‘The moment of her death was that moment, cleaner than the death of old age. What happened later was nothing to Oonagh. Where would you have found her a grave? What dignity did she have that was not of the spirit? What happened later was aimed not at her, but at you. And you are now doing precisely what Gabriel meant you to do.’
She paused. ‘There is a saying. ‘O Bhikshu! empty this boat! If emptied, it will go quickly. Having cut off passion and hatred, thou wilt go to Nirvâna.’ It is not a time for emotion. You are facing east, and you cannot fight the East with emotion; only with your brain and your soul.’
The lamp flickered. Motionless in the gathering darkness, his head pressed against the doorpost, his face turned fully away, he gave no sign whether her words had reached him. Whether he did not choose to speak, or found speech physically impossible, no one could have told. The silence dragged on. Breaking it, eventually, herself, Marthe said quietly, ‘Your other problem, of course, is myself. You won’t solve that either, by dismissing me as if I had never existed. You may consider that you are sending me ashore in my own interests, but I put it to you that you are not. I am prepared to risk my life by staying. You must find the manhood to allow me to stay.’
Lymond straightened. Turning his head until the bruised, heavy blue eyes looked into the blue eyes of Marthe, he said, ‘Who are you?’ His voice was exhausted.
Marthe’s, cool and articulate, did not alter at all. ‘My name is Marthe.’
‘What is your other name?’
‘The name of my father.’
‘And who is your father?’
The slender, strongly made shoulders sketched a shrug. ‘Who knows? He had no ship and no money; or if he had, he found better employment for both than in looking for me. Like your son, I am a bastard.’
‘No, my dear,’ said Lymond. ‘Forgive me.… But I think you are a bastard like nobody else.’ And brushing past her, he walked up into the solitary deck of the poop.
When the longboat came from Strozzi requesting his passenger, he sent it back empty.
He stayed alone on the poop for a long time, and it was nearly dawn when, moving carefully, he walked down to his cabin. It was no surprise to find Salablanca there. Lymond said, ‘Tell the master in the morning we are not going to Malta. He is to make straight for Djerba instead.’ And walking past the slumbering Jerott, rolled on to his own neatly made bunk, and was still.
7
Bône and Monastir
In these tart waters, there came to the Dauphiné a spring Jerott Blyth was never to forget.
They were no longer travelling direct to Constantinople, but instead following the track of an unknown child in a journey which might take them anywhere. And now they knew that, step by step, they had to expect direct opposition on Gabriel’s behalf.
Summoning them all to the tabernacle on the day after that encounter with Leone Strozzi, Francis Crawford had made sure there was no misunderstanding about that, and had given them all, once more, a chance to withdraw from the voyage.
None had taken it. Marthe and Gaultier, Jerott supposed, had business interests they could pursue in the Levant, whatever the fate of the spinet. Onophrion perhaps had not yet given up hope of seeing his new master disembark, groomed and painted at the Golden Horn in the tournure so carefully furnished. And he, Jerott, remained for some reasons he knew, and some he would not admit to himself.
Lymond did not make it easy. His dry voice during that meeting still rang, on occasion, in Jerott’s head. ‘I suggest, if you come with me, that you remove from your minds the image of a live human child. We are going to be brought literally hundreds of these, now the size of the reward is known. We are going, if I know Gabriel, to be shown disease and poverty and young children in distress unimaginable. If you are coming, Jerott, you must recognize that nothing can be done for these. They can’t eat money. We can supply them with food for one meal and medicine for one day and it will do nothing but spin out their misery by those few hours longer.…
‘We are looking for one object, which happens to be the key to Graham Malett’s destruction. That is all.’
‘If that is all,’ had said Jerott, ‘why look for it at all?’
‘Now that,’ Lymond had said, ‘is a very good point. I seem to remember making it myself, in fact, last night. Mlle Marthe persuaded me differently. That is why I am now warning you all, Mlle Marthe included, against sentimentality. We are looking for a pawn. And if we succeed in taking it, Gabriel’s pride will be pledged, wherever he is, in attempting to recover it. That attempt, I trust, he will not survive.’
Silent so far, Onophrion Zitwitz had raised his sonorous voice. ‘On what,’ he had asked, ‘does a child of one year endeavour to feed?’
‘Does it matter?’ Jerott Blyth had said bitterly.
The days that followed, Jerott passed in the routine concerns of the voyage, in perfecting with Lymond and Salablanca what he already had of Arabic and of Turkish; and in drinking.
To Lymond’s single disparaging comment on this last, he had answered without civility. ‘I’ve had enough of obedience, chastity, sobriety and poverty. Other men are not frigid, Francis.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Lymond. ‘If you find this whole project unbearably irritating, there is not the slightest reason why you should stay. What else do you find so inflaming? Marthe?’
In spite of himself, Jerott grinned. ‘There’s a girl who hates the sight of you.’
‘She hates, if you notice, anything masculine. I can only recommend that you don’t allow yourself to be drawn to her. And that you either stop drinking, or leave.’
Jerott said nothing until the indifferent gaze, returning, rested on him. Then he said, ‘Do you mean that?’
‘Yes,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘I mean it. And you can disregard any other conversations we have had on this subject. If you’re desperate for women, you can disembark and buy a Berber slut with a ring through her nose, to the spoil of kissing, tomorrow. No doubt you’ll find it easy to buy a quick passage home.’
High on his cheekbones, the blood stained Jerott’s skin. But he said caustically, ‘I think I might succeed in controlling my ravening hunger. But if I want to drink, I’ll drink, Francis; whether it pleases you or not. If you want me off, put me off. Otherwise, you’ll just have to put up with it, won’t you?’ And he walked out.
Their first official stop was at Bone, although they put off a skiff at Cape Tedele and at Gigeri. The peculiar difficulty of this search was so obvious that it needed no stressing. Apart from Algiers and Bône and one or two others, the rest of the harbours on this coast were closed to them, because they had been taken back by the Emperor in the fighting of the last two or three years, and now came under the Crown of Castile. And the Emperor, of course, was the sworn enemy of France. So Susa, Monastir, Mehedia, the fort of Calibia and most of Tunis itself were out of bounds to the Dauphiné. The only harbours she could frequent were those which paid tribute to Algiers. And from there, undetected if possible, the investigation would have to be prosecuted inland to the forbidden towns under Spain.
They had one clue: the camel-trader Ali-Rashid. That he had gone through Bône all these weeks ago Salablanca had discovered on these quiet shore-going visits, along the dunes and sandy cliffs east of Algiers. One moonlit evening off Tigzirt, Jerott had gone part of the way with him, drawn by the silvered Roman pillars standing above the sand, and had found himself wading ashore through the streets of the drowned city of Iomnium, with weeded carving pricking his fingers, and phosphorescent life rolling in clouds of green fire under sculptured black arches. It was there, in the lee of the mountains, that Salablanca heard that the trader had passed through, after Dragut had gone, in the autumn. It was a cold trail they were following.
It was there, too, that Jerott, in vinous and melancholy solitude on the aft deck at night, saw Marthe slipping in from the sea, her robe incandescent in the moon, and her hair fronding her shoulders like the dark weeds of Iomnium. ‘Salablanca
told me. I had to see it,’ she said. ‘Look.’ And she opened her hands.
Blurred by the abrasive seas and disfigured with molluscs, a grey, once-marble cupid lay in her palms, its wings honeycombed, its eyes hollow and vacant. Her own, staring at it, had lost all remembrance of herself: her breathless young eagerness was something Jerott remembered once in Francis Crawford, before the years of disenchantment ground it away. ‘So the sea, at least, will yield you its delights,’ Jerott said. ‘I thought you were perhaps like the Sarmates, who might not lie with a man till they had first killed one in battle.’
Like a rippling conch in the moonlight, her fingers closed fast on their prize. ‘Must you spoil it? Must you spoil everything?’ she said. And turning abruptly in her dark runnels of wet, was instantly gone.
Jerott stayed, with the explicit intention of finding a new flask of wine and emptying it, before he went down below.
The Cadi at Bône was a renegade Christian, who sent them bread, roast mutton and the regrettable speciality of the area, macolique, or platters of paste, meal, onions and bony pullets in sauce. Onophrion, receiving them, shrank a little and disappeared while Lymond was effusively thanking the Cadi’s emissary: they never saw the platter again.
Next day, while Lymond made his ceremonial call at the Cadi’s house, Jerott and Salablanca interviewed two hundred children between them.
Bône, standing lop-sided on high, ragged rocks, had in its time been a great corsair port, and had still a good fortress and harbour, a fine mosque to which the Cadi’s house was attached, and the broken ruins on the foreshore of the great city of Hippo. In two sackings, the town itself had shrunk to three hundred poor houses, but there were good wells on the lower, southern side of the town and fertile ground just outside it. No one in Bône was starving though none, as they stood in their robes, black and white, brown and striped; in the thick, carpet-like textures of the desert, and the muslin of the Cadi’s officials, showed the untroubled bloom of high-spirited health.
The people of Tedele had been gay, Salablanca had told them. The people who thronged the quayside at Bône as Salablanca began to shepherd them to the site he and Jerott had chosen were anxious, vociferous, sarcastic, aggressive, derisive, beseeching and, some of them, silent. Among the last were the women who accompanied their menfolk, heads folded in cotton, eyes downcast above the yaşmak. Jerott, grim-faced, found he had no words for the women. It was Salablanca, walking firmly among them, who was saying gently over and over, ‘There will be money; it is so. The Efendi is just. Bring your children over here. The children will be examined over here.…’
All along the coast from Algiers, Salablanca had spread the word. And long before that, carried by the fishing-boats and the raiders, Lymond’s message had reached the Barbary coast. A yellow-haired, blue-eyed child named Khaireddin, born in Djerba the previous spring to a black-haired giáur taken prisoner from Gozo by Dragut Rais, and bearing his brand, was sought, said the message, by a Christian Efendi who would pay gold for delivery of the unquestioned child to him, alive.
And to that, since, had been added the scraps of knowledge they had. That in Djerba the child had been nursed by a negress called Kedi in the harem ruled by Dragut Rais’s mistress Güzel. That from Djerba, child and mother had been taken to Algiers, where both had been sold on Dragut’s departure for Prevesa in the autumn. And that before the mother’s death, the child had been sold, through one Shakib, to Ali-Rashid the camel-trader.
But that last, Jerott knew, had not been made public. And, looking around him in the open space they had chosen, far from where the Dauphiné lay berthed, he wondered how much of the original message had been understood. Children abounded. Piccolo to the bass stridencies of protest and acclaim by their sires, children cried and laughed, screamed and whimpered. Under the mild, grey sky scraps of bare flesh rolled and crawled and staggered among the swathed and sheeted adults: flesh coloured from grey-white to coffee; flesh supine in bundles and baskets or across sheeted knees; flesh ragged-shirted and mobile. Lured by the incense of silver, families had crossed the mountains, by mule or donkey or camel, to deliver their offering. Others, infected by the disease of excitement, had snatched up a child that morning from tent or hut or the bare sand itself, and brought it boldly to show. The two hundred children now being brought to Jerott and Salablanca, one by one, ranged from the shadowy head and curved plastic limbs of the infant to the firm walking toddler, shouting in Arabic; the dark hair curling over his infested dark skin.
Jerott had been afraid it would be impossible. It was not. All but eighteen of these children had dark hair. And of the three fair-haired boys with blue eyes, only one was remotely near the right age.
It was wrapped in rags in a woman’s arms, and lay staring unseeing, its blond skin flaccid and its breathing shallow and harsh. Jerott said, ‘This child is sick. What is its name, and where was it born?’
‘It was born in Djerba, Efendi. I have nursed him for Dragut Rais himself, and the great lord had him branded. See!’ And bending, the woman turned back the rags.
His guts rising within him, Jerott looked at the raw and glistening flesh thus revealed. ‘When was that done?’
‘In October, Efendi. Before Dragut Rais left.’ Her brows, drawing together as she closed the child’s covering over its wound, were as fair as the baby’s.
Jerott said gently, ‘If the Imám here allows it, wilt thou unveil?’
She was frightened. The blue eyes flickered from Jerott to Salablanca and back. ‘Wherefore, unveil?’
‘It is for the child,’ said Jerott. Without looking at it, he could hear the sawing tick of its breath.
‘It is for the money? The child will have money if I unveil?’
Forgetful of all Lymond had said, Jerott opened his lips. It was Salablanca who spoke, with stern compassion. ‘He can have none if thou wilt not.’
She would have needed little persuasion anyway, Jerott supposed. It was already unseemly that alone she had come and spoken with men, and infidels moreover. But there were no tears on her face, which was fair and heavy and comely, and the exact print of the child’s. Again, Salablanca said what had to be said. ‘Alas! It is the son of a black-haired giáur woman we seek. Thou hast a fine boy: see to him.’ And, bending, he assisted Jerott to rise, with an iron hand round his arm, and with that same grip, murmuring apology in Spanish under his breath, he drew Jerott from the place.
The crowd, disappointed, ran alongside them as they returned to the ship, and but for the Imám, sent for at first light that morning, they might have had more trouble than they did. The fair-haired woman and the baby, lost in the swirl, Jerott did not catch sight of again.
It was not Salablanca’s fault. His rush of urgent apologies Jerott brushed aside when they were installed once more aboard; but he could not discuss it with Onophrion or the Gaultiers except for conveying, curtly, that he had been unsuccessful. Jerott sat stiff-necked in his cabin and was unaware of time passing until he looked up and saw Lymond, returned, before him, his jewels dimly sparkling in the seeping of late afternoon light; and heard him say dryly, ‘My apologies, Jerott. Next time I shall do it myself.’ And walking forward, as he flung his cap on the bed and began to untie his pale doublet, Lymond added, ‘You’re sober. Was it so bad?’
Jerott spoke with the raw gristle of his throat. ‘They are mutilating the children.’
‘They mutilated one child. Now they know it is unacceptable, they won’t do it again. You understand, Jerott, that if we pay these people anything, there will be a thousand children at the next station, and half of them wilfully injured?’
‘I understand it all,’ said Jerott. ‘Since you won’t fight face to face, you and Gabriel are using children as weapons. Or is that sentimental?’
‘It is sweeping, certainly,’ said Lymond. ‘I suggest you either try to forget it, or apply your mind to it properly.’ He pulled another, plain tunic over his head, picked up his belt and said, ‘I have traced Ali-Rashid to a village j
ust south of Monastir. The quickest way from here is to ride. The Dauphiné will sail on to Pantelleria tomorrow and hover off Monastir, and then Djerba, waiting. You can go with her. Salablanca and I shall of course be ostensibly on board, but in fact we shall go ashore here before dawn. There are horses bought ready: we are joining a group of pilgrims and traders.’
Jerott said, ‘There is no need for another summons of children if Ali-Rashid has the baby?’
His weariness barely disguised, Lymond answered him. ‘Jerott. We are the puppets, and we are being encouraged to dance. If Ali-Rashid possesses that child, it will be under circumstances of distress and humiliation every bit as deliberate as today’s. There is no room on this journey for the sensitive flower. I have said this before. The boy is a pawn. The piece we must take is Gabriel.’
It was not a large caravan which left Bône at dawn the next day going east: perhaps a hundred in all, of all nationalities, mounted on mules, on small Arab horses, on camels, with sumpter-animals following, and a small escort of Janissaries. Their business and their destinations were diverse: they travelled together for one purpose only: safety. You did not travel in ones and twos on the Barbary coast.
Despite all he had said, Jerott joined it. In plain dark frieze, like Lymond’s, and accompanied by Salablanca, with some food, a goatskin flask and essential clothes in their saddlebags, he mounted the horses Salablanca had bought for them and in the semi-dark, with none to challenge their identity, they rode out of Bône and through the melon-patches, the date palms and the fig trees that grew darkly around it.
‘You speak Italian. We are a Venetian botanical party,’ was all Lymond had said. And when a dark-skinned figure reined in beside him and began asking questions, Jerott did speak Italian, and signalled, elaborately, for Salablanca to translate. Himself, he had no need to wait for a translation. ‘The signor’s brother rides at the head of the column,’ was what the stranger was saying. ‘Does the signor not wish to join him?’
Pawn in Frankincense Page 15