Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [225]
Studying Francis Crawford now, bright-gilded by firelight, quick-voiced, restless, pursued wherever he moved by outbursts of laughter, Jerott understood, for the first time, a little of the machine.
Gabriel was away, so Lymond was soliciting their affections. But by the same token, licence was not without limits. Whether they realized it or not, no extremes of tongue or behaviour were being permitted, and no excess offensive to the Church. That would please Blacklock and Bell and Plummer and the spiritual faction; just as the sophisticated had been drawn by that prodigal joy at his own expense.… One step out of line and the edge would return to his voice. A respite, for a second, in the chorusing, and his eyes were chilly; hard as blue steel.
So he, Jerott, had been fighting the wind. You did not expect human values from a machine. You did not grow angry with a machine, or be disappointed or feel betrayed by it. You treated it with detachment and curiosity, as you would any soul-deprived object, and if it kicked you in the teeth, you side-stepped and kicked it back, harder.
*
At Algiers two weeks later, in the heat of August, the child Khaireddin was branded. The white-hot iron, with which Dragut stamped all his possessions, bore the first word of a famous verse from the Qur’ân, and the old corsair’s initial. It was heated on a brazier just outside the women’s quarters of the palace and impressed with care on the baby skin over the ribs and under the right arm. While it heated, the baby smiled, as he always did, up into the black face of the woman holding him, whose milk had fed him in his five months of life. The spare, curling floss on his head pressed on her arm as he craned upwards, blue eyes joyous, leaf-tongue jammed in the hinge of a pink-padded laugh. Then the eunuch, judging nicely with his eye, brought his hand down.
The uprush of screaming went on for a long time. It was followed by a monotonous throat-scraping squawk, like the hysteria of some large bird in anger that went on repeating all morning, thickening with hoarseness, pausing for a second, fifty seconds, as the baby slipped into sleep only to be pulled out again by pain, to scream and scream over again. The noise wakened even Oonagh O’Dwyer from her own fever, but she had not been told of the branding, and she was not likely to recognize her son’s voice.
Her first and surest instinct, since he was born, had been to destroy him. For that reason she had denied herself every link with him; had hardly held him; had never fed him. Even had she wished, she had been too ill at first.
And then Dragut Rais had come to her, and had snapped his fingers absently over the infant and commenting lightly on his fairness, had asked her if Francis Crawford had sired him, or the Unbeliever who had visited her tent. And as she stared at him, stupid with weakness, she had discovered that nothing, indeed, had escaped the attention of her guards on those hot nights outside Tripoli.
One nocturnal visitor she had had; one treasured night of ultimate peace. And it was from Dragut Rais that she learned that her visitor had not been, could not have been, Francis Crawford.
After that, when she had made her first attempt to make away with first the baby, and then herself, she had botched it The woman Güzel, coming too soon, had taken the child away and restored it, and next time, when she had persuaded the black woman Kedi to give him to her, the negress had run to Güzel and they had taken him from her again.
That time, she had looked at him; really looked, from the soft pulse that pattered in the silvery down over his brow to the curled fingers, each no larger than the top joint of her own. A line of milk,