Pawn in Frankincense (47 page)

Standing spaced apart from her, his hands brown on the rail, his skin darkened to chestnut by the sun under his thickly clinging black hair, Jerott watched the pilgrims and their boxes disembark and set off across the dazzling sea. ‘If you have faith, you don’t need the trappings,’ he said.

‘You mean you have faith, and they do not? So help you, God and holidome? Oh, come, Mr Blyth,’ said Marthe. ‘After worshipping at the feet of the late Graham Malett and lying down under the feet of the ever-present Mr Crawford, you are still the unshaken shrine of the ancient faith of the Knights that uplifts but does not blind?’

‘I claim nothing at all. It’s your choice of subject, not mine,’ said Jerott.

‘Certainly, you are not defending your beliefs,’ said Marthe, looking at him speculatively. ‘You disappoint me. But then, you have abandoned your Order. Perhaps you have found another more to your taste? God appears in multifarious guises. Why not the Mussulman’s God, that is good and gracious, and exacts not of him what is harsh and burdensome, but permits him the nightly company of women; well knowing that abstinency of that kind is both grievous and impossible? It might make this journey more comfortable for us both.’

Looking into that cold and beautiful face: ‘You mean,’ said Jerott curtly, ‘to fulfil the role of the nightly houri made of musk?’

Marthe smiled. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that although I despise the hanging jaw of hunger, I do not intend that the needy should look to me for their banquet.’

‘To Kiaya Khátún, then?’ said Jerott. And caught his breath at the look on her face.

Then it changed; and her lashes covered her eyes. She said, ‘Francis Crawford has much to answer for, hasn’t he?
I break what is thine, because thou corruptest what is mine
? You are wrong. Kiaya Khátún makes her own Paradise.’

‘Who is she?’

The arched brows rose. ‘Who knows? In Stamboul she is a powerful woman: a friend of Roxelana, the wife of the Sultan; the beloved of Dragut whose palaces she controls. Before that, in Venice. They say she is a Gritti, by an exiled Doge and a Greek slave. No one knows.’

The straight nose; the dark eyes; the handsome, olive face; the black hair strung with jewels; the small, plump hands holding the
knife steadily at Lymond’s heart, precisely, to sever the skin. Jerott said, ‘She has lived with many?’

Marthe laughed at him. ‘
C’est Vertu, la nymphe éternelle
. She has chosen her field of power and has lived with the master of it as long as it pleased her. You have met her. Try to tell me you haven’t felt the tug of the magnet.’

Her hair gleamed on her shoulders, amber and silver and Indian yellow, coiled like heavy syrups enfolding the sunlight; and her white, polished skin was coloured with sun. ‘No,’ said Jerott. ‘I felt no attraction.’

The smile remained in her eyes. ‘That was because, perhaps, the magnet was turned in another direction.’

Jerott’s dark gaze was suddenly alert. ‘You think …?’

‘I think that when Kiaya Khátún tires of the mysteries of the polygone étoile, Mr Crawford has need to look out, for she will choose and brittle her deer if it pleases her; and undo him most woodmanly and cleanly that she might.’

‘He has no field of power,’ said Jerott, and watched her turn to the rail slowly, still smiling, her eyes seeing nothing.

‘Have you heard of the
sheb-chiragh
, the night lamp?’ said Marthe. ‘On a certain night, the Arab says, when the water-bull cometh up to land to graze, he bringeth this jewel with him in his mouth, and setteth it down on the place where he would graze, and by the light of it doth he graze.… She is the lamp, and should she come to him, he may graze where he pleases.’

It was then, in bewildered understanding and pity, that Jerott made the error of touching her. She turned on him, alight with malice, supple as a ribbon of steel, and said, ‘I am tired of the game. Go to the classroom and glut yourself on penny tales whose language you understand; for you misread mine to a tedium.…’

He took his dignity and left her; and because he was vulnerable to her as he had been vulnerable to Francis Crawford he found the same solitary and belligerent salve for his troubles: he drowned them.

According to the French factor at Scanderoon, where they landed two days later, it was no mean advantage to view the pleasures of Scanderoon through a thin veil of alcohol. Jerott, supervising a little unsteadily the disembarking of his and Marthe’s boxes, and replying in kind, wherever necessary, to her descant of bright, acidulous comment, was inclined to agree.

To begin with, it was so foully unhealthy, between marshes and mountain, that they had not been permitted to land until two hours after sunrise, when heat had cleared all the poisonous mists from the bogs. Scanderoon itself, huddled between the ruins of a waterlogged
castle and a scattering of lizard-infested shells, amounted to no more than forty reed-thatched board houses, most of them occupied by a diverse coterie of quarrelling merchants, unified only in their physical miseries. Agents in Scanderoon seldom lived to retire home on their wealth.

In a limited way, the French factor was helpful. Jerott and the lady were placed in a khan, a hollow square surrounded by two tiers of arcaded buildings, built from charity and offered for the accommodation of the passing tourist or trader. In the Grand Seigneur’s empire, there were no inns. Here, the stores and the stables and the commonality were served on the ground floor, Marthe and Jerott in separate rooms on the upper floor, with the two servants he had acquired on the way, for their style.

Once settled, he wasted no time. Already he had verified from the factor that no ship called the
Peppercorn
had made landfall this year, to his knowledge; but that sometimes, of course, such a ship, if she were English, would unload her cargo, say, in Cyprus and send her passengers by small boat to the coast. English ships did not call at Scanderoon. There was no agent. Only the ships of the Seigneury, or of France, or of the Great Turk’s own domains.

Jerott’s head ached. Marthe had disappeared, with her slave, allegedly to consult the Syrian merchants on the same business. The French agent’s damp timbered house, in which he sat, smelt of goat grease and
bukhur-jauri
, the strong Javanese incense beloved of Negroes. He caught sight of the woman, a veil half over her woolly hair, round the edge of the door. He didn’t blame the man: not here. He said, ‘If such a small boat landed persons, say of Syrian nationality, or even Western Europeans, what record of such people might I find to exist? My superior seeks particularly a dark-haired woman, a Syrian from Mehedia, and a fair two-year-old child.’

For that, said the agent, he would require to study the records of the Cadi, whom he would find at Aleppo. There also were the merchants who traded with such second-hand cargo, and the priests and the Patriarchs who looked after the spiritual welfare of newcomers. He would ask in Scanderoon if such a pair were remembered, and where they had gone. Sometimes, men came and took boat for Tarsus, only eight miles off over the bay, especially those engaged in the silk-rearing business. Did M. Blyth wish to make inquiries at Tarsus?

Through a haze of wine, which affected his efficiency very little, Jerott initiated inquiries at Tarsus. He had all the merchants of Scanderoon narrowly questioned. He examined the records. He collected Marthe, who was standing, absently covered in Baghdad pigeons, in the Syrian merchant’s courtyard, discussing the uses of turpentine. And when all these activities had drawn a blank, he bespoke the services of baggage-mules, horses, a Janissary and two
Ajémoghláns the following day, to convoy Marthe and himself in safety to Aleppo. Then he returned to the khan, ate a leaden meal of mutton and rice, quarrelled with Marthe and, retiring to his mattress, drank himself into a nightmarish sleep, punctuated by the howling of jackals.

The journey from Scanderoon to Aleppo, which occupied slightly more than three days, was marked by no roguish departure from the general atmosphere of exasperation and gloom. At Belan, they slept on the ground. At Antioch, between high Biblical rocks, they lodged in a house, also on bare ground, with a pillow, a mattress and a quilt. They crossed the plain of Antioch, and hired a boat over the Orontes, which was low. They left the wildfowl and the water-buffaloes of the coast and met instead the tented villages of the Bedouins, with flocks of dangle-eared goats and the thick-tailed Syrian sheep, dragging thirty pounds of fat and wool at its back.

They had no provisioning to do. The Janissary visited the villages and called at the low goat-hair tents to buy bread-cake and water, and brought them goat’s milk and yoghourt and dates to add to the meat and sour butter they carried. On the last evening, approaching Hanadan, a village eight miles from Aleppo, there occurred the only incident in which Janissary and Ajémoghláns were required to act in their protective capacity.

The raid in fact came from nowhere just before the sudden extinguishing of night. Two of the horses had gone lame, and their reduced pace had made them late in arriving within the safety of Hanadan. Torches had been lit, to scare off brute dog and jackal as much as to frighten off thieves. But even so, the raiders perhaps believed that the little caravan was very much more numerous and heavily laden than in fact it was. They came whirling out of the darkness, on small Arab horses: a blur of white headgear, coarse cloaks and striped kaftans, with the burning pitch shining red on their swords. Then the Janissary, scimitar at his side, fired off a hackbut, and throwing it down, charged steel flashing with the Ajémoghláns at his heels; and the raiders, seeing the economy of the luggage and the scarcity of well-plenished merchants, weighed risk against risk and, bringing their horses round, rearing, made off in the dark.

The Janissary, remarkable so far for his silence, returned pleased and loquacious. The man with one eye—had they noted?—the leader was Shadli, the dog, the son of a drunkard, who forced money from every caravan of note from Scandaroon to Aleppo, and sometimes from Aleppo as far as the Grand Sophy’s frontier. Demanded money, and if the caravans did not pay, then the tribes descended and lives and money, all were lost.

‘I have heard,’ said Marthe, ‘there are Kurds in these mountains who worship the Devil.’

‘It is true,’ said the Janissary. ‘God is good, they say; and will harm nobody; but the Devil is bad, and must be pleased, lest he hurt them. But these are not Kurds, Khátún. These are Bedouin, who call themselves the Saracens of Savah and, living in their tents, earn their livelihood thus. But they are spendthrifts. The money goes: always they want more. When the army is here, you will see: then they raid the opium caravans and sell direct to our soldiers. When our army goes to war,’ said the Janissary, ‘all the opium-bearing fields are despoiled for their comfort and courage.’

Jerott found, stiffening, that Marthe was looking at him. ‘Did you know that?’ she said. ‘Fifty camels a year loaded with opium come in from Paphlagonia, Cappadocia, Galatia and Cilicia. The Janissaries take it daily—half a drachm and you wouldn’t notice it. A whole drachm might perhaps bring a man to a state no more objectionable than your own. But of course, before they resell, the tribes will adulterate. What began as four-ounce cakes in India might finish as slabs of half a pound or even a pound, and this can cause trouble.’

‘If it is pure,’ said the Janissary harshly, ‘there is no insult.’

‘Have you ever seen a man starve in order to buy himself a hundred grains daily, and then be deprived of his source? That isn’t an insult,’ said Marthe. ‘That is the root of the tree that grows in the bottom of Hell.’

It was no news that Turks lived on opium. ‘You said something about “when the army is here”,’ said Jerott.

‘It is so. Rustem Pasha, the Grand Vizier, has left Stamboul,’ said the Janissary. ‘From Scutari he brings an army to Aleppo, where it will be joined by the armies of Damascus and Tripoli and Aman. Didst thou not see the soldiers at Antioch? Together they winter here. Then in the spring, my lord marches on Persia.’

‘Another Persian campaign?’ said Jerott. He was thinking. Men, money, munitions, poured into the dry fields of Persia. And none for France, facing not only the Emperor, but the Emperor’s niece newly crowned Queen of England. What of the French invasion of Corsica now? What of his friends, the trained company Lymond had created, which he had abandoned to go on this self-destructive, harrowing search? Paid off for lack of funds? Decimated for want of good weapons? Hell, thought Jerott, staring at the bloodshot rooftops of Hanadan. I’ve had enough. If the brat’s not at Aleppo it’s dead, or it’s going to cost more than our blood to redeem it. If the trail ends here, it ends and I go back to France. My God, I’m a soldier, not a wet-nurse to somebody’s bastard.

‘I prefer you, I think, drunk to sulking,’ said Marthe. ‘Consider. An angel descends with every drop of water and lays it in its appointed place. If it rains, you wül be dry, or you will be wet. Why then flinch or rebel?’

‘Because,’ said Jerott with emphasis. ‘I’m not a bloody Saracen.’