Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘I feel,’ said Lymond, ‘you would fail to convince as a Pole. Go as yourself. Unless M. Gaultier still has objections? In which case Marthe will of course come with us, and we shall leave Aleppo to Jerott and Archie?’

  ‘No … no,’ said Georges Gaultier. ‘Though I shall need her to help with the spinet at Constantinople.’

  ‘She will be there,’ Lymond said.

  They waited until he had gone, with Salablanca, to view the brigantine San Marco, which had been hired for the trip to Aleppo. But although it was leaving, they had been told, in the hour, Marthe made no immediate movement to pack. She said instead, to Jerott, ‘Are there no balloons, no bunting, no dancing round bonfires? Does the machine not make festival when the great Gabriel is dead? Or is the whole programme a farce, clicking from item to item, and none of it real? Is there such a person as Gabriel? Did he live? Is he dead? And after him we have Child One; and then another to seek; and who knows, yet another and another: this man will traverse Europe, a crazy Pied Piper drawing waifs, flotsam, lagan and deodands in his train. Is Philippa Somerville lost? Or safe at home in England with Fogge …? Tell us, Mr Blyth. If he is mad, I can agree with him.’

  ‘He isn’t mad,’ said Jerott.

  Onophrion Zitwitz stirred. ‘Your pardon, Chevalier. But there would be no urgency, surely, in finding these children if Sir Graham Malett were not dead.’

  ‘He is dead,’ Jerott said. ‘And by Lymond’s hand. So either child or both will perish. You don’t hold festival, Mlle Marthe, with that hanging over your head.’

  ‘It was an assassination, then?’ said Marthe, sweet contempt in her voice. ‘I thought it remarkable our friend should be so finely unblemished. What a pity he could not risk asking a question or two. About the identity of the children, for example.’

  ‘It … was a fair fight,’ said Jerott. A body, floating mindlessly in the sea, blood waving like weed from its half-severed wrists. And another, swaying below, who had held on too long; beyond the last thread of air and the last spark of consciousness, with all the strength of his considerable will. ‘And the identity of the children was a device of Gabriel’s own caprice. Both are branded; both were in Dragut’s harem. No one knows one from the other. Both, it is to be assumed, will suffer now Gabriel is dead, for Gabriel didn’t care for either, except as a means of revenge. One is Lymond’s son. And the other is Gabriel’s. And no one living now knows which is which.’

  ‘Then,’ said Georges Gaultier, rising from his fine chair, ‘rather than perpetuate the one or the other, I must say I should prefer to let them both die.’

  Of the two ships which parted company that night, the Dauphiné had the more uncomfortable journey. To begin with, it was hard work. After months of desultory sailing and captivity, she was required to fulfil her royal function once more: her slaves and her sails had to be redressed, her decks varnished, her colours freshened, her officers dressed in their creased and mildewed best clothing.

  The stores under Onophrion’s care had suffered no harm. Long before the landing at Zakynthos, Lymond’s clothes were in exquisite order; the food stores inventoried; the silver and menus made ready. In Lymond’s efficient hands the running of the ship likewise became invigorated and orderly. To Salablanca, the spectacle was familiar. To Onophrion, it was what he expected in any man he distinguished by serving. And to Gaultier, it was another manifestation of the loutish physical world, which so often insulted the sensitive man and his art. The world to which, with pleasure, he lent money at exorbitant interest.

  They arrived at Zakynthos, guns firing and French flag fluttering high on the masthead, and lay still in the pink evening light, the rigging outlined in the firefly light of twelve hundred candles. The Proveditore came to supper, and spoke of Venice with maudlin nostalgia; her four hundred bridges; her thousand gondolas; the shops under the Arches; the sound of La Trottiera, ringing at noon.

  And her women, grande de legni, grosse di straci, rosse di bettito, bianche di calcina … While Onophrion filled the guest’s goblet and placed before him in turn the roast Ambracian kid, the palm hearts, the Tartessian lampreys, the fried figs and clove rissoles, the pies of capon and marrow, the cold broth of almonds and cinnamon, the fried bread done in sugary batter and the leched pears in malmsey, Lymond spoke about those.

  Gently, and by devious ways, the House of the Palm Tree and the merchant Marino Donati entered the talk. It was a pity, said the Proveditore, that the Envoy had not called sooner, for Signor Donati was a man of great sympathy, with some treasures to show. But alas, against all the commands of Mother Church (the Proveditore unsteadily crossed himself), the poor man, a mere two weeks since, had seen fit to take his own life.

  He was able, however, before he was escorted with care to his castle, to outline in contentious detail the route taken to Usküb each year by the children of Devshirmé. And Salablanca, visiting the House of the Palm Tree in all innocence next day seeking a friend, was able to verify that the death of the merchant Donati was all too true.

  He did more. He spoke to a woman of his own race, once the cook, and now living in a corner of the shock-splintered building, awaiting the notice of the new occupant, or of the officers of the town, or whoever would shelter and feed her and her children once more. From her, he heard of Míkál and the Pilgrims, and of Philippa’s departure, as Archie had described, to follow the Children of Tribute to the north. From her also he heard of the twinning ring, which had hung round the neck of the white child.

  ‘Kuzucuyum—Lambkin, they called it,’ she said. ‘A faint spirit half-slipped betwixt the skin and the flesh, till they sent him to Prince Dragut’s to recover. Then in October came back this same Kuzucuyum; beautiful and bright in the colour of his body, and energetic and firm in his soul.’

  This child was born in Zakynthos?’ had asked Salablanca. ‘Of what parentage?’

  ‘Ah, base, base,’ said the woman. ‘Of a girl unwed and a father unknown. She came for the birth, and left after, and only the master’s sister and I were there when the time came. The master’s sister held her wrists when she shrieked, but it was I who severed the child.’

  ‘The master’s sister … who was this?’ Salablanca had asked. ‘And when?’

  ‘Her name? Signora Donati: that was all I ever knew. And when? Two years ago, or three: I do not know. She was duenna, they said, to the child: the child who was brought to bed of the boy. A poor duenna, thou sayest, who permits her jewel to be ravished so young. A child, the mother was; with hair the colour of apricots, sunning in June.’

  ‘Who was the mother?’ he had asked gently, and the cook had grinned, her black eyes wrinkling above the black veil. ‘To ask this was forbidden. But they said—and I think it is true—that the child was well born in her own land, and of good blood. They say her brother was even a Knight of St John of Jerusalem, vowed to chastity, eh? How dost thou think he would look on his sister, were he to discover the truth?’

  ‘He knew it,’ said Salablanca, and paid her, not in aspers or crowns, but in zecchinos of gold.

  Retold quietly to Lymond, with all the formality Spanish could lend it, the story had still an implication which nothing could soften. Before Salablanca, Francis Crawford did not always school his expression. Now, standing head bent in his cabin, gazing heavy-eyed and unseeing at his own interlaced hands, he did not try. One child born of Oonagh at Djerba. One child born of Joleta here at Zakynthos. Both in Dragut’s harem. One had come back to Zakynthos and joined the Children of Tribute. One had gone with Oonagh to be sold to Ali-Rashid the camel-trader, and finally to the silk-farmer of Mehedia and his sister’s terrible house. Which?

  One was his son. And one was Gabriel’s.

  Let them both die. Gaultier had said that, or so Jerott had told him, in his voice meant to be overheard. But what of the child? Marthe had said that; and Philippa too; but only Philippa, he thought, had meant it. And Philippa had made no vow at St Giles.…

  Think of it, not as a child but as a p
awn. He had said that himself once, to Jerott. Because he knew … God, he knew! Jerott’s terrible romanticism, which would taste death so readily; so splendidly offer the blood of his fellows, in defence of the weak and the puny.

  This child; this unknown son of his blood, was worth one life: his own. From its unmindful genesis, its heritage from birth had been suffering; an evil not to be tolerated: an evil outweighed only by the greater evil of Gabriel’s survival.

  But Gabriel was dead. As a man, this child would be one’s offering to the future races of men. The burden of his upbringing, wherever it fell: however tiresome or onerous, was of no importance compared with his living grasp of the future. This, one felt of one’s son. Was it not also true of Gabriel’s?

  From that monstrous connection, a child had been born as blameless as his. Neither child, from reports, was malformed or mentally maimed. Gabriel’s son had escaped the physical risks of his heritage; other taints, it might be, had escaped him as well. What was original sin? Was it more than an arbitrary pattern set in the loom, of talents and weaknesses, picked out from the warp of one’s forebears? Who could say then that, more than his own, Gabriel’s house might not hold the potential of genius?

  It was a theory that cut across every natural instinct … Oh, Christ: of course it was. If you were Gaultier, you said, kill them both. If you were Jerott, you would fret cut your soul to distinguish the one from the other, and then crush Gabriel’s son like a leech beneath the sole of your foot. If you were … who you were …

  ‘Señor?’ said Salablanca, and touched him.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Lymond. ‘An unaccustomed course of straight thinking. Like the drinking water of Porretta: it either cleans you or bursts you.’

  There was a little pause. Then, ‘You have read in the Qur’ân,’ said Salablanca softly.

  Lymond looked up. ‘I have read. It is wise.’

  ‘It is wise. It says, You have the appointment of a day from which you cannot hold back any while; nor can you bring it on before it is time.’

  ‘Blessed be all the Prophets, and praise be to God the Lord of Both Worlds,’ said Lymond, with sudden sharp irritability. ‘But I sometimes think an arthritic moorhen could beat them for speed.… Tell the Master we sail before noon.’

  ‘We sail? Where, señor?’

  ‘To Thessalonika,’ said Lymond. ‘To call on the Viceroy.’

  As the swiftness of the Danube, they say, could be gauged at Belgrade by the clack of the boat mills, so might the nervous hostility between Jerott Blyth and the exquisite Marthe be judged by the increasing venom between them as the San Marco took her laborious way eastwards from Malta. In the middle of September, she landed them, brawling like butter-wives, at Scandaroon, the port for Aleppo.

  A trained fighting man, accustomed to hard words and hard blows and the company of men like himself, for years ruled by the self-discipline required by the world’s greatest order of chivalry, Jerott had come to terms now with the fact that one man could make him feel and act like a rhinoceros in a cloud of mosquitoes.

  Marthe had not perhaps quite the purely detached ability to hurt which Lymond exercised with such care. But with Marthe in every other way it was far, far worse. The eyes, the mouth, the brain, the body through which she expressed her indifference and her contempt were those of a woman he wanted. A woman high, cool, remote as a cloud forest, trailing mosses and bright birds and orchids; a woman with a body like moonlight seen through a pearl curtain. A woman whom he had not touched since, her sardonic blue eyes studying him, she had said, ‘You only want me because …’

  For the thousandth time, Jerott shut his mind to that episode. He had work to do. He was looking for a woman and a child who had left Mehedia in July on a ship called the Peppercorn. At Alexandria, he asked. At Candia. At Cyprus. At every port the San Marco touched, Egyptian, Syrian, Venetian. At all he received thé same answer. The Peppercorn had not called this year.

  They loaded and unloaded cargo. The heat; the flies; the bothering wind, always in the wrong direction, began to affect Marthe as Jerott had seen Lymond react under stress; as a slate under a little axe cleaves into sheets thin and hard and more brittle. At Cyprus, she said, ‘There go the pilgrims. Two days in a longboat to Joppa, and then a mere thirty miles overland to Jerusalem. The Holy City your Order fought for and whose keys they still possess, don’t they, Mr Blyth? Although the keyhole has gone. Doesn’t it stir your Christian soul: although the Turks have taken over the Tomb of David and the Centacle, and the Franciscans of Mount Zion shake at their prayers? Have you no yearning, after your years of self-denial and prayer, for a garter which has touched a weed in the Garden of Gethsemane?’

  Standing spaced apart from her, his hands brown on the rail, his skin darkened to chestnut by the sun under his thickly clinging black hair, Jerott watched the pilgrims and their boxes disembark and set off across the dazzling sea. ‘If you have faith, you don’t need the trappings,’ he said.

  ‘You mean you have faith, and they do not? So help you, God and holidome? Oh, come, Mr Blyth,’ said Marthe. ‘After worshipping at the feet of the late Graham Malett and lying down under the feet of the ever-present Mr Crawford, you are still the unshaken shrine of the ancient faith of the Knights that uplifts but does not blind?’

  ‘I claim nothing at all. It’s your choice of subject, not mine,’ said Jerott.

  ‘Certainly, you are not defending your beliefs,’ said Marthe, looking at him speculatively. ‘You disappoint me. But then, you have abandoned your Order. Perhaps you have found another more to your taste? God appears in multifarious guises. Why not the Mussulman’s God, that is good and gracious, and exacts not of him what is harsh and burdensome, but permits him the nightly company of women; well knowing that abstinency of that kind is both grievous and impossible? It might make this journey more comfortable for us both.’

  Looking into that cold and beautiful face: ‘You mean,’ said Jerott curtly, ‘to fulfil the role of the nightly houri made of musk?’

  Marthe smiled. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that although I despise the hanging jaw of hunger, I do not intend that the needy should look to me for their banquet.’

  ‘To Kiaya Khátún, then?’ said Jerott. And caught his breath at the look on her face.

  Then it changed; and her lashes covered her eyes. She said, ‘Francis Crawford has much to answer for, hasn’t he? I break what is thine, because thou corruptest what is mine? You are wrong. Kiaya Khátún makes her own Paradise.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  The arched brows rose. ‘Who knows? In Stamboul she is a powerful woman: a friend of Roxelana, the wife of the Sultan; the beloved of Dragut whose palaces she controls. Before that, in Venice. They say she is a Gritti, by an exiled Doge and a Greek slave. No one knows.’

  The straight nose; the dark eyes; the handsome, olive face; the black hair strung with jewels; the small, plump hands holding the knife steadily at Lymond’s heart, precisely, to sever the skin. Jerott said, ‘She has lived with many?’

  Marthe laughed at him. ‘C’est Vertu, la nymphe éternelle. She has chosen her field of power and has lived with the master of it as long as it pleased her. You have met her. Try to tell me you haven’t felt the tug of the magnet.’

  Her hair gleamed on her shoulders, amber and silver and Indian yellow, coiled like heavy syrups enfolding the sunlight; and her white, polished skin was coloured with sun. ‘No,’ said Jerott. ‘I felt no attraction.’

  The smile remained in her eyes. ‘That was because, perhaps, the magnet was turned in another direction.’

  Jerott’s dark gaze was suddenly alert. ‘You think …?’

  ‘I think that when Kiaya Khátún tires of the mysteries of the polygone étoile, Mr Crawford has need to look out, for she will choose and brittle her deer if it pleases her; and undo him most woodmanly and cleanly that she might.’

  ‘He has no field of power,’ said Jerott, and watched her turn to the rail slowly, still smiling, her eyes seei
ng nothing.

  ‘Have you heard of the sheb-chiragh, the night lamp?’ said Marthe. ‘On a certain night, the Arab says, when the water-bull cometh up to land to graze, he bringeth this jewel with him in his mouth, and setteth it down on the place where he would graze, and by the light of it doth he graze.… She is the lamp, and should she come to him, he may graze where he pleases.’

  It was then, in bewildered understanding and pity, that Jerott made the error of touching her. She turned on him, alight with malice, supple as a ribbon of steel, and said, ‘I am tired of the game. Go to the classroom and glut yourself on penny tales whose language you understand; for you misread mine to a tedium.…’

  He took his dignity and left her; and because he was vulnerable to her as he had been vulnerable to Francis Crawford he found the same solitary and belligerent salve for his troubles: he drowned them.

  According to the French factor at Scanderoon, where they landed two days later, it was no mean advantage to view the pleasures of Scanderoon through a thin veil of alcohol. Jerott, supervising a little unsteadily the disembarking of his and Marthe’s boxes, and replying in kind, wherever necessary, to her descant of bright, acidulous comment, was inclined to agree.

  To begin with, it was so foully unhealthy, between marshes and mountain, that they had not been permitted to land until two hours after sunrise, when heat had cleared all the poisonous mists from the bogs. Scanderoon itself, huddled between the ruins of a waterlogged castle and a scattering of lizard-infested shells, amounted to no more than forty reed-thatched board houses, most of them occupied by a diverse coterie of quarrelling merchants, unified only in their physical miseries. Agents in Scanderoon seldom lived to retire home on their wealth.

  In a limited way, the French factor was helpful. Jerott and the lady were placed in a khan, a hollow square surrounded by two tiers of arcaded buildings, built from charity and offered for the accommodation of the passing tourist or trader. In the Grand Seigneur’s empire, there were no inns. Here, the stores and the stables and the commonality were served on the ground floor, Marthe and Jerott in separate rooms on the upper floor, with the two servants he had acquired on the way, for their style.