Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  For a long moment she faced him. Behind, she heard Jerott rein and begin to trot back. The shadows were long. ‘Yes. You have courage,’ she said; and twisting, her arm raised like a butcher’s, she plunged her blade deep in the neck of his horse.

  She felt him take a breath then. He kicked his stirrups free as the blood spurted and, grasping her, pulled them both clear as the beast fell. She sat up as Jerott, after a look, dismounted and dispatched it with his sword. ‘You will leave me here,’ said Kiaya Khátún, with composure. ‘I believe with one horse you will still reach your ship, and I in turn know my way to find help. The Dauphiné will be set free as you ask, with no harm to your friends.’

  Jerott, looking from Lymond’s stained shirt to the horse’s carcase, was brief. ‘Take her up in the saddle. I’ll run beside you.’

  ‘No. I believe her,’ said Lymond. Rising, he gave her his hand, and as she stood, studied her, from the Greek nose to the luminous, clever brown eyes. ‘I think we are too late. Are we?’

  The pitch-pine torch from the castle was the signal,’ said Güzel. ‘And the equestrian display was meant to deceive. The fleet of the Knights of St John is within a day’s sail of Zuara, and the Aga Morat’s men under their captain left before dawn to take up their stance.’

  Standing still, he had not freed her hand. ‘You do not like Gabriel,’ he said; and Kiaya Khátún, smiling a little, examined him coolly in turn.

  ‘I like whom Dragut Rais likes,’ said Güzel. ‘Where it does not displease Dragut—may Allah protect you.’ And, unsmiling, she stood on the sand and watched Lymond move off, with Jerott riding pillion behind.

  Minutes later, they stopped at the shore. The skiff they found awaiting them had two pairs of oars and took them, at Lymond’s killing pace, over darkening waters to the little hired brigantine. Archie Abernethy was on board. As they pulled the shallop in, Lymond walked to the poop giving orders interwoven with English for Archie or Jerott. They were to make straight for Zuara.

  Within minutes the anchor was up, and then the striped mainsail filled and she moved off, silently, without lights or ensign under a bravery of stars. Then Lymond, crossing to where Abernethy sat on a hatch, dropped beside him and remained there, head bent, elbows on knees; his knuckled hands sealing his mouth.

  Archie said nothing. Jerott, seated with his back to the mast, felt his head roll to one side, opened his eyes and sat up. His back ached. Lymond said, still without moving, ‘Tell me about Philippa.’

  Archie Abernethy had been waiting for it. He had been dreading it all the way from Zakynthos, from ship to ship and mule to mule and mile to mile of that hurried, frustrating journey. He said, ‘She’s all right. I’ll tell you later. Why not go below? I’ll call you. You’ll fight all the better.’

  Lymond did not move, but there was an edge Jerott knew in the soft voice. ‘Tell me now.’

  ‘Well …’ said Archie Abernethy, and told him.

  After the first three words, Lymond dropped his hands and sat up: by the end he was on his feet, staring at the stolid face of the mahout. ‘You left her alone in Zakynthos!’

  ‘Yes. Well. I had to warn ye,’ said Archie. ‘Man, ye’d be there yet if I hadna got it all fixed. And the lassie is fine. I wouldna have left her if I wasna sure she’d be safe.’

  ‘You were under orders,’ said Lymond, speaking with fearful precision, ‘to escort Philippa Somerville to her home in England. You tell me now that you have left her among total strangers in a country quite unknown to her, and about to attempt a journey, by herself, into the wilds of Macedonia in order to buy … My God, I think you must be insane,’ said Francis Crawford; and for a second his voice split, lacerated by his nerves. ‘A child of twelve, let loose among Turks … what bloody daisy-field at the back of your mind persuades you she’ll be safe? The whole thing is a trap. It must be. You know as well as I do that the child wasn’t sent from Algiers to Zakynthos in October. It was passed from hand to hand along the whole North African coast until it ended up at Mehedia where Jerott here saw it. Christ, didn’t you tell her?’

  Archie Abernethy got up. He had resumed his turban: under it, his weathered skin was very dark, but composed, although his eyes were uneasy. ‘It seemed to be the right bairn,’ he said. ‘It was in the care of Evangelista Donati’s own brother. It was the right size and colouring; it was branded; it came from Algiers; it spoke English. And,’ said Archie, rushing it a little for his own good as well as Lymond’s, ‘it was the wean the Dame de Doubtance had told Mistress Somerville to go off and find.’

  He told Philippa’s story to a silent audience. Jerott, biting his lip, was thinking too hard still to comment. And Lymond, retreated again to the hatch, became very quiet indeed. Archie Abernethy ended, paused, and said, ‘I’d back the wean to be genuine, sir. She’s a fey woman, the Dame de Doubtance, and the bairn had her ring.’

  ‘The Lady of Doubtance is a fraying-post for bloody neurotics. We are dealing with facts.’ Lymond stopped. ‘Jerott. Which child do you think sounds genuine?’

  ‘We know,’ said Jerott. ‘My God, I know anyway.… I’ve held him in my arms, Francis. Only one is called Khaireddin, and only one had a nurse called Kedi who spoke Irish Gaelic like a native. The other’s either a trap, or some damned funny idea of the old woman’s.’ He couldn’t see Lymond’s face in the dark, but risked it. He said, ‘You seemed to believe her, anyway.’

  There was a pause. Lymond’s voice, when it came, was normal but tired. ‘Oh, I suppose I believe her. Whether I can interpret her correctly or not is another matter entirely.…’ Then, after a longer pause: ‘… Christ? he said. ‘There can’t be a doubt. There can’t be two boys so alike.…’ He stopped again, his lips pressed together.

  ‘And tomorrow?’ said Jerott. ‘I gather Gabriel will be there?’

  ‘With the Knights of St John,’ said Archie, relieved. ‘And distinguished by a blue panache, so’s his circumcised friends ken not to scratch him. He’ll be there, and so shall we. He’s ours for the taking.’

  In the dark, Jerott spoke only to Lymond. ‘And you will kill him, notwithstanding,’ he said.

  Curtly, Lymond replied, ‘I shall kill him.’

  ‘Then all you have to do afterwards,’ said Jerott, his voice equally weary, ‘is to watch and see which child will die.’

  13

  Thessalonika

  ‘There are eighteen varieties of verse-form in Ottoman poetry,’ wrote Philippa in the diary she began that autumn on leaving Zakynthos. ‘All Ottoman poetry is about love.’ After some thought, she added, ‘Geomalers have very long memories.’

  The beginning of the diary was one of several formidable steps she took, with Míkál’s help, after Archie Abernethy and Sheemy had departed. She bought a mule. Her clothes were in rags, and moreover foreign: she invested in cheap new ones: brown linen for bodycloth, and a long gown of rough frieze with a coarse over-robe.

  She bought also two linen squares, which she wore, breathing heavily, over her face and head. Into her pouch she put the handful of little squared aspers they gave her as change: the rest of the money Archie had left her was sewn into her smock, or else wrapped round with thread in the mending-things she packed, with a spare set of clothes, in her saddlebags. Behind her saddle went a little wool mattress, a quilt, and two light, long-haired rugs, bound in a roll.

  She had no stockings, but Míkál obtained for her a pair of red leather shoes with pointed toes and thongs, classical style. He also brought for her several very beautiful handkerchiefs, for which he would take no payment, saying she was to receive them as a gift. She wondered, in her waxing sophistication, in what kind of coin he had paid for them.

  There were a dozen, finally, in the party which accompanied her out of Zakynthos. Five of them were Geomalers like Míkál, dressed for travel in purple smocks more or less like his, with whole unsewn skins on their shoulders as cloaks, tied in front by a knot in the forelegs. They had no baggage, other than their cymbals and bells, and sometime
s a little book of Persian love sonnets, or a staff, or a garland of flowers. They all had long hair, some of it loose and shining like Míkál’s, and sometimes thick and sticky with dressing. The other six comprised two boys, a weaver, a bow-maker and two merchants going to Petrasso.

  Only the merchants were mounted. The others ran at her side as she rode docilely down to the harbour, on Míkál’s instructions: the tops of their heads smelt of turpentine, and the rain of bell-sounds mingled with greetings, chanting, laughter and snatches of song reminded her of a children’s party Kate had once arranged at Flaw Valleys, when the cook’s illegitimate niece had been sick.

  There was a frigate there, bound for Morea. No money changed hands that Philippa saw. The little party, chanting and jingling still, swept on board with the merchants, and in a matter of minutes she was sailing out of Zakynthos, bound east for the coast of Morea.

  With some trouble, Philippa stifled her questions. She was to follow the four-yearly course of the Children of Tribute, which was always the same. From village to village and city to city of occupied Greece she was to travel east and north in their footsteps towards Usküb in north Macedonia, where they gathered, Míkál said, before entering Stamboul itself. He would take her. He would protect her. And once she had found and bought the baby Khaireddin, he would set them both on board ship for home.

  The Pilgrim with anchusa wound in his hair had a mad scourge of a bell in F sharp. In her lighter moments, Philippa wondered if Míkál’s friends would allow her to cull them, say to two major chords and a diminished seventh in G.

  They arrived at Petrasso. It was a city, rich with the currant trade, but Philippa saw none of it. The children had gone the easy way, along the Gulf of Corinth to Athens: three days’ soft travel alongside the water, and then a climb through bare rock to the ruins of Corinth, the Isthmus; Megara.

  Míkál spoke of Old Athens: ‘It interests you? The walls are there; nearly six miles of them round, but there are few houses within them now, though a great many ruins. But ruins one can see anywhere.… Aşk olsun!’ He smiled, his voice caressing, and the man he had addressed returned the greeting: ‘Aşkin cemal olsun!’ and stopped to speak. Philippa was getting used to this exchange, hour after hour. ‘Let there be love!’ and ‘May thy love be beautiful!’

  She looked at the chipped marble horse-trough in the crown of the street, which had once been a classic sarcophagus; deep-fleeced lambs were still incised on its flanks. The vagaries to which the terms ‘love’ and ‘beauty’ were subject never failed to surprise her. Then Míkál came away from his friend with his hands full of radishes, and the matter seemed of minor importance.

  She was not allowed to see Athens. However slowly the tribute was sought, picked and packed, it seemed that the commissioners had long since left Athens and had begun to make their way, so report said, through Thebes and Lamia north. ‘We shall take boat,’ said Míkál, ‘to Naupactus.’

  They took boat to Naupactus. It was merely a ferry, crossing the Gulf of Patras to the mouth of the Momos, whose valley north they would follow. Of Naupactus she had a brief impression of Venetian ramparts, water-mills, a citadel with some rather old-fashioned guns, and a sheep’s head a notary gave them, opened and warmed, with the inside minced up and cooked in oil and fat mixed with salt and some sumac seeds. She bought some bread to go with it, much against Míkál’s wishes, and they had a feast, after which he sang her twenty-four verses in Persian from Ummídí, pausing from time to time to translate.

  They had lost the merchants bound for Petrasso, but had kept and added to the boys, and had found a vineyard-owner, taking his family up to the terraces. Philippa travelled for a while with the women and children in a small wicker cart with low wheels and round front, pulled by two oxen, while three of the boys rode her mule. They left the family at the vineyard, among the rows of small stiff shrubs, unstaked; but she had a big wooden pot full of grapes at her saddle-bow when she mounted once more. The discord of the bells, she noticed, had almost ceased to concern her.

  It was very hot. Through the worst of the day, she curled up and slept on her mattress, the bells sleeping and still all around her; then they would walk and run and dance far into the night, whirling torches and singing, until they found a cottage, or simply a herdsman with a fire and an olive-wood crook, his goats all about him, and would eat whatever they had been given—fruit and pumpkins, un-pressed cheese carried crumbling in goatskins, unleavened cakes baked in cinders and mixed up with sesame seeds. Then they would drink from running water, talk, sing and at length, sharing the fire, would sleep until dawn.

  During the four days from Naupactus to Lamia they crossed a mountain range as well as seven miles of plain; and Philippa listened to six hundred couplets in mesnevi verse and a diwan of four hundred gházels, in Turkish metre with internal sub-rhymes. Míkál translated.

  At Lamia, having cut off by this device the whole way through Attica, they learned that the children had passed by already, still travelling north on the road to Thessalonika. They were given three wild duck, lost a boy who decided to linger, and joined a wedding party going towards Volos. They were asked to the wedding.

  It was a three-day journey along a shore track to Volos, and they sang all the way. The village at which the wedding was held came in sight on the second day, and Philippa, stopping the mule, disappeared into the scrub and reappeared washed all over, in a fresh change of clothes. While she had been away, Míkál had woven her a garland of ivy and poppies. She exclaimed with pleasure. ‘There is that which melts the soul,’ said Míkál, ‘in a young deer walking impulsively, in trust, in grace and in courage. I have opened the book of love … I read and write in it. Thou, too, shalt read.’

  Philippa, who had no illusions about her style on a mule, felt her nose become glossy. She said, ‘I don’t know about love; but I know all about kindness. I just wish to goodness you’d all get a good job teaching somewhere.’

  But Míkál merely fluttered his beautiful eyelashes and laughed at her. ‘I have it now, Philippa Khátún,’ he said.

  They admire, confided Philippa to her diary that night, the Beloved with a chin like an orange, tulip-cheeks and an eye shaped like an egg. Also, what is a four-eyebrowed beauty? Whatever it is, Kate darling, I don’t think it applies to the Somervilles. And so, although it is the very first compliment I have ever received, I don’t suppose it will go to my head.

  The Pilgrims danced at the wedding. It was a poor village, but the church was full of flowers and candlelight; the altar swimming with silver; the nimbused heads of the saints watching her, under thin, painted eyebrows, from the gold- and enamel-wrought ikons.

  They swept into the sunlight in clouds of incense and garlands to the music of lyre, zampouna and meskale, the bride and bridegroom handlocked with silver and flowers, gilded crowns of worked paper on their dark heads. With the veils thrown back, and the long shreds of gold tinsel like fountain water sparkling and tinkling behind, Philippa saw how young they were, girl and boy. They would spend all their lives here, she to bear children and work in the fields, to cook and draw water and spin, and to bruise wheat and rice there, in that Corinthian capital, upturned for a mortar.

  He would fish, on windless nights, as they had done under the Caesars, with his four brothers in one boat, with a lamp and a trident; he would plough the painted shards in the fields with his unwheeled plough behind his two oxen: he would take his stick and his axe, when he had to, to fight off Bulgar nomads; Turkish brigands; he would sow his crop, and, when the time came, he would hand over, if he must, his most beautiful child to the Commissars of Tribute.

  Seated on a splendid new carpet, her embroidered tunic carefully spread, her hair wound with ribbons and beads, the bride giggled beside her new husband; their parents, stout, toothless, gleeful, stood behind calling. It was the time for presents: each villager, walking up, bent and, kissing the girl, laid a small gift on her lap, hardly ceasing to talk, while she, searching behind her, found and offere
d to each a small sheaf of flowers in return. They were roses, Philippa saw, tied and plaited with care in fine spangles.

  She had a pair of buckles from her old shoes. Kate had bought them in Newcastle because they looked like two snakes in silver, and therefore very seemly, said Gideon, for Somervilles. Philippa brought them out before her worse nature could catch up with her better and, kneeling, put them quickly on the little bride’s lap.

  It was clear that the girl had no idea whatever what they were for, and Philippa, whose Turkish and Arabic were prodigious, had, except for esoteric pronouncements of love, no suitable phrases in Greek. Smiling broadly and firmly, she got her roses and backed, until she was within reasonable distance of the spit with the wild boar on it, and then sat swallowing nobly until the feasting began.

  When the Pilgrims left, they set off in moonlight, with the villagers for their escort until they had reached the main track. They had danced the Romeika and the Candiote, the Wallachian and the Arnaoute; they had sung, they had told stories and long poems; there had been laughter and drinking. Between Greek Christians and the Pilgrims of Love there was no barrier, Philippa found. The Pilgrims, their philosophy Arabian, their arts Persian and Turkish, embraced love and merriment as the Greeks did; and the Greek nature responded.

  The Pilgrims played. The lyrist walked ahead of them, showing the way, his rough three-stringed lyre like an old rebec, held and plucked at arm’s length: behind, torches flickered and laughter sparked around the little mule as Philippa rode along, talking to the villagers who thronged on foot around her with Míkál as her interpreter. They ask what years thou hast, and from where thou comest, and where is thy husband?’

  ‘Tell them I’m sixteen, and I come from the Border between England and Scotland, and I’m not married,’ said Philippa. She had spent her birthday in the Lazaretto at Zakynthos, and they had taught Sheemy Wurmit’s moulting parrot to sing ‘Happy Birthday to You’ as a surprise, and she had been so pleased she cried.… ‘Why hast thou no husband?’ added Míkál.