Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [106]
‘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