This dragged on until Friday when the issue was brought before the capital assembly. The Grand Master did not want to have an extra assembly and appealed to the Piliers only to give a sentence. A prisoner could be judged just as well on Friday as he could on Tuesday. Some ordeal that must have been. So they had a trial on Friday, and on Saturday it had leaked out that the Grand Master had demanded capital punishment. Gozon had promised to keep the order, and it would cost him his life. He figured he would be disarmed, and that he was. The Piliers put forward all that Brother Gozon had done, and how he killed at least one hundred Turks and now a dragon in the bargain. So he received the lightest sentence that could be given. Everyone went to the chapel. Brother Gozon was called up to the hall. He was stripped of his red surcoat with the white cross and his spurs. Then he was sent to his private quarters. There he would stay under house arrest while waiting for the next ship home.
No one in the city was pleased with this decision. For that matter, neither were any of the remaining knights in the convent. It had leaked out that the prisoner would rather be executed than sent home in disgrace. But the Grand Master simply said no to this.
So some brothers made up a letter of petition for Brother Gozon, which every commander signed. The Grand Master received it, but was like a wall.
Then the day of St. John the Baptist arrived. After the fast, when all had confessed their sins and taken the sacrament, there would be the general assembly in the grand hall. The Grand Master sat there on his throne, just as unaffected, with all the Piliers, Commanders, and landowners around him while the knights, chaplains, and troop commanders took their places. The Grand Master decided that the meeting would be open and allowed the doors to be opened. The people who had been crowding around outside now rushed in, crowding and howling until the guard established order. Then dead silence fell in the room as the Pilier of Provençe rang his bell and read the letter of petition for Gozon.
Now the Grand Master received it where he wanted to. He called Gozon in and said that he had seriously offended. No one should turn a blind eye to his orders. But wrath has its time, and forgiveness has its own time too, as Ecclesiastes teaches. So he asked if the former knight, Dieudonné de Gozon would once again take up the Religion. If he would, he may bow his knee here and now, confess his sins, renew his oath, and receive his surcoat and sword back. The whole hall shouted with joy and rang bells. There has never been a feast like it on the day of St. John the Baptist since. Later Brother Gozon became a Commander, then a Pilier, and finally Grand Master. But when he killed the dragon they promised to throw him in irons and remove him. What an ordeal that must have been.
The Test
“Maybe this?”
The treasurer held up a heavy gold chain, rattled it, and let it shine in the little bit of sun that made it through the half open wood doors. They—him, the Grand Master’s deputy, and the Chancellor—had gone up to the top floor in a gate tower where the Grand Master kept the treasures that could be used as gifts of respect to visiting potentates.
“Too valuable . . . and too common,” said Pomerolx, the deputy. “He would only weigh the gold and then tax us as if we were one of his provinces.”
It was an issue concerning Sofi, the Shah of Persia. He had sent his envoy to Carretto. Disappointed and perplexed, they had heard that he was dead and buried. They had deliberated in their incomprehensible language whether to get horses and ride to Ferakles where the pretender to the throne, Amuratte, a cousin to Suleiman’s father, lived under the Religion’s protection as their guest and hostage. They had probably promised him help and eternal friendship if he could organize a rebellion against Suleiman. Right now they could use that. The shah feared that the Janissaries would cross the border any day. That the Grand Turk also wanted to conquer Persia was no secret.
Because Sofi was a thankful ally, one ought to send him fitting gifts of friendship, but they had to be kept within certain parameters because no one knew what political course the new Grand Master was planning.
The treasurer looked around in the rubbish perplexed. They may as well have been with a pawnbroker who had noble clients. There were rings and chains, gold plated spurs, bags of golden cloth, Turkish armor, and scimitars with scabbards inlaid with precious stones, and hunting helmets lying all over. Most of it was war booty, though some of it had been royal gifts that were deemed useless and stowed away. Just to be on the safe side, these had been furnished with notations of origin. Then there were inherited things that had belonged to dead brothers of the order.
Pomerolx, the deputy, moved some Venetian dishes and pulled out a large chest finished with gold borders, precious stones, and enameled plates. He lifted the lid and pulled out a chessboard of different colored squares.
“You have to press them in a certain order. Nothing opens the secret lock without the code. We give it to him with a sealed letter so he alone can know the secret and keep his shady agreements and bottles of poison safe and undisturbed. He puts value in that. That and a bundle of the green Florentine silk, some hunting guns, and one of the fine Nuremberg pistols with wheel locks—and two falcons. That will be sufficient.”
The falcons were standard gifts. The Hospitallers had perfected this way of hunting. You could not find better falcons anywhere in the world. And they had plenty of them.
The Chancellor nodded unwillingly. It would be politically shrewder and wiser to send gifts to Suleiman than to maintain friendship with his enemies.
“We should also consider the Frenchmen,” he said. “And the Pope’s galley captain. They should have a royal gratuity when they return home.”
“Who said they are going home?”
Pomerolx sounded irritated.
“Common sense and the report from Constantinople.”
Pomerolx was silent. They had just read the secret reports from Constantinople, prepared by agents who neither Pomerolx nor the Chancellor could name ,written with invisible ink according to a jealously guarded secret recipe. They were written between lines in shipping documents and catalogues of goods and smuggled out by merchants whose names were just as carefully guarded. All the reports were unanimous. They spoke about energetic armament. There was work around the clock in the cannon foundries. Grain was stored up as high as mountains. At least a thousand transport camels were on their way to Constantinople, and all Sipahis in Anatolia and the Balkans were on alert. On the other hand, it was almost normal in the shipyards. There was no doubt that this year there would be an overland campaign, probably in Hungary. It was a much higher probability there now, as the Hungarians in their madness had shamelessly abused and murdered Suleiman’s ambassador, sending home his severed ears and nose.
The Chancellor said dryly and a little scornfully what the others thought.
“As soon as it is known, requests are made by our allies to sail home. And what can we do, but give them some gold chains and let them go?”
“Are we agreed then?” Pomerolx asked. “And the Lord Chancellor can set up a protocol?” D’Amaral nodded reservedly. Fifty years as a knight of St. John had taught him not only to receive an order without blinking, but also to know the bitterness of receiving it from one who ranked far below him in seniority.
Somberly and quietly, he crossed the castle courtyard preoccupied. The salutes of the watches and uncovered heads bowing while sweeping their berets that he encountered on his way out irritated him.
Arriving home, he pulled out the secret reports. He wanted to go through them again and make a statement before the council meeting. A good hour had passed, when there was a knock on the door. It was the Turk Ibrahim.
“What do you want?”
The Chancellor furled his gray bushy eyebrows and looked at the slave irritated. To come un-summoned, he was still taking his forbidden freedoms.
“Make it short.”
“Lord,