Sick with effort, his chest heaving, every joint in his tired body sore, Jerott turned, and smiling, Lymond put a strong hand through his arm. ‘Come, children,’ he said.
The chicks were dead. Inside the hut the hot reek told it, and the silence, and the single bleared candle on the floor whose light wavered on the daffodil down in puffs and drifts all about it and on the benches above, picking out the waxy loop of a beak, the brown, half-open thumbnail of a wing, the skeleton claws. On one side they had been pushed back, in a tumbled ridge, to make way for boxes and sacks stamped with the mark of the Order. Beside them lay a young man with a large bruise on his ruddy skin, and cord round his legs and wrists. He was one of the Calabrians.
‘From the arsenal?’ said Jerott at length, his gaze on the boxes.
The big Moor, turbaned once more, his back to the closed door, was silent, his face expressionless, but Lymond answered. ‘Of course. His friends will be back soon. They’ve gone to join forces with the garrison at the Châtelet. Then they hope no doubt to load guns and powder and matches from here into a small boat and make for the brigantine and the untrusty sea, no keeper of calms. Unfortunately’—he did not glance at the furious boy on the floor—‘as I have already told our friend, the trip will be useless.’
A flood of Italian, nearly incomprehensible even to Jerott who knew Italian very well, conveyed disbelief and denial as well as uproarious fury. Jerott knew how the boy felt. Having, at some cost to themselves, spared the time to free Francis Crawford, it seemed unfair that Francis Crawford, along with his henchman freed from the bastinado, should then do his considerable best to undermine their little plot.
Jerott doubted if he himself would have had the stomach for it. Lymond clearly had no qualms. He said with gentle cheerfulness, ‘We shall see. Giulio here says his friends will already be aboard the brigantine, ready to sail. I’m sure he’s right, except that they’ll find there’s nothing to set sail with. As you would know too, if you’d been watching, the sails, oars, cables and everything else that make a ship move have been dismantled from the brigantine in the last two days. And from every smaller boat in the harbour. She’s an empty shell, my friend. Your lads might as well take their guns to a floating tomb. Not,’ said Lymond peaceably, ‘that they’re going to have the chance of taking the guns anywhere, for you and I in just a moment are going to blow them up.’
Jerott wished he had killed that damned Moor. He pulled himself together and said sarcastically, ‘Of course, if you want to cut your own throat. You know these fellows killed a man to open the magazine and get you out of your cell. And you’re being blamed for it. Surely the first thing to do is to report this, have the ordnance taken back to the castle, and have a strong party waiting for the Calabrians when they come back for the guns as they’re bound to do, whether they get out to the brigantine or not. In their own eyes they’re dead men unless they fight back. They don’t know de Herrera has picked on you.’
‘It’s my French accent,’ said Lymond idly. He was listening, Jerott realized, for any sound outside the hut. The Moor had slipped off again, no doubt to resume watch. Then, bringing his attention back suddenly, ‘Look,’ said Lymond. ‘Nine times out of ten you may be right in extremity to make a public example by frying someone’s liver in front of the vulgar—I won’t argue. But here leniency is the only answer. You are threatened physically in that there is a breach in St Brabe whose extent no one yet knows; and unless the defences behind are properly manned there may be a break-through. You are threatened politically by the Spanish knights’ fear of Turkish vengeance and the fact that, if they can find any easy way out, the blame has a good chance of being pinned on the French. Add to that mess two hundred peasant boys to be guarded day and night because they renegued and having absolutely nothing to lose by murdering the entire garrison and you get not only disaster, but a silly disaster.’
‘What, then?’ said Jerott. Lymond was speaking Italian, of a rough and ready kind but plainly, and probably understandable enough to the boy on the floor.
‘So the Spanish knights are never allowed to discover what has happened. We return to the castle with our friend here, leaving a lit fuse to take care of the powder: poor little fried chickens, my dear. The Calabrians between here and the Châtelet, in the Châtelet or at sea can’t help but see it, whatever they imagine caused it. No ship; no weapons. They’ll have to come back, if only to find out what has happened. And if they find no one suspects them, what can they do but return docilely to their posts and hope to God no one notices their feet are wet?’
Switching suddenly to English, he added something to that fast summing-up. ‘De Vallier and des Roches must be told, of course. And trouble may well boil up among the men themselves once the firing restarts. But at least if the Spanish don’t know, we’ll avoid open insurrection and mayhem at this exact juncture, and have a chance of keeping them on our side.’
‘And who,’ said Jerott, ‘is supposed to have knifed the sentry and taken the powder?’
‘Salablanca,’ said Lymond calmly. ‘Our big friend outside. That was very nicely fought, by the way. He is no novice in any sense of the word at in-fighting.’
‘I’m flattered,’ said Jerott sarcastically. ‘And a big, strong man, too. He carried all this alone?’
‘No. His brother and a handful of slaves helped him. They’ll be assumed, I hope, to have died in the fire.… In fact, they’ll make for the Turkish camp.’
‘So you have been unlocking a few more fetters,’ said Jerott blankly. He had his sword again, he remembered, and his dagger. The Calabrian would help him.
‘I’ve saved you two hundred soldiers,’ said Lymond. ‘In exchange for six slaves, one of them dying.’
‘You’d have been a damned sight better letting them escape,’ said Jerott sharply, ‘and get themselves and the munitions and the boat blown out of the water by Osmanli guns. Then they’d be no further encumbrance on us as prisoners or as potential rebels.’
There was a brief pause. ‘That, I am sure,’ said Lymond, ‘is what any man in the Order would have done. I am not a monk.’ He was kneeling, a light flaring between his fingers, and looking up from the slow match, so efficiently led from powder to fuse, Jerott saw something grim in the underlit face. ‘Let’s get to the castle,’ said Lymond, and rising, crossed to the prone man and cut his bonds. ‘Do you understand? The powder will burn; your friends cannot leave by ship. If they come back now, no one will know what you have done. Go quickly and tell them so.’
The youngster was perhaps seventeen, certainly not more; and he could hardly sit, far less stand. Lymond propped him, adroitly, while the blood returned to his cramped limbs: the lashing had been sailors’ work. But in spite of the pain, he was talking before he was upright.
Jerott grinned. What he could make of the language was picturesque even for that lusty countryside. ‘He says he doesn’t believe you. He says you are destroying the guns that would have saved their lives and will betray them now to the Governor to save your own skin.’
‘Well, it was worth trying,’ said Lymond calmly. All that hate seething on his arm had not, it appeared, upset him. ‘We’ll take him with us to the castle. When he sees we aren’t proposing to sell him by the slice, he may change his mind. The Moor can take the message meantime—the other lads will trust him. Come!’
The peasant backed and muttered. ‘He doesn’t trust you at the castle either,’ said Jerott, who was beginning to feel a little more cheerful. ‘He wants to go to the Châtelet after all.’
‘Thank you,’ said Lymond, staring at him, ‘for the interpretation. Don’t you think we had all better get wherever we are going, before the whole bloody building blows up?’
Whether the boy understood every word Jerott doubted, but he had certainly got the sense of what Lymond said. Ceasing to rub his cramped limbs, he launched himself like a dog at the door. And instead of letting him go, swifter even than the boy, in a single blur of movement, Lymond stopped him. Gasping
, the lad wrenched desperately in his grip, trying to kick himself free. Lymond, holding him, suddenly turned his head listening, and then said sharply over the scuffling, ‘We have company. You’ve been followed, Blyth. De Vallier doesn’t trust you either, it seems.’ And at the same moment, silent as an owl’s flight, the door opened beside them and the Moor slipped in. ‘We heard them. How many?’ said Lymond, and the big man spoke low. ‘Veinte, señor. Debemos pronto.…’
‘To get out. Quite. By the window, Jerott. There’s a big one opening at the back. We can’t fight twenty men, and we’ve got to get this lad out of sight—No, you fool!’ to the struggling Calabrian. ‘Look. If you’re found anywhere near here, you’ll be connected with that ammunition. You can’t hope to get to the Châtelet now; the Moor’ll do that errand. You’d better come back to the castle with us.…’
And as the Calabrian, with a sudden, desperate movement, twisted and half-jerked himself free, Lymond said resignedly ‘Hit him, somebody. We’ll take him unconscious if we have to.’
Whatever they had expected, the boy silenced even Lymond this time by his response. For now, pushed to it at last, hopelessly late, he began to talk. In the hut among the frail dead fledgelings he commanded utter silence; so absolute you could hear what Lymond had heard: the obscure shift of men gathering at a little distance—proably, Jerott thought with half his mind, the market. The explosion wouldn’t harm them at that distance: there wasn’t enough powder. Lymond said in Italian, carefully, ‘Say that again,’ and the hoarse voice, thick with fear, almost unintelligible in dialect, spoke again, while above his rough head the eyes of Jerott, Lymond and the Moor met and held.
The little explosion promised by the quiet fuse burning at their feet was only the forerunner, paltry as the new-hatched younglings, of the end of Tripoli. Before leaving the castle magazine the Calabrians had lit a slow fuse much bigger and longer and more important. It was timed to reach the first keg of powder once the rebels were safely afloat. It had been burning now for the better part of an hour. And the key to the locked iron grille which alone gave access to the arsenal had been thrown in the sea.
Lymond asked only one question. ‘How much time have we left? How much time before the arsenal blows up?’ And by that he meant the whole castle of Tripoli.
‘It must be three-quarters consumed,’ said the boy, and a shade of pride entered the sunburnt face. Lymond flung him from him.
‘Let him take his chance,’ he said. ‘He knows now how to save himself. Salablanca, hide, and get to the Châtelet with the news if you can. If not, Allâh speed you. Jerott.… Your conscience is God’s. If you support me in this fiction, go to the market, tell them you have seen slaves here inside; tell them you’ve overheard them admit the arsenal has been fired. Before you’ve got halfway through that, I’ll have this blown up. Then do what I’m going to do … run like hell.’
‘I’m going back to the castle,’ said Jerott, his voice strained as he flung back the heavy shutters giving on to the lane at the hut’s back and prepared with the others to jump.
‘Bravo!’ said Lymond sardonically and Jerott felt his anger rise and flood the vacant places of his fear. For Lymond had only said, run, and the implication of choice was worse than an insult: it was the last animal smear on his honour. Through all that was to cóme that night, Jerott Blyth behaved like a madman, hugging that single word to him.
No one spoke now. One by one they dropped to the ground and Jerott raced to his brother knights as Calabrian and Moor melted into the hot night and the lit taper in Lymond’s hand arched back through the window and began to eat through the wooden cask. Then he lost sight of them all. As de Herrera met him, sword drawn in the shadows, and he shouted the news, the hatching hut at his back blew up in a corymb of vermilion and gold. Before the detonations ended, Blyth was running towards the castle, his message delivered, and after only a moment’s hesitation the Spanish followed. For of all the knights, the Moors, the soldiers and slaves, all the worthy merchants and traders, the priests and serving brothers and Tripolitains, men women and children in the castle, only they and the three men who had found other business so tactfully behind, knew that in fifteen minutes the siege would be over. And that neither Islâm nor the Order would be masters of Tripoli, for Tripoli would not exist.
*
It was a case where numbers could not help, only skill. There was enough powder in the arsenal, Jerott knew, to destroy not only the castle but the city itself. There was no use shouting warnings, for there was nowhere to run to in time, and panic would only hinder the small chance they still had. Only they, on the perimeter when they got the news, had been safe, and they had thrown safety away.
He kept grim faith with his implied promise to Lymond. In the handfuls of words he flung to de Herrera as they ran, he said nothing of the Calabrians. And soon none of them spoke at all but merely ran, their throats parched, stumbling through the dark, broken lanes, ricocheting from wall to wall in the thread-like maze of alleys which lay between themselves and the castle.
To men who knew Tripoli well, in daylight, it was perhaps ten minutes’ work. To Jerott Blyth and his fellow knights, it was a gasping nightmare of missed turnings and blocked passages and sudden, blind walls. A rotting barrow of fruit, jammed in an archway, held them up for precious seconds; and soon after that, hurling himself round a corner under a dark bridgeway blocking the stars, he found himself in someone’s courtyard, blundering between lemon trees into a dry fountain, his feet clattering on the tiles. Outside again, casting about, his foot struck a tin bowl and he knew he was in the silversmiths’ alley, and had been here before—my God, was he running in circles? And time—time was slipping away.
Then, at last, heart-bursting minutes later, they saw ahead the corner bastion and the high, dark outer wall leading to the main gate of the citadel. Ears straining, eyes aching, Jerott and his fellow knights crossed the open square to the big doors like beings demented and, cursing the guard for their questions, burst through into the castle. Then Jerott cried out.
Ahead, towers, walls, battlements sprang black across the sudden, burning orange of the night sky. A second later there was a roar; then another, and another, while the flaming air shook and writhed. For a moment, none of the little band moved or spoke. Then de Herrera beside him drew in a breath like a sob, and gripping Jerott’s shoulder, launched forward again.
What they saw was gunfire. The Turkish battery had opened up again.
Afterwards, Jerott remembered bumping into a number of people without explanation; passing de Vallier himself standing looking oddly after them, and running very fast through a number of courtyards, up and down stairs and then through an endless series of connecting rooms and down a stair, which led to more stairs, until they were in the long series of chambers and passages belonging to the Roman bath-house.
They were then, Jerott knew, in precisely no less and no more danger than they had been up above in the open air. It only felt, if possible, worse. In any case they had now no chance at all, for he reckoned, and guessed that the others knew also, that the time was up. Henceforward, every second of life was won from chance. And every door, every vast iron hatch between themselves and the burning fuse was closed and barred.
It was that discovery which nearly defeated their courage. Their strength, though they hardly knew it, was already spent. Then de Herrera said sharply in a high, exhausted voice, ‘Will you let one heathen destroy the Religion in Tripoli?’ and flung himself like a maniac on the heavy bolts of the next door. After that, they wrenched each open between them, silent but for their sobbing breath, and the slowest was left behind to slam them shut, to bring no transfusion of air to the speed of the fuse.
At the last door even Jerott hesitated. The lit match must now be so near the powder that a breath would dispatch it. The opening of this door in his hand was his entrance card, at twenty-five, to heaven or hell. The bolts were drawn. He remembered to pray for the first time, briefly and even with shame, and d
rew the door open.
In the quiet space before the great door of the arsenal the yellow lamps shone peacefully on the obliterated, weaving wall-dancers who in a thousand years had seen and suffered worse than this. The oak door unlocked by the Calabrians was ajar, unguarded: what need of a guard when the massive grille door inside was shut and its key at the bottom of Tripoli Bay?
But before it, two men were working; working feverishly, their movements surging in lamplit rings through the water spreading slowly across the tiled floor. Above the trample of soldiers’ feet at his back, above the rampaging screech of a file, a familiar voice unfamiliarly crisp said, ‘Blyth. I want a locksmith, a crossbow and bolts, some cloths and a lot more water. We have perhaps five minutes. Axes are causing too much vibration, and the file won’t be in time.’ And as de Herrera, behind, relayed the orders, Lymond added over his shoulder, ‘Two of you come in. The rest stand by for orders. The corridor doors can remain open. We have tried drenching the floor, but the slope of the arsenal has sent it back to us. We have failed to reach the fuse with damp cloths on a rod: it is at the far side of the cellars and the other stores are in the way. I am about to try shooting soaked cotton.…’
And Francis Crawford, wasting no further time or words on them, finished binding his dripping, lightly wrapped arrows, and stretching the small Moorish bow in his hand aimed swiftly, and sent the laden shaft through one of the spaces in the grille. It floundered unbalanced through the air, above the stacked barrels and boxes, the stands of armour and spears, the stacked arquebuses and axes arranged in blocks throughout the wide vaulted cellars, with loading alleys cross-hatched between. Far across the room, from some bay invisible behind the crammed stands, a thread of smoke, thinly moving, was just visible in the dim lamplight within. And beyond the smoke, where like a monstrous clutch of marble and iron the cannon shot stood in pyramids against the far wall, a touch of rosy light appled the balls.