‘Unless …’ said Lymond, ‘… Oh, bloody hell, let’s get it over with. You take that wall and I’ll take this. We’ll walk the length of the garden and compare notes at the bottom. There’s no point in sticking together anyway: if anyone attacks you in this place, you don’t fight; you run, and get back to the ship as you can. If anything strikes you as mysterious, whistle.’
‘Right.’
‘… Jerott?’
Two steps away, Jerott stood perfectly still. ‘I hear you.’
‘You sound like a schoolmaster,’ said Lymond’s voice at his ear, with a trace of its usual lightness. ‘It doesn’t matter. Go on.’
Jerott did not move. ‘What were you going to say?’
‘Something regrettable. I’ll say it; and then we can both forget it,’ said Lymond. ‘You put up with a lot, you know. More than you should. More than other people can be expected to do.… I find I need a sheet anchor against Gabriel. However much I try—don’t let me turn you against me.’
Jerott said slowly, ‘You command your own will. Otherwise I shouldn’t be here.’
‘You mean I swallowed my pride. But then, there are some things I don’t think I could stomach.… And Gabriel knows them too well.’
‘Gabriel,’ said Jerott firmly, ‘is now at Birgu, Malta, engaged in a life-and-death struggle for the Grand Mastership of the Order of St John. He is unlikely to spend a large part of his time arranging esoteric disasters for his adversaries. He is far more likely to arrange to kill them stone dead.’
‘All right. You go and get killed stone dead on that side of the garden, and I’ll stick to this,’ said Lymond. ‘Calamitosus est animus futuri anxius, or why worry about tomorrow, when your funeral is today. Goodbye.’
‘Au revoir,’ said Jerott Blyth, in stout contradiction of his own theory; and, striding off to the right, contacted the wall rather suddenly and proceeded to follow it, in cloud-muffled starlight; surveying his half of the ground as he went.
And so he was the first, in the end, to encounter Oonagh O’Dwyer … far down the garden and out of range of their whispering voices. So far off that Jerott was drawn to the place by a sound which had been inaudible where Lymond and he had stood before parting. In that disused and derelict garden, the sound of light, wind-blown fountains, playing in a large pool. Listening, Jerott turned and walked slowly towards it.
There were cypresses in the way; formal gardens sealed from the stars by wall and creeper and a hedging of palms. It was from this absolute dark that he turned a corner and saw stretching before him a study in milk-quartz and silver; a fantasy lit by the moon and the stars and a single lamp hung in the distance, an ox-eye on velvet.
It was a flower-garden, the green growing scents stirring already in the mild African winter. The pond sunk in its centre was a long one, edged by a vista of twinned silver sprays: from end to end, the spray rose like a mist and obscured the kiosk at the far end, a lacy thing hung with leaves, where the oil lamp burned quietly still.
And under the lamp, Jerott saw, a woman was sitting.
He stopped. From the rest of the garden there came no untoward sound; no voice, no footfall; no stir but the wind shaking the tree-tops and the kissing patter of water on water, nearer at hand. If Lymond was near, there was no sign of him. If this were Gabriel’s trap, it was delicately baited indeed.
His sword drawn, moving from shadow to shadow along the tall cypresses, his footfalls lost in the waterplay, Jerott advanced to the kiosk until, reaching the last of his cover, he was able to stop and study as much as the lamp showed him inside.
The little building was of great elegance: a marriage of Fez and Granada, with flowered tiles and fine marquetry and, above, a honeycomb of rose-coloured stucco like a flower-form sheathing the chamber. Inside, there was a single divan, draped and set with fine cushions, and a rug on the floor. She is not one, Archie Abernethy had once said, who has ever looked young, nor would she ever look less than beautiful. Black hair she has, you would say like a barrel of pitch; and queer, light eyes that look through you, and a neck you could put your one hand around. That is Oonagh O’Dwyer.
The woman sitting there, straight and still on the bright velvet cushions, was not young; nor was she less than beautiful. The black hair, loose and shining, and deep, fell back over her shoulder and forward down to her waist; her chin was high above the pure line of her neck, which you could have held in one hand. Her eyebrows were black, and arched in pride, or surprise, or over some deep, long-held thought; and below the black, silky lashes, the wide eyes were packed full of straw.
5
Algiers
Fighting for the Order in Malta, sub suave jugo Christi, Jerott Blyth had seen many things. He knew what man could do to man; he knew, given primitive nature and primitive provocation, what of suffering and what of brutalization and what, sometimes, of nobility could ensue.
So he turned his back on that elegant kiosk and, closing his eyes, leaned against the smooth birch-tree bark until the sickness cleared from his brain and the blackness from his sight and until the turmoil was locked hard within him.
He did not look again, after that, at that cold, lighted arbour. He sheathed his sword and whistled; and at an answering whistle, strode through the dark garden, heedless of noise, to find Francis Crawford.
Lymond stood, a taut shadow on some dim, arcaded path, and said, ‘What?’ sharply as Jerott appeared. Then as Jerott, breathing hard, suddenly found himself speechless, the other man soundlessly joined him. In the dark, he could not read Jerott’s face. But he said, as if he had, ‘Lead on. I’ll follow you.’
The pond this time was not a vista but a panorama, laid out before them, with the kiosk in profile on their left. Faced with the sparkling garden; the pool, the plash of live water against the shadowy trees and the mellow, innocent light from the tiny kiosk, Lymond stopped and Jerott stood with him.
Lymond said, ‘It’s all right: you don’t have to tell me. She is in the kiosk. And dead.’ His face in the strange silver light was neither full of pain nor distraught. He had expected it, Jerott realized. He had braced himself hard against death; and for the reality, he was quite unprepared. Jerott spoke, his voice steady. ‘She is more than dead, Francis. If I thought you would do it, I would beg you to go without seeing her.’
Lymond said, ‘What has he done?’ but under his breath: he did not want or wait for an answer. Nor did he hurry. Rooted, by a kind of desperate courtesy, to the grass where he was standing, Jerott watched the other man walk down alone, fair hair ghostly against the ctesiphon pattern of water, towards the softly lit room at the end.
Lymond had undipped and dropped the dark cloak, and on his shoulders the Viceroy’s tissue fell straight and flat, the emeralds distantly sparkling. Jerott saw him check, violently, at what must have been his first glimpse of the woman within. Then he recovered, and walked steadily on to stand, nearer than Jerott had done, full in the light of the lamp. But, like Jerott, a moment’s glance was all he could bear; and then he closed his hands over his face.
For a long time he stood there, the yellow hair laced over his taut fingers; as still as the queenly, naked simulacrum of the lovely woman who had been Oonagh O’Dwyer. Then Lymond moved; and suddenly, with all his force, swung round a fist in a gesture which even at that distance conveyed a fury of abomination. The lamp, swept from its perch, crashed to the floor of the kiosk, and darkness fell on the grove.
The fountains hissed. Moving forward a step, Jerott could see nothing now in that chill pleasure-house, nor could he detect any movement to hint what Francis Crawford might do. His voice quiet, Jerott called. ‘Francis … if you want something done, let me do it.’
‘I have done it,’ said Lymond. And came towards and past Jerott with the swift, easy walk which was one of his attributes; tailored shoulders outlined against a new, orange light, freshly born, which flickered, gained strength, pounced and weaved its way up from the floor of the kiosk and finally fastened, sparkling and avid
, on its food.
Jerott could not follow at first. Instead, numb and unmoving, he stood and watched the fire of the other man’s making: watched it seize on the wood and the fabric, on the black hair and on the stuff of the couch. The feet flared, and the hands buckled like gloves in her lap. But before leaving Francis had cast about Oonagh O’Dwyer’s shoulders, in the darkness his white and miniver cloak. All the rest of her it concealed, as the emeralds, blackening, cracked and fell and the white fur, smoking, turned yellow and brown.
Jerott turned away then. Only once, as the whole pavilion caught and blazed like a jewel in the night, he looked back and saw the fur gone and the woman’s body translucent as a beautiful lamp; eyes and mouth circles of fire in the hollow rind of the face. Then Jerott choked aloud and, wheeling, launched himself with all the power in his legs after the man in whose living arms she had once lain.
Later, Jerott Blyth was to realize that Lymond for a short time forgot he existed: that, leaving the fire he had kindled with that hideous lamp, he had walked straight back through the garden and up to the house, had hammered on the door and had burst without pausing into the occupied room among the women and children. At the time, racing anxiously through the garden, whistling and calling, Jerott heard the screams and, avoiding the house, found and climbed one of the perimeter walls and walked along it, scanning the street. He sensed, more than saw, the dark movement far along the same wall when Lymond, at its extremity, came to scale and drop over it and then, moving fast, vanished into a mesh of black alleys in the opposite direction. Balancing in his turn, Jerott jumped; and then, running lightly and fast, set himself grimly to follow.
Once before, under the bright sun of Malta, this merciless race had been run. Then Jerott, overtaking the man he disliked and mistrusted, had prevented Lymond from making the journey which might have kept Oonagh O’Dwyer out of Dragut Rais’s hands. Running now; following those faint, echoing footsteps through tunnel and archway, round courtyard and market, Jerott wondered whether, coming fresh from her pyre, he was offering Francis Crawford yet another disservice, or not.
The night had cleared. Within the white walls of the wealthy came voices, and the muted sounds of a pipe: courtyard trees above the flat roofs glimmered, lamplit, and children chattered and cried. In the souks, men sat on the beaten earth, half naked, or coarsely shirted, or robed, and talked, moving their hands, or slept, or played endless games, traced in the mud. Tethered mules, waiting patiently, turned over the nameless rubbish heaped in the dirt; goats, jostling through with their herdboy, blocked him for two precious minutes as, slowed to a walk to avoid raised voices and stares, Jerott followed the swift figure ahead.
Coming into the crowded ways of the lower town, Lymond had been slowed, too. There was no way of knowing whether he knew where he was, or where he was going: but Jerott saw that, forcing his way through the alleys, he made some effort at least not to invite trouble: the dark cloak, retrieved from the garden, hid his hair and his clothes and protected him from a degree of attention.
It also made it harder, coming into the darker souks where the thatched and wood-strutted houses, leaning over the lane, met in a black vault above, for Jerott to see and keep him in sight. By the same token, cloaked and concealed, both he and Jerott had lost their rank and their international immunity. As an envoy of France, in a country friendly to France, Lymond was nearly untouchable. Tonight, alone in these streets, his death would be a regrettable accident convenient to many, and a triumph to some, with no blame attached. Thinking, meantime, only of that, and of the need to be at the other man’s side, Jerott quickened his pace. Behind him, someone else did the same.
Now the alleys were less crowded and darker. Ahead, a lantern hung from a fig tree gleamed momentarily on Lymond’s face as he swung round a corner: hurrying after, Jerott saw the lamp lit the court of a mosque and above, oddly confiding and close, the mellow voice of the muezzin gave sudden utterance, calling the faithful to prayer, and was taken up, like a bird-call, near and far through the minarets of the city. Stumbling up the next precipitous alley, Jerott did not look back, and the man behind him did not look up at all.
It was just beyond that, where the long, blank wall of a mosque or a college skirted the souk, that Jerott first realized that not one but several pairs of bare feet moved behind in the darkness. On his left a closed door clicked, for no reason, and then yawned open, emptily. And ahead and above there were other sounds; common sounds at uncommon levels.
Imperceptibly, Jerott’s right hand found the hilt of his sword and eased it, ready to draw from its scabbard. He had time to do that, and to see that Lymond, lost nearly to view, was pursuing his road apparently free and quite unmolested, when, in a sudden scamper, his assailants were on him.
In the dark, there seemed a great many. Prepared, he hurled himself sideways to miss some of the cudgels: the rest took him on his shoulders and back, but left his sword-arm undamaged: the blade, as he brought it up, flinging back the hampering cloth, glittered under the moon.
They had not expected cold steel. As he cut, blindly, and felt the blade bite, the staves continued to strike him, but not at close quarters: there had been a recoil he could feel, checked by a man’s hissing command in Arabic.
The voice seemed familiar. For a moment, fending off breathlessly with knee and dagger and elbow, twisting, wrenching, and dragging free to swing and slash with the two-sided blade, Jerott could make no chance to turn. When he did, it was to look into the black swarthy face of the man who had brought Oonagh O’Dwyer’s letter.
Then, for the first time, retreating quickly; stumbling back uphill, his head ringing, his arms aching, bearing with him a swarm of silent attackers, Jerott Blyth took breath and called Lymond’s name. Then, back to the wall, he prayed briefly, from habit; and from habit fought, as years in the Order had taught him to fight, against the Saracen; against impossible odds.
It seemed unlikely that Lymond would hear him, and if he did, in the violent pendulum of that night’s events, that he would understand, or even care. That he did come was perhaps as much an automatic response as Jerott’s. He came in the only way possible, running unseen along the white wall and dropping hard on the mêlée, his sword already driving through the dark press of bodies; his left arm, furled in his burnous, up and taking their blows.
He felled two men with the impact and killed the third who came at him, brushing his side with his club. Then, as Jerott deflected the blow of a fourth, Lymond used the second’s respite to drive his blade, twice, through the scrambling men at his feet. Jerott, his own hands more than full, saw him offer his bared head to the sweep of a cudgel as he tugged, freeing his sword; but the blow when it came flung the striker on his side in the alley, impaled on that hungry blade. Then Lymond, at Jerott’s side, faced his two remaining assailants.
One of them, with a muttered exclamation, broke away and, turning, ran into the darkness. The other, ignoring his prayers, Lymond also ran through.
On a sobbing breath, Jerott started to talk, pointing after the running dark figure. Lymond said, ‘I know. I saw him,’ and smiled. Then he had gone, leaving behind him the smell of fresh blood from his clothes.
In the alley it was very quiet. Whoever had noticed the incident, lights remained out and shutters were closed. On the ground in the dim starlight the fallen shapes might have been those of ewes resting, their jaws moving softly, thought Jerott with sudden stupid incongruity, after nightfall in a green Scottish field. Only in the silence a man’s voice suddenly began to pray as he had prayed, but in Arabic; and was as suddenly cut off. Jerott could not see whose it was.
It had not occurred to him to go after Lymond and the running man who had been their felt-capped messenger of Dragut Rais’s house. He was very sore, for one thing; and breathless; and the man who had carried out this piece of butchery, single-handed and scatheless, was a stranger to him. So he waited; but not very long; for presently Lymond returned, with two mules; their hooves clicking up the s
tony mud of the souk. The felt-capped man sat on one of them. He was not bound, which didn’t matter, as he could not, Jerott noticed, have walked. Lymond said, ‘Are you hurt?’
It was an inquiry aimed merely at resolving how he, Jerott, was to be placed on the mule. Jerott said, ‘I’m all right,’ and watched Lymond mount behind the dark, thickset man. The man said nothing but Jerott, mounting slowly himself, saw his face twitch as the mule moved into motion. Jerott said, ‘Where are we going?’
He did not expect a reply: it had been like addressing the thousand-year stones of a broch, a longhouse, a settlement laid suddenly bare by cold, sea-sucked sand and having, edgily, the form of house, hearth and dear human practices in its long-decayed stones. Then Lymond said, succinctly, ‘There’s a postern up there, and a path leading up to the hills. When Dragut left, the unwanted slaves were sold off, with most of the babies. The promising ones go in part-tribute to the Sublime Porte. The young in the next échelon are farmed out to learn hardship and Turkish and grow up to be good little Moslems. And the sick and the feeble go to whoever thinks he can flog a day’s work out of them. I found out at Dragut’s house where …’
His voice died of its own accord on the unspoken name. The little mule’s feet, trampling steadily onwards, pocked the brief silence. Jerott said, ‘Where she’d been taken when Dragut left? Oh, I see. And where she wrote that letter from, of course. She was … she was brought back to Dragut’s garden after that. I imagine Dragut himself would be told nothing of what happened then. Have you found out … was it Gabriel’s doing?’
Ahead, clear in the moonlight, was the double town wall, with the postern. A little gold, Jerott knew, would see them easily through it. Reined in for a moment the two mules stood quietly, side by side, and one of them tossed, irritably, the frayed rope which stood it as reins. ‘Yes,’ said Lymond.
There was only his voice to go on: the resumed burnous covered other men’s blood on his clothes and also shadowed his face. Jerott said, ‘Before we go … if you mean to go through with this, Francis; for Christ’s sake, there’s no stopping. You’d better make up your mind now whether you can sustain it or not.’
Pawn in Frankincense Page 10