Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [107]
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