Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [154]
‘I think that when Kiaya Khátún tires of the mysteries of the polygone étoile, Mr Crawford has need to look out, for she will choose and brittle her deer if it pleases her; and undo him most woodmanly and cleanly that she might.’
‘He has no field of power,’ said Jerott, and watched her turn to the rail slowly, still smiling, her eyes seeing nothing.
‘Have you heard of the sheb-chiragh, the night lamp?’ said Marthe. ‘On a certain night, the Arab says, when the water-bull cometh up to land to graze, he bringeth this jewel with him in his mouth, and setteth it down on the place where he would graze, and by the light of it doth he graze.… She is the lamp, and should she come to him, he may graze where he pleases.’
It was then, in bewildered understanding and pity, that Jerott made the error of touching her. She turned on him, alight with malice, supple as a ribbon of steel, and said, ‘I am tired of the game. Go to the classroom and glut yourself on penny tales whose language you understand; for you misread mine to a tedium.…’
He took his dignity and left her; and because he was vulnerable to her as he had been vulnerable to Francis Crawford he found the same solitary and belligerent salve for his troubles: he drowned them.
According to the French factor at Scanderoon, where they landed two days later, it was no mean advantage to view the pleasures of Scanderoon through a thin veil of alcohol. Jerott, supervising a little unsteadily the disembarking of his and Marthe’s boxes, and replying in kind, wherever necessary, to her descant of bright, acidulous comment, was inclined to agree.
To begin with, it was so foully unhealthy, between marshes and mountain, that they had not been permitted to land until two hours after sunrise, when heat had cleared all the poisonous mists from the bogs. Scanderoon itself, huddled between the ruins of a waterlogged castle and a scattering of lizard-infested shells, amounted to no more than forty reed-thatched board houses, most of them occupied by a diverse coterie of quarrelling merchants, unified only in their physical miseries. Agents in Scanderoon seldom lived to retire home on their wealth.
In a limited way, the French factor was helpful. Jerott and the lady were placed in a khan, a hollow square surrounded by two tiers of arcaded buildings, built from charity and offered for the accommodation of the passing tourist or trader. In the Grand Seigneur’s empire, there were no inns. Here, the stores and the stables and the commonality were served on the ground floor, Marthe and Jerott in separate rooms on the upper floor, with the two servants he had acquired on the way, for their style.
Once settled, he wasted no time. Already he had verified from the factor that no ship called the Peppercorn had made landfall this year, to his knowledge; but that sometimes, of course, such a ship, if she were English, would unload her cargo, say, in Cyprus and send her passengers by small boat to the coast. English ships did not call at Scanderoon. There was no agent. Only the ships of the Seigneury, or of France, or of the Great Turk’s own domains.
Jerott’s head ached. Marthe had disappeared, with her slave, allegedly to consult the Syrian merchants on the same business. The French agent’s damp timbered house, in which he sat, smelt of goat grease and bukhur-jauri, the strong Javanese incense beloved of Negroes. He caught sight of the woman, a veil half over her woolly hair, round the edge of the door. He didn’t blame the man: not here. He said, ‘If such a small boat landed persons, say of Syrian nationality, or even Western Europeans, what record of such people might I find to exist? My superior seeks particularly a dark-haired woman, a Syrian from Mehedia, and a fair two-year-old child.’
For that, said the agent, he would require to study the records of the Cadi, whom he would find at Aleppo. There also were the merchants who traded with such second-hand cargo, and the priests and the Patriarchs who looked after the spiritual welfare of newcomers. He would ask in Scanderoon if such a