Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [95]
‘I haven’t, naturally, given the matter a thought,’ Lymond said; and with very good reason, Jerott did not say any more. When, presently, with one of des Roches’s men as sponsor and guide, they made their way safely into Tripoli under the shattering roar of the guns, and from there to the castle down stolid, uneven, thread-like alleys between the sealed houses, Jerott knew that professionally Lymond was an impeccable ally; and that there was nothing else about him that he cared for at all.
*
By the time the morning heat was rising white off the desert, they were embroiled in the back-breaking work which was to occupy them for two days. Within the castle of Tripoli were the permanent garrison of twenty-five elderly Knights of the Order and a hundred Moors, Mohammedans but no friends of the Turk, who served the Order as soldiers. To these and their slaves had been added the twenty-five young rebel knights released from the prisons of St Angelo, and those Calabrians who had fled from the Châtelet and who now, exposed to gunfire much worse, were too scared even to go back.
The Governor, de Vallier, sunken-faced from strain and sleeplessness, cried when two brisk young men from Malta were brought to him and Jerott Blyth, who had thought until then of little but the saving of Gabriel, transferred his shame-faced anger, with fine lack of logic, to Lymond. The sole comfort then was the news, brought by a fugitive camel-driver, that d’Aramon and all his suite were still safe. Sinan Pasha wanted no war with France. He merely wished to keep France neutral, by force if need be, until the surrender of Tripoli was accomplished.
As time passed, another gift of grace became apparent. The Turks were aiming all their fire, big and small, at the bulwark of St James, the best of the castle. Thick, well-mortared and terraced within, the wall received shot after shot without cracking or crumbling, and no sooner did a gap appear than it was stopped up by slaves working in the security of the great bulwark.
Labouring there with his fellow knights, with Moors, Turkish prisoners, commanding, cajoling, directing; masked with red grit and sweat, Jerott saw nothing of Lymond, whom he knew to be working on the other buttresses where no money had been spent, and where the old stone, dry and naked of mortar, was no more than a crazy fabric which the most skilled engineer could do little with now.
The Calabrians had been put as far from the gunfire as possible, and set to shovelling earth against the battered wails. Lymond moved there also for a while, and then returned to the bulwark of St Brabe.
Jerott wondered, cynically what he had expected to do. The problem with the Calabrians—the fundamental problem that had isolated them ever since they arrived—was lack of communication. When they troubled to listen, the lads could understand Italian’s Italian; but no one at Tripoli except their own captain could make anything of the thick Calabrian dialect which was all that they knew.
After a day and two nights of continuous bombardment, during which they had done all they could to strengthen the town and the castle, and the slaves at the St James bulwark, working in shifts, were keeping pace evenly and without trouble with the damage, Jerott handed over his post to de Poissieu, one of the young French knights, and walked all round the fort.
The sun was reaching its height. Moving out from the shade of the awnings, slung between rooftop and roof of the high leaning alleys; crossing the sand-filled, ruptured paving from near-darkness into sunshine, it was like stepping into fresh, stinging hot water. After a while, beneath the breastplate he wore, in common with all the knights, over the black vest of his habit, he began to feel the heat as a weight on his sodden shoulders