Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [65]
They had one clue: the camel-trader Ali-Rashid. That he had gone through Bône all these weeks ago Salablanca had discovered on these quiet shore-going visits, along the dunes and sandy cliffs east of Algiers. One moonlit evening off Tigzirt, Jerott had gone part of the way with him, drawn by the silvered Roman pillars standing above the sand, and had found himself wading ashore through the streets of the drowned city of Iomnium, with weeded carving pricking his fingers, and phosphorescent life rolling in clouds of green fire under sculptured black arches. It was there, in the lee of the mountains, that Salablanca heard that the trader had passed through, after Dragut had gone, in the autumn. It was a cold trail they were following.
It was there, too, that Jerott, in vinous and melancholy solitude on the aft deck at night, saw Marthe slipping in from the sea, her robe incandescent in the moon, and her hair fronding her shoulders like the dark weeds of Iomnium. ‘Salablanca told me. I had to see it,’ she said. ‘Look.’ And she opened her hands.
Blurred by the abrasive seas and disfigured with molluscs, a grey, once-marble cupid lay in her palms, its wings honeycombed, its eyes hollow and vacant. Her own, staring at it, had lost all remembrance of herself: her breathless young eagerness was something Jerott remembered once in Francis Crawford, before the years of disenchantment ground it away. ‘So the sea, at least, will yield you its delights,’ Jerott said. ‘I thought you were perhaps like the Sarmates, who might not lie with a man till they had first killed one in battle.’
Like a rippling conch in the moonlight, her fingers closed fast on their prize. ‘Must you spoil it? Must you spoil everything?’ she said. And turning abruptly in her dark runnels of wet, was instantly gone.
Jerott stayed, with the explicit intention of finding a new flask of wine and emptying it, before he went down below.
The Cadi at Bône was a renegade Christian, who sent them bread, roast mutton and the regrettable speciality of the area, macolique, or platters of paste, meal, onions and bony pullets in sauce. Onophrion, receiving them, shrank a little and disappeared while Lymond was effusively thanking the Cadi’s emissary: they never saw the platter again.
Next day, while Lymond made his ceremonial call at the Cadi’s house, Jerott and Salablanca interviewed two hundred children between them.
Bône, standing lop-sided on high, ragged rocks, had in its time been a great corsair port, and had still a good fortress and harbour, a fine mosque to which the Cadi’s house was attached, and the broken ruins on the foreshore of the great city of Hippo. In two sackings, the town itself had shrunk to three hundred poor houses, but there were good wells on the lower, southern side of the town and fertile ground just outside it. No one in Bône was starving though none, as they stood in their robes, black and white, brown and striped; in the thick, carpet-like textures of the desert, and the muslin of the Cadi’s officials, showed the untroubled bloom of high-spirited health.
The people of Tedele had been gay, Salablanca had told them. The people who thronged the quayside at Bône as Salablanca began to shepherd them to the site he and Jerott had chosen were anxious, vociferous, sarcastic, aggressive, derisive, beseeching and, some of them, silent. Among the last were the women who accompanied their menfolk, heads folded in cotton, eyes downcast above the yaşmak. Jerott, grim-faced, found he had no words for the women. It was Salablanca, walking firmly among them, who was saying gently over and over, ‘There will be money; it is so. The Efendi is just. Bring your children over here. The children will be examined over here.…’
All along the coast from Algiers, Salablanca had spread the word. And long before that, carried by the fishing-boats and the raiders, Lymond’s message had reached the Barbary coast. A yellow-haired, blue-eyed child named Khaireddin, born in Djerba the previous spring to a black-haired giáur taken prisoner from Gozo by Dragut