Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Jerott found he had a full bowl of raki in his hands. He drank it and got up. ‘No,’ said Marthe.

  He was stronger than she was, and he could prove it. He closed his hand on her wrist and pulled; and although she resisted at first, she suddenly came quite easily, so that he nearly cannoned back into the other dancers. There were tears in her eyes. He stretched open his own, to see more clearly.

  They were tears of rage, or of pain. She was rubbing her wrist. Her arm, under the loose sleeve of the robe, was milky white on the underside, and toasted very pale gold on the outside, like a chicken half done on the spit. He thought that picturesque, and was going to tell her so, when his gaze fell on her throat, just above the high linen neckline, and he wondered what colour her skin was, just under it. They had somehow got into the press of the dancers, swaying and crowding thick against them, and the drums throbbed like a headache and the flutes sobbed and ached as, underneath all the raki, something within him was aching, searching, demanding.

  Marthe had made herself very flat and was leaving him, disappeared almost to nothing between two walls of dancers. Jerott stretched out an arm, and closing the hand again on her wrist, pulled her through back to him, although he saw she was in pain, and was sorry that it was the same wrist. He took the neck of the white robe and the neck of her dress together, between his two fingers and thumbs and tore them carefully down perhaps six inches. Her skin part of the way was the golden brown of a half-roasted chicken, but the rest was pure white.

  Her eyes were huge. He had never seen such a blue. Not anywhere. He would hold to that against anybody. She looked round, her yellow hair stuck to her cheek, as though searching for somebody, but she didn’t speak or call, Jerott was happy to find; although with the chants and the drums, no one would hear her. It struck him that they had privacy, in a sense, and he held her wrist hard, and said, ‘I love you. D’you love me? I love you. I don’t love anyone else, do I? You have all I want. I don’t need anyone else. I love you.’

  ‘And I love you,’ said Marthe. She relaxed suddenly, one hand holding the slit edge of her robe; her cheek laid on his shoulder. They turned; revolving, nested in the curves of the music; sleepily; the drums throbbing soft and then loud. The floor was not quite so crowded. ‘There is another room,’ said Marthe.

  Her light bones lying against him were part of him: the voice was the voice of his heart. Jerott threaded his hand down the silken fall of her hair and down her warm spine and stroked her as they moved until she stirred and looked at him, and he realized that a long time ago she had spoken. Her face was different.

  Speech was difficult. He nodded, and held her as she steered him through a curtain of changing sequins which sometimes became people; and into a place where there were no sequins but a cool darkness where he was able, with a little difficulty, for she was strong, to set her down somewhere while he slit the overrobe carefully down to the bottom.

  She had to prick him with it more than once before he saw that the shimmering thing in front of his eyes was his own knife, unstrapped from inside his sleeve, and that she was holding it ready to stab. His hands dropped, and Marthe rose to her feet, in her nearly immaculate Western gown, and looked down on him as he swayed where he knelt.

  ‘Take your sops, Mr Blyth, and go back to the schoolroom,’ said the light, weary voice. ‘For every disingenuous small boy there is a disingenuous small girl, I suppose, somewhere.’ She spoke to someone, and surprisingly, before him, there was another bowl of that damned fire-water.

  He drank it off and, smiling, fell asleep at her feet on the carpet without seeing how long she stood there surveying him; a frown in the unique cornflower eyes.

  He woke twice, after that: once lying in the open by a reeking dung fire, which had brought on the coughing which roused him. Between paroxysms he was aware of the night sky, and a dark circling of tents, and of Marthe’s voice, speaking in Arabic to someone. It sounded peremptory.

  The other voice, a man’s, he did not know, though when the fire suddenly flared he saw the black and white stripes of a Bedouin cloak, and a turn of jaw which looked somehow familiar. Then someone moved, and he saw the man Marthe was addressing. He was Shadli, the leader of the Saracens of Savah whom they had driven off on the way to Aleppo.

  His stomach heaved. By the time he was less occupied with his own ills, the conversation, whatever it was, was over, and there was no one there but Marthe and some Bedouin women, their cheeks tattooed in blue circles. He shut his eyes, but took the liquid someone forced through his teeth and was at once thickly asleep. But that, until much later, he thought was a dream.

  The next time he woke, it was daylight; and he was in his own bed.

  To dissect a fully grown giraffe with any success, in the open, in Aleppo, in September, demands an esoteric assortment of talents, such as, for example, a smart turn of speed.

  At sixty-three, Pierre Gilles was a few years past his best, but he was going to have a damned good attempt. A day after he came across the beast, on its last legs on the road in from Cairo, he had bought it, had it brought to the French Consul’s house in Aleppo, and ignoring the cries of the attaché, who was a fool, had got the men scurrying to fill the courtyard with straw, set up the tables and basins and a stool for his secretary, Pichón, and fix the awning from wall to wall, ready for day. He had started work then and there, by torchlight; and by dawn, when he stood back for the first time, sweating, and drank off the Candían wine that they brought him, the beast was already half flayed, and Pichón had ten pages of notes.

  That was when he went indoors, devil take it, to exonerate nature and to snatch, while he was there, a quick bite of food; and this damned girl caught him.

  When he came out of that argument half an hour later, he was red in the face, from the old cap on his head to the uncurled white beard which straggled over his blotched working-smock. He seized his apron and jerked it over his head with an imprecation in Latin which made his secretary sit up; and even when he had his knife in his hand again, he found it hard for quite ten minutes to concentrate.

  By noon, when all the bins were full and the flies were proving a problem, he went indoors again, for the sun staring through the awning was fairly unpleasant, although it had taken a fool like Pichón to faint from it. In his room he stripped, upended a jug of water over his great hulk and put on the smock again without resuming his clothes.

  Pichon’s notes, so far as they went, were on the table. Stripping off a chicken wing they had left for him, he chewed and wrote, his fist making faint red smears over the Latin, swearing under his breath. Then he drank some grape-juice, which was better than wine when you wanted your hand to be steady, and strode out of the room, the battered notes in his hand, just as a young man, with a face as livid as Pichon’s, came out of another door and collided with him. The young man apologized.

  The voice was educated. Looking at him with attention, Pierre Gilles thought the boy looked reasonably intelligent. From the suntan under all the picturesque black hair, he had obviously been here or travelling all summer, although the accent, he thought, had been Franco-Scots. Gilles made up his mind, and snapped, ‘D’you write Latin?’

  Sometimes Jerott forgot that the blazon of chivalry, with all the status it once had carried, was no longer his. In any case, he had an incredible headache. He stared at this enormous, round-shouldered old man in the filthy nightgown and buskins, and snapped back. ‘Of course.’

  Pierre Gilles was relieved. ‘Good. Excellent.’ Placing one bony hand on Jerott’s left shoulder, he pivoted him forward and, propelling him amiably before him, walked him out of the house, talking as he went. Herpestes, who had also had some chicken, was waiting ahead of him and jumped on his shoulder as he passed: Gilles paused to stroke him, and Jerott, walking on, arrived at the steps down to the courtyard and stopped as if poleaxed.

  Instead of swept tiles and potted orange trees, blood-drenched straw packed the yard, in the midst of which reared the ruins of some red en
amelled object almost wholly covered with flies. There was an arrangement of tables and buckets and basins and an array of shining objects like knives, of which he was not immediately sensible, as the effect of the white awning with which the courtyard apparently had been roofed was to produce a concentration of heat and stench quite unimaginable.

  Jerott stared in front of him, trying not to breathe, and aware of the blood draining from his own skin in sympathy with the abused organs within. Then a word reached him of all the old man had been saying. Giraffe. The old monster was cutting up … dissecting a giraffe. And—Jerott looked suddenly at the blood-smeared notes which had been pushed in his hand—he was recording the details. In Latin.

  No one who had been long in Archie Abernethy’s company could fail to know who this was. Jerott felt sick. His head ached; and the thinking he had done since he came to his senses that morning had not helped to make him feel better. If the brat’s not at Aleppo, it’s dead, he had convinced himself somehow. Or likely to cost more than our blood.

  He had meant to go back to France. He had no intention of wet-nursing anyone’s bastard, then or now. But now he meant to find that child, alive, whether anyone wanted it or not.

  Jerott swallowed. When it had to be done, it could be done. That, at least, you learned in the Order; and he had relearned it, to some purpose, under Lymond. He took a deep breath and, turning, spoke to the old man as he joined him, the grey, cat-like creature on his shoulder. ‘I believe, sir, you must be M. Pierre Gilles d’Albi?’

  ‘Yes. Naturally,’ said the anatomist. Several sick-looking men, obviously hired as menial assistants, had appeared and were waiting for him: he ignored them, peering, frowning, at the carcass and then up at the sun as he tied the leather apron-strings over his smock. ‘The stool’s over there.’ Without warning, he shot a glance at Jerott under drooping white brows. ‘But it’s too much for you, is it?’

  ‘No. I’ll do it,’ said Jerott. ‘If I may introduce myself? My name is Jerott Blyth. I’m a Scotsman from Nantes, and I have a very good friend who is a lifelong admirer of yours. Archie Abernethy.’

  ‘Good,’ said Pierre Gilles. He strode forward, Jerott following, and knife in hand, slit something disgusting and peered inside, his right hand continuing to work. ‘Take this down. De Gyraffa, Bellon dicet, quam Arabes Zurnapa, Graeci et Latini Camelopardalin nominant…’

  Five nerve-racking sentences later, he paused. ‘Do I have to translate?’

  There was pen and ink on the table. Scribbling furiously, Jerott shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Thanks to God.’ Something flew past into a bin. ‘Did you say Abernethy?’

  ‘That’s right. Archie Abernethy. He looked after the menagerie at Taraassery, and I think he was in Constantinople too. He also had the care recently of the King of France’s elephants. By the name Abernaci.’

  ‘Oh. Now, what have we here?’ said M. Gilles. ‘Ah. Take this down …’

  There followed five minutes’ furious dictation, followed by the flight through the air of another section of giraffe. ‘There’s a bit here I want to draw later. If it lasts. Abernaci? Oh, I remember him well. A small fellow, with a broken nose? So he is still alive, is he?’

  ‘I expected to meet him here, in Aleppo,’ said Jerott. ‘We’re both with Francis Crawford. It’s a special embassy with a gift from the King to the Sultan.’

  Pierre Gilles stopped working. He straightened, his hands bent at the wrists like a begging dog’s, and said, ‘You are in the same party as the girl?’

  ‘What girl?’ said Jerott, a little bemused in spite of himself with the stench and the Latin and the heat and the effect of the raki.

  ‘The girl who calls herself Marthe, I think it is? You are a friend of Marthe?’ said the anatomist.

  It required a moment’s reflection, but Jerott decided on the truth. ‘No. We are in the same party, but the rest of us know very little of Mlle Marthe. She is assistant to the antiquarian-craftsman who manufactured the gift,’ said Jerott.

  ‘Georges Gaultier, I understand. A rogue and a usurer. Take my advice and do not meddle with either of them. Hold that, will you?’ said Pierre Gilles.

  Jerott took it, hurriedly laying down his pen. ‘Why? Do you know them, sir?’ he said.

  The anatomist, screwing up his eyes, was taking measurements. He reeled them off, noting them down himself with bloody fingers, before he said, ‘I simply advise, do not meddle with them. Now pass me the hacksaw.’

  It was all Jerott was able to get out of him on that subject, and almost his total pronouncement on any other. To Jerott it had seemed suddenly likely that if anyone had seen and heard of a white child landed with a Syrian woman somewhere along the coast, or even here in Aleppo, Pierre Gilles might have done so.

  In an age of eccentric scholars, he had a reputation all his own: this shrewd old man with the powerful frame and flamboyant stride and extravagant temper. Fluent in the classical languages and at home in half a dozen others, he had always gone his own way, loosely armed with someone’s commission: travelling with the French Ambassador d’Aramon in the wake of the Sultan; resting at Rome to write up his notes and publish his books, loosely under the patronage of some Cardinal. And always with Herpestes on his shoulder.

  As the afternoon wore on, and the anatomist, up to his elbows and over in a frenzy of work, either did not hear what he was saying or barely took time to answer, Jerott stopped talking and confined himself to his notes. Only once, as Gilles’s pet slipped softly from the bench where he had been sitting and streaked, long and grey and deadly, to pounce on something at the edge of the courtyard, Jerott glanced round at the bright eyes, and the sharp black muzzle and the feline whiskers, and said, ‘What do you call him?’

  ‘Herpestes,’ said Gilles. He worked for a moment, then straightening, stretched and wiped a hand over his streaming brow. He looked at Jerott. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

  Jerott grinned. ‘Only because I knew about him. Herpestes ichneumon, a genus of digitigrade carnivorous quadrupeds of the family Viverridae. They have them in Egypt, as house pets for rat-catching.’

  ‘You have had a good tutor. I see no reason,’ said Gilles, still inspecting him, ‘why you should not come to Constantinople with me and help that fool Pichón. Your Latin is rather poorer but you have at least a strong stomach.’

  ‘I am honoured,’ said Jerott, amusement struggling through the stone ballast occupying the place of his guts. ‘But I was trying to explain, I am staying here because I am looking——’

  ‘For some child the Turk is amusing himself with. I recall. But did you not also say that in a day or two you would know from the attaché whether or not the boy has been in Aleppo? If the attaché finds the child for you, you may send him home and come to Constantinople with me. If not, you said, did you not, that the child would probably in any case now be dead?’

  ‘If he’s alive, he’ll still be in danger,’ said Jerott. It sounded limp. ‘I shall have to go back home with him. And if he isn’t here, I’ll have to go on trying to find him.’

  Pierre Gules had just made a plan, and he did not wish it disturbed. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What is this you fear for the child? He is ill, or delicate? We shall initiate inquiries from Constantinople, and it will be found. The Grand Turk is more powerful than a little consular attaché.’

  It was a long time since Jerott had taken orders from a stranger. He said curtly, ‘I am afraid it would be too late. The child was a hostage for the life of Sir Graham Reid Malett, one of the Knights of the Order on Malta. Sir Graham was killed in the battle of Zuara last month by the child’s father. As soon as the news reaches its keeper, it will be dead.’

  ‘One moment,’ said Pierre Gilles. He lifted his beard and stood, arms akimbo, screwing up his face against the mellowing light falling through the stretched linen over his head. ‘The light is going. What mysteries my friend here has left, I think he must keep. And the Consul, if he comes back tomorrow, will wish the use of
his courtyard perhaps. Yes, I think we may consider that we have done. Herpestes!’

  The ichneumon ran towards him and leaped on his shoulder. The sweating labourers, summoned also by signal, came and received their instructions. The anatomist turned back to Jerott, untying the strings of the apron and peeling it off, to Herpestes’s annoyance. ‘You say, Blyth, the urgency comes from the death of this knight Graham Malett?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jerott.

  ‘Then,’ said Pierre Gilles heartily, ‘there is no urgency. The knight Graham Malett is alive, though no longer a knight. It is a joke, I fear, against Malta the length of the Coast. Have you not heard of the great new Pasha just installed in Zuara? He is your dead man: your Graham Reid Malett himself.’

  There was no urgency. As the sky darkened and evening fell, Jerott sat in his room, staring with unseeing eyes at the wall, thinking. When someone knocked on his door and asked him to go to the attaché’s chamber, he was already prepared for what he would hear.

  The child was not in Aleppo, and was highly unlikely ever to have been in Aleppo. ‘It is strange,’ said the attaché, doing his best under bothering circumstances, ‘that M. le Comte thought it necessary to send to Aleppo in the first place. The ship Peppercorn you speak of is an English bottom, and does not call at Ottoman ports.’

  ‘They said something of the sort at Scanderoon,’ said Jerott. ‘We thought there was an English agent here perhaps.’

  ‘There are negotiations, but so far no one,’ said the attaché. ‘Meanwhile, English ships, you understand, may call only at those ports under the control of the Seigneury, such as Crete and Candia, where you have already been. Sometimes, depending on the weather, the Peppercorn calls at these places, but she has only one regular port of call at this season, and that is to load mastic on the island of Chios.’

  ‘Chios. In the Aegean?’ asked Jerott.

  ‘Between Samos and Lesbos, yes. It is ruled by Venice but pays tribute to Turkey. You do not know it? It is a garden, Mr Blyth,’ said the attaché. ‘Flowers, and trees, and great red partridges, tame as chickens. And the handsomest women in Europe, to be had for a song. They understand these matters better than in Aleppo,’ said the attaché, who had become vaguely aware of a certain undercurrent of atmosphere in the Consulate, and in any case wished to be free of visitors before the Consul came home. ‘Each girl pays a ducat a day to the Captain of the Night, and she may do as she pleases. You will go to Chios?’