Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [73]
The silk-farmer who had presented the unhatched eggs to the Bektashi dervish was a Syrian, turbaned, round-faced and brown-haired—an amiable man, with several robed wives and a cheerful parcel of brown-skinned slaves who gathered round, white teeth smiling, until he cuffed them away.
It was Jerott’s fourth farm, and it had cost him half an hour of careful talk over dried figs and raisins and a dish of little eggs cooked in saffron to identify it as the one he was seeking. Standing in the warm sheds, looking at the tiered wicker trays of black worms rustling, rustling as they ate their way through the young green mulberry shoots, he shaped the conversation with infinite patience. To take and conceal another man’s possessions, even if these were only a black woman and a child too young to work, was something for which the Syrian might pay bitterly in money and in the crudest physical maltreatment. It was not an admission to be made lightly to strangers.
The insects fed. Unremittingly, day and night, from the forty meals of their first day of life, they would feed, these grubs little more than an aphid in size. Soon their first skin would be cast, feet, skull, jaws and teeth discarded in husk, and the revealed worm, wrinkled and pale, would fall to eating again. As the farmer talked, children, dark-haired and quiet, moved in and out between the piled ranks of trays with reeded baskets of leaves, gently sprinkling each shelf, or, sheltering a little wisp of dry, burning straw, coaxed the lethargic to appetite in its warmth. ‘They be light witted and shy, and noise doth offend them,’ said the farmer. ‘Therefore it is becoming to live softly among them. They see nothing, and move little, yet for twenty centuries, it is said, from the time of the Flowery Kingdom, they have lived to serve man.’
‘Your children are quiet,’ Jerott said.
‘They are tired,’ said the farmer. ‘Each day the leaves must be gathered and the grub must be satisfied day and night, and kept warm, and rats and mice frightened away. Then when it has entered its hammock, its florette, and, after reposing, has spun, the vigil begins. There is little sleep at such times. Without children it could not be done.’
‘Grown slaves sleep less than children,’ said Jerott.
‘They cost more.’ Emerging from the dusk of the huts, Jerott found the clear air of the desert above the darkening mulberry trees already tinged with the carmine of sunset. Pausing in his walk, just outside the white walls of the farmhouse, he said, ‘I have a kindness to beg. I would pay thee the price of six adult slaves for one child of thine, with his nurse.’
The farmer stopped. ‘Thou sayest?’
Jerott met the honey-brown eyes. ‘I speak not as merchant, but as brother to brother. There is a Christian bereft of his heart, a fair son taken from him in mischief and left with the Bedouin. To any caring for the boy and his nurse, my friend would give gold, and would exchange honest silence.’
The farmer glanced round. In the deepening twilight, the awakened scents of leaf and blossom stirred like the promise of food in the nostrils and the white acid of jasmine struck the lungs. There was no one near. The farmer said, ‘Thou art no merchant?’
‘I am from France. From the Dauphiné, bound for Stamboul,’ said Jerott quietly. A life for a life. To place himself in this man’s power was the only way he possessed to purchase his confidence. ‘The child is a year old or more, and is branded. The nurse, Kedi, is black.’
There was a long pause. ‘And this child,’ said the farmer at length. ‘This child, if he were found: what would his destiny be?’
‘A painted roof over his head; a silk carpet under his foot; a rich man’s clothes on his back and a rich man’s food in his belly,’ said Jerott. ‘For your children, when I have him, there would be the same.’
A smile, reluctant and wry in the dark, overspread the silk-breeder’s face. ‘You speak of my jewel; soft, tender, delicate, the brother of angels and lustrous in beauty as the golden-skinned moon. The child is mine, and his slave: she spins