Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  The light was brightening. Francis Crawford turned away, abruptly, and began, with care, to dress.

  Two hours after that, the Sultan’s golden caique came for them, with its eighty red-capped oarsmen; its prow a gilded feather curled round its cable; its curtained pavilion inlaid with mother-of-pearl, gold and tortoiseshell and with rubies and turquoises edging the exquisite marquetry of its roof. They embarked smoothly, in a living pattern, this time, of silver and satin and jewels, leaving the music and crowds on the waterfront and gliding out on the bright water, where the fishermen poled over, calling, and the carved stems of the merchantmen were crowded with faces.

  The mist had gone. Half-way across, the Dauphiné, rowed out to midstream from the berth which was costing the French Crown twenty pounds daily, let off two volleys of small shot, and then two rounds of each of her guns, followed by an outburst of fanfares from her trumpets, her banners lifting in the first morning wind. On one of the hills someone was putting up kites: the small chequered shapes twitched and spiralled and floated, drawing the gaze to the sky. On the waterline below the seawall of the Seraglio one could also distinguish for the first time a jostling line of pale colour and dark beside the Seraglio quay. ‘The welcoming party, with horses,’ said d’Aramon. ‘The two Pashas will have silver staffs: the Kapijilar-Kiayasi, the Grand Chamberlain, and the Chiaus Pasha, the Chief of the Ushers. The rest are a guard of honour: thirty or forty. Two gifts here.’

  ‘And one for the helmsman,’ said Lymond. French-fashion, his white cap-feather dropped rakishly over one cheekbone. His face, underlit by the sun and the silver, was perfectly cool, and his short bright hair crisp, like a cat’s, in the damp. There had been an argument with the man Zitwitz about perfume, in which Lymond, acidly, had capitulated. (‘Many here smell strong, but none so rank as he.’) It occurred to d’Aramon that it was a long time since he had witnessed a display of cold-blooded thoroughness to equal it.

  They landed. The light Arab horses, trellised with pearl and trailing velvet and tassels, were not easy to collect and control, when oneself in the fanciest costume. But two by two, formalities finished, the procession was formed, and passing the sea gate of Topkapi, the Sultan’s kiosk of marble and crystal, the Fish Gate, the Imperial mill, bakery and hospital set against the outside Seraglio wails, and the broken marble of the older civilization which had shared Seraglio Point, turned its back on the sea; and following the high turreted wall of the palace, climbed the low hill to the summit, where shone the vast golden dome of St Sophia, and the tall, white marble tunnel of the Bab-i-Humayun; the Sublime Porte itself; the Gate to the Royal Seraglio.

  Like a carnival party; like a company of playactors, whose painted cloths and sparkling glass jewels were real, thought d’Aramon grimly, the two Ambassadors with their gentlemen and their escort rode between the two lines of white-feathered door guard and into the square quarter-mile of exercise-ground, green with trees and lined with strange irregular buildings, which was the first of the four courts of the Palace. ‘I wish you good fortune,’ said the Baron d’Aramon to his companion. ‘May you return through this gate bearing your son and the child of your friends. You have travelled far for this moment.’

  A brief, one-sided smile pulled at the new Ambassador’s mouth. ‘Thank you,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘Aussi Dieu aide—perhaps—aux fols et aux enfants.… What are the buildings?’

  D’Aramon told him. On the right, the long hospital, with its red tiled roofs, and the low freestone buildings of the main well and waterworks. On the left, the dome of the old Byzantine church of St Irene, once filled with the weapons and armour of Greeks and Crusaders. An arcade and horse-trough, a wood- and tool-yard; and the cupolas of the Mint and of the Pavilion of Goldsmiths and Gemsetters, where worked the shield-makers and cutlers and sword-smiths, the gold-chasers and engravers, the workers in amber and copper and silver, the glovers and upholsterers, the carvers and makers of musical instruments, whose art, like the dials of the spider, clothed and veiled the precincts of mastery.

  This was the courtyard of the Janissaries, the children of Hadji Bektash, the first standing army in Europe since the days of the Romans. They stood on either side, rank upon rank of blue robes, unmoving; silent; the bird-of-paradise feathers of ceremony in the copper sockets of each high white felt bonnet, curling and falling knee-length behind. Riding from end to end of that long double column, with the doors of the Sublime Porte closing behind, the Baron de Luetz felt again the fear which never failed to grip him, after all these years, on finding himself inside these high walls: the awe forced on every stranger by the weight of the silence.

  It was a court used by many outside the Seraglio: a court of business and training, a place full of affairs, the laden mules passing to and fro between the guard and the buildings, and turbaned men of many races bearing burdens or bent on swift errands. Nevertheless, there was complete silence. A cough could be heard, distantly, in the still, heavy air. The tread of their horses’ feet, as they moved over the flat unpaved dirt and then crossed some broad, cobbled path, formed alternating patterns of tone, and the chime of bridle and bit and the soft tread of their escort echoed back from the buildings. In silence, they crossed the wide court, and in silence halted before the Inner Wail and the true entrance to the Seraglio: the battlemented gatehouse and twin octagonal towers of the Ortokapi; the Gate of Salutation.

  Across the First Court, Ambassadors and officials of the Inner Service had the privilege of riding. Within the Ortokapi, none rode but the Sovereign of Sovereigns himself. As their escort, moving silently forward, held their horses, the principals of the French Embassy and their retinue dismounted in a ripple of white and black and scarlet, pale blue and silver, and on foot entered the great marble porch; while above them the spiked heads of the Sultan’s detractors and traitors knotted the white stone among the bronze shields and scimitars which hung on its surface; and these, stirred by the movement beneath them, quaked into a shimmering curtain of silver and gold. Within, a double wrought-iron door led into the Ortokapi vestibule. There, the Ambassadors’ feet sank into carpet and the two pages bearing the heavy silver stuff of their trains lowered it, at a faint smile from Lymond, and stepped smartly back.

  On either side, as before, stood the Janissaries, but dressed this time in silk with jewelled gold on their brows. Before them, two men waited to welcome them: the Agha of Janissaries, black moustached and hugely turbaned, his long hanging sleeves lined with fur. Then after him the most powerful civil authority in the Seraglio: the Bostanji Bashi, who under the title of Head Gardener was master of all security within the Seraglio, possessor of great estates and executioner of the great. To them, bowing hand on breast, the Baron d’Aramon presented his successor. The swarthy faces did not change, nor did the new Ambassador, speaking most formal French and awaiting, courteously, the interventions of the interpreter, show either excitement or apprehension. Then, gifts presented, they were in the big reception chamber which led off the vestibule to the right, and awaiting permission to enter the Court of the Divan.

  From the Hall of the Divan, Rustem Pasha as Grand Vizier and supreme head of the civil and military hierarchy under the Sultan governed the kingdom for his master with his judges and Treasury officials, with his three lesser viziers and the Grand Mufti, head of the Islamic religion. The Grand Vizier, who ruled over six thousand salaried servants and a harem, they said, as big as the Sultan’s: who had in his palace, they said, six hundred silver saddles and eight hundred sabres with jewel-covered hilts and a library of five thousand ancient manuscripts—who was worth altogether three-quarters of a million silver ducats—the Grand Vizier was leading the army against Persia. In his place Ibrahim Pasha, the second Vizier, would welcome and feast them before, at last, they were summoned to the Sultan himself.

  They waited perhaps half an hour, their staff standing rigid under Master Zitwitz’s forbidding eye; Gaultier shuffling uneasily among the black and crimson robes of the sweating, whispering merc
hants until Lymond’s pleasant voice said in his ear, ‘Griping, isn’t it? What are you worried about? Unless they’ve dropped the bloody thing in the Bosphorus, it’ll be the sensation of the Seraglio.’

  ‘If it works,’ said Georges Gaultier. The lines on his face, usually dirt-coloured, were orange.

  ‘Well, if it doesn’t work, there’s always the jewellery,’ said the new Ambassador blandly. ‘And if they’ve picked off all the garnets, there’s still the spinet. And don’t have the face to tell me that doesn’t work, even though your brilliant niece didn’t arrive.’

  For in those last days of panic Lymond himself had tuned the spinet, perched on a stool, his head to one side, patiently tapping, listening, adjusting while Gaultier worked on the case, against time, adjusting the weights, repairing and repainting the damage caused by friction and damp and the vagaries of temperature during the long nine-month voyage. Marthe’s boxes were there, with their hanks of Nürnberg wire; the fish glue, the felt, the pins and the nails, and the kid bag of vulture feathers for plectra. It had taken two days, the tuning, in between Lymond’s other affairs; and he appeared both to know what he was doing, and to enjoy it.

  At the end, there had rung through the rooms of the Embassy a faint, fast cascade of sound M. d’Aramon had never heard in that air before, and seldom anywhere else. With Gaultier and, in time, a gathering group of the household, he had heard the brief recital through, from a neighbouring room, and had entered with congratulations and diffident questions. And Lymond, answering, had been, Gaultier thought, more communicative and relaxed than at any point in the past months when the sound of a flute, finely played, would have made him turn on his heel.

  So music to this man was a weight or a counter-weight, like those working the delicate wheels of Gaultier’s automata. It would be interesting to know, thought Gaultier, what change of balance had created the need for it now.

  Then they were summoned to return to the vestibule, where the inner gates, the gates of the Court of the Divan, now stood fully open.

  They opened on a wide-eaved canopy, upheld by ten marble columns with copper chapters and bases, and lined with a ceiling of Persian work, panelled gold upon turquoise, whose shape and colours were repeated in the tessellated ground at their feet. The arcade of which this was part surrounded the four sides of a courtyard smaller than the one they had passed: a garden filled with fountains and small, blowing willow trees, and lawns edged with box and the tall black ovals of cypresses.

  The sun had come out, filling the court with sharp greens and blue shadows; striking gold from the stalked domes of the kitchens behind the long gallery which closed the right side of the garden, and from the Treasury domes on the left, and from the single cupola, far in the distance, of the gate to the third and forbidden court: the Gate of Felicity.

  To the left, far ahead, stood the low, arcaded pavilion of the Council Chamber which was known as the Divan, with its four-sided tower and tall spire, crowned with the flashing gold crescent which could be seen over all Topkapi. Today, the gazelles which sometimes grazed on the sunny slope of the garden had gone. Instead, still as a Persian miniature, Kapici and Janissaries, in patterned rows of long robes and bright sashes and unstirring plumes, lined the wide path to the Divan and stood guarding each gate.

  Led by the Bostanji Bashi, Lymond stepped from the blue and gold of the vestibule into the sunshine and, followed by the severe column of his suite, walked down the patterned path and between the slender pillars and under the wide gold-latticed canopy of the Divan.

  There, the door of the first chamber was open, its green velvet hangings held back by a pair of negro child pages in turban, trousers and slippers. Inside, the Baron de Luetz glimpsed the stirring of jewels and bright silks of the Divan’s highest officers, standing round the walls of the room to receive them. On the far wall, lit by a diffusion of sunlight, there was a gleam from the flowered Iznik tiling with which the room was set, joined and edged with wrought gold, and the deep crimson and green of the silk rugs on the floor and behind the Vizier’s throne, opposite. The Bostanji Bashi, turning, bowed and waved Lymond in.

  So, robed and jewelled in blue velvet and silver, and followed by his page and the person and page of M. d’Aramon, Francis Crawford entered the Hall of the Divan, and, stepping upon the deep carpet, faced the throne of the Vizier.

  ‘Welcome,’ Gabriel said.

  Philippa saw it happen. Because no prayers or promises would move the black slaves or the eunuchs or even, in despair, Kiaya Khátún to let her view, from whatever thrice-guarded vantage, the reception of the new French Ambassador, she had taken her books and her papers and marched off, changing to a graceful prowl as she remembered, to bury her hopes and excitement in a course of philology, followed by the works of Abd-ul-Baki, the Sultan and Khan of lyric verse, somewhat spoiled by being translated, for her benefit only, into the hybrid mixture of Mediterranean languages the girls all called Frankish.

  By pure accident she was seen by Roxelana Sultán, who had formed a liking for her, and who required, for that moment, a feminine escort who could not speak Turkish. She talked briefly to Philippa’s eunuch, and, dismissing both him and her servant, signed to the Pearl of Fortune to lay down her papers and follow her.

  Once before Philippa had been beyond the Black Eunuch’s courtyard, to the little paved court with the fountain from which rose the steps inside the Divan tower. Beyond that again, she had been told, was the anteroom to the Carriage Gate, where she and the other girls would enter the great covered carts in the Second Court to travel with the harem, if the Sultan ever required it.

  For a moment she wondered if indeed she was about to be taken out into the open air; to ride perhaps by Roxelana Sultan’s side on a visit to St Sophia.… But it was Tuesday, not Friday; and instead of passing through to the Carriage Gate, the Sultana signed to her to open the door into the tower. Holding it open, Philippa saw with interest that there was no living being in sight: no eunuchs; no servants. Whatever Roxelana was about to do, it was not to be witnessed. Then she followed her mistress up the steps of the tower.

  The small, low room she presently entered held a carpet and a cloth-of-gold stool, and was lit by one narrow window, intricately gilded and grilled. It looked, Philippa saw, as her mistress seated herself, spreading her robes on the stool, directly down into what must be the Hall of the Divan. And Roxelana, she now realized, had no business there at all. For it was, if harem rumour was correct, the Sultan’s personal listening-post. Unveiled; her heart thudding underneath the Tartar cloud shapes on her kaftán, Philippa dropped at a sign to the carpet, and sat crosslegged staring at the moving headgear below.

  The variety of turbans seemed endless. A doughnut, closed in with pleating and a button on top. A severe square, cuffed and pleated meanly and vertically. A cone, with a headband. A cottage loaf, swathed round the brow. A circle of quilting, with dewlaps drooping above. An immaculate study in bandaging, with the pleats at right angles; the whole thing rakish and flat. And another, round as a ball of thick wool. The tall cone hat of a Bektashi dervish, and the great onion globe of the Agha of Janissaries, wound round a fez. Then he disappeared, and was replaced by the Grand Mufti, all in green. They nearly all had moustaches: Prolixos duntax mystaces gestant. Bellon, quoted by Mr Crawford. She now knew what it meant.

  The spinet they were presenting had come. She had heard that, and knew it had gone into the Treasury, with the other big gifts: the rest they would bring with them. She wondered if Mr Crawford had found out yet—but of course, Archie would have told him … unless anything had happened to Archie?—if he had found out that she was here. And Kuzucuyum.

  One could not, of course, whistle through the grille. Or, since Roxelana’s presence was illicit, one would disappear sacked into the Bosphorus. So one must simply be prepared to look, and to listen.…

  I wish, Kate used to say, you would one day discover the sneaky and (on occasion) intoxicating uses of a little self-discipline.…
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  So Mr Crawford was expected, down below in the Divan. Philippa tried to recall what she had gleaned of the ceremony. He would come in through the door opposite her, with his chief officers and the departing Ambassador, and would talk to the Second Vizier, acting in Rustem Pasha’s absence. He, she supposed, since she couldn’t see him, must be seated in state opposite the door, and immediately under her window.

  Then they ate—in the adjoining room, perhaps, walking through the doorless arch in the pierced screen which was all that divided the two rooms. Then they would robe to go to the Sultan, but by then, probably, Roxelana would be bored and would have required her to leave.… Heavens, she’d asked her something twice already. Scarlet, Philippa bent to pick up the little fan Roxelana had indicated, and when she straightened, Lymond stood in the doorway below.

  Blessed with relations in London, Philippa was well versed in court costume; and her weeks in the harem had accustomed her to inordinate finery. So she paid no attention to the maligned velvet and silver and looked only at the way he stood; his hands loose on his thighs over the folds of his over-robe; and the poise of his head, dark against the green of the garden; and the fining-down of his face since she had seen him last, outside Algiers; and the absence of carelessness in the eyes and the unsmiling mouth. Then another voice below her window said, ‘Welcome.’ A voice that she knew.

  Coming in from the sun, for a second Lymond must have been blinded. She saw his eyes widen, and his lips part, and then close, straight and tight. He had control of himself in a heart-beat, and in another had swept off his plumed cap and, gloves on heart, executed a slow, sweeping bow. But Philippa could sense the extravagance of the shock he was covering, even when he spoke softly in English. ‘Life is full,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘of small disappointments.’