Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [68]
Lymond did not let her off easily. Riding beside her: ‘It’s a very pretty costume,’ he said. ‘What are you hoping will happen?’
‘I have some work to do for my uncle. With some races it is impossible to do business if you are a woman. With such people, or with the more foolish or excitable man, I find it simpler dressed like this.’
‘Simpler for what?’ said Lymond. ‘In these parts, you’re more apt to find the excitable men waiting lined up in queues.’
‘I stand corrected,’ said Marthe. ‘But then, sua quique voluptas. You know so much more of all that than I do.’
‘Incidi in Scyllam, cupiens vitare Charibdim. Who are you running from?’ said Lymond. ‘Your father?’
‘You are welcome to think so. If you will accept the corollary,’ said Marthe; and Francis Crawford, smiling in the brightening dawn, his hands closed on his reins, said, ‘Pax. We can bring each other too quickly, perhaps, below the cuticle. Let us advance, as the man said, and praise the Almighty, who infused unspeakable jollity into all this our camp.’
Thereafter, in wary silence, they rode all four side by side.
Afterwards, Jerott had little clear recollection of that ride. Fields planted with corn and grazings of pale cattle and sheep gave way to light sandy plains and marshes and rocky, scrub-covered hills. Primitive villages, melting one into the other, left an impression only of filth, and smell, and a scattering of chickens and goats, and naked children, smeared grey with mud. Sometimes there was cultivation: a melon patch, a windmill.
Sometimes, outside a small town, they came across a group of young slaves, their smooth dark skins naked to the waist, washing linen in a thick stream, chattering as they pounded. They stood to watch as the column rode past, their white teeth smiling, their necks and wrists and ankles enclosed in great circles of latten, studded with glass gems. And sometimes, among the plodding groups of robed figures with their slow, laden asses, there would be a string of Moors on their saddleless Barbary horses with only rope for a bit. They came and went quickly, naked too but for their white aprons and linen cloth rolled round their dark heads and under their chins, in a glitter of long javelins, and knives.
At night, Salablanca, riding ahead, would find them a cabin to stay in, and would have the room filled with fresh straw and their mats laid, and a wood fire burning when the rest of the caravan came up, while the family squatted outside in the dark, under threadbare blankets, through the chilly spring night. Twice, Marthe left them; both times during daylight to call on some usurer friend of Gaultier’s in one of the walled towns they visited. And Salablanca, prompted by Lymond, was everywhere; talking, smiling, asking questions.
They were following, without doubt, Jerott knew, in the footsteps of Ali-Rashid. And it seemed that, as Lymond dispassionately remarked, they were being allowed to catch up with him. In time, Jerott was to come to believe, it was this feeling of predestination, of having their course unalterably laid out for them, leading them inescapably to whatever doom Gabriel might plan, that was their greatest affliction.
‘Of course. The carrot before the donkey,’ Lymond replied at once to this surmise. ‘But as long as we are following, at least the carrot is there. And one day, if we are audacious and forceful, we might capture the stick.’
They caught up with Ali-Rashid, as had been predicted, just outside Monastir, on the great western road, the Roman highway which still ran between Tunis and Tripoli.
It was dusk, and they had almost reached their stopping-place for the night, when they saw the encampment. It looked at first like one of the several they had met already, of traders bound