Pawn in Frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett
‘My brother?’ Jerott said.
Noiselessly, Lymond materialized beside him. ‘No. My young brother, is it not? Indeed, it is my wish to speak to him, and we thank you for your courtesy. We shall ride forward and join him.’
And as the horseman grinned, saluted and rode back to his place, Lymond added, undisturbed, ‘Why so inconceivably perplexed? It’s not a hard riddle. Consider. Who, stretching the imagination of course to its most grotesque outer limits, might be taken for my younger brother, if dressed in boy’s clothing?’
‘Marthe?’ said Jerott.
‘The nubile Marthe,’ Lymond agreed. ‘Than whom there is not in this hundred mile a feater bawd. Let’s surprise her. Let’s take her with us.’
In boots, doublet and cloak, with her yellow hair bundled under a cap like a callow schoolgirl defying her tutor, she should have looked mildly ridiculous; in fact, thought Jerott, it was probably Lymond’s concern to make her so. But there was nothing childish about the cold hostility in her face as she waited for them, riding up to evict her, or her lack of concern as soon as she realized Lymond would make no effort to send her back to the ship.
Lymond did not let her off easily. Riding beside her: ‘It’s a very pretty costume,’ he said. ‘What are you hoping will happen?’
‘I have some work to do for my uncle. With some races it is impossible to do business if you are a woman. With such people, or with the more foolish or excitable man, I find it simpler dressed like this.’
‘Simpler for what?’ said Lymond. ‘In these parts, you’re more apt to find the excitable men waiting lined up in queues.’
‘I stand corrected,’ said Marthe. ‘But then, sua quique voluptas. You know so much more of all that than I do.’
‘Incidi in Scyllam, cupiens vitare Charibdim. Who are you running from?’ said Lymond. ‘Your father?’
‘You are welcome to think so. If you will accept the corollary,’ said Marthe; and Francis Crawford, smiling in the brightening dawn, his hands closed on his reins, said, ‘Pax. We can bring each other too quickly, perhaps, below the cuticle. Let us advance, as the man said, and praise the Almighty, who infused unspeakable jollity into all this our camp.’
Thereafter, in wary silence, they rode all four side by side.
Afterwards, Jerott had little clear recollection of that ride. Fields planted with corn and grazings of pale cattle and sheep gave way to light sandy plains and marshes and rocky, scrub-covered hills. Primitive villages, melting one into the other, left an impression only of filth, and smell, and a scattering of chickens and goats, and naked children, smeared grey with mud. Sometimes there was cultivation: a melon patch, a windmill.
Sometimes, outside a small town, they came across a group of young slaves, their smooth dark skins naked to the waist, washing linen in a thick stream, chattering as they pounded. They stood to watch as the column rode past, their white teeth smiling, their necks and wrists and ankles enclosed in great circles of latten, studded with glass gems. And sometimes, among the plodding groups of robed figures with their slow, laden asses, there would be a string of Moors on their saddleless Barbary horses with only rope for a bit. They came and went quickly, naked too but for their white aprons and linen cloth rolled round their dark heads and under their chins, in a glitter of long javelins, and knives.
At night, Salablanca, riding ahead, would find them a cabin to stay in, and would have the room filled with fresh straw and their mats laid, and a wood fire burning when the rest of the caravan came up, while the family squatted outside in the dark, under threadbare blankets, through the chilly spring night. Twice, Marthe left them; both times during daylight to call on some usurer friend of Gaultier’s in one of the walled towns they visited. And Salablanca, prompted by Lymond, was everywhere; talking, smiling, asking questions.
They were following, without doubt, Jerott knew, in the footsteps of Ali-Rashid. And it seemed that, as Lymond dispassionately remarked, they were being allowed to catch up with him. In time, Jerott was to come to believe, it was this feeling of predestination, of having their course unalterably laid out for them, leading them inescapably to whatever doom Gabriel might plan, that was their greatest affliction.
‘Of course. The carrot before the donkey,’ Lymond replied at once to this surmise. ‘But as long as we are following, at least the carrot is there. And one day, if we are audacious and forceful, we might capture the stick.’
They caught up with Ali-Rashid, as had been predicted, just outside Monastir, on the great western road, the Roman highway which still ran between Tunis and Tripoli.
It was dusk, and they had almost reached their stopping-place for the night, when they saw the encampment. It looked at first like one of the several they had met already, of traders bound for Guinea to buy slaves, and pepper and gold, set out in the familiar pattern: the tents of the women and children in the middle, with the flocks and the cattle next, and the camels, the horses and the dogs last, with a ring of bonfires outside. Since passing La Calle they had been in lion country, and the hunters with the caravan had ceased riding out at dawn to bring back antelope and gazelle for the pot.
Now, as they approached warily, Jerott saw that there was something quite different about the design of the camp ahead. The tents were few but the number of fires seemed immense. Then he saw that the dark patches within the fires, which he had taken for the familiar kermes, the scrub-oak, were in fact animals; and as the mild wind shifted, and the sudden stench came unmistakably to his senses, he identified them beyond doubt. Camels, in extremely large numbers, and with only a small number of riders. Ali-Rashid, who else?
They stopped that night within sight of the other camp, and, leaving Marthe with Salablanca, Lymond rode over immediately to the camel-trader, Jerott beside him. Others were there before them, examining the animals and holding spasmodic conversation with the traders: there were no more than six of these last, Jerott saw; and the senior, Ali-Rashid himself, a gross, bearded man wearing a skull-cap wrapped about, Turkish-style, with some blue striped cotton, and a red, frogged coat under his blanket-like cloak. Jerott, used to the subdued tones preferred by the Moors, wondered what nationality the man was. But when he spoke, sitting crosslegged with a dish of stewed mutton resting under his great belly, the dialect was Arabic. He ate noisily, without offering to share with his visitors, and when the last of these moved away, Lymond crossed to the stained Cairo matting and, saluting quietly, dropped down beside him.
Jerott did not see the sum of money which changed hands at the end of that conversation, but from the camel-trader’s sudden excess of affability and the manner in which, at the end, he heaved himself to his feet, clapping his hands for his boys and attempting to press on them couscous and spirits and, finally, the services of one of his drovers, he understood that Lymond had not been niggardly.
Lymond himself, refusing briefly, stood up and said to Jerott, ‘He was paid to seek out the child and to buy it. He was then told to get rid of it any way he cared after three weeks. Just about the end of that time a family of Bedouin caught up with him and bought the child from him in return for some kif. He didn’t know why, but later realized they must have heard of the reward money. Since then, they’ve disappeared into the interior, but he thinks they send someone to the coast now and then to find out if the promised reward is in sight.’
The sickening smell of crude spirits mingled with the stench of the camels. Despite their refusals, Ali-Rashid had disappeared into his tent, and the sound of dispute floated out as he attempted to explain, no doubt, the extreme desirability of pleasing his visitors. Jerott said, ‘That’s a snake, if you like. I’m surprised he didn’t creep after those bloody Bedouin and snatch the child back from them, once he learned of the money.’
‘He couldn’t find them,’ said Lymond. ‘He admits that he tried. A member of the troop that bought the child turned up yesterday with money to buy a new camel, and he would have followed him then, but he got a very clear warning that if he di
‘And how,’ said Jerott, ‘do you propose to follow a handful of men and a camel on a trail already a day and a half old?’
‘Haven’t you noticed?’ said Lymond. ‘Every camel-trader notches the feet of his beasts with his own particular trade-mark. The Bedouin’s was the only single camel Ali-Rashid sold yesterday. All we have to do is follow its track in the sand.’
‘What sand?’ said Jerott.
‘Don’t be pessimistic,’ said Lymond. ‘Ali-Rashid wants that extra money. There’ll be sand and prints and maze-toothed Labyrinthodontia if need be. And to save you further effort, I’ll repeat, you are not coming with me.’
‘And Marthe?’ said Jerott with animosity. In three days their caravan would have left Monastir.
‘Yes. Marthe. Won’t it be interesting,’ said Lymond thoughtfully, ‘to see whether Marthe elects to move on without us, or whether she stays here with you? Especially as Salablanca has sewn all the rest of the money into her saddle.’
She elected to stay. When, after three days, their caravan did move on, Salablanca found lodgings for Marthe and Jerott and himself in a village near by, and they settled down, in the highest discomfort, to wait.
Not that Marthe was idle. Against Jerott’s advice, she rode almost daily, in her boy’s clothes, in and out of the small towns of the shoreline and came back, brisk and calm, with a string of sardonic anecdotes concerning her day’s observations, and no account at all of her own employment, whatever it was.
In some ways, Lymond’s absence seemed to have brought to her a sense of release. Though still self-possessed, she lost a little the disdainful detachment which so incensed Jerott, and as neither he nor Salablanca showed any interest in the femininity within the doublet and hose, she began, with a characteristic dry intelligence, to take her share of the exchanges, social, speculative, essential, between the two men whose lives, wittingly or not, she had elected to share.
On the fourth or fifth day after Lymond’s departure, Marthe spent several hours behind the walls of Monastir. Like most of the coastal strip at this point, the city was in Spanish hands, and if it were known that any members of a French embassy, however loosely attached, were living disguised in the neighbourhood, they would all, Jerott know, receive short shrift. He was relieved therefore when she came back, undisturbed and even complacent, in the late afternoon, in the company of the men and women from the village who supplied Monastir daily with fowl, meat, vegetables and eggs, and whom she used as her protection.
Jerott had no reason to challenge her wit. For a woman, it seemed to him at times excessive to tiresomeness. Now, almost before Salablanca could take her horse, she said, ‘There is a dervish hermit just outside the village, and I am told they are great bringers of news. Might a woman talk to him without offence, Salablanca?’
‘If he is a Bektashi Baba,’ said Salablanca. ‘That is an Order which admits women to its worship. But not otherwise. Why, wouldst thou reveal thyself to such a one?’
‘It is best to be honest … sometimes,’ said Marthe. ‘Will you come with me?’
It was the first time she had even remotely indicated that she found their company necessary. ‘We’ll both come,’ said Jerott. ‘But I’m not sure what you expect. Stray children are rather beneath their level of interest.’
‘I was concerned rather with stray adults,’ said Marthe briefly. ‘For if you are prepared to wear the year through with your needlework, awaiting our dear Mr Crawford, I must confess I am not. If he has had his throat cut, it would be a convenience to know it.’
‘I see. Have you ever seen a Bedouin camp?’ Jerott said, his voice deceptively gentle. ‘Their tents are black, or brown, with a huddle of chickens and goats, and their women are nearly naked, with a brass or silver ring in one nostril, and beads, and blue tattooing on their lips and their cheeks and their arms. The children have lice and pot bellies and open starvation sores on their faces, and their eyes are half blind and overgrown like a black and blue lichen with flies. That is where this child is being brought up.’
‘Calm yourself,’ said Marthe wearily. ‘I am sure the unfortunate creature, if not happily dead, will be snatched from these horrors forthwith by its sire. I want only to know when I can hope to get away from the chickpeas and couscous and back to Onophrion’s cooking.’
‘If you wish to leave, there is nothing, to my knowledge, to stop you,’ said Jerott.
‘Well, that’s good news,’ said Marthe, with final and unanswerable malice. ‘I thought you needed the gold in my saddle.’
Deferentially, Salablanca’s voice broached Jerott’s silence. ‘La señorita has known that the gold has been concealed in that place?’
‘La señorita,’ said Marthe coldly, ‘in the absence of offers, has been saddling and unsaddling that damned horse like a coal-heaver for three days since you sewed the coins in the lining. It was hardly likely the weight would fail to attract my attention.’
Which left Jerott wondering, gloomily, which it was Lymond had miscalculated so severely: Marthe’s native intelligence, or the chivalry of her masculine escort: himself.
The dervish was Bektashi: wearing a loincloth only on his skeletal brown body; his black hair matted and long; his fingernails yellow and clawed like a sick hunting beast’s. He was asleep, a little distance from the village, on a bed of warm ash left by the fire of a herdboy, and the grey powder patched his face like decay as he twitched and stretched, when they called him. He sneezed, a great many times with a soprano and desperate violence, drank the water Salablanca silently offered him, and with a benign gesture, hand on heart, offered them the courtesy of the beaten earth lying before him, like a prince holding Divan.
You had to admit, thought Jerott, sitting crosslegged, listening to Salablanca’s quiet introduction of Marthe, that her instinct had been right. The dervish betrayed no surprise on learning that the fair-skinned, compact boy before him was French, and a woman; or that she longed for his wisdom. It seemed likely, as she had said, that in his travels a great deal was known to him already. Speaking gently, he welcomed them and discoursed with simplicity on the subjects she raised. Jerott wondered if she was the stranger she seemed to Bektashiism, or if she knew its theme, so apposite to her own temperament: its insistence on Oneness, the enemy of all multiplicity. From the dervish, at least, she should have the truth. The law is my words, had said Mohammed, quoted by Haji Bektash Veli. The way is my actions. Knowledge is my chief of all things. Truth or reality is my spiritual state.
When at length she broached her question: ‘Of such a man knowledge hides itself from me, as the ostrich lies upon its breast,’ said the dervish. ‘But I see that the rope thou seekest hath two colours, twisted with a black strand and a white strand. Dost thou not seek also a child?’
It was Jerott who answered before Marthe. ‘They say there is among the Bedouin a yellow-haired boy-child, a year old, with an Ethiopian nurse.’
The black eyes of the dervish rested on him. His was a big-boned face, refined by asceticism; the beard sprang from a heavy jaw; and the nose, arched and fleshy, structured the groined eyebrows and unfleshed malar ridges like the prow of a ship. He said, ‘Thou meanest well by this child?’ and Marthe’s cool voice answered modestly, ‘He is the son of the Efendi about whom we spoke.’ It struck Jerott how much Lymond would dislike this cursory interference in his affairs; and further that Marthe, whatever her ostensible motives, fully realized this.
‘Allah is wise,’ said the dervish. ‘I have breathed on such a one; the most delicate in complexion of children, but sick with travelling. The Bedouin are a people distempered and of evil habit: the child placed with them had not prospered, and was removed in secret, they say, by his nurse.’
‘She ran away?’ said Je
‘Kedi indeed was the name spoken,’ said the dervish with compassion. ‘I did not meet them, but had the story from him who found nurse and child wandering in the olive trees and took pity on them. The child bore the brand of Dragut.’
‘Where are they now?’ Marthe’s collected voice put the question.
The dervish hesitated. ‘To conceal a slave is an offence. And a slave the property of my lord Dragut a great offence.’
‘He had sold her,’ said Jerott. ‘None need fear the wrath of Dragut; and the one who sheltered this woman and child we would make great.’
‘But I know not his name,’ said the dervish with gentle regret. ‘Only that Mehedia was near to his village, and that for alms he was moved to offer me this.’ And with long, irregular fingers, he touched the strip of rawhide round his neck. Attached to it, Jerott had already observed, was a small bag made of soft white cotton, whiskered with wood ash. It contained, he supposed, the dervish’s fortune; and he wondered if perhaps the nature of the coins would hint at the donor. Marthe, watching his eloquent face, smiled. ‘You don’t come from Lyons, or you would know what you are looking at,’ she said. ‘Two ounces of oriental insect called bombykia, Mr Blyth. As useful a clue as any we might possess.’
‘Bombykia?’ said Jerott, whose mind was not at that moment in perfect alignment with Aristotle.
‘Silkworms, Mr Blyth,’ said the girl Marthe. ‘The horned worm of India at whose mating men rejoice as at a wedding; from whose bowels came the robes Cleopatra wore, spun from the wind. Go look, Mr Blyth, for a mulberry bush.’
8
Mehedia
Go look, Mr Blyth, for a mulberry bush, Marthe had said. And Jerott Blyth went, because he thought she was right. Ali-Rashid, they knew, had sold the slave-nurse and the infant to the Bedouin. It was entirely possible that the nurse, taking the child, had contrived to escape, and had been given asylum by some family breeding silk near Mehedia … which was in Spanish hands.