Pawn in Frankincense (42 page)

It was as well. Now, with the Grand Master’s death surely imminent, Leone Strozzi was about to achieve a small but dazzling coup for the Order. Thirteen miles east of Djerba on the North African coast, Zuara was not a great city. But because of a good harbour it had become rich in commerce and also a profitable lair for all the Barbary corsairs east of Algiers.

He was going to reduce it. He was going to give the Moors inside the town such a fright that they would think long before they allowed Turkish or renegade ships to shelter again; and he was going to teach the corsairs that they had their own depots and harbours and ships to defend before they could freely rove the seas plundering others.

Slaves in Malta had described the fortifications to him. They were all on the north. The land side of Zuara, they said, was both unguarded
and unfortified. They had only to advance to the ditch unseen through the palm trees, and Zuara was theirs.

So the Moorish slaves said. He had no reason to disbelieve them: they had too much to lose. He was taking several of them with him as guides; and the Order’s galleys, and his own brigantines fully armed. And aboard he was carrying twelve hundred men, including the three hundred best Knights of the Convent. Three-quarters of all the Knights on Malta were sailing with and under Leone Strozzi: de la Valette was under his command; Graham Malett must look to him for orders.

They had already made their dispositions: his own nephew was to lead the advance scouting party; the Commander de Guimeran was to lead the advance guard proper, and the Chevalier de la Valette the main body of troops following. He himself, Leone Strozzi, would bring up the rearguard with the reserve infantry, throwing them in where required; directing the order of battle. It would succeed. He would cover himself with glory. And the youngster of his own name, Piero’s son, his charming young nephew, would make a name in his first big engagement.

Flushed with triumph; buoyant with expectations; illumined with shadowless vanity, Leone Strozzi stood under the fluttering red silk of his banners and watched the pale coasts of Africa come nearer and nearer.

The
Catarinetta
had her accident on the morning of the 14th of August, their last day at sea. How it happened, no one afterwards was exactly able to say. One moment, the little fishing-smack with the striped sail was skimming towards them, set on a parallel course; and the next, with a crunch of broken timber that shook the
Catarinetta
, she was under their flank, and the few men who had been aboard her, hurt, dead or dying, were spilled in the sea.

The slaves, shouting, had shipped oars automatically, but by the time de Guimeran recovered his balance and ran up on deck, the
Catarinetta’s
impetus, despite the jar, was enough to have driven her some distance onward. He satisfied himself that no irreparable damage had been done to her sides and, leaving Gabriel to initiate emergency repairs, de Guimeran replaced him at the tiller and gave orders to turn.

Afterwards, he remembered that Gabriel, working like a slave himself, his face lined with remorse, had still turned and demurred, hesitantly. There were no survivors by now. And they had the lives of twelve hundred men in their hands. Already the other galleys had forged far ahead. They must keep up, or endanger the coup. De Guimeran didn’t listen. He had seen one dark head in the water which was not floating helplessly, and one arm alternately upraised and thrust forward swimming. He completed his orders and
La
Catarinetta
swung round, her sails filling, and flew back the way she had come.

By the time she reached the wreckage, the swimmer was the only man living. Standing amidships, boarding tackle in his hands, de Guimeran nursed the galley along, order by order, until it lay as close as was possible to the swimming man. There was blood on the face under the black, streaming hair, and he was swimming, de Guimeran saw, one-handed, but doggedly for all that. He was not dressed like a fisherman.…

Gabriel, standing beside him, his work abandoned, said suddenly, ‘He will need help; his wrist is broken. Let me support him up the ladder …’ and, without waiting for permission, vaulted lightly over the rail and into the surging water beside the wounded man. The swimmer looked up.

‘It’s …’ said the Chevalier de Guimeran. ‘My God, it’s Jerott Blyth.’

To that, Jerott knew later, he owed his life. Half conscious from a blow on the head and the pain of his wrist; clouding the water with the blood from the shallow cuts which covered his body, he looked up as someone jumped into the water beside him, but he did not hear de Guimeran’s shout. He was looking instead at the man treading water beside him: the smiling, big-featured face; the guinea-gold hair, regardlessly cropped; the magnificent shoulders under the soaked doublet, with the Cross of St John white on its breast. ‘My dear Mr Blyth,’ said Sir Graham Reid Malett, tenderly reaching out one muscular arm and placing it, relentlessly, on Jerott’s tired shoulders. ‘It is no use. I’m afraid you must drown.’ Then the water closed over his head.

He came up once, as another body splashed into the water beside him. For a moment he saw Gabriel’s face quite clearly: saw his eyes narrow, and heard his voice say, ‘De Guimeran … really, I can manage this by myself, I am sure.’ Then he realized that the firm hand under his other arm was de Guimeran’s, and that despite anything Gabriel might wish to do, he was being propelled surely and swiftly to safety.

Graham Malett caught up with him again, just before he dragged himself, with de Guimeran’s help, up the rope net they had let down over
La Catarinetta’s
low sides. Jerott felt the powerful body behind him, and the ungentle grasp on his loose arm just as he reached the top of the rail. Then, with a sudden quick movement, entirely invisible to any of the craning heads watching above, his broken wrist was seized without mercy and twisted.

Like summer lightning, the pain fled through his nerves. Jerott’s heart thundered once; he heard the tearing gasp as the breath left his lungs; and then he pitched forward on the deck of the
Catarinetta
at de Guimeran’s feet, quite unconscious.

He was alone when he woke; lying on a bed in the gunroom, in darkness. Sitting up slowly, he found that someone had doctored his cuts, although his head still ached and he had a dull and constant throb from his wrist, bandaged tightly and strapped lightly in place across the front of his shirt. De Guimeran, he supposed, would carry a surgeon. He wondered why unexplained death had not overtaken him while he was unconscious, and deduced that Gabriel had failed to find the opportunity.

Or perhaps … It was extraordinarily quiet. With care, Jerott got to his feet, and picking his way between bedding-rolls and packing-cases and assorted litter, found the door and then, in the next hold, a ladder leading up to the deck. His head swimming a little, he climbed it and looked round about him.

It was night. Even if he had not seen them, black against the indigo sky, the smell of the palm trees would have told him they were anchored close off the coast, lightless, with the other ships of the fleet lying silent around them. But for slaves and seamen; perhaps a knight as second officer deputizing for captain, and one or two caravanisti, they were empty of men. The expedition had arrived, and had landed. But not at Zuara.

Jerott turned. An unknown voice, speaking diffidently in the darkness, said, ‘Chevalier Blyth? I was to pay you M. de Guimeran’s compliments, and say he hoped not to be long delayed. I trust you find yourself better?’

It was not the time to point out that he was no longer a Knight; that he had abandoned the Order. Jerott said, ‘Are you in charge? Do you know where you are?’

He heard and groaned at the slight hauteur in the reply. ‘My name is St Sulpice: I am in charge, sir, and at your service. And we are at Zuara. The landings were completed while you were unconscious, some hours ago.’

Jerott said, ‘Have you ever been here before?’

‘At Zuara? No. It is new to all of us. Therefore, the pilot.’

‘Who was the pilot?’ said Jerott, but he knew the answer already.

‘An excellent man, I believe. A Genoese,’ said St Sulpice defensively, ‘taken on by Sir Graham Reid Malett. You do not consider him at fault?’

‘I know he’s at fault,’ said Jerott Blyth dryly. ‘He’s brought you to a place at least twelve miles too far east.’

They wouldn’t believe him. Hurried consultations with the skeleton crew on the Admiral galley and then the others merely brought the same conclusion: if Jerott was right, then why had the Prior not sent a skiff back to warn them when he and his men discovered the error? It might not, of course, have been immediately noticeable. They might even have landed the army before it became obvious. And by then it would, Jerott thought, be rather easier to march
twelve miles by the coast than to face embarking twelve hundred men all over again and sailing farther along.

Easier, that is … if you did not know that the mistake was intentional; that the district was warned; that the Aga Morat and his troops were only waiting somewhere to spring the whole trap. He said, persuasively, ‘Let’s settle it, then. Send a skiff ashore and see what information it can pick up. We may even have found the Prior left a message for the fleet which has somehow gone astray.…’

They sent a skiff. He didn’t go with it. It was too late, anyway. They had left hours ago: they would be nearly at Zuara by now, or would have met whatever fate was planned for them en route. As a messenger of warning he had utterly failed, and through no fault of his own. What danger had Gabriel scented on seeing that fishing-vessel, which had made him take such instant steps to annihilate it? Somehow, he must have learned, in the messages from Zakynthos, that his secrets had been penetrated—even that Archie had escaped with the knowledge, bound for Djerba.

This, for Gabriel, might be the last disservice he ever planned to perform for the Knights. With exposure now almost certain, he had used the last of his authority to lead his fellow Knights into disaster. He had no intention of going back to Malta, Jerott suddenly realized. That was why, having failed in the water, he merely ensured that Jerott would remain silent for long enough for the expedition to leave. Nothing must discredit Gabriel before he had achieved this night’s work. Afterwards, it did not matter. The great landing, planned once probably to throw Leone Strozzi for ever out of the running as a possible Grand Master, was being used instead to raise even higher Graham Malett’s stock with his master the Turk.

The skiff came back, with consternation aboard. It was true. This was not Zuara. The army had gone; marching on foot. They had found the pilot, his neck broken; and a shallop floating loose on the shore, with a dead man in the bottom. ‘It is a trap,’ said Jerott. ‘A trap I came to warn you about. We can do very little now to set it right. But if you trust me, I will tell you what I think we should do.…’

He divided the fleet into two parts. The smaller he left, fully lit, under a junior commander at a spot within six miles of Zuara. The rest he took himself, with St Sulpice assisting, to lie off Zuara itself.

They rowed there
à outrance
, against the wind; and the wind brought them ashes, and the stink of charred flesh and gunpowder, and the thud of cannon and the crackle of small shot, and the shrieking, ululating roar of a town in sack.

Somewhere in that conflagration was Lymond. And somewhere, Graham Reid Malett.

The decision had been Lymond’s, as every decision had been Lymond’s on that unpleasant little trip out of Djerba on the fishing-vessel Archie Abernethy had procured them. Jerott, who was known to the Knights, would intercept the fleet and warn them by sea. Lymond and Abernethy would meet them, for double safety, as they landed, and would by then be able to give Strozzi, with some luck and some very hard work, an idea of the dispositions of the Aga Morat’s two forces, and of the true fortifications of Zuara.

If the odds were overwhelmingly against them, the Knights could withdraw. If, turning the ambush to their advantage, they had some hope of success, then they might well go ahead. Whichever way it turned out, Graham Reid Malett, Jerott knew, would never leave that beach-head alive.

Now all that had gone for nothing. Because of Gabriel, the fleet had not been warned by himself. And again because of Gabriel, the landing had not been made near Zuara, but far down the coast, where Lymond could not possibly have met them. He might hope, thought Jerott, to take the coast road east from Zuara himself and intercept Strozzi, if he had seen, in the dark, the direction the fleet from Malta was taking, and was able to guess roughly the land route they might choose. But was that even possible, at night? And if he found them, might he not be shot down on sight? Invading at night through enemy country, no one would think of asking questions before they let fly.…

Or he might wait near Zuara for the advance scouts, and find both Strozzi to warn and Graham Malett to kill by that method, if the Knights had not already been ambushed by the Aga Morat’s force from Tripoli before they ever got to Zuara.