Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘The Subject! Of course. Archie, that’s what the message meant. The Subject is at Djerba. Who else is Gabriel tracking so carefully but Mr Crawford! So the Object——’

  ‘… is the baby,’ said Archie.

  ‘The Object goes to Stamboul,’ quoted Philippa exultantly. ‘It fits!’ She frowned. ‘But if Gabriel is already intriguing with Turkey, he’ll make sure that they don’t sell the baby to Lymond. We ought to get it back now, before it gets to Stamboul; before Gabriel even knows that we’ve found it. With Mr Crawford chasing false clues all over North Africa, of course Gabriel’s suspicions will be lulled. Think of it,’ said Philippa gloatingly. ‘We let Signor Donati, without suspecting anything, supply another bill of lading in place of the missing one, secret writing and all. Mr Wurmit—you will, won’t you?—travels on the same ship to Malta, sees the Grand Master and exposes Gabriel’s collusion with Turkey. Gabriel is finished, and Leone Strozzi’s expedition to Zuara is a howling success. Meanwhile,’ said Philippa dreamily, ‘Archie and I follow the children, find and pay for our yellow-haired bullock and bear him home to his father on elephants. Paeans, circuses.’

  There was silence. Then Archie Abernethy cleared his throat briefly. ‘You’ve overlooked a wee something,’ he observed. ‘If Mr Crawford’s a prisoner on Djerba, it’s on Gabriel’s orders. If anything happens to Graham Malett, Mr Crawford’ll no Uve long after it Man, they’ll fill him with stuffing and bread him. He’s got to get out of Djerba beforehand. Moreover——’

  ‘Moreover, I’m no blate about going to Malta,’ said Sheemy Wurmit comfortably, ‘but the way winds are, I might well get there two weeks too late. There’s no date set for this attack on Zuara. It might be over, for all you and I ken.’

  Philippa’s bony jaw squared. ‘I see,’ said the heir to the Somervilles. ‘It’s the good old freemasonry of gentlemen squires. You want to go straight to Djerba, get Lymond out, and sprint off to Zuara to save the Knights and make leched beef of Blue Panache in person. You’ve forgotten one thing. If Gabriel dies, the child dies. If you go, how do I get to that party of children?’

  ‘I take you,’ said the Pilgrim of Love. Reclined with grace on a mattress beside them, he had faded from their attention, occupied with planning and argument. Now, as he stirred, the lamplight fell on his graceful limbs and his angular, open-eyed face, and the little bells whispered. ‘In a place known as Usküb, in north-west Macedonia, the children are gathered. They will not have reached Stamboul yet. I shall take you to them, I and my friends. You will be safe. But it means you entrust yourself and your money to me. You are not prepared to do that.’

  Philippa considered him. A plain child, her thin face weathered to the colour of good oxblood hide; her hair reduced to mud-coloured thatch by the sun and her hard-worn, voluminous skirts not only grimy but distinctly frayed round the hemlines, she was unequivocably nobody’s moppet. She said, ‘I think I trust you. But Mr Abernethy has more experience of the world than I have. Archie?’

  Archie Abernethy drew a deep breath and, from the bottom of what was indeed a profound experience of men and animals, drew of his knowledge of both. ‘Your name is Míkál,’ he said. ‘And you’re one of the Pilgrims of Love. I’ve kent others. They’re not all pure, not holy, nor indeed very strong in the heid. But one and all, they’ve been well-meaning bairns. What I must ask you now is not whether you mean well; I think ye do. But have ye the wits to safeguard and cherish a lassie?’

  ‘It is said, “Every soul is held in pledge for what it earns,”’ said Míkál. ‘I vow to you, by my soul, that I shall protect her.’

  ‘You are vowed to love,’ said Archie. ‘If she is threatened, or the gold she carries, what will protect her?’

  ‘They are the slaves of violence, whose master I am,’ said Míkál. ‘Can there be doubt who will prevail?’

  ‘I spoke of a man,’ said Archie. ‘A man at present in Djerba. The gold is his gold, and the boy is his son. If the girl is harmed, or the son, or the gold, God will dance for him.’

  ‘I hear thee,’ said Míkál blandly. ‘God send thee no more rest than a Christian’s hat: but thou art a good man.’

  ‘I understand lions,’ said Archie.

  They took their leave of her, Archie and Sheemy Wurmit, next morning: Sheemy to travel to Malta, blithely, to meddle in Sir Graham Malett’s affairs, not without hopes of reward; and Archie to take passage on a south-bound trading-ship which would, expensively, land him by skiff outside Djerba. He was dressed in his turban, his speech accented in Urdu.

  It was Philippa’s last link with home—the very last. The last link with Scotland. The last link with Kate. The last link, perhaps, with Francis Crawford, on whom, through the years, she had spent so much unhappy dislike.

  There had been no hint, in that cheerful, self-confident upbringing on the North Tyne, that one day she would find herself alone in the Ionian Sea, on the verge of a journey into the unknown with a stranger of one day’s acquaintance, seeking a child of that same Francis Crawford’s.

  She had been happy at home. Gideon, the most gentle of fathers, had in his life been her hero; Kate had been and was her beloved. What the grown-up future might hold she had always mistrusted. She feared and disliked the sophistication of courts; she treasured the freedom of childhood; she shied from the bore and the prig, the sentimental and the smart, the intense and the humourless. She had been cynical, as was Kate, about senseless adventure. A different thing, she and Kate had told each other, from the slaking of a well-formulated cultural hunger.…

  Oh, Kate,’ said Philippa, with a lemony smile; and, drying her one cowardly eye, blew her nose and went off briskly to place her honour, her quest, and her hopes of minimal daily nourishment without overmuch garlic at the feet of her Pilgrim of Love.

  11

  Djerba

  On Djerba, the August sun, burning, had set fire to the whole white-hot arc of the sky; blazing down on white sands and white walls; on the painted green and black of the palms and their shadows; on the idle nets, the sun-dried shallops drawn up on the beaches; and the lustreless spars of the Dauphiné as she lay idle at anchor in the inner pool.

  In the villages; in the little market town near the palace, the curs slept in the shade; the camels rested, chewing, their liquid eyes almost closed; mules stood motionless, drooping in the silent courtyards. And in Dragut’s palace also, in this the worst heat of the day, people and animals slept, those that could; and those who could not amused themselves in their various fashions.

  The mistress of Dragut’s palace, who called herself Güzel, or Kiaya Khátún, had taken her lute to the picture-maker’s, a cabin in a little-used courtyard behind the stables; and was playing and singing, absently, in her thickly golden contralto, while she watched the old man who, in spite of the heat, was working with spidery delicacy among his papers inside. She didn’t turn as Marthe came through the open door, but continued what she was singing, her eyes downcast, her brow clear under the little band-box hat with its short, pristine veil.

  Le temps a laissié son manteau

  De vent, de froidure et de pluye

  Et s’est vestu de broderie

  De souleil luyant, cler et beau.…

  Marthe, her airy sarsenet breathing over the marble floors; her unbound hair caught behind each ear with an ivory comb, bent over the pans of still water and said, ‘If, as I assume, you wished to dispatch Mr Crawford out of earshot, you may rest assured: you have.’

  Kiaya Khátún’s eyes, amused, studied the girl for a moment; but Kiaya Khátún’s voice, undisturbed, concluded her song.

  Il n’y a beste ne oyseau

  Qu’en son jargon ne chante ou crie

  Le temps a laissié son manteau

  De vent, de froidure et d’ennui…

  ‘I know,’ said Güzel cheerfully, laying down her lute. ‘He was here earlier, watching Youssef. Extraordinary, is it not, how he cannot bear music? Here, in the land of the Lotophagi, where we should make love and live
of the dew, and the juice of flowers and roses.… And you, as well as Odysseus, are discontented.’

  Youssef, laying his papers aside, had risen slowly from his low stool, and bending over the nearest water-tray, was preparing his pots of pigment. As the girl watched, he stirred the water with his finger, and set swimming upon it, drop by drop, the oily colours: cerulean and indigo, maize, russet, umber and aubergine; spot by spot merging, blending, coalescing and shoaling, in forms elliptic and cycloid; into whorl and veining under the soft, titillating finger. ‘Can he hear your music?’ said Marthe.

  ‘Youssef has no tongue. He cannot speak; but he can hear,’ said Kiaya Khátún. ‘Does it not please you, to live in the company of such men? Your young, dark-haired friend is learning to recognize that he is in love with you. You should consider him.’

  ‘Should I?’ said Marthe. Beside her, the old man had shaken drops of sage and vermilion on his water-mosaic. She watched him shape them. ‘Poppies,’ she said. ‘Güzel, they are beautiful. This and your music … you have happiness. Why cannot I find it?’

  ‘Because you do not look in the right places,’ said Kiaya. ‘But why consult me? I only give you advice which you do not take. Look, he is placing the paper now on the water.’

  Marthe did not look. In a voice which she could not quite prevent from shaking, ‘Jerott Blyth is nothing,’ she said. ‘I would choose a cur, a cat, a house goose for company sooner.’

  ‘He is a man,’ said Güzel quietly.

  Silence fell. His arms bare, his movements smooth with the skill that defeats age, Youssef lifted the sheet of paper floating on the colour-skeined water and, turning it dyed side uppermost, laid it flat.

  On a groundwork of delicate veining, a handful of poppies glowed, their vermilion petals and green leaves spiralling in an echoing mosaic of colour. Her eyes full of tears, looking at it, Marthe repeated, ‘It is beautiful. Is there nothing for me?’

  Her fine eyes watching the girl, ‘What about Odysseus?’ said Kiaya Khátún.

  Marthe turned away, and moved to the door. ‘He is not a man,’ she said. ‘He is Chaos, a mythical bird with a name, but no body; agreeable only to the eye of the mind.… The Aga Morat’s tents have come back.’

  ‘He finds the plains here suit his cavalry trainers.… Recognize him, then, with your mind. Why not? Two cold temperaments may consort well together.’

  Marthe looked round. ‘There is a saying: When two hungry people lie together, a beggar is born. He will get what he will get; and so shall I.… Shall I play for you?’ And taking the lute Kiaya quietly held out, the girl Marthe sat, her face pale with the heat, and added crisply, ‘If I serenade Mr Crawford, perhaps it will make my regard for him plainer.’

  She had a high voice; not trained as was Güzel’s, but tuneful and pure. Through the still heat of Djerba the words floated with an almost professional clarity:

  Je prie à Dieu qu’il vous doint pauvreté

  Hiver sans feu, veillesse sans maison

  Grenier sans blé en l’arrière-saison

  Cave sans vin tout le long d’été.

  Je prie à Dieu, le roi de paradis,

  Que mendiant votre pain alliez querré Seul, inconnu, et en étrange terre

  Non entendu par signes ni par dits …

  At the end, ‘It is a way of life you defend,’ said Kiaya Khátún, unmoved. ‘But not necessarily a good one.’

  She said no more, although the old man Youssef, limping forward as Marthe left, laid in her hands, still shining, the chambletted picture of poppies. Marthe thanked him, and moved out of sight through the courtyard before, with trembling fingers, she tore it across and across.

  Presently, for the mistress of Dragut’s palace was nothing if not purposeful, there arrived the hour Kiaya Khátún had determined to devote to her principal prisoner. This time she took some trouble, as she had not done with Marthe, to ensure that there should be no witnesses.

  In the past weeks the woman whose name was Güzel had had several exchanges with Francis Crawford, about whom she knew something from a great many sources.

  She was also well aware that this prolonged captivity, with heat, boredom and frustration, was undermining the nerves of some of her prisoners. For their own reasons, Marthe and Jerott Blyth quite evidently were finding it hardest to bear. Onophrion Zitwitz, who within two days had deferentially taken over her kitchens and marketing, clearly found in these activities some relief from his anxieties. Gaultier, with a placidity she found a little irritating, drifted quite unworried into a pleasant routine which took him from room to room, admiring the lavish fruits of Dragut’s plunder: aligning an ivory here; correcting a timepiece there; replacing, with loving care, a fallen jewel in its setting. Time to Georges Gaultier alone, it seemed, was of no moment: first of all the company he had eaten the lotus.

  To the casual eye, the same seemed at first true of Lymond. Certainly, in none of their exchanges so far had any intemperate word passed between prisoner and captor. She found him outrageously charming, and cleverer by far than she had expected. She discovered that she was being sounded, with great skill, on a number of subjects, and it was early established, without discomfort on either side, that she was not amenable to bribes nor to any equivalent service he might offer her. He was to remain under duress, without concessions, for precisely as long as Dragut might choose.

  After that discussion, she saw him less. The first key had failed. With skill and adroitness, he proceeded to try all the rest. But her servants, as she well knew, could not be suborned. Dragut’s hand fell too heavily for that. The guard on the galley was impregnable, and so was the watch on the causeway. In any case, he had no money—she had seen to that: the saddles taken carefully to pieces, the quilting unpicked. He had been carrying a sum which would outfit Dragut’s fleet next winter.

  What he did next, in fact, was nearly to escape her. Blyth was not yet recovered. Knowing, she supposed, that she would not touch a sick man, and that Gaultier and his niece from an old friendship were safe from her, he had laid his plans with precision, informing nobody, and after half killing a guard one moonless night had swum out to the fishing fleet, one of whose members, at market one day, had not been immune to promises. Mr Francis Crawford had been three miles out of the bay when they had caught him: she had allowed them some latitude in subduing him. Dragut had said only that he should not, if possible, be killed. The fisherman had been ganched.

  That had been four days ago, and she had not sent for him until now. Dragut had had made for her, Turkish-style, a kiosk in one of the gardens, its walls set with mother-of-pearl and pierced to admit the faintest airs from rose and hyacinth, mint and lemon and thyme.

  Inside, around three of the walls ran a low silk-covered divan, full of cushions: in the centre, the floor was made of glass, below which a channel of fresh water ran. In hot weather the voice of the brooklet was cooling. In winter it flooded the kiosk, and the divan grew grey mould. You cannot, thought Kiaya Khátún with regret, have everything. She sat down among the cushions, her bracelets tinkling, and listened for Francis Crawford, her painted feet crossed.

  His footfall was fight, but Güzel heard it coming; even heard the hesitation, at one point, between step and step. She said, raising her voice, ‘Don’t, I pray you, give way to nostalgia. This is not Algiers.’ As she finished, he appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Of course it isn’t Algiers,’ said Lymond, his voice brittle with hard-controlled temper. ‘Algiers is full of fat Turks.’

  They stared at one another. Heavy bruising was evident on one side of his face, and there were cuts on his eyebrow and lip. He didn’t limp, but a stiffness suggested itself under the light Arab clothes he wore; the white cotton, loosely tied at the waist, fell clear to the ground.

  ‘You wish me to respect your sensibilities?’ said Güzel. ‘You behaved ill-advisedly, and your ally has been punished. You are fortunate that Dragut Rais is not here, or someone’s life would equally be forfeited for the guard whom y
ou attacked. I make it clear now that if there is any repetition your steward Zitwitz will be bastinadoed to death. Not one of your colleagues, Mr Crawford, but your servant.’ She paused. ‘I wonder where you obtained the ring you gave to the fisherman?’

  Standing still in the doorway, his eyes veiled: ‘You know, surely,’ said Lymond. ‘It came from my newly betrothed. Now let’s go and ganch him, liver, lungs, tripes and trillibubs, and add a last of seal’s fat to the commonweil?’

  ‘Sit,’ said Kiaya Khátún. ‘I find rhetoric tiresome.’

  Lymond crossed the glass floor, paused by the shot-silk upholstery opposite her, and sank down, with some care, among the cushions. ‘But the situation breeds rhetoric,’ he said. ‘Like fleas in a bucket of pigswill.… Make thou fast, Gabriel, the gates of hell. For example.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Güzel.

  ‘Not at all. The food, however,’ said Lymond, dispassionately, ‘is excellent. They shall not hear therein vain or sinful discourse, except the word Peace, Peace. Continue. I have been extinguished red-hot in vinegar and am tempered to talk. It’s a nice day.’

  ‘The King of England is dying,’ said Güzel. ‘If Mary Tudor is Queen and dies childless, Margaret Lennox will succeed her.’

  Unblinking, Lymond spoke softly. ‘Who says so?’

  ‘The court. Of all women, she is Queen Mary’s favourite, and Elizabeth is a bastard. Then Lennox rules Scotland.’

  ‘He may,’ said Lymond. ‘Until I have killed Gabriel.’

  ‘There is more,’ said Kaiya Khátún, blandly. ‘The French army is in confusion; the French fallen back from Thérouanne, and Seigneur d’Essé slaughtered. The King, they say, speaks only to Mistress Diane and St André, and not at all to the Constable. The fate of your company is not so far known.’