots of his hair, the sword-hilt wet in his hand, and after a moment of incomprehension realized that the dim blur ahead of him which was the unknown man’s face was now clearer; that in fact the guard, in conduct very far from that of a Calabrian peasant, was quietly approaching him.
The man had seen him; he knew he was alone. There was one corollary: the knife. As he saw the shadow lift its arm, Jerott flung himself sideways and forward, and a moment later with his left hand grabbed a muscular body wrapped in unexpected f
olds of cotton. With his right, he brought his sword down hard. There was a spark of fire, and his arm jarred. He had been parried by a dagger, a dagger which disappeared as Jerott, changing his grip, wrenched the fellow’s right arm behind his back and adroitly kicked his feet from under him. The man crashed backwards taking Jerott with him, sword in hand. He did not guess the other man had shifted his knife already from right hand to left until the hilt hit the bone of his wrist with a crack as he rolled on top of his victim. Then Jerott Blyth dropped his sword and clutched for life at the upraised fist holding the dagger below.
Apart from the chink of metal and the soft flurry of their movements, there had been little sound. Neither spoke: Blyth because he could not afford to draw the attention of the men inside the building; his opponent for most cogent reasons of his own. Holding the other man’s wrist stiffly at a safe distance, Jerott twisted violently to avoid being kicked off; tried and failed because of the man’s robes to force him into any kind of lock; and after devoting a hard-pressed second to wrenching a gouging hand from his face, lost his grip, rolling over and over under the thickset body to come up, in a total exercise of strength, with his own knife at last in his hand.
At the same time, automatically, the forefront of his brain was assembling a number of extraordinary facts. This was a robed and bearded man, not a peasant boy in shirt and breeches. What he had just knocked off was a turban, and what lay under his hand was a naked scalp, from which dropped the slave’s single, degrading hank of hair. It passed through his mind while he drew, fighting for his life, on the long, long training in close combat which he possessed embedded in his bone; and in three sudden, definitive movements he had the Moor disarmed and his knife at the dimly seen throat. At his shoulder a damnable, familiar voice murmured, ‘How brave and clever, Jerott, my heart. Now let him go.’ And a sword, delicately used, pricked Jerott Blyth’s back.