Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [142]
The Knights, on foot, fought back grimly. Their heads shielded by close-helm or salade, armed with breastplate and backplate under the short surcoat, they defended themselves as they could with their great oval shields, their axes, their two-handed swords, staggering to the rush of the horses; driving against the white-turbaned figures. The soldiers, in leather jerkins or brigantines like his own, were running; retreating to the sea gates in haste, their prisoners dashing free as they went.
Parrying, defending himself, assisting whom he could where he could, Jerott fought his way across the square to where the battle was thickest: round the tall flag with the white cross which was the standard of the Order. The sacred standard, his duty to which, in all the years of his training, had become ingrained in his soul: never to fall into enemy hands; never to touch the ground; never to be defiled; never to be abandoned. And beside it, taller than the rest, was a Knight in full armour with his visor lowered, a Knight unrecognizable by anything except the blue panache on his helm.
Fighting towards that, Jerott passed by and ignored the familiar faces which surged thick about him now: Tolon de St Jaille, de Guimeran, le Plessis Richlieu, Justiniani, Sforza, young Strozzi, Piero’s son, the Chevalier Poglieze … Knights of every country, the best of their kind; and brave men. Then the Knight with the blue panache turned towards him, his sword drooping; his gloved hand pushing back his vizor, and Jerott’s sword was already half-way towards the naked face within when it was struck up, sharply, by another blade from below. ‘No, you fool,’ said a hard, emotionless voice he barely recognized as Lymond’s. ‘The man you are killing is Leone Strozzi.’
Continuing to fight, automatically; his eyes on the banner, his ears alert for Strozzi’s commands as, retreating, the Knights began to turn back towards the gates and the sea, Jerott saw that, apart from that one stroke, Lymond was not fighting. Instead, concealed by the darkness and the smoke, he had found a place from which he could watch: and there he stood still, wearing only the arms Abernethy had brought him; a shirt of chain mail over the almond silk trunk-hose he had been wearing at Djerba, now stained and scuffed; a sword-belt; a dagger; a purse. His hair, Jerott saw, was uncovered, although he had been given a morion, and his eyes, ceaselessly roving over the dark receding mainstream of the struggle, were narrowed like those of a marksman waiting for the partridge to rise at the tock of a drum.
So he had not yet found Graham Malett; or Graham Malett had not yet found him.
Soldiers, Knights and Serving Brothers now, fighting for their lives against horses and men, were clear of all the souks of the town. The desperate knots of resistance where the great officers, bound by their vows, preferred death to surrender to the heathen were one by one scattered and hewn down. The square underfoot, roughly paved with brick and small pebbles set in mortar, was thick and viscous with blood, and trammelled with foot-catching lumber: of hacked bodies and strewn clothes and loose armour plate and ownerless weapons. Outside, along the harbour pool and the shoaling sands of the shore, those who were already free of the town would be streaming, fighting in their heavy armour as they went, making for the boats, which but for Jerott would not have been there.
Because of that, Jerott saw,