Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [96]
Here and there, against the city wall, the slaves were still at work, naked ebony backs whitened with sweat and dust beside the stocky olive torsoes of the Osmanlis, their single lank lock swaying from shaven foreheads, the chinking of the iron chains that linked them by the ankle, two by two, surfacing quietly like continuous, gentle tambourines above the thunder of sound. In the second’s space that came, now and then, between shots you could hear a child crying within one of the shuttered houses, its voice muffled by the thickness of sandstone. The alleys, crowded usually with water carriers, mules and merchandise, slaves and servants, beggars, goats, poultry, children, were empty; the street of the cook shops was shut.
As he stepped out into the open, past the ruined temple next to the big Roman archway, Jerott saw lying among the rubble the marble head of a boy, the rimmed almond eyes open to the sun, and wondered what the battered, fought-over houses of Tripoli would have to show of grace fourteen hundred years hence. He spoke to all the knights at the walls without seeing Lymond; the few Calabrians he had seen working on the western bulwarks had now gone. It was a Genoese knight, his face drawn stiff by the sun into lines of fatigue, who said, ‘Your nimble friend, I believe, is in the hot-house.’ It seemed ridiculous, but there was nothing but weariness in the other man’s face. With no enthusiasm at all Jerott walked towards the square, anonymous building the knight had indicated, and pushed open the door.
The first thing that struck him was the heat. Thick as a blanket, airless, stinking, it closed in on him at the door and his overloaded lungs heaved; streamers of light flashed behind his dazzled eyes, and he halted, for the moment quite blind.
Out of the darkness, against a background of men’s voices and a soft multiple fluting that bothered him by its familiarity, Lymond’s voice said, ‘Chevalier!’ paused, and added something in Italian in which Jerott Blyth, who knew Italian, recognized perfectly a very coarse joke pertaining to himself. There was a general laugh, a spontaneous, wholly uncultivated laugh of genuine amusement. Jerott’s sight cleared. Lymond had the Calabrians with him. Eight of them, half-naked in twisted white breechcloths and ragged vests, were scattered about the long hut, their unshaven, grinning faces turned towards him. Peasants. He looked round, noting the great apertures in wall and roof, glazed in and covered now with dirty blankets; even so, the heat through the glass was stifling. Along the walls and down the centre, on long benches of rough wood, were laid dozens of trays, and on the trays something moved.
Jerott Blyth took a step forward, and as he did so, Lymond moved forward and touched him. Something small and cold pricked down the young knight’s classical jawbone to land almost weightlessly on his chest: the soft piping enveloped his head. His quick temper already up, Blyth took a swipe at it.
‘Ah, be kind to them,’ said Lymond mildly, on a wave of sniggering laughter. ‘They think you’re Mother.’
The minute, gauzy objects crawling over his elbows, slipping inside his armour, bumping down the planes of his sweating face, were new-born chicks. Yellow, beady-eyed, nodding, they filled every bench; Lymond’s hands, as he stood before him, were full of them. ‘Hatching chickens without hens,’ he explained. ‘An old Moorish trick. The people would have let them all die in their fright, but these fellows know about birds. They may not understand guns, but they’ll help the garrison to survive, all the same. Are you going back? I’ll come with you.’
He looked as fresh as the night he had swum from the French galley. Brushing the young birds from his clothing, Jerott wondered hotly what work, if any, the man had done this last day and night, and then saw that the well-shaped hands