Pawn in Frankincense (21 page)

And to that, since, had been added the scraps of knowledge they had. That in Djerba the child had been nursed by a negress called Kedi in the harem ruled by Dragut Rais’s mistress Güzel. That from Djerba, child and mother had been taken to Algiers, where both had been sold on Dragut’s departure for Prevesa in the autumn. And that before the mother’s death, the child had been sold, through one Shakib, to Ali-Rashid the camel-trader.

But that last, Jerott knew, had not been made public. And, looking around him in the open space they had chosen, far from where the
Dauphiné
lay berthed, he wondered how much of the original message had been understood. Children abounded. Piccolo to the bass stridencies of protest and acclaim by their sires, children cried and laughed, screamed and whimpered. Under the mild, grey sky scraps of bare flesh rolled and crawled and staggered among the swathed and sheeted adults: flesh coloured from grey-white to coffee; flesh supine in bundles and baskets or across sheeted knees; flesh ragged-shirted and mobile. Lured by the incense of silver, families had crossed the mountains, by mule or donkey or camel, to deliver their offering. Others, infected by the disease of excitement, had snatched up a child that morning from tent or hut or the bare sand itself, and brought it boldly to show. The two hundred children now being brought to Jerott and Salablanca, one by one, ranged from the shadowy head and curved plastic limbs of the infant to the firm walking toddler, shouting in Arabic; the dark hair curling over his infested dark skin.

Jerott had been afraid it would be impossible. It was not. All but eighteen of these children had dark hair. And of the three fair-haired boys with blue eyes, only one was remotely near the right age.

It was wrapped in rags in a woman’s arms, and lay staring unseeing, its blond skin flaccid and its breathing shallow and harsh.
Jerott said, ‘This child is sick. What is its name, and where was it born?’

‘It was born in Djerba, Efendi. I have nursed him for Dragut Rais himself, and the great lord had him branded. See!’ And bending, the woman turned back the rags.

His guts rising within him, Jerott looked at the raw and glistening flesh thus revealed. ‘
When was that done?
’

‘In October, Efendi. Before Dragut Rais left.’ Her brows, drawing together as she closed the child’s covering over its wound, were as fair as the baby’s.

Jerott said gently, ‘If the Imám here allows it, wilt thou unveil?’

She was frightened. The blue eyes flickered from Jerott to Salablanca and back. ‘Wherefore, unveil?’

‘It is for the child,’ said Jerott. Without looking at it, he could hear the sawing tick of its breath.

‘It is for the money? The child will have money if I unveil?’

Forgetful of all Lymond had said, Jerott opened his lips. It was Salablanca who spoke, with stern compassion. ‘He can have none if thou wilt not.’

She would have needed little persuasion anyway, Jerott supposed. It was already unseemly that alone she had come and spoken with men, and infidels moreover. But there were no tears on her face, which was fair and heavy and comely, and the exact print of the child’s. Again, Salablanca said what had to be said. ‘Alas! It is the son of a black-haired
giáur
woman we seek. Thou hast a fine boy: see to him.’ And, bending, he assisted Jerott to rise, with an iron hand round his arm, and with that same grip, murmuring apology in Spanish under his breath, he drew Jerott from the place.

The crowd, disappointed, ran alongside them as they returned to the ship, and but for the Imám, sent for at first light that morning, they might have had more trouble than they did. The fair-haired woman and the baby, lost in the swirl, Jerott did not catch sight of again.

It was not Salablanca’s fault. His rush of urgent apologies Jerott brushed aside when they were installed once more aboard; but he could not discuss it with Onophrion or the Gaultiers except for conveying, curtly, that he had been unsuccessful. Jerott sat stiff-necked in his cabin and was unaware of time passing until he looked up and saw Lymond, returned, before him, his jewels dimly sparkling in the seeping of late afternoon light; and heard him say dryly, ‘My apologies, Jerott. Next time I shall do it myself.’ And walking forward, as he flung his cap on the bed and began to untie his pale doublet, Lymond added, ‘You’re sober. Was it so bad?’

Jerott spoke with the raw gristle of his throat. ‘They are mutilating the children.’

‘They mutilated one child. Now they know it is unacceptable, they won’t do it again. You understand, Jerott, that if we pay these
people anything, there will be a thousand children at the next station, and half of them wilfully injured?’

‘I understand it all,’ said Jerott. ‘Since you won’t fight face to face, you and Gabriel are using children as weapons. Or is that sentimental?’

‘It is sweeping, certainly,’ said Lymond. ‘I suggest you either try to forget it, or apply your mind to it properly.’ He pulled another, plain tunic over his head, picked up his belt and said, ‘I have traced Ali-Rashid to a village just south of Monastir. The quickest way from here is to ride. The
Dauphiné
will sail on to Pantelleria tomorrow and hover off Monastir, and then Djerba, waiting. You can go with her. Salablanca and I shall of course be ostensibly on board, but in fact we shall go ashore here before dawn. There are horses bought ready: we are joining a group of pilgrims and traders.’

Jerott said, ‘There is no need for another summons of children if Ali-Rashid has the baby?’

His weariness barely disguised, Lymond answered him. ‘Jerott. We are the puppets, and we are being encouraged to dance. If Ali-Rashid possesses that child, it will be under circumstances of distress and humiliation every bit as deliberate as today’s. There is no room on this journey for the sensitive flower. I have said this before. The boy is a pawn. The piece we must take is Gabriel.’

It was not a large caravan which left Bône at dawn the next day going east: perhaps a hundred in all, of all nationalities, mounted on mules, on small Arab horses, on camels, with sumpter-animals following, and a small escort of Janissaries. Their business and their destinations were diverse: they travelled together for one purpose only: safety. You did not travel in ones and twos on the Barbary coast.

Despite all he had said, Jerott joined it. In plain dark frieze, like Lymond’s, and accompanied by Salablanca, with some food, a goatskin flask and essential clothes in their saddlebags, he mounted the horses Salablanca had bought for them and in the semi-dark, with none to challenge their identity, they rode out of Bône and through the melon-patches, the date palms and the fig trees that grew darkly around it.

‘You speak Italian. We are a Venetian botanical party,’ was all Lymond had said. And when a dark-skinned figure reined in beside him and began asking questions, Jerott did speak Italian, and signalled, elaborately, for Salablanca to translate. Himself, he had no need to wait for a translation. ‘The signor’s brother rides at the head of the column,’ was what the stranger was saying. ‘Does the signor not wish to join him?’

‘
My brother?
’ Jerott said.

Noiselessly, Lymond materialized beside him. ‘No. My young brother, is it not? Indeed, it is my wish to speak to him, and we thank you for your courtesy. We shall ride forward and join him.’

And as the horseman grinned, saluted and rode back to his place, Lymond added, undisturbed, ‘Why so inconceivably perplexed? It’s not a hard riddle. Consider. Who, stretching the imagination of course to its most grotesque outer limits, might be taken for my younger brother, if dressed in boy’s clothing?’

‘
Marthe?
’ said Jerott.

‘The nubile Marthe,’ Lymond agreed. ‘Than whom there is not in this hundred mile a feater bawd. Let’s surprise her. Let’s take her with us.’

In boots, doublet and cloak, with her yellow hair bundled under a cap like a callow schoolgirl defying her tutor, she should have looked mildly ridiculous; in fact, thought Jerott, it was probably Lymond’s concern to make her so. But there was nothing childish about the cold hostility in her face as she waited for them, riding up to evict her, or her lack of concern as soon as she realized Lymond would make no effort to send her back to the ship.

Lymond did not let her off easily. Riding beside her: ‘It’s a very
pretty
costume,’ he said. ‘What are you hoping will happen?’

‘I have some work to do for my uncle. With some races it is impossible to do business if you are a woman. With such people, or with the more foolish or excitable man, I find it simpler dressed like this.’

‘Simpler for what?’ said Lymond. ‘In these parts, you’re more apt to find the excitable men waiting lined up in queues.’

‘I stand corrected,’ said Marthe. ‘But then,
sua quique voluptas
. You know so much more of all that than I do.’

‘
Incidi in Scyllam, cupiens vitare Charibdim
. Who are
you
running from?’ said Lymond. ‘Your father?’

‘You are welcome to think so. If you will accept the corollary,’ said Marthe; and Francis Crawford, smiling in the brightening dawn, his hands closed on his reins, said, ‘Pax. We can bring each other too quickly, perhaps, below the cuticle. Let us advance, as the man said, and praise the Almighty, who infused unspeakable jollity into all this our camp.’

Thereafter, in wary silence, they rode all four side by side.

Afterwards, Jerott had little clear recollection of that ride. Fields planted with corn and grazings of pale cattle and sheep gave way to light sandy plains and marshes and rocky, scrub-covered hills. Primitive villages, melting one into the other, left an impression only of filth, and smell, and a scattering of chickens and goats, and naked children, smeared grey with mud. Sometimes there was cultivation: a melon patch, a windmill.

Sometimes, outside a small town, they came across a group of
young slaves, their smooth dark skins naked to the waist, washing linen in a thick stream, chattering as they pounded. They stood to watch as the column rode past, their white teeth smiling, their necks and wrists and ankles enclosed in great circles of latten, studded with glass gems. And sometimes, among the plodding groups of robed figures with their slow, laden asses, there would be a string of Moors on their saddleless Barbary horses with only rope for a bit. They came and went quickly, naked too but for their white aprons and linen cloth rolled round their dark heads and under their chins, in a glitter of long javelins, and knives.

At night, Salablanca, riding ahead, would find them a cabin to stay in, and would have the room filled with fresh straw and their mats laid, and a wood fire burning when the rest of the caravan came up, while the family squatted outside in the dark, under threadbare blankets, through the chilly spring night. Twice, Marthe left them; both times during daylight to call on some usurer friend of Gaultier’s in one of the walled towns they visited. And Salablanca, prompted by Lymond, was everywhere; talking, smiling, asking questions.

They were following, without doubt, Jerott knew, in the footsteps of Ali-Rashid. And it seemed that, as Lymond dispassionately remarked, they were being allowed to catch up with him. In time, Jerott was to come to believe, it was this feeling of predestination, of having their course unalterably laid out for them, leading them inescapably to whatever doom Gabriel might plan, that was their greatest affliction.

‘Of course. The carrot before the donkey,’ Lymond replied at once to this surmise. ‘But as long as we are following, at least the carrot is there. And one day, if we are audacious and forceful, we might capture the stick.’

They caught up with Ali-Rashid, as had been predicted, just outside Monastir, on the great western road, the Roman highway which still ran between Tunis and Tripoli.

It was dusk, and they had almost reached their stopping-place for the night, when they saw the encampment. It looked at first like one of the several they had met already, of traders bound for Guinea to buy slaves, and pepper and gold, set out in the familiar pattern: the tents of the women and children in the middle, with the flocks and the cattle next, and the camels, the horses and the dogs last, with a ring of bonfires outside. Since passing La Calle they had been in lion country, and the hunters with the caravan had ceased riding out at dawn to bring back antelope and gazelle for the pot.

Now, as they approached warily, Jerott saw that there was something quite different about the design of the camp ahead. The tents were few but the number of fires seemed immense. Then he saw that the dark patches within the fires, which he had taken for the
familiar
kermes
, the scrub-oak, were in fact animals; and as the mild wind shifted, and the sudden stench came unmistakably to his senses, he identified them beyond doubt. Camels, in extremely large numbers, and with only a small number of riders. Ali-Rashid, who else?

They stopped that night within sight of the other camp, and, leaving Marthe with Salablanca, Lymond rode over immediately to the camel-trader, Jerott beside him. Others were there before them, examining the animals and holding spasmodic conversation with the traders: there were no more than six of these last, Jerott saw; and the senior, Ali-Rashid himself, a gross, bearded man wearing a skull-cap wrapped about, Turkish-style, with some blue striped cotton, and a red, frogged coat under his blanket-like cloak. Jerott, used to the subdued tones preferred by the Moors, wondered what nationality the man was. But when he spoke, sitting crosslegged with a dish of stewed mutton resting under his great belly, the dialect was Arabic. He ate noisily, without offering to share with his visitors, and when the last of these moved away, Lymond crossed to the stained Cairo matting and, saluting quietly, dropped down beside him.