Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Lymond’s voice, speaking from under the canopy, was bored. ‘By taking us, as I have said, to Dragut Rais, who will make all things clear.’

  ‘But verily,’ said the Aga Morat, ‘when the prince is absent or niggardly with his permission, I am able to take permission of myself when I will. The lady is fair.’

  ‘The lady,’ said Lymond, ‘is the special care and interest of Henri of France. To thy intelligence it must be clear that this thing must be hidden from the fools at Mehedia. Further, it is she who is to present to the Grand Signor himself the gift we convey to Stamboul from France. Should she fail from weakness or excess of the sun, the Sultan cannot be pleased.’

  ‘She may sit,’ said the Aga Morat. ‘And Mr Blyth also, while we exert ourselves in this affair. It is suggested I take you all three in custody to Dragut Rais’s castle, there to await his pleasure when he returns?’

  ‘We are your servants,’ said Lymond. Huddled in some haphazard patch of shade, where Marthe’s strong hand had led him, Jerott distinguished a note in that level voice he had not heard before. Looking up, straining, however, he could detect no bodily signs of fatigue or unendurable stress. Lymond, on the contrary, sat with picturesque grace, his head bare, his doublet dusty but untouched, his shapely hands lying loose.

  Then Jerott observed something further. As he was studying him, so the Aga Morat’s eyes rested on Francis Crawford also with a curious and vivid attention. And unlike Lymond’s, the Aga Morat’s plump hands were locked hard together: clean and sweating and pink.

  ‘It is said,’ said the Aga Morat, ‘that blindness of the eyes is a lighter thing than blindness of the perceptive faculties of the mind. The sun is high: the perception is dazzled. One has made divers chambers available to us in these poor houses for an hour. Let us retire and, by giving ease to the flesh, bring new light also to the proper functions of the mind. There, for the Hakim’s servant Mr Blyth, and the lady. In this chamber, Crawford Efendi and I shall have much to discuss.… Sweet to be taken up, you say, as medicine is by the lip. Such a creature I enjoy, thin-skinned, tender and delicate, light of flesh and goodly in make, impulsive in walk and beautiful in the justness of stature. Communing thus, shall not our dreaming souls melt?’

  For a moment, Lymond did not reply. Then he said, in the same level voice, ‘It is written before God, that after this hour we depart all four, in good health to Djerba?’

  The Aga Morat had risen. Looking down, his heavy face creased in a smile. ‘It is written,’ he said.

  Slowly, Lymond rose also. He looked neither at Jerott nor at Marthe, but stepped straight out from under the awning and confronted the Aga. In the blinding white light, the fine lines of his skin were all suddenly visible, and his eyes by contrast quite dark. But his hair, uncut since Marseilles, shone mint-gold in the sun. ‘If it is so agreed,’ Lymond said, ‘I am solicitous for thee, as thou art for me.’ And without pausing, he followed the Aga Morat into the house.

  It was all Jerott waited to see. Before they pulled him into the room he was to share with Marthe and Salablanca he had fallen into an uneasy sleep; and, muttering, was hardly aware when, the hour ended, they were brought out and mounted again. Carried, finally, by Salablanca’s wide pommel he knew little of the brief journey to Djerba when, leaving the wilderness behind, they flew to the shore and across the crumbling causeway to where the island stood on the hot blue horizon: a single line of silvery sand and the fronded green of uniform palms.

  Forced awake, briefly, by the splashing as eight hundred hooves sought the square, sunken stones Jerott confirmed again that his companions were there: Salablanca beside him, unchanging; Marthe beyond, her lips tight and blue circles printing the white skin under her eyes. Then he looked for Lymond, and found him after a while, riding alone, among Arabs, his gaze directed ahead. Jerott closed his eyes, and relaxed.

  He opened them in the prison they were to inhabit until Dragut Rais returned to his home; a prison of fountains and palm trees and the music of soft-feathered song-birds weaving slight winds like the flyers of the spinning-wheel from perch to perch of their cage. Roses grew by his pillow and petted carp swam to his hand in raised channels of marble veined in pink and in blue. He lay on silk and fed from black hands on new bread and nectarines and sea food seethed in fresh milk.

  The négresses could not answer his questions. It was three days before, in the light warmth of new morning, they took his carpet and cushions out to the patio and, lying there, he saw the robed girl sitting near him was Marthe. ‘So. Correct in faith, and the adversary of death. You survived,’ said the girl.

  ‘So it seems. Francis and Salablanca?’

  ‘They survived also. The Aga Morat has gone. We are here to await Dragut Rais’s pleasure.’

  Jerott glanced round. Beyond the low walls that enclosed them he could see hedges of cypress and myrtle, and the soft hide of ripe oranges showed among the gloss of ranked trees behind them. It seemed less a castle than a loose pattern of kiosk and courtyard, joined by steps and archways and low colonnaded ways hung with vines. He said, ‘The problem of escape isn’t an agonizing one, is it? I’m sorry I moulted my flight feathers. What are Francis’s plans?’

  Marthe turned on him her wide, deliberate blue stare. She had lost flesh, Jerott thought. Although her extreme pallor had gone, there was about her an odd hint of tension and violence, which was not to be wondered at. Alone with strangers for weeks in an alien country and exposed to danger, fatigue and pitiless brutality, what man of her age would be unaltered, far less a solitary, intelligent girl? But her voice, as she answered, was the neutral vessel he knew. ‘Mr Crawford is singularly planless. The problem of escape is no problem: escape doesn’t exist. Djerba is an island joined to the mainland by a single well-guarded causeway. This is an open prison, that’s all.’

  ‘Then the Dauphiné? The ship should be here,’ Jerott said reasonably. ‘Why don’t they get your uncle and Onophrion over to vouch for us, if they’re so bloody suspicious? I thought that was Francis’s whole object in forcing the Aga Morat to take us to Djerba.’

  ‘It was,’ said Marthe. ‘He underestimated the local growth of suspicion. The Dauphiné has been impounded. She’s in the pool next to the causeway and my uncle and Mr Zitwitz are on shore. Didn’t you recognize Onophrion’s cooking?’

  Jerott sat up. ‘You mean there’s a French captain and a French pilot and a French bos’n and a French ship and a French bloody embassy living on board her, and the Aga Morat still won’t concede we belong to it?’

  ‘The Aga Morat,’ said Marthe, ‘has nothing to do with it. We are in Dragut Rais’s house now. And Dragut Rais is away. And Dragut Rais’s household don’t feel like taking any risks. Permitte divis caetera, and Deus Dragut isn’t at home.’

  From sitting posture, with great skill, Jerott got to his feet. ‘And precisely whom in Dragut Rais’s household,’ he said, ‘are we dealing with?’

  The ironic blue gaze studied him. ‘You think you can improve on Mr Crawford’s performance? I applaud you. Go straight through that archway,’ said Marthe, ‘and you will find the whole meeting in conference.’

  He was not too bad on his feet, Jerott found. Leaving Marthe smiling her damned smile behind him, he skirted the pool and, picking his way over the thin coloured paving, found the arch and walked slowly through it.

  It led, he discovered, to another courtyard, wider than the one he had left, and sheltered by an awning of tasselled white silk. This time there was no pool, but fine rugs lay here and there on the smooth polished paving, and at one end, a shallow flight of steps led to a low, carpeted dais piled high with cushions.

  If there was a meeting, it had now broken up. The steps were crowded. Jerott saw Onophrion’s bulk, his back towards him, offering something, it seemed, at the dais: around him slaves chattered, dressed in bright silks with bangles rippling on ankle and arm and a blackamoor, crosslegged, played on a whistle. In the main courtyard Georges Gaultier sat, his placid face brown and unch
anged, mending a clock in his old smock of natural flax. Under the diffuse light of the awning the thin wheels glimmered under his flickering fingers and in a small cloth there sparkled the gold cogs and pins: the minute litter lay cherished, like the yellow eggs of the bombyx, thought Jerott, which is not killed but is born with no means to survive. Seeking further, at last he found Lymond, hitched alone on the marble edge of a tub, the clock mask with its two ebony hands held between idle fingers. Jerott made his way towards him, and Lymond looked up.

  ‘Jerott. How are you feeling?’

  It was what Jerott expected him to say, and yet the inflexions today and those of his awakening in the Governor’s prison in Mehedia, still sharp in his mind, were totally different. Then Jerott realized he was comparing two sides of a difficult illness and pushed the thing from his mind. He said, ‘What’ve you done to your hair?’

  Lymond’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Cut it,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind. I’ve also shaved, washed behind my ears and trimmed my nails, if you want to inspect them. Personalities aside, what can I do for you?’

  Today, Jerott decided suddenly, he did not feel well enough to be mocked. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said briefly, and turned on his heel.

  He had not heard, amid the rush of light voices and the tinkling of bells, someone rise and come down the steps: he did not realize as he spun round that someone was approaching to greet him until she was so close that turning, he had to fling out his arms to avoid a collision.

  He was holding, he found, the straight shoulders and folded-back veil of a beautiful woman. She was small, hardly over his heart, but of a classical perfection: her eyes, looking up at him, were deep brown and momentarily serious. He released her, looking still. He saw a clear, olive face with black brows and heavy coils of black hair, strung on her brow with looped pearls. Her nose was Greek, long and straight, and her lips soft and full. But her voice, when she spoke, was a full contralto, commanding its English with a mingling of accents he was unable to place. ‘Mr Blyth? You are well, and have come to discover why you may not proceed forthwith to Aleppo? I am afraid I am the one you must blame. You see, I have explicit instructions from my dear lord.’ She smiled, the black brows arched. ‘We shall try to make your enforced sojourn as pleasant as possible.’

  Jerott opened his mouth and shut it again. Then he said, ‘You are …’

  ‘I am Güzel, Dragut Rais’s principal mistress,’ said the woman agreeably. ‘But I should like you, if you will, to address me as Kiaya Khátún.’

  10

  Zakynthos

  On the Venetian island of Zakynthos, in better times known as the Flower of the Orient, off the west coast of Greece, and with the full width of the Mediterranean Sea between herself and the occurrence at Gabès, Philippa Somerville sat in the local Lazaretto in her fifth week of quarantine, playing a cut-throat game of cards for olives, with Archie Abernethy, her escort. Looking on, in varying stages of convalescence, were their three fellow sufferers from Venetian hygiene: a Sicilian currant-importer, a freelance interpreter and another dervish, one of which, said Archie gloomily, seemed to turn up, free, in every two pokes of pepper.

  Determined to look on the bright side of things, Philippa collected her winnings, and ate them. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We’re a nice, representative group. I can do card-tricks, and you can train animals and Haji Ishak can he on nails and Sheemy Wurmit can do a comic turn with his parrot and Signor Manoli can swear in ten different dialects of Sicilian. We only need a good bass-baritone and a tenor rebec, and we could work out a tour.’

  Nobody grinned. Sighing, Philippa took up the cards, gazed sorrowfully at Archie Abernethy, and began dealing again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘How was I to know I was a chicken-pox carrier?’

  To Archie Abernethy, as well, it seemed a long time since he had left Lymond’s ship just outside Algiers and sailed with Leone Strozzi to Sicily in the simple belief that he was about to escort Philippa, her maid Fogge and four men-at-arms safely home.

  They had reached Syracuse safely enough. They had taken leave of Strozzi and returned to the inn he had found for them while Archie arranged the next stage of their journey. At that point, Philippa had broken the news that, far from going home, she was on her way to Zakynthos, and why. ‘Urn,’ said Archie Abernethy, staring at her so intently that his two eyes seemed to meet over the broken bridge of his nose. ‘So the Dame de Doubtance teilt ye the bairn might be there? And ye’ve a ring?’

  He studied the ring. ‘And this wasny from the old lady, but another one. D’ye mind the young woman’s name?’

  ‘It was Kiaya Khátún,’ said Philippa. ‘She gave me the address in Zakynthos I was to call at. And it’s no use looking like that, Archibald Abernethy, because I’m going.’

  ‘I doubt Fogge isna going,’ said Archie artfully. Fogge, prone ever since Pantelleria, was prepared to set sail again, she had conveyed, in her coffin. ‘And if you take the men-at-arms, who’s to protect her?’

  ‘I don’t want the men-at-arms,’ said Philippa. ‘It’s none of their business. If you’re not interested in saving a Christian child from the hands of the Turk, Archie Abernethy, I’ll just go on my own.’

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ intoned Archie Abernethy through his broken-backed nose, and looked at her sideways, considering.

  It had been a matter for concern, of course, and even, he deduced, of unacknowledged jealousy that Marthe had not after all left the Dauphiné; and Philippa had displayed a certain nervous irritation during the voyage to Sicily which Archie knew was unusual. Last year in Scotland, as one of Lymond’s master-company of officers, he had met Philippa Somerville and knew her for a lassie of good sense and courage. On the other hand, he was not sure how much she knew of his own doubtful history. Once, long ago, his brother had been Lymond’s right-hand man in the days of his outlawry. Once, too, he himself had fought with Lymond in Europe. But all the rest of his life, Archie Abernethy had been something else: he had been a keeper of menageries. Two years before, he had kept the elephants of the Royal House in France.

  And before that—a good deal before that—he had been in Constantinople. Except that as menagerie keeper to the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent he was known as Abernaci the Indian, and not as Archibald Abernethy of Partick-head, Glasgow, Scotland. A matter of tactics not so far removed from the truth. India was only one of the countries with which Archie had become familiar in the course of his life. In his professional capacity, he was perfectly capable of conducting Philippa wherever in Europe or Asia she might find reason to go. But what he knew and she didn’t was that, on the other side of the Mediterranean, Francis Crawford was already following the only authentic trace they possessed of a child born to the Irishwoman and sold first to a hovel in Algiers and then, it appeared, to a camel-dealer. Jerott Blyth had told Philippa the child had died on being dispatched overseas as a piece of pure fiction to drive her away.

  That the child was dead, Philippa would not believe. That it had been sent to Zakynthos seemed very likely indeed, Archie could see, to one exposed to the Dame de Doubtance’s mystic pronouncements. Unfortunately, although always meticulous to the letter, the Dame de Doubtance’s statements, Archie from past experience was aware, were sometimes a wheen irregular in the spirit of that which they seemed to convey.

  So she was a capricious old besom. There was no child at Zakynthos, because the child was known to be still in North Africa. If he, Archie, mentioned that the child was in North Africa, the benighted lassie would turn straight about and sail back to Lymond. If he didn’t, she would go to Zakynthos, draw a blank, and return quietly home. Zakynthos, although it paid yearly tribute to Turkey, was

  Venetian-governed and safe. So, thought Archie, grinning his crooked, disingenuous grin; let’s go to Zakynthos together.

  He had begun, in the last few weeks, to grow his black beard again. He knew his languages: he could at a pinch take the turban and blend into his old, familiar identity. The girl was young and pl
ain enough to avoid notice, and in cheap clothing even more unremarkable, passing for a tall twelve. Sewn into Archie’s cloak, his baggage, his undershirt was a small fortune in gold which Lymond had supplied for their journey, and part of this Archie used to launch the frail Fogge and her four men-at-arms on their slow journey home. Then, with Philippa, he boarded the English ship Mary, laden with tin, pewter, lead, rabbitskins and kerseys from Newbury and bound for Odysseus’ kingdom.

  Unhappily, since Odysseus’ time, the Flower of the Orient had drawn up a few rules. If you wished to enter Zakynthos you had to far la quarantena, and stay ten days at least in the Lazaretto outside Zakynthos to obtain your sede for the three signors of health.

  It was a pleasant enough place, consisting of single stone cells built round a patio and low-roofed, of necessity because of the earthquakes. And although the windows to the outside were small and stoutly latticed in fir, they were allowed to walk in the courtyard and sit in the shade of the fig tree, and the guardian, who lived with his wife over the entrance vault, supplied them with bedding and bought all their needs, as they required, in the town.

  Philippa, with a room to herself and the services of the guardian’s wife, was full alternately of impatience and a kind of weak-minded alarm over her own rashness. She ought to be at home in Flaw Valleys, doing her morning exercise on the lute, at which, said her teacher, she would have had a distinguished future, had she not been born English.

  Instead she had sailed over the blue sea from Sicily to this narrow white town lying at the foot of its green hill with the Proveditore’s castle on top; the stony earth studded with olive trees, with sheep and goats grazing; the wide harbour with its piled barrels of oil and its packed ships of every country on earth. Nations at war found in Zakynthos discreet haven for merchant ships, and the banners of the Lion, the Lily and the Crescent flew there together. What happened outside, in the turmoiling dangers of the intricated Isles of the Ionian and Adriaticall Seas, was none of Zakynthos’s business.