Pawn in Frankincense (24 page)

It had not been done without cost. One hundred and forty Knights and four hundred troops from the Order had left Birgu with Jerott, but not all had returned. There had been lavish plunder, in the end: gold, silver and jewels; and over seven thousand slaves had been taken from here by the Christians; and the son of the Viceroy, Don John de Vega, installed as Governor. The Viceroy, Jerott had no trouble in recalling, had claimed the honour of victory. To Jerott’s mind that belonged to Claude de la Sengle, who had made a hospital of his tents and called on his Knights to leave the fighting in turn and attend to the sick.

So it was now held, but with difficulty. Behind the slow rising ground through which he had just ridden, with its orchards and vineyards, lay the mountains, and behind them the vast plains where the Arabs pastured their animals. So large and hostile a territory, so far from the succour of Europe, was a burden on the Emperor which he would gladly, it was rumoured, have passed to the Knights of St John. Until now, the Knights of St John had been wise enough to ignore it. Riding through the studded gates of Mehedia in the dark, Jerott bent his dark face within the fall of his head-cloth, and did not look at the torches. This soil belonged to Spain and the Emperor, who was France’s bitterest enemy. And he was no longer a Knight, but Scottish-French, and on a French embassy. One mistake, and Gabriel’s revenge would be part-way complete.

The house of the silk-farmer’s sister lay in a crooked lane hardly wide enough for a horse, but the arched doorway was brilliantly lit, and the courtyard, although its pillars were wood, held a small fountain in a floor patterned with coloured pebbles in mortar, with bright plants, well-watered, placed about in earthenware pots. Vine-leaves, lacing the open gallery which ran round the enclosure, sea-washed the patio in shivering blackness and light as they revealed and obscured the lit rooms lying behind. From there, evenly humming, Jerott heard the sound of a spinning-wheel; and somewhere, someone was playing a flute.

Tying Jerott’s horse and his own, the farmer crossed the yard and tapped on a double-leafed door, smiling at Blyth as he followed. A dog barked. The spinning-wheel faltered, and then went rhythmically on, nor did the flute-player hesitate. In the darkness, Jerott thought he heard the gates into the street quietly close. A child squeaked, and up in the gallery a man laughed, and then a door shut, muffling the sound. Behind the farmer, the house doors suddenly opened, and sound and light tumbled into the courtyard, surrounding the stocky form of a woman. When she saw the Syrian, she smiled, with blackened teeth, and welcomed him in.

The silk-farmer’s sister was not young, and because of that perhaps
was unveiled, her eyes circled with kohl and her dark hair reddened with hènnah. She listened to her brother’s brief tale as they sat, on unexpectedly fine brocade cushions, in a small room thick with dusty hangings and rugs, to which clung the stale smell of storax and spikenard and the pungent benzoin often favoured by Africans. There might have been
kif
, but if so, the stronger smells smothered it.

Jerott watched, as she talked, the bracelets jangle and clash on the woman’s thick arms. They were of gold, and heavy. Silk-farming, obviously, was a lucrative trade. They clattered again as she clapped her hands and a slave, barefooted, slid in to lay fuel on the brazier which smoked dully, half-extinguished, in a corner. It reminded Jerott of the sweet sound of swordplay, in the days when his life had been a fighting man’s, not a nomad’s. He wondered how long it took a human being to kipper in scent. Then he realized that the Syrian had risen, and taking his arm, was saying, ‘Here is Kedi. My sister says you may gladly remove her. She is finding the boy.’ Jerott stood up, and a negress came in.

Once, she had been a free citizen of a proud Ethiopian court. Once, too, prized for her milk, she had been fed and cared for and although a slave, had lived in vague happiness, Jerott supposed, wet-nursing the white, the brown, the olive-skinned children of corsairs.

Now, the padded muscle and the soft, meat-fed flesh had melted from under the supple black skin, and the wide-eyed woman who now stood upright before him in her stained robe and headcloth had big-knuckled hands twisted with hardship. Her collar and cheekbones rested in hollows, and where the swollen milch-breasts once pressed against the soaked cotton, the stuff now lay folded and flat. Jerott said, ‘Dost thou speak English?’ and the woman, no surprise in her eyes, said, ‘I learn in Dragut’s household, Efendi.’

‘And did you learn Irish?’ Jerott said.

This time, there was a little life in the stare. This time she hesitated, and Jerott said gently, ‘It is all right. The child’s father has come. We are going to take you both where you will be happy and safe.’

‘The child’s father?’ Again uncertain, she paused. ‘Who is he?’

‘His name does not matter. He is a Christian, and Khaireddin must be brought up a Christian as well. He is rich. You will be happy.’

‘He would take me with Khaireddin?’ The slow brain thought. ‘But then, what of my mistress?’

Jerott hesitated. ‘How was she when you left her?’

‘She was sick, Efendi. In that terrible house with the goats on the floor. She could not carry water: she said,
“Fawg may le Dia”
,’ Leave me to God. The attempt at Gaelic was quite recognizable. She went on, ‘Then Shakib came to buy us, the child and myself, for Ali-Rashid. But the lady he left.’

There was a silence. Only when he saw the fright return to her eyes did Jerott realize he had been staring at her, with God knew what in his own face. For it was now clear, beyond iota of doubt, that this was indeed Kedi, the woman who had nursed Oonagh’s son. And somewhere in this house must be the pawn itself.

‘Remove from your minds,’ Lymond had said, ‘the image of a live human child.’ For Francis Crawford, meticulously fulfilling his responsibilities, such advice would appear simple. But he was not here in this room; only Jerott, who had forgotten his own safety and whose heart throbbed with strange pulses as he looked at this withered black woman and said, ‘And where is the little boy? The little fair boy? After all that, how is he?’

The Syrian, rising, smiled and forestalled her answer. ‘Come and see him. He is with the cocoons, which must be turned to avoid mould. Those soft, small fingers; that delicate skin. Such beauty! Come, come and see. Kedi will await you by the brazier.’

Moving to the door after the silk-farmer, with the dizzying perfumes, stirred by the heat, confusing his senses, Jerott heard again, from the warren of little rooms and the unseen gallery above, the subdued sounds of laughter, and music, and children’s voices calling, complaining, giggling. As they walked along the little dark passage curtains twitched; he caught a glimpse of a man’s dishevelled white robe, and once he was stopped by a child, as he hurried after the Syrian: a lovely boy of six or seven years old, with long lashes and glistening black curls, who caught his hand, saying laughing, ‘
Yalla ma’y … hall liyâ … sharr biyâ
.…’ Then the Syrian, turning back, hissed at him, and the boy, still laughing, disappeared with a flick of embroidered slipper below his expensive short gown. The smell of myrrh went with him—my God, are they all drenched in perfume? thought Jerott; and stumbled on after the farmer.

The little building to which he was taken stood at the end of a walled garden; a paved enclosure behind the house strewn with half-dried washing, dim in the dark; and a carpenter’s bench and a cistern of marble, the water swimming dark and greasily in the moonlight. There was no fight but the oblong lying behind them from the lit door of the house; and ahead, the traces of candlelight from the low stucco building they were approaching, leaking through ill-fitting shutters. The windows, he noticed, were barred, and there were iron rods rammed into sockets on either side of the door.

It did not seem right. Contrary to his hopes, the night air only made his muddled head worse. Leaning against the cold, substantial wall, Jerott watched the Syrian unbar and unlock the door, and tried to listen to what he was saying. ‘Forgive me. Like the pressing of thirsty camels on their watering-troughs, the thieves of Mehedia would come to purloin my silk, and but for this, all my labours and those of my family are empty as water. Come in, Efendi, and rest.
It is warm, and the child shall keep you company while we gather his clothes.’ And opening the door, he bowed Jerott in.

Inside, he thought, it was like a threshing-floor. Half of the brightly lit room was empty, with a lit brazier like the one he had left smoking gently by an Egyptian mat in the middle. The rest was lined with tier upon tier of wide racks clouded like an aviary with azure blue down. But these little beings, thought Jerott with melancholy, did not sing, or move, or breathe. They were, in their hundreds, winding-sheets of indigo-fed silk, each enclosing the shrivelled corpse of its host. Two thousand to make one single pound of raw silk for an emperor’s robes … and they must be turned, and turned, to prevent mould. Fighting his lethargy, Jerott scanned the bare room.

‘He has fallen asleep,’ said the farmer. ‘Khaireddin! Remember your lesson!’ And from a drift of blue floss on one of the low shelves there came a small sound and a child’s fair head lifted instantly, its face still closed and shadowed with sleep. There was a moment’s pause while the child sat, its dazed blue eyes opening and closing. Then the Syrian said, chidingly, ‘Khaireddin!’ and, with obedient care, the little boy stepped, as unsteady as a new lamb, from the low shelf to the floor and came, with the flat-footed gait of the very little, towards Jerott Blyth.

He had waited, paralysed with nervous reluctance to see before him, distressingly, Francis Crawford again as a child. What he saw was a small European boy who was himself only; who with a babyhood behind him of dirt and terror and darkness had been left solitary at night in a locked warehouse, and had wakened sharply to a command and a stranger; but who stood now before him, barefoot in his crumpled striped shirt, and contrived a smile, round-eyed, with his soft kitten’s mouth. On the high brow, the saffron silk hair was an irregular nimbus to which one or two soft cocoons drunkenly hung, shadowing his round cheeks; and in the baby face, curve melted into curve, reflecting each into the other, growing like fruit on the bones they would conceal until, in one year or two, there would return the structure; the marks of race with which he was born.

Returning the stare of that devouring blue gaze, Jerott could see nothing of Lymond but his colouring, and perhaps the sweep of the fine, thick lashes fringing his eyes. The spaced features, the curled nose, the faint brows and the blue veins running through the thin white skin of his temples were his own, and neither Lymond’s nor Oonagh’s. Jerott, a bachelor and still to all purposes a monk, none the less felt the pull: the painful desire to enfold this unwanted child with peace, security and warmth, and to set him in his grandmother’s arms, within orderly days, in the land of his heritage.

Jerott knelt, his hood fallen back from his black hair, as the child advanced; and without moving, like a man watching a nestling, said,
‘Khaireddin? My name is Jerott. Kedi wants a ride on my horse. Do you want to ride on my horse with Kedi?’ He spoke, deliberately, in English; and he thought for a moment that the child understood. He hesitated in his effortful walk and, turning his head, gazed at the Syrian, his eyes widening; his brows angled, for a second, with worry. Then, as the Syrian nodded and smiled, the child stepped forward to Jerott’s shoulder, and putting one arm round his neck, curled round to kiss the hollow neck of his shirt. And Jerott, caught utterly unawares by the practised, sensuous gesture, smelt at last the reeking perfume on the little boy’s shirt, and saw the paint on his lips and, as he flung the child off with a reflex of unbearable, unthinking revulsion, the sneer on the face of the Syrian.

Jerott had his sword half out from under his robe when the door crashed open on a throng of armed men. He ran backwards pulling it free. The light dazzled his eyes: at the back of his mind he saw that the child whom he had hurled to the floor had even then given only one sharp croak of fright and had been silent: the blue eyes, black with terror and anxiety, were turned on the Syrian. Then he had no time to see more, for his attackers were on him, and the lights were flashing even more confusingly in his eyes, and his sword, as he bore its full weight, was like a rooted tree in his hand.

He fought, slowly, before they overwhelmed him, and realized slowly, as he fought, that it had all been a trick; that from the moment Marthe had found the dervish he had been guided here, for this moment, when it would be driven home, for ever, that the pawn between Lymond and Gabriel was a living boy-child, and that they had both failed him. Stupefied by the drug in the brazier Jerott hardly felt the blow which at length felled him; did not know when they replaced his sword in its scabbard and, leaving him prone on the bare, plastered floor, began swiftly to work on the shelves.

It did not take long. In twenty minutes the soft blue cocoons, so carefully tended, were piled on the empty half of the floor, heaped and drifting like summer clouds round the flushed fire of the brazier. Efficiently, all that was inflammable was moved well out of reach, and Jerott himself pulled to the wall, as far away as possible from the ghostly cumulus of worms in their silk biers. Then heavy carpets were pinned over shutters and door and Kedi, drugged and senseless also, was brought in and laid at his side.

Only then did the Syrian, turning, give a last order. One of the men, dagger stuck in his sash and hairy arms pilled with itching wisps of blue fleece, walked over to where the child sat silently hunched, its thumb in its mouth. It made no sound as the man scooped it up, one-handed, under the arms and walked with it to the door. The little boy only came to life on the threshold, as they passed the stout form of the silk-farmer. Gasping a little from the spreadeagled hand
gripping his chest, the child ducked his head and, his eyes seeking the Syrian, pressed a conciliatory kiss on his captor’s muscular arm.