Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey [101]
Although I had not thought myself hungry, my appetite manifested unexpectedly and I ate with good will as Lord Trente told his story.
The delegation had had a swift, uneventful journey from Marsilikos and arrived a scant week before us. Raife Laniol, Comte de Penfars, was Ysandre's ambassador in Iskandria. He had bade them fair welcome and arranged for lodgings for the party with the lady Metriche. She was a widow of mixed blood, Menekhetan and Hellene alike; there was, I understood, an unofficial caste system at work in Iskandria, and native Menekhetans are reckoned of less worth than those descendants of Hellas.
Comte Raife had quickly grasped the sensitivity of the situation, and aided in negotiations with Pharaoh's Secretary of the Treasury, presenting the offer of Alban trade-rights as an alluring opportunity. Amaury Trente made a pretty presentation of the tokens they had brought: a chest of lead, brooches and armrings of intricate gold knot-work, and cleverest of all, potted seedlings of native Alban flora, for the Pharaohs of Menekhet were long known to be eager for exotic botany.
It had all gone remarkably well, and the delegation was presented to Ptolemy Dikaios, Pharaoh himself, who expressed his delight with the gifts and a keen interest in opening trade with Alba. Amaury Trente cited the interests of the Cruarch—linen flax, dates, wheat—mentioningas a casual aside a fancy of the Cruarch's to assuage his wife's whim, and retrieve a young D'Angeline boy mistaken sold into slavery in the city.
I have only the word of Amaury Trente and his companions by which to gauge, but I have no reason to doubt it. By all accounts, he managed it with a subtlety that would have satisfied Melisande. Pharaoh heard it with half an ear and waved his bejeweled hand, ordering his Secretary of the Treasury to ensure that this trifling matter was done, and returning to the more serious matters of flax and dates.
Well and so, it would have been done. The Secretary of the Treasury put one of his senior clerks on the matter, disdaining to sully his own hands, and the clerk found out the slaver Fadil Chouma's residence in the Street of Crocodiles. Invoking his master's name, he enlisted a squadron of the Pharaoh's Guard and presented himself at Fadil Chouma's residence, prepared to demand the return of the D'Angeline boy in the interests of the state, compensation to be, of course, negotiable, with death as an alternative.
But Fadil Chouma was already dead.
And the D'Angeline boy long since sold.
I understood better why Lord Amaury Trente clutched at his own hair. Although Chouma's household remembered the boy, there was no record of Imriel de la Courcel's sale—and Fadil Chouma had kept exacting records. There was, perhaps, a reason for it. Doubtless the D'Angeline boy was a piece of goods Fadil Chouma had sooner forget. It was Imriel, after all, who had killed him.
It was a fluke accident, in a way, although I daresay the boy intended it. It had happened in the kitchen—Chouma's women had cosseted the lad, owing to his beauty, and allowed him thence to feed him sweetmeats and the like—where Imriel had turned like a flash, faster than anyone could have reckoned, and seized a knife the cook had been using to debone a chicken. He sunk the knife into Fadil Chouma's thigh.
To be sure, 'twas no mortal wound; Chouma bellowed like a bull, the knife was removed and the wound bandaged. Imriel was beaten, and within two days, sold. Fadil Chouma, his mouth compressed in a tight line, would not say to whom. Already his wound festered. In four days, the leg was hot and rigid with swelling, red streaks making their way upward.
"He wouldn't let the chirurgeon take his leg," Amaury Trente said grimly. "I was told he died screaming, and I wasn't sorry to hear it. But no one knows what he did with the boy.”
Our table had been cleared of dishes. The Menekhetan servants hovered nearby with pitchers of barley beer, clearly hoping we would retire