Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  If it was true, they might have broken Gabriel’s prearranged train of progress, provided they got to the child quickly enough. If it wasn’t true, they were abandoning Francis, along with the waiting-post, and walking straight into an ambush.

  Faced with this logic, Marthe had merely raised her slim shoulders indifferently. ‘You must, of course, do as you please,’ she had remarked. ‘But I really think, through all these years, that Mr Crawford has learned to take care of himself. I am sure his unique sense of domestic responsibility will impel him, unswerving, to trace us wherever we go.’

  Which was precisely the kind of bitchy remark, thought Jerott furiously, that Lymond himself would have made.

  In the end, Jerott chose the moderate course. He travelled alone because he would not allow their waiting-post to be abandoned. Salablanca and Marthe remained there: Marthe wild with impatience and Salablanca smiling, unmoved. The bulk of the money, well hidden, stayed with them while Jerott, carrying only enough for his needs, mounted his horse and rode east, into high spring and the enemy-held territory of Mehedia.

  Soon, these flat plains would lie exhausted again under the dusk-drinking lions of summer. Now Jerott rode past green hedges and plane and pomegranate trees and date palms, through olive groves and by fields sprouting with barley and wheat. Wild mignonette sprang among the thistles between the cracked marble stones of some forgotten Roman-built path and the blue of cornflowers and wild lupin and hyacinth hazed the long grass. In the villages there was milk to be had from the pale, full-bellied cows, and honey like muslin, eaten beneath the blossoming orange trees in an orchard where the scent fed the senses like the threshold pleasures of love. And Jerott, who had wished to be alone for his own sake as well as for Lymond’s, closed his eyes as he sat under the orange trees, and prayed for Francis Crawford, who did not recognize love, and for himself, who did.

  Presently through the olive trees, said to bear the name of God on every leaf, he saw as he rode the rocky peninsula with the walled town of Mehedia on his left. Then the olives gave way to low green bushes, fat and glossy, rich with rotten fish and oil cake and lascivious feeding as Marthe had described them. Jerott rode through the grove of white mulberries, and past the rows of thatched rearing-houses, and began to pursue an altogether spurious line of inquiry, gently, from farmhouse to farm, about the purchase of soufflons for inexpensive, waste silk.

  The silk-farmer who had presented the unhatched eggs to the Bektashi dervish was a Syrian, turbaned, round-faced and brown-haired—an amiable man, with several robed wives and a cheerful parcel of brown-skinned slaves who gathered round, white teeth smiling, until he cuffed them away.

  It was Jerott’s fourth farm, and it had cost him half an hour of careful talk over dried figs and raisins and a dish of little eggs cooked in saffron to identify it as the one he was seeking. Standing in the warm sheds, looking at the tiered wicker trays of black worms rustling, rustling as they ate their way through the young green mulberry shoots, he shaped the conversation with infinite patience. To take and conceal another man’s possessions, even if these were only a black woman and a child too young to work, was something for which the Syrian might pay bitterly in money and in the crudest physical maltreatment. It was not an admission to be made lightly to strangers.

  The insects fed. Unremittingly, day and night, from the forty meals of their first day of life, they would feed, these grubs little more than an aphid in size. Soon their first skin would be cast, feet, skull, jaws and teeth discarded in husk, and the revealed worm, wrinkled and pale, would fall to eating again. As the farmer talked, children, dark-haired and quiet, moved in and out between the piled ranks of trays with reeded baskets of leaves, gently sprinkling each shelf, or, sheltering a little wisp of dry, burning straw, coaxed the lethargic to appetite in its warmth. ‘They be light witted and shy, and noise doth offend them,’ said the farmer. ‘Therefore it is becoming to live softly among them. They see nothing, and move little, yet for twenty centuries, it is said, from the time of the Flowery Kingdom, they have lived to serve man.’

  ‘Your children are quiet,’ Jerott said.

  ‘They are tired,’ said the farmer. ‘Each day the leaves must be gathered and the grub must be satisfied day and night, and kept warm, and rats and mice frightened away. Then when it has entered its hammock, its florette, and, after reposing, has spun, the vigil begins. There is little sleep at such times. Without children it could not be done.’

  ‘Grown slaves sleep less than children,’ said Jerott.

  ‘They cost more.’ Emerging from the dusk of the huts, Jerott found the clear air of the desert above the darkening mulberry trees already tinged with the carmine of sunset. Pausing in his walk, just outside the white walls of the farmhouse, he said, ‘I have a kindness to beg. I would pay thee the price of six adult slaves for one child of thine, with his nurse.’

  The farmer stopped. ‘Thou sayest?’

  Jerott met the honey-brown eyes. ‘I speak not as merchant, but as brother to brother. There is a Christian bereft of his heart, a fair son taken from him in mischief and left with the Bedouin. To any caring for the boy and his nurse, my friend would give gold, and would exchange honest silence.’

  The farmer glanced round. In the deepening twilight, the awakened scents of leaf and blossom stirred like the promise of food in the nostrils and the white acid of jasmine struck the lungs. There was no one near. The farmer said, ‘Thou art no merchant?’

  ‘I am from France. From the Dauphiné, bound for Stamboul,’ said Jerott quietly. A life for a life. To place himself in this man’s power was the only way he possessed to purchase his confidence. ‘The child is a year old or more, and is branded. The nurse, Kedi, is black.’

  There was a long pause. ‘And this child,’ said the farmer at length. ‘This child, if he were found: what would his destiny be?’

  ‘A painted roof over his head; a silk carpet under his foot; a rich man’s clothes on his back and a rich man’s food in his belly,’ said Jerott. ‘For your children, when I have him, there would be the same.’

  A smile, reluctant and wry in the dark, overspread the silk-breeder’s face. ‘You speak of my jewel; soft, tender, delicate, the brother of angels and lustrous in beauty as the golden-skinned moon. The child is mine, and his slave: she spins in Mehedia, in my sister’s house, and has care of the child until he may be taken to train.… In what way, Efendi, didst thou say thy friend, receiving his son, would remember his servant?’

  ‘In five hundred ducats of gold,’ said Jerott. ‘And in his unsurpassed gratitude.’

  ‘Come,’ said the farmer. He opened the door of his house and, in the golden light of the threshold, called for a lantern and for a boy to saddle Jerott’s horse and his own. ‘The gates of Mehedia will be closing. Come with me, and I will take you to them tonight.’

  He talked, pleasantly, on all the short journey to the high, sand-coloured walls of Mehedia. In his sister’s house the white cocoons of raw silk came to be finally stored: all the cocoons save those whose life-cycle was allowed to perfect itself on the farm. On the farm, in careful small numbers, the creamy silk moth was allowed to break through to life after all its endeavours, destroying the floss of its capsule. On one spot it was born—the great awakening, the psyche of the Greeks. On the same spot, unmoving, it mated. On the same spot, two days later, it died.

  ‘You kill them?’ asked Jerott. Above, the battlements were printed black against the great stars of the sky and, faintly, he could hear the small, familiar sounds of well-jointed armour, and the voices of the watch, conversing quickly in Spanish. ‘Poor servants of man.’

  ‘Would a Believer kill?’ said the farmer; and Jerott, reminded by the reproof in his voice, cursed himself for forgetting. ‘We are the garden, say the Bektashi. The rose is in us. Every live thing, once given in birth, is deserving of life. The silk moth is born. It has no organs of nutrition. In two days, therefore, it dies.… Here are the gates of Mehedia. Enter, and claim thy friend
’s son.’

  At precisely that moment, Francis Crawford came slowly through the olive trees to the village where he had left Jerott, Marthe and Salablanca, and drew rein outside the headman’s house.

  Before the little horse stopped moving, Salablanca was at his side. Taking her time, Marthe noted, with interest, that the management was sun-blistered and saddle-stiff but evidently quite unmolested, although his clothes were stained and grimy with dust. Leaning against the doorpost, ‘Return of the migrant. You could do with oiling and anting,’ she said.

  ‘I could do, in fact, with sanding and scouring,’ Lymond said. ‘If you care to lay a tub of any known liquid within one hundred yards, I’ll absorb it by suction. Where’s Jerott?’

  Salablanca, unsaddling, called a horse-boy to look after the footsore little mare and entering the house began, with his magical softness, to fulfil all Lymond’s needs. Marthe, coming in too, shook down her hair from her cap and perched on a stool, watching. ‘He has gone to catch butterflies. You reached the Bedouin?’

  ‘Yes. Eventually.’ Standing in his hose and soaked shirt, he drank, acrobatically, from the water-jug as from a porrón and upended what was left, with majesty, over his head. Marthe said, ‘No child?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Lymond. Crosslegged on the floor, his tangled hair dripping over one eye, he broke up a small cake of bread and drew towards him the bowl of rice and lamb Salablanca had brought him. ‘Plenty of children. But rather short of the right number of features and limbs. He had chosen a family with the pox.’

  ‘Leprosy?’ Salablanca, stopping, said it in Spanish.

  ‘No, the pox. But the effects look much the same. I saw every one before they told me the nurse had run away with the boy.… It’s all right. I was careful. I won’t infect you,’ he added, to Marthe.

  ‘I do not worry. I rely on your heroism,’ said Marthe. ‘You remind me of Surya. In two of his hands he held waterlilies; the third blessed, and with the fourth he encouraged his worshippers.’

  ‘As a leaf is swept away by a torrent, so you will be conquered by my omnipotent goodness.… Where is Jerott?’ Irritatingly, he would not respond to her jibes. From his face she could learn nothing, except that he was a little fine drawn with sleeplessness and lack of regular food. She said, ‘Where’s Ali-Rashid?’

  ‘Ali-Rashid is dead,’ said Lymond sharply; and Salablanca spoke quickly. ‘Señor Blyth went to try and trace the little one at a silk-farm. A dervish directed us to a village outside Mehedia.’

  Lymond had stopped crumbling bread. ‘He went alone? When?’

  ‘Alone, yes. This afternoon, señor.’

  ‘It’s quite close, and perfectly safe,’ said Marthe. ‘And unlike Christians, Bektashis do tell the truth.’

  ‘Some of it,’ said Lymond. ‘It was a Bektashi dervish who stopped me outside the Bedouin camp and told me the same. It’s still Gabriel’s circuit. Jerott’s just cut across two of the stages, that’s all.’

  He stopped only to change before setting off again, on a fresh horse, with both Marthe and Salablanca this time beside him. It took them a good part of the evening to find the right farm, and then to learn that the stranger who had called that afternoon had gone to visit the silk-farmer’s sister in Mehedia. ‘There was a boy the gentleman wanted to buy,’ said the old man who received them. ‘A young boy with his nurse. He offered much money.’

  ‘Rightly so. Your family will be rich,’ Lymond said. ‘How would we reach this house of your daughter?’

  ‘Thus you will reach it,’ said the old man, and described the place: as he finished he put out, unhurried, one arm to restrain their departure. ‘… But not until tomorrow, Efendi. Now none may enter Mehedia. Now the gates are closed for the night.’

  Experienced in battle, and owning many masters, the city of Mehedia occupied a narrow neck of land washed on three sides by the sea, and contained a citadel within its high walls, whose ramparts, towers and battlements held a great arsenal of cannon. Beside the harbour, large and sheltered, was a smaller railed basin where galleys might lie.

  Once dominated by Spanish-controlled Tunis, the Moors and Mohammedans who lived there had revolted against Turks and Christians alike, and set up a commonwealth which Dragut Rais had destroyed, installing his own nephew as Governor instead.

  It was a double insult which the old Emperor could not afford to sustain. Three years ago Jerott had sailed for Mehedia in his engraved armour with the eight-pointed cross of Malta on his cloak. Three years ago the Emperor’s admiral Andrea Doria with his own fleet, with the Pope’s galleys, with the Viceroy of Sicily and galleys and troop ships from Naples, and with the fleet of the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Malta under Bailiff Claude de la Sengle had attacked Mehedia in blazing midsummer, and had taken it.

  It had not been done without cost. One hundred and forty Knights and four hundred troops from the Order had left Birgu with Jerott, but not all had returned. There had been lavish plunder, in the end: gold, silver and jewels; and over seven thousand slaves had been taken from here by the Christians; and the son of the Viceroy, Don John de Vega, installed as Governor. The Viceroy, Jerott had no trouble in recalling, had claimed the honour of victory. To Jerott’s mind that belonged to Claude de la Sengle, who had made a hospital of his tents and called on his Knights to leave the fighting in turn and attend to the sick.

  So it was now held, but with difficulty. Behind the slow rising ground through which he had just ridden, with its orchards and vineyards, lay the mountains, and behind them the vast plains where the Arabs pastured their animals. So large and hostile a territory, so far from the succour of Europe, was a burden on the Emperor which he would gladly, it was rumoured, have passed to the Knights of St John. Until now, the Knights of St John had been wise enough to ignore it. Riding through the studded gates of Mehedia in the dark, Jerott bent his dark face within the fall of his head-cloth, and did not look at the torches. This soil belonged to Spain and the Emperor, who was France’s bitterest enemy. And he was no longer a Knight, but Scottish-French, and on a French embassy. One mistake, and Gabriel’s revenge would be part-way complete.

  The house of the silk-farmer’s sister lay in a crooked lane hardly wide enough for a horse, but the arched doorway was brilliantly lit, and the courtyard, although its pillars were wood, held a small fountain in a floor patterned with coloured pebbles in mortar, with bright plants, well-watered, placed about in earthenware pots. Vine-leaves, lacing the open gallery which ran round the enclosure, sea-washed the patio in shivering blackness and light as they revealed and obscured the lit rooms lying behind. From there, evenly humming, Jerott heard the sound of a spinning-wheel; and somewhere, someone was playing a flute.

  Tying Jerott’s horse and his own, the farmer crossed the yard and tapped on a double-leafed door, smiling at Blyth as he followed. A dog barked. The spinning-wheel faltered, and then went rhythmically on, nor did the flute-player hesitate. In the darkness, Jerott thought he heard the gates into the street quietly close. A child squeaked, and up in the gallery a man laughed, and then a door shut, muffling the sound. Behind the farmer, the house doors suddenly opened, and sound and light tumbled into the courtyard, surrounding the stocky form of a woman. When she saw the Syrian, she smiled, with blackened teeth, and welcomed him in.

  The silk-farmer’s sister was not young, and because of that perhaps was unveiled, her eyes circled with kohl and her dark hair reddened with hènnah. She listened to her brother’s brief tale as they sat, on unexpectedly fine brocade cushions, in a small room thick with dusty hangings and rugs, to which clung the stale smell of storax and spikenard and the pungent benzoin often favoured by Africans. There might have been kif, but if so, the stronger smells smothered it.

  Jerott watched, as she talked, the bracelets jangle and clash on the woman’s thick arms. They were of gold, and heavy. Silk-farming, obviously, was a lucrative trade. They clattered again as she clapped her hands and a slave, barefooted, slid in to lay fuel on the brazier which s
moked dully, half-extinguished, in a corner. It reminded Jerott of the sweet sound of swordplay, in the days when his life had been a fighting man’s, not a nomad’s. He wondered how long it took a human being to kipper in scent. Then he realized that the Syrian had risen, and taking his arm, was saying, ‘Here is Kedi. My sister says you may gladly remove her. She is finding the boy.’ Jerott stood up, and a negress came in.

  Once, she had been a free citizen of a proud Ethiopian court. Once, too, prized for her milk, she had been fed and cared for and although a slave, had lived in vague happiness, Jerott supposed, wet-nursing the white, the brown, the olive-skinned children of corsairs.

  Now, the padded muscle and the soft, meat-fed flesh had melted from under the supple black skin, and the wide-eyed woman who now stood upright before him in her stained robe and headcloth had big-knuckled hands twisted with hardship. Her collar and cheekbones rested in hollows, and where the swollen milch-breasts once pressed against the soaked cotton, the stuff now lay folded and flat. Jerott said, ‘Dost thou speak English?’ and the woman, no surprise in her eyes, said, ‘I learn in Dragut’s household, Efendi.’

  ‘And did you learn Irish?’ Jerott said.

  This time, there was a little life in the stare. This time she hesitated, and Jerott said gently, ‘It is all right. The child’s father has come. We are going to take you both where you will be happy and safe.’

  ‘The child’s father?’ Again uncertain, she paused. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘His name does not matter. He is a Christian, and Khaireddin must be brought up a Christian as well. He is rich. You will be happy.’

  ‘He would take me with Khaireddin?’ The slow brain thought. ‘But then, what of my mistress?’

  Jerott hesitated. ‘How was she when you left her?’

  ‘She was sick, Efendi. In that terrible house with the goats on the floor. She could not carry water: she said, “Fawg may le Dia”,’ Leave me to God. The attempt at Gaelic was quite recognizable. She went on, ‘Then Shakib came to buy us, the child and myself, for Ali-Rashid. But the lady he left.’