Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [112]
He was very close to her: the hair identical to hers ruffled over his brow; the eyes open and inimical, of an identical blue. She could smell, sickeningly, the scent of him and sense, greater than her own, his physical power.
‘We are in the mud. Let us wallow,’ said Lymond bitterly. And grasping her with fingers as pitiless as Jerott Blyth a moment before had used on himself, he bent his head and forced on her, with extreme and deliberate violence, the longest and the most savage kiss of which he was capable.
Bruised; stifled; contaminated, she could not quite weather it. Half weeping with hatred and with nausea, she gripped the wall as it ended and but for that could not have remained upright when he opened his hands.
Facing her in the moonlight, Francis Crawford too was none too steady: in his heavy-lidded eyes there was a queer lack of focus; a masking almost like blindness. But, after a moment, he spoke his farewell to her in something near his normal, light voice. ‘And whether that approached incest or not, I suppose only you know,’ he observed; and turning, walked down into the night.
The next day, perhaps because it was all too obvious that, with the exception of Georges Gaultier and Onophrion, no two members of the imprisoned party were speaking to one another, Kiaya Khátún allowed them all out under guard, with the rest of the population of Djerba, to watch the Aga Morat’s men at equestrian exercise.
Jerott, who had gone to sleep at dawn, to waken with a crashing headache, had avoided Marthe’s quarters and anywhere Lymond might be encountered. Without thinking at all deeply about anything, he was chiefly aware of the need to be back in a company of men, fighting something. The recollection that the best company of men he had ever known was Francis Crawford’s simply made him feel sick again. He sat down beside Georges Gaultier, who was talking about Aleppo, and ascertained that from its port he could find a ship to take him virtually anywhere he pleased. ‘You can get anything in Aleppo,’ said the little usurer mildly. One of Kiaya Khátún’s doves, stalking forward, hopped on to his hand and he fed it, idly, from a screw of loose grain. ‘You’ve never been there?’
Jerott Blyth shook his head.
‘I suppose it’s the Sultan’s third city now. The main market, anyway, for Baghdad and the whole of the East … Goa, Cambaietta. Sugar, cotton, opium, Chinese silk, dried ginger, elephants’ teeth, porcelain, pepper and diamonds … you can get anything in Aleppo. There’s a French station, too. They would look after you, if you have to wait for a ship: and plenty of merchants who have English or French.’
‘Pierre Gilles,’ said Jerott suddenly. ‘Doesn’t Pierre Gilles spend a lot of time there now?’
‘Now let me see,’ said Gaultier. He flicked out the last of the grain, screwed the paper into a ball, and shied it, absently, at the waddling audience of birds. The scholar; the man who used to collect animals for the King of France’s menagerie? I thought he lived in Rome, but you may be right.… Master Zitwitz, our friend here tells me he is leaving for Aleppo.’
Onophrion Zitwitz, treading past from market with a caravan of small boys and donkeys, all equally laden, paused and surveyed Jerott. ‘You have cause to believe, sir, that we are conceivably in the first instance about to leave Djerba?’
‘None at all,’ said Jerott. ‘Except that Mr Crawford wishes to go to Aleppo, and by some means I am perfectly sure he will contrive to get what he wants.’
Onophrion’s train was blocking the courtyard. He waved it on, then requesting permission, seated himself deferentially a little away from the two men. ‘I am troubled,’ he said, ‘about this projected tour to Aleppo. I say nothing of our imprisonment here, or whether the corsair, when he returns, will or will not decree that we shall all be put to death: that