Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [253]
‘But you bought it?’ said Jerott.
She nodded. Her hair, slipping, had coiled in great loops round her shoulders. In the bottom of the boat a little water, drifting backwards and forwards, ran over her strong, slender feet. ‘In Algiers we obtained what they wanted and wrote to them by pigeon. In Aleppo I met Shadli and bought the manuscripts and the fragments. They are safe, where Maître Gilles can get them——’
‘When he has traced the full extent of his discovery for you? Do you know what it is he has discovered?’ said Jerott. ‘What if he was wrong, and you have paid Shadli for nothing?’
Marthe stood up. ‘Come and see,’ she replied.
The loose bricks fell inward: a simple façade, which Marthe re-erected behind them when she and Jerott had entered the opening, leaving the boat rocking outside. ‘My uncle ferries the boat back to the house, and then comes for us. Usually, that is. Just now you again hurt his shoulder.’
‘When I go back, I’ll probably hurt the other one,’ said Jerott blandly. ‘So where is Gilles? Somewhere in here?’
‘Follow me,’ Marthe said, and, stooping, started away from the cistern and along the lightless brick tunnel which led from it.
It smelt sour. The walls were coated with moss, and stuff which oozed and glittered in the light of the torch. Here and there the walls had cracked and falls of earth and thin bricks made their advance slow and difficult, although this, Jerott saw, had been much worse until recent hands had forced a rough clearance. In that narrow space, it must have meant days of hard, claustrophobic work for all of them; with nowhere to put the excess dirt except, labouring, the distant mouth of the cistern; and always the fear that what had fallen might fall again; that the ceiling would cave; and what lay above them come crashing on top.
It was not airless. Sometimes the passage would branch, and a draught of dead odours would make the torch flicker and smoke: then, Jerott noticed, there was always, high on the walls, a minute mark which Marthe checked, in silence, before choosing her route. Twice Jerott noticed a lamp hanging; a new lamp from an old bracket unlit. The second time, Marthe took it down and kindled it, and henceforth carried that instead of the torch, which she gave to Jerott instead. Once, struggling past a half-concealed opening, he caught a glimpse of another great cistern like the one they had left, but empty; its splendid porphyry columns sunk into mud. And once, a crypt, its stone sleepers prone and oblivious; their praying hands raised to the crazed vaulting hanging broken over their heads. Then suddenly there came á moment when the blackness ahead of them grew a thin veil of light and Jerott saw, far in the distance, that the conduit gave a sharp turn; and that beyond the turn a strong lamp was standing.
Since the last broken-backed breach in the tunnel, they had been walking steeply downhill. On his right, Jerott saw another ancient aperture, closed and heavily barred; then they reached the turn at the bottom. Something long and whiskered and lithe ran over Marthe’s bare foot. It had happened before and Jerott, behind, had seen her set her teeth and go on without faltering. But this time the creature itself turned and, springing, climbed on her shoulder.
Jerott had his knife raised to kill when he recognized the ichneumon. Then a lamp blazed in his eyes, and Pierre Gilles’s abrupt voice said, ‘Amor ordinem nescit. Are you not afraid, Mr Blyth, that your greedy young friend will undo you? She has worked hard on her endeavour and has no wish to share it. Unless of course you have joined forces with this unhappy pair?’
He stood bent in the lamplight surveying them: a big-boned old man with a grimed shock of white hair, whose expression was no less forbidding for being smeared with dust and with slime. Marthe spoke sharply. ‘You have your papers. Or will have, in a day or two. You have said—do you