Once settled, he wasted no time. Already he had verified from the factor that no ship called the Peppercorn had made landfall this year, to his knowledge; but that sometimes, of course, such a ship, if she were English, would unload her cargo, say, in Cyprus and send her passengers by small boat to the coast. English ships did not call at Scanderoon. There was no agent. Only the ships of the Seigneury, or of France, or of the Great Turk’s own domains.
Jerott’s head ached. Marthe had disappeared, with her slave, allegedly to consult the Syrian merchants on the same business. The French agent’s damp timbered house, in which he sat, smelt of goat grease and bukhur-jauri, the strong Javanese incense beloved of Negroes. He caught sight of the woman, a veil half over her woolly hair, round the edge of the door. He didn’t blame the man: not here. He said, ‘If such a small boat landed persons, say of Syrian nationality, or even Western Europeans, what record of such people might I find to exist? My superior seeks particularly a dark-haired woman, a Syrian from Mehedia, and a fair two-year-old child.’
For that, said the agent, he would require to study the records of the Cadi, whom he would find at Aleppo. There also were the merchants who traded with such second-hand cargo, and the priests and the Patriarchs who looked after the spiritual welfare of newcomers. He would ask in Scanderoon if such a pair were remembered, and where they had gone. Sometimes, men came and took boat for Tarsus, only eight miles off over the bay, especially those engaged in the silk-rearing business. Did M. Blyth wish to make inquiries at Tarsus?
Through a haze of wine, which affected his efficiency very little, Jerott initiated inquiries at Tarsus. He had all the merchants of Scanderoon narrowly questioned. He examined the records. He collected Marthe, who was standing, absently covered in Baghdad pigeons, in the Syrian merchant’s courtyard, discussing the uses of turpentine. And when all these activities had drawn a blank, he bespoke the services of baggage-mules, horses, a Janissary and two Ajémoghláns the following day, to convoy Marthe and himself in safety to Aleppo. Then he returned to the khan, ate a leaden meal of mutton and rice, quarrelled with Marthe and, retiring to his mattress, drank himself into a nightmarish sleep, punctuated by the howling of jackals.
The journey from Scanderoon to Aleppo, which occupied slightly more than three days, was marked by no roguish departure from the general atmosphere of exasperation and gloom. At Belan, they slept on the ground. At Antioch, between high Biblical rocks, they lodged in a house, also on bare ground, with a pillow, a mattress and a quilt. They crossed the plain of Antioch, and hired a boat over the Orontes, which was low. They left the wildfowl and the water-buffaloes of the coast and met instead the tented villages of the Bedouins, with flocks of dangle-eared goats and the thick-tailed Syrian sheep, dragging thirty pounds of fat and wool at its back.
They had no provisioning to do. The Janissary visited the villages and called at the low goat-hair tents to buy bread-cake and water, and brought them goat’s milk and yoghourt and dates to add to the meat and sour butter they carried. On the last evening, approaching Hanadan, a village eight miles from Aleppo, there occurred the only incident in which Janissary and Ajémoghláns were required to act in their protective capacity.
The raid in fact came from nowhere just before the sudden extinguishing of night. Two of the horses had gone lame, and their reduced pace had made them late in arriving within the safety of Hanadan. Torches had been lit, to scare off brute dog and jackal as much as to frighten off thieves. But even so, the raiders perhaps believed that the little caravan was very much more numerous and heavily laden than in fact it was. They came whirling out of the darkness, on small Arab horses: a blur of white headgear, coarse cloaks and striped kaftans, with the burning pitch shining red on their swords. Then the Janissary, scimitar at his side, fired off a hackbut, and throwing it down, charged steel flashing with the Ajémoghláns at his heels; and the raiders, seeing the economy of the luggage and the scarcity of well-plenished merchants, weighed risk against risk and, bringing their horses round, rearing, made off in the dark.
The Janissary, remarkable so far for his silence, returned pleased and loquacious. The man with one eye—had they noted?—the leader was Shadli, the dog, the son of a drunkard, who forced money from every caravan of note from Scandaroon to Aleppo, and sometimes from Aleppo as far as the Grand Sophy’s frontier. Demanded money, and if the caravans did not pay, then the tribes descended and lives and money, all were lost.
‘I have heard,’ said Marthe, ‘there are Kurds in these mountains who worship the Devil.’
‘It is true,’ said the Janissary. ‘God is good, they say; and will harm nobody; but the Devil is bad, and must be pleased, lest he hurt them. But these are not Kurds, Khátún. These are Bedouin, who call themselves the Saracens of Savah and, living in their tents, earn their livelihood thus. But they are spendthrifts. The money goes: always they want more. When the army is here, you will see: then they raid the opium caravans and sell direct to our soldiers. When our army goes to war,’ said the Janissary, ‘all the opium-bearing fields are despoiled for their comfort and courage.’
Jerott found, stiffening, that Marthe was looking at him. ‘Did you know that?’ she said. ‘Fifty camels a year loaded with opium come in from Paphlagonia, Cappadocia, Galatia and Cilicia. The Janissaries take it daily—half a drachm and you wouldn’t notice it. A whole drachm might perhaps bring a man to a state no more objectionable than your own. But of course, before they resell, the tribes will adulterate. What began as four-ounce cakes in India might finish as slabs of half a pound or even a pound, and this can cause trouble.’
‘If it is pure,’ said the Janissary harshly, ‘there is no insult.’
‘Have you ever seen a man starve in order to buy himself a hundred grains daily, and then be deprived of his source? That isn’t an insult,’ said Marthe. ‘That is the root of the tree that grows in the bottom of Hell.’
It was no news that Turks lived on opium. ‘You said something about “when the army is here”,’ said Jerott.
‘It is so. Rustem Pasha, the Grand Vizier, has left Stamboul,’ said the Janissary. ‘From Scutari he brings an army to Aleppo, where it will be joined by the armies of Damascus and Tripoli and Aman. Didst thou not see the soldiers at Antioch? Together they winter here. Then in the spring, my lord marches on Persia.’
‘Another Persian campaign?’ said Jerott. He was thinking. Men, money, munitions, poured into the dry fields of Persia. And none for France, facing not only the Emperor, but the Emperor’s niece newly crowned Queen of England. What of the French invasion of Corsica now? What of his friends, the trained company Lymond had created, which he had abandoned to go on this self-destructive, harrowing search? Paid off for lack of funds? Decimated for want of good weapons? Hell, thought Jerott, staring at the bloodshot rooftops of Hanadan. I’ve had enough. If the brat’s not at Aleppo it’s dead, or it’s going to cost more than our blood to redeem it. If the trail ends here, it ends and I go back to France. My God, I’m a soldier, not a wet-nurse to somebody’s bastard.
‘I prefer you, I think, drunk to sulking,’ said Marthe. ‘Consider. An angel descends with every drop of water and lays it in its appointed place. If it rains, you wül be dry, or you will be wet. Why then flinch or rebel?’
‘Because,’ said Jerott with emphasis. ‘I’m not a bloody Saracen.’
‘What a pity,’ said Marthe. ‘Another difference, I fear, to divide us. Because I, of course, am.’
As always, Jerott rose to the bait. That her remark was a simple statement of truth took a long time to penetrate; but in the end he was brought to admit, in his heart, that given the person she was, it was not beyond understanding. Thinking back, he even remembered how, outside Mehedia, the thought had once crossed his mind when she overplayed, by a fraction, her ignorance of Bektashi dervishes. She had travelled in Moslem countries: she had seen, as Jerott, his voice raised, reminded her, that they treated their women as servants and playthings. It did not trouble her.
&
nbsp; She did not say, look at Roxelana. She did not say, look at Kiaya Khátún. But she did say, coldly sardonic, ‘What better hopes have I in Europe? I have no birth, no money, no inheritance, no future. I live from Georges Gaultier’s charity, and the caprice of the Dame. No man of ambition will marry a bastard. To marry beneath me is to become a servant: to accept anything other than marriage is to become a plaything. I have little choice wherever I go. I prefer a society which accepts that I have no choice, and does not pretend that I have. I prefer a God who does what he wills, and rules as he desires, and enjoins on me not to prevent anything against its destiny. I prefer a religion which can say:
Yigĭt Olanlar anilir
Filan oğlu filan diye
Ne anon var, ne baton var
Benzersin sen piçe tanri.
Jerott did not need a translation.
Those who are heroes are known, Such as this man, who is the son of that other …
Thou hast no mother and no father:
Thou resemblest a bastard child, God.
‘You think it blasphemy, no doubt,’ she said. ‘It isn’t. It is divine simplicity, I believe.’
He made one last attempt. ‘You are leaving a civilization which rules by the intellect for a civilization which rules by the senses,’ said Jerott.
‘And you would dissuade me?’ said Marthe.
16
Aleppo
‘… The Sultan of Cambaia has moustaches so long, he ties them up with a fillet like a woman, and he has a beard white to the navel.’
The glories of the Orient. ‘Indeed,’ said Jerott Blyth flatly; and wished for the hundredth time that supper were over; that the French Consul were not away on affairs, and that the attaché who was their host in his place was with the Sultan of Cambaia, with his moustaches tied tight round his larynx.
Outside those high stone walls were the streets of Aleppo, third city of Suleiman’s Empire; built on its four hills with its mosques and its minarets and its khans and its high garrisoned castle; its souks and its low arcaded houses and its fountains from the underground flow of the Singa; its great suburbs; its four miles of gardens and vineyards, its fields of cotton and rice, figs and melons and cucumbers, cabbages, lettuces, beets, plums and pears stretching to the walls of the Old City, wrecked by the Tartars; and everywhere the patient bullock treading its blindfolded circle as the wheels turned and the river-water trickled into the light stony ground, and brought it fertility.
Riding today to the French Consul’s house, Jerott had recalled that most of the population of Scotland could be fitted into this Egyptian city, still the greatest market in Asia, after forty years of Suleiman’s rule. Qui vero in Indiam, Persiam, aliasque Orientis regiones profisci cupiunt, semper istic negociatores reperiunt, qui ultro citroque commeant, Bellon had written. And still the camel-trains poured in from Taurus; the great Persian boxes streamed up the Euphrates, the treasures of India were carried in by boat and camel and packhorse from the Red Sea and the Gulf: turtle-shells in barrels from Bombay, and wax and seahorse teeth, and negroes and gum.
Here Venice bought her drugs, her indigo and her spices, her mohair, cotton and wool, and in return unloaded these shining bales of satin and damask, of scarlet and violet wool, these boxes of gold and of silver: three hundred and fifty thousand ducats’ worth of trade every year. In all, to Venice; to France; to the merchants of Egypt and Cairo, Aleppo sent annually one hundred thousand ducats’ worth of her own silk cloths alone; and five hundred thousand ducats’ worth of other things.
For this kind of business you must have great khans for your traders to dwell in, and many agents, both diplomatic and spiritual. You must have food and water in plenty, and shops where strangers can buy food, and ovens where it may be cooked for them. You have your warehouses for the non-perishing goods: the gems, the amber, the lignum, the aloes, the musk. You have your interpreters and your hirers of camels; your covered bazaars, your mosques with thronging stone cupolas, lined with gilt and mosaic inside. Within the tall towered walls with their eleven gates you have a Cadi and a Beglierbey, dispensing justice; customars to deal with trade taxes; pensioned horsemen—the Timarriots—to keep order.
Within the castle walls lived two thousand people, a garrison of five hundred Janissaries and their Agha. And these men jostling in the streets were the permanent residents they controlled—Turks, Moors, Arabs, Jews, Greeks and Armenians; Maronites, Georgians, Chelfalines, Nostranes; the spendthrift Bedouin with his tent on a dungheap; the poor Greek who earned his asper a month swabbing his boothkeeper’s path-frontage daily. The dumb and the mad. The naked fool led by dervishes, eating flies and the eyes of dogs raw. The call of the muezzin, floating many-threaded from tower to tower, which canopied the roaring voice of the streets, speaking all the tongues common to man: Italian and Arabic, Turkish, Armenian and Persian, Hebrew and Greek, and the alien incomers’ tongue of the Chaldee, the Tartar, the Indian.
A shifting, bright alien population, numbering hundreds of thousands. In which a woman and child would be, as the Janissary who brought them had pointed out pityingly, ‘small, Efendi: small as the white point on the back of a date-stone’.
The French attaché, with whatever cause, was more bracing. ‘A woman without friends, in Aleppo? She would need help. The priest. The Patriarch. The services of a consul to procure her the shelter of a khan, to change her money, to obtain a carrier, an interpreter, a Janissary, a guide. Whoever has helped her, one can discover him.’
‘And if she had friends waiting?’ said Jerott.
‘Ships come as the wind blows. How could they wait?’ said the attaché. ‘Wherever they are, she must seek them. Yellow hair is not common. Somewhere is the horse, the camel she used.… In a week I may hâve news for you.’
‘It must be sooner than that. Wherever he is, he is in danger,’ said Jerott.
But the attaché shrugged. ‘In the East, God knows, time is different. To achieve any desired end: it is slow. But dangers hasten slowly, as well.’
He was out in both reckonings. Before the end of a week, he had concluded his inquiries and doom, the brisk doom of the Christians, had arrived.
It began with the culminating explosion in a series of skirmishes to do with Marthe’s desire to explore Aleppo, in Arab clothes, accompanied by the Ethiopian woman he had bought for her, and no one else.
Jerott had complained, before coming on this trip, that he could not in good faith be accountable for Marthe’s safety. It did not prevent him, when he found her slipping out of a side door that first morning, from seizing and berating her before the absent French Consul’s interested household, until she stopped him by stalking back into the house.
When, in her own room, she confronted him, it was like facing the worst of Francis Crawford; with the difference that Lymond was usually right, and therefore cut deeper still.
It was unpleasant enough. Marthe stood, robed from head to foot in the coarse undyed robes of the Arab, her veil crushed in her hand, and demanded, softly, to know by what conceivable right her safety, spiritual, moral or physical, was any business of his. ‘Do you imagine,’ said Marthe, ‘that I cannot conceive of the risks? Or that I have not the intelligence to weigh them? Or that perhaps I may not be able to judge better than you the course I must take in my own affairs?’
‘My God,’ said Jerott. He slammed the door and, walking across, flung his cap on her table. ‘Perhaps for one second you would sit on the lid of your irreducible ego and listen to me. I regard you, masculine or feminine, as the greatest genius the world has ever produced. I agree you have a superior knowledge of your own affairs and are far more capable than the Consulate, for example, of weighing up the risks. Suppose even, for the sake of conjecture, that I don’t give a brass bagcheek whether the first Tartar you meet doesn’t drag you back to his tents and elect you Broody Mother to the whole bloody tribe. All I am saying is that, first, if anything happens to you, I’ve got to face Francis Crawford and also your uncle. And second, if you
must face risks with good reason—and there had damned well better be a good reason—-then there’ll be a good few less risks if I come along with you.’
‘No,’ said Marthe simply.
That was the first time. Flinging out furiously ten minutes later, having achieved precisely nothing, Jerott retired cursing to his room and stayed there until his servant warned him, as he had been instructed, that the mademoiselle had left her room once again.
That time, Jerott thought he had never seen her look so angry. The blue eyes were open pits of cold hatred when she saw him; but this time, she did not turn back or argue. Slipping the black veil into place over her face, she brushed past him and continued on her way out of doors.
‘Very well,’ said Jerott. ‘Only I am afraid you will not remain very anonymous. I am coming with you, and, as I hope you have noticed, I am wearing one of Onophrion’s more vernal creations in pale green watered silk. Always mindful of my master’s dignity. We shall be a pretty pair.’
Then she turned back, and slammed the door in his face.
The key was on the outside. Jerott turned it, withdrew it and, taking it with him, found the two Janissaries the attaché had allotted him and went out, followed by the sound of furious hammering.
It was dusk when he returned. To get out now, she would have to pass the Consulate guards; and in any case, as Jerott well knew, she was no fool. No woman who knew her Middle East would venture unescorted now. He unlocked Marthe’s door, tapped on it, and turned back into his room without waiting to speak with her.