Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [74]
‘In five hundred ducats of gold,’ said Jerott. ‘And in his unsurpassed gratitude.’
‘Come,’ said the farmer. He opened the door of his house and, in the golden light of the threshold, called for a lantern and for a boy to saddle Jerott’s horse and his own. ‘The gates of Mehedia will be closing. Come with me, and I will take you to them tonight.’
He talked, pleasantly, on all the short journey to the high, sand-coloured walls of Mehedia. In his sister’s house the white cocoons of raw silk came to be finally stored: all the cocoons save those whose life-cycle was allowed to perfect itself on the farm. On the farm, in careful small numbers, the creamy silk moth was allowed to break through to life after all its endeavours, destroying the floss of its capsule. On one spot it was born—the great awakening, the psyche of the Greeks. On the same spot, unmoving, it mated. On the same spot, two days later, it died.
‘You kill them?’ asked Jerott. Above, the battlements were printed black against the great stars of the sky and, faintly, he could hear the small, familiar sounds of well-jointed armour, and the voices of the watch, conversing quickly in Spanish. ‘Poor servants of man.’
‘Would a Believer kill?’ said the farmer; and Jerott, reminded by the reproof in his voice, cursed himself for forgetting. ‘We are the garden, say the Bektashi. The rose is in us. Every live thing, once given in birth, is deserving of life. The silk moth is born. It has no organs of nutrition. In two days, therefore, it dies.… Here are the gates of Mehedia. Enter, and claim thy friend’s son.’
At precisely that moment, Francis Crawford came slowly through the olive trees to the village where he had left Jerott, Marthe and Salablanca, and drew rein outside the headman’s house.
Before the little horse stopped moving, Salablanca was at his side. Taking her time, Marthe noted, with interest, that the management was sun-blistered and saddle-stiff but evidently quite unmolested, although his clothes were stained and grimy with dust. Leaning against the doorpost, ‘Return of the migrant. You could do with oiling and anting,’ she said.
‘I could do, in fact, with sanding and scouring,’ Lymond said. ‘If you care to lay a tub of any known liquid within one hundred yards, I’ll absorb it by suction. Where’s Jerott?’
Salablanca, unsaddling, called a horse-boy to look after the footsore little mare and entering the house began, with his magical softness, to fulfil all Lymond’s needs. Marthe, coming in too, shook down her hair from her cap and perched on a stool, watching. ‘He has gone to catch butterflies. You reached the Bedouin?’
‘Yes. Eventually.’ Standing in his hose and soaked shirt, he drank, acrobatically, from the water-jug as from a porrón and upended what was left, with majesty, over his head. Marthe said, ‘No child?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Lymond. Crosslegged on the floor, his tangled hair dripping over one eye, he broke up a small cake of bread and drew towards him the bowl of rice and lamb Salablanca had brought him. ‘Plenty of children. But rather short of the right number of features and limbs. He had chosen a family with the pox.’
‘Leprosy?’ Salablanca, stopping, said it in Spanish.
‘No, the pox. But the effects look much the same. I saw every one before they told me the nurse had run away with the boy.… It’s all right. I was careful. I won’t infect you,’ he added, to Marthe.
‘I do not worry. I rely on your heroism,’ said Marthe. ‘You remind me of Surya. In two of his hands he held waterlilies; the third blessed, and with the fourth he encouraged his worshippers.’
‘As a leaf is swept away by a torrent, so you will be conquered by my omnipotent goodness.… Where is Jerott?’ Irritatingly, he would not respond to her jibes. From his face she could learn nothing, except that he was a little fine drawn with sleeplessness and lack of regular food. She said, ‘Where’s Ali-Rashid?