Pawn in Frankincense (23 page)

Which was precisely the kind of bitchy remark, thought Jerott furiously, that Lymond himself would have made.

In the end, Jerott chose the moderate course. He travelled alone because he would not allow their waiting-post to be abandoned. Salablanca and Marthe remained there: Marthe wild with impatience and Salablanca smiling, unmoved. The bulk of the money, well hidden, stayed with them while Jerott, carrying only enough for his needs, mounted his horse and rode east, into high spring and the enemy-held territory of Mehedia.

Soon, these flat plains would lie exhausted again under the dusk-drinking lions of summer. Now Jerott rode past green hedges and plane and pomegranate trees and date palms, through olive groves and by fields sprouting with barley and wheat. Wild mignonette sprang among the thistles between the cracked marble stones of some forgotten Roman-built path and the blue of cornflowers and wild lupin and hyacinth hazed the long grass. In the villages there was milk to be had from the pale, full-bellied cows, and honey like muslin, eaten beneath the blossoming orange trees in an orchard where the scent fed the senses like the threshold pleasures of love. And Jerott, who had wished to be alone for his own sake as well as for Lymond’s, closed his eyes as he sat under the orange trees, and prayed for Francis Crawford, who did not recognize love, and for himself, who did.

Presently through the olive trees, said to bear the name of God on every leaf, he saw as he rode the rocky peninsula with the walled
town of Mehedia on his left. Then the olives gave way to low green bushes, fat and glossy, rich with rotten fish and oil cake and lascivious feeding as Marthe had described them. Jerott rode through the grove of white mulberries, and past the rows of thatched rearing-houses, and began to pursue an altogether spurious line of inquiry, gently, from farmhouse to farm, about the purchase of soufflons for inexpensive, waste silk.

The silk-farmer who had presented the unhatched eggs to the Bektashi dervish was a Syrian, turbaned, round-faced and brown-haired—an amiable man, with several robed wives and a cheerful parcel of brown-skinned slaves who gathered round, white teeth smiling, until he cuffed them away.

It was Jerott’s fourth farm, and it had cost him half an hour of careful talk over dried figs and raisins and a dish of little eggs cooked in saffron to identify it as the one he was seeking. Standing in the warm sheds, looking at the tiered wicker trays of black worms rustling, rustling as they ate their way through the young green mulberry shoots, he shaped the conversation with infinite patience. To take and conceal another man’s possessions, even if these were only a black woman and a child too young to work, was something for which the Syrian might pay bitterly in money and in the crudest physical maltreatment. It was not an admission to be made lightly to strangers.

The insects fed. Unremittingly, day and night, from the forty meals of their first day of life, they would feed, these grubs little more than an aphid in size. Soon their first skin would be cast, feet, skull, jaws and teeth discarded in husk, and the revealed worm, wrinkled and pale, would fall to eating again. As the farmer talked, children, dark-haired and quiet, moved in and out between the piled ranks of trays with reeded baskets of leaves, gently sprinkling each shelf, or, sheltering a little wisp of dry, burning straw, coaxed the lethargic to appetite in its warmth. ‘They be light witted and shy, and noise doth offend them,’ said the farmer. ‘Therefore it is becoming to live softly among them. They see nothing, and move little, yet for twenty centuries, it is said, from the time of the Flowery Kingdom, they have lived to serve man.’

‘Your children are quiet,’ Jerott said.

‘They are tired,’ said the farmer. ‘Each day the leaves must be gathered and the grub must be satisfied day and night, and kept warm, and rats and mice frightened away. Then when it has entered its hammock, its florette, and, after reposing, has spun, the vigil begins. There is little sleep at such times. Without children it could not be done.’

‘Grown slaves sleep less than children,’ said Jerott.

‘They cost more.’ Emerging from the dusk of the huts, Jerott found the clear air of the desert above the darkening mulberry trees
already tinged with the carmine of sunset. Pausing in his walk, just outside the white walls of the farmhouse, he said, ‘I have a kindness to beg. I would pay thee the price of six adult slaves for one child of thine, with his nurse.’

The farmer stopped. ‘Thou sayest?’

Jerott met the honey-brown eyes. ‘I speak not as merchant, but as brother to brother. There is a Christian bereft of his heart, a fair son taken from him in mischief and left with the Bedouin. To any caring for the boy and his nurse, my friend would give gold, and would exchange honest silence.’

The farmer glanced round. In the deepening twilight, the awakened scents of leaf and blossom stirred like the promise of food in the nostrils and the white acid of jasmine struck the lungs. There was no one near. The farmer said, ‘Thou art no merchant?’

‘I am from France. From the
Dauphiné
, bound for Stamboul,’ said Jerott quietly. A life for a life. To place himself in this man’s power was the only way he possessed to purchase his confidence. ‘The child is a year old or more, and is branded. The nurse, Kedi, is black.’

There was a long pause. ‘And this child,’ said the farmer at length. ‘This child, if he were found: what would his destiny be?’

‘A painted roof over his head; a silk carpet under his foot; a rich man’s clothes on his back and a rich man’s food in his belly,’ said Jerott. ‘For your children, when I have him, there would be the same.’

A smile, reluctant and wry in the dark, overspread the silk-breeder’s face. ‘You speak of my jewel; soft, tender, delicate, the brother of angels and lustrous in beauty as the golden-skinned moon. The child is mine, and his slave: she spins in Mehedia, in my sister’s house, and has care of the child until he may be taken to train.… In what way, Efendi, didst thou say thy friend, receiving his son, would remember his servant?’

‘In five hundred ducats of gold,’ said Jerott. ‘And in his unsurpassed gratitude.’

‘Come,’ said the farmer. He opened the door of his house and, in the golden light of the threshold, called for a lantern and for a boy to saddle Jerott’s horse and his own. ‘The gates of Mehedia will be closing. Come with me, and I will take you to them tonight.’

He talked, pleasantly, on all the short journey to the high, sand-coloured walls of Mehedia. In his sister’s house the white cocoons of raw silk came to be finally stored: all the cocoons save those whose life-cycle was allowed to perfect itself on the farm. On the farm, in careful small numbers, the creamy silk moth was allowed to break through to life after all its endeavours, destroying the floss of its capsule. On one spot it was born—the great awakening, the
psyche of the Greeks. On the same spot, unmoving, it mated. On the same spot, two days later, it died.

‘You kill them?’ asked Jerott. Above, the battlements were printed black against the great stars of the sky and, faintly, he could hear the small, familiar sounds of well-jointed armour, and the voices of the watch, conversing quickly in Spanish. ‘Poor servants of man.’

‘Would a Believer kill?’ said the farmer; and Jerott, reminded by the reproof in his voice, cursed himself for forgetting. ‘
We are the garden
, say the Bektashi.
The rose is in us
. Every live thing, once given in birth, is deserving of life. The silk moth is born. It has no organs of nutrition. In two days, therefore, it dies.… Here are the gates of Mehedia. Enter, and claim thy friend’s son.’

At precisely that moment, Francis Crawford came slowly through the olive trees to the village where he had left Jerott, Marthe and Salablanca, and drew rein outside the headman’s house.

Before the little horse stopped moving, Salablanca was at his side. Taking her time, Marthe noted, with interest, that the management was sun-blistered and saddle-stiff but evidently quite unmolested, although his clothes were stained and grimy with dust. Leaning against the doorpost, ‘Return of the migrant. You could do with oiling and anting,’ she said.

‘I could do, in fact, with sanding and scouring,’ Lymond said. ‘If you care to lay a tub of any known liquid within one hundred yards, I’ll absorb it by suction. Where’s Jerott?’

Salablanca, unsaddling, called a horse-boy to look after the footsore little mare and entering the house began, with his magical softness, to fulfil all Lymond’s needs. Marthe, coming in too, shook down her hair from her cap and perched on a stool, watching. ‘He has gone to catch butterflies. You reached the Bedouin?’

‘Yes. Eventually.’ Standing in his hose and soaked shirt, he drank, acrobatically, from the water-jug as from a porrón and upended what was left, with majesty, over his head. Marthe said, ‘No child?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Lymond. Crosslegged on the floor, his tangled hair dripping over one eye, he broke up a small cake of bread and drew towards him the bowl of rice and lamb Salablanca had brought him. ‘Plenty of children. But rather short of the right number of features and limbs. He had chosen a family with the pox.’

‘
Leprosy?
’ Salablanca, stopping, said it in Spanish.

‘No, the pox. But the effects look much the same. I saw every one before they told me the nurse had run away with the boy.… It’s all right. I was careful. I won’t infect you,’ he added, to Marthe.

‘I do not worry. I rely on your heroism,’ said Marthe. ‘You remind me of Surya. In two of his hands he held waterlilies; the third blessed, and with the fourth he encouraged his worshippers.’

‘As a leaf is swept away by a torrent, so you will be conquered by my omnipotent goodness.… Where
is
Jerott?’ Irritatingly, he would not respond to her jibes. From his face she could learn nothing, except that he was a little fine drawn with sleeplessness and lack of regular food. She said, ‘Where’s Ali-Rashid?’

‘Ali-Rashid is dead,’ said Lymond sharply; and Salablanca spoke quickly. ‘Señor Blyth went to try and trace the little one at a silk-farm. A dervish directed us to a village outside Mehedia.’

Lymond had stopped crumbling bread. ‘He went alone? When?’

‘Alone, yes. This afternoon, señor.’

‘It’s quite close, and perfectly safe,’ said Marthe. ‘And unlike Christians, Bektashis do tell the truth.’

‘Some of it,’ said Lymond. ‘It was a Bektashi dervish who stopped me outside the Bedouin camp and told me the same. It’s still Gabriel’s circuit. Jerott’s just cut across two of the stages, that’s all.’

He stopped only to change before setting off again, on a fresh horse, with both Marthe and Salablanca this time beside him. It took them a good part of the evening to find the right farm, and then to learn that the stranger who had called that afternoon had gone to visit the silk-farmer’s sister in Mehedia. ‘There was a boy the gentleman wanted to buy,’ said the old man who received them. ‘A young boy with his nurse. He offered much money.’

‘Rightly so. Your family will be rich,’ Lymond said. ‘How would we reach this house of your daughter?’

‘Thus you will reach it,’ said the old man, and described the place: as he finished he put out, unhurried, one arm to restrain their departure. ‘… But not until tomorrow, Efendi. Now none may enter Mehedia. Now the gates are closed for the night.’

Experienced in battle, and owning many masters, the city of Mehedia occupied a narrow neck of land washed on three sides by the sea, and contained a citadel within its high walls, whose ramparts, towers and battlements held a great arsenal of cannon. Beside the harbour, large and sheltered, was a smaller railed basin where galleys might lie.

Once dominated by Spanish-controlled Tunis, the Moors and Mohammedans who lived there had revolted against Turks and Christians alike, and set up a commonwealth which Dragut Rais had destroyed, installing his own nephew as Governor instead.

It was a double insult which the old Emperor could not afford to sustain. Three years ago Jerott had sailed for Mehedia in his engraved armour with the eight-pointed cross of Malta on his cloak. Three years ago the Emperor’s admiral Andrea Doria with his own fleet, with the Pope’s galleys, with the Viceroy of Sicily and galleys and troop ships from Naples, and with the fleet of the Knights
Hospitallers of St John of Malta under Bailiff Claude de la Sengle had attacked Mehedia in blazing midsummer, and had taken it.