Pawn in Frankincense (36 page)

He was, perhaps, the only interested party in the immediate vicinity who was not watching Jerott Blyth and Lymond. After the blow
which had loosened the other man’s grip, Jerott had wrenched himself free of the crowd and, pulling out the few coins which were all Güzel had left him, offered them all to the
harech-
seller. Those whose view he was blocking shouted, and the guards, standing along the open back of their dais, murmured insults and watched with contempt. The
harech
-seller, unhooking his cup, filled it with raw spirit and leaned to give it to Jerott. Lymond took it, and quite calmly emptied it out on the sand.

It splashed a little over them both. The smell of it, reeking from his clothes, turned Jerott’s head: he had drunk nothing, after all, since his illness. As the pedlar scrambled for the fallen cup among the wet cushions, he turned on Francis Crawford, his face hollow, and brought up his hands.

Lymond said, very softly, in English, ‘This is part of a plan to escape. Pretend to strike me, and listen.’

‘You stinking catamite,’ said Jerott; and with all his considerable strength launched a blow at Lymond’s face which was very genuine indeed. It was parried with an abruptness that rattled his teeth.

‘All right, Jerott,’ said Lymond levelly. Without pausing, he closed in, gripped Jerott’s arm, and against the wildest resistance managed, in two apparently smooth steps, to engineer a full wrestler’s lock on the other man. In humiliation and acute physical anguish, Jerott drew a deep breath and prepared, at the cost of a fracture, to shove. Lymond said, ‘The Maltese fleet under Strom is attacking Zuara. They’ll step into a trap: Gabriel has warned the Aga Morat.’

Jerott frowned. His face scarlet, his shirt soaked, his muscles corded with effort, he did not think of giving in. But he had stopped pushing while, breathing quickly, he said, ‘How do you know?’

‘Archie Abernethy.’

Jerott looked up. ‘How? Where is he?’

‘Break my grip and say something aloud.… He was in camp, peddling liquor, last night.’ He pulled his hand free, swearing, and Jerott, who perhaps had not meant to bite so deeply, staggered back and said, ‘Who’s going to stop me?’ for the benefit of the English-speaking spectators. Onophrion, worried, got to his feet. Jerott added, breathlessly, ‘Philippa?’

‘All I know is, she’s safe.… If you’re coming with me, listen,’ said Lymond. He ducked, and then swung a punch that did not quite go wide. ‘And then knock me out cold.’

‘With pleasure,’ said Jerott. His dark eyes were bleak. ‘And if I succeed?’

‘You won’t,’ Lymond said.

But all the same, when Jerott hit him a few seconds later he hurtled back through cushions and shoulders and struck a tent-pole like a shellfish cracked by a seagull. Onophrion, too late to stop it, caught
him as he slithered down to the ground and, tut-tutting, propped cushions about him. Sitting down, neatly and quietly, Jerott Blyth drank off three cups of
harech
, and handed the bowl back for more.

In the arena, they had saddled the horses, and, stringing off down the courses full pelt, began one after the other to alight and resume saddle over and over; feet racing beside the galloping horse, wrists jerking, spine, thighs and calves in the blue pantaloons soaring; seat in saddle again until, approaching the mark, they snatched their bows, strung and shot. They did the same, bending and unbending their bows three times between setting-off point and mark; the same alighting and jumping up on both sides of the horse; the same jumping right way and reversed; the same standing, hallooing, on their mounts’ heaving rumps.

The arrows whickered into the marks. The horses’ hooves, neat and small, flashed pounding from position to position, slithering to a halt in front of Güzel in a shallow veil of white grit. Teeth flashed. Bodies hurtled, lissom and sinewy, and in a triumph of shouts, at the end of each violent, brilliant course, the scimitars flashed, pulled with a cry from the sheaths and glittering, a dozen half-eclipsed suns in the bright cobalt sky.

Georges Gaultier said, ‘Even if you have bought the whole cask, Mr Blyth, I should desist. That stuff can bund.’

Jerott Blyth pulled himself upright on his cushion, lifted the cup at his feet after two misses, and held it out. ‘Have some.’

‘No, thank you,’ said Maître Gaultier. ‘For spirits one requires a strong head or else a weak brain, and I fear I possess neither.’

Jerott grunted. The boy had gone. Beside him, bought outright with money borrowed from anyone who would lend it, was the
harech
-vendor’s cask, half empty: a dark dribble from his less than accurate pouring contoured the crimson silk cushions with their velvet raised pattern. A little way off Salablanca, warned off already, sat watching him crosslegged. Jerott said, ‘Bloody Muslim: y’r old man had the idea, hadn’t he? No wine. A d’vil in ev’ry grape. Didn’ say a word about spirits, did he? Cunning old devil.’ He poured himself another cup, belligerently, his eyes half shut, and viewed the field. ‘Cur-tailed, skin-clipping heathens.’

The riders, with graceful accuracy, were shooting now with saddles girthed and ungirthed, buckled time about with crackling speed. Jerott turned his head from bleary contemplation of that, and viewed Lymond over several intervening heads. Lymond, dizzily sitting up, was at least sober, with Onophrion bending fussily over him. As Jerott watched, one of the Aga Morat’s men also approached and, leaning down, spoke.

It appeared to be a summons of sorts. Jerott saw Lymond look up, holding the back of his head; and then Onophrion, bending, began to help him to his feet. He looked vaguely taken aback and
as if, thought Jerott with satisfaction, he had a hell of a headache. Escorted by the messenger and two guards Lymond, walking, disappeared into the Aga Morat’s draped dais. ‘Stinking catamite,’ Jerott repeated.

The rider nearest to Kiaya Khátún alighted, flipped a somersault and, vaulting back into the saddle, shot three times, accurately, into the mark. The next, calling a roar from the crowd, lay on his face prone in the saddle, the little mare’s tail in his mouth, and shot, grinning. The next, riding bareback and without bridle, stood on his hands until close to the mark; somersaulted, took aim and shot. Güzel said, ‘A drink, Mr Crawford. It will help to remove the effects of your young friend’s bad manners.’

Sitting very still, with the Aga Morat’s plump hand on his shoulder, Lymond said, ‘I thank you; no.’

‘Abstinence, like the cock sparrow, cannot be long lived,’ said Güzel blandly. ‘They say,
si peccas, pecca fortiter.
’ The cup she held out, unlike Jerott’s, was made of jasper and ringed with Corinthian letters, gilded and damascened. But the drink was the same.

‘Indeed, some Stoics uphold you,’ said Lymond, wide-eyed, his gaze on the arena. ‘Liberty to drink and to debauch are said to recreate and refresh the soul.’

‘Then——’ said Kiaya Khátún.

‘I have no soul,’ said Lymond. ‘Forgive me.’

‘But your servants have,’ said Kiaya Khátún. ‘Or at least flesh which may suffer. Drink, Mr Crawford.’

And as the Aga Morat’s hand slid from his shoulder, he took the cup slowly from her and drank; and when she refilled it, meeting his eyes, he drained it again; and a third time.

Soon after that, Jerott rose undulating to his feet and, mouthing a long and explicit, if slurred, insult in Arabic, lobbed a cushion into the arena. It fell in front of a bareback rider at a crucial moment of balance: the horse shied, and the rider, saving himself in a snap of white and scarlet and blue, fell rolling like tumbleweed in the path of the next, and was kicked. From the three sides of the arena and the two stands at its head a communal moaning arose, and Georges Gaultier, seated just behind Jerott, reached up and, with force, drew him down to his seat and held him there, addressing conciliatory Arabic to the guards. The injured man was dragged off.

‘God grant sweet rest to the Knights of St John.’ It was Marthe’s bitter-sweet voice. ‘The other great cavalier, too, bids fair to be crapulous, I observe. O Kama, Kama: with thy bow made of sugarcane strung of bees, and thy five flower-tipped arrows?’

Jerott, sweat trickling down his dark face, didn’t look round. He paid no attention to Marthe or to Gaultier: he was beyond caring about Onophrion’s hovering bulk or Salablanca’s sober, lingering stare. He had ceased too to glance at the pavilion where Lymond
was sitting, totally relaxed with gentle abandon, the weight of his brow on his knuckles. Jerott stood up.

There were some insults lightly bandied in Islam, and a few more lying between those and matters answerable only by death. Taking the offensive, middle course, Jerott Blyth called to the riders, and as they pursued their concentrated courses, ignoring him, he bent and, again picking up cushion after cushion, hurled them into the arena with the very evident object of causing what mischief he could.

Misconduct of that order was not likely to be overlooked a second time. Jerott looked over his shoulder, saw the guards converging on him and, heaving a last unforgivable missile, walked out weaving into the arena himself. Lymond looked up.

Jerott could hardly have chosen a more exquisite moment. The horses were racing in couples, a single rider erect with one foot on each. Before the mark, bow in hand, each had to let fly three arrows into the wand: past the mark, each had to turn, keeping his balance on the two lumbering horses, and shoot, with accuracy, three arrows more.

Two did so and, finding Jerott straying noisily at their feet, swerved and passed him. The third, with more time to consider, threw away his bow and snapped his fingers, glancing behind him. The rider behind drew abreast. For a matter of seconds, the four horses thundered side by side. Then, releasing one of his horses, the second rider balanced on the remaining bare back, and then lightly jumped the intervening space between it and the next. For a moment the two riders stood, and then sat side by side. The next moment they had swept up to Jerott. He felt a hard hand under each armpit; a jerk that almost displaced his shoulder-blades, and then he was hurtling backwards through the air between the galloping horses, his heels jarring and bumping, and hazily aware that if either of the two riders holding him chose a course which diverged from his fellow, then there were really no working alternatives. He would split.

In the Aga Morat’s pavilion, Francis Crawford, with some trouble, stood up. ‘Christ,’ he said vaguely. ‘It’s Jerott.’

‘It is, indeed,’ said Kiaya Khátún. And as the Aga, black-faced, turned to his guards: ‘No—leave it, my lord Aga. If you will. Let us see what sport they make of poor Mr Blyth.’

As a spectacle, the chastisement of poor Mr Blyth already looked promising. He had had the sense, largely because he was stone cold sober, to lift his feet from the ground so that he hung, a dead weight, from the arms of his captors as he was swept backwards between them. Then, finding this wearing, as he had hoped, one of them called out aloud.

There was an answering shout from behind him. He had just time to realize that the riders on either side of him were about to overtake, between them, a third horse, when the powerful arms holding him began swiftly to lift him, higher and higher. They released him; and with a thud that drove the breath from his body he dropped, reversed, into a third person’s saddle.

The horse he was now on was racing like hell. Checking his first impulse to somersault over its tail, he got on with the job of turning right way round in the saddle. It was a hilarious business, according to the shouting and laughter around him, and he slipped a couple of times for good measure. The bearded figure of his rider, grinning, paid no attention whatever to the scrambling behind him but reaching the mark, shot coolly three times, then, leaning down, ungirthed his saddle.

It was a dirty trick. With horses occupied and riderless thundering around him, Jerott felt the saddle beginning to slide: as the leathers came in sight he flung himself, knees working, on his stomach across the horse’s spine and crooked his arms over its flank. The rider, posed on the slipping saddle, had his eyes on a riderless horse just approaching: as it drew level, he smiled at Jerott in a derisory flash of white teeth and, abandoning the sinking ship, jumped.

Jerott, whose vanity was suffering, got one arm free and snatched. He was too late to stop him. With accuracy and ease the rider alighted, smiling, on the back of the next galloping horse, balanced a moment, and then sat in the saddle, an expression of distrust on his face. Between himself and Jerott Blyth, careering bareback on the neighbouring horse, flew, unreeling, twenty yards of white muslin, as, like an old wife at her spindle, Jerott unwound his turban.

Havoc ensued. Whooping, kicking his heels, he brought down four horses, darting off at an angle with the tightening streamer before the turbanless Arab finally shot off his horse in a tangle of cane frame and felt cap, exposing to Mohammed, untimely, his single-lock handgrip to heaven.

Jerott looked round. It had not perhaps been wise. For a Moslem to bare his head was shame; to have it done for him by a Christian was serious injury. He reduced his horse’s speed for a moment, thinking, as the other riders, in numbers, began to ride hard towards him. He still had the end of the turban, wrapped several times round his hand.

With the rest of it lying coiled on the grass, it was now useless. He was beginning to unwind it when it tightened. ‘Well done, Brother Blyth,’ said Lymond’s voice, clear and carefree as he had heard it so many times, in action, at home with his company. ‘First round to God and St Andrew. May I play?’

Bare-headed and coatless, he stood on the sand, laughing at
Jerott. Then, the other end of the muslin wound round his wrist, he turned and, running hard, laid his hand on a loose horse and vaulted into the saddle. With the reins in his hand: ‘All right,’ said Lymond. ‘Let’s go.’

‘He’s drunk. He’ll kill himself,’ said the Aga Morat, grumbling.

‘Let him go,’ said Kiaya Khátún, for the second time. ‘Horsemanship to these men is second nature. They will provide a spectacle and no doubt will receive a suitable drubbing. Humility is a virtue Scotsmen require to be taught.’