At length, while the rebels huddled together, sheltering from the unceasing guns, Guenara himself had gone to the breach, since no French knight would be trusted.
‘And?’ said d’Aramon without expression, reflecting nothing of the Spaniard’s low-spoken violence.
‘It was without prospects,’ said Guenara shortly. ‘All that is left of the wall on that side would have been down before night. If we had tried to make de Poissieu’s brilliant entrenchments we should have simply thrown away lives. The rebels understood that.’
‘They forced you to surrender?’ The irony in de Seurre’s voice was barely concealed.
Fuster’s, in turn, showed his resentment. ‘They demanded that the white flag be shown instantly. Or they would let the infidels inside themselves.’
‘So falls the Order in North Africa,’ said the French Ambassador; and this time, the distaste showed.
A little after that, the deputies were sent for again by a thoughtful Sinan Pasha, Dragut at his side. The treaty as suggested by the Marshal de Vallier would after all stand, and Sinan Pasha himself was ready to swear by the Grand Seigneur’s head to observe it.
On the Turkish side, he had only one condition to make. The General wished the Marshal de Vallier to come in person, to discuss the sea transport required for the great evacuation. An officer must be sent as hostage for the Turkish ships’ safe return. At the same time Sinan Pasha would send a Turkish officer as hostage to Tripoli in the deputies’ care.
The change of heart was too sudden, the terms too suave. Yet, what could they do? Bolstered only with pride, Fuster and Guenara at length left, with the so-called prisoner whose presence meant nothing in the Oriental philosophy of expendable life. ‘You fools!’ said the Chevalier de Seurre to the air as he looked after them. ‘If you bring de Vallier here, you are digging his grave.’
So much only Gabriel had waited to hear. Returning to his tent he walked like a blind man, ignoring Lymond, deftly busy within, and dropped on his knees before the cheap, wrought altar, his head bent.
The other man also, it seemed, had heard the news. He finished the neat package of clothing he was making, and was proceeding with meticulous care to sharpen two most handsome Turkish daggers before he broke the silence, still without looking up. ‘And is this the soldier rebuking the monk or the monk rebuking the soldier?’ he said.
But, saint or fighting man, Graham Malett’s face was invisible between his robed arms, and though his praying hands locked suddenly white on the altar, he said nothing at all.
Next day, returning to her tent from the permitted exercise in the milder heat of the early hours, Oonagh found a parcel concealed in the cushions where last night her lover had lain, and beneath it, a dagger. Inside the parcel were the cap, the turban, the tunic and belt, the kirtled robe and soft leggings she must wear as an Osmanli; and a note. ‘Dress. The one who calls for you will arrange what you cannot. Afterwards, remember you are dumb.’
Thus simply her greatest fears, the turban, her lack of Turkish, were met. Before she dressed, she went for the last time to Galatian.
He was better; almost ready to walk. If he had been a man still, she thought, none of this would have been possible. Indiscreet, importunate, he would have driven Gabriel, every man, from the door. Yet he had cherished her on that queer and violent escape from her past; had installed her as his own, and fed and kept her since on Malta and Gozo. Even now, the food she ate was given her because of him. She said, seeing him jump as he always did when she entered, ‘You will be safe now, Galatian. Every knight is to be ransomed,’
His heavy face was sulky, sticky already with the heat. ‘There will be prejudice against me. Who knows what lies will have been told?’
If only the man would stand up to what he had done! She tried, in spite of her contempt, to find the right words. But she had not the patience, or the compassion which alone might redeem the Chevalier de Césel now. ‘At least,’ she said, her round vowels honey soft on her despising breath, ‘at least you can fairly put your back into your vows of poverty and obedience, since there never was a knight in the Order so chaste as you will be now. Good-bye, Galatian!’
Another man would have cursed her, or even stirred himself, in spite of the pain, to confront and grip her. The knight of Gozo upbraided her like a disappointed woman, and the short-breathed phrases and unvarying pitch of it buzzed in her ears as she changed.
Gabriel, standing with d’Aramon’s party at the door of their tent, saw the fresh contingent of Moors and Janissaries march off to the shore as the sun began to lose its first white shuddering heat that afternoon. Lymond he picked out beside the big Moor who had ostensibly led the escape from Tripoli. In unaccustomed white with the muslin bound expertly round his head, he looked quite at home; he did not glance over his shoulder. Oonagh he found finally walking behind, young and slight, her skin lightly stained, as was Lymond’s, to deepen the tan. Without the veiling black hair all the Irish breeding of her face was exposed to the light, but no fear showed. Nor was it any spiritual faith which sustained her, as Gabriel well knew, but a fatalistic, mystical trust in Francis Crawford.
Shortly after that, the man sent as Turkish hostage to Tripoli returned to tell Sinan Pasha that his terms were agreed. Marshal Gaspard de Vallier, Governor of Tripoli for the knights, was coming to the Turks’ camp to parley, with only his friend de Montfort to support him.
Long before the Marshal arrived, his harbinger had spread the news that the Christian garrison was rent now from side to side: that against every counsel of prudence and humanity the visit of the Marshal had been arranged, on the rebels’ insistence, so that on this elderly, pitiable knight the strength of Turkish good faith might be tested.
No besieged group in such extremes of disunity could survive, the Turkish officer observed with deference to Sinan Pasha. Whatever the nominal terms of the treaty, in fact the General could make what conditions he chose.
*
Oonagh’s task was to carry food, water, ammunition from the deep entrenchments by the shore to the forward ditches under the chipped and broken walls of Tripoli, and the emplacements where the cannon squatted, braced on the timbers of the beached and over-thrown galleys.
The guns were silent for the parley, but the drilled and naked servants of the guns were using every second of the respite like fairy gold, to cleanse, oil, replace, restock. All afternoon the work went on under the eye and tongue of their captain, and she wondered that she had ever been afraid of detection. These men were too busy for that. Only the captain, treating her as the mute lad of the Moor’s styling, had taken a moment now and then to finger her as she passed and repassed until, suddenly alive to the risk, she arranged her route differently.
Lymond, she saw, worked at the Moor’s side, thus relieved of the need to use much of his Arabic, and did so as if he had handled culverin all his life. He probably had, she thought; and wondered how he felt, repairing the mouth that had blown death into this stronghold, and might do so again.
A strange feeling began to grow on her that afternoon. As she darted from rock to rock and foothold to foothold with the leather flasks, the satchels, the sackloads of powder, she felt neither sickness nor strain. All her despised feminine feebleness had vanished, and in its place she had something as near happiness as she had probably ever attained.
When at last the light mellowed in the quick African twilight, she was dazed, realizing that the time of waiting was past. By then she had eaten, grinning wordlessly at the mimed cameraderie of sweating men, coarsely moustached, whom she had seen just now prostrate themselves in silent worship as nobly as the robed knights in St Lawrence. They treated her, now they had leisure, with a sly, teasing roughness to which her own hard fibre responded. She was not afraid. Dusk hid her identity; her wit had no frontiers. Then it was dark.
Lymond came for her very soon, laconic in Arabic, signing to her what to do. He had contrived some task at the waterfront, as he had had to do. They had spoken no
word of English since they set out. Even now, holding her elbow as she stumbled over the tumbled rock, he said nothing that any man could not hear. Then, momentarily hidden by an escarpment, he pulled her down to her knees, and laying quick hands on her glimmering robes, began to peel them from her down to her shift. Then from his own clothing he pulled something dark and tossing it to her, left her alone with it while he stripped. Underneath he wore the same dark, tight tunic that she had just slipped on. It was, she recognized suddenly, something of Gabriel’s. Then he took her arm.
At the edge of the still, dark pool that was the sea, at the brimming edge of freedom where no boat was to be seen, she spoke the first words of the few they were to exchange. ‘I cannot swim. You know it?’
In the dark she saw the flash of his smile. ‘Trust me.’ And he drew her with a strong hand until the green phosphorescence beaded her ankles, and deeper, and deeper, until the thick milk-warm water, almost unfelt, was up to her waist. She heard him swear feelingly to himself as the salt water searched out, discovered his burns. Then with a rustle, she saw his pale head sink back in the quiet sea and at the same moment she was gripped and drawn after him, her face to the stars, drawn through the tides with the sea lapping like her lost hair at her cheeks, the drive of his body beneath her pulling them both from the shore. They were launched on the long journey towards the slim shape, black against glossy black, which was the brigantine, with Thompson on board.
She never knew how long a swim that was, for she had one task: to make his work possible. Her body limp, her limbs brushing the surface of the sea, she took air at the top of his thrust; learned after the first gagging mistake to close every channel to the sudden dip, the molesting wave that slapped suddenly over her cheek. The hard grip under her armpits never altered, nor did Lymond’s own breathing for a long time vary at all.
Above the little plash and hiss of their moving, there was a deepening silence as the bustle of the shore fell away. The guns were silent yet. Above them, lit by a single, anxious lamp, the white speck of surrender hung from the castle battlements. Lymond lifted his head, supporting her, to judge his distance as he had done from time to time, and it was only when he spoke that she realized with a shock how much sheer will-power that level, timeless porterage had cost. ‘We’re nearly there,’ he said; and sliding round supported her so that she too, upright, could see the high sides of the brigantine blocking out the dark sky at their back. As they watched, a pinpoint of light winked on and off again and he laughed, without any breath to do it with, and said, ‘Thompson. If he tries to buy you … refer him to me!’
And in that second a skiff, its lamps blazing, shot out from behind the brigantine and, oars flashing, bore straight down on them.
Lymond said one word, ‘Breathe!’ before the waters closed over her head. She had seen the robed, shouting Janissary in the prow of the boat, the glint of darts and scimitar and, between the rowers, the bound figure of a man in hose and shirt, his mouth sealed by a cloth. It was Thompson the corsair.
She went under on a strained gulp of air, thinking the brigantine was no use to them now. Exhausted and weaponless out at sea, they faced a boatload of armed men.… Then, her black hair fronding about her, she had no thoughts as her brain darkened without air. Suddenly, the cruel grip that had carried her down thrust her upwards again, and the collar of the sea found and broke against her head. Wildly filling her lungs she found that above them now was the brigantine, and that Lymond had taken them into its lee. Her hand, guided by his, touched cold wood, slimy with weed, and then something else, fat and slippery, that pricked in her palm. A rope.
In her ear, his voice was no more than a breath. ‘Hold on as long as you can. I shall be back.’ Then he was gone.
The boat was circling. Masked as yet by the hulk above her, Oonagh saw the tilting lamplight move sweeping round and retrace its path. The Janissaries had lost them, she realized, for the moment, and were searching again for the two heads, black in the shimmering path of their light. Then she heard a shout and, her heart shaking her numb, exhausted body, saw that the oars had accelerated, were moving swiftly and purposefully towards a sudden brush in the water: a revolving darkness which resolved itself into the head and shoulders of a swimmer brought at last to the surface for air, before sliding below the dark waters again. Above the speeding boat, a fan of silver particles rose, arched and fell, and kneeling men shouted against one another and pointed. Darts. And there, lancing the night like a silver needle, the shaft of a spear.
These were fishermen. And this living man in the water, their fish.
Living still; for casting suddenly at loss, the boat turned, a glinting fishbone of oars, and turned again before darting suddenly, propelled by triumph, at a tangent once more. The shouting, clear across the water, reached a climax and cut off again. The swimmer had surfaced and submerged once more.
It happened again, and then again; always in an unexpected direction, and always with a coiling speed that took him down before the missiles struck. And always, too, farther and farther away from the brigantine where the woman was hiding.
Later, she realized that he was waiting for something else too. But now, a paralysed debtor, she watched the game being played out. She could do nothing. Of what use to shout? It wouldn’t save him; and he would sooner end, she guessed, in the sea. Now, drive himself as he would, his dives were briefer and less and less swift, so that he surfaced always within range, in that network of barbs. She heard the commanding officer laugh then and give an order, and a man holding a small bow of the Turkish kind came and stood in the bows.
There was something odd about the arrow. Then she saw the thin, tough cord at its base, and found that it was not an arrow, but a harpoon.
‘Stay down’ Surely, from her Celtic breeding, she could transmit to him this silent anguish? ‘Stay down. And I shall let go this little cord, and share your rest in the sea.’
She saw him rise then close to the boat, all his skill worn out at last, his head flung back. Saw the archer take aim. Then saw the black sky, dressed at its foot with the sprinkled lights of besieged Tripoli crack across and across with red flame; flame which brightened and grew and took to itself other crackling small fires, all woven about the shore where the Turkish guns rested; where Lymond had spent the long, profitable afternoon.
For perhaps five seconds, the gaze of every man in the boat was on that blazing, unaccountable feu de joie. In that small space, with the last shreds of his powers, Lymond reached the skiff on the side where Thompson, bound impotently, lay. There was only time to slash once at the pirate’s bound wrists; then Thompson himself was overboard, Lymond’s knife in his hand, and below water like an eel, there to free his ankles, tear the seal from his mouth, and obey Lymond’s hiss in their own tongue. ‘The brigantine … Get the woman.’
Thompson was a practical man. No one in Turkish hands ever argued with a chance of freedom. No one, burdened with a man as spent as Lymond was, could do more than expect an early, cheap death for them both. He abandoned Lymond, since that was what Lymond wanted, and with the life-saving knife swam off in the darkness to the brigantine, where he was not pursued until far too late since Francis Crawford, from the limbo virtually of a sleepwalker, made his enforced boarding with enough spectacular venom to keep the rowers engaged for much longer than they enjoyed.
Unfortunately, when Thompson had finished sprinting about the ocean, in which he was perfectly at home, beneath or on top, he reached the brigantine to find it entirely deserted inside and out. After an interval of faithful casting about—for he remembered Lymond as a connoisseur in bedfellows—he gave up and drifted off to another boat he had fitted up in his spare time, before that little party had surprised him tonight on the brigantine. Before he went, he noted that there was another skiff missing. Possibly the guard they had left on board after capturing him had got hold of the woman and was rowing her ashore while all the games were going on, to capture the credit. Either that, or the poor bitch
had drowned.
He got on board, shook himself like a pony, and peeling off his wet clothes, sat down in a towel, cup in hand, to sip wine and watch the fireworks on shore until they went out just before dawn. Then, not cold but pleasantly tired, he went off to bed.
*
It was the last dawn any of them were to see over Tripoli. For by then Gaspard de Vallier, Governor of the city, was lying in irons aboard Sinan Pasha’s own galley after an interview in which the Turkish general, receiving the Marshal in his camp with the barest sketch of courtesy, had thrown the treaty in his face and demanded immediate payment, once more, of all the Sultan’s campaign expenses by the knights. And when de Vallier, disbelieving, had remonstrated, Sinan Pasha’s fury had burst. The Osmanli made and kept treaties with men of honour; not with dogs of Christians who owed their lives at Rhodes to the Grand Seigneur’s clemency, and that on the promise that the Order should never in future attack the Sultan’s subjects or exercise piracy on his seas, but should respect his flag in all places. ‘But,’ ended Sinan Pasha, and spat, ‘no sooner free; no sooner settled in that robbers’ nest in Malta, but the great and honourable knights returned to their old thieving trade.…’
It was not true, but the quarrel was long past dealing in truths. In vain the Marshal, gripping de Montfort’s arm, offered to send to Malta for the original Rhodes agreement to prove that no such terms had existed. In vain, flaring up too weakly and too late, he had announced that he was ready to tear up yesterday’s treaty if need be and resume fighting. Sinan Pasha’s anger and also his interest had died. At a gesture, the Marshal was dismissed, against every code of gentle practice; in two sentences his companion de Montfort was told the terms he might place before his fellow knights on his return. Either the money would be paid to the Turkish general as he asked, or the whole garrison and city would suffer for it, and soldiers and inhabitants both would be sold off as slaves.