Pawn in Frankincense (71 page)

‘I have money. What was it?’

For a moment longer, Míkál looked at him. Then, taking a cup from the floor, he held it so that its contents could be seen. ‘This. I did not know how much to give thee. But thou hast need of more, much more than is wise. Thou art ill, Hâkim.’

‘I know that.’

‘Thou dost not know why?’

‘No.… There have been other times like it; but never lasting so long. This time … it was bad,’ Lymond said.

‘Until now? The pains have gone?’ asked Míkál.

‘Almost.… What did you give me?’

‘Hâkim … it was opium,’ said Míkál gently. ‘Enough to send sweet sleep to the strongest of men for twenty-four hours. Yet after an hour thou art awake and in pain, for thy body knows this drug and will not be satisfied. In this cup is the rest of thy sleep; and thy death, if thou must continue its slave.’

You have all the afflictions of the highly-strung
, Sybilla had said to him once, long ago.
All your life you will have to disguise them
. And so, as with everything else, he had set his teeth through each attack and gone on. Until he realized, with his mind darkened with fantasies and with every nerve burned stark to the quick, that this time there was something finally, fatally wrong. ‘Where is Ishiq?’ Lymond said quietly. He had managed, at least, to pull himself up and sit like a sane man on his rug.

‘Asleep, over there. He knows merely that thou hast paid him, as I suppose, to take the place of his master. With thine eyes covered he could not guess thy need of the poppy. Nor did he break faith with thee. For five days I and my friends have sought thee in vain. Thy betrayer, beautiful as a bird, is the colour and form of thy voice.’

‘My debt to Ishiq I know. My debt to you I am beginning to learn. Míkál, I do not think it possible that I could have come to rely on opium or anything else without my own knowledge. How could it be?’

‘There is an old Turcoman saying,
The soul enters by the throat
. For many months, thy body has fed on it, Efendi, to make thee thus distempered without it.’

‘
Without
it?’

Míkál was patient. ‘This illness, lord, is suffered by those who need opium and cannot obtain it. Always before there has been one at hand to give it to thee, in whatever secret manner it is administered.
Now thou art away from thy enemies and they laugh, for without it, thou wilt be sick unto madness.’

Every camp has its traitor
, Kiaya Khátún had said. And Francis Crawford knew the traitor in his. He said, Thank you. It is clear now. I have only one thing to ask. Is there a remedy, or must I take opium until …’ He did not finish. He had seen this with other drugs: the mindless dervishes, led by their keepers. The mad, communing with God. Greater and greater doses, to produce less effect, until mind and flesh, besotted, fell slowly to pieces. To end, with nothing accomplished.
Know that this world’s life is only sport and play and gaiety and boasting among yourselves, and a vying in the multiplication of wealth and children
. Indeed, Gabriel was great.

‘There are two paths,’ said Míkál. Thou mayest shun the drug. This is the great illness thou hast tasted, exciting in mind and body a commotion from which the reason may steal away, as the diffusion of the odour of perfume.’

‘And the other?’ His voice this time was under control: the Meddáh’s voice, pleasant and light. He could not steady his hands, or marshal the tuned body slipped out of tone, but the soul was still there, thought Míkál. Resting his hands delicately on his crossed legs, he answered.

‘The other course is to withdraw thyself day by day from the drug, disregarding thy senses and tied to thy purpose, as to the piece of wood stuck in the wheat pile, round which the bulls and cows tread and turn. It will take many weeks during which I shall stand thee in stead of thyself, for thou wilt be languid and faint, as a man with a wound which will not be staunched.’

‘There is no time for that,’ Lymond said. ‘What I have to do must be started now; and I must be able to do it. When it is finished, I can take your first course, or your second.’

In his purple silk, the fine hair laid on his shoulders, the bells bright on his ankles, Míkál sat still as an image. ‘When it is finished,’ he said, ‘there may be no choice. I have told thee, already thy body accepts and wears as a halter that which in another person would kill. With this drug, thou hast dispensed with the warning of pain. The soul pursues its desires and will not know when the body has failed it.’

‘I have no choice now,’ said Lymond; and shrugged; and lifting the cup Míkál had shown him, drank it down to the dregs.

The house Georges Gaultier had bought was indeed exactly halfway between the Bazaar and the Hippodrome of Constantinople. That he bought it after and not before the arrival of his niece Marthe and her learned friend Pierre Gilles from Aleppo was something nobody stressed.

Jerott helped them take their belongings across the Golden Horn and into the City from their temporary abode with the French chargé d’affaires. No one else seemed particularly interested in aiding them: Jean Chesnau, who ran the Embassy now was not a d’Aramon. And Gaultier did nothing: hanging back green-faced and groaning, nursing the wad of bandaging round his left shoulder.

Hearing the story of that wound, from many sources, Jerott wondered what on earth had possessed Francis to inflict it. He had hoped of course to make contact with Philippa through Gaultier, but the man was craven and this was his punishment. Its crudity Jerott found troubling. It was unlike Lymond: and a number of other things he heard about the late Ambassador’s behaviour were perplexing also. Jerott wished again, bitterly, that he had not left before they arrived, and that he could have shackled Marthe under the eye of the one person living with the capacity to understand and control her. For reasons of his own, if Marthe was right, Lymond had refrained so far from doing either. But the time was coming, Jerott thought, when he must.

In the meantime he had disappeared, and Jerott could hardly force his company on a strange ménage. He would continue to stay at the Embassy, but at least he could make a reason for discovering where this odd household of three—and Herpestes—was proposing to stay. Then he had Francis to find.

He knew they were watched. But he had seen no sign of Gabriel and heard nothing from him, although Chesnau had told him of the palace the new Vizier had occupied, to the south of St Sophia. As soon as Lymond had left the Embassy, the persecution they had been suffering had ceased.

The damned place was full of hills. Riding up from the waterside behind the packmules, half the time they were climbing a running gulley of mud between the high pavements and twice, without the swarm of half-naked children who ran with them, they might have got stuck. Gilles, digging in his purse, announced,
‘Natura sunt Turcae avari et pecuniarum avide?
’ and flung them a handful of coins. His need for a secretary, it seemed, had suddenly vanished. Staring bad-temperedly from under his spicular eyebrows, he had informed
Jerott, in plain French, that he would send to him at the Embassy when and if he required him. The anger, Jerott thought, was not directed at himself, but at Marthe and her uncle. In which case, why go and stay with them?

The New Jerusalem was not looking its best today. The gold-domed mosques and slim minarets among the wet gardens were splendid enough, and so were the baths and the carved marble fountains and the stone palaces of the aghas, with their looted Byzantine porticos from the older, buried palaces of Justinian, for which he had stripped the temples and towns of an empire. But where now were the bronze roofs and gilded tiles of Constantinople; the silver columns; the statues of Ulysses and Helen; of Homer, in talk and dispute, so alive he was thought nearly to breathe? And where the figure of a bronze Justinian, clothed like Achilles, looking east with the world in one hand and his other outstretched, forbidding the barbarian to advance?

A Barbariis et incendiis deletas esse
, said Gilles. Destroyed by those barbarians; by earthquake and by fire. Less than fifty years ago thirteen thousand people had died here when the earth moved and broke the conduits from the Danube to the City, and the waters of the Golden Horn deluged Stamboul and Pera. Seven years ago the Bezestan, the round covered market to which they were now climbing, had been burnt to the ground, and all the houses beside it. Hence the rough shacks and booths which clung to the walls of the mosques, crowding the workshops already tucked into the arches of hammam and medrese. There were other streets, small and twisting and arcaded with pentises of wood, which were lined with booths: passing, one caught the smell of goat fat and uncured leather; of crushed sesame seeds or melting honey; or of new sawdust from a lathe shop making handles for hatches, with outside a stack of new wood, white and red-gold yew from Mengrelia, dripping and satiny in the wet.

The houses too, Jerott thought, looked temporary: some of white clay bricks and some wooden-framed, the timber filled with sun-dried clay brick, their latticed wooden balconies projecting over the street. They came in all sizes and shapes, but most had no more than two storeys, with a slanting roof of thick-ridged clay tiles, or flatter roofs sometimes planted with orange bushes and shrubs. And everywhere, open spaces and ruins: the arches and columns and fountains and baths, the churches and gardens of the city built to match Rome.

Gilles knew them all. Here was the Forum of the Bull: there the house of Concordia and the Temple of Thomas the Apostle. Under this plain the hot baths of Honoria and the Forum of Theodosius. There the baths of Achilles, which Justinian making the aqueduct remembered, and whose conduits he was able to use, so well in those days were the pipes and passages recorded, leading the great underground network of water to the city’s cisterns and fountains and
baths. There, still standing, the historied column made by Arcadius, a hundred and forty feet high, with its spiral banded design celebrating the victory over the Scythians; and here the column, now pinned with iron and broken with fire, which once held the statue of Constantine Helios, whose sunny nimbus was framed by the nails that had pierced Christ on the Cross.

The rain had swept most people from the streets. Men went by barefoot, their burdens strapped to their heads, their splashed skirts kilted up to their calves: children played: a laden buffalo pressed by, and a tripe-seller’s donkey. Few beggars, for the crowded almshouses of the Mehmet Mosque took care of charity,
loi, foi, nation que ce soit
. Instead, sometimes, the crumbs of a rude justice: the bones and flesh of a criminal staked outside the house of the injured; or the cry,
Yâ Fattâh!
from the pavement where a paralytic crawled for his living. They turned a corner, into a street which was little but a quarry of broken stone and mud, with houses set like playing blocks in the dirt; or sometimes huddled two or three together among a scattering of winter bushes from which broken marble glimmered, the vestiges of some Byzantine palace or church.

Outside the biggest house, a square whitewashed structure with a rough wall enclosing a yard, Gaultier stopped, and the procession of packmules behind him. ‘
Here
?’ said Jerott, astounded.

‘It is not easy,’ said Georges Gaultier with asperity, ‘for a foreigner to obtain premises in Constantinople. Until I can find something better: here.’ Marthe did not look round, but he had the impression she was smiling. Then Gaultier opened the gate, and they moved inside and unloaded.

Such was the briskness of the whole operation, that within an hour Jerott found himself, deep in thought, on his way back to Pera again. From the little he had seen, Gaultier’s house was as unprepossessing inside as out.… The walls were plain and plastered; the floors wooden and uneven; the ceilings timbered and cursorily painted in a particularly nasty shade of mid-green. Even with the carpets and cupboards and bedding they had brought with them, it would hardly look, Jerott thought, like the Star in Bread Street. The ichneumon had appeared quite distraught.

Marthe at least had had the grace to thank him, with characteristic irony. ‘Receive the blessings of St Blasius, patron of bones in the throat. It cannot have been a congenial task. After all your admirable sheep-herding from Aleppo: what a pity you won’t be able to guess, in the end, what knavery we are planning.’

‘I could have you watched,’ said Jerott, rashly. With her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkling, the fine-chiselled face took the breath away.

Marthe laughed: a true laugh of mischievous pleasure. ‘Do,’ she said. ‘Why not? You might see the ichneumon.’

She had the door half closed when he said, on a sudden impulse of despair, ‘Marthe … what are you going to do? People die here, you know, for very little. Who will help you?’

She stood in the doorway and smiled. ‘Who will help me? Myself. What am I doing …? Don’t you remember the jingle?

That was all she said, and she shut the door, laughing. It took Jerott most of the journey home to find, searching his memory, that he had no recollection at all of the rest. Francis would have known.

Elsewhere in the city, a number of interesting occurrences took place.

The blind Meddáh, of whom the boy Ishiq took such good care, continued to make his rounds of the city and to give pleasure to the simpler-minded of her citizens, who found the story-teller quiet, but by no means enfeebled. At night, he was given shelter at the house near the Valens Aqueduct which the Pilgrims of Love shared with their brethren and other friends of the road.

It was one of these, curled up outside the Mehmet baths preparing to spend a comfortable hour in the ashes, who accosted the Jewess Hepsibah courteously for alms as she came out pink from the apodyterium, her slave behind her with the covered brass bowl on her head holding her linen, her smock and her coverlet. It also held, as everyone knew, the embroidered chaplets and girdles and scarves Hepsibah spread out and sold wherever she went.