Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘So you don’t regret it?’ said Jerott.

  ‘I have seen them,’ said Gilles. ‘I shall examine and record them, perhaps, before my friends take them from me.… I should like to have been known as the man who found Justinian’s treasure. I should like to have seen the pieces studied by scholars and placed together, as they have always been, in the sanctuary of the church, not competed for and sold to covetous and ignorant collectors. Had I been able to present this to my patron, I could have commanded any position, any sum for my travels and studies.… I regret the irresponsible and mischievous way I have been compelled to give up what is mine, and I find it hard to forgive these two stupid people for what they are doing.…’

  ‘But?’ said Jerott. Beside him Marthe was also standing, her head flung back, watching the speaker, her blue eyes lit with cold anger.

  ‘But there is one other consideration,’ said Gilles, ‘outside all tuum and meum. In this war which you as a Knight of St John have fought, between Christian and Moslem: what could be inflaming—what could turn a game of conquest into a game of implacable hatred—sooner than this, the theft from Suleiman’s capital of perhaps its greatest treasure, and that proudly displayed and celebrated in Rome? Then the hordes surely would descend, and who would protect us?’

  ‘The relics could be received privately,’ said Jerott. ‘It need not be made known where they were discovered, or how. No one else in the city knows they have ever been here.’

  The old man, lying on the piled straw outside with the ichneumon on his shoulder, shifted a little and began to get up. ‘It is cold. We must go. As you say, it might have been done secretly thus. But where then my reward and my acclaim? … I am philosophic. The treasures were imprisoned, and they have been freed. They will take their place again in the world, and so shall I. I have again the notes I looked on as lost, and the manuscript I grieved for: I may return now and begin on my book. It is the girl and her uncle who will suffer. I have lost only my vanity.’

  ‘Be philosophic,’ said Marthe. Her voice was shaking. ‘Condescend, and forgive. It is easy when you are wealthy and learned and travelled, and have a lifetime of achievement behind you. I use my wits, because they are all I possess. If they bring me at last what everyone else has denied me, what right have you to condemn us?’ She swept her arm round the silent room. ‘I have spent my life as you have among beautiful things. I know how to care for them. I feel for them as you do, and so does my uncle. These must be sold, but with my share of what they will bring I can become a person. For the first time a human being with a life of my own; a home and friends and possessions, and work I may follow in peace and become namely for …’

  Jerott said, ‘You speak like an embittered old man. Where are your children?’

  She looked at him, her eyes full of anger and unshed tears of self-pity. ‘Where they will stay, my drunken monk,’ she said harshly. ‘They are not yours to speak for.’

  He climbed the rope then without speaking and made his way stooping up the short arm to the main passage where Gilles already awaited them, the powerful lamp in his hand. The wall behind him, lit for the first time, was packed shoulder-high with bales and piled blocks of straw. Jerott said, ‘Why is it so cold?’ He was shivering.

  ‘You wish to know?’ said Gilles. Turning he strode up the slope until he came to the opening, heavily blocked, which Jerott had already noticed. ‘This can be opened only from the outside here,’ said Gilles. ‘It led once to a cistern, now dry. Then another entrance was discovered, on the far side of the cistern and nearer the surface, and this aperture was forgotten. These underground caverns are put to many uses, as you have doubtless seen. This one is a storehouse for snow.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jerott. ‘To cool Suleiman’s sherbet.… Hence also the straw.’

  ‘Snow for the Seraglio, probably,’ Gilles agreed. ‘Or perhaps for the use of the viziers or the aghas in their great houses. In time of heat, the winter robe of Olympus is an exquisite luxury.’

  The door he had been unblocking swung open as he spoke, and Jerott, moving forward, pressed his fingers into the stiff, compacted mass which filled all the opening. So tightly was it packed that his numbed fingertips could hardly drive through the surface. A cold fresh air swept through the passage.

  ‘It is cold enough,’ said Gilles; and swung the door shut.

  Behind, the light in the treasure-chamber had gone out. Marthe rejoined them a moment later and without speaking they made their way slowly back to the boat. Drifting back over the green water between the silent dark columns there was a desolation in Jerott’s soul such as all the shifting experiences of his life had never bred in him. Wide-eyed and tense in the darkness, he could have wept for them all; and not least for the old and beautiful things once nourished on incense and prayer and now brooding, conserving their power. Now the spider spins his web in Caesar’s palace hall, and the owl keeps watch on the Tower of Afrasiâb. So Mohammed the Conqueror had said as he vanquished the city: a conquest which looked not to the past but to the future: a conqueror who built his own temples and palaces and formed and wisely governed an empire which bid to become as rich and wide as the Caesars’.

  How small, beside that, was Marthe’s smarting ambition; the old man’s rightful disgruntlement: his own silent hurt. The change had come, and must be accepted. The treasure was unimportant now in its own right except in the one aspect which Gilles had detected: as a bone between dogs. There was a wider vision, he was beginning to see, which Gilles had and which Francis had: pursuing a vendetta which was universal far more than personal: a self-imposed mission to destroy a brilliant and powerful man whose vicious ambition could throw nations into the arena like the beasts of the Hippodrome. Jerott knew then, with his head if not his heart, that in trying to save the children, they had all been wrong. Nothing mattered but Gabriel’s death.

  Francis had known that, in St Giles, when he had chosen to kill rather than beg for the life of his son; and only Philippa’s intervention had saved Graham Malett. A second time, after the horror at Algiers, Lymond had been dissuaded only by Marthe, in the long darkness of the aftermath, from seeking out Gabriel on Malta and killing him then, without regard for the child. Dissuaded by Marthe, who had no interest in Lymond or child, but wished merely to pursue her own objective, unhampered by the death of an envoy. And a third time Lymond had attempted it, at Zuara; when Jerott, commending his courage, could not disguise his disgust: at a nature so exigent, so governed by intellect as to be unmoved by the fate of a boy.

  But that was before he had seen him with a cowed and beaten and terrified child, murmuring to it as it played with its shells. They were all wrong. But who among them now had the will and the inhumanity to take Gabriel’s life, and sacrifice those of Philippa and the children?

  One person, it appeared. Climbing out of the boat and up the ladder into Gaultier’s house Jerott turned to face Marthe; ignoring Gilles; ignoring Gaultier sitting rocking, his hand to his shoulder. His voice was perfectly calm. ‘You will take your brother’s message to Philippa Somerville, and you will deliver it, correctly and fully, under guise of repairing the spinet. Or I shall bring the Janissary into the house.’

  She had of course expected it. She had been afraid perhaps of worse: that he would hand her regardless to the Seraglio and attempt to use the treasure for barter. She did make one last attempt. ‘You would throw Master Gilles to the wolves?’

  ‘I would tell them the truth,’ said Jerott. ‘That he did only what he was forced to do, and for no personal gain.’

  She did not say, You would throw me to the wolves? although she could have had no illusions about her own fate if he denounced them. Instead she gave a short laugh. ‘So this,’ said Marthe, ‘is true love. I made my only error, I think, in Aleppo. A rape on the floor of the tekke would have avoided this nuisance. But to tell the truth, I judged you incapable.’

  He took the flat of his hand across her face then: the hard, soldier’s hand, which made an
impact like the sound of the breaking of sticks, and left her fine skin staring livid; and then colouring fast with bruised blood. ‘I hope,’ said Jerott, breathing softly and hard, ‘that you never meet those who will judge what you have done. How would you recognize love? Or compassion? Francis at least has learned that. You avaricious little slut … do I call in the Janissary; or will you do as I say?’

  Her face was unflinching as a tablet of stone. ‘I shall do it,’ she said. ‘Since I must, to be free of you. Go then and find you a whoremonger. What use to you—any of you—is a mind and a soul, when all you need is a body?’

  There was a silence. ‘You didn’t ask,’ said Jerott at length. ‘But I would have forgone even the body for the sake of the mind. And I would have claimed neither body nor mind, had I discovered a soul.’

  He informed M. Chesnau that day that Gaultier’s niece was willing to adjust and rewire the spinet, assuming the Kapi Agha still thought it necessary.

  It was, as he knew, entirely necessary; no one else having the proper thickness of wire. The following day one of the Chiausi arrived with a summons for Marthe, and, the following morning, she entered Topkapi.

  She was unescorted, save for the Janissaries who were commanded to fetch her. Gaultier had refused point blank to associate himself with a folly he considered she had brought on herself, although what she could have done to stop Jerott he was unable to suggest. He remained in his house with Pierre Gilles, who had now received, from Jerott, an outline of the quest which had brought him and his friends to Stamboul.

  ‘Then of course,’ Gilles had said, ‘the girl must go to Topkapi.’ And to the vociferous Gaultier: ‘Tacite, little man.’

  Nevertheless, the outcome mattered to Gilles no less than to Gaultier. If Jerott found Marthe had failed him, he might do as he threatened and denounce them and their treasure. And if anything happened to Marthe, how would he ever recover his papers?

  Jerott took no chances. Having discovered that neither Gaultier nor the old man could swim, he removed the boat to another part of the cistern. The swim back through dark, ice-cold water was more exhausting than he had expected, but he accomplished it; and set someone he could trust to keep a watch on the house. No one after that was allowed out or in but the negress, for food. Until Marthe came back, no one was going to smuggle that treasure away from under Jerott Blyth’s nose.

  Marthe wore her best dress for Topkapi, but made no other concessions to the occasion; stalking through to the ultimate splendours of the Ottoman Empire like a physician called in to bleed it. She made no comment on the magnificence of the room in the selamlìk where she was led to work on the spinet. It was one of Khourrém Sultan’s chambers, although the Sultan’s wife was not there. Marthe asked the black eunuch who brought her, presently, to request the presence of anyone who could play it; and Philippa appeared almost immediately.

  Of all those who had set out on the Dauphiné, Philippa’s lot had been the most solitary, and the separation from her own kind now very long. Her brown eyes were waterlogged, frowning to keep back the tears at the first sight of Marthe; but the blue answering gaze was unsmiling and even, in a curious way, angry. In French, which the eunuch understood, Marthe reeled off a number of questions on the spinet’s performance; returned to the instrument and tinkered with it while Philippa stood, stupid and tentative, in the middle of the floor. Then Marthe called her over to hear some instructions.

  It was timed with the efficiency she so scorned in her brother. Above their heads, as they bent over the spinet, the clock struck the hour. And under cover of its bells and its bustling automata, Marthe gave rapidly to Philippa the details she had been told to pass on.

  When the frenzied activity stopped, Marthe was already bent over the wires, pliers in hand, while Philippa sat at the keyboard, her frightened body drowning her mind with primitive chemicals. Escape, with the child, was something she had never dreamed possible. She began, with cold fingers, to play a run in a difficult key, and said softly, in English, ‘Is there another child?’

  ‘Play middle G,’ said Marthe. ‘Yes. There are plans for him also.’

  ‘Which—?’ began Philippa, her brain beginning to function once more; but Marthe cut her off. ‘No one knows. Thank you. Now D and C. Yes. I shall call the eunuch over now and instruct you both together. Is there anything more?’

  Only to thank you,’ said Philippa. ‘To thank you for coming.’

  Marthe stared at her. Whether she saw the fresh skin and bright hair; the straight shoulders and thin, pretty hands, she gave no indication. ‘I came,’ she said, ‘because I was forced to.’ And turning, called over the eunuch.

  She left shortly after, having exchanged no more with Philippa than that. The Chiausi escorting her were waiting at the door of the selamlik and walked with her up the slope of the third court, the grey light cold on their silver-tipped staffs. Straight and elegant in her stiff Turkish over-robe, a veil over her hair, Marthe this time had relaxed infinitesimally; her blue eyes observing in silence the marbles and gold and the deep-coloured tiles within the slim colonnades, and the square wrought shell of the Throne Room before the Gate of Felicity.

  The Gate opened slowly, the doorkeepers standing impassive before it, their white plumes lifting and flickering in the sharp little wind. Within the porch stood a line of tall men, dressed not as Chiausi or Janissaries, but in elaborate coats, with tall hats of violet velvet. Beside her, Marthe’s escort had halted. She glanced at them, her heart thudding suddenly; and then took a step forward alone, her head high.

  No one moved. She stopped again, and in a firm voice addressed them in Turkish. They smiled and nodded, variously, in return, standing immovable from wall to wall of the porch, but none of them spoke, except with his fingers. Then, still smiling, they walked forward and began to surround her, edging her away from the wide golden gateway and back into the innermost garden. She turned then, quickly, to speak to her escort but they had gone silently, disappearing between the green pillars; and they did not turn back although she called sharply before trying again, her voice cutting, to order the men in her way to stand back.

  They heard, she thought, and understood probably; but they did nothing to help her, but merely stood smiling around her, while the Gate of Felicity closed. Then, gently, they gripped her by the arms and guided her back into the secret, innermost court of the Seraglio.

  Marthe was in the hands of the mutes.

  24

  Constantinople: The House of Jubrael Pasha

  The Meddáh that day was in the Hippodrome, the ruins of the great coursing-ground with its pillaged horseshoe of arcades high above the Marmara Sea, where once lions fought and chariots raced for the Byzantine emperors and their courts. Ottoman palaces now had encroached on its great thirteen-hundred-foot spread; its stones had been used for Suleiman’s splendid new khan, and its marble pillars for Suleiman’s mosque. Long ago, the old statues from Greece and from Rome had been thrown down or stolen: Castor and Pollux; Hercules in bronze by Lymachus. The chariot of Lysippus with its four golden horses had stood on the Imperial Box until the fourth crusade, when the Venetians had taken and placed it in their own church of St Mark’s.

  Pillars still remained, of coloured marble, upholding the galleries beneath which were the cages and chambers and storehouses; and at the other end, near St Sophia, some tiered buildings and remains of wide shallow steps. In the centre, in a straggling line, there remained also what was left of the treasures brought to Byzantium from Greece and Asia Minor, and all over the civilized world. The obelisk from Karnak, set up by Theodosius on its plinth of deep bas-relief, was now nearly three thousand years old; its hieroglyphics still sharp and clear. Near it, the Column of Constantine still showed the marks where its plates of gilt bronze had been pinned, and between them, twenty feet high, were the three coiled bronze snakes from the Temple of Delphi, whose heads had once held the great golden tripod and vase before the shrine two thousand years earlier. A century before, on anothe
r site, water, wine and milk had flowed from the three serpent heads which now gaped at the winter skies, broken and dry. Now Suleiman used the waste ground between for sports and for festivals, and the Janissaries practised their archery and rode fast, dangerous games of Djirit among its broken pillars and fragmented marble, where flocks of goats rested in summer, and dogs roamed, and vendors of sherbet and sweetmeats set up their stalls in the shade of the galleries.

  Today it was cold; and there were braziers among the pale stones, where you could take your pieces of meat straight from the butcher, and have them skewered and roasted: the smell of hot mutton, pushed by the sea winds, floated among the drift of idlers who were watching a company of seraglio Ajémoghláns on horseback taking part in a wild and dangerous game of Djirit, their four-foot white wands stabbing, vicious as spears. The story-teller had been placed in state near one of the braziers, and the crowd increased; for he was now well known for his marvellous tales in the ancient tradition as well as for new ones of his own, which, like the silk-moth, he spun strand by strand without effort, filled with delicate wonders.

  A man, then, of poetic imagination. But could one reconcile that, thought Jerott Blyth, on the edge of the crowd, with a man who could kill as Lymond had killed in Algiers; who could plan and act without mercy? He shrugged, inside his long fur-lined coat, and sent his Janissary over to buy a skewer of meat.

  Ishiq came up, bowl in hand, a few seconds later. Jerott dropped in his coins. ‘Tell him,’ he said, ‘that the girl has not come back from Topkapi, and that according to the Seraglio she has been invited to stay longer to put the spinet fully in order. We have had no direct message from Marthe herself.’ He grinned at Ishiq; a happy slave, who had no doubts about his master, and the boy, calling Allah to bless him, also grinned and ran off. In the background, Lymond’s voice rose and fell in its beautiful Turkish: behind hood and beard and blindfolding bandage, Jerott could make nothing at all of his face. Then the Janissary came back, and Jerott stayed, chewing, till the skewer was empty and the begging-bowl came round for the second time.