Pawn in Frankincense (50 page)

‘Eat, then,’ said Marthe. ‘They are meant to go together. When you have eaten, you need have no fear of the raki.’

It might have been true, had they not refilled his goblet so often. Marthe did not stop them, and after a while, since he remained so exquisitely clear-headed, he saw no point in confusing the cupbearers. By then they could hardly have heard him refuse, in any case, for the music had begun, from some source he could not quite make out; sinuous wind music, loosely serpentine like the golden verses sewn on the curtains and woven into the carpets: reedy flute music, with the tinsel patter and throb of a corymb of drums. A man and a woman rose, prostrated themselves in front of the Baba, and started to dance. The arena cleared.

The sheepskins had gone; the dervishes, seated crosslegged beside the Baba, cups in hand, swayed with the music and someone began to sing to it; a kind of chant which the others took up. ‘These are
Nefes’es;
the intonations,’ said Marthe. ‘The sound of them, with the special properties of the raki, leads to a state of spiritual ecstasy, and the desire to express this in dance. Others will follow.’

There were a dozen figures already on the floor, dancing in pairs; man with woman, man with man. The figures were formal, and performed in deliberate sequence: a swaying of the body to right and to left, slowly with the surge of the music, then quickening fraction by fraction till, breathless, each dancer stopped.

They stopped with their robes touching, their breasts heaving still with the effort. Then each put his or her left hand on the breast, bowed, and still bent, their heads close, they swung their arms rhythmically, hypnotically, to right and to left, again and again as the music wavered and pulsed.

Jerott watched their faces. Of the dancers nearest him, the woman’s face, half hidden by the fall of her hair, was white and glazed with the heat. Her brows, raised with the effort, had creased her white skin into a thousand fine lines: Jerott could see water run down her temples, and the pulse there beginning to throb, as her skin darkened with the uprush of blood. Full of raki, full of exaltation, her head down, she swayed to and fro, her arms swinging like white silken chains.

When the figure ended she staggered, and her partner, smiling, his eyes fixed, caught and steadied her: somewhere someone had fallen. More and more men had pressed in with the dancers. The music changed and, swaying, they began encircling the room. The music got quicker, and louder, and moving round, in a swirl of warmly fumed, linen-swathed bodies, of sweating skin and sinuous hands, close together couple by couple, each dancer began to revolve.

Jerott found he had a full bowl of raki in his hands. He drank it and got up. ‘No,’ said Marthe.

He was stronger than she was, and he could prove it. He closed his hand on her wrist and pulled; and although she resisted at first, she suddenly came quite easily, so that he nearly cannoned back into the other dancers. There were tears in her eyes. He stretched open his own, to see more clearly.

They were tears of rage, or of pain. She was rubbing her wrist. Her arm, under the loose sleeve of the robe, was milky white on the underside, and toasted very pale gold on the outside, like a chicken half done on the spit. He thought that picturesque, and was going to tell her so, when his gaze fell on her throat, just above the high linen neckline, and he wondered what colour her skin was, just under it. They had somehow got into the press of the dancers, swaying and crowding thick against them, and the drums throbbed like a headache and the flutes sobbed and ached as, underneath all the raki, something within him was aching, searching, demanding.

Marthe had made herself very flat and was leaving him, disappeared almost to nothing between two walls of dancers. Jerott stretched out an arm, and closing the hand again on her wrist, pulled her through back to him, although he saw she was in pain, and was sorry that it was the same wrist. He took the neck of the white robe and the neck of her dress together, between his two fingers and thumbs and tore them carefully down perhaps six inches. Her skin part of the way was the golden brown of a half-roasted chicken, but the rest was pure white.

Her eyes were huge. He had never seen such a blue. Not anywhere. He would hold to that against anybody. She looked round, her yellow hair stuck to her cheek, as though searching for somebody, but she didn’t speak or call, Jerott was happy to find; although with the chants and the drums, no one would hear her. It struck him that they had privacy, in a sense, and he held her wrist hard, and said, ‘I love you. D’you love me? I love you. I don’t love anyone else, do I? You have all I want. I don’t need anyone else. I love you.’

‘And I love you,’ said Marthe. She relaxed suddenly, one hand holding the slit edge of her robe; her cheek laid on his shoulder. They turned; revolving, nested in the curves of the music; sleepily; the drums throbbing soft and then loud. The floor was not quite so crowded. ‘There is another room,’ said Marthe.

Her light bones lying against him were part of him: the voice was the voice of his heart. Jerott threaded his hand down the silken fall of her hair and down her warm spine and stroked her as they moved until she stirred and looked at him, and he realized that a long time ago she had spoken. Her face was different.

Speech was difficult. He nodded, and held her as she steered him through a curtain of changing sequins which sometimes became
people; and into a place where there were no sequins but a cool darkness where he was able, with a little difficulty, for she was strong, to set her down somewhere while he slit the overrobe carefully down to the bottom.

She had to prick him with it more than once before he saw that the shimmering thing in front of his eyes was his own knife, unstrapped from inside his sleeve, and that she was holding it ready to stab. His hands dropped, and Marthe rose to her feet, in her nearly immaculate Western gown, and looked down on him as he swayed where he knelt.

‘Take your sops, Mr Blyth, and go back to the schoolroom,’ said the light, weary voice. ‘For every disingenuous small boy there is a disingenuous small girl, I suppose, somewhere.’ She spoke to someone, and surprisingly, before him, there was another bowl of that damned fire-water.

He drank it off and, smiling, fell asleep at her feet on the carpet without seeing how long she stood there surveying him; a frown in the unique cornflower eyes.

He woke twice, after that: once lying in the open by a reeking dung fire, which had brought on the coughing which roused him. Between paroxysms he was aware of the night sky, and a dark circling of tents, and of Marthe’s voice, speaking in Arabic to someone. It sounded peremptory.

The other voice, a man’s, he did not know, though when the fire suddenly flared he saw the black and white stripes of a Bedouin cloak, and a turn of jaw which looked somehow familiar. Then someone moved, and he saw the man Marthe was addressing. He was Shadli, the leader of the Saracens of Savah whom they had driven off on the way to Aleppo.

His stomach heaved. By the time he was less occupied with his own ills, the conversation, whatever it was, was over, and there was no one there but Marthe and some Bedouin women, their cheeks tattooed in blue circles. He shut his eyes, but took the liquid someone forced through his teeth and was at once thickly asleep. But that, until much later, he thought was a dream.

The next time he woke, it was daylight; and he was in his own bed.

To dissect a fully grown giraffe with any success, in the open, in Aleppo, in September, demands an esoteric assortment of talents, such as, for example, a smart turn of speed.

At sixty-three, Pierre Gilles was a few years past his best, but he was going to have a damned good attempt. A day after he came across the beast, on its last legs on the road in from Cairo, he had bought it, had it brought to the French Consul’s house in Aleppo,
and ignoring the cries of the attaché, who was a fool, had got the men scurrying to fill the courtyard with straw, set up the tables and basins and a stool for his secretary, Pichón, and fix the awning from wall to wall, ready for day. He had started work then and there, by torchlight; and by dawn, when he stood back for the first time, sweating, and drank off the Candían wine that they brought him, the beast was already half flayed, and Pichón had ten pages of notes.

That was when he went indoors, devil take it, to exonerate nature and to snatch, while he was there, a quick bite of food; and this damned girl caught him.

When he came out of that argument half an hour later, he was red in the face, from the old cap on his head to the uncurled white beard which straggled over his blotched working-smock. He seized his apron and jerked it over his head with an imprecation in Latin which made his secretary sit up; and even when he had his knife in his hand again, he found it hard for quite ten minutes to concentrate.

By noon, when all the bins were full and the flies were proving a problem, he went indoors again, for the sun staring through the awning was fairly unpleasant, although it had taken a fool like Pichón to faint from it. In his room he stripped, upended a jug of water over his great hulk and put on the smock again without resuming his clothes.

Pichon’s notes, so far as they went, were on the table. Stripping off a chicken wing they had left for him, he chewed and wrote, his fist making faint red smears over the Latin, swearing under his breath. Then he drank some grape-juice, which was better than wine when you wanted your hand to be steady, and strode out of the room, the battered notes in his hand, just as a young man, with a face as livid as Pichon’s, came out of another door and collided with him. The young man apologized.

The voice was educated. Looking at him with attention, Pierre Gilles thought the boy looked reasonably intelligent. From the suntan under all the picturesque black hair, he had obviously been here or travelling all summer, although the accent, he thought, had been Franco-Scots. Gilles made up his mind, and snapped, ‘D’you write Latin?’

Sometimes Jerott forgot that the blazon of chivalry, with all the status it once had carried, was no longer his. In any case, he had an incredible headache. He stared at this enormous, round-shouldered old man in the filthy nightgown and buskins, and snapped back. ‘Of course.’

Pierre Gilles was relieved. ‘Good. Excellent.’ Placing one bony hand on Jerott’s left shoulder, he pivoted him forward and, propelling him amiably before him, walked him out of the house, talking as he went. Herpestes, who had also had some chicken, was waiting ahead of him and jumped on his shoulder as he passed: Gilles paused
to stroke him, and Jerott, walking on, arrived at the steps down to the courtyard and stopped as if poleaxed.

Instead of swept tiles and potted orange trees, blood-drenched straw packed the yard, in the midst of which reared the ruins of some red enamelled object almost wholly covered with flies. There was an arrangement of tables and buckets and basins and an array of shining objects like knives, of which he was not immediately sensible, as the effect of the white awning with which the courtyard apparently had been roofed was to produce a concentration of heat and stench quite unimaginable.

Jerott stared in front of him, trying not to breathe, and aware of the blood draining from his own skin in sympathy with the abused organs within. Then a word reached him of all the old man had been saying.
Giraffe
. The old monster was cutting up … 
dissecting
a giraffe. And—Jerott looked suddenly at the blood-smeared notes which had been pushed in his hand—he was recording the details. In Latin.

No one who had been long in Archie Abernethy’s company could fail to know who this was. Jerott felt sick. His head ached; and the thinking he had done since he came to his senses that morning had not helped to make him feel better.
If the brat’s not at Aleppo, it’s dead
, he had convinced himself somehow.
Or likely to cost more than our blood
.

He had meant to go back to France. He had no intention of wet-nursing anyone’s bastard, then or now. But now he meant to find that child, alive, whether anyone wanted it or not.

Jerott swallowed. When it had to be done, it could be done. That, at least, you learned in the Order; and he had relearned it, to some purpose, under Lymond. He took a deep breath and, turning, spoke to the old man as he joined him, the grey, cat-like creature on his shoulder. ‘I believe, sir, you must be M. Pierre Gilles d’Albi?’

‘Yes. Naturally,’ said the anatomist. Several sick-looking men, obviously hired as menial assistants, had appeared and were waiting for him: he ignored them, peering, frowning, at the carcass and then up at the sun as he tied the leather apron-strings over his smock. ‘The stool’s over there.’ Without warning, he shot a glance at Jerott under drooping white brows. ‘But it’s too much for you, is it?’

‘No. I’ll do it,’ said Jerott. ‘If I may introduce myself? My name is Jerott Blyth. I’m a Scotsman from Nantes, and I have a very good friend who is a lifelong admirer of yours. Archie Abernethy.’

‘Good,’ said Pierre Gilles. He strode forward, Jerott following, and knife in hand, slit something disgusting and peered inside, his right hand continuing to work. ‘Take this down.
De Gyraffa, Bellon dicet, quam Arabes Zurnapa, Graeci et Latini Camelopardalin nominant…
’