Pawn in Frankincense (54 page)

‘Tomorrow,’ said the Baba peaceably; and laying down his cap, again clapped his hands. ‘Thy ship sails tomorrow. Tonight there is music and dancing for thy delight. Dismiss thy servants. Rashid will be thy other self.’ And the eunuch, kneeling by Lymond and offering, smiling, a bowl of something which was neither khusháf or sherbet, was the last thing Onophrion and Salablanca saw before they were politely dismissed.

On the surface, nothing was wrong. On the surface, two clever and subtle intelligences had dealt, fencing, with a number of forbidden subjects and had made themselves, on the whole, remarkably well understood. But Onophrion was uneasy. Fed, though not to his satisfaction, he roamed the kitchens, peering into the ovens and prodding the carcasses. He opened a box of sugar, newly in from Alexandria, and pouring a little into his plump, shining pink palm, tasted it and expressed satisfaction. The ship it had come from was in the berth next to the
Dauphiné
, and the ship’s clerk, waiting for his bills to be signed, was anxious to keep him in talk.

By the time he got away the music in the selamlik had stopped, though there was much ringing of small bells and occasional laughter. The senior office-holders of the Begherbey’s government, one would gather, had joined the Ambassador and his mentor in their evening of pleasure. Onophrion found Salablanca sitting alone in silence, as close as he could get to the door of the selamlik, and said, ‘I am unhappy. I have spoken to some who have just brought in some goods from the harbour. There are men lingering outside the garden.’

Salablanca did not get up, but his black eyes did not move from Onophrion’s face. ‘They wait to rob?’

‘Had they been ordinary thieves, they would have stolen the spices. They wait, I believe, to ambush and kill.’

‘Then?’ said Salablanca. ‘He sleeps here tonight. They cannot ambush Janissaries in daylight tomorrow.’

‘They might break in tonight,’ said Onophrion. ‘Who knows, in this heathen land; they may be in league with the household. In my view, he ought to be guarded. After all, we brought quite a few of our own men with us.’

‘Overtly, it cannot be done,’ said Salablanca.

‘Discreetly, it can,’ said Onophrion. ‘If one of us remains in his room and can call out at the first sign of trouble.’

‘This I shall do,’ said Salablanca softly.

An expression of lofty distaste crossed M. Zitwitz’s fleshy pink face, and was gone. ‘I’m sure you will. Customs being what they are, I don’t suppose he’ll be expected to warm his own bed either. Mumsconduren, they call these dervishes. Practitioners of incest. A gentleman all the world over is entitled to his amusements, but I consider it puts an unwarranted strain on good manners to press him with these kinds of attentions.’

Salablanca’s dark face and soft voice both kept their gravity. ‘Do not fear. Monseigneur’s integrity is, I am certain, inviolate.’

For a moment M. Zitwitz, who never gossiped with his inferiors, looked at him. Then holding his counsel, he turned and plodded away.

In the event, the sheets were warm when finally Lymond was
allowed to retire to his room in the small hours of the morning. He closed the door gently behind him. Then, pulling his way down the jewelled ties of his doublet, he walked lazily up to the bed and stood looking down on the beautiful body which lay there, brown and lithe as a cat.

Lymond slipped off his doublet. ‘No, Míkál,’ he said. And swinging the dark green silk for a moment from one idle finger, he allowed it to fall, spreading lightly over the breathing bronze flesh. ‘With or without bells. I dare not have you catch cold. You would be a walking tintinabulation of clangers.’

There was a blur of movement. The green silk was on the floor and the boy’s sweet warmth, enveloping, was where Lymond had been. But Lymond had moved quite as swiftly and was there no longer, but at the window, which looked out, he saw briefly, on a little courtyard, with flat trays of something dark and aromatic laid out on the bricks, and a garden beyond. Míkál, arrested with dignity and grace in the place of his failure, stood breathing lightly a little way off, and said, ‘Hâkim?’

His back to the window, Lymond took a quick breath, and held it for a moment, his eyes searching Míkál’s. Then he said gently, ‘Thou art faultless: delicate as a flower. May thy love be beautiful. May thy beauty be light. May thy light be exalted light. But with another, Míkál’

The dark brows in the faun-face were straight. ‘I have played to you,’ said Míkál.

‘I know,’ said Lymond. He hesitated and then, clearly against his will, he said, ‘It isn’t that music doesn’t matter: the reverse, as it happens. So my defences against it are very strong. Can you understand that?’

The reasoning was plain enough, evidently, to Míkál. He dropped on the mattress, stretching on his two slender elbows, and looking up at Francis Crawford with a kind of hurt anger, mixed with a queer bravura challenge, he said, ‘Will the tongue of Ummídé speak for me?’ And went on in his soft and desperate voice:

Lymond had not moved, although his heavy gaze this time was downbent; and there was no levity for once in his face. He said, ‘I am
sorry. It is a hurt for me, too. There is no apology enough for him who holds the wine of love in his hand.’

I ask for no apology,’ said Míkál. ‘I ask nothing but kindness.’

‘I have learned,’ said Lymond, ‘that kindness without love is no kindness.’

Pushing himself slowly backwards, Míkál stood slowly up. ‘Thy love then is given to women?’

‘To no one,’ said Lymond; but the boy’s intent ear caught the breath of delay. ‘To whom, then?’ said Míkál. ‘To one of your friends?’

This time, no trace of hesitation was visible. ‘My love is given to no one,’ said Lymond. ‘To neither man, woman or child. Duty, friendship, compassion I do owe to many. But love I offer to none.’

Míkál did not say anything. For a long time he stood still; then, moving slowly, he walked round the mattress and up to the window, to come to rest, without attempting this time to touch him, in the space before Lymond. Then he spoke to him gently. ‘How many years hast thou, Hâkim?’

Francis Crawford’s real age. Something the Dame de Doubtance had known and the girl Marthe had not. Something which, building up mastery over a strong and heterogeneous company of battle-tough men, he had never revealed.
Timeless as Enoch …

‘I am twenty-six,’ Lymond said. And flinched as Míkál, his eyes dark with pity, leaned forward dry-lipped and kissed him once, on the cheek, before turning lightly and swiftly to walk through the door.

Salablanca watched him go. He waited until he thought all sounds inside the chamber had ceased, and easing the door, slipped inside to find some corner where he could rest on guard until day. It was not his fault that Lymond, wide awake and sensitive that night to every change in the air, had lain on the brocade mattress, and had watched him beneath half-closed eyes from the moment the doorhandle stirred.

He saw that it was Salablanca, and half smiled, unseen in the dark, and lay still thereafter, part-dressed under the single thin quilt, his sword by his hand. Purgatory, said the Qur’ân, was a beautiful meadow peopled by the spirits of the feeble-minded, illegitimate children and those neither good enough for heaven nor bad enough for hell. There was no privacy there either. But at least there was no need to talk.

An hour after that, the intruder arrived. The fir-wood lattice was beautifully hung. First there was a mere shadow between it and the moonlight; then it swung open quite without noise, and a man, naked but for a cloth round his waist, dropped without sound into the room.
The knife in his hand was curved, a foot and a half long; and even Salablanca’s shout didn’t stop him as he flung himself towards the Ambassador’s bed. Lymond, lying quite still, watching him through his lashes, let his assassin reach the bed and lift up his arm before he threw himself rolling off the mattress and on to his feet, sword in hand.

The knife had descended. The man hesitated, pulling back his steel in a drift of light moonlit feathers as Salablanca reached him behind, and the intruder turned, teeth bared, to deal with him.

Lymond’s sword got there first. It drove through the naked body, hard and slanting to avoid Salablanca just beyond and the man screamed, dropping the knife, and then holding his side, bent low and ran, swift as a rat for the window.

Lymond got there on his heels as the would-be murderer, blood streaming dark over his waist-cloth, hung on to the balcony and dropped. There was a clatter, and Lymond, jumping wide after him, laughed breathlessly, and Salablanca, following, heard him say, ‘Mind the jam.…’ Mother-naked; streaming with peaches and gore, the wounded assassin somersaulted, groaned, picked himself up, and staggering, set off through the yard to the garden, Lymond and Salablanca almost upon him.

It was then, in the moment of success, that a sword flashed in the darkness ahead of them; and another and another. Wild and unkempt, half-naked like the wounded intruder or covered in animal skins and rags, a pack of men ran out into the courtyard, blocking Lymond’s path and surrounding Salablanca behind him, while the injured man, scurrying past, made good his escape.

It was well organized. Easy to find a gypsy, a delly, and pay him to break in and kill. Rarer to instruct such a man, if he failed, to draw his victim, escaping, into a trap such as this. Lymond, fighting quite simply for his life, parried one blade with a shower of sparks in the darkness, flung himself under the arc of another, undercut at a dark body and backing, called to Salablanca, ducking and cutting as he went. Somewhere behind him was a door. He thudded against it, heeling to one side as a sword drove past him to splinter the wood and felt, parrying with one hand, for the handle.

It was locked. A flash of white and a clot of black moving figures, like a night swarm of wasps, told where Salablanca must be. Bending, twisting, striking, Francis Crawford fought in silence until, catching someone’s blade in the steel of his crossguard, he used the second’s advantage to drive the man plunging before him, straight-armed through the throng to where Salablanca had been. His side touched the marble edge of a water cistern just as a second and third man, closing in, turned their swords on him and he dropped like a stone, cutting as he went at the bare flesh of their thighs. To the clash of metal on metal, the panting of men under stress, the clatter of trays
and the scuffle of naked feet on the brick, there was added a scream and a splash, which gave him an instant’s satisfaction. Then there came the rush he had feared.

He parried some of it, but there were too many this time. He had time to think that Salablanca must be dead: to admire in a detached way the speed of it, so that although now doors were opening and voices calling, it was now much too late. A blade seeking his throat seared hot against the side of his neck; another took his sword arm, and as they kicked the useless blade from him and closed in he went down at last, unconscious of the thrusts he had taken; using all the tricks in his experience to hurt, to maim, to stay merely alive.

The noise was increasing. Light, flickering and jumping, had entered the courtyard and was sending monstrous shadows up the walls of the outbuildings and house: there was a tread of many feet and a shouting and a clatter of steel. Above him, a gross bearded figure, grinning, had risen from the mass of his assailants, sword in hand.… His executioner. For the last time, using all his considerable strength, Francis Crawford tried to throw off the men pressing upon him, but there were too many: he was locked, hands, arms, legs, thighs, lying there in the dust with the sword over his heart. Then the delly astride him, still grinning, put his fists one above the other on the pommel of Lymond’s own blade, and holding it upright, prepared to drive it straight down like a man piercing a well. And since there was no hope, Lymond laughed, looking up at him, and said, in English, ‘
And so … it was all for nothing at all. And who is to care?
’