Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [67]
Jerott spoke with the raw gristle of his throat. ‘They are mutilating the children.’
‘They mutilated one child. Now they know it is unacceptable, they won’t do it again. You understand, Jerott, that if we pay these people anything, there will be a thousand children at the next station, and half of them wilfully injured?’
‘I understand it all,’ said Jerott. ‘Since you won’t fight face to face, you and Gabriel are using children as weapons. Or is that sentimental?’
‘It is sweeping, certainly,’ said Lymond. ‘I suggest you either try to forget it, or apply your mind to it properly.’ He pulled another, plain tunic over his head, picked up his belt and said, ‘I have traced Ali-Rashid to a village just south of Monastir. The quickest way from here is to ride. The Dauphiné will sail on to Pantelleria tomorrow and hover off Monastir, and then Djerba, waiting. You can go with her. Salablanca and I shall of course be ostensibly on board, but in fact we shall go ashore here before dawn. There are horses bought ready: we are joining a group of pilgrims and traders.’
Jerott said, ‘There is no need for another summons of children if Ali-Rashid has the baby?’
His weariness barely disguised, Lymond answered him. ‘Jerott. We are the puppets, and we are being encouraged to dance. If Ali-Rashid possesses that child, it will be under circumstances of distress and humiliation every bit as deliberate as today’s. There is no room on this journey for the sensitive flower. I have said this before. The boy is a pawn. The piece we must take is Gabriel.’
It was not a large caravan which left Bône at dawn the next day going east: perhaps a hundred in all, of all nationalities, mounted on mules, on small Arab horses, on camels, with sumpter-animals following, and a small escort of Janissaries. Their business and their destinations were diverse: they travelled together for one purpose only: safety. You did not travel in ones and twos on the Barbary coast.
Despite all he had said, Jerott joined it. In plain dark frieze, like Lymond’s, and accompanied by Salablanca, with some food, a goatskin flask and essential clothes in their saddlebags, he mounted the horses Salablanca had bought for them and in the semi-dark, with none to challenge their identity, they rode out of Bône and through the melon-patches, the date palms and the fig trees that grew darkly around it.
‘You speak Italian. We are a Venetian botanical party,’ was all Lymond had said. And when a dark-skinned figure reined in beside him and began asking questions, Jerott did speak Italian, and signalled, elaborately, for Salablanca to translate. Himself, he had no need to wait for a translation. ‘The signor’s brother rides at the head of the column,’ was what the stranger was saying. ‘Does the signor not wish to join him?’
‘My brother?’ Jerott said.
Noiselessly, Lymond materialized beside him. ‘No. My young brother, is it not? Indeed, it is my wish to speak to him, and we thank you for your courtesy. We shall ride forward and join him.’
And as the horseman grinned, saluted and rode back to his place, Lymond added, undisturbed, ‘Why so inconceivably perplexed? It’s not a hard riddle. Consider. Who, stretching the imagination of course to its most grotesque outer limits, might be taken for my younger brother, if dressed in boy’s clothing?’
‘Marthe?’ said Jerott.
‘The nubile Marthe,’ Lymond agreed. ‘Than whom there is not in this hundred mile a feater bawd. Let’s surprise her. Let’s take her with us.’
In boots, doublet and cloak, with her yellow hair bundled under a cap like a callow schoolgirl defying her tutor, she should