Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [95]
Instead she had sailed over the blue sea from Sicily to this narrow white town lying at the foot of its green hill with the Proveditore’s castle on top; the stony earth studded with olive trees, with sheep and goats grazing; the wide harbour with its piled barrels of oil and its packed ships of every country on earth. Nations at war found in Zakynthos discreet haven for merchant ships, and the banners of the Lion, the Lily and the Crescent flew there together. What happened outside, in the turmoiling dangers of the intricated Isles of the Ionian and Adriaticall Seas, was none of Zakynthos’s business.
Faced with ten days in the Lazaretto, Philippa longed to march outside and grapple with the strangeness of it all, exercising whatever sophistication she had acquired in these months of untoward travelling and the despised talent which was the only one she had ever been credited with: a gift for plain common sense.
Not that life in quarantine was humdrum. Sitting in the courtyard between Archie Abernethy and the wee man with the parrot, she was able to watch the Aïssqoua dervish in meditation, interrupted by brief performances of frenzy twice daily, when he rolled on sword-edges, kissed snakes, chewed glass and clutched red-hot iron bars. Philippa heated them for him, when the guardian’s wife refused to come in because of the snakes, and inspected his blister-free palms admiringly afterwards while he and Archie held a long foreign conversation which had to do, Archie said, with transcendental meditation. The little man with the parrot, who had come off a ship just in from Syria, sat for a while allowing the Arabic to flow over his head, and then leaning towards Philippa said, ‘Are youse English?’
In public, Archie was an Indian animal-trainer and Philippa was, as the fancy took her, niece, wife, daughter or assistant, of nameless origin. Since they always ended up speaking English to one another, it was not a deception they were able to keep up for very long, and in the Lazaretto, Philippa supposed, it hardly mattered. In any case, she was all too familiar with the cadences of that inquiry. ‘I’m English,’ said Philippa. ‘And my friend is Scots, but he prefers to use his Indian name for his menagerie work. And you don’t need to tell me what you are.’
The man with the parrot, who was a very little man with a triangular grin and a black bonnet with two dangling earflaps, said frothily, ‘No, I ken. I’m Sheemy Wurmit frae Paisley. Trader. And that’s Netta. She’s no weel.’
Philippa gazed at the parrot, and the parrot rasped Sheemy Wurmit’s arm with one gnarled grey claw and stared blearily back. It was moulting. ‘I can see that,’ she said. ‘Archie, this is Sheemy Wurmit, and his parrot’s no weel.’
Philippa, who had never before had the experience of introducing two Scotsmen to each other, found to her relief that they got on rather well. Sheemy, indeed, viewed Abernethy’s dark, turbaned face with a certain reverent awe. ‘Ye’ll hae seen a Rhynocerots then,’ he said. ‘Oo: a right gruesome beast, yon. And yon great humphy-backit deils wi’ the long grisselly snouts hanging down twixt their teeth. That’s an awful sieht, yon.’
‘Elephants,’ said Archie.
‘Whatever ye call them. And Ziraphs. Hae ye seen a ziraph? All speckly reid and white neck, wi’ a camel-heid on the tap that could lick the roof off a ten-storey tenement. Yon’s a disgrace against Nature. I seen one cut up back there outside Cairo, for why I’d not care to guess, gin ye needed a speckly stair-runner.’
‘Cut up?’ said Archie quickly. ‘D’you mean dissected?’
‘I mean cut up,’ said Sheemy Wurmit. ‘By a fellow called Giles.’
‘Peter Giles?’
‘I dunno. Giles. He was on his way to Aleppo to get another beast there. He makes drawings of their insides. He’d done it