Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [64]
‘No,’ said de Villegagnon strongly. Standing, his vast bulk towering over the forgotten messenger, he spoke at last for himself. ‘No. I will go gladly. But if Mdina is to be saved, it will be saved not by peasants but by men who fight for religion and honour, by the Knights of St John who adopted these people as their children when the Order made Malta its home. Keep your great officers. Keep your defences. Keep your posts at St Angelo firm. But spare me a hundred knights—knights of no great seniority, but men who would willingly lay down their lives to defeat the Turk, and who would know how to make Islâm pay dearly. Give me a hundred.’
Back in his carved seat leaned the Grand Master, his black hat tall above the grey, passionless face, the patch insouciantly staring. ‘I shall give you six,’ he said with extreme care. ‘Since to travel alone, and at such risk, is a burden I find I cannot lay on you, dear Brother. Take six, to be your companions.’
The sharp intake of shocked breath in the airless room was the only sound that met his remark. Suddenly Gabriel stood. But he was too late. De Villegagnon, looking straight at the Grand Master, had spoken his mind. ‘You are laying nothing on me and on the six men you speak of,’ he said, ‘but death without honour.’
The Grand Master rose. Smoothly, swiftly for so old a man, he rose to his feet, and from his dais looked down on them all, his beaked nose pallid, his sunken cheeks drawn in noble distaste. And this time, in his edged voice, just anger showed plain.
‘Brother Nicholas, hear this. In a Knight Hospitaller of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, whatever his age, whatever his rank, whatever he boasts of experience, I look to find valour. I expect obedience. I demand humility before the inscrutable will of the Lord.… Puling argument I do not attend. If you are affrighted by the prospect before you, with even six of my knights at your side, then I need only raise my voice to call on knights who believe that to die for their Order alone does them honour. I have no time,’ said Juan de Homedès bitingly, ‘for traitorous chatter. If you mean to leave, it had better be now, before daybreak. If you are afraid, say as much.’
‘Afraid!’ Not respect for the head of his Order, not discretion, not Christian humility as adjured, made de Villegagnon pause, but the steady message of Gabriel’s blue gaze. Nicholas Durand de Villegagnon, his voice stiff with hurt, answered the Grand Master then. ‘In speaking as I have done, I intercede for the city of Mdina, for the knights and the Maltese within her, and for the six wasted lives being abandoned with mine, that is all. My lord,’ said de Villegagnon, staring straight at the one eye of this Aragonese who was master of them all, ‘I give you proof that fear never made me decline danger. I go to Mdina tonight, and alone. So that the people of Mdina may die knowing’—and he paused, his voice heavy with ill-fitting irony—‘that through their sacrifice, the knights of this Order may remain secure in their castle of St Angelo to face the future with confidence, unscathed.’
He was allowed to leave, because the Grand Master had always hoped that he would leave; but not, after all, alone. Faster than the precious remnant of darkness, his shield, was melting away, the report of the Grand Master’s pronouncement had spread. Six knights might go with him to beleagured Mdina. And when, corselet shining under his robe, helmet clapped on his rough hair, de Villegagnon strode down the steep ramp to the castle ditch, a handful of corn and an arquebus cord in his hand, and began calling gently to the mares tethered there, a touch on his arm turned him to face, not a riding horse’s soft mouth but a knight of the French Langue, robed but without armour, a horse roughly bridled with cord at his arm, and behind him five other men. ‘There was a ballot,’ said a soft, vivid voice. ‘And you lost.’
Jerott Blyth. Behind him, three French-born companions of long ago whose