Pawn in Frankincense (28 page)

True to their training, the Spaniards held together. Back to back, with sword and dagger and the hooves of their horses as weapons, they fought and killed in their turn, were wounded, and died. Without looking round, Jerott knew that as the sound lessened, as the blinding fragments of armour showed less and less among the twisting robes of the horsemen, the line of men at his back had drawn nearer; had encircled the small grove in which he and Marthe sat their horses, and that at a sign from the standard their fate, also, would be decided.

Beside him, Marthe, perfectly white, had not moved. Jerott said, ‘You saved my life at Mehedia. There has been no time to thank you.’

She did not look at him. ‘I enjoy acting,’ said Marthe in her clear,
intolerant voice. ‘As … he does. The human scene is well rid of us both.’

Very soon after that, the carnage was complete, and the signal they expected came clearly from the blotched and littered sand of the battlefield, where the Arab horsemen, little reduced, had already dismounted to pillage the dead. There were no Spaniards living. Some, their horses cut down beneath them, had attempted in the end, blindly, to run, and had been hewn down, delicately limb by limb and feature by feature, while begging for death. Two, released from their armour, had had the flesh of their backs slit for spreadeagling.

Jerott saw the signal pass, and the Arabs waiting outside the palm trees begin to filter towards Marthe and himself. His head swimming, he none the less pulled himself straight in the saddle and began, slowly, to pull out his sword. In Marthe’s hands a little dagger winked in the sun. Jerott said, ‘Though I can’t help you, I shall still pray for you. Who are you, Marthe?’

She had moved to face their assailants, but at the question she turned, and he winced at the irony in the brilliant blue gaze. ‘
Qui nescit orare, discat navigare
.… Why ask now? Do you expect to live to gratify Mr Crawford’s curiosity?’ said Marthe.

‘… No. You said,’ continued Jerott, weakly dogged, ‘that the world was well rid of you both. I cannot believe it.’ The Arabs were very close now: he could see the high saddles and the tasselied housings on each little horse.

‘Oonagh O’Dwyer would believe it,’ said Marthe. ‘And the branded baby at Bône. And the woman Kedi and these twenty soldiers, and the infant catamite, wherever he may be going. Don’t you think they would all have been happier if Francis Crawford had never existed?’

‘It’s easy to blame. What can you know of him?’ Jerott said.

‘All I know of myself. Too much. And nothing,’ said Marthe.

She cut a man to the bone before she was overpowered, and the knife wrenched from her as she tried to turn it on herself. Jerott saw it, and in a fury of pity and anger pulled his sword up with both hands and brought it, weakly, again and again across the thrusting mass of his assailants before they overwhelmed him. Aga Morat’s men did not kill either Jerott or the girl there and then. They took them, cruelly lashed on horseback, across that strewn and bloody arena under the hot sun to Gabès, where in a clearing between the deserted white walls the Aga Morat, sitting under an awning of reeds, studied the smooth umber flesh of a young Moorish girl he had just accepted as tribute.

On the edge of consciousness, Jerott saw the scene as he was cut from his horse: the silken thighs and underfed ribs of the girl as she swayed round and round, smiling vaguely, under the prod of her
handler; the intent black eyes of the Turk, as he sat crosslegged on the latticed shade of his carpet, the jewel-handled knives glinting dimly in the silk of his sash, and in his turban the Pasha’s feather in gold.

In the shadows behind him, Francis Crawford, resting at ease, stirred, and murmured in Arabic, ‘… No. I favour the other. Sweet to be taken up, as medicine is by the lip; sweet as the swelling out of the new moons, and full. Take the other.’

‘It shall be,’ said the Aga Morat comfortably, and snapping his fingers, followed the girl with his eyes as she was forced away, running. Then he turned. ‘Ah. Mr Blyth. I have been sharp with thy friends. Thou wilt in thy heart forgive me, for as a stone with which perfume is bruised, I release thereby the truth. It is long since I entertained a Knight Hospitaller of your Order.’

Swaying, Jerott stood in the sun, hanging on to his saddle. In Lymond’s averted blue gaze he found no advice and no help. He said, ‘As Mr Crawford I am sure will have told you, Lord, I am no longer of the Order.’ The brute was not only gross: he was scented. Competing with the reek of sweat, of spiced food, of blood Jerott inhaled unspeakable emanations of sweet basil and spikenard.

‘It is strange,’ said the Aga agreeably. ‘Doubly strange, when so short a time past thou exerted thyself at Tripoli so mightily. Triply strange, when at Mehedia, I am told, thou wast vehement in proclaiming the attachment. He who now calls himself Crawford was in Mehedia no more than the steward of this lady. And this lady, whom I am asked to believe is a Frenchwoman, there called herself a noblewoman of Italy. How may one poor in understanding as myself resolve such a tangle?’

Lymond’s voice, speaking from under the canopy, was bored. ‘By taking us, as I have said, to Dragut Rais, who will make all things clear.’

‘But verily,’ said the Aga Morat, ‘when the prince is absent or niggardly with his permission, I am able to take permission of myself when I will. The lady is fair.’

‘The lady,’ said Lymond, ‘is the special care and interest of Henri of France. To thy intelligence it must be clear that this thing must be hidden from the fools at Mehedia. Further, it is she who is to present to the Grand Signor himself the gift we convey to Stamboul from France. Should she fail from weakness or excess of the sun, the Sultan cannot be pleased.’

‘She may sit,’ said the Aga Morat. ‘And Mr Blyth also, while we exert ourselves in this affair. It is suggested I take you all three in custody to Dragut Rais’s castle, there to await his pleasure when he returns?’

‘We are your servants,’ said Lymond. Huddled in some haphazard patch of shade, where Marthe’s strong hand had led him, Jerott
distinguished a note in that level voice he had not heard before. Looking up, straining, however, he could detect no bodily signs of fatigue or unendurable stress. Lymond, on the contrary, sat with picturesque grace, his head bare, his doublet dusty but untouched, his shapely hands lying loose.

Then Jerott observed something further. As he was studying him, so the Aga Morat’s eyes rested on Francis Crawford also with a curious and vivid attention. And unlike Lymond’s, the Aga Morat’s plump hands were locked hard together: clean and sweating and pink.

‘It is said,’ said the Aga Morat, ‘that blindness of the eyes is a lighter thing than blindness of the perceptive faculties of the mind. The sun is high: the perception is dazzled. One has made divers chambers available to us in these poor houses for an hour. Let us retire and, by giving ease to the flesh, bring new light also to the proper functions of the mind. There, for the Hakim’s servant Mr Blyth, and the lady. In this chamber, Crawford Efendi and I shall have much to discuss.… Sweet to be taken up, you say, as medicine is by the lip. Such a creature I enjoy, thin-skinned, tender and delicate, light of flesh and goodly in make, impulsive in walk and beautiful in the justness of stature. Communing thus, shall not our dreaming souls melt?’

For a moment, Lymond did not reply. Then he said, in the same level voice, ‘It is written before God, that after this hour we depart all four, in good health to Djerba?’

The Aga Morat had risen. Looking down, his heavy face creased in a smile. ‘It is written,’ he said.

Slowly, Lymond rose also. He looked neither at Jerott nor at Marthe, but stepped straight out from under the awning and confronted the Aga. In the blinding white light, the fine lines of his skin were all suddenly visible, and his eyes by contrast quite dark. But his hair, uncut since Marseilles, shone mint-gold in the sun. ‘If it is so agreed,’ Lymond said, ‘I am solicitous for thee, as thou art for me.’ And without pausing, he followed the Aga Morat into the house.

It was all Jerott waited to see. Before they pulled him into the room he was to share with Marthe and Salablanca he had fallen into an uneasy sleep; and, muttering, was hardly aware when, the hour ended, they were brought out and mounted again. Carried, finally, by Salablanca’s wide pommel he knew little of the brief journey to Djerba when, leaving the wilderness behind, they flew to the shore and across the crumbling causeway to where the island stood on the hot blue horizon: a single line of silvery sand and the fronded green of uniform palms.

Forced awake, briefly, by the splashing as eight hundred hooves sought the square, sunken stones Jerott confirmed again that his
companions were there: Salablanca beside him, unchanging; Marthe beyond, her lips tight and blue circles printing the white skin under her eyes. Then he looked for Lymond, and found him after a while, riding alone, among Arabs, his gaze directed ahead. Jerott closed his eyes, and relaxed.

He opened them in the prison they were to inhabit until Dragut Rais returned to his home; a prison of fountains and palm trees and the music of soft-feathered song-birds weaving slight winds like the flyers of the spinning-wheel from perch to perch of their cage. Roses grew by his pillow and petted carp swam to his hand in raised channels of marble veined in pink and in blue. He lay on silk and fed from black hands on new bread and nectarines and sea food seethed in fresh milk.

The négresses could not answer his questions. It was three days before, in the light warmth of new morning, they took his carpet and cushions out to the patio and, lying there, he saw the robed girl sitting near him was Marthe. ‘So. Correct in faith, and the adversary of death. You survived,’ said the girl.

‘So it seems. Francis and Salablanca?’

‘They survived also. The Aga Morat has gone. We are here to await Dragut Rais’s pleasure.’

Jerott glanced round. Beyond the low walls that enclosed them he could see hedges of cypress and myrtle, and the soft hide of ripe oranges showed among the gloss of ranked trees behind them. It seemed less a castle than a loose pattern of kiosk and courtyard, joined by steps and archways and low colonnaded ways hung with vines. He said, ‘The problem of escape isn’t an agonizing one, is it? I’m sorry I moulted my flight feathers. What are Francis’s plans?’

Marthe turned on him her wide, deliberate blue stare. She had lost flesh, Jerott thought. Although her extreme pallor had gone, there was about her an odd hint of tension and violence, which was not to be wondered at. Alone with strangers for weeks in an alien country and exposed to danger, fatigue and pitiless brutality, what man of her age would be unaltered, far less a solitary, intelligent girl? But her voice, as she answered, was the neutral vessel he knew. ‘Mr Crawford is singularly planless. The problem of escape is no problem: escape doesn’t exist. Djerba is an island joined to the mainland by a single well-guarded causeway. This is an open prison, that’s all.’

‘Then the
Dauphiné
? The ship should be here,’ Jerott said reasonably. ‘Why don’t they get your uncle and Onophrion over to vouch for us, if they’re so bloody suspicious? I thought that was Francis’s whole object in forcing the Aga Morat to take us to Djerba.’

‘It was,’ said Marthe. ‘He underestimated the local growth of
suspicion. The
Dauphiné
has been impounded. She’s in the pool next to the causeway and my uncle and Mr Zitwitz are on shore. Didn’t you recognize Onophrion’s cooking?’

Jerott sat up. ‘You mean there’s a French captain and a French pilot and a French bos’n and a French ship and a French bloody embassy living on board her, and the Aga Morat still won’t concede we belong to it?’

‘The Aga Morat,’ said Marthe, ‘has nothing to do with it. We are in Dragut Rais’s house now. And Dragut Rais is away. And Dragut Rais’s household don’t feel like taking any risks.
Permitte divis caetera
, and Deus Dragut isn’t at home.’

From sitting posture, with great skill, Jerott got to his feet. ‘And precisely whom in Dragut Rais’s household,’ he said, ‘are we dealing with?’

The ironic blue gaze studied him. ‘You think you can improve on Mr Crawford’s performance? I applaud you. Go straight through that archway,’ said Marthe, ‘and you will find the whole meeting in conference.’

He was not too bad on his feet, Jerott found. Leaving Marthe smiling her damned smile behind him, he skirted the pool and, picking his way over the thin coloured paving, found the arch and walked slowly through it.

It led, he discovered, to another courtyard, wider than the one he had left, and sheltered by an awning of tasselled white silk. This time there was no pool, but fine rugs lay here and there on the smooth polished paving, and at one end, a shallow flight of steps led to a low, carpeted dais piled high with cushions.

If there was a meeting, it had now broken up. The steps were crowded. Jerott saw Onophrion’s bulk, his back towards him, offering something, it seemed, at the dais: around him slaves chattered, dressed in bright silks with bangles rippling on ankle and arm and a blackamoor, crosslegged, played on a whistle. In the main courtyard Georges Gaultier sat, his placid face brown and unchanged, mending a clock in his old smock of natural flax. Under the diffuse light of the awning the thin wheels glimmered under his flickering fingers and in a small cloth there sparkled the gold cogs and pins: the minute litter lay cherished, like the yellow eggs of the bombyx, thought Jerott, which is not killed but is born with no means to survive. Seeking further, at last he found Lymond, hitched alone on the marble edge of a tub, the clock mask with its two ebony hands held between idle fingers. Jerott made his way towards him, and Lymond looked up.