Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [39]
Upton, the fat Turcopilier, dropped his argument abruptly. ‘And M. le Comte de Sevigny is to give us the benefit of his experience,’ he said.
Again the wise, disarming blue gaze scanned Lymond. ‘I did not care to court his already well-founded contempt by expressing it,’ he said. ‘But that, of course, has been all along in our minds.… Shall we go ashore?’
And, sparing Francis Crawford the need to reply, Gabriel turned and moving lightly, for all his great height, led the way on to the baked sandy clay of Birgu.
*
Less than an hour later, bathed and robed, the Chevalier de Villegagnon went to pay his formal respects to the Grand Master, and Lymond, left for the moment alone, changed quickly and in anonymous dark jerkin and hose walked into the steep, slatted lanes of Birgu.
From a breathless sky, the sun beat on the soft yellow rock; the long spit on which the knights had reared their tall, elegant houses, face to face in a network of alleys that climbed the steep ridge on either side from the water’s edge, where the Maltese lived still, in cabin and hut. Emptied by the hour of siesta, Birgu presented itself boldly to the observer climbing silently between the splendour of grille-work and portico, cartouche, shrine and balcony; beneath the banners drooping still from the sunlight into the shadowy canyons where he walked.
First the private houses with their marble steps and beautiful knockers; the coat of arms fresh, the saints in their flowered niches bright with gold and enamel. Then the Auberges, Inns of the Eight Langues into which this Order of international knights had long ago been divided, so that each race could sleep and eat with its fellow nationals and speak, in the Inn at least, the same common tongue.
Since 1540, the English Langue had been nominal only. There were ten English knights left on Malta, of whom Nick Upton was one. In London there were, openly, none. When King Henry VIII of England renounced the Pope, he renounced the Order of St John of Jerusalem as well; seized the Order’s rich Priory at Clerkenwell and all their possessions.
In Scotland the Priory was untouched, but only two of her knights remained in the convent: Jerott Blyth, at present in Sicily and now ranking as French; and Graham Malett, Knight Grand Cross and friend of the French, whose integrity that afternoon in support of de Villegagnon must sway even the Grand Master to believe that Malta and Tripoli would be attacked, and Malta and Tripoli must be saved.
Now, as Lymond, observing, quartered Birgu, only the Maltese stirred.
Between the palaces of the knights and those that served them; the convents, the elegant homes belonging to officers of the Church and the town; between the bakehouse and the shops of the craftsmen, the arsenals and magazines, the warehouses, the homes of merchants and courtesans, Italian, Spanish, Greek; past the painted shrines and courtyards scraped from pockets of earth with their bright waxy green carob trees, a fig, a finger of vine, a blue and orange pot of dry, dying flowers and a tethered goat bleating in a swept yard, padded the heirs of this rock, this precious knot in the trade of the world. Umber-skinned, grey-eyed, barefoot and robed as Arabs with the soft, slurring dialect that Dido and Hannibal spoke, they slipped past the painted facades to their Birgu of fishermen’s huts and blank, Arab-walled houses or to sleep, curled in the shade, with the curs in a porch.
A great Church and a race of defenders had come to bless the peasants and noblemen of Malta, who possessed a rock and the language Christ spoke. Bitterly silent both about the privileges they had lost and the laws they were now to fulfil, the Maltese were apt to recall that the Church was already theirs long before the knights came; and that before the knights came, they had no need of defenders.
At the highest point in the little walled town, overlooking the canal which separated Birgu from the big white