Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [45]
There was only his voice to go on: the resumed burnous covered other men’s blood on his clothes and also shadowed his face. Jerott said, ‘Before we go … if you mean to go through with this, Francis; for Christ’s sake, there’s no stopping. You’d better make up your mind now whether you can sustain it or not.’
‘No,’ said Lymond. ‘Let’s just try it and see.’
He sounded not unfriendly and perfectly rational. Except that Jerott knew that he could not trust from one second to the next what he would do.
The house to which Oonagh O’Dwyer had been sold, with her baby, was little more than a huddle of sheds, the holes pegged over with hides and stuffed with plasterings of straw. Hens ran, squawking, as the two mules came upon it in the dark, climbing a rocky path between short, wind-twisted trees; and skirting the broken mud walls of a plantation of corn or barley or anonymous vegetables. The green leaves which made the drug kif were also grown in those hills, Jerott knew. He had smelt the sickly tang of the hashish in the souks as they walked, and he smelt it again now, clinging to the sour hides of the building, and mixed with the smoke of a cow-dung fire.
A cur, whose hysterical barking had attended all the last of their journey, came headlong towards them, and hurtled, teeth bared, at the throat of one of the mules. It died, on Lymond’s sword, before Jerott had his own half pulled out. Then Lymond, dismounting, walked across to the ramshackle building, sword in hand, and ripped the hide door-curtain off.
If it had occurred to him that here was another trap, and with a deadlier welcome awaiting him, he took no precautions. Jerott, his sword out, his hand holding Lymond’s mule and his own, saw him stand barring the threshold, the stink of cow-fat and ordure and human neglect surging out with the smoke-clouds.
Inside there was only an old man, his head sunk on his knees, and two women, perhaps mother and daughter, their hands knotted; their faces grained with dirt and malnutrition; poverty and long overwork. In the fitful light of their fire their features showed, resigned to command and brutality; answering with beaten silence Lymond’s string of staccato questions in Arabic. Beside Jerott, the felt-capped man on the mule bit his lip.
Then Lymond, turning, addressed Jerott curtly in English. The next moment, driven by the flat of Jerott’s sword, the mule with the felt-capped man on its back jerked and, blundering forward, plunged through the doorway of the shack and shook off its burden. The mule, backing, stood shivering in the doorway beside Jerott while the felt-capped man lay writhing on the dirt floor at the feet of the women.
There was no need to ask whether they knew him. As they knelt beside him, wailing and muttering, Lymond lifted his sword, and placing it point down on the prone man’s bare, bloodstained chest, said in Arabic again, ‘Now I will have my questions answered, or he dies in his place.’
Looking from the lined faces of the women to the man on the floor, his sweating face grey under the brown, his oiled black hair covered with filth, Jerott knew that whether he was a son, a brother, a husband, loved or hated, he was the breadwinner in that house and they could not afford to let him die. And indeed, it was the old man, lifting eyes glazed with drugs, who said, ‘She was cheap, he said; and there was no one to carry water after the last child died. But she could not carry water, and that smooth face was no use to my handsome son, and she was dear; dear.’
‘But thou hadst gold for the woman’s own child?’ said Lymond. His voice was both clear and impersonal.
The old man said, ‘A little, long since gone. One came to buy the child, that is true. But what of the money for the woman? My son hears that some Hâkim offers a fortune for the woman alive, and the woman writes some words for my son to bear to this Hâkim when he comes, to tell him she is safe