Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [94]
‘And the brigantine?’
Des Roches, looking inquiry, was not aware of a brigantine. Jerott explained what they had seen. Halfway through, the Commander turned abruptly and began marching up and down the small room, his hands tight clasped behind his back, listening until Jerott had finished. Then he spoke standing foursquare, his arms still tightly held. ‘I knew nothing of this. But you are right, I am sure. They prepare a way of escape. There is, as you know, no chance of sailing to freedom with the fleet waiting outside. It is suicide. But I cannot remove that hope. For if I do, I swear to you, these boys will surrender.’
‘But if they desert you.…’ began Jerott.
‘They pay the price of death at the Turk’s hands. And the fort is still intact, to be manned by better men.… War is a hard game,’ said des Roches abruptly. ‘Were I to beg them not to sail for their own sakes, they would not believe me. Seeming ignorance is better. Come, let us sleep while we may.’
Then he stopped, the breath pinched in his throat. Yellow, orange, flame in the black night, came the blaze of the first cannonade, followed by the ear-deadening shock of sound. Pushing through a wayward fabric of running, gesticulating men, des Roches and his three visitors reached the roof of the fort and looked towards Tripoli.
Jarred with light, the white walls, the flat roofs, the spire and minaret, the castle and arch flickered in gunfire which lit all the translucent water of the bay and defined the scattered, vacant vessels black and stark against the blaze of the batteries. From the castle, pathetically, came a crackle of arquebus fire and, caught in the light, the frail sparkle of arrows, falling harmlessly on the hulks that formed a bulwark for the entrenched Turkish cannoneers.
The shore batteries had begun and for two days and nights were barely to stop.
In the demoniac light, Lymond’s face was lividly blithe. ‘Well,’ he said, and looked with raised eyebrows from one man to the other. ‘Déjà la nuit en son pare amasse un grand troupeau d’étoiles vagabondes. Du Bellay, by courtesy of Sinan Pasha. Shall we go?’
‘No,’ said Jerott Blyth.
‘Eh.…’ said Thompson; and Lymond stopped. ‘Yes?’
‘Yon’s a nice little brigantine,’ said Thompson. ‘They poor Italian laddies couldna take a boat out to her now, in all this light, and they’ll no can swim. It’d be a pity to waste her.’
‘My dear seawater pickpocket,’ said Lymond patiently. ‘Even you couldn’t sail that brigantine single-handed through a hundred and thirty enemy vessels without causing a little outburst of petulance at least.’
Beatific in the hiccoughing light, the pirate’s brosy, black-bearded face split in a grin. ‘Will ye wager?’ he said. ‘There’s no telling at sea. This isna my fight, Francis Crawford. My trade is the sea, and I’ve lost one boat already through this poor, peely-wally Order. I’m making sure of my own while there’s time. Forbye.…’
‘Forbye,’ he repeated, looking Jerott Blyth up and down carefully and returning his bold gaze to Lymond, ‘some of youse might be glad of a wee boat before you’re all done.’
Five minutes later he had gone—where, no one could say; and the dark knight was left with Lymond alone.
‘All right,’ Lymond observed. ‘Go to hell your own way. Blyth, your Archangel Gabriel won’t hurt for five minutes. Either he’s dead along with d’Aramon and the rest, or Sinan’s waiting to see what the bombardment will do. With or without me, you can’t stop those guns, and it’s far too late to do any good here. They’re going to need a garrison of experienced men later on, not one man now. All that being so, is there any religious objection to entering Tripoli that I haven’t thought of?’
A moment’s real reflection had told