Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [129]
Then d’Aramon alone, his face stark with strain, left the canopy and moving towards the scattered men on the ground, halted and raised his voice. In French, Spanish and Italian he spoke seven words only.
‘Brethren of the Order, you are free.’
By nightfall of that day, the 20th August, the Turkish ships lent by Sinan had taken on board the chosen two hundred, and most of the forty surviving knights of the garrison had embarked, Graham Malett and Jerott among them, on d’Aramon’s own three boats.
D’Aramon himself was not there. Stiffly, he sat flanked by his entourage at Sinan Pasha’s side in the great hall of Tripoli castle, lit from arch to arch as the knights had never dared light it, while outside turbaned Janissaries moved about the courtyard and battlements so lately crowded with six hundred Christian knights and soldiers and refugees; and hackbuts and cannon, destined to fight for the Religion, thundered and cracked in victory paeans to the skies.
On Sinan Pasha’s far side, close to the other leaders, Dragut, Salah Rais, the Aga Morat in shining tissues and winking gems, sat de Vallier, the vanquished Marshal, with his entourage; commanded like the Ambassador to do honour to the treaty in this celebration banquet of Islâm. As the curds and steaming mutton went round; the fruit, the fowl, the almond paste and the Fezzan dates passing before the Governor untouched, Nicolas de Nicolay wondered if the old man was struck even yet by the orderliness of this conquering army, to whom drunkenness was a sin; whose soldiers might rape, loot, torture, kill under orders but were forbidden, marching, to trample on roses; who neither lightly shouted nor lightly swore but five times a day gave recognition and thanks prostrate to their God. And the French King’s cosmographer thought of all he had seen crossing Tripoli that day—the turreted walk still fair and strong, with double ditches and false breaches; the wells and fountains, the food, the munitions, the artillery—and wondered how the world, bemused already by quarrelling reports, would judge the Order which had bloodlessly abandoned it.
They did not hear, through that interminable feast, the firing of the only guns still defending the Religion. At the little fort called the Châtelet, at the mouth of the bay, the Serving Brother des Roches alone had defied the call to surrender, and the thirty soldiers of the garrison who had replaced the Calabrians had rallied to support him.
It was, of course, suicide; but self-immolation with a purpose, selfless and gallant. Possession of the Châtelet meant virtual command of the harbour, given possession also of the castle. Des Roches had three times refused Sinan Pasha’s command to deliver the fort intact. Instead, he was forcing the Turkish fleet to level the building about them.
The roof had partly gone, ten men had died and ammunition was running low when, just after dusk, a low black boat arrived soundlessly at the sea gate of the fortress, guided by the finest sea-robber in the region, and with him a man des Roches, hastily summoned, recognized. Amid the smell of cordite, the dust of crushed stone and mortar, the fumes of burning wood, the crash of the attacking batteries and the splintering explosion of the massive balls, the Châtelet was silently evacuated and the little garrison, spent, lacerated and dazed still with their own good fortune, delivered in the concealing darkness to d’Aramon’s own galley.
Thompson and Francis Crawford, with due modesty, came aboard last, swamped with low-spoken congratulations, and dropped with the others to concealment below, while the boat was lashed to the blind side of the galley’s decks. No one had seen. With d’Aramon’s own skiffs immobilized and the Tripoli shore guarded, no boat could have put out unseen that night … except one supposedly empty, already rocking deep in the empty bay, with the pirate