Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [152]
One was his son. And one was Gabriel’s.
Let them both die. Gaultier had said that, or so Jerott had told him, in his voice meant to be overheard. But what of the child? Marthe had said that; and Philippa too; but only Philippa, he thought, had meant it. And Philippa had made no vow at St Giles.…
Think of it, not as a child but as a pawn. He had said that himself once, to Jerott. Because he knew … God, he knew! Jerott’s terrible romanticism, which would taste death so readily; so splendidly offer the blood of his fellows, in defence of the weak and the puny.
This child; this unknown son of his blood, was worth one life: his own. From its unmindful genesis, its heritage from birth had been suffering; an evil not to be tolerated: an evil outweighed only by the greater evil of Gabriel’s survival.
But Gabriel was dead. As a man, this child would be one’s offering to the future races of men. The burden of his upbringing, wherever it fell: however tiresome or onerous, was of no importance compared with his living grasp of the future. This, one felt of one’s son. Was it not also true of Gabriel’s?
From that monstrous connection, a child had been born as blameless as his. Neither child, from reports, was malformed or mentally maimed. Gabriel’s son had escaped the physical risks of his heritage; other taints, it might be, had escaped him as well. What was original sin? Was it more than an arbitrary pattern set in the loom, of talents and weaknesses, picked out from the warp of one’s forebears? Who could say then that, more than his own, Gabriel’s house might not hold the potential of genius?
It was a theory that cut across every natural instinct … Oh, Christ: of course it was. If you were Gaultier, you said, kill them both. If you were Jerott, you would fret cut your soul to distinguish the one from the other, and then crush Gabriel’s son like a leech beneath the sole of your foot. If you were … who you were …
‘Señor?’ said Salablanca, and touched him.
‘It’s all right,’ said Lymond. ‘An unaccustomed course of straight thinking. Like the drinking water of Porretta: it either cleans you or bursts you.’
There was a little pause. Then, ‘You have read in the Qur’ân,’ said Salablanca softly.
Lymond looked up. ‘I have read. It is wise.’
‘It is wise. It says, You have the appointment of a day from which you cannot hold back any while; nor can you bring it on before it is time.’
‘Blessed be all the Prophets, and praise be to God the Lord of Both Worlds,’ said Lymond, with sudden sharp irritability. ‘But I sometimes think an arthritic moorhen could beat them for speed.… Tell the Master we sail before noon.’
‘We sail? Where, señor?’
‘To Thessalonika,’ said Lymond. ‘To call on the Viceroy.’
As the swiftness of the Danube, they say, could be gauged at Belgrade by the clack of the boat mills, so might the nervous hostility between Jerott Blyth and the exquisite Marthe be judged by the increasing venom between them as the San Marco took her laborious way eastwards from Malta. In the middle of September, she landed them, brawling like butter-wives, at Scandaroon, the port for Aleppo.
A trained fighting man, accustomed to hard words and hard blows and the company of men like himself, for years ruled by the self-discipline required by the world’s greatest order of chivalry, Jerott had come to terms now with the fact that one man could make him feel and act like a rhinoceros in a cloud of mosquitoes.
Marthe had not perhaps quite the purely detached ability to hurt which Lymond exercised with such care. But with Marthe in every other way it was far, far worse. The eyes, the mouth, the brain, the body through which she expressed her indifference and her contempt were those of a woman he wanted. A woman high, cool, remote as a cloud forest, trailing mosses and bright birds and orchids; a woman with a body like moonlight seen through a pearl curtain. A woman whom he had not touched since, her sardonic blue eyes studying him, she had said, ‘You only want me because …’
For the thousandth time, Jerott shut