Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [46]
‘Well?’ said Lymond.
‘When we returned from the fields, the woman was dead. Killed by her own hand. What are we to do?’
The passionless voice continued. ‘What did you do?’
‘He came again. He who had arranged for us to sell the child. He offered a sum—a paltry sum, but what could we do? The woman was dead—for my son to deliver the message to the Hâkim as if nothing had happened; and he took the woman away.’
‘Who was this man?’ said Lymond.
Then, for the first time, the man on the floor raised his head; and Jerott saw in his eyes the kind of snarling courage he had seen a moment before in the eyes of the cur outside. ‘His name was Shakib, Efendi,’ he said. ‘The Efendi killed him this evening, in the streets of the town.’
In that bloodbath by the wall. My God, thought Jerott. He’s killed the only man who can tell him about the child, if that’s true. If it was true.
Lymond’s voice was gentle. The sword, pressing a little, had driven a beaded runnel of blood over the man’s breastbone. ‘But is that truly so?’ he said. ‘How may I tell?’
‘It is true!’ The younger of the two women suddenly screamed. ‘It is so! When the camel-trader last came, Shakib bought the boy-child from us—the robber! The thief!—And sold him again, for much gold, to the other. Then last night he comes, and says, “Give me the white woman’s body.” … ’
Her voice died, but Lymond’s voice, addressing her, remained cold and soft. ‘Why should he do that? Was someone in turn paying him?’
They looked at one another. Then the man on the floor, his lips twisted, said, ‘The same who paid Dragut Rais. It was a jest. The instructions came from him who spoke with the Prophet Mohammed. The Archangel Gabriel.’
There was a little pause. Then: ‘Tell me this last thing,’ said Lymond carefully. ‘The name of the camel-trader who bought the child, and how I may find him?’
But the old man simply stared at him, and the two women shook their heads; and the man on the floor, looking up at the sword and the still face above it, bared his teeth and said, ‘For that you must needs ask Shakib, Efendi, and Shakib, alas, cannot reply.’
He had no hope, Jerott saw, as he grinned into Lymond’s shadowy face. Only the same guts as the dog. He died, the rictus still on his face, as Lymond drove the sword home with a jerk and then, wrenching it out, turned on his heel. The screaming of the women followed him into the night as he rammed the stained blade into its sheath and, putting his foot into the stirrup, swung into the mule’s saddle, stained and sticky as well with the blood of the man who had bought Oonagh O’Dwyer to share his straw like a goat in a hut, and who had helped to bring her, in the end, to sit in that kiosk in Dragut Rais’s garden.
The women Lymond had not touched. These coarse, dirt-patterned hands, Jerott thought, had handled and fed that small child, who had crawled in that dirt and lain breathing that foul, drug-laden air. Beyond his whereabouts, Lymond had asked nothing about him; and Jerott thought he understood why. Tonight, he found it too easy to kill.
Outside, it had started to rain. Far to the right, glimpsed intermittently through rocks and trees as they picked their way through the stones and the mud, glimmered the lights of the Kasbah, and the occasional pricking of light from the upper streets of Algiers, on the slopes of its hill. Otherwise the night was quite black, and the uneven paths scoring the hillside, twisting downhill to the invisible sea and joining village to village between the scattered gardens and castles and mosques, had to be traced by sound in the dark, and by the aid of those few distant lights.
The two men rode without speaking. God knew, Jerott thought, Francis Crawford had cause to be silent. And it was obvious that, on this open hillside in a land full of enemies, silence and darkness were their only defence. He listened, straining, against the rustle of the wind and the creak of the saddles and the mules’ tapping feet. There was nothing. But bare feet made