Pawn in Frankincense (35 page)

The next day, perhaps because it was all too obvious that, with the exception of Georges Gaultier and Onophrion, no two members of the imprisoned party were speaking to one another, Kiaya Khátún allowed them all out under guard, with the rest of the population of Djerba, to watch the Aga Morat’s men at equestrian exercise.

Jerott, who had gone to sleep at dawn, to waken with a crashing headache, had avoided Marthe’s quarters and anywhere Lymond might be encountered. Without thinking at all deeply about anything, he was chiefly aware of the need to be back in a company of men, fighting something. The recollection that the best company of men he had ever known was Francis Crawford’s simply made him feel sick again. He sat down beside Georges Gaultier, who was talking about Aleppo, and ascertained that from its port he could find a ship to take him virtually anywhere he pleased. ‘You can get anything in Aleppo,’ said the little usurer mildly. One of Kiaya Khátún’s doves, stalking forward, hopped on to his hand and he fed it, idly, from a screw of loose grain. ‘You’ve never been there?’

Jerott Blyth shook his head.

‘I suppose it’s the Sultan’s third city now. The main market, anyway, for Baghdad and the whole of the East … Goa, Cambaietta. Sugar, cotton, opium, Chinese silk, dried ginger, elephants’ teeth, porcelain, pepper and diamonds … you can get anything in Aleppo. There’s a French station, too. They would look after you, if you have to wait for a ship: and plenty of merchants who have English or French.’

‘Pierre Gilles,’ said Jerott suddenly. ‘Doesn’t Pierre Gilles spend a lot of time there now?’

‘Now let me see,’ said Gaultier. He flicked out the last of the grain, screwed the paper into a ball, and shied it, absently, at the waddling
audience of birds. The scholar; the man who used to collect animals for the King of France’s menagerie? I thought he lived in Rome, but you may be right.… Master Zitwitz, our friend here tells me he is leaving for Aleppo.’

Onophrion Zitwitz, treading past from market with a caravan of small boys and donkeys, all equally laden, paused and surveyed Jerott. ‘You have cause to believe, sir, that we are conceivably in the first instance about to leave Djerba?’

‘None at all,’ said Jerott. ‘Except that Mr Crawford wishes to go to Aleppo, and by some means I am perfectly sure he will contrive to get what he wants.’

Onophrion’s train was blocking the courtyard. He waved it on, then requesting permission, seated himself deferentially a little away from the two men. ‘I am troubled,’ he said, ‘about this projected tour to Aleppo. I say nothing of our imprisonment here, or whether the corsair, when he returns, will or will not decree that we shall all be put to death: that is a matter for Mr Crawford to deal with. But should we be freed, what grounds are there for thinking the child we seek is at Aleppo? Forgive me, but they seem slender.’

‘You know what they are,’ said Jerott. ‘He was taken by ship from Monastir by the silk-farmer’s sister in an English bottom bound for Scanderoon. Whether they landed there we don’t know. We can only follow and try to find out. If they are found in Aleppo, no doubt Mr Crawford will ship the child home immediately. If they are not, he is perfectly capable of pursuing them both without me. I’m afraid my own affairs are beginning to require my attention.’

However much I try, don’t let me turn you against me
. But since Marthe had joined them at Bône, Jerott thought, the man who had spoken those words had not been the same person. Or perhaps it was he himself who had changed.

The
Peppercorn
, sailing east with a good deal of cargo to unload, ran into unpleasant weather after two weeks between Malta and Candia, and had to lower her sails.

The silk-farmer’s sister, who was an old friend of the captain’s, was largely unaware of it: she had moved into his cabin a long time ago and was cementing the friendship with hashish. The cook, shredding salt meat and biscuit for the officers, took a bowl below now and then for the child Khaireddin, whom the woman had put in the gunroom. There was no light, but room enough for his pallet, and at night he shared the room with the
comité
and one or two others who ignored but did not ill-treat him. Only, alone during the first day of the storm, he could not keep his feet, being so young, and, rolling and sliding, was tossed for a while between the stores and the walls until, wedged in a corner, he fell abruptly asleep.

When he awoke he was still alone, and one of the crates, shaken loose, was knocking about in the dark. He had learned not to cry, and made no sound in fact until, the ship tilting still further, the security of his corner suddenly dissolved, and he found himself again sliding to and fro in the dark, the loose cases beside him.

When the
comité
unlocked the door the child had screeched himself into hysteria and the silk-farmer’s sister, irritated, gave him a thrashing. Then relenting, she lifted him on to his mattress, which the carpenter had nailed to the floor, fastened him to it safely with a lashing under his arms, and checked that the crates had been safely re-corded. He smiled at her hugely as she finished, and attempted, with distraught eyes, to press a kiss on her hand. When he screamed again, through the night, the
comité
got up, cursing, and tilted the ale-jug against the child’s mouth.

It worked like a miracle. Finding his night’s sleep assured, the
comité
, as time went on, felt better disposed to the child. He cut the dirty fair hair which tangled over his eyes; picked off his lice; and, since he was always wet, found the boy a box full of straw to sleep in, tossing the soaked mat overboard. Then, having made the gunroom habitable, the
comité
largely forgot about him, except to observe to the silk-farmer’s sister, in case she had not already noticed, that the brat could hold his drink like a man.

The prisoners on Djerba were taken out of the palace in the afternoon when the sun, low in the blue sky, had lost the worst of its heat, and led to the arena where, flanked by the Aga Morat’s open-fronted pavilions, they sat under awnings on Turkey carpets covered with cushions, and prepared to watch his Arabs perform.

Emerging from the depths of the palace in his own clothes, his hair still damp from the baths, unscented, unsmiling, Lymond did not speak to Jerott, although he answered Kiaya Khátún’s greeting with formal correctness. Marthe, her eyebrows lifted, said, ‘Good morning, Mr Blyth. Smile! You look like a toad in a creel full of flowers,’ and walking past him, still smiling, put her hand on her uncle’s arm. Onophrion followed. Güzel, watching them, her face thoughtful, left the palace a little later, with her attendants, to take place of honour beside the Aga Morat himself in the big, three-sided pavilion. That, later, she was to regret.

The heat was stifling; and the noise, thought Jerott out of his permanent nausea, high-pitched and ululating, might have come from a pack of hysterical hounds. The arena was nothing more than a vast rectangle of plain, neither roped nor in any way circumscribed for the safety of the riders or of the robed and half-naked throng of spectators greeting, arguing, jostling in fez, turban and cap. Sellers of water, of sherbet and sesame bread pushed their way calling through the crowds; a patch of turbulence, marked by bleating, showed where someone had brought a kid and some hens maybe for barter.

Desert Arabs watched in small clusters, silent under striped goat- and camel-hair, their wives veiled in blue cotton smocks, their glass rings glittering no less than their eyes. There were ragged Zinganges, thieves and idlers, selling stolen muscadines and waiting with ready fingers for unguarded purses: a Greek merchant, blue and white turban wrapped round his toque, clapping hands to have sherbet brought to himself and his secretary; women veiled and silent but for the silver chime of the earrings inside their long hair.

Today, Kiaya Khátún was also veiled. Greek-fashion, the white silk fell back from her brow over her long blue-black hair, knotted with gold buttons and pearls and twined with coloured silk ribbons. Her charsháf, falling from the bridge of her nose, covered a fine shift, with wrought silk work at neck and borders and wrists, and she wore a silken coat over it, embroidered with jewels at its edge and dully shining, its leaf patterns damasked in white satin. Under the veil her earrings were tassels of seed pearls, the knots studded with
rubies, but her fingers were ringless. From her head to her pale gilded buskins, she spoke of power and wealth.

Beside her, in the Turkish collarless coat, buttoned with acorns, the Aga Morat was attempting, with smiling deference, to disguise the fact that they were quarrelling. His teeth shining white through his beard, he said, ‘My lord Dragut said nothing to the contrary.’

‘My lord Dragut,’ said Kiaya Khátún tartly, ‘could not have foreseen that the prisoners would be driven into such a position that they would be ready at any cost to attempt an escape. They are to be kept here, by whatever means, until the Knights of St John have made their attack on Zuara and have failed. If I cannot keep them under lock and key, I will keep them with drink and with drugs. Once they are comatose, you are welcome to visit whichever you choose.’

‘I find it difficult to understand,’ said the Aga, smiling harder still through his black beard, ‘why then they are here and not locked in the palace.’

‘Because, such is the wonder of your horsemen, my lord Aga, that my palace this day would empty itself, leaving the prisoners to Allah knows what mischief. Here, under your omnipotent eye, at least they are safe.’

And the Aga Morat, longing in his eyes and rage in his heart, said, ‘I bow to thy wisdom. What is undone may be spun again … after Zuara.’

Which was why Jerott Blyth, having allowed the sour milk to pass him, and the water-carrier with his sewn bearskin over his shoulder and his brass staff and cup, suddenly saw weaving through the crowds standing beside him something he did want, carried strapped over his shoulders by a crooked, grey-bearded pedlar in a frieze cloak and goatskin boots.

From over a hundred heads Kiaya Khátún also saw him, recognized the shape of the bladder he carried and said to the Aga Morat, ‘There is the seller of
harech
. If they do not buy from him now, I shall see that he is sent to them later. By this evening we shall have some in the palace.’ It amused her to think that Dragut, the dreaded killer of the Levantines, was also a true son of Islam, and in his palace permitted no drinking of wine. None the less, she well knew, he would approve any order of hers which kept Francis Crawford and his adherents idle on Djerba while Islam overthrew the attacking Knights of St John.

She looked over all the intervening heads to where Lymond sat on his cushions. He was very still, in a soft almond silk Onophrion must have had brought from the ship; his freshly cut hair burnished; his shirt-pleating white against his lightly browned skin. Then Jerott moved, and Lymond, turning, saw the pedlar of
harech
, summoned, begin to push his way over.

Kiaya Khátún saw Lymond say something sharply and, putting out a hand, grip Jerott’s arm. And everyone there saw the white anger on Jerott Blyth’s face as, turning, he chopped his arm free with the edge of his hand and stood, awaiting the pedlar. Then the horsemen galloped on to the arena, and the little scene dissolved, as men knelt and stood to see better. Satisfied, Kiaya Khátún sank back and watched.

Two hundred yards wide, the exercise-ground stretched on either side of her awning, and receded before her for much farther than that. In the middle distance before her they had aligned three markers of sand, a spear as mark stuck in each, with sufficient space between for six horses to gallop abreast. And in lines of six, level as beading, the riders dashed along the sand now, one line to each course, straight-backed on the small, high-saddled horses, bow at pommel, quiver at shoulder and lance, streaming its long scarlet gold-lettered pennant, held straight as the wires of a cage in each horseman’s grip.

For display, Güzel saw, the Aga Morat had given them identical clothing in Dragut Rais’s colours. Each rider, besides his white turban, wore a scarlet knee-length coat with wide gathered sleeves over white shirt and striped girdle and long, loose trousers of blue. Flashing past the three heaps of sand to the far end of the arena they had dismounted as one, and each throwing off his coat and quiver, unbuckled and flung down his saddle, remounted, and seizing a handful of darts, set off bareback at full tilt on the return journey, strung out along the four courses, mane, tail and girdle fringe streaming. One after the other the darts arched and tocked into the targets as each man, his horse gripped in his thighs, fled past, turned, flung and, whooping, galloped on up to the awnings and bending, scooped up the staves waiting there. For a second they were all beside her, jostling, shouting, steaming; then, assembled like mercury, they were lined up once more and dashing back to the mark, staves in hand, had struck it and, turning, had flung down the staves and taken up quivers and arrows.

The horses were beautiful: chestnut, golden bays, piebald and dappled, with the small tapering head and arched neck of the Arab, and the swift, free-shouldered gallop. And the speed, whether one cared for horses or not, was entrancing. Smiling her appreciation, Güzel glanced away for a moment to the other awning on her right, found what she was looking for, and watched, her brow creasing. Then, making up her mind, she turned and spoke to the Aga Morat. On the arena the bowmen, galloping from both ends, were passing and repassing in pattern, shooting at the mark as they went. ‘I should say,’ said Georges Gaultier with a connoisseur’s interest, ‘that that’s dangerous.’