Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [34]
A water-carrier … a slave, and most likely a Christian. Lucky, if this were his métier, to walk bowed through the filthy paths ignoring blows and the running mucus of spittle. Some were not so fortunate. Sold to country Arabs or Numidians and greased with fat they might draw a plough with the asses and carry dung to the fields. Chained to the galleys they were open to any barbarity to appease the wind, should it fail. Ganching, flaying, crucifying were the punishments a Christian might suffer, and torture by fire and truncheon and rope. But then, thought Jerott, what nation gentled its conquered? Not the Christian world. Not the Knights of St John.
There were orange-trees in leaf in the square before the Viceregal palace, and a herd of goats sent prancing and pattering by whip and stave. The palace guards in red fez and white burnous, knives in belts, stood silent while the cortège dismounted and Jerott, turning as his mare was taken away, realized they were on a plateau perhaps five hundred feet above sea level, and saw for the first time, stalking down the hillside by block and dome and garden and cypress and minaret, the city through which he had ascended, and the harbour, the tower, the shoal of galley, brigantine, caique and galleasse lying on the grey water, with the Dauphiné and her flags and her blue and white awning resting among them, a lotus in a crocodile swamp.
Their men-at-arms, he saw, were to remain in the lower court, while Lymond and he and those who had been mounted passed up through the innermost gate. Jerott gazed at his own lieutenant, raised a reassuring eyebrow, and walked past all that comforting armour and up into the palace. He crossed a courtyard, skirted a small marble pond and entered an arcade lined with armed men, from which a high wooden staircase ascended to a pillared gallery above.
There, beside an elaborate fountain, they were held up for a while and Jerott began to suspect, for the first time, that something had gone wrong. Then they were admitted up the stairs and into the Viceregal gallery, and he knew it.
‘You must regard Algiers,’ Lymond had said, ‘as a colony of the Sublime Porte, Constantinople. It has three masters. The Viceroy or Governor, to whom we owe our official respects, is Hassan, a Sardinian eunuch and renegade, who succeeded Barbarossa. He rules Algiers for the Sultan, and we kiss his hand and give him the two-and-threepenny things. The second is the chief of the Janissaries, the Agha of the moment. They, of course, are the cream of the Turkish-trained fighting troops, living in barracks or colleges throughout Suleiman’s empire to watch and fight for him. The Viceroy is Suleiman’s tool, but the Agha is his eye and his arm. The one-and-sixpenny things are for him. Lastly, there are the corsair chiefs who sail for ransom, booty and labour on their own account, and are prepared, at a price, to sail and fight for the Sultan if he requires it. Their head is Dragut, whom you know … and I know. He has many lairs—Prevesa, Adrianople, Djerba—but he has a palace in Algiers as well.’
‘And you think Oonagh O’Dwyer may be there?’ Jerott had asked. And as Lymond did not reply, had added, ‘And what does he get in that case?’
‘A free pass,’ had said Lymond, ‘into Paradise.’
On this, their primary state call, Jerott Blyth remembered all that as he looked past the carpet-hung pillars, and the low fountain and the marble floor and the brazier, whose satiny heat roused a host of red scimitars, and turned into moiré the transparent air through which he saw the high dais.
Seated on the piled cushions, his Capi-agha in crimson velvet beside him, was no Sardinian