Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [78]
He had waited, paralysed with nervous reluctance to see before him, distressingly, Francis Crawford again as a child. What he saw was a small European boy who was himself only; who with a babyhood behind him of dirt and terror and darkness had been left solitary at night in a locked warehouse, and had wakened sharply to a command and a stranger; but who stood now before him, barefoot in his crumpled striped shirt, and contrived a smile, round-eyed, with his soft kitten’s mouth. On the high brow, the saffron silk hair was an irregular nimbus to which one or two soft cocoons drunkenly hung, shadowing his round cheeks; and in the baby face, curve melted into curve, reflecting each into the other, growing like fruit on the bones they would conceal until, in one year or two, there would return the structure; the marks of race with which he was born.
Returning the stare of that devouring blue gaze, Jerott could see nothing of Lymond but his colouring, and perhaps the sweep of the fine, thick lashes fringing his eyes. The spaced features, the curled nose, the faint brows and the blue veins running through the thin white skin of his temples were his own, and neither Lymond’s nor Oonagh’s. Jerott, a bachelor and still to all purposes a monk, none the less felt the pull: the painful desire to enfold this unwanted child with peace, security and warmth, and to set him in his grandmother’s arms, within orderly days, in the land of his heritage.
Jerott knelt, his hood fallen back from his black hair, as the child advanced; and without moving, like a man watching a nestling, said, ‘Khaireddin? My name is Jerott. Kedi wants a ride on my horse. Do you want to ride on my horse with Kedi?’ He spoke, deliberately, in English; and he thought for a moment that the child understood. He hesitated in his effortful walk and, turning his head, gazed at the Syrian, his eyes widening; his brows angled, for a second, with worry. Then, as the Syrian nodded and smiled, the child stepped forward to Jerott’s shoulder, and putting one arm round his neck, curled round to kiss the hollow neck of his shirt. And Jerott, caught utterly unawares by the practised, sensuous gesture, smelt at last the reeking perfume on the little boy’s shirt, and saw the paint on his lips and, as he flung the child off with a reflex of unbearable, unthinking revulsion, the sneer on the face of the Syrian.
Jerott had his sword half out from under his robe when the door crashed open on a throng of armed men. He ran backwards pulling it free. The light dazzled his eyes: at the back of his mind he saw that the child whom he had hurled to the floor had even then given only one sharp croak of fright and had been silent: the blue eyes, black with terror and anxiety, were turned on the Syrian. Then he had no time to see more, for his attackers were on him, and the lights were flashing even more confusingly in his eyes, and his sword, as he bore its full weight, was like a rooted tree in his hand.
He fought, slowly, before they overwhelmed him, and realized slowly, as he fought, that it had all been a trick; that from the moment Marthe had found the dervish he had been guided here, for this moment, when it would be driven home, for ever, that the pawn between Lymond and Gabriel was a living boy-child, and that they had both failed him. Stupefied by the drug in the brazier Jerott hardly felt the blow which at length felled him; did not know when they replaced his sword in its scabbard and, leaving him prone on the bare, plastered floor, began swiftly to work on the shelves.
It did not take long. In twenty minutes the soft blue cocoons, so carefully tended, were piled on the empty half of the floor, heaped and drifting like summer clouds round the flushed fire of the brazier. Efficiently, all that was inflammable was moved well out of reach, and Jerott himself pulled to the wall, as far away as possible from the ghostly