Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [49]
‘He didn’t want blood-poisoning,’ said Lymond callously. ‘Also he didn’t know you’re so damned slow with a knife.… If you’re as sprightly as all that, hell, you can get up and eat.’ And after he had, it was true, he felt almost better, given twenty-four hours’ unbroken sleep.
It was a courtly household, ruled with quiet ceremony by the tall, grizzled Moor who was Salablanca’s father; who remembered the white marble and the peacocks and the fountains of Granada, before Spain seized them again. He spoke Spanish, as did all the household Jerott saw, although the women who slipped in and out with the plates of rice and vegetables and meats were veiled except for the eyes, and said nothing.
In Malta, Jerott had learned a little of several languages, as was common in that high-bred, mixed society. He knew enough, now, to share with Lymond the courtesies of the table, and to listen later, eyelids drooping, when, seated deep in soft cushions, they talked of the fate of Algiers, and its rich trade and its violent, self-seeking factions, and of the nations which sought to devour it. Salablanca’s father told of the tribes of the desert; of the nomads, of the trading Arabs; of the small towns along the coast which had been seized and exploited by corsairs; of Tunis, another Algiers but bigger than Rome, and torn too by warring interests and races. He spoke too of Salah Rais’s rule: of his journey six hundred miles over the Nubian desert to exact tribute from the subject states under Turkey. He had come back with fifteen camel-loads of gold, so they said.
They were talking still: Lymond questioning and the men, sitting gravely crosslegged in their virginal robes, drinking small cups of hot liquid, and answering him quietly with their hands and their voices, when Jerott, beaten with sleep, was persuaded to return to his mattress.
When he woke, there was grey light in the room and the talk was ending: the men, rising, shook out the folds of their robes and Salablanca, offering scented water to Lymond, was saying as he waited, towel on arm, ‘I am known. Forgive me, but if you follow me to the harbour, thus hooded and robed, none will stop you. Once more clothed in your fashion, you will be safe from the Agha. This night, it was spleen.’
He hesitated. Jerott, pausing behind in the doorway, remembered that it was through Lymond that the big Moor was here at all, and not bastinadoed to death in the castle at Tripoli. He imagined with what delicacy the old patriarch had made his thanks. No wonder they had done their best to rescue them from the Janissaries. What bitter luck, thought Jerott, that Salablanca had swum over too early to know about Oonagh. And by the time Francis had landed, her life and the honourable reserves of the grave had then both been wrenched from her grasp.
Then Salablanca looked at Lymond and said, ‘We have heard of the wound done to your honour. May God make woe to attend such a man as your enemy. My father asks, as brother of brother, if he may aid you against him who wrongs you, or may avenge what is evilly done.’
‘He is a great and generous man,’ said Lymond. ‘But I wish no help, and need no revenge. Except in one thing.… The woman, I am told, sold her child to the man Shakib for a camel-trader when the trader was last in Algiers. If I wished to trace this child, how might it be done?’
‘Wait, señor.’ Salablanca was gone only a moment; long enough for Jerott to realize that this conversation was taking place between Lymond and Salablanca so that as few as possible might be involved in it; and that Lymond for the same reason had denied all claims of revenge. Somewhere, thought Jerott, there was the man who conveyed the instructions from Gabriel, and who had seen that they were carried out. But Salablanca lived in Algiers. Lymond would not ask him to meddle with what might destroy him. On the other hand: ‘Your camel-trader is a man named Ali-Rashid,’ said Salablanca, returning. ‘He comes often: his route is well known. We have written it for you.’
Carefully, Lymond took the paper