Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [153]
They loaded and unloaded cargo. The heat; the flies; the bothering wind, always in the wrong direction, began to affect Marthe as Jerott had seen Lymond react under stress; as a slate under a little axe cleaves into sheets thin and hard and more brittle. At Cyprus, she said, ‘There go the pilgrims. Two days in a longboat to Joppa, and then a mere thirty miles overland to Jerusalem. The Holy City your Order fought for and whose keys they still possess, don’t they, Mr Blyth? Although the keyhole has gone. Doesn’t it stir your Christian soul: although the Turks have taken over the Tomb of David and the Centacle, and the Franciscans of Mount Zion shake at their prayers? Have you no yearning, after your years of self-denial and prayer, for a garter which has touched a weed in the Garden of Gethsemane?’
Standing spaced apart from her, his hands brown on the rail, his skin darkened to chestnut by the sun under his thickly clinging black hair, Jerott watched the pilgrims and their boxes disembark and set off across the dazzling sea. ‘If you have faith, you don’t need the trappings,’ he said.
‘You mean you have faith, and they do not? So help you, God and holidome? Oh, come, Mr Blyth,’ said Marthe. ‘After worshipping at the feet of the late Graham Malett and lying down under the feet of the ever-present Mr Crawford, you are still the unshaken shrine of the ancient faith of the Knights that uplifts but does not blind?’
‘I claim nothing at all. It’s your choice of subject, not mine,’ said Jerott.
‘Certainly, you are not defending your beliefs,’ said Marthe, looking at him speculatively. ‘You disappoint me. But then, you have abandoned your Order. Perhaps you have found another more to your taste? God appears in multifarious guises. Why not the Mussulman’s God, that is good and gracious, and exacts not of him what is harsh and burdensome, but permits him the nightly company of women; well knowing that abstinency of that kind is both grievous and impossible? It might make this journey more comfortable for us both.’
Looking into that cold and beautiful face: ‘You mean,’ said Jerott curtly, ‘to fulfil the role of the nightly houri made of musk?’
Marthe smiled. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that although I despise the hanging jaw of hunger, I do not intend that the needy should look to me for their banquet.’
‘To Kiaya Khátún, then?’ said Jerott. And caught his breath at the look on her face.
Then it changed; and her lashes covered her eyes. She said, ‘Francis Crawford has much to answer for, hasn’t he? I break what is thine, because thou corruptest what is mine? You are wrong. Kiaya Khátún makes her own Paradise.’
‘Who is she?’
The arched brows rose. ‘Who knows? In Stamboul she is a powerful woman: a friend of Roxelana, the wife of the Sultan; the beloved of Dragut whose palaces she controls. Before that, in Venice. They say she is a Gritti, by an exiled Doge and a Greek slave. No one knows.’
The straight nose; the dark eyes; the handsome, olive face; the black hair strung with jewels; the small, plump hands holding the knife steadily at Lymond’s heart, precisely, to sever the skin. Jerott said, ‘She has lived with many?’
Marthe laughed at him. ‘C’est Vertu, la nymphe éternelle. She has chosen her field of power and has lived with the master of it as long as it pleased her. You have met her. Try to tell me you haven’t felt the tug of the magnet.’
Her hair gleamed on her shoulders, amber and silver and Indian yellow, coiled like heavy syrups enfolding the sunlight; and her white, polished skin was coloured with sun. ‘No,’ said Jerott. ‘I felt no attraction.’
The smile remained in her eyes. ‘That was because, perhaps, the magnet was turned in another direction.’
Jerott’s dark gaze was suddenly alert. ‘You