Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [105]
‘It is said, “Every soul is held in pledge for what it earns,”’ said Míkál. ‘I vow to you, by my soul, that I shall protect her.’
‘You are vowed to love,’ said Archie. ‘If she is threatened, or the gold she carries, what will protect her?’
‘They are the slaves of violence, whose master I am,’ said Míkál. ‘Can there be doubt who will prevail?’
‘I spoke of a man,’ said Archie. ‘A man at present in Djerba. The gold is his gold, and the boy is his son. If the girl is harmed, or the son, or the gold, God will dance for him.’
‘I hear thee,’ said Míkál blandly. ‘God send thee no more rest than a Christian’s hat: but thou art a good man.’
‘I understand lions,’ said Archie.
They took their leave of her, Archie and Sheemy Wurmit, next morning: Sheemy to travel to Malta, blithely, to meddle in Sir Graham Malett’s affairs, not without hopes of reward; and Archie to take passage on a south-bound trading-ship which would, expensively, land him by skiff outside Djerba. He was dressed in his turban, his speech accented in Urdu.
It was Philippa’s last link with home—the very last. The last link with Scotland. The last link with Kate. The last link, perhaps, with Francis Crawford, on whom, through the years, she had spent so much unhappy dislike.
There had been no hint, in that cheerful, self-confident upbringing on the North Tyne, that one day she would find herself alone in the Ionian Sea, on the verge of a journey into the unknown with a stranger of one day’s acquaintance, seeking a child of that same Francis Crawford’s.
She had been happy at home. Gideon, the most gentle of fathers, had in his life been her hero; Kate had been and was her beloved. What the grown-up future might hold she had always mistrusted. She feared and disliked the sophistication of courts; she treasured the freedom of childhood; she shied from the bore and the prig, the sentimental and the smart, the intense and the humourless. She had been cynical, as was Kate, about senseless adventure. A different thing, she and Kate had told each other, from the slaking of a well-formulated cultural hunger.…
Oh, Kate,’ said Philippa, with a lemony smile; and, drying her one cowardly eye, blew her nose and went off briskly to place her honour, her quest, and her hopes of minimal daily nourishment without overmuch garlic at the feet of her Pilgrim of Love.
11
Djerba
On Djerba, the August sun, burning, had set fire to the whole white-hot arc of the sky; blazing down on white sands and white walls; on the painted green and black of the palms and their shadows; on the idle nets, the sun-dried shallops drawn up on the beaches; and the lustreless spars of the Dauphiné as she lay idle at anchor in the inner pool.
In the villages; in the little market town near the palace, the curs slept in the shade; the camels rested, chewing, their liquid eyes almost closed; mules stood motionless, drooping in the silent courtyards. And in Dragut’s palace also, in this the worst heat of the day, people and animals slept, those that could; and those who could not amused themselves in their various fashions.
The mistress of Dragut’s palace, who called herself Güzel, or Kiaya Khátún, had taken her lute to the picture-maker’s, a cabin in a little-used courtyard behind the stables; and was playing and singing, absently, in her thickly golden contralto, while she watched the old man who, in spite of the heat, was working with spidery delicacy among his papers inside. She didn’t turn as Marthe came through the open door, but continued what she was singing, her eyes downcast, her brow clear under the little band-box hat with its short, pristine veil.
Le temps a laissié son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluye
Et s’est vestu de broderie
De souleil luyant, cler et beau.…
Marthe,