Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [101]
‘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, glittering stars, to keep the over-eager on each side circumspect.
Jerott Blyth, so tired that