Pawn in Frankincense (11 page)

Last year in Scotland, the bond between Jerott and Francis Crawford had been forged, and it had seemed to Jerott then that he understood for a little the kind of man Lymond was. Then they had separated, Lymond to cross to the Continent in pursuit, it was believed, of Graham Malett, and Jerott to carry out orders and convey their company of foot and light horse into France.

He had known, when Philippa appeared and insisted on travelling with him, that he would receive no welcome from Lymond. A personal vendetta—if it were no more than that—between Lymond and Gabriel was a common thing, understood and respected. The kind of maudlin susceptibility which could wring its hands all over Europe in the wake of an indifferent mistress and an unknown and unwanted infant was something other entirely. Jerott did not know, even yet, whether Lymond had had intentions of setting afoot any inquiries, during this curious embassy, about Oonagh and the child. He had gone to Baden, he was beginning to believe, as he had drifted through other notorious centres of gossip, in order to find out what he could of Graham Reid Malett. But Philippa’s coming, and the subsequent news of both woman and child, had forced Lymond into an irritating and preposterous role.

He had responded by prohibiting them all from his confidence. After that first, unchecked outburst of anger, Lymond had confined his exchanges with Jerott, as with everyone else, to the ordering, in efficiency and comfort, of their journey; and to the small-talk, albeit witty, immodest and allusive small-talk, of everyday usage. One exception to that had been their experience with the Lyons astrologer. The other was in the thin cutting-edge, so fine as to be almost invisible, in the rare exchanges between himself and the girl
Marthe. For Francis Crawford and Marthe were alike. Sometimes the physical resemblance between them was striking enough to be uncomfortable.

Such things were not unknown, or even all that uncommon. For centuries Scotsmen had travelled and trained and settled in France. Lymond and his brother had both been to university in Paris, and his father and grandfather both had lived and fought all over France. Of course, somewhere, perhaps generations ago, they shared the same blood. They shared too, obviously, the same overbearing pride of blood. It struck Jerott as ironical that after all they had suffered in the past over Lymond’s relations with women, there should be something quite as disturbing about this instant, mutual antipathy between himself and the girl.

It was with uneasiness that he saw her materialize, a dim shadow in the damp, lukewarm dark, beside Lymond and himself as they let slip the anchor that night outside the famous mole with its octagonal lighthouse, and under the low black hills where the thirteen thousand houses of the capital of Barbary, this Hell-mouth, the centre of Earthly Darkness, glimmered block upon block, a white triangle climbing the slopes. The anchor-chain rattled, and: ‘
Hâte le vif! Recouvre le mort!
’ said Marthe’s light, pricking voice, repeating the
comité’s
command. A Levantine idiom, concerned with paying out cable. But Jerott, favouring her with his magnificent black stare, turned and walked across to the rail.

He heard Lymond say placidly, ‘Don’t be too witty. All Hassan Pasha’s fleet is in there: probably about ten galleys and another fifty ships of war. Apart from the free Moors, the Spanish Moors, the Arabs, the Turks, the Jews, the merchants, the renegade Christians, the corsairs and the Viceroy’s own fighting men, there are also about six thousand Janissaries and five hundred families of Turkish-trained Spahis.

‘As far as they are concerned, this is an alien ship full of alien heretics. Because it suits Turkey to remain friendly with France, the Viceroy and senior officials will probably contrive an appearance of friendliness. Don’t be deceived. We are one big happy party and we must continue to look like one big happy party, or a sugar-cane to an onion it’ll be
hâter le mort
for the lot of us.’

‘You advise prudence?’ said Marthe. ‘They say, be an old man quickly, who desires to be an old man long.’ Standing straight and arrogant, her bright head tilted, the binnacle candles lighting the thick lashes and delicate profile, she drew attention, with force to both her youth and her looks.

Once before, Marthe had inquired blandly how old Lymond was. Jerott, who knew, had not thought fit to tell her. And Lymond, now, the indifferent blue gaze sweeping hers, merely threw her a couplet. ‘
Chi asini caccia e donne mena, Non è mai senza guai e pena
. I suggest
you cease driving the ass, and the ass may then continue to escort the lady.’

Philippa, newly arrived, tugged Jerott’s sleeve. ‘Was that as rude as it sounded?’

Jerott turned. ‘No,’ he said mildly. ‘From where I was standing, it was more in the way of a warning.’

Philippa, who had just been forbidden, with Marthe, to set foot on shore, was in no amenable mood. ‘Huh! Discipline!’ she muttered.

‘Yes, discipline,’ said Lymond, turning also. ‘And I’ll give you some foreign wisdom on that score as well. ‘
L’absence de discipline est la source de tout mal: quiconque n’obéira pas, l’amiral devra l’éventrer.’
If I find any woman has moved from this ship tomorrow I shan’t eviscerate you, but I’ll land at the next Christian port and put you all in a convent. ‘Good night.’ After a moment Philippa realized that it was she and not he who was about to retire; and descended the hatch stairway huffily, Marthe stepping calmly behind her.

Down below: ‘What happens,’ demanded Philippa, ‘if they all go ashore tomorrow, and they never come back?’

Marthe was brushing her hair. It fell like pale yellow silk over her fine shift and sprang sparkling like frost from her finger-ends as she stopped and swung it back from her face. Gathering it back in its ribbon, ‘I imagine,’ she said dryly, ‘that that has been thought of; and that the
sous-patron
and M. Zitwitz and M. Abernethy have received their competent orders. I do admire efficiency,’ said Marthe. ‘But how
tedious
it can be in excess.’

The sloop from shore arrived at daybreak next day, with a gift of two sheep and a bullock, and an invitation from the Viceroy to the King of France’s good Envoy to enter the harbour of Algiers and present himself at the Palace. And just before noon, watched discreetly by Marthe, Philippa, Fogge, Abernethy and Onophrion and the deputy master and crew, Lymond disembarked with a company of twenty-five men directly on to the historic jetty and there, together with Jerott Blyth, Georges Gaultier and the senior servants and officers of his company, mounted the dozen dark-faced Turkish horses, like Spanish gennets, awaiting him.

Their gold-tasselled trappings were of silk embroidered with jewels, but hardly outglittered, Master Onophrion noted with pleasure, the doublets, cloaks and plumed caps of M. le Comte de Sevigny and his train as designed by himself. In black and vermilion velvet, spooled and corded with gold and lined and cuffed with white coney, the entourage of the unconcerned Mr Crawford passed under the chalk and grey Algerine skies between the iron ranks of his welcoming Janissaries and with a squadron before and behind, pennants flying in escort, passed through the gate and uphill between
the white flat-roofed ouses towards the Kasbah and the Viceroy’s own palace.

Disdainful of fur and fretful, privately, about the cost of his buttons, Jerott Blyth sat like the born horseman he was, and watched discreetly for trouble.

The whip of the Christian world, they had named this city once. The Wall of the Barbarian; the Bridle of both the Hesperias, the Scourge of the Islands, the Sanctuary of Iniquity and the Theatre of All Cruelty. He had never been here before. More than ten years ago, when he was still in Scotland, a boy, the Knights of St John had lost eight thousand men failing to capture Algiers, and the Emperor Charles flung his crown into a sea covered with men and timber and horses. There, outside the city, his exhausted army had sunk their pikes in the mud and slept upright, like ghosts, their hands clasped on the grips.

Where the Knights of St John had never subsequently set foot Lymond, in a French ship, had more than once visited. Lymond knew Algiers and had described it minutely, before this expedition. Then, in more detail still, they had been briefed by Salablanca, the Moor Lymond had befriended from one of the thousand families of Modajares expelled from the Kingdom of Granada who had settled in strange hybrid Andalusian suburbs and villages close to Algiers. Salablanca had been freed by Francis Crawford from a second slavery in Tripoli. Last night, as Jerott happened to know, he had received his final freedom from Lymond and, slipping overboard with all his possessions bound on his head, had swum ashore without waiting for morning, to be reunited with his parents at last.

The steep, rutted street was a runnel of mud. Pressed against the blank walls with their small iron grilles were men of every alien facial contour and colour. In turban and fez, in robes white, black and brown, in striped cotton and bare brown skin girt with a loincloth, they flattened back to the crack of the stave as the company agha cleared the way, heron plume streaming. Here was a mosque, and another, and another. Here the square domed shape of one of the sixty-odd baths, some for bathing, some a prison for slaves.

There, in an open space, pack-camels were kneeling, with their ineffable sneers, and donkeys with panniers stuffed with green beans going down to the markets. And there in that side street was a market.… Quails in baskets, copper, pelts for floormats, terracotta; piles of roots and odd vegetables, half shovelled under covering rags because of the rain. Another mosque. A long blank wall broken suddenly by a deep, shadowed arch. Beyond it, squatting still as young olive-trees set in a plain, a class of small boys in red caps and dun-coloured shirts, chanting, in treble. The lustrous dark eyes in smooth olive skins turned as they passed, chanting still, and Jerott looked at Lymond and quickly away.

A water-carrier … a slave, and most likely a Christian. Lucky, if this were his métier, to walk bowed through the filthy paths ignoring blows and the running mucus of spittle. Some were not so fortunate. Sold to country Arabs or Numidians and greased with fat they might draw a plough with the asses and carry dung to the fields. Chained to the galleys they were open to any barbarity to appease the wind, should it fail. Ganching, flaying, crucifying were the punishments a Christian might suffer, and torture by fire and truncheon and rope. But then, thought Jerott, what nation gentled its conquered? Not the Christian world. Not the Knights of St John.

There were orange-trees in leaf in the square before the Viceregal palace, and a herd of goats sent prancing and pattering by whip and stave. The palace guards in red fez and white burnous, knives in belts, stood silent while the cortège dismounted and Jerott, turning as his mare was taken away, realized they were on a plateau perhaps five hundred feet above sea level, and saw for the first time, stalking down the hillside by block and dome and garden and cypress and minaret, the city through which he had ascended, and the harbour, the tower, the shoal of galley, brigantine, caique and galleasse lying on the grey water, with the
Dauphiné
and her flags and her blue and white awning resting among them, a lotus in a crocodile swamp.

Their men-at-arms, he saw, were to remain in the lower court, while Lymond and he and those who had been mounted passed up through the innermost gate. Jerott gazed at his own lieutenant, raised a reassuring eyebrow, and walked past all that comforting armour and up into the palace. He crossed a courtyard, skirted a small marble pond and entered an arcade lined with armed men, from which a high wooden staircase ascended to a pillared gallery above.

There, beside an elaborate fountain, they were held up for a while and Jerott began to suspect, for the first time, that something had gone wrong. Then they were admitted up the stairs and into the Viceregal gallery, and he knew it.

‘You must regard Algiers,’ Lymond had said, ‘as a colony of the Sublime Porte, Constantinople. It has three masters. The Viceroy or Governor, to whom we owe our official respects, is Hassan, a Sardinian eunuch and renegade, who succeeded Barbarossa. He rules Algiers for the Sultan, and we kiss his hand and give him the two-and-threepenny things. The second is the chief of the Janissaries, the Agha of the moment. They, of course, are the cream of the Turkish-trained fighting troops, living in barracks or colleges throughout Suleiman’s empire to watch and fight for him. The Viceroy is Suleiman’s tool, but the Agha is his eye and his arm. The one-and-sixpenny things are for him. Lastly, there are the corsair chiefs who sail for ransom, booty and labour on their own account, and are prepared, at a price, to sail and fight for the Sultan if he requires it. Their head is Dragut, whom you know … and I know. He has many
lairs—Prevesa, Adrianople, Djerba—but he has a palace in Algiers as well.’

‘And you think Oonagh O’Dwyer may be there?’ Jerott had asked. And as Lymond did not reply, had added, ‘And what does he get in that case?’

‘A free pass,’ had said Lymond, ‘into Paradise.’

On this, their primary state call, Jerott Blyth remembered all that as he looked past the carpet-hung pillars, and the low fountain and the marble floor and the brazier, whose satiny heat roused a host of red scimitars, and turned into moiré the transparent air through which he saw the high dais.

Seated on the piled cushions, his Capi-agha in crimson velvet beside him, was no Sardinian eunuch. The dark, heavy-jowled face with its black brows and spare-contoured beard, and the white turban binding its brow above the jewelled egret’s feather, was an Egyptian face, the face of Salah Rais, one of the conquerors of Tripoli, whom Jerott had last seen with Sinan Pasha and Dragut when he and all the Knights of St John lay conquered and trussed on the sand at their feet. And Lymond—Lymond who had fought with the Knights in that action, had been a prisoner in the Turkish camp under Salah Rais’s eye.

That they had been recognized was certain, or the change of Viceroy would not have been concealed from them until now. That they would be treated with even an appearance of friendliness was debatable. For while Algiers, prompted by the Agha, might tolerate France, neither Salah Rais nor the Janissaries would suffer a Knight of St John to escape them. The circled, black eyes surveyed them. ‘Greetings,’ said Salah Rais, briefly, in Arabic.