Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Above the tracing of beard, the full lips puckered. ‘Thou art generous,’ said Salah Rais gravely, and fired.

  Thundering back and forth in the bare, high-vaulted room, the sound crashed on the eardrums, drowning the sharp voices of shock and fear and surprise; and the smoke hung blue in the air, the wrung-out, acid smell of it coating the tongue. At Lymond’s feet, in a litter of smashed tiles and plaster, the King of France’s gemmed coffer lay, a tangled wreckage of gold foil, splinters and wire. ‘Now Allâh be my friend,’ said Salah Rais in surprise. ‘My brother the King of France has destroyed his own excellent gift, and it must now, alas, be replaced!’

  In the deep, vermilion folds of Lymond’s cloak fragments of tile glittered, and a powder of gold dusted one thin kidskin shoe. Throughout, he had not moved. ‘The King of France presents his apologies for the inconvenient properties of his poor gift and will feel himself honoured to replace the casket,’ said Lymond. And, looking down at his cloak, ‘I fear I present myself before Your Highness with an appearance of unseemly neglect. If you will permit me’—and drawing off his cloak, he dropped it, red and gold, among the unhinged jewels of the trophy—“I should let it lie here, with the rubbish.’

  ‘Fortune,’ said Salah Rais, ‘abounds with evil accidents. It would ill become a man of the true Faith to be less generous. One will replace the cloak with a better. Thou wilt dine with me. Then I shall give myself the honour of accompanying thee to the harbour.’

  A new cloak had indeed been brought: Jerott wondered by what means its degree of relative magnificence had been signified. It fell weightily from Lymond’s shoulders: white tissue and ermine, the edge sewn with gold wire and emeralds. The sharp green clashed, nastily, with the red velvet doublet beneath. Dropping his hands from the clasp, Lymond said, ‘It pains me, but this is a pleasure I must defer until tomorrow. If the Viceroy will descend to the harbour at noon and accept the paltry hospitality of the Dauphiné, I shall be proud to break bread with him. Then, on his departure, the cases of arms may suitably be disembarked with his party. We are anxious to leave with the afternoon light.’

  The Viceroy of Algiers, standing, made no obvious signal; but behind him, like a breath on the small hairs of his neck, Jerott felt the cold of drawn steel. ‘I regret,’ said that unbroken, suave Arabic. ‘Tomorrow is Friday, and among my people, no work may be done on that day. We must then beg to accept thy delightful bounty today.’

  His breath held, Jerott looked at Lymond. Francis Crawford said gently, ‘But today I have set aside, from the most weighty necessity, for paying homage to your two respected associates. I must call on His Excellency the Agha of Janissaries, and on my lord Dragut Rais.’

  It was then, for the first time, that Jerott realized that Salah Rais understood French. With one upraised palm he stopped his interpreter with the first words of this speech in his mouth, and said himself, smoothly, in Arabic, ‘Both these gentlemen, it is regretted, are absent from home. How desolate they will be. How afflicted, particularly my lord Dragut, who was extolling only last month the generosity of thyself to my people.’

  Standing rigid with all his sweating companions at Lymond’s still back, Jerott was aware of a crashing headache and a mounting desire to cut loose and do something silly. They were supposed to be thoroughly briefed before they left on this expedition. Lymond had said nothing, damn him, about offering cases of guns to the heathen. Nor was it clear why Salah Rais, who a moment before had clearly held the whip hand, was suddenly apparently bargaining. And without a translator. Unless …

  Unless, thought Jerott, suddenly, Salah Rais was in fact saying: I want those carbines. I want them now, and I don’t want the Agha to find out until it’s all over. And if you don’t tell the Agha I’ll offer you …

  ‘It so happens,’ said Salah Rais, ‘that I may be able to do thee some service. Thou hast offered a fortune, all Africa knows it, for the return of a certain woman and a certain one-year-old child. Many will come to thee with false tales in hopes of the money. Some of my own people have come to my gates with news, they claim, of the boy or the mother. While the cases are being unloaded, it may please thee to meet these people here, in a private room in my palace? Keep by thy side whom you wish. If thou hast need of any official of mine, however senior, to attend at the harbour, I shall arrange it.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Lymond gently, ‘thou art a man born to great occasions. It shall be according to thy desires.’ He picked, Jerott noticed, the fat vizier for his personal hostage. To stay with him in the palace, he kept no one but Jerott himself.

  They had to wait a few moments while their companions joined the men-at-arms in the yard and, mounted again, rode down to the harbour with Salah Rais’s escort to proffer Lymond’s written note to the sous-patron and have the carbines unloaded from the Dauphiné’s hold. Until that was complete, Jerott supposed, they would be under courteous guard. Salah Rais wanted those weapons. A man governed by a distant and powerful nation and at the mercy of its colonial army wanted all the surprises he could achieve, up his sleeve.

  Of the ethics of that, this was not the place to inquire. Instead, Jerott said in English to the man waiting silently at his side, ‘I see. A policy of strict laissez-faire. When did you make it known you’d pay for news of Oonagh O’Dwyer and the child?’

  ‘A long time ago.’ Lymond was listening, his eyes fixed on the door.

  ‘Before we met you at Baden?’

  ‘Oh, God, yes.’ And seeing, perhaps, Jerott’s face, Lymond said, ‘I’m sorry. But it was, after all, my own business. And my own money.’

  ‘How much?’ And as Lymond did not reply, Jerott persisted. ‘How much? My God, it was my neck you were risking today.’

  Lymond looked at him. ‘Did I ask you to come on this voyage? I can’t say I recall it.’

  Jerott’s colour was high. ‘No, you didn’t, you bloody high-handed bastard. You might at least have cut your friends in for a share of the prize-money. How much is it?’

  ‘On the day I am brought face to face with the living child, or the living woman,’ said Lymond carefully, ‘my bankers at Lyons will pay five hundred thousand ducats, in gold, to those who contrived that I found them.… You will wait here, please, for me.’ A robed figure, silently arrived in the doorway, bowed and beckoned.

  Lymond was turning to go when Jerott, abruptly, put out a hand. ‘Did you say what I think you said? You have a fortune this size? And you have offered it all?’

  ‘It is all I do have,’ said Lymond. ‘And pride is expensive to buy. As Gabriel knows.’

  Francis Crawford was away for two hours. He interviewed fifteen human beings in the small room where Salah Rais, with Egyptian irony, had summoned all who claimed Lymond’s reward, in the hope of placing the Special Envoy of France conveniently in Salah Rais’s debt.

  The Viceroy’s requital, come so patly to hand, was the speedy delivery of the carbines, even now loading on the quay under the no doubt amazed eyes of the women, and Onophrion and Archie. In exchange for it Francis Crawford received nothing; for none of the fifteen he interviewed possessed the information which he sought.

  To Jerott, on his return, Lymond said simply, ‘None of them. Shall we go?’

  ‘Are you sure?’ It was a stupid question. Lymond merely said, ‘They didn’t go away empty-handed. I have sent my respectful leave-takings to the Governor: let not a whelp go unsaluted.… Let’s go back to the ship.’

  ‘You’re leaving Algiers?’

  ‘What else? Dragut Rais isn’t here. We’ll give the Viceroy his feast early tomorrow, and sail.’

  ‘Will he come?’ said Jerott. ‘Now he has his beautiful carbines?’

  ‘He’ll come,’ said Lymond briefly. ‘When he notices I haven’t included the bullets.’

  And that smart and equivocal transaction and its useless corollary might have been the end of the incident at Algiers.

  Except that before Jerott, with Lymond, left the palace, a man found them: a thickset man whose c
oarse shirt hung on powerful shoulders, and who wore a round felt cap on his forceful black curls. He spoke in Arabic. ‘The Envoy from the French ship?’

  Lymond stopped. ‘I lead the gentlemen on the French ship Dauphiné, yes. Your name?’

  The felt cap moved, once. ‘It is of no matter. But thou, thou art the prince who offers gold to find a child and a woman?’

  ‘Yes. You have information?’ said Lymond.

  ‘I have more,’ said the man. Beyond an avenue of slim pillars they had lit the lamps in the courtyard: against the chevrons of flickering light his face was impassive and blank. ‘I have written word from the woman herself. What dost thou pay?’

  ‘This,’ said Lymond, and held out the ruby he slipped from his finger. ‘And all I promise if I meet her or the child, alive, as a result.’

  A moment later, he held the note in his hands.

  Once, long ago in Graham Malett’s white house on Malta, Lymond had received from Jerott’s contemptuous hands a letter written by Oonagh O’Dwyer. Do not come, had said the black, vigorous script. I do not wish to see you.

  The writing, unchanged, was still irrefutably hers. But the message this time was different. Addressed to Lymond in his full and correct name and dated the previous day—the day, thought Jerott, when, lying outwith the harbour, they had sent news of their coming to the Viceroy—it said: The day set for our meeting is coming. I am glad, for I have been very tired.… These are poor people to whom gold is small use: do not overwhelm them.… Forget the child ever lived. It has been sold, they told me; but it may be a lie: it failed a lot, they said, after the branding. I do not want you to have him. Your life has been wasted enough.… And, after a space, and written differently, as if on an impulse: I regret nothing save for that fool of a man. And anyway, what good do regrets do?

  Below, she signed her name. There was no word of fondness or of recrimination.… She must, thought Jerott, looking out of the side of his eye, have been a strange and powerful woman, this mistress of Lymond’s.

  No … not mistress. She had been that to Cormac O’Connor, who wished to be King of all Ireland, and whose dream she had lived until, spoiled and gross, Cormac had lost all his vision and lost her, finally, too. Then Lymond and she had been on opposite sides, Archie Abernethy had told him. What had brought them together was one move, coolly plotted, in some far more vital intrigue. What it had led to was this.

  She had no regrets. That was probably true. With the death of her lifelong struggle for Ireland, it must seem that little else mattered. And of the child she spoke with complete unconcern. Jerott wondered if she were a woman indifferent to children. Or one who, weighing Lymond’s life and the child’s, had made a hard choice.

  Then Lymond, looking up, said, ‘Where is she?’ and the messenger, smiling and bowing, said, ‘Dragut’s house. Dragut Rais is with the fleet; he is away. The woman waits for the Hâkim there.’ He paused. ‘The Hâkim will not wish an escort. If he will follow, there is a side door which will take us out of the palace.’

  ‘Wait a bit.’ Jerott, catching a handful of white tissue and emeralds, held Lymond back. ‘Didn’t the note say something about poor people? It doesn’t sound right. And in any case you can’t walk about the back streets like that.’

  ‘It had occurred to me,’ Lymond said, and Jerott let his hand fall. It crossed his mind to wonder why he had not been dispatched back to the harbour, and then he realized that his appearance in the courtyard, alone, would only set inquiries afoot. Also, Lymond would need his help with the woman. It further crossed his mind to wonder why he had thought it important to come in the first place.

  He kept his mouth shut while, sent off with silver, the felt-capped man returned promptly with two white, hooded burnouses, smelling strongly of goat, which he and Lymond put on. Then, stepping into the dark, noisome air, Lymond said softly, ‘She is in Dragut’s house? I know the place very well. Suppose you and Mr Blyth follow, and I choose the way.… Mr Blyth, I should warn you, has a nervous disposition and a very sharp dagger.’ And as they set off, twisting and turning through the dark, precipitous streets, Jerott thought, acidly, that a slip of that dagger, if it happened, would save Francis Crawford a large sum of money. That the thought was unworthy did not make him any less peevish.

  Dragut Rais’s Algerian palace was of marble, and set within gardens whose walls traced, in stucco, the benign injunctions of the Prophet Mohammed. Behind the blank walls no lights could be seen, and the double-leafed doors, gilded and inlaid with woods, were decisively closed. Skirting the wall for a weak place, Lymond found, somewhere, an invisible foothold and, in spite of the hampering cloth, was neatly up and over: Jerott, left below with the silent messenger, wondered sardonically how many ducats’ worth of vermilion velvet had lost its spruceness in going. From the top of the wall, Lymond’s voice said quietly, ‘There’s a light on at the back somewhere, and voices—he probably keeps a few servants, or they move in with their families, more likely, when he goes away. The main rooms seem to be empty, and the courtyards aren’t lit. Ask him where she’s supposed to be.’

  Jerott turned. It was as well that he did, for the doubled fists of the messenger, striking hard for his neck, met his shoulder instead. Jerott grunted, twisted, and grabbed.

  He was a second too late. Ducking, the felt-capped man, muscles hard, dragged himself out of that grasp and, flinging off to one side, got his balance, glanced once at Jerott, and then darted off into the darkness. After the first step, breathing hard, Jerott stayed where he was, swearing. But he could hardly leave Lymond. He looked up.

  ‘Bravo,’ said Francis Crawford, sitting crosslegged on top of the wall, his hood shaken free on his shoulders. ‘You’re a credit to the bloody Order, aren’t you? You know you’ve got a knife in your hand?’

  There was no excuse, which didn’t make it any better. Jerott said, ‘I apologize. I’ll go after him now.’

  There was a furious pause. Then Lymond’s voice, the chill gone, said, ‘Don’t be an ass, Jerott? You know I can’t do without you.’

  It was an obvious answer. But it was also something Jerott had never had from Lymond before: an apology and an appeal both at once.

  He found he had nothing to say. Instead, he pushed back his hood and, giving Lymond his hand, pulled himself up to the wall-top beside him. Then, side by side, they dropped silently into the unlit garden of Dragut Rais’s house, and methodically set about entering and searching its rooms.

  It took half an hour. Familiar with Arab houses and their lack of all but movable furnishings, Jerott was not surprised that breaking in should be simple: there was literally nothing to steal. Possessions, packed into coffers, moved from house to house with their owner: Dragut’s would be at Djerba or Prevesa or Constantinople by now. For the Viceroy had clearly been truthful, if in this respect only: Dragut Rais was not there.

  Walking through chamber after bare chamber, and skirting the dark courtyards with their rustling trees and dried and derelict fountains, Jerott tried to imagine it as it must have been in the summer, when the corsair princes sailed through their rich, sunny playground and made sport with their luxurious spoils.

  Oonagh O’Dwyer had been one of those captives: had lain perhaps by that marble basin and watched the fish play and tended her child … perhaps. Jerott had never seen Oonagh O’Dwyer, and could imagine no child of Lymond’s here.

  In the end, they did hear children’s voices, but the screeching voices of Algerine children, black-haired, filthy and raucous, swarming in one room far at the back with half a dozen half-bred Moorish women … the servants, or the families of the servants left to safeguard the property. Of menfolk there was no sign: at that hour they would have business in the lower town common to their kind, Jerott knew. Dropping softly from his viewpoint through a high, half-shuttered window, he rejoined Lymond saying, ‘Now what?’

  Just that, for there was no use in saying, What did I tell you? At the royal palace your rank had royal protection. In the street
s, perhaps, you were able to escape notice. But you are here because you were sent here … by a woman in Baden; by another woman in Lyons; by a man you have never seen before who brought you this far and then ran away. It is a trap—you and I know it’s a trap, of Gabriel’s devising; and we have no protection at all.…

  ‘That leaves the gardens,’ said Lymond. ‘Not very likely, but we’ll search them to make sure. What puzzles me is why they didn’t attack in the house, if they’re going to. They can hardly surround the whole house and garden, unless they’ve got a squadron of troops, and they’re not going to find it very easy to catch us out here in the dark. If this is all Gabriel’s doing, then it’s for some other purpose, surely, other than a simple ambush and killing.’

  Leaving the path, they moved over the soft winter grass and through a dark maze of small, hanging trees. More paths, a fountain, a paved square lined with dark tubs. Jerott barked his shin and bit back an exclamation. Lymond’s voice, even and quiet, said, ‘Unless there has been a mistake, a fault in his plans. But I can’t believe that, though I’d like to.… ’

  Before them the rest of the gardens stretched into darkness, unknown and quiet. From the house, muffled by bushes and trees, women’s voices scratched the silence, raised in anger or argument. A cat mewed, and far off, the constant, irritating barking of a dog was taken up by another, still more distant. Of the crammed, multilingual, vociferous life that lay outside this expensive, deserted oasis there was no other sound, and they could hear the wet, lukewarm wind moving the tops of the trees and blowing a dead leaf, like tinfoil, along the brick path. Jerott said, ‘There’s nothing here. If it’s a trick, it’s just the malicious one of leading us up a blind alley. That brute who ran away wouldn’t have turned his back on a fortune.’