Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘They’re breaking into the house.’ Lymond, leaning down, his hand on her arm, said, ‘Philippa, there’s no time to coax him. Hand him to Marthe, and jump up yourself. We have to get rid of the boat.’

  Then she was in a black, reeking conduit, just high enough to let them walk stooping, and when Kuzúm stood suddenly still, frenzied rejection on his white dirty face, she helped Marthe tie her handkerchief over his mouth.

  Lymond scuttled the boat, sending the small raft first spinning into the darkness; and then quickly and silently rebuilt the entrance with bricks. Jerott, the dim lamp in his hands, looked at him for a moment in question, and then without speaking pushed past to Gaultier and Gilles and led the way forward. For good or evil, their retreat was cut off.

  On the long, scrambling journey to the treasure-chamber, none of them spoke. Míkál, sure-footed and slender, helped Marthe and Philippa through the narrow, rubble-blocked openings, and Jerott, his teeth on edge with his slowness, walked behind the old man. Gaultier, the least agile of them all and the most desperate, thrust painfully through, battering himself and colliding with others, with Archie a noiseless shadow behind. Last of all Lymond picked his way bearing Kuzúm, the little boy’s face in his shoulder, the second lamp in his hand.

  There was no noise behind. There was no sound ahead, but the slithering crunch of their feet scaling the uneven landslides of limestone and brick, and the sudden rattling fall of small gravel disturbed by their weight. Scrambling on grimly, hot and dirty in her long robes, Philippa wondered about Marthe and her uncle, and the secret they seemed to have kept from them all. She was not clear, from what Jerott had said, exactly what part in the business Pierre Gilles had played. On other points, too, Jerott had been exceedingly brief. When she had asked what would happen now to the relics, Jerott, on the other hand, had given an unamused smile.’ You weren’t present at the interview between Marthe and Francis this morning. He called her one of nature’s bloody little hermaphrodites. Then he told her she was a mercenary bitch and could pay for it.’

  Philippa said, ‘When did he say that? This morning? Not last night?’

  ‘Look, he wasn’t in any state to command language like that last night,’ Jerott had said. ‘Anyway, he hardly saw her except at the chess game. No, this morning. Why?’

  ‘She doesn’t hate him,’ Philippa had said. ‘Last night she wanted to help.’

  And Jerott had paused before saying, ‘Well, I’m damned sure she won’t want to help now. We’re using this conduit as a means to get through to the Hippodrome and out before Roxelana traces and stops us. She and Gaultier and Gilles can all take from the chamber in passing such small relics as they can put in their sleeves or their purses. All the rest must be left. The master has spoken.’

  He sounded disenchanted and angry. Philippa had said, ‘Do you think Roxelana would really be interested in pursuing Gaultier and Marthe? Gilles wasn’t even at the Seraglio.’

  ‘You have put your finger,’ Jerott had said blandly then, ‘on the point at present exercising M. Gaultier. On the other hand, the only way to be sure is to stay behind and see whether they kill you or not.’

  The path had begun to drop steeply. There was some kind of aperture, heavily barred, on their right, and then the tunnel plunged ahead into darkness. She thought she could detect some distance ahead a cleared fork, with a passage running off to the right while the main channel went on, steadily climbing. Behind them, Lymond’s voice said softly, ‘Stop.’

  They all halted but Gaultier. It was Gilles who wound his powerful fingers into his arm, and holding him, gave a short, curious whistle.

  There was no sound. But a shadow detached itself from other, different shadows and, racing towards them, flung itself on Pierre Gilles. Philippa swallowed. It was a cat. No, it was a long-bodied grey beast like a cat, with a small, pointed black muzzle, and whiskers and little round ears. It sniffed round the anatomist’s face and beard, apparently in affection, and then slipped down his body and stood before them on the path, head tilted and one paw upraised. Then, silently, it ran backwards and forwards into the depths of the tunnel, pausing every third or fourth time to look up at its master.

  They all stood where they were, thought Philippa, bewitched as if the beast had been one of Archie’s pet tigers. Then Gilles bent, and scooping the animal up, turned to Lymond and jerked his great head. Jerott saw it too. Arms outspread, in silence he began pushing them all back, up the hill of the tunnel, and blew out the torches.

  Lymond’s lamp was still lit. He transferred Kuzúm to Philippa’s arms and turned again down the passage, his voice muted but clear. He said, ‘No, I was wrong. We hadn’t gone far enough. It’s there, just to the right.’ And swinging the lamp, he walked on downhill, making a lot of quiet noise. Behind him, they all stood in the dark in their places, Archie’s hand this time on Gaultier’s shoulder. Marthe stood quite still. It was Jerott who, after a moment, swore under his breath and, leaving them, moved off after Lymond, talking in the same kind of voice. Philippa saw Lymond’s one angry gesture, waving him back, but Jerott walked on downhill, ignoring it. He got to the bottom and smiled; and Philippa saw Lymond smile in return. Then Lymond’s voice said, ‘Hell. The light’s gone out.’

  The lamp had indeed vanished. For a moment nothing more happened, then Philippa heard Jerott’s voice say in the blackness, ‘Look, let’s go round to the room. We can relight it there. Put out your hand to the right. There’s the wall.…’

  The footsteps in the darkness started again, going slowly. Behind Philippa, with the smallest of chinks, Archie Abernethy got out his sword.

  It must have been only seconds after that that she was aware of someone coming towards her: two sets of footsteps, crushing the small stones in spite of their stealth. Not Lymond or Jerott, but men of heavier build, whose hoarse breathing they could all hear. Then she felt Archie move, and then Míkál, and there was a trampling, covered by the greater noise made by the two men walking ahead. The breathing became wild and was cut off: someone made a noise in his throat. Then she felt Míkál, breathing lightly, slip back beside her, and after a moment Archie came too. Of the two strangers there was no sign at all.

  Silence fell, disturbed only by the footfalls of Jerott and Lymond, out of sight far ahead in the short passage leading, she guessed, to the treasure room. Then the sounds came to a halt and she heard their voices, arguing evidently about relighting the lamp, which was clearly giving some trouble. In the end, it stayed unlit, for no bloom of light reached them from the arm of the passage, and indeed there came a brief silence, presumably as they let themselves down to the chamber. Gaultier jerked, and Archie’s hand dug into his arm.

  The second set of hurried footsteps, much lighter than the first, made themselves heard just as a greater noise erupted suddenly from the far rising end of the conduit. The noise this time of many men with lanterns, rushing downhill towards them and turning along that same junction where the treasure room lay. The sound reverberated against the low roof: the tumbling of rubble and swearing of colliding bodies running hard and stooped in the dark, and then the echoing sound of many voices in differing keys: question and answer, a puzzled trampling about and a swinging of light, reaching out from the short arm of the passage and illumining the long conduit rising uphill ahead, now perfectly clear.

  It illumined also Lymond and Jerott, running noiselessly back to the flock, and waving them on. ‘Now,’ said Francis Crawford, and, as Philippa snatched up Kuzúm, he put a hand on her elbow and raced with her down to the dip and towards the uprising ground.

  Georges Gaultier got there first. He must have known that the trap had been sprung; that believing them all to be in the chamber by now, or at least round and in the short passage, their adversaries, whoever they were, had swept round into chamber and passage, hoping to trap them. But if he knew, it made no real difference. All that mattered was that Lymond was leading the way on through the main channel, and past the way to the treasure.

&n
bsp; So Georges Gaultier ran. He ran past Jerott and Lymond and Philippa, down into the flickering light of the junction, and swung round to face the short passage, arms upraised, the light full on his face. ‘Don’t take it!’ he shouted to the anonymous faces, staring at him behind the massed torches. ‘Don’t take it! It’s mine! I’ll pay you for it! I’m not with the others: I can prove it. I found it all, and it’s mine!’

  He didn’t even see the arrow that killed him. It flew arching from the bright lights and took him full in the chest, so that he stumbled, his knees sagging, and fell forward, his hands raking the rubbish, without hearing the sonorous voice which addressed him. ‘Come then, M. Gaultier,’ it said. ‘Come and get it.’ And added, still rich, still soft, still deferential even in its smooth cadences, ‘I really should not advise you now, Mr Crawford, to lead your friends through past the junction. There are six bows trained on the opening where poor M. Gaultier stood, and the light is now excellent.’

  ‘Onophrion Zitwitz!’ said Philippa.

  The unseen speaker had heard her. ‘Ah, the bride. How many of you are there, I wonder …? I need not tell you, madame, that your groom is a master of trickery. But for poor M. Gaultier, I believe he might have escaped, for the moment. And I had made up my mind that twenty-four hours more of life was all that M. le Comte de Sevigny should have.’

  ‘Twenty-four hours more than Graham Reid Malett?’ said Lymond softly. First in that headlong rush down the passage, he had stopped dead as Gaultier darted out past him, Philippa swinging against him; and slithering to a halt in turn, all the others behind him had stood still, concealed in the shadows, and watched Gaultier’s murder take place.

  ‘Twenty-four hours more than the greatest man who ever lived,’ said the hard voice of Onophrion Zitwitz. ‘It is more than I promised myself. But you will die the death he would have wanted for you, and your assorted friends with you.’

  ‘Gabriel sent you to join me at Baden?’ Lymond’s voice, coolly interested, told nothing of the speed with which, turning the assorted friends round, he was in process of dispatching them to safety, back along the long path to the cistern.

  Onophrion’s voice halted him and them. ‘If you go back, you will meet still more of my friends. It will have taken them a little time to find a new boat, but when they have found it, they know what to do. I paid a call on M. Gilles while you were all in the Seraglio, didn’t I mention it? He wasn’t at home, although my watchers knew he hadn’t emerged. What were you doing, Master Gilles? Making an inventory? At least the house was quite vacant when I got in, and I could search it at leisure … the secret was not hard to find.… Yes, Sir Graham asked me to join you at Baden, and to tell him all that you did. I would have laid down my life for Sir Graham.… Alas, I could not prevent you from killing him.…’

  ‘The mutes were good at it too,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘He made himself unpopular, you know, with Roxelana. Even without me, she couldn’t afford to let him survive.’

  ‘He could have survived anything,’ said the rich voice, suddenly roughened. ‘Anything, but injustice and double-dealing by those whom he trusted. You … Leone Strozzi … de Villegagnon—all tried to besmirch him. At Zuara, you tried to kill him.’

  ‘Hence the accidents between Malta and Thessalonika,’ said Lymond. ‘Until you got news from Egypt in the Beglierbey’s house, you thought as we all did that Gabriel was dead. Gabriel living had told you not to harm me: I was to be preserved—am I right?—for a more painful fate. Gabriel dead meant that at last you could take the joys of revenge. And whether living or dead, there was a revenge you had already taken, for which I was hoping to pay you in very particular coin.’

  ‘It seemed to me,’ said the disembodied, gratified voice, ‘that you might presently realize that the opium was reaching you through your food. It hardly mattered. You did not understand until too late, as it happened, that you were receiving opium at all.’

  ‘Or Salablanca might have lived,’ said Lymond evenly. ‘If not Khaireddin. What a great deal, I’m afraid, you must answer for.’ He was looking after Marthe, who had laid a hand on his arm, and then disappeared. After a moment the old man Gilles followed her. Archie, consulting Lymond with his eyes, stayed where he was, and so did Jerott, Míkál and Philippa, clutching Kuzúm. Then Philippa saw Jerott give a great start and, staring at Lymond, bend to pick up the extinguished torch from the floor. Lymond said aloud, ‘Where did you meet Graham Malett?’

  ‘I was a Serving Brother on Malta. A humble Brother, but he allowed me to care for him as if I were worthy. It was Graham Malett who trained me.’ Lymond was working with flint and steel and paper. There was a spark. The torch, shielded by Archie, flared into light. Lymond said suddenly, light-heartedly, ‘I always thought your urchins in ginger were bloody appalling. Did he give you the recipe?’

  Onophrion’s shadow leaped on the wall. Onophrion himself was more circumspect. Hurt in his tenderest spot, he moved a mere two feet forward, but it was enough for Lymond, slipping down the passage quietly, to emerge for a second so that he and Onophrion were in full view. The marksmen behind in the short passage had hardly time to swing round and aim when Lymond’s knife, thrown very hard, entered Onophrion’s leg at the groin. And in the same moment Jerott, dodging round the same corner, threw his torch, equally hard, at the rampart of straw. Onophrion screeched and fell like the trunk of a tree to the ground. And the straw stacked against the wall of the short passage, the wall opposite the chamber of treasure, began to crackle and blaze.

  The glare of it and the first of the smoke came round the corner and back up the conduit to where Philippa and the rest were all standing. Jerott with Lymond behind him came with the smoke, fast up the incline, and Philippa found herself retreating; pushed gently by Jerott with the rest of the party back up the hill: back the way they had come. She said, ‘Once they get a boat, the other men will simply come up the conduit behind us?’

  Once they get a boat,’ said Lymond. And to Jerott he said, ‘Will he think of it?’

  ‘He’s busy with his leg at the moment,’ said Jerott. ‘You meant to miss?’

  ‘I meant,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘to do just what I did. Maître Gilles, you know what will happen?’

  Rose-coloured in the increasing light, Pierre Gilles’s white-bearded head nodded. ‘It’s best. It was the girl Marthe’s idea.’

  Turning briefly, Lymond’s eyes looked for and found the blue eyes of Marthe. ‘As Master Gilles here would say, Ars sine scientia nihil est. It may bring down the roof. And you’ve lost everything, you know.’

  ‘It will bring down the roof. Moist Mother Earth …’

  He finished it for her: ‘… engulf the unclean power in thy boiling pits, in thy burning fires.… Or we shall suffocate.’ He broke off, listening to the voices. It seemed to Philippa that Onophrion had called out his men: she could hear them beating on straw, with no results but to make the great light burn even brighter. Then, the rich voice ringing; sobbing with the pain in his leg, Onophrion directed that the straw should be moved. A flaring gobbet, thick with white smoke, was pitchforked suddenly into the dark conduit at their feet, and made them flinch back. It was followed closely by another. Blocks burnt and unburnt built up before them as they stood choking and watching; then Lymond with Jerott and Archie began to work with their swords. Not to put out the fire, or to turn it away: but to direct its full force against the dark wall on their right.

  A trickle of water, trembling with vermilion lights, ran suddenly past Philippa’s feet and dried up, hissing, on the hot stones. And Lymond, lifting his head, met Marthe’s gaze once more and said with gentle inflection, ‘And what a thing is an intelligent hermaphrodite bitch. I think we should get back. No one will try to leave yet. They’ll want to save the stuff in that room.’

  And so they backed, coughing and choking; Kuzúm’s screaming face pressed on Philippa’s neck, and Philippa looked down again at an icy touch on her ankles and found the whole passage was running with wa
ter, which rose as she watched and soaked the hem of her dress. She turned and ran properly, back up the hill after the others, and in passing, looked and saw the opening from which the river was issuing.

  It was the aperture on which Gilles and Marthe had been working, hauling down the barred timber and pressing open the door on a glittering cave, creaking and seething within. It was then that she realized that the right-hand wall of the long passage and of the short enclosed a warehouse of snow.

  Now the bricks of the wall were red-hot. Water poured through the door-hatch, followed by glistening slush and half-dissolved floes thrust through the opening by the increasing pressure behind. The framework of the hatch suddenly burst and they drew back as the torrent increased in size, thin jets of spray playing like mist through the brickwork adjoining, the mortar melting in front of their eyes. Pierre Gilles said, in his most practical manner, ‘I should point out that if this wall collapses ahead of the other, the lower parts of the junction will be filled to the roof. It does not assist our escape.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Lymond, ‘you think we ought to run for it now?’ And as the old man’s beard twitched Lymond smiled in return and said, ‘I believe you are right. Jerott, take Marthe on your left. Míkál, will you take Philippa and Kuzúm? Then Archie and M. Gilles.… I’ll bring up the rear.’

  They ran down the slope as the fires, hissing, were giving way to white clouds of steam mixed with smoke: clouds like windblown feathers and streamers of muslin, which hid and enfolded them as they reached the bright junction, the water high at their knees, and stumbled through and began to struggle on uphill, out of the wet.

  There was no one to stop them. The treasure-chamber was half full of ice water, the green streams pouring down over the bright painted frescoes and stirring and nicking and gouging chariots and charioteers from their strong ancient beds. The caskets, floating a little, became waterlogged and sank unregarded as men fought for the rope, and the water, brimming faster and faster filled up the room. In the short passage it was now hard to hold to one’s footing: the men already out with their plunder floundered, blinded with smoke, their bows laid down, their burdens grasped in their arms. Onophrion, the blood from his groin marbling the flame-rippled water, struggled and shouted in vain to be set on his feet, to be carried, to be helped up the dry road to safety.