Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [266]
In small things, the drug made one careless. It was Míkál who cared for him physically: who brought food and saw that it was eaten, and who restored the clothes of which Lymond, so uncharacteristically, took little care. He saw too that he had regular sleep while he could, although its quality was now restless and full of turbulent dreams from which he woke silent and running with sweat. There had been times when to Míkál, too, it had seemed that this day would never come: the day set for release, when Archie and Jerott between them would guide the children to safety, and Lymond would be free to pursue his own fate, and Gabriel’s. Míkál wondered what would become of the girl whom the man Blyth had compelled to go to the Seraglio without Lymond’s knowledge. Lymond had sworn at him, but mildly, when he had come to confess it. They hadn’t known then that the girl would be detained, nor had they made plans to free her. The Embassy, perhaps, would take care of that.…
Lymond was ready. By now, in the unlit farmhouse barn in the dark fields to the west of the city, Philippa and the two children should have met, and Archie would be setting out with them on the long, fast journey home, where bribery had already marked the stages and ensured them protection and shelter and food so far as was humanly possible in the time he had had to spare. Then they would be within reach of his own friends and thence from station to station until they reached France and Sevigny.
The planning was over: the meticulous arrangements with money running shorter and shorter; the talk and the listening; the making of a net out of cobwebs and a rope out of sand. His surcoat on, his hood still on his shoulders, Lymond turned to Míkál. ‘Ishiq has what I can give him, and so have the others. What do you lack, that I may give it to you?’
Míkál’s handsome, fringed eyes filled with a half-angry, half-affectionate scorn. ‘Thou knowest too well,’ he said sweetly. ‘What I desire, thou dost not possess for thyself. How canst thou render it then to another?’
For a moment Lymond did not speak. Then he said, ‘You have a tongue, have you not, which breaks backs? I have madness in many forms, but that which springs from the passions of the heart is not in my nature. That is all. We are all fashioned differently.’
‘We are all alike,’ said Míkál. ‘But this thou hast not yet discovered. Give me then a piece of thyself. I will take a lock of thy hair.… It is unwelcome?’
‘No,’ said Lymond quickly. ‘It is unwashed. But you may have it all, with pleasure, if you want it.’
A moment later Míkál stood with the brief ring of hair in his hand, watching while Lymond slipped through the door and out into the night, on his way at last to Gabriel’s house.
Built by a dead Vizier from the limestone of Makrikeui and the marble bones of fallen Byzantium, Gabriel’s palace was on high ground overlooking the Hippodrome and the Sea of Marmara beyond. The wind had dropped. Between the dark stems of the monuments sea and sky were a horizonless amethyst: small boats afloat on the water no more than a single pricking of light, set each on the quivering pillar of its reflection. And on the left St Sophia brooded, squat as a toad with its two slender minarets, smoke-grey against the veils of the sky.
The light waned. Lymond, standing motionless in the shadow of the high palace wall, had no need to reconnoitre: as Meddáh he had watched all the routine of Gabriel’s household and marked all the gates and the windows, and the keepers who guarded them.
Gabriel would be in Aya Sofia, for worship. The call for sunset prayer had already gone out; the myriad voices rising each tinted by distance as the minarets held each their different tones in the fast-fading light. Come now and worship the great God. La ilia Eillala, Mahomet Resullala. Olla bethbar: God is alone.
The sea and the sky were now