Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [227]
By morning, Francis Crawford had gone, and France was without an Ambassador.
Much later, under wintry skies dove-grey with rain, Jerott Blyth crossed the Bosphorus and landed on the mud flats of Topkhane with his baggage and horses, with six beaver-tails and the folded hide of an elephant, with the garrulous old man called Pierre Gilles and the ichneumon called Herpestes, and with the young woman called Marthe, whose brother feared and ignored her.
Archie Abernethy was no longer with him. As far back as Chios he had looked from afar at the horses, the boxes, the camels, the golden-haired Marthe and the broad-shouldered, white-bearded man with his pet on his shoulder and had shaken his head. ‘If it wasna the Wooing o’ Jock and Jenny, I’ve heard of nothing to beat ye for gear.’
‘We’ve nothing to gain by concealment,’ Jerott had replied curtly. ‘We’re part of the Ambassador’s suite.’ They had found no ship to take them to the Sublime Porte, and Pichón, faced with another overland journey, had left them. Jerott, desperately anxious to make speed to Constantinople, was saddled with Gilles, who took his own time and to whom Marthe adhered, Jerott thought suddenly, like a warder to some elderly captive. And Marthe in turn Jerott would not let out of his sight, although her nearness was misery.
‘Aye,’ said Archie thoughtfully. ‘A kistful o’ tin pennies like yon will fairly make the streets rattle. I’ve a mind to make a more modest entry myself.’
‘Go as you please,’ said Jerott. ‘You’ll get there quicker. I don’t suppose even Gabriel recognizes you like that.’
‘I was thinking as much,’ said the mahout with cordiality. ‘Forbye, I might lay my finger on one of the weans. Better a fowl in hand nor two flying, whichever fowl it will be.’
‘Have you money?’ The inexhaustible revenue from Lymond. Give a Turk money with one hand, and he will permit you to pull out his eyes with the other.
‘Oh, aye,’ said Archie, the scarred face composed. ‘And if not, I’ve a trade I can ply. There’s ae matter more. D’ye plan to be sober or wilsum?’
Jerott’s dark face reddened with anger. ‘You may look to your own practices,’ he said. ‘And leave me to mine.’
‘Aye,’ said Archie, without undue conviction. ‘For if Mr Crawford is killed, we’ll need all the wit we can muster between us.’
Archie vanished without the rest of the party’s being aware that he was there. It took Jerott three weeks to retrace his steps to Smyrna and drag his party north, over plains fertile and barren; through streams and by hills and over mountainous roads swept bare by rain into glistening structures of agate and porphyry.
Sometimes they were fortunate to sleep in a khan, where charity provided them with a modicum: wood, meal, oil, some meat and some bread, and where all, Gilles assured them with resonance, would be accepted, sive Idolatra, sive Turca, sive Judaeus, sive Christianus. For the rest they slept within the mud walls of a village, set in boulders and dirt, its flat roofs terraced with wicker; or a township among dwarf oak and arbutus and chestnut trees, where boar roved wild on the hills and the low ground in summer was feathered with purple spireae.
They passed fields of cotton and buffalo dragging their rough wheelless ploughs; herds of glossy black Caramanian sheep and a flock of goats, clothing a whole living hillside as they flowed home to the fold, the low sun red and capricious with shadows. Sometimes a windmill. Sometimes an ass-driven waterwheel, its buckets sounding like camel-bells. Once a caravan crossing their path of thirty camels laden with mushrooms. But mostly a silence, broken by the chattering of their mules’ feet on stone and on boulder and the chime of the harness, and the voice of the drivers, lazily: ‘Gel! Gel! Gel!’ … Hurry, while over their heads eagles and ravens floated