Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  The suites of the Head Nurse, the Head Laundress and the Mistress all led off from the same pleasant courtyard, with the serving slaves’ kitchens and dormitories tiered around the same space. The Head Nurse was black, and came out of her quarters to meet them; chuckling at Kuzúm and speaking to him in Turkish. Philippa said impulsively, and uselessly, in English, ‘Oh, please.… He doesn’t understand. He speaks English. Could I stay with him just a little, until he gets used——’

  The eunuch’s voice came, sharply, calling her new name. Philippa said quickly, ‘Or Tulip. Tulip, stay with him. I’ll come back. Kuzúm, I’ll corne ack.’ She knelt. Took, Tulip is staying with you. This is your new nurse. She’s your new nurse, who will take care of you. Show her your ball. I’ll come back.’

  The eunuch called again, and getting up, with an unregarded cracking of seams, Philippa hurried into the dark entrance of the Mistress’s quarters, and was conducted along soft carpets to a little chamber behind. The eunuch, bowing, departed.

  After the sunlight, it was dark inside, and scented, with a warm aroma she imperfectly remembered from a long time ago. A voice spoke, and a young, plainly dressed girl with a long-stemmed fan rose to her feet, bowed, and slipped out past Philippa. The voice spoke again in Turkish and Philippa, recognizing the command, took a long breath and went in.

  The room was too small for a dais, but a deep mattress paned with bright velvets and heaped with pearl-braided cushions served as a throne for the speaker. The Mistress of the Harem was not veiled. Her hair, under a small golden cap, smelt of Cingalese tuberose, but she was dressed in brown silk, gold-brocaded from throat to knee with birds and boats and combers and hounds, beneath which heavy bracelets gleamed in the dusk, at her wrists and her ankles. The design of the silk was not Moslem, and neither was the face, which was smooth-skinned and straight-nosed, with high, painted brows.

  It was a face she had seen before. A great many thoughts went through Philippa’s head in the little silence that followed; but the chief one she found, despite her shaking knees, to be anger. ‘You sent me to the House of the Palm Tree to find him,’ said Philippa to Kiaya Khátún, whom she had last met drinking coffee, in Lyons, with the Lady of Doubtance, that strange old astrologer. ‘And I did; and I’m grateful. But did you mean us both to come here in the end, all the time?’

  Kiaya Khátún, friend of Dragut; friend of Khourrém Sultán; skilful administrator who might choose and relinquish her post as she pleased, for there was none other to equal her, looked at Philippa and smiled. ‘Be seated, child; and take qahveh. None will run off with your child. If he cries, you may go and comfort him: the Head Nurse is a good woman but stupid; and remarkably amenable. Now. You were saying … How long ago it seems!’ said Güzel, sipping gracefully. ‘I really cannot remember what I hoped for the boy. But the Dame de Doubtance ‥ the Dame de Doubtance, I remember, was most insistent that you should by some means enter the Seraglio. She thought, I believe, that you would benefit by the experience.’

  ‘Did she?’ said Philippa, her back stiff. ‘Then since the arrangements to get me in have worked so nicely, I take it there’ll be no difficulty about getting out. Today, for instance.’

  ‘And leave the boy?’ said Kiaya Khátún softly. And as Philippa did not answer she added, ‘Tell me, my child: do you speak Turkish?’

  ‘A little.’ Geomalers have very long memories. She wondered what had happened to Míkál, who had taken her to Thessalonika, and had abandoned her. A creature of Gabriel’s, surely, would have killed her prior to destroying the child. Or … Enlightenment broke on her. Did Míkál have not a master, but a …

  ‘Since you arrived, have you spoken Turkish or shown that you understand it?’

  Philippa’s attention returned to the Mistress. ‘No … I don’t think so. I haven’t had a chance. Why?’

  ‘Good,’ said Kiaya Khátún. ‘It would prove, I think, beneficial if you continued to show ignorance. You will be taught it, of course. But it is an extremely difficult language to learn.’

  Philippa, who had not found it so, opened her mouth, thought, and shut it again. Kiaya Khátún went on. ‘It would be better, also, if your acquaintance with me were not known to exist. You are here at this moment in order that I may conduct an examination. You will say, if you are asked, that this has been done.… You are, I take it, a virgin?’

  It occurred to Philippa that never in the whole of her life had she been required to give as much thought to that circumstance, happy or unhappy, as in the last half-hour. ‘Yes,’ she said, not very politely.

  Kiaya Khátún smiled. ‘Drink your qahveh,’ she said. ‘You do not consider it so, but the place you will fill is one of high honour. You have heard, I am sure, how the Sultan’s wife Khourrém was no more than a Russian slave-girl in this harem when she won the Sultan’s love. She is called still Roxelana, “the Russian one”. She was then the second only of the Sultan’s four principal ladies: the first, Bosfor Sultán, had already given him his son Mustafa. But it was Roxelana in the end whom the Sultan married: the first ruler for nearly one hundred and fifty years to take a legal wife to himself. Twelve years ago she moved from the Old Seraglio to share his apartments here in Topkapi, and the harem has grown with her and her three sons, now all grown and away. But Roxelana stays, and the Sultan, they say, makes no move without her advice.’

  Philippa got to the mud at the bottom of her cup, and put it down. ‘The prospects for advancement,’ she said, ‘seem rather limited.’ Gideon’s farm-manager had once said that, and Gideon had laughed.

  Güzel smiled. ‘Roxelana will not live for ever. Nor, for that matter, will Sultan Suleiman; and his son Prince Mustafa, though married, is not as his father is. Suleiman, as is known, has since his marriage taken no woman but Roxelana to his bed.’

  Philippa felt herself, rather unpleasantly, go perfectly white, and then scarlet. Her heart was behaving like a very old blacksmith. She said, ‘So he won’t … I shan’t …’

  ‘The chances are,’ said Kiaya Khátún blandly, ‘that you will remain a virgin. Unless you cannot resist the other blandishments you will meet. But hard-headed Border common sense, I am sure, will prevail.… The Mistress of Baths, I am told, is awaiting you.’

  The eunuch had appeared on the threshold. ‘Kuzúm,’ said Philippa quickly. ‘What will happen to the child?’

  ‘Ah, the child,’ said Güzel. ‘He is privileged. He will live here for three years in the care of the Head Nurse: you may see him as much as you wish. Then he will be given tutors and will join the older children here in the harem for schooling. At eleven, he will leave the harem, and you will not see him again. It will be your loss, not his. With such training, the highest office is open to such a man. Everything, naturally, except marriage.’

  ‘Why?’ said Philippa. ‘Don’t they allow——’

  Kiaya Khátún rose. With small, tapered fingers stained rose, she smoothed down the stiff folds of the silk and pulled the dark hair more becomingly round her straight shoulders. ‘My dear child,’ she said, and signed, imperceptibly, to her servant. ‘The game of posterity is not one that this Sultan chooses to play. By the time Kuzucuyum is of marriageable age, Mr Crawford’s son—if he is Mr Crawford’s son—will not be a man, but a eunuch.’

  In the scented steam of the baths, stripped, kneaded, scoured and anointed; made smooth from her head to her feet, Philippa faced the hardest battle of her day. From the lined, painted face of the Mistress of the Baths to the half-naked women who attacked her tanned skin, giggling, with their rough cloths she was vouchsafed no mercy; and as she lay helpless on the marble, not over-clean; knot-boned and flat as a boy, with her tangled, mouse-coloured hair and unremarkable face, nothing spared her the comments of the other girls of the harem who came and went, rose and ivory, half veiled with steam, and touched and stroked and prodded her, laughing their silly cackling laughter, until the Baths Mistress pushed them away, commenting, lewdly and cruelly, in the Turkish she was not supposed to under
stand.

  She lay prone, her wet eyes sunk deep in her sweating wet arms while they worked on her back; and sought grimly some styptic for tears. In her mind she saw her mother Kate’s soft brown eyes, and heard her speaking serenely. There are four ways to meet persecution. Ignore it, suffer it, do it better than they do. Or just make them laugh. It had been the head cowman’s son, that time. ‘He hasn’t got the least sense of humour,’ she remembered saying despairingly. Kate had been unperturbed. ‘I know, dear. You’ll just have to be funny for two.’

  Her ear caught Greek in two—no, three voices. And somewhere, someone said a sentence in French. She had some kind of lingua franca then. She needn’t be dumb. When they turned her over, and someone said something, and there was a general laugh, Philippa said forbiddingly, in Greek, ‘In case you haven’t noticed, you are now viewing the side which bites. You may, if you wish, paint a cross on it.’

  Someone laughed. One of the bright voices in Greek said, ‘Not a cross, English One. What is thy name?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ said Philippa. ‘Pearl of Fortune, I think. What’s yours?’

  The Greek girl was red-haired, with a retroussé nose and a mouth full of flashing white teeth. ‘I am Laila,’ she said. ‘And my other friend here Perfume of the Desert. What other tongues hast thou?’

  ‘Only French,’ said Philippa apologetically, with a gasp as a heavy hand whacked her flanks.

  ‘Then this is Fleur de Lis, and the others have Turkish or Italian names. You will get to know.’ Fleur de Lis was short-legged, with a neck like Venus and the head of a saint. Her comments had been not only the best barbed but the most unflinchingly true. She said, ‘Tu as douze ans?’

  ‘If you think I look like twelve, then I’m twelve,’ said Philippa kindly. They were all around her now, helping the maids to pour rosewater and wrap her in towels. Her hair, washed and rubbed and pomaded, was pinned on top of her head, her blood ran in wide, silken channels and they had taken her bones out and polished them. Philippa stood up and shut her eyes in a daze of mental anguish and physical euphoria, and propelled by small soft hands, moved to the beds in the outer hall. There was a flash of white skirts, and a voice screamed ‘Fippy!’

  It was Kuzúm, naked, his eyes blue as the sea in his shining pink face; his yellow hair, curled by the steam, sticking up in wet spikes and roulades. He ran into her arms.

  ‘He wouldn’t sleep until he’d seen you, Khátún,’ said the under-nurse with him; and as if she didn’t understand, Philippa smiled at her over the child’s yellow head, and sitting down on the couch, sat him up on her knee.

  ‘What you agoing do?’ he said.

  Philippa smiled and kissed the nape of his neck. ‘Sleep, my cherub.’

  ‘Kuzúm sleep aside Fippy? What’s there?’ said Kuzúm with interest, and pushed one fat finger under her towel.

  ‘Me,’ said Philippa cheerfully. ‘And oh, Kuzúm … look at all your lovely new aunties!’

  But in her heart she was saying: ‘Khaireddin Crawford … we are two people who may never know what it is to be a man or a woman. But we shall make friends, and find happiness, and comfort each other.’

  By the time Lymond left Thessalonika, bound for Constantinople, both Philippa and the boy had been in the harem for some weeks. He learned this himself, almost at the outset of the voyage, by the simple accident of encountering the ship which had taken Philippa, now on its way south.

  To Georges Gaultier, and indeed the master and crew of the Dauphiné, it had seemed an excuse at last for slackening the ruinous speed at which they had been held since leaving Malta. In this they were disappointed. If the girl and the child were in the Seraglio, they were safe perhaps from any vengeance Gabriel might have wreaked from the grave. But if any petition for their freedom were to be made, it must be made to the Sultan before he left, as was rumoured, to march south with his army. And further…

  ‘It is to be understood,’ said Onophrion Zitwitz deprecatingly to M. Gaultier, as he ended his customary tirade a day or two later. ‘The girl is young and inexperienced, and moreover plainly reared. Plunged into luxury; decadence … forced to witness and take part in who knows what licentious conduct … It is not unnatural that His Excellency wishes to make all speed possible.’

  They were then within sight of the narrow straits of the Dardanelles, having been tossed backwards and forwards in extreme discomfort since leaving harbour. Autumn winds, pranking all round the compass, combined with sudden sail-drenching rainstorms, had held them up in spite of every expert device and had exhausted the oarsmen to an unfortunate degree. ‘We’ll be in the narrows tonight,’ said Gaultier, his lean cheeks raw with the wind. ‘Why the hell doesn’t he get on a horse and ride for the Porte, if he’s in such a hurry?’

  M. Zitwitz picked up the remains of the broker’s uneaten cold meal, and hesitated, as if unwilling to risk a discourtesy. Then he said, in the same tone of deference, ‘Because, sir, one cannot carry this beautiful spinet on horseback. Is it not so? And to present petitions, he must call in state, with his full train and the King of France’s new gift.… In the narrows and in the Sea of Marmara beyond we shall have shelter. It will not be long, sir.’

  ‘It was too long,’ said Georges Gaultier bitterly, ‘six months ago.’

  Thoughtfully, Onophrion went about his business. To a detached observer, it was obvious that not only the speed and the climate were to blame for the tension on board the Dauphiné. Since Thessalonika, Lymond’s moods had been unpredictable. His care for a swift passage was tireless and his instructions could not be faulted; but he took less trouble, sometimes, to make them palatable to the hard-worked seamen who must fulfil them; and with the officers of the ship, with Georges Gaultier and with Onophrion himself, he was either uncommunicative or abrupt to the point of discourtesy. Onophrion continued with his task, which was to set dinner, as well as he could, on a damp cloth in the master’s cabin, and then went on deck to locate Mr Crawford.

  The new Ambassador was on the rambade, where he had been walking for the past hour; up and down, his yellow hair soaked and tangled, his flying cloak ruined with salt. Despite the long summer’s sun and the sting of the wind, his skin above the dark cloak was as pale as a troglodyte’s, and marked faintly with stresses which had not been there when, six months ago, as Gaultier said, they had started their voyage.

  Salablanca’s death, of course, had been a blow. There was concern for the girl. But more than that; with an effort of imagination one saw perhaps what it meant to take a year, virtually, out of one’s life to perform a duty towards two young unknown children, for whom one felt responsibility, but no bond: to leave the live world; one’s career, one’s affairs to spend empty days on land and on shipboard, travelling, waiting; being forced to wait for an object one did not even desire, except with one’s intellect. To Mr Crawford, the death of Sir Graham Reid Malett was the justification for such a waste. Now, he must feel the justification was indeed small.

  Lymond had seen him. Buffeted by the wind, he came back slowly over the gangway and paused, his hand on the doorpost, his eyes on the food-laden table. ‘After all your effort,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Your Excellency will not dine?’

  ‘I think not,’ said Lymond. ‘Will you tell the captain I have gone below for a space? Call me, if you wül, in an hour.’

  Onophrion Zitwitz, a man of great experience, looked at his master’s strained face and was of a sudden inspired. The injuries Lymond had received at Thessalonika had been treated that night by the Beglierbey’s own physician, and Lymond had not mentioned them since. But after the death of Salablanca the new Ambassador had had no personal aide to look after either his physical welfare or his grooming and both, all too obviously, had been neglected.

  Onophrion Zitwitz, taking a calculated diplomatic risk, leaned forward and shut the door to the deck. ‘If Your Excellency will sit down,’ he said, with considerable firmness in that sedate, well-drilled voice, ‘I shall pour
you some aqua-vitae and ask the barber-surgeon to come.’

  ‘What: for a blood-letting?’ said his master. But he left the door and sat down, with precision, where Jerott, drunk, had once sat; and after a moment, without speaking, dropped his head on his arms. So Onophrion, waiting neither for the barber-surgeon nor the spirits, unfastened Lymond’s cloak and as much as he could reach of his doublet, and slipping in his plump, soap-smelling hand, located the wad of stiff, fraying bandage which bound his right shoulder.

  Without comment Onophrion withdrew his hand, and taking the sharpest of the knives which lay on the table, slit unhesitatingly through velvet and lawn and the bandage itself until he laid bare the neglected sword thrust, swollen, angry and raw.

  Without moving, Lymond said, ‘Would it not be better below?’

  Master Zitwitz looked at him. ‘If you can climb down, Your Excellency. The wound is poisoned.’

  ‘I began to think so,’ said Lymond. ‘But then it pained me only at intervals. It didn’t seem worth a commotion.’

  With Onophrion Zitwitz there was never a commotion. In five minutes Lymond was below decks and the surgeon was on his way; and hot water; and Master Zitwitz had even, at the back of his mind, a menu for the small trayful of food he proposed bringing when the whole nasty business was over. Francis Crawford, prone on his bed, had not spoken since he arrived there.

  Onophrion said, suddenly, ‘Bearing pain will not bring him back.’ And as Lymond twisted round, his eyes open, his face taut with angry astonishment, the steward recoiled and went on, as if no one had spoken, ‘If you will forgive me, sir: between here and Constantinople it will be impossible to keep Your Excellency’s shoulder dressed and your clothes as they should be without a personal servant. If Your Excellency would permit me to appoint one of my own men … I have trained him myself.…’