Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [104]
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 folds 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.
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