Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [33]
Marthe was brushing her hair. It fell like pale yellow silk over her fine shift and sprang sparkling like frost from her finger-ends as she stopped and swung it back from her face. Gathering it back in its ribbon, ‘I imagine,’ she said dryly, ‘that that has been thought of; and that the sous-patron and M. Zitwitz and M. Abernethy have received their competent orders. I do admire efficiency,’ said Marthe. ‘But how tedious it can be in excess.’
The sloop from shore arrived at daybreak next day, with a gift of two sheep and a bullock, and an invitation from the Viceroy to the King of France’s good Envoy to enter the harbour of Algiers and present himself at the Palace. And just before noon, watched discreetly by Marthe, Philippa, Fogge, Abernethy and Onophrion and the deputy master and crew, Lymond disembarked with a company of twenty-five men directly on to the historic jetty and there, together with Jerott Blyth, Georges Gaultier and the senior servants and officers of his company, mounted the dozen dark-faced Turkish horses, like Spanish gennets, awaiting him.
Their gold-tasselled trappings were of silk embroidered with jewels, but hardly outglittered, Master Onophrion noted with pleasure, the doublets, cloaks and plumed caps of M. le Comte de Sevigny and his train as designed by himself. In black and vermilion velvet, spooled and corded with gold and lined and cuffed with white coney, the entourage of the unconcerned Mr Crawford passed under the chalk and grey Algerine skies between the iron ranks of his welcoming Janissaries and with a squadron before and behind, pennants flying in escort, passed through the gate and uphill between the white flat-roofed ouses towards the Kasbah and the Viceroy’s own palace.
Disdainful of fur and fretful, privately, about the cost of his buttons, Jerott Blyth sat like the born horseman he was, and watched discreetly for trouble.
The whip of the Christian world, they had named this city once. The Wall of the Barbarian; the Bridle of both the Hesperias, the Scourge of the Islands, the Sanctuary of Iniquity and the Theatre of All Cruelty. He had never been here before. More than ten years ago, when he was still in Scotland, a boy, the Knights of St John had lost eight thousand men failing to capture Algiers, and the Emperor Charles flung his crown into a sea covered with men and timber and horses. There, outside the city, his exhausted army had sunk their pikes in the mud and slept upright, like ghosts, their hands clasped on the grips.
Where the Knights of St John had never subsequently set foot Lymond, in a French ship, had more than once visited. Lymond knew Algiers and had described it minutely, before this expedition. Then, in more detail still, they had been briefed by Salablanca, the Moor Lymond had befriended from one of the thousand families of Modajares expelled from the Kingdom of Granada who had settled in strange hybrid Andalusian suburbs and villages close to Algiers. Salablanca had been freed by Francis Crawford from a second slavery in Tripoli. Last night, as Jerott happened to know, he had received his final freedom from Lymond and, slipping overboard with all his possessions bound on his head, had swum ashore without waiting for morning, to be reunited with his parents at last.
The steep, rutted street was a runnel of mud. Pressed against the blank walls with their small iron grilles were men of every alien facial contour and colour. In turban and fez, in robes white, black and brown, in striped cotton and bare brown skin girt with a loincloth, they flattened back to the crack of the stave as the company agha cleared the way, heron plume streaming. Here was a mosque, and another, and another. Here the square domed shape of one of the sixty-odd baths, some for bathing, some a prison for slaves.
There, in an open space, pack-camels were kneeling, with their ineffable sneers, and donkeys with panniers stuffed with green beans going down to the markets. And there in that side street was a market.… Quails in baskets, copper, pelts for floormats, terracotta; piles of roots