Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [201]
He was too late to close the door, but the sight of him waiting, knife in hand, in that narrow gap was enough to make the first two hesitate as shoulder to shoulder they threw themselves through the fast-closing entrance. Then their swords flashed, and Jerott’s knife came up in a shower of sparks, and there was another, much louder clatter of steel at his elbow which was followed, almost immediately, by a squeal from one of the two dellies before him. One of the men crowding in from the street suddenly dropped back, and as another leaped into his place, Jerott snatched a second to glance hurriedly round to the source of the noise.
It came from the little man in the turban who, recovered from the thrust which had bounced him back inside the garden, had returned to the door and was standing on the balls of his feet, with eighteen inches of steel in one hand and a long-handled axe in the other. Inside the turban, the scarred, sun-darkened face was familiar. ‘Well, now,’ said Archibald Abernethy. ‘D’ye think we should rush them; or just let them run on inside and exhaust themselves?’
Suddenly, the odds were utterly perfect. So long as they fought in the doorway, they couldn’t be rushed. They had weapons. They had all Jerott’s formidable experience. And they had every dirty trick a little Scots mahout had learned in a lifetime of Eastern bazaars. As the second man gasped and fell, choking, Archie pursed his lips and gave a small whistle. ‘It doesna seem fair,’ he said, axe whirling, dodging and stabbing at Jerott Blyth’s elbow. ‘But I heard the lassie call them in yesterday.’
‘Who?’ said Jerott, gasping. Two against three now: even better. A pity to summon help at this stage and just spoil it. Then, like a nightmare ride of some dwarvish Valkyrie, the air turned black, as prompt to their call, half a hundred unwieldy scarlet-beaked partridges laboured on urgent wings out of the firmament, and hitting turbans, weapons, arms, shoulders, chests in their haste, descended with the weighty assurance of the loved into the garden.
Inside the house, an interrogatory door opened. Outside the house, another door shut, as the men pressing upon it from the outside abruptly withdrew and fled. ‘O michty,’ said Archie with sorrow. ‘They’ve flattened a partridge.’
Jerott Blyth took him by the shoulder and shook it. ‘Were you inside?’
‘Oh, aye,’ said Archie.
‘The Syrian woman is …’
‘Oh, aye,’ said Archie. ‘I know. I went to see her.’
‘What about it then?’ With an effort, gasping, Jerott kept his voice low. ‘Does she still have the baby?’
‘No. She says it’s in Constantinople,’ said Archie. ‘At the house of a nightingale-dealer. She paid the sponge-boats to take him.’
It was the same direction Marthe had given him. ‘Do you think she’s speaking the truth?’ Jerott asked. Someone had come through the house door and was crossing the garden towards him. He opened the door and a partridge strutted in, clucking.
‘I think so. She didna know why I was asking. But I was going to ask down at the rocks to make sure.’
Jerott, too, had seen the brown Egyptian divers, sliding into the water knife in hand to wrest the sponges from the sharp rocks, and the dead treasure from the bones of the ocean. They carried oil, it was said, in their mouths to spit out at the bottom, through whose magnifying gouts the smallest coin became plain. Or with sponges stopping their mouths, soaked in oil, stayed below, seventy, a hundred fathoms under the surface, until their air was exhausted. There were many tales of the divers: how they were reared on dry biscuit so that they would remain thin, how they were trained from small children, and might not marry until they had stayed half an hour under water. He had seen the small boats travelling north, laden like ill-treated asses with their ragged, billowing cargo: the sponges brought ashore every night in mountainous sackloads for drying.…
There was no one in the lane or the alley. Shutting the door, Jerott walked away, without looking back, from the Syrian’s house. He said to Archie, ‘They could