Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [45]
Lymond, nearer the foot of the room, reached the doors first. But as he touched them, the timber shook with invisible assault; loud voices sounded outside and a guard shouted in protest. The handle rattled. Then, as Lymond fell back to where the knights stood, arrested in turmoil, the door burst open to admit Jerott Blyth.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Lymond mildly into the sudden extreme quiet. ‘Sicily haven’t sent their two hundred men.’
Blyth looked round. Visibly, a little colour returned to his handsome face, white with rage. His fists unclenched, hesitated, and then raising one, he removed his bonnet. Behind the long tables the knights lingered, shuffling, and then with a scraping of chairs slowly resumed their seats, leaving de Villegagnon again alone on the floor, his back to the Grand Master’s dais, staring as the Grand Master was staring at Jerott Blyth’s disordered dark figure.
It was de Villegagnon, his own anger forgotten, who echoed Lymond’s words. ‘They haven’t sent the two hundred?’
The small, dark knight stalked, without speaking, from the closing doors to the foot of the dais. Arrived there, he hurled his battered black bonnet at the foot of the steps and folded his arms.
‘They have sent them,’ he said, ‘I have come with them. Had they sent two hundred sheep, you could have eaten them. Two hundred goats, and you could have milked them. Two hundred cannon balls, and you could have killed Turks with them. What they have sent,’ said Jerott Blyth, forgetting Latin, Spanish and decorum in his anger, ‘are rabbits!’
‘They promised us soldiers,’ said de Villegagnon, his voice echoing in the silence.
‘They have sent us shepherd boys,’ said Jerott, the excitement suddenly dead in his blood. ‘Youths from the hills of Calabria. Woodsmen and goatherds, tenders of vineyards. Men wise in the stars and the weather and in growing grapes and melons and pomegranate trees. Boys who have been ill with fright all the way from Messina; children who have never seen a Turk; youths who have never held a sword or a gun. ‘These,’ said Jerott, his voice shaking again, ‘are to be the defenders of Christ’s Church against the heathen in Tripoli.’
By then, moved as he was, he must have realized that his eloquence had struck no echo here: that he was to be permitted no fuel for his anger. The Grand Master had had enough of wayward emotion. Icily thanked, icily reprimanded, icily dismissed, Jerott Blyth found himself in the street without having heard a voice raised in comment; nor did he realize until joined almost at once by de Villegagnon and by Lymond, also dismissed, into what kind of crisis he had burst.
They did not know that the struggle within the Grand Council in which all three had precipitated went on all afternoon; that as the door closed behind the Chevalier de Villegagnon, the Grand Master had at last smiled. ‘Either this Frenchman is the Constable’s dupe, or he has a mind to make us his.’ And against all argument, de Homedès’s premise was unshaken. The Sultan Suleiman would never expend his wealth to take a barren rock such as this. And there must be firm news to the contrary before he would authorize a grano to be spent. The Turkish fleet was aiming at Italy, and the possessions of the Emperor Charles. And all this solicitude from France was no more than an attempt to denude Sicily and the Italian States of their defences by concentrating them uselessly on the knights.
To la Valette’s renewed urging that he should garrison Tripoli with young knights under a wise and experienced Grand Cross, to put fortifications in order and evacuate useless mouths, de Homedès replied sharply that he