Pawn in Frankincense (48 page)

‘What a pity,’ said Marthe. ‘Another difference, I fear, to divide us. Because I, of course, am.’

As always, Jerott rose to the bait. That her remark was a simple statement of truth took a long time to penetrate; but in the end he was brought to admit, in his heart, that given the person she was, it was not beyond understanding. Thinking back, he even remembered how, outside Mehedia, the thought had once crossed his mind when she overplayed, by a fraction, her ignorance of Bektashi dervishes. She had travelled in Moslem countries: she had seen, as Jerott, his voice raised, reminded her, that they treated their women as servants and playthings. It did not trouble her.

She did not say, look at Roxelana. She did not say, look at Kiaya Khátún. But she did say, coldly sardonic, ‘What better hopes have I in Europe? I have no birth, no money, no inheritance, no future. I live from Georges Gaultier’s charity, and the caprice of the Dame. No man of ambition will marry a bastard. To marry beneath me is to become a servant: to accept anything other than marriage is to become a plaything. I have little choice wherever I go. I prefer a society which accepts that I have no choice, and does not pretend that I have. I prefer a God who does what he wills, and rules as he desires, and enjoins on me not to prevent anything against its destiny. I prefer a religion which can say:

Jerott did not need a translation.

‘You think it blasphemy, no doubt,’ she said. ‘It isn’t. It is divine simplicity, I believe.’

He made one last attempt. ‘You are leaving a civilization which rules by the intellect for a civilization which rules by the senses,’ said Jerott.

‘And
you
would dissuade me?’ said Marthe.

‘… The Sultan of Cambaia has moustaches so long, he ties them up with a fillet like a woman, and he has a beard white to the navel.’

The glories of the Orient. ‘Indeed,’ said Jerott Blyth flatly; and wished for the hundredth time that supper were over; that the French Consul were not away on affairs, and that the attaché who was their host in his place was with the Sultan of Cambaia, with his moustaches tied tight round his larynx.

Outside those high stone walls were the streets of Aleppo, third city of Suleiman’s Empire; built on its four hills with its mosques and its minarets and its khans and its high garrisoned castle; its souks and its low arcaded houses and its fountains from the underground flow of the Singa; its great suburbs; its four miles of gardens and vineyards, its fields of cotton and rice, figs and melons and cucumbers, cabbages, lettuces, beets, plums and pears stretching to the walls of the Old City, wrecked by the Tartars; and everywhere the patient bullock treading its blindfolded circle as the wheels turned and the river-water trickled into the light stony ground, and brought it fertility.

Riding today to the French Consul’s house, Jerott had recalled that most of the population of Scotland could be fitted into this Egyptian city, still the greatest market in Asia, after forty years of Suleiman’s rule.
Qui vero in Indiam, Persiam, aliasque Orientis regiones profisci cupiunt, semper istic negociatores reperiunt, qui ultro citroque commeant
, Bellon had written. And still the camel-trains poured in from Taurus; the great Persian boxes streamed up the Euphrates, the treasures of India were carried in by boat and camel and packhorse from the Red Sea and the Gulf: turtle-shells in barrels from Bombay, and wax and seahorse teeth, and negroes and gum.

Here Venice bought her drugs, her indigo and her spices, her mohair, cotton and wool, and in return unloaded these shining bales of satin and damask, of scarlet and violet wool, these boxes of gold and of silver: three hundred and fifty thousand ducats’ worth of trade every year. In all, to Venice; to France; to the merchants of Egypt and Cairo, Aleppo sent annually one hundred thousand ducats’ worth of her own silk cloths alone; and five hundred thousand ducats’ worth of other things.

For this kind of business you must have great khans for your traders to dwell in, and many agents, both diplomatic and spiritual. You must have food and water in plenty, and shops where strangers can buy food, and ovens where it may be cooked for them. You have your warehouses for the non-perishing goods: the gems, the amber,
the lignum, the aloes, the musk. You have your interpreters and your hirers of camels; your covered bazaars, your mosques with thronging stone cupolas, lined with gilt and mosaic inside. Within the tall towered walls with their eleven gates you have a Cadi and a Beglierbey, dispensing justice; customars to deal with trade taxes; pensioned horsemen—the Timarriots—to keep order.

Within the castle walls lived two thousand people, a garrison of five hundred Janissaries and their Agha. And these men jostling in the streets were the permanent residents they controlled—Turks, Moors, Arabs, Jews, Greeks and Armenians; Maronites, Georgians, Chelfalines, Nostranes; the spendthrift Bedouin with his tent on a dungheap; the poor Greek who earned his asper a month swabbing his boothkeeper’s path-frontage daily. The dumb and the mad. The naked fool led by dervishes, eating flies and the eyes of dogs raw. The call of the muezzin, floating many-threaded from tower to tower, which canopied the roaring voice of the streets, speaking all the tongues common to man: Italian and Arabic, Turkish, Armenian and Persian, Hebrew and Greek, and the alien incomers’ tongue of the Chaldee, the Tartar, the Indian.

A shifting, bright alien population, numbering hundreds of thousands. In which a woman and child would be, as the Janissary who brought them had pointed out pityingly, ‘small, Efendi: small as the white point on the back of a date-stone’.

The French attaché, with whatever cause, was more bracing. ‘A woman without friends, in Aleppo? She would need help. The priest. The Patriarch. The services of a consul to procure her the shelter of a khan, to change her money, to obtain a carrier, an interpreter, a Janissary, a guide. Whoever has helped her, one can discover him.’

‘And if she had friends waiting?’ said Jerott.

‘Ships come as the wind blows. How could they wait?’ said the attaché. ‘Wherever they are, she must seek them. Yellow hair is not common. Somewhere is the horse, the camel she used.… In a week I may hâve news for you.’

‘It must be sooner than that. Wherever he is, he is in danger,’ said Jerott.

But the attaché shrugged. ‘In the East, God knows, time is different. To achieve any desired end: it is slow. But dangers hasten slowly, as well.’

He was out in both reckonings. Before the end of a week, he had concluded his inquiries and doom, the brisk doom of the Christians, had arrived.

It began with the culminating explosion in a series of skirmishes to do with Marthe’s desire to explore Aleppo, in Arab clothes, accompanied by the Ethiopian woman he had bought for her, and no one else.

Jerott had complained, before coming on this trip, that he could not in good faith be accountable for Marthe’s safety. It did not prevent him, when he found her slipping out of a side door that first morning, from seizing and berating her before the absent French Consul’s interested household, until she stopped him by stalking back into the house.

When, in her own room, she confronted him, it was like facing the worst of Francis Crawford; with the difference that Lymond was usually right, and therefore cut deeper still.

It was unpleasant enough. Marthe stood, robed from head to foot in the coarse undyed robes of the Arab, her veil crushed in her hand, and demanded, softly, to know by what conceivable right her safety, spiritual, moral or physical, was any business of his. ‘Do you imagine,’ said Marthe, ‘that I cannot conceive of the risks? Or that I have not the intelligence to weigh them? Or that perhaps I may not be able to judge better than you the course I must take in my own affairs?’

‘My God,’ said Jerott. He slammed the door and, walking across, flung his cap on her table. ‘Perhaps for one second you would sit on the lid of your irreducible ego and listen to me. I regard you, masculine or feminine, as the greatest genius the world has ever produced. I agree you have a superior knowledge of your own affairs and are far more capable than the Consulate, for example, of weighing up the risks. Suppose even, for the sake of conjecture, that I don’t give a brass bagcheek whether the first Tartar you meet doesn’t drag you back to his tents and elect you Broody Mother to the whole bloody tribe. All I am saying is that, first, if anything happens to you, I’ve got to face Francis Crawford and also your uncle. And second, if you must face risks with good reason—and there had damned well better be a good reason—-then there’ll be a good few less risks if I come along with you.’

‘No,’ said Marthe simply.

That was the first time. Flinging out furiously ten minutes later, having achieved precisely nothing, Jerott retired cursing to his room and stayed there until his servant warned him, as he had been instructed, that the mademoiselle had left her room once again.

That time, Jerott thought he had never seen her look so angry. The blue eyes were open pits of cold hatred when she saw him; but this time, she did not turn back or argue. Slipping the black veil into place over her face, she brushed past him and continued on her way out of doors.

‘Very well,’ said Jerott. ‘Only I am afraid you will not remain very anonymous. I am coming with you, and, as I hope you have noticed, I am wearing one of Onophrion’s more vernal creations in pale green watered silk. Always mindful of my master’s dignity. We shall be a pretty pair.’

Then she turned back, and slammed the door in his face.

The key was on the outside. Jerott turned it, withdrew it and, taking it with him, found the two Janissaries the attaché had allotted him and went out, followed by the sound of furious hammering.

It was dusk when he returned. To get out now, she would have to pass the Consulate guards; and in any case, as Jerott well knew, she was no fool. No woman who knew her Middle East would venture unescorted now. He unlocked Marthe’s door, tapped on it, and turned back into his room without waiting to speak with her.

Next morning, awakened from light sleep by his servant’s touch, Jerott thought, without pleasure, that it was the same rotten business again. He had a headache, and no prospect of remaining anything but distressingly sober if he was to keep his self-willed companion in sight.

But the news was not of Marthe’s imminent departure alone into the stews of Aleppo. Marthe, it seemed, had come to her senses. She wished, for her uncle’s sake, to view the merchandise in the covered bazaar and also to help with any inquiries which Mr Blyth might be making in pursuit of the child. If Mr Blyth felt he could dispense with his Janissaries, she, Marthe, would dispense with her Arab clothing and confide herself to his protection dressed a la Christianesca for the day.

It was a stilted surrender, and the pricking of his senses should have warned him. As it was, he sent off a cordial message of agreement, while reserving the right, childishly, as a bonus for trouble taken, to retain one Janissary if he jolly well wanted.

With their Janissary, scimitared and white-capped behind them, Jerott and Marthe explored Aleppo. He had some officials to visit whom the attaché had suggested, but all the detailed investigation was already under way, he knew, through the tortuous channels known best to the Consulate. To be walking from alley to alley, and meeting people, and asking the same stupid questions was only a method of keeping busy, of stifling one’s restlessness; of persuading oneself that one was here for some good; that a life might be saved if one worked hard enough.

And at his side throughout, there was Marthe … quick-witted and intuitive, articulate and thoughtful. He had loved her for her beauty and for an excellence with which he was already familiar. That day, engrossed together in the fate of the child, he met her mind to mind and fell in love with her, with every grain of his spirit and cell of his body; with the essential finality of death.

If Marthe knew of it, she gave no sign. It was she who found the tekke, the house of the dervishes; and, standing under the gateway, said, ‘Of course Islam is anathema to you. But in some things, my faith and yours are not far apart. The Bektashi think that the fervent practice of worship engenders in the soul graces; and that in the
science of hearts the soul may procure wisdom.… I have a favour to ask.’

‘Ask it,’ said Jerott.

‘This is a Bektashi tekke: a place where the dervishes gather for worship and instruction. They do not mind the presence of infidels, nor do they forbid women. Will you allow me to take you inside?’

‘The Janissary——’ Jerott began.

‘The Janissary cannot enter. Mr Blyth, these are holy men sworn to contemplative and utter humility; dedicated to tolerance and devoted to love. The Way is one, they say: the Form is many. There is nothing to fear in a tekke of the Bektashi Order.’