Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [138]
Graham Malett caught up with him again, just before he dragged himself, with de Guimeran’s help, up the rope net they had let down over La Catarinetta’s low sides. Jerott felt the powerful body behind him, and the ungentle grasp on his loose arm just as he reached the top of the rail. Then, with a sudden quick movement, entirely invisible to any of the craning heads watching above, his broken wrist was seized without mercy and twisted.
Like summer lightning, the pain fled through his nerves. Jerott’s heart thundered once; he heard the tearing gasp as the breath left his lungs; and then he pitched forward on the deck of the Catarinetta at de Guimeran’s feet, quite unconscious.
He was alone when he woke; lying on a bed in the gunroom, in darkness. Sitting up slowly, he found that someone had doctored his cuts, although his head still ached and he had a dull and constant throb from his wrist, bandaged tightly and strapped lightly in place across the front of his shirt. De Guimeran, he supposed, would carry a surgeon. He wondered why unexplained death had not overtaken him while he was unconscious, and deduced that Gabriel had failed to find the opportunity.
Or perhaps … It was extraordinarily quiet. With care, Jerott got to his feet, and picking his way between bedding-rolls and packing-cases and assorted litter, found the door and then, in the next hold, a ladder leading up to the deck. His head swimming a little, he climbed it and looked round about him.
It was night. Even if he had not seen them, black against the indigo sky, the smell of the palm trees would have told him they were anchored close off the coast, lightless, with the other ships of the fleet lying silent around them. But for slaves and seamen; perhaps a knight as second officer deputizing for captain, and one or two caravanisti, they were empty of men. The expedition had arrived, and had landed. But not at Zuara.
Jerott turned. An unknown voice, speaking diffidently in the darkness, said, ‘Chevalier Blyth? I was to pay you M. de Guimeran’s compliments, and say he hoped not to be long delayed. I trust you find yourself better?’
It was not the time to point out that he was no longer a Knight; that he had abandoned the Order. Jerott said, ‘Are you in charge? Do you know where you are?’
He heard and groaned at the slight hauteur in the reply. ‘My name is St Sulpice: I am in charge, sir, and at your service. And we are at Zuara. The landings were completed while you were unconscious, some hours ago.’
Jerott said, ‘Have you ever been here before?’
‘At Zuara? No. It is new to all of us. Therefore, the pilot.’
‘Who was the pilot?’ said Jerott, but he knew the answer already.
‘An excellent man, I believe. A Genoese,’ said St Sulpice defensively, ‘taken on by Sir Graham Reid Malett. You do not consider him at fault?’
‘I know he’s at fault,’ said Jerott Blyth dryly. ‘He’s brought you to a place at least twelve miles too far east.’
They wouldn’t believe him. Hurried consultations with the skeleton crew on the Admiral galley and then the others merely brought the same conclusion: if Jerott was right, then why had the Prior not sent a skiff back to warn them when he and his men discovered the error? It might not, of course, have been immediately noticeable. They might even have landed the army before it became obvious. And by then it would, Jerott thought, be rather easier to march twelve miles by the coast than to face embarking twelve hundred men all over again and sailing farther along.
Easier, that is … if you did not know that the mistake was intentional; that the district was warned; that the Aga Morat and his troops were only waiting somewhere to spring the whole trap. He said, persuasively, ‘Let’s settle it, then. Send a skiff ashore and see what information it can pick up. We may even have found the Prior left a message for the fleet which has somehow gone astray.…’
They sent a skiff. He didn’t go with it. It was too late, anyway. They had left hours ago: they would be nearly at Zuara by now, or would have