Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [122]
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