Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [41]
As silently as he had come, Lymond left. Walking back to Gabriel’s house through the graveyard and the steep sandy lanes, he marshalled dispassionately his information and his emotions on what he had seen. Centuries ago, appealing for a new Crusade, the cry had been ‘Dieu le veut!’—God desires it.
But which God? Francis Crawford inquired pensively of each silent street of closed doors. For if your Moslem is also devout and self-denying, loyal and fervent, courageous and tolerant, and believes that to dispatch a Christian in battle will send him straight to the Red Apple of Paradise, then in the forthcoming attack, with no professional, no ideological flaw on both sides, sheer weight of numbers must tell.
He said nothing of all this to the Chevalier de Villegagnon, whom he found already returned in Graham Malett’s house. But presently Gabriel himself came in and, halting in the doorway, looked first at Lymond and then at his fellow knight. ‘Have you told him?’
The Chevalier, rising, shook his head and Gabriel, gentle irony in his voice, addressed Lymond direct. ‘You are to appear, M. le Comte, along with the Chevalier here in an hour’s time before the Grand Council to corroborate M. de Villegagnon’s report from France. You will see us, as I am sure you would prefer, at our worst.’
Durand de Villegagnon, a deeply passionate man behind a shell of militarism and law, looked uneasy. Lymond did not. He said, ‘I try to rely not on feelings, but facts. At the cost, for example, of sundry murmurs from my insessorial arches, I have been surveying Birgu—all of Birgu. The Conventual Church and the hospital, as well as the magazines.’
‘And you would not mind being carried into either?’ said Gabriel gravely.
‘Not with eternity in Paradise assured for every Ottoman wound.’
‘Someone,’ said Gabriel, entering the room fully at last and kneeling, from habit, before the old and much-travelled shrine, ‘once called us mercenaries of the spirit. True, of course. But we are all in life risking one thing to gain another. Is it better to fight for vanity, ambition, money, revenge, pique …?’
‘Would you fight to cleanse the Qur’ân from the earth if the reward for death were the torments of Hell?’ Lymond said.
There was a long pause. De Villegagnon, heated, drew breath to reply and thought better of it. Outside, as the violence of the sun subsided, life began to stir in the narrow street. The shadows moved. ‘I,’ said Gabriel at length, looking directly at Lymond, his eyes calm as a child’s, ‘have always sinned and never, consequently, deserved more than a hope of Paradise. But if I had, and by fighting the Turk I must give it up … then my answer is, yes. For those that follow me, that they might taste Heaven, I would fight, as I mean to fight; and suffer, as I should be made to suffer. No man could do more.’
‘One man did not do as much,’ said Lymond tranquilly, and saw Gabriel’s fair skin stained red from neck to brow. But instead of replying he crossed himself, and turning to the crucifix on the altar, bent in prayer.
In a grip that bruised, de Villegagnon drew Crawford of Lymond from the room and in the dim white hall confronted him, outrage in his voice. ‘What devil possessed you? The like of that man is not to be found in Europe, and you shame him before his own shrine?’
Mild surprise on his face, Lymond turned. ‘I think Graham Malett can fight his own battles,’ he said. ‘It merely seemed as well to discover whether we are fighting for power or for Holy Church. For