Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘Don’t go any further,’ said Marthe. She stood up. ‘If you go down there I shall brick you in. I swear it.’

  His foot on the top rung, Jerott looked up and smiled. ‘Would you?’ he said. ‘I doubt it, you know. Pierre Gilles is down there. And I don’t think somehow you want Pierre Gilles bricked up.… If you want to stop me,’ said Jerott conversationally, ‘you can always call in my Janissary.’

  But Marthe had already turned her back on him and walked back into the room, without watching Jerott climb, lightly and carefully down into the hole.

  I am going to the well, sweet sir, she said. It was a well, the sides green with glutinous mosses. Small, transparent creatures slid past his hands as he gripped the wet rungs, looking down at the darkly moving surface below him, whose pattern was contoured by the faintest glimmer of light.

  He had climbed down a third of the ladder when the walls of the well stopped. He could see the edge of the brickwork rising past his feet as he descended and the ladder continuing below him, unsupported, into an expanse of rippling water, which was wider than the bottom of a well: which had no confines; which spread to right and to left of him as he moved down until at last he was standing within a foot of the surface, the mouth of the well a luminous square in the brick archway over his head, and his ears filled with the bellow of Thor and the hiss of storm-raising dragons: a mighty and echoing noise which drummed and seared through his head until he felt like a man caught in a millrace. Jerott looked about him, and was silent.

  He stood in a limnophilous palace of marble whose faint columns, rank upon rank, marked the darkness like runes and upheld, with their ghostly carved capitals, the winged vaults of the ceilings which spread, mottled with moisture, far over his head.

  Its carpet was water: water which ran green and icy and clear under his feet and licked and floated and sucked at the white marble pillars in their dim and motionless rows: a forest rooted in foam. A forest a thousand years old; built by Justinian as part of the vision by which his new Jerusalem would flower with springs and fountains and blossom: by which, conducted by pipe and conduit and aqueduct, the sweet waters flowed from the hills to the cisterns lying like this one, sunk under the city. Some were known and still used. Some were shattered by earthquake and lay exposed to the air; deep green basins transformed into gardens or sunken alleys for workshops. Some, like this, had remained secret and safe while the buildings overhead crumbled and wasted, and the trapdoors were forgotten where men in the upper air once drew their clear water from the great man-made cavern below. Or perhaps those who still lived there thought it merely a well, and lowered and raised their buckets in ignorance.

  There was a boat moored at the foot of the ladder: the boat Gaultier must have used. Jerott had stepped into it when he heard a movement above, and the square of dim light over his head blazed with flickering yellow. Then as he watched Marthe appeared, climbing barefoot down the ladder, her skirt-tails tucked into her waistband; a wax torch in one hand, wincing and flaring in the eddying draughts. Then she was down, on the last rung of the ladder; her smeared face pale in the torchlight. She said, ‘Since you are here, let me take you.’

  There was no sign of Gaultier. Jerott untied the rope and slotted the torch into the ring specially made for it, while Marthe lifted the pole and slid the small punt, delicately, between the long colonnades.

  There were fish in the water: pale darting shapes which swarmed close under the light, flashing their thin silver sides. The columns were thick: perhaps six feet in diameter with a passage of twelve feet between each pair, and there must have been four or five hundred of them, vanishing into the green roaring gloom. How high they were, it was impossible to tell; although from the marks on the pillars Jerott thought the cistern now held possibly as much as it could. After a thousand years, there must be small cracks and fissures in the signinum plaster and the thin sturdy bricks. Despite the ceaseless fall of the watercourse, the smooth drums of the columns and the worked Corinthian capitals were sharp-cut and intact, the masons’ marks still engraved on the stone. Marthe said, steeling her voice against the rush of the water, ‘We have seen only two other well-holes in use, cut in the vaulting. You can tell by the ferns.… There, if you look.’

  He looked where she pointed: to the damp carved acanthus leaves over his head, out of which there curled, living and green, a thin clump of fern. There was no sign of the daylight which coloured it: the trapdoor, if there was one, was fastened and dark.

  Soon after that they reached one of the walls, the thinly layered pink brick rising sheer out of the water into the darkness above; and Marthe, turning the skiff, began to feel her way along the rough surface, counting pillars, Jerott saw, as she went. Then she stopped. Set deep in the brick to her hand was an iron ring, old and eaten with rust, to which she tied up the boat, slipping the wax light at the same time out of its holder and bringing it up to the wall. In its light Jerott could see that the uniform courses of brick were here broken; and that beside the ring was a framing of stone: a rectangular aperture which had been filled in roughly with unmortared bricks of a different colour and shape.

  ‘An old conduit,’ said Marthe. ‘When the level of the water dropped, it fell eut of use. Master Gilles found it twenty years ago when he was exploring the water-system of the Hippodrome. He found that the pipes which supplied the central spina with fountains were part of a big system which ran under the seating and below all the main offices, supplying water for drinking and ablutions, and for the pens of the animals. It links up with other systems under what used to be the main Forum, and the churches of St Irene and St Sophia. He came across this watercourse when he was investigating what was left of the Church of St Euphemia: he had just begun to explore it when the Turks got it into their heads that he was removing precious antiquities from their ruins, and forbade him to investigate further. He has been back since, but never to St Euphemia. He had thought then of doing it this way, through a house, but couldn’t find anyone he could trust to help with the digging.… There are many fractures with earthquakes, and much of the passage is blocked. But he wrote, in code, what he had found; so that his patron might one day benefit from it.…’

  ‘And these papers were lost on the Persian campaign?’ There was no need now for Jerott to make his voice carry: the incoming water, far through the forest of columns, reached them as a low, booming hiss. Above his head, streamers of light danced and slid on the arches and columns, thrown back by the torchlight and the changing mould of the waves. Pichón had said the old man had lost all his papers. Where? He didn’t remember. And had come back from Rome this time, hoping to find them.

  And had found them. Jerott said, ‘Who found them? The Bedouins? The Saracens of Savah, who came to watch you arrive safely at Hanadan, and strangely failed to attack?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marthe. Resting in the swaying boat, the torch slack in her hand, she looked dispirited and cross and queerly perplexed; and Jerott could understand, if not sympathize. Since, with his Janissary waiting outside, she could not lose him or dispose of him, there was nothing left but confession. On his own he was bound now to discover the truth, and with an upheaval which would wreck all their privacy. What, wondered Jerott, would she ask of him now? She said, her voice level, ‘The Bektashi knew that we buy papers; old manuscripts and broken fragments they consider of no value. They sent us word there was a packet of great importance, and some seals and some fragments of metal, wrapped up in a bag. They sent us a page of the manuscript, and we realized that it was Gilles’s account of a great discovery he had made, but in code.… They put a high price on the packet.’

  ‘But you bought it?’ said Jerott.

  She nodded. Her hair, slipping, had coiled in great loops round her shoulders. In the bottom of the boat a little water, drifting backwards and forwards, ran over her strong, slender feet. ‘In Algiers we obtained what they wanted and wrote to them by pigeon. In Aleppo I met Shadli and bought the manuscripts and the fragments. They are sa
fe, where Maître Gilles can get them——’

  ‘When he has traced the full extent of his discovery for you? Do you know what it is he has discovered?’ said Jerott. ‘What if he was wrong, and you have paid Shadli for nothing?’

  Marthe stood up. ‘Come and see,’ she replied.

  The loose bricks fell inward: a simple façade, which Marthe re-erected behind them when she and Jerott had entered the opening, leaving the boat rocking outside. ‘My uncle ferries the boat back to the house, and then comes for us. Usually, that is. Just now you again hurt his shoulder.’

  ‘When I go back, I’ll probably hurt the other one,’ said Jerott blandly. ‘So where is Gilles? Somewhere in here?’

  ‘Follow me,’ Marthe said, and, stooping, started away from the cistern and along the lightless brick tunnel which led from it.

  It smelt sour. The walls were coated with moss, and stuff which oozed and glittered in the light of the torch. Here and there the walls had cracked and falls of earth and thin bricks made their advance slow and difficult, although this, Jerott saw, had been much worse until recent hands had forced a rough clearance. In that narrow space, it must have meant days of hard, claustrophobic work for all of them; with nowhere to put the excess dirt except, labouring, the distant mouth of the cistern; and always the fear that what had fallen might fall again; that the ceiling would cave; and what lay above them come crashing on top.

  It was not airless. Sometimes the passage would branch, and a draught of dead odours would make the torch flicker and smoke: then, Jerott noticed, there was always, high on the walls, a minute mark which Marthe checked, in silence, before choosing her route. Twice Jerott noticed a lamp hanging; a new lamp from an old bracket unlit. The second time, Marthe took it down and kindled it, and henceforth carried that instead of the torch, which she gave to Jerott instead. Once, struggling past a half-concealed opening, he caught a glimpse of another great cistern like the one they had left, but empty; its splendid porphyry columns sunk into mud. And once, a crypt, its stone sleepers prone and oblivious; their praying hands raised to the crazed vaulting hanging broken over their heads. Then suddenly there came á moment when the blackness ahead of them grew a thin veil of light and Jerott saw, far in the distance, that the conduit gave a sharp turn; and that beyond the turn a strong lamp was standing.

  Since the last broken-backed breach in the tunnel, they had been walking steeply downhill. On his right, Jerott saw another ancient aperture, closed and heavily barred; then they reached the turn at the bottom. Something long and whiskered and lithe ran over Marthe’s bare foot. It had happened before and Jerott, behind, had seen her set her teeth and go on without faltering. But this time the creature itself turned and, springing, climbed on her shoulder.

  Jerott had his knife raised to kill when he recognized the ichneumon. Then a lamp blazed in his eyes, and Pierre Gilles’s abrupt voice said, ‘Amor ordinem nescit. Are you not afraid, Mr Blyth, that your greedy young friend will undo you? She has worked hard on her endeavour and has no wish to share it. Unless of course you have joined forces with this unhappy pair?’

  He stood bent in the lamplight surveying them: a big-boned old man with a grimed shock of white hair, whose expression was no less forbidding for being smeared with dust and with slime. Marthe spoke sharply. ‘You have your papers. Or will have, in a day or two. You have said—do you not believe it?—What is wealth in comparison to knowledge?’

  ‘You pervert logic. I have offered a fair price for my papers several times beyond what you have paid to redeem them. Instead you require me to hide in a city where I am known and respected; and to dig like a dog.…’

  ‘How else,’ said Marthe, ‘could you have uncovered the truth of the matter you described in your notes? The Turks had forbidden you this piece of territory. We offer you a chance to finish your research: a piece of pure science unblemished by gain, And you will receive back your papers for nothing.’

  ‘Master Gilles means,’ said Jerott gently, ‘that he doesn’t like blackmail.’ He looked at the old man. ‘What did they threaten to do if you failed to comply?’

  ‘Ha!’ said Pierre Gilles. ‘You are, I see, a simpleton like myself. They undertook to destroy all my papers. The whole folly is now academic. I have completed my investigation and shall leave Constantinople as soon as I am told where to recover my belongings.’

  Beside him, Jerott saw that Marthe had become very still. ‘You’ve found it?’ she said.

  ‘It was a simple exercise in logistics. And from the traces found in some of the passages, quite inevitable, as I have told you. It is there behind me. I have left a light down below.’ And the old man moved to one side, with exaggerated courtesy, taking his lamp.

  Behind him, Jerott saw, the passage they were pursuing travelled a short way and ended: whether in a wall or in a chance fall of earth was not easy to say. On the left, where Gilles had been standing, the floor of the conduit had sagged even more, making a space littered with tiling and straw in which a man could almost stand upright. Near the floor on the same side the brickwork had shattered and fallen, leaving a sizeable gap. A gap through which, Jerott now saw, a dim light was streaming from a small room sunk far below the level at which they were standing: a room whose floor was a picture, pebble by pebble, of a panther attacked by a trident, and a chariot-race with quadrigas: Jerott could see the horses’ eyes flickering white in the terre verte and cobalt, the terracotta and gold.

  In the centre was a small marble fountain, full of rubble still; and a broken bench on one side still lifted a white lion’s foot, in protest at outrage. The atrium of a Byzantine nobleman’s house, kept intact when fire or earthquake reduced the buildings above it; and the shock which had tilted the conduit resettled the earth at strange and different levels. A room which someone discovered when in dire need of refuge; and used; and resealed with newer bricks and mortar and plaster, which could be distinguished even now from the breach Gilles had made. ‘You may go down. There is a rope,’ said the dry, impatient voice. ‘It is all there. I have examined it and started an inventory, so far as I can. You will be so kind, perhaps, as to make haste. It is exceedingly cold.’

  Jerott turned. Marthe, lamp in hand, was looking at him with dense, cornflower eyes. ‘Go down,’ she said. ‘And tell me what you can see.’

  The room was bigger than he thought, and more beautiful. The mosaic pavement, spreading under his feet, had been swept clear of dust so that the swirl of motion and colour could clearly be seen. The walls had been painted: horses pranced and strange birds strutted in pairs, and odd and delicate persons in toga or chlamys stood and watched, or ran mysterious races. There was a small silver mirror still hung on a wall, and a silver jug with a spout, thin and blackened with age, standing still in a niche.

  The ceiling had held up; but the end wall was nothing but bricks and tiles and great slabs of marble, where the rest of the house had caved in. The opposite wall was intact. Against it, Master Gilles had spread out his cloak, smoothing the folds over the tesserae. On that in turn he had placed a number of objects: nearly all rectangular and tinged a uniform blackened grey. Some still bore the shreds of silk cloth in which each had been wrapped. Against the side wall were others, stacked one on the other in varying shapes and textures and sizes; and all coated likewise with a great silting of lime dust and rubble. As Jerott stood looking, he heard Marthe descend and come to stand quietly behind him.

  Neither moved; and the voice of Pierre Gilles, scholar, anatomist and historian, mouthing sonorously from the ceiling, made them both jump.

  Item. The gold chest set with rubies, containing the iron chains of St Peter. Item, a gold cross set with jewels and pearls, and three golden lamps and two score silver candelabra, with golden apples depending. Item, two golden chalices and one golden dove. Item, the headdress and belt of the Prophet Elijah, encased in a silver casket thickly covered with jewels. Item, a great leather case containing five score golden plates, each set with pearls and small jewels. Item
, a casket of gold within a casket of silver, containing the robe, the girdle and the icon of Mary the Mother of God. Item—’

  ‘From St Sophia?’ said Jerott. His gaze, since Gilles started to speak, had been only on the old man at the top of the rope, calmly reading his stupefying list: an inventory which, if true, meant only one thing: the treasure from the altar, the sanctuary and the chapels of the church of St Sophia: the furnishings of the new tabernacle of God and the relics brought to it from all over the Christian world. The apparel of the Heavenly Bridegroom, believed ruined and thieved by the barbarian when he tore the silver from Justinian’s columns and the gold from the aisles.

  ‘… Most of it has gone,’ said Gilles’s reflective voice. ‘The silver altar table and the crown of Constantine and the silver chariot of Constantine and Helena: all the large objects have gone. There were forty thousand pounds of silver in the priests’ sanctuary alone. But consider what price, for example, the Virgin’s casket might command among the Church Fathers? Your young friend conceives it effort well spent.’

  ‘And do you?’ Jerott said. Marthe, he could feel, was on her knees, her fingers gently probing. There was a little creak as one of the caskets opened, and he heard her take a short breath.

  There was a pause. Then, ‘Who would not have yearned to make this discovery?’ said Gilles. ‘It is one I have traced over long years and through many sources, until this one manuscript yielded the last clue I wanted: a block of distorted notes which I had no time to decipher before they were lost. I had been working in the vaults of St Sophia when I was asked to leave: they were afraid of what I might find and take, never dreaming that the real treasure was far off, under the earth.… If you had followed the tunnel uphill instead of turning here to the right you would have found where it branches. One conduit runs clear and direct to St Sophia: it was the one I was seeking and it is unblocked still: I have been there. The other branch is short and runs to the Hippodrome. Only this arm was blocked by fallen debris, perhaps when the palace of Ibrahim Pasha was built, or the summer praying-place destroyed for the Mosque of the Three—both must be near. The conduit was roofed with marble slabs from many buildings just here: when you come up you will see them, some with letters and some with low relief … one can see even the stamps on the bricks. So near is history.’