Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [239]
Jerott’s trouble was that he had no idea where to report. If Lymond were still in Constantinople, and alive, he was making no effort to contact the Embassy, although surely by now he must be aware that he, Jerott, had come. Of Archie’s movements he was ignorant; and it did not in fact occur to him that he might also have arrived in the city. Instead he set out to apply all his hard-won experience, doggedly, to tracing his leader.
It was not the simplest of tasks. To begin with, he had to lose the Janissary with whom the Embassy despite his protests persistently saddled him. He did so after a few days, during which he walked the poor man mercilessly all through Pera and Constantinople, sightseeing; getting his bearings. It was during these excursions that the house of Názik the nightingale-dealer came to his notice, and he remembered what Archie had said. The following evening he asked the Janissary’s advice on a matter of entertainment, and was led, with a certain grave camaraderie, across the Golden Horn and into a building, where he paid handsomely for the privilege of forgoing the said entertainment and left by a window, while the Janissary waited patiently below.
It did not take Jerott long to reach the waste ground outside the Beyazit Mosque, empty now of its slumbering pigeons and the unloading camels and the throngs round the letter-writers and the sellers of sherbet. Hooded and unrecognizable in the long Turkish robes they all wore outside the Embassy, Jerott sat crosslegged under the trees in the Beyazit garden as the lamps lit in the mosque, and the turbaned heads of the tombstones on their narrow white shoulders peopled the grass with queer shadows, and watched the timber house with the aviary under the walls, its lights streaming over the ground.
Unlike the other houses beside it, the house of Názik came to life in the evening. People came and went in the grey, fading light, and he could hear children’s voices, and a raucous cry, often repeated, of some large corvidian bird. Once a dog howled and was silenced, sharply, with a blow.
Jerott slipped nearer as it grew darker. Far above his head, the voice of a muezzin called in its minor key from the minaret: long, slow notes broken by three or four more of a quick appoggiatura; blending into strange chords as other, distant voices took up the call. Already the space round the square had become a path for dark figures moving into the mosque. Soon, after their ablutions before the silver spouts of the fountain, they would kneel inside on the soft carpets as he had seen them, before the carved wooden minber and the candles thick as a man, in their heavy brass sticks. Pale soles in couples, shining in a carpeted gloom, filled with the fluttering movement of backs bowing and straightening; and the sound of many voices, made small by the echoing space but still sharp and attacking, like the muted arguments of men in a bazaar. The sky was Prussian blue, the trees blue-black around him.
Across in the nightingale-dealer’s house, two shadows among many, a man and a small child, emerged and were lost in the darkness. Jerott got to his feet. Where? Yes.… There, downhill, where the ruins of some ancient building glimmered in the stray lamps, the rows of windows framing the indigo sky. A man and a child: a child from whose hair the lamplight struck sudden gold: whose walk was too slow for the man, who paused suddenly and, bending, swung the boy up on his shoulders.
He was too far away to distinguish properly their shape or their features. Suddenly the shadows closed on them utterly, and Jerott, soft-footed, started to run.
The hands which closed on his shoulders came from nowhere and were many. Silently he fought, and at first with success: his strength they had not expected, nor his profound expertise in the matter of hand-to-hand fighting. They did not call; but he felt one man go down with a gasp and another grunted and fell back as he hit him. But there were more, coming on