Pawn in Frankincense (43 page)

Whichever he had done, the Knights had entered Zuara: so much from the seafront was plain. Perhaps, with no fleet to succour them, they had had no alternative. Perhaps, seeing the galleys there waiting, they would now attempt to withdraw. Giving his orders; seeing the boats lowered ready, Jerott hesitated still.

Never till now had he fully realized how widely Francis Crawford and he were now separated; how much damage Lymond had himself wilfully caused, in the last weeks, to the relationship existing between them. On board the fishing-vessel, waiting to be slipped ashore with Archie just outside Zuara, Lymond had seemed to him as hard and self-contained as the culverin on the rambade, uttering no words that were not orders; his intelligence shut against all life and all humanity that did not concern his one purpose.

Once before, Jerott had seen him like that, in Algiers. He had seen him as he was now, with every skill of mind and body tuned to the ultimate pitch in pursuit of one object. Francis Crawford like that was uncontrollable and very close to invincible. But not invincible. And not impervious to the reckoning afterwards.

Walking to the side of the
Catarinetta
, Jerott thought of many things. Of the nuns at Baden; of Shakib and the others who died in Algiers. Of Ali-Rashid the camel-trader, and the branded infant at Bône. Of Kedi the nurse, and the Syrian silk-merchant, and himself close to death at Mehedia. Of a child’s arm round his neck, and a child’s kiss in the hollow of his shirt. Of the Spaniards who died at Gabès, of Philippa’s danger; of this, the betrayal of a whole Order of Knighthood.

He heard his own voice saying,
She is more than dead, Francis. If I thought you would do it, I would beg you to go without seeing her
. And Lymond’s own voice, long ago in Scotland, before the child Philippa snatched the knife from his hand and allowed Gabriel to make the escape which had led to all this; Lymond’s own voice in the Cathedral in Edinburgh, saying,
For Will Scott, for Wat Scott his father … for the pain you occasioned the Somervilles and the corruption and death of your sister, for what, above all, you hoped to do to this realm of Scotland, I call your life forfeit
.

Jerott Blyth set his lips tight; checked the sword and the dagger Archie Abernethy had given him, and the brigantine jacket he had begged from St Sulpice; and letting himself down into the shallop, with St Sulpice, the Serving Brothers and all the men he thought could be spared, had himself rowed to Zuara at speed.

The gates of Zuara had been open, with no guards on duty. Strung-up after that nervous, twelve-mile march with his troops, Leone Strozzi found that puzzling. And yet there was no reason to be over-wary. They had walked through twelve miles of palm groves and beach; past walled gardens and mud houses and high banks of Indian fig; along sandy tracks between patches of melon and peppers and apricot and orange and pomegranate trees, without meeting so much as a dog.

If anything was strange, that was strange. But then, God’s will was in the work to their hand. God’s will ordained that instead of scrambling through a ditch at the back, they should walk through the city gates in the front. He made certain dispositions, and laid down certain rules: each company had its work to do. They were to meet in the central square without scattering or plundering until all posts of danger had been seized. And to secure their exit, he left several companies guarding the gateway outside. Then they marched in.

The key positions were not hard to occupy, because there were hardly any men to be found in the city, which was a pity, as he had offered two crowns for every Moor’s head brought to him afterwards. And resistance, once they had occupied them and roused the citizenry to their predicament with drums and trumpets in the main
square, turned out to be of a token kind only, for the city was filled largely with old men, women and children.

It was when they discovered this that the army of Malta, regrettably, ran amok. It was not, of course, the fault of the Magistral Knights and the Knights of Grace, the Chaplains of Obedience, the Serving Brothers, the Piliers, the Priors, the Bailiffs or the Knights Grand Cross of the Order. But officered by the Knights were nine hundred soldiers of mixed nationality and a uniform appetite for money and women.

They fired the buildings as they ran through, looking for prisoners and plunder with tree branches dipped in pitch for their torchlight. They fought one another over the silver bracelets on a child’s ankle, or the earrings from an old woman’s lobes, or the coins round a girl’s canvas cap. They stuffed embroidered silks into their shirt-fronts, and rings and aspers and ducats into their pouches. They found opium, and finely chased seals, and hoards of coral and gold and pearl buttons, and spilled open chest and cupboard and market stall to find more. Girdle cakes of barley and millet bounced upset in the flickering dark with the ringing wares of the brassworker, and a basket of wild artichokes rolled with its soft leafy fists among the spilled salt, fat and cheese of the suqi dealer along the warrens of small vaulted passages, with dead men underfoot.

Two crowns for a Moor’s head; and as slaves, the women and children might be worth even more. La Valette, with great trouble, had gathered over a thousand prisoners in the dark square, ready to march them out to the ships which were so mysteriously tardy in coming, when the Moor Ali Benjiora found him: a man he knew well, who had served under him once at Tripoli.

Conspicuous by his height, and his curling white cropped hair and beard, de la Valette bent to hear the man’s words; made him repeat them; and then, raising his voice in the uproar, found and summoned Leone Strozzi. ‘There is an ambush. The Aga Morat’s army, he says, is surrounding us from two sides, half from Tripoli and the rest under the Aga from Djerba: four thousand horsemen in all, with arquebuses and bows. We are to be trapped in the city.’

Strozzi’s eyes, brilliant with excitement, glowered at the Moor. ‘How is this true?’

‘It is true,’ said de la Valette. ‘I know this man and I trust him. More than that, he was shown the troops and told where to find us by someone known to both of us: the French Envoy, Crawford of Lymond.’

‘Then it is true,’ said Strozzi slowly. He looked round. The pillage was almost over, the city was blazing; the worst had been done. More, he saw, looking beyond the smoke and the flames out to sea, his ships had at last come. It was time to cut losses. ‘Retreat! The drums will beat retreat!’ he said with energy; and flung back his
bright helmeted head shouting. ‘To the shore! Retreat to the shore! All captives to the shore, and make ready to embark! The Chevalier Justiani, make your signal to the Admiral galley. All boats to the shore …’

He thrust through the uproar, shouting. A moment later the drums started, but even where de la Valette stood, in the square itself, they were hardly audible. The Knights of St John were being called on to retreat, and none of them yet knew it. The Chevalier Parisot de la Valette, opening his purse to reward the Moor Ali Benjiora, was struck by a thought. ‘You came into the city: how did you come in?’

‘Through the gates,’ said the Moor. He slipped the gold into his robe.

‘Through the gates? The commander of the companies guarding the walls let you enter?’

‘What companies?’ said the Moor. ‘There is no one, Hâkim, outside the gates. They all came in, it is said, long since to plunder.’

So for the second time that night, the gates of Zuara stood open to an invader, but this time to a succouring force; a brutal friend who was prepared to let a city die in order to trap its assailants.

Jerott landed on the shore, the other skiffs hard behind him as the Aga Morat with four thousand armed cavalry thundered into the burning city. Facing him, every gate to the sea was flung open, a yawning red mouth in the night, and the black shapes of people poured through; Moorish women and children, wailing and screaming, soldiers cursing, Knights carrying wounded. Shouldering against the tide, sword in hand, Jerott pushed through into the town, seeking for a face he knew in the dashing smoke and the distorting glare of the flames. Then he saw that pillage had stopped; and carnage had begun.

The horses, these brilliantly ridden horses of the Aga Morat’s, were the chief terror, Jerott found. Grazed by the encircling fires, they reared and plunged and kicked, ripping the smoke and pounding flesh and bone in their path. Scimitars flashed, and the blade of long, double-edged daggers, used again and again; and the steely face of small axes, attacking their food. Here and there, and then suddenly everywhere at once, the echoing thud of arquebus fire could be heard. He saw one man’s face, rearing over him, spear ready to lunge, and recognized it as he parried, burying his sword in the man’s unprotected thigh. It was one of the men he had ridden with, on the display-ground at Djerba.

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, fighting one-handed shoulder to shoulder with his former brothers across the square beside the standard, unaware of the agony of his unslung wrist, there was at each of the sea gates a jammed mass of their fellows unable to get through; fighting back to the gates under shock after shock of arquebus fire and scimitar and striking hooves as the Aga Morat sent line after line of cavalry bursting through them until soon the gates, fleetingly blocked by the living, would be closed to them for all time by the dead.

Jerott left the standard. Running to the gates, he found Strozzi’s nephew beside him, bound on the same errand: to free by any means humanly possible the block at the gates. For the next few moments, shouting orders, hurling men from him, using his sword where necessary to force their own men into the open on the other side, there was no time to do anything but what he-had been trained, by the Order and by Lymond, to do. Then, as the gates began to clear and the last of Leone Strozzi’s conquering army, dragging its wounded, began to stream through on to the dark sands, Jerott spoke gaspingly to the boy still at his side. ‘Where is Gabriel?’