Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [117]
The riders, with graceful accuracy, were shooting now with saddles girthed and ungirthed, buckled time about with crackling speed. Jerott turned his head from bleary contemplation of that, and viewed Lymond over several intervening heads. Lymond, dizzily sitting up, was at least sober, with Onophrion bending fussily over him. As Jerott watched, one of the Aga Morat’s men also approached and, leaning down, spoke.
It appeared to be a summons of sorts. Jerott saw Lymond look up, holding the back of his head; and then Onophrion, bending, began to help him to his feet. He looked vaguely taken aback and as if, thought Jerott with satisfaction, he had a hell of a headache. Escorted by the messenger and two guards Lymond, walking, disappeared into the Aga Morat’s draped dais. ‘Stinking catamite,’ Jerott repeated.
The rider nearest to Kiaya Khátún alighted, flipped a somersault and, vaulting back into the saddle, shot three times, accurately, into the mark. The next, calling a roar from the crowd, lay on his face prone in the saddle, the little mare’s tail in his mouth, and shot, grinning. The next, riding bareback and without bridle, stood on his hands until close to the mark; somersaulted, took aim and shot. Güzel said, ‘A drink, Mr Crawford. It will help to remove the effects of your young friend’s bad manners.’
Sitting very still, with the Aga Morat’s plump hand on his shoulder, Lymond said, ‘I thank you; no.’
‘Abstinence, like the cock sparrow, cannot be long lived,’ said Güzel blandly. ‘They say, si peccas, pecca fortiter.’ The cup she held out, unlike Jerott’s, was made of jasper and ringed with Corinthian letters, gilded and damascened. But the drink was the same.
‘Indeed, some Stoics uphold you,’ said Lymond, wide-eyed, his gaze on the arena. ‘Liberty to drink and to debauch are said to recreate and refresh the soul.’
‘Then——’ said Kiaya Khátún.
‘I have no soul,’ said Lymond. ‘Forgive me.’
‘But your servants have,’ said Kiaya Khátún. ‘Or at least flesh which may suffer. Drink, Mr Crawford.’
And as the Aga Morat’s hand slid from his shoulder, he took the cup slowly from her and drank; and when she refilled it, meeting his eyes, he drained it again; and a third time.
Soon after that, Jerott rose undulating to his feet and, mouthing a long and explicit, if slurred, insult in Arabic, lobbed a cushion into the arena. It fell in front of a bareback rider at a crucial moment of balance: the horse shied, and the rider, saving himself in a snap of white and scarlet and blue, fell rolling like tumbleweed in the path of the next, and was kicked. From the three sides of the arena and the two stands at its head a communal moaning arose, and Georges Gaultier, seated just behind Jerott, reached up and, with force, drew him down to his seat and held him there, addressing conciliatory Arabic to the guards. The injured man was dragged off.
‘God grant sweet rest to the Knights of St John.’ It was Marthe’s bitter-sweet voice. ‘The other great cavalier, too, bids fair to be crapulous, I observe. O Kama, Kama: with thy bow made of sugarcane strung of bees, and thy five flower-tipped arrows?’
Jerott, sweat trickling down his dark face, didn’t look round. He paid no attention to Marthe or to Gaultier: he was beyond caring about Onophrion’s hovering bulk or Salablanca’s sober, lingering stare. He had ceased too to glance at the pavilion where Lymond was sitting, totally relaxed with gentle abandon, the weight of his brow on his knuckles. Jerott stood up.
There were some insults lightly bandied in Islam, and a few more lying between those and matters answerable only by death. Taking the offensive, middle course, Jerott Blyth called to the riders, and as they pursued their concentrated courses, ignoring him, he bent and, again picking up cushion after cushion, hurled them into the arena with the very evident object of causing what mischief he could.
Misconduct of that order was not likely to be overlooked a second time. Jerott looked over his shoulder, saw the guards converging on him and, heaving a last unforgivable missile,