Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  There was a silence. Only when he saw the fright return to her eyes did Jerott realize he had been staring at her, with God knew what in his own face. For it was now clear, beyond iota of doubt, that this was indeed Kedi, the woman who had nursed Oonagh’s son. And somewhere in this house must be the pawn itself.

  ‘Remove from your minds,’ Lymond had said, ‘the image of a live human child.’ For Francis Crawford, meticulously fulfilling his responsibilities, such advice would appear simple. But he was not here in this room; only Jerott, who had forgotten his own safety and whose heart throbbed with strange pulses as he looked at this withered black woman and said, ‘And where is the little boy? The little fair boy? After all that, how is he?’

  The Syrian, rising, smiled and forestalled her answer. ‘Come and see him. He is with the cocoons, which must be turned to avoid mould. Those soft, small fingers; that delicate skin. Such beauty! Come, come and see. Kedi will await you by the brazier.’

  Moving to the door after the silk-farmer, with the dizzying perfumes, stirred by the heat, confusing his senses, Jerott heard again, from the warren of little rooms and the unseen gallery above, the subdued sounds of laughter, and music, and children’s voices calling, complaining, giggling. As they walked along the little dark passage curtains twitched; he caught a glimpse of a man’s dishevelled white robe, and once he was stopped by a child, as he hurried after the Syrian: a lovely boy of six or seven years old, with long lashes and glistening black curls, who caught his hand, saying laughing, ‘Yalla ma’y … hall liyâ … sharr biyâ.…’ Then the Syrian, turning back, hissed at him, and the boy, still laughing, disappeared with a flick of embroidered slipper below his expensive short gown. The smell of myrrh went with him—my God, are they all drenched in perfume? thought Jerott; and stumbled on after the farmer.

  The little building to which he was taken stood at the end of a walled garden; a paved enclosure behind the house strewn with half-dried washing, dim in the dark; and a carpenter’s bench and a cistern of marble, the water swimming dark and greasily in the moonlight. There was no fight but the oblong lying behind them from the lit door of the house; and ahead, the traces of candlelight from the low stucco building they were approaching, leaking through ill-fitting shutters. The windows, he noticed, were barred, and there were iron rods rammed into sockets on either side of the door.

  It did not seem right. Contrary to his hopes, the night air only made his muddled head worse. Leaning against the cold, substantial wall, Jerott watched the Syrian unbar and unlock the door, and tried to listen to what he was saying. ‘Forgive me. Like the pressing of thirsty camels on their watering-troughs, the thieves of Mehedia would come to purloin my silk, and but for this, all my labours and those of my family are empty as water. Come in, Efendi, and rest. It is warm, and the child shall keep you company while we gather his clothes.’ And opening the door, he bowed Jerott in.

  Inside, he thought, it was like a threshing-floor. Half of the brightly lit room was empty, with a lit brazier like the one he had left smoking gently by an Egyptian mat in the middle. The rest was lined with tier upon tier of wide racks clouded like an aviary with azure blue down. But these little beings, thought Jerott with melancholy, did not sing, or move, or breathe. They were, in their hundreds, winding-sheets of indigo-fed silk, each enclosing the shrivelled corpse of its host. Two thousand to make one single pound of raw silk for an emperor’s robes … and they must be turned, and turned, to prevent mould. Fighting his lethargy, Jerott scanned the bare room.

  ‘He has fallen asleep,’ said the farmer. ‘Khaireddin! Remember your lesson!’ And from a drift of blue floss on one of the low shelves there came a small sound and a child’s fair head lifted instantly, its face still closed and shadowed with sleep. There was a moment’s pause while the child sat, its dazed blue eyes opening and closing. Then the Syrian said, chidingly, ‘Khaireddin!’ and, with obedient care, the little boy stepped, as unsteady as a new lamb, from the low shelf to the floor and came, with the flat-footed gait of the very little, towards Jerott Blyth.

  He had waited, paralysed with nervous reluctance to see before him, distressingly, Francis Crawford again as a child. What he saw was a small European boy who was himself only; who with a babyhood behind him of dirt and terror and darkness had been left solitary at night in a locked warehouse, and had wakened sharply to a command and a stranger; but who stood now before him, barefoot in his crumpled striped shirt, and contrived a smile, round-eyed, with his soft kitten’s mouth. On the high brow, the saffron silk hair was an irregular nimbus to which one or two soft cocoons drunkenly hung, shadowing his round cheeks; and in the baby face, curve melted into curve, reflecting each into the other, growing like fruit on the bones they would conceal until, in one year or two, there would return the structure; the marks of race with which he was born.

  Returning the stare of that devouring blue gaze, Jerott could see nothing of Lymond but his colouring, and perhaps the sweep of the fine, thick lashes fringing his eyes. The spaced features, the curled nose, the faint brows and the blue veins running through the thin white skin of his temples were his own, and neither Lymond’s nor Oonagh’s. Jerott, a bachelor and still to all purposes a monk, none the less felt the pull: the painful desire to enfold this unwanted child with peace, security and warmth, and to set him in his grandmother’s arms, within orderly days, in the land of his heritage.

  Jerott knelt, his hood fallen back from his black hair, as the child advanced; and without moving, like a man watching a nestling, said, ‘Khaireddin? My name is Jerott. Kedi wants a ride on my horse. Do you want to ride on my horse with Kedi?’ He spoke, deliberately, in English; and he thought for a moment that the child understood. He hesitated in his effortful walk and, turning his head, gazed at the Syrian, his eyes widening; his brows angled, for a second, with worry. Then, as the Syrian nodded and smiled, the child stepped forward to Jerott’s shoulder, and putting one arm round his neck, curled round to kiss the hollow neck of his shirt. And Jerott, caught utterly unawares by the practised, sensuous gesture, smelt at last the reeking perfume on the little boy’s shirt, and saw the paint on his lips and, as he flung the child off with a reflex of unbearable, unthinking revulsion, the sneer on the face of the Syrian.

  Jerott had his sword half out from under his robe when the door crashed open on a throng of armed men. He ran backwards pulling it free. The light dazzled his eyes: at the back of his mind he saw that the child whom he had hurled to the floor had even then given only one sharp croak of fright and had been silent: the blue eyes, black with terror and anxiety, were turned on the Syrian. Then he had no time to see more, for his attackers were on him, and the lights were flashing even more confusingly in his eyes, and his sword, as he bore its full weight, was like a rooted tree in his hand.

  He fought, slowly, before they overwhelmed him, and realized slowly, as he fought, that it had all been a trick; that from the moment Marthe had found the dervish he had been guided here, for this moment, when it would be driven home, for ever, that the pawn between Lymond and Gabriel was a living boy-child, and that they had both failed him. Stupefied by the drug in the brazier Jerott hardly felt the blow which at length felled him; did not know when they replaced his sword in its scabbard and, leaving him prone on the bare, plastered floor, began swiftly to work on the shelves.

  It did not take long. In twenty minutes the soft blue cocoons, so carefully tended, were piled on the empty half of the floor, heaped and drifting like summer clouds round the flushed fire of the brazier. Efficiently, all that was inflammable was moved well out of reach, and Jerott himself pulled to the wall, as far away as possible from the ghostly cumulus of worms in their silk biers. Then heavy carpets were pinned over shutters and door and Kedi, drugged and senseless also, was brought in and laid at his side.

  Only then did the Syrian, turning, give a last order. One of the men, dagger stuck in his sash and hairy arms pilled with itching wisps of blue fleece, walked over to where the child sat silently hunch
ed, its thumb in its mouth. It made no sound as the man scooped it up, one-handed, under the arms and walked with it to the door. The little boy only came to life on the threshold, as they passed the stout form of the silk-farmer. Gasping a little from the spreadeagled hand gripping his chest, the child ducked his head and, his eyes seeking the Syrian, pressed a conciliatory kiss on his captor’s muscular arm.

  It was one hour before midnight when the last man out of the warehouse upset the brazier, with care. Because of their forethought, nothing burned but the silk, and the smouldering flicker as worms and cocoons dissolved into vapour and ash was hidden from all Mehedia’s high towers by the sealed windows and door. By the same token and with the same foresight, the sealed windows and door kept in the ash and the vapour.

  The ash was harmless. The vapour was concentrated hydrocyanic gas.

  At one hour after midnight the guards on the landward gate of Mehedia, who were Spanish and thoroughly schooled in their jobs, distinguished a camel-train, surprisingly making its way down towards them. Although the caravan made no secret of its progress and was well lit, the walls were immediately manned, and a dozen cannon and twenty crossbows and arquebuses were trained on it from that moment until it finally came to a halt, and three riders rode from its van and stopped just under the gates. At a sign from the captain the watch, not impolitely, called down the information, in Arabic, that the gates were closed until dawn.

  There was a pause. The captain, a susceptible bachelor from Valladolid who disliked night duty for a number of reasons, saw that the first of the three riders, a turbaned Moor who was presumably the dragoman, was interpreting to the second, whom he now saw was in European clothes, and well-cut European clothes at that. He caught a glimpse of a chain which he would have priced at three thousand écus in Madrid and something very nice indeed sparkling in the gentleman’s hat. Making a diplomatic guess, the captain cleared his throat, stepped to the ramparts, and repeated the same information, more politely, in Italian.

  The fellow in the chain rode forward, looked up, and let off a salvo of acidulated Spanish that all but fried the guard in its armour. The captain quelled his first instinct to recoil, and instead snapped at his lieutenant. ‘You have heard no commands from the Governor to admit special persons tonight?’

  The lieutenant hadn’t. Reinforced, the captain turned to the battlements and said as much, in frigid Spanish, to the gentleman below. The gentleman below, in highly idiomatic Spanish, responded by repeating his demands, together with various related promises of an unbenign nature. The jewels in his enseigne were as big as marrowfat peas.

  ‘¿Cómo?’ said the lieutenant anxiously. ‘He says,’ said the captain, ‘that this is the train of the Donna Maria Mascarenhas, an eminent lady esteemed by the Vatican, on her way to the Holy City on pilgrimage. The Governor of Tunis commends her to the care of the Governor of Mehedia and since she has a falling sickness, which makes her journeys protracted, had sent a messenger to our Governor earlier today requesting the privilege of entry if they arrived after dark. So this fellow says.’

  ‘Who’s he?’ said the lieutenant, who was a married man. ‘And if there’s a lady, where is she? I see nothing but camels.’

  ‘He’s steward of her household, he says.…’ The captain could see nothing but camels either, and he knew what camels cost, and was able to calculate, quickly, the amount of baggage they must be carrying. He could distinguish a number of drivers, but no one else of consequence. Then the third rider, for the first time, moved forward into the torchlight.

  ‘!Jesús!’ said the captain.

  Down below, sitting on horseback beside Salablanca before all Ali-Rashid’s camels, Lymond felt Marthe ride up between them. He did not need to turn to know how she looked. Mantled in the satin of her gilt unbound hair, with the wide severe brow, the white skin, the borrowed skirts and the pearls she had, unaccountably, produced, each one as big as a hazelnut, she was a vision to make all the arquebuses droop and the crossbowmen slacken and sweat. ‘Perhaps,’ said Lymond with virulence, ‘the captain might risk his reputation to the extent of admitting the lady, her servant and myself while he sends to inform the Governor that his guests have arrived. You may assure yourself, sir, that the Moor and I carry no weapons. Unless you suppose the lady carries a culverin I cannot conceive what harm we may do you.’

  Hopelessly, the captain grasped at a last straw. ‘You say the lady suffers some sickness?’

  ‘Nothing infectious,’ said Lymond with cold reserve. He still had not glanced towards Marthe. ‘Donna Maria suffers from fits.’

  ‘!Qué lástima!’ said the captain politely. He found it hard, it was clear, to take his eyes from her. ‘And what form do these take?’

  ‘Really, I hardly think——’ Lymond began acidly, but the captain interrupted him. ‘Your pardon, sir. But with the safety of my troops to consider …’

  ‘Really, it will hardly affect your troops,’ said Lymond. ‘The lady unhappily suffers fits of extreme violence, during which she struggles, screams and attempts to throw off all her clothes. Now, will you kindly arrange for us to enter?’

  Five minutes later, they were all three inside.

  They had twenty minutes, Lymond calculated, before the lieutenant came back from the castle with a troop of fully armed soldiers and the news that the Governor of Mehedia had never heard of the Donna de Mascarenhas but was very much aware there was a French Envoy loose in the land. With Salablanca sitting in the background, he sipped some very sweet Candian wine, along with Marthe, in one of the upper rooms in the guardhouse tower in company with the captain and one of his subordinates: in between making conversation he was calculating, if the truth were known, what kind of head the girl would have for strong liquor. The captain, who was drunk on pure sensation, said, ‘You will forgive me, Señor Maldonado; but had you not told me, I should have taken the lady and yourself for sister and brother.’

  ‘My father,’ said Marthe, ‘unhappily, was not a fastidious man. I have several of Señor Maldonado’s brothers as well in the household. They also suffer from fits.’

  ‘Of the same kind?’ said the captain, gazing.

  ‘Approximately,’ said Marthe coolly. ‘They scream, struggle, and try to throw off all my clothes.’

  ‘But Donna Maria forgets,’ said Lymond. ‘Poor Horatio, poor Vincenzo, poor Nicolò, poor Giovanni: by persevering in time they all discovered total relief.’ He studied Marthe. ‘You look pale.’

  ‘Lack of my usual exercise. I shall, I think,’ said Marthe, ‘take the air on the battlements, if the captain will allow me?’

  The captain had no objections: there was a guard at the foot of the stairs. He was only regretful, bowing her out, that for the time being he was losing her company. For a moment, standing beside her on the open guardwalk in the soft night, he looked around at the small occasional lights and the dark murmuring trees and said, ‘Shall I come with you?’ But she refused sweetly, smiling, and he let himself in again to the room with Señor Maldonado and the Moor, whose door, with apology, he had locked.

  ‘Señor, more wine? I am amazed,’ said the captain, ‘that so lovely a lady has not married.’

  ‘But indeed she has married,’ said Lymond. ‘Five times. And not one husband, poor fellow, survived matrimony by more than a year. She is too good for them. The last one, dying, compared her to a nugget of gold. Do you melt it or do you rub it or do you beat it, said he, it shineth still more orient.’

  ‘Sayest thou?’ said the captain, glancing towards the half-open door. And at that exact moment, out on the battlements, the Donna Mascarenhas emitted a scream. The captain jumped to his feet.

  Another scream. ‘The fit!’ said Lymond.

  The captain strode to the door. Another scream. And another.

  The captain flung the door open. Anxiously, Lymond called. ‘If she undresses, I pray you do not restrain her! It can cause untold injury!’

  The captain ran out but did not forget, in going, to close a
nd lock the guardroom door on the two men behind him. Then he fairly raced round the guardwalk.

  It was empty. But over one wall there trailed a fragment of what was once a woman’s gauze veil. And on the paved path below, as, pallid, he leaned over and sought it, was a crumpled heap which had once been a woman’s bright dress, with the marvellous string of baroque pearls still entwined in its folds. Silently, the captain turned and made with speed for the stairs.

  Marthe watched him go, from where she lay flat on the roof in her tunic and hose, the blonde hair again bundled into its cap. When he was quite out of sight, she dropped to the walk and turning the key of the guardroom with both her small, strong-boned hands, opened it for Lymond and Salablanca to walk through. ‘Ad unum mollis opus? said Marthe.’ ‘Make the most of it, Mr Crawford. This is my single dissolute act for tonight.’

  And soft-footed beside them, she slipped down the unguarded stairs and past the knot of excited men searching the path, and into the dark narrow ways of Mehedia.

  Soberly hooded, and without chain and cap, Lymond led them direct to the house of the silk-farmer’s sister. It was easy to find, for desultory fires burned here and there, although the looting had now almost stopped, since there was nothing left to take away. They stepped into the courtyard through which the stout silk-farmer had led Jerott that evening, the door hanging burst and splintered behind them, and through another smashed hole found their way into the house.

  There was no one there; but what had been there was not hard to tell. Working swiftly from room to room, they were silent. The looters had taken the silk cushions, the carpets and the braziers. They had taken the fine sheets and the mats and the copper dishes for meat. But they had left, permeating everywhere, the sickening smell of the perfume; the odour of drugs; the peculiar reek of sensual abomination. And they had left the small mats, the low, dirty hand-marks and the worn toys of children.