Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [71]
‘Well, that’s good news,’ said Marthe, with final and unanswerable malice. ‘I thought you needed the gold in my saddle.’
Deferentially, Salablanca’s voice broached Jerott’s silence. ‘La señorita has known that the gold has been concealed in that place?’
‘La señorita,’ said Marthe coldly, ‘in the absence of offers, has been saddling and unsaddling that damned horse like a coal-heaver for three days since you sewed the coins in the lining. It was hardly likely the weight would fail to attract my attention.’
Which left Jerott wondering, gloomily, which it was Lymond had miscalculated so severely: Marthe’s native intelligence, or the chivalry of her masculine escort: himself.
The dervish was Bektashi: wearing a loincloth only on his skeletal brown body; his black hair matted and long; his fingernails yellow and clawed like a sick hunting beast’s. He was asleep, a little distance from the village, on a bed of warm ash left by the fire of a herdboy, and the grey powder patched his face like decay as he twitched and stretched, when they called him. He sneezed, a great many times with a soprano and desperate violence, drank the water Salablanca silently offered him, and with a benign gesture, hand on heart, offered them the courtesy of the beaten earth lying before him, like a prince holding Divan.
You had to admit, thought Jerott, sitting crosslegged, listening to Salablanca’s quiet introduction of Marthe, that her instinct had been right. The dervish betrayed no surprise on learning that the fair-skinned, compact boy before him was French, and a woman; or that she longed for his wisdom. It seemed likely, as she had said, that in his travels a great deal was known to him already. Speaking gently, he welcomed them and discoursed with simplicity on the subjects she raised. Jerott wondered if she was the stranger she seemed to Bektashiism, or if she knew its theme, so apposite to her own temperament: its insistence on Oneness, the enemy of all multiplicity. From the dervish, at least, she should have the truth. The law is my words, had said Mohammed, quoted by Haji Bektash Veli. The way is my actions. Knowledge is my chief of all things. Truth or reality is my spiritual state.
When at length she broached her question: ‘Of such a man knowledge hides itself from me, as the ostrich lies upon its breast,’ said the dervish. ‘But I see that the rope thou seekest hath two colours, twisted with a black strand and a white strand. Dost thou not seek also a child?’
It was Jerott who answered before Marthe. ‘They say there is among the Bedouin a yellow-haired boy-child, a year old, with an Ethiopian nurse.’
The black eyes of the dervish rested on him. His was a big-boned face, refined by asceticism; the beard sprang from a heavy jaw; and the nose, arched and fleshy, structured the groined eyebrows and unfleshed malar ridges like the prow of a ship. He said, ‘Thou meanest well by this child?’ and Marthe’s cool voice answered modestly, ‘He is the son of the Efendi about whom we spoke.’ It struck Jerott how much Lymond would dislike this cursory interference in his affairs; and further that Marthe, whatever her ostensible motives, fully realized this.
‘Allah is wise,’ said the dervish. ‘I have breathed on such a one; the most delicate in complexion of children, but sick with travelling. The Bedouin are a people distempered and of evil habit: the child placed with them had not prospered, and was removed in secret, they say, by his nurse.’
‘She ran away?’ said Jerott. ‘Didst thou meet them? The child’s name they say was Khaireddin, and the nurse’s Kedi.’
‘Kedi indeed was the name spoken,’ said the dervish with compassion. ‘I did not meet them, but had the story from him who found nurse and child wandering in the olive trees and took pity on them. The child bore the brand of Dragut.’
‘Where are they now?’ Marthe’s collected voice put the question.
The dervish hesitated. ‘To conceal a slave is an offence. And a slave the property of my lord Dragut a great offence.