Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [43]
The night had cleared. Within the white walls of the wealthy came voices, and the muted sounds of a pipe: courtyard trees above the flat roofs glimmered, lamplit, and children chattered and cried. In the souks, men sat on the beaten earth, half naked, or coarsely shirted, or robed, and talked, moving their hands, or slept, or played endless games, traced in the mud. Tethered mules, waiting patiently, turned over the nameless rubbish heaped in the dirt; goats, jostling through with their herdboy, blocked him for two precious minutes as, slowed to a walk to avoid raised voices and stares, Jerott followed the swift figure ahead.
Coming into the crowded ways of the lower town, Lymond had been slowed, too. There was no way of knowing whether he knew where he was, or where he was going: but Jerott saw that, forcing his way through the alleys, he made some effort at least not to invite trouble: the dark cloak, retrieved from the garden, hid his hair and his clothes and protected him from a degree of attention.
It also made it harder, coming into the darker souks where the thatched and wood-strutted houses, leaning over the lane, met in a black vault above, for Jerott to see and keep him in sight. By the same token, cloaked and concealed, both he and Jerott had lost their rank and their international immunity. As an envoy of France, in a country friendly to France, Lymond was nearly untouchable. Tonight, alone in these streets, his death would be a regrettable accident convenient to many, and a triumph to some, with no blame attached. Thinking, meantime, only of that, and of the need to be at the other man’s side, Jerott quickened his pace. Behind him, someone else did the same.
Now the alleys were less crowded and darker. Ahead, a lantern hung from a fig tree gleamed momentarily on Lymond’s face as he swung round a corner: hurrying after, Jerott saw the lamp lit the court of a mosque and above, oddly confiding and close, the mellow voice of the muezzin gave sudden utterance, calling the faithful to prayer, and was taken up, like a bird-call, near and far through the minarets of the city. Stumbling up the next precipitous alley, Jerott did not look back, and the man behind him did not look up at all.
It was just beyond that, where the long, blank wall of a mosque or a college skirted the souk, that Jerott first realized that not one but several pairs of bare feet moved behind in the darkness. On his left a closed door clicked, for no reason, and then yawned open, emptily. And ahead and above there were other sounds; common sounds at uncommon levels.
Imperceptibly, Jerott’s right hand found the hilt of his sword and eased it, ready to draw from its scabbard. He had time to do that, and to see that Lymond, lost nearly to view, was pursuing his road apparently free and quite unmolested, when, in a sudden scamper, his assailants were on him.
In the dark, there seemed a great many. Prepared, he hurled himself sideways to miss some of the cudgels: the rest took him on his shoulders and back, but left his sword-arm undamaged: the blade, as he brought it up, flinging back the hampering cloth, glittered under the moon.
They had not expected cold steel. As he cut, blindly, and felt the blade bite, the staves continued to strike him, but not at close quarters: there had been a recoil he could feel, checked by a man’s hissing command in Arabic.
The voice seemed familiar. For a moment, fending off breathlessly with knee and dagger and elbow, twisting, wrenching, and dragging free to swing and slash with the two-sided blade, Jerott could make no chance to turn. When he did, it was to look into the black swarthy face of the man who had brought Oonagh O’Dwyer’s letter.
Then, for the first time, retreating quickly; stumbling back uphill, his head ringing, his arms aching, bearing with him a swarm of silent attackers, Jerott Blyth took breath and called Lymond’s name. Then, back to the wall, he prayed briefly, from habit; and from habit fought, as years in the Order