Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Snatches of laughter, and a song from a wine-booth. A shrieking block in one alley as a long chain of Armenian porters, arms interlaced, brought up from the harbour a great two-ton fat-bellied keg on a pole. The clangour, night and day, outside the gates from the new arsenal with its hundred arches or vaults for the building and dry-docking of galleys.

  D’Aramon took the new Ambassador everywhere: even to the foundry and barracks at Topkhane, on the Bosphorus shore, where the viziers and Imams sat on sofas crying Allah! Allah! as the stokers threw wood on the furnaces; and the founders, naked but for slippers and caps and the thick protective sleeves on their arms, mixed gold and silver for the True Faith with the bubbling brass in the foundry; and sheep were sacrificed, screaming, in the red glare of the furnace as its mouth was forced open with long iron hooks, and the white metal flowed to the moulds.

  That day, they were too late for dinner, and M. d’Aramon took his colleague instead to a Greek tavern serving a good Ancona wine and spiced white bread and honey and Tomourra caviare, cut whole and salted. ‘As you know, I dare say … in Stamboul you will find cook-shops, but no taverns or inns as one would expect in a Christian country.’ M. d’Aramon was feeling stimulated and modestly pleased with himself. It was some time since he had travelled about Galata on foot. He was a little footsore, perhaps—the streets were shocking—but otherwise for his age quite remarkably fresh.

  ‘Nulla apud Turcas esse diversoria … Yes, I know,’ said Crawford mildly. They were the first words he had spoken for some time. He had not, M. d’Aramon noted, indulged overmuch in the caviare, although he had taken a little more wine than was his usual remarkably spare habit. A trembling flicker of sapphire blue flame from the ring on the other man’s hand, lying still by his goblet, drew the Baron’s attention, just as Crawford added, in the same breath, ‘I wonder … are there horses one might hire to the Embassy?’

  ‘My dear sir!’ Instant solicitude; but beneath it, an undeniably selfish shadow of pleasure. Exhausted. And he could give him … what? Twenty years? But it was, of course, a very steep climb back to the hilltop at Pera.

  M. d’Aramon obtained the horses, and with his Janissaries walking behind, returned home with the new Ambassador who smiled, but did not again speak until, dismounting in the Embassy courtyard, they walked indoors together. There he turned, and holding out his hand to M. d’Aramon said, ‘Will you forgive me? As Abraham entertained the angels with hearth-cakes, you have entertained me, and I am deeply indebted. It is to my shame that I have not your energy.’

  His voice was steady and the hand he offered was cool. But from the roots of his damp yellow hair, all Crawford’s skin, d’Aramon saw with surprise, was sparkling with sweat.

  He said something, he remembered, and stood watching as the new Ambassador, withdrawing his hand, smiled and turned into his own private chamber. Later, d’Aramon was thinking about it again, in his own study, when the fat Swiss steward scratched on the door and then entered.

  He brought the explanation for this curious behaviour, quite simply, with his apologies.

  ‘M. le Comte has recently had an infection of the shoulder, Your Excellency, which troubles him if he does not have a sufficiency of rest. He would not himself venture to upset your programme, but if you would be so kind as to ensure that he has an opportunity to dine here at the Embassy each day, followed by an hour, no more, in which to repose …’

  ‘But of course,’ said M. d’Aramon, roused to a lively anxiety. ‘I did not know. He did not, of course, mention it. I trust no harm … I hope,’ said M. d’Aramon hurriedly, as another thought struck him, ‘that Tuesday’s ceremony will not be too much for him?’

  ‘Thank you, sir. It is kind of you, sir. You may rest perfectly assured,’ said Master Zitwitz with gentle and absolute confidence, ‘that His Excellency will attend Tuesday’s ceremony with no difficulty whatsoever.’

  19

  Chios and Constantinople

  About half-way between Aleppo and Chios, it came to Jerott Blyth, like Achillini discerning the bile duct, that he hated ichneumons.

  Afterwards, with the mountains, the steppes, the gorges behind him; having lived through the sleepless days in the stifling heat of the tents and passed the labouring nights in the saddle of his small Turkish horse, which could walk or gallop but was unable to trot, or on the jolting back of one of the two hundred camels in their long caravan, Jerott was prepared to admit that for many reasons that long journey, six weeks in all, between Aleppo and Constantinople was one of the worst in his life.

  Through all the misery of mosquitoes and dust-storms, of stale meat and sour milk and brackish water, through the perpetual cries of the camel-men; the plodding clank of the bells, the barking of the leashed dogs in the casals they passed; the rauccous groups of itinerant merchants forming and reforming among the riders, inquisitive, insistent; stinking, some of them, worse than their camels, there rode at his side Pierre Gilles discoursing in Latin on the glories of Constantinople (forma illius est triangula), and of the ancient city which battle and fire had reduced to ruins (Adde incendia, et ruinas, quas cum alii barbari, tum postremam Turci ediderunt, qui iam centum annos non cessant funditus antiquae urbis vestigia delere).

  Listening, with the ears of suffering and boredom, Jerott recognized dimly at least that to Gilles the old city of the Byzantine emperors was more real than the city of Suleiman: as he spoke of underground cisterns, baths and palaces, of the Forum of Constantine and the purple pillar beneath which, Cedrinus had written, twelve hampers of holy writings had been buried; of the Gate of Diana showing the contests of Gygantus, the thunderbolts of Jove, the Neptune with Trident; of the triple bronze snakes from the Shrine of the Oracle at Delphi, whose three heads ran with milk, with water and wine; as he told of the golden pyramid of cupids whose flying bronze image revealed how the wind blew.

  He heard of the Sacred Palace with the Halls of Pearl and of Gold; of the Throne of Solomon with its golden lions and its rose trees of gilded bronze with jewelled and enamelled birds on its branches which sang in harmony as the lions roared and music played while the Emperor spoke to his subjects. Of the mystic phial of the Sigma whose wine flowed through a golden pineapple into a silver basin filled with almonds and pistachios. Of the jewelled reliquaries and the looted statues of marble and bronze; of the great library with its works of philosophers, poets and scientists; works of horoscopy, astrology, numerology; manuscripts in Persian and Hebrew and Greek; fragments of original scriptures …

  ‘You should write about it,’ said Jerott one day, stemming the flood, and Gilles, jolting about on his mule, the ichneumon on his shoulder in the folds of his cloak, raised his eyebrows and shrugged. It was Pichón, the secretary, who came alongside later and whispered, ‘His papers were lost, Mr Blyth, on the journey he took with the Sultan and M. d’Aramon five years ago. All his notes for just such a book, and a deal of original writings he came across in his research. All lost as the army travelled through some defile not far from Bitlis. A disaster for the world. He has never forgotten it, or been able to bring himself to start over again. It is better not to open the subject.’

  With which Jerott, having succeeded better than he had hoped, most heartily agreed.

  For on his other side rode Marthe, the exquisite enemy, whose presence for him was a physical anguish which did not grow less. Marthe, the cold and the treacherous, whom he wanted; and who was sister to Francis Crawford of Lymond.

  He is my brother, she had said in Aleppo; and staring silently back at her, the lines of anger still on his face, he had known beyond doubt that it was true. No freak of genetics, pranking through generations, could account for two people, man and girl, endowed each with the same wayward mordacity; the same isolation; the same double-edged gifts. After a long time, Jerott had said, ‘Does he know?’

  Sitting as she had sat throughout, her hands loose on her lap, Marthe answered without any movement. ‘He guesses, I think. Once, he came near to asking; but you may
be sure he will never question too closely. He is far too afraid.’

  ‘Afraid?’ Afraid to acknowledge, to provide for an illegitimate half-sister? It was the oddest thing Marthe had said. If it were true, thought Jerott; no wonder she was bitter. And yet if Lymond had suspected the truth—and looking back, play by play and prick by prick, Jerott suddenly realized, with extraordinary clarity, that of course he had—why had he chosen to ignore it completely? To treat her, from the day they first met, with a hostility hardly disguised?

  Pride? Hardly. The loud-mouthed brown-haired egotist who had been second Baron Crawford of Culter might have sown his wild oats over half Europe, surely, without reflecting upon the honour of his wife Sybilla or either of his two sons. If there was a byblow fallen on hard times, one did what one could. Lymond was not a poor man. Neither was Richard, the third Baron, his brother. Jerott said, aloud, ‘I don’t understand.’

  In Marthe’s blue eyes, studying him then, there was a curious look. ‘He doesn’t want you to understand,’ she said. And added quickly, as he opened his mouth, ‘Save your breath. I have nothing to tell you. I am a bastard, brought up in the charge of the Dame de Doubtance, of Blois and Lyons, of father and mother unknown. All I have been told all my life is that a rich Scottish lord, Francis Crawford of Lymond, is my brother.’

  ‘Then when you met him, you thought …’

  The cool voice was sardonic. ‘One early outgrows one’s visions of being transported to luxury. I knew when he stood in that room in Marseilles that he had not known I existed.’

  But Lymond had realized in the end who she was. Day by day, becoming surer and surer. And far from acknowledging it, had openly shown his distaste. Jerott said, helplessly, ‘I still don’t … some of the things he has done I … cannot condone. But I have never known him be less than generous.’

  ‘Then we are different, my brother and I,’ said Marthe dryly; and rose to her feet. ‘Generosity is a virtue I have had no chance to study. Or it may have escaped me, perhaps, through the parent we do not have in common … always assuming, of course, there is one parent we don’t have in common.…’

  And Jerott, riding sticky and filthy in that tumultuous cavalcade, thought once again of all that these words could imply, and remembered the look in Marthe’s eyes as she spoke them. And it struck him that if Francis Crawford and his sister showed little mercy towards the world and each other, it was not without cause.

  They had never spoken of it again. He had no cause to trust her. He knew her dishonest. He was aware that she was travelling to Constantinople merely to rejoin Georges Gaultier and that although she had offered him, supposedly, the whereabouts of Lymond’s child—the child, my God, thought Jerott distractedly, of her own blood—she felt no concern about its recovery.

  And in spite of all that, he remained obsessed with her: with the long veiling lashes round the intense blue of her eyes; the high polished brow over which her hair fell, cream and ochre and lemon and chrome in the sun; and the colour of the sun on her cheekbones and the thin bridge of her nose. The slimness of her arms … the long, slender bones of her foot. Her voice; her wit; her laugh when she was entertained.

  For whatever reason, Marthe laughed easily on all that laborious journey: even when, reaching the big khan at Ulukişla, they and all the caravan were detained, together with all those travellers already within, by a detachment of mounted Spahis from Eregli, a day’s journey north. By the third day, when the tally at the door of the khan was full, and Jerott was becoming extremely uneasy, they were released and allowed to continue their journey. Eregli, when they stayed there next day, was full of activity, and there were Janissaries’ tents, with the ceremonial cooking-pots of more than one company set in the plain between Eregli and their next halt at Karapinar. The rumour was that the Sultan was on his way south.

  At Konya, two days farther on, Jerott and his three companions together with Marthe’s woman and two guiding Janissaries left the main caravan and waited with their mules and horses and three baggage camels and driver for a party travelling west, to Izmir.

  It was less warm, there on the high plateau, than it had been: the hills around the old town were dusty and bare, and the khan neglected. Using the night once more for sleeping, their rest was perpetually fractured by the voice of Herpestes, and the rats he slaughtered and brought to his master, bloody and warm from the kill. During the day Jerott listened, without enthusiasm, to the voice of Pierre Gilles describing the glories of ancient Iconium: the citadel (into which they could not penetrate) and the mosque with its ranks of stolen Byzantine capitals (which they could not visit). There was a tekke on the east of the town where the founder of the Whirling Dervishes lay in his marble sarcophagus; but Marthe merely smiled when Jerott suggested, acidly, that she should pay her respects, and the quality of the smile, and the recollections it brought, had a predictable effect: he began drinking again.

  Thereafter the journey to Izmir was blurred by that circumstance. He remembered the ferry to the island of Chios because the ferryman was a thief whom he had to throw into the water, which gave him much satisfaction, even though some twenty close relatives of the Syrian arrived, none less than nine feet in height, and would have served him in the same way or worse if his Janissaries had not prevented them. He remembered a voice, presumably Marthe’s, quoting with gentle amusement, ‘Alas … if angels should sniff at his shroud?’ and the old tub-thumper saying, in plain French for once, ‘What happens if we can’t get a ship?’

  At that point, governed by a soldier’s instinct which never entirely deserted him, Jerott Blyth painfully pulled himself together. Whatever Marthe and Pierre Gilles might desire, he had not come to Chios as fast as abominable travelling conditions would allow merely to take ship for Constantinople. He had come because the Peppercorn had called here to load mastic, and to disembark, so it was said, a Syrian woman and a two-year-old boy.

  In the grip therefore of a high degree of nausea and a mind-wrecking headache, Jerott deposited the whole of his party, with ichneumon, at the house of Joseph Justinian, the French Consul at Chios, and left them drinking cherry syrup on the wooden balcony into the gardens while he went, with the help of a secretary, to find the English Consulate, and then those officers of the Seigniority, the Genoese administration, who might be able to tell him the fate of the Peppercorn’s passengers.

  It wasn’t difficult. It was extremely simple, in fact. The Peppercorn had sailed in, loaded with mastic, and gone. The Syrian woman had disembarked; reported as required to the Council, and had set up business in Chios. For some reason, Jerott had expected to find her, like her brother, settled in one of the silk-growing colonies, or in one of the villages of the Mastichochonia, where pistacia lentiscus wept its gummy St Theodore’s tears from August to September. It had not occurred to him that she might simply continue with the trade she had followed in Mehedia: that of running a brothel. He obtained its direction, dismissed the unwilling secretary, and set off.

  Chios the island was little more than a hundred and twenty miles round all its circumference. Chios the city lay round its harbour with rocky hills at its back and a big double-walled castle to the north, sharing its hill with the colonnades of a natural hot bath, built like a temple. The flag of St George flew over a bourse as adequate, he was told, as that of Lyons or the Royal Exchange in London itself and the city, four miles from the mainland, was a trading centre for the fine mohairs of Anatolia as well as its own silk and cotton and marble and the aromatic resinous gum with which one qualified one’s new wine or spirits, or drank mingled with honey and water.

  Chios paid ten thousand ducats in tribute to Turkey, and could afford to. Its soil was a garden. Outside the walls Jerott had seen fig trees, almonds, apricots; date palms, orange and lemon trees; grapes, olives, pomegranates and a wealth of late summer flowers. The streets were narrow but the houses, unlike Turkish houses, were handsome, of dressed snow-white stone; and the people were richly attired: Greeks, Genoese, Jews and their
beautiful wives in velvet, damask and satin, their sleeves laced with silk ribbons, their narrow aprons fringed and embroidered. Their hair was long, under tall ribbed coifs of white satin, sewn with pearls and with gold, and half veiled in yellow and white, through which their chains, their jewels and trinkets glittered and trembled. Look out, had said the attaché at Aleppo, for the partridges and the women, whose very husbands acted as panders. Nine English shillings a night, had added the attaché at Aleppo, seeing him off. And supper included.

  And indeed, under his feet, all red beak and claw, waddled the partridges. And before him, swaying and graceful, the women walked to and fro, smiling. Quite insensibly, Jerott quickened his pace.

  The house of the Syrian woman was tall and wreathed in vineleaves. A discreet notice, in Greek and in Turkish, directed custom to the garden gate at the back. Jerott, reading it, was aware of a burst of laughter from the alley behind him, but was unaware until he turned and found himself surrounded that the laughter was directed against himself.

  The men were all, he thought, dellies: the roving adventurers from the north who, dressed in wild-beast skins and with little else but their weapons, earned their livelihood by their strong arms, and attached themselves to anyone who would pay them.

  These were dressed partly in skins and partly in folds of coarse cotton. They had good boots on their legs, and strong swords at their sides, and there were perhaps five of them, rolling together. They were drunk.

  Jerott, who was alone, and on the French Consul’s advice without his dress sword and dagger, cursed the mischance that had brought them. It was possible, and, from their jeers and their cackling laughter as they approached him, very probable, that they were merely after some sport. Caught where he was, he was fair game. He might also be expected to have on him at least the price of his proposed entertainment. Eyeing the happy quintet as they closed in on him, Jerott decided with resignation that this time discretion was preferable. Beside the front door at his back there was a bell-pull. He backed to it, grasped it and heaved.