Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  The most experienced traveller among them was the first to adapt. Pierre Gilles was still more than capable of the outrageous pronouncement; the onorous intonation, the exposition in French and bastard English and the purest of Latin on every phenomenon met by the way. But it was muted and measured, and in its way, often welcome. The hostility he could not help displaying, sometimes, to Marthe appeared no more, with an effort, than the tart impatience of the old with the young. On Jerott he enjoyed lavishing, at times, his powers to instruct and to shock.

  With the half of his mind and the fraction of his heart which were free, Jerott warmed to the old fiend; while hypnotized, as the hare by the snake, with the presence of Marthe.

  She too, out of necessity, had sheathed the barbs of her weapons. The brittle gaiety she had brought from Aleppo had changed into tranquil sobriety. Cool, deft and imaginative, she added to the ease and comfort of an uneasy and uncomfortable journey and if she spoke, spoke of practical things. Once, she went with Jerott to the shack of a blacksmith, and helped him choose the thin iron shoes from the unperforated shapes, big and small, hung round the booth, and watched the smith fit it cold, crouching, his shins crossed, supporting the hoof.

  The coins he was given in change were small and blackened. Even before they left the booth, Jerott sensed her excitement, and when Gilles later identified them it blazed out, her eyes sparkling, her face illumined with eagerness. They were from the days of Alexander: worth something for their antiquity: worth more for the wonder of their existence. Then the flame was extinguished, and she was careful again.

  Of her, Jerott asked no questions. And only once, approaching the snows of Olympus, with the city of Bursa ahead, did he ask Gilles about his precise plans.

  For a moment, the old man was silent, riding along, his feet in their great leather boots dangling, shovel-stirruped, half to the ground. ‘Plans. I find them unnecessary. If some papers of interest propose themselves, I shall examine them. I have an offer from the Seraglio Librarian, and another from one or two monasteries. I have in mind a leisurely stay, perhaps in the city. You will reside at the Embassy. I shall call if I need you.’

  There was no object in pointing out yet again that he was not a paid employee; that he was concerned with a quest of his own; that the length of his own stay in Constantinople was problematical at the least. Jerott said, ‘You mean to stay in the city? Where?’

  Pierre Gilles cleared his throat. ‘Anywhere not entirely unsuitable. The girl here has an uncle who is buying a workshop between the Bazaar and the Hippodrome. They can give me a bed.’

  Jerott Blyth reined in and stared at him. ‘Gaultier is buying a house? He and Marthe are staying in Constantinople?’

  ‘So it appears. There will be plenty of work for him,’ said Gilles roughly. ‘Few other clockmakers in the city: no one who can work with Western musical instruments. No other agent for antiques. He’s a Christian, but the Moslems don’t care. So long as he pays up his taxes.’

  But Jerott, riding on, was silent. He had been wrong. He had envisaged at worst a quick confidence trick: a swift act of treachery. But to throw in their lot with the Ottomans was something again. If Gaultier, that careful man, was uprooting his business and investing in property, it meant that whatever happened, he was sure of security. Or that the prize was so big that he could afford to lay out and lose in the process the price of a house?

  Gilles said, ‘If you look over there, you will see the horses bringing down the snow for Suleiman’s sherbet. The ajémoghláns do the work regularly, and it’s taken to the Sublime Porte and kept underground till needed. Heu prodiga ventris hi, nives, Uli glaciem potant, poenasque montium in voluptatem gulae vertunt. Pliny. They did it in Nero’s time, too. D’Aramon prefers water frozen in snow. He keeps a civilized household. I hope your friend does as much.’

  Odd that until Archie put the thing into words, he, Jerott, had never even thought of the possibility of Lymond’s dying before him. His own hurt, his vexed abhorrence of so much which Lymond had done and said, had blinded him to the fact that this was not an exercise in high ethics. Gabriel had gone out of his way until now to preserve his victim at all costs, tenderly, as in Nero’s flakes and crystals of ice, so that he might distinguish more clearly the nauseating destruction of all those around him.

  It had to end some time. Some time, the cat would trap the mouse for the last, teasing time, and his true and exquisite punishment would begin.

  If it happened: if he and Marthe and Gilles got to Constantinople and found Lymond dead, what then? Jerott thought. And though his hands were cold on the reins he found the answer easily enough. If Lymond could come so far and risk so much for the sake of an idea: an idea of duty and compassion which had nothing to do with the affections; a concept of evil quite apart from the calls of revenge, then he could do no less. Up to his rescue from Mehedia, Jerott realized now, looking painfully back, he himself had done almost as much, freely and gladly, for the opposite reasons. All he had done had been done for Lymond. With the vanishing of that star from his firmament he had found nothing to take its place: nothing to drive him but pique.

  He was quiet when they rode into wall-less Bursa through the plane trees and pines, and was hardly surprised, so elegiac was his mood, to find himself in a city of mourning. It was Marthe who elicited the reason, in a khan of anxious and uncommunicative travellers. On his way south to join Rustem Pasha and the army, the Sultan Suleiman had halted to make camp outside Eregli, and had summoned from his post in the provinces his son and heir, Prince Mustafa, whose command of the Janissaries Rustem Pasha had so extravagantly praised.

  It seemed to Suleiman, they said, that Mustafa had alienated his people’s affections. It even seemed that Mustafa had put it about that the Sultan was old, and incapable of leading his army; and that he, Mustafa, would be better ruling now in his place.

  Whatever the truth, Suleiman had sent for his son, and whatever his misgivings, Mustafa had promptly come. Within the royal pavilion, he had failod to discover his father. Instead there awaited him three mutes, with a bowstring, which they knotted, and pulled round his neck. It was said that from behind the hangings, Suleiman watched his son die.

  In Bursa lived Mustafa’s widow, and their four-year-old child. ‘Let’s get out,’ said Jerott briefly. And they did.

  Ten days later they crossed the Bosphorus, and rode up the hill to the French Ambassador’s house. Rain, the fifth blessed of God, soaked the vines of Pera and Onophrion Zitwitz, welcoming them in, spoke like a man who had forgotten the sunshine.

  M. d’Aramon had gone back to France as soon as the Sultan left the city, and in his place M. Chesnau had arrived at last from Gallipoli and was acting as chargé d’affaires. M. Gaultier remained, in moderate health, anxiously awaiting Mademoiselle. M. le Comte.

  ‘I understood Mr Crawford had been appointed Ambassador,’ said Jerott. His pulses thudding, he did not know how angry he looked.

  ‘It was so. He was received by the Sultan,’ Onophrion said. ‘Unfortunately, the Sultan was unable to agree to free Mistress Somerville and the child, and M. le Comte resigned his position, to recover his freedom of action. I do not know whether you have heard that Sir Graham Malett is Chief Vizier in Rustem Pasha’s present absence.… Mistress Somerville and the child are in the Seraglio. The whereabouts of the other child is not known. May I ask whether your own inquiries have borne better fruit?’

  ‘We haven’t got the other child, if that’s what you mean,’ said Jerott. ‘Where is Mr Crawford?’

  Onophrion flinched. ‘Forgive me. I believed I had told you. On resigning, His Excellency left the Embassy quietly. We have not heard from him since.’

  ‘I think,’ said Jerott, ‘it is perhaps time we did something about that. Would you kindly inform M. Chesnau that we and M. Gilles are all here, and have M. Gaultier told that his niece has arrived? He should perhaps know,’ said Jerott acidly, ‘that he has bought a house half-way between the Bazaar and the Hippodrome, and
that M. Gilles is going to stay with him. With his ichneumon.’

  Despite his thinness and pallor, and the dark rings which came so easily under his eyes, the child called Khaireddin grew daily more handsome; flat-backed and blue-eyed, with arched feet and small, well-made hands, and yellow hair curling like silk. His manners were pretty, because he was beaten daily, where it would not show, when he made a mistake; nor was he allowed to taste his broth, his rice, his bread and sesame oil until he had recited the words he did not understand and practised the other things he had to do.

  It was better than the boat filled with sponges, for there the grown-ups had forgotten to feed him at all, and had flung him off when he tried to beg, frightened and smiling, in the only way he knew how. He seemed to remember when it was better still, on a long, long journey inside a boat, when he ate a lot, and always seemed to be sleepy, and had no lessons at all. But that was a long time ago.

  Názik, the nightingale-dealer, saw that all his charges were watered and fed, and kept in good looks. Alone among the bird merchants and fowlers of Constantinople he had a house, instead of dwelling in gardens and heaths, his nets and lime-sticks spread; his falcons and gled-kites taking partridge and woodcock and duck to fill his customers’ pots and to feather their arrows.

  Built of timber, secure under the arched walls of the Beyazit Mosque, the house was long and narrow, with an upper storey for his own private purposes, and behind, a netted enclosure for the free-flying birds. His talking birds he kept separately, and his cages, and his children.

  Of the last, Khaireddin was perhaps the most amenable: he was certainly the youngest by far, and the source of a large part of his master’s income. Thinking of the future sometimes, Názik wondered if the great lord whose money he was receiving would one day die, and the child be left on his hands. Once the boy was older and more skilful, and free of the infant ways which made him so hard to keep clean, no matter how often he was shouted at, he could be trained to bring in a fortune.

  There was a cage, in onyx and pearl, which Názik longed to buy for him. He had already shown him the other, the iron one which could be heated on charcoal, into which he put boys who disobeyed. In fact he had used it only once, on a young Jew who had hacked off a customer’s hand. The noise had upset the nightingales.

  His orders were never to let the boy out of his sight, nor far from the shop. Within those limits, he could use him as he pleased, so long as his life was not endangered. For that amount of money, no less than the threat which came with it, Názik would have kept the boy under lock and key, had he proved wild or unruly. But he was too young to be cunning, and too weakly willing to be troublesome, except out of stupidity. Názik had found him once touching the bright, fruit-laden ships in the stalls of the fruit merchants, and twice with the story-teller. In each case he had let him come home unmolested. Allow him to be seen, his instructions had said. His shop was watched, he knew, to see if they were carried out.

  About the reasons for it all, Názik felt no curiosity. There was no limit, he knew already, to the whims of mankind.

  In the Seraglio of Topkapi, the child called Kuzucuyum was divested of his leaf-green silk tunic and trousers and whipped, as Gabriel promised. It is fair perhaps to say that Roxelana Sultán had not expected it, or she would not have kept Philippa, clumsy-fingered, at her side for an hour; so that when the girl left at the end of it, and fled through the dim mesh of corridors in a rush of warm, scented air, it was already over when she came, gasping, to the head nurse’s courtyard.

  He was too shocked even to cry properly. He lay like a waterless flower in the cot, blood streaking his white linen wrappings, and sobbed soundlessly in a high, rushing alto; his eyes unseeing, his round fists thrust on his chest. When Philippa touched him, choking, he went rigid; when she spoke to him, he paid no attention. She had failed him, she understood. With loving reassurances she had coaxed him to live among strangers, and the strangers had turned on him, and she had not come. It had happened before, although she was not to know that, and neither did Kuzúm remember his branding.

  But something of the terror of it must have remained, for although the weals were light and healed fairly quickly, he became very quiet and balky to feed: sitting in round-eyed defiance with a mouthful of food, deaf to persuasion and orders, although if they pressed him too far, he would begin to tremble, and Philippa made them stop. You could not explain, in another language, that he was summoning all his courage to test the boundaries of permitted behaviour, beyond which he now knew it to be so terrible to trespass. He had been shouted at and attacked: he did not know why. How was he to know when it might happen again?

  Philippa saw his strained face looking after her each day when she had to go, and ached because he did not call her back. He loved her, but she had not saved him before. How should he look to her to save him again?

  Evangelista Donati had been so confident. Once within the Seraglio, she had said, who can hurt you or the child? Yet Graham Malett, their prime enemy, was here, in power, and claiming the child as his own. And the Sultan was leaving, they said.

  Philippa knew, when she saw Gabriel’s golden figure from the Divan window, that whatever demands France might make, she and Kuzúm would never be freed. But it was worse still than that. Through them, she now saw quite clearly, the final conflict with Lymond would be forced to its climax. The ridiculous present the Embassy had brought, the horological spinet, had been wheeled into Khourrém’s rooms, and no doubt she, Philippa, would be expected to play it. Fear and apprehension, daily occupying the pit of her stomach, had made her in other ways grimly determined. She took a long time to approach the Sultana’s private apartments, and a long time to find her way back. She sometimes took a long time even to turn the handle of the door: particularly if the visitor was Gabriel.

  After all, she understood very little Turkish, and certainly not Turkish spoken softly and fast, without an interpreter. Even if she were seen, none would concern themselves. From taciturn, Philippa turned very gay among the other girls, though to herself she was capable of long stretches of silent communing. Then came the day when she was asked to perform on the spinet, and she had her first close inspection of the ungainly thing: a chest of drawers topped by a campanile.

  To her relief, the frenzy of bells and of puppetry stilled as she drew out the keyboard. It at least was fashioned properly: the naturals formed of ebony had arcaded ends; the accidentals had slips of ivory. Flowers, in leather and ivory, were set into the soundboard. Inside the drop front was pasted a small oblong card, unseen until the drawer was opened. On it, someone had written in English, I have tuned this myself. C. de L. & S. The script was level and small, and extraordinarily clear. She had never seen it before.

  With hands which shook very slightly, Philippa ran her thin, flat-padded fingers over the keys. The quilling, she realized at once, was very light indeed; the touch of the plectra gave a soft bright tone which ran like spray under the hand—all except … there. Pausing, Philippa played it again, and then continued, launching into the piece she had chosen, while she thought. At the end, dismissed to busy herself with sweetmeats, she put her request in a low voice to the eunuch who understood English, who presently approached Khourrém and received the necessary permission. If the spinet required adjusting, she might stay behind when Roxelana Sultán went to the bath, and do what she could.

  There was only one note out of tune: one of the lowest accidentals, seldom employed; but so glaringly off pitch that, once struck, it was bound to be noticed. With great care, alone in the silent room, Philippa drew out the drawer to its fullest extent, exposing the soundboard with its shimmering parallel strings. There she made an interesting discovery. Caught in the turns of the wire where the faulty string coiled round its wrest-pin was a small scrap of paper. And on the paper, when she carefully unwound the wire and released it, was nothing but a minute drawing in ink of a six-pointed star.

  Philippa stared at it for a long time before she realized what
it meant. She turned it upside down and reversed it: she even took it to one of the candelabra and heated it, with all too clear recollections of the house of Marino Donati. There was nothing there at all but the imprint of a star. A star with six points, not the eight of the star of St John. The star of David: the symbol of Jewry.

  At that point Philippa held the paper in the candle flame and watched it burn, and then, thoughtfully, returned to the spinet. A Jew, in this haven of Moslems? No, wait. No Jew, but there was a Jewess. A dark, middle-aged woman with more than a hint of a moustache, who came in weekly to instruct in cosmetics and undertake small commissions: the matching of silks for their embroidery; the passing, Philippa suspected, of love-letters.… It had seemed more than likely, to Philippa’s practical mind, that everything she was told the woman took straight to the Kislar Agha or Kiaya Khátún—it was, after all, a harmless enough outlet for their excess of romantic imaginings and could come to nothing: no man unauthorized had ever entered the harem and left it alive. Was she to gather from this that she could trust the Jewess?

  Or was it all a trick of Gabriel’s, to mortify her and taunt Mr Crawford still more?

  She could not recognize the writing. Supposing Lymond had sent it: how could he guess she would be the first to perform on the spinet? Or was it well known at the Embassy that there was a dearth in the Seraglio of performers, and had he guessed that, at any cost, she would apply for permission to play it?

  Chewing her nails thoughtfully, until she remembered, Philippa stared at the strings. Then she noticed something else. The faulty string had been slack. It had also been doctored. It had been filed, very lightly and carefully, at the point where it would require to wind round the wrest-pin in order to secure its true pitch. If she were to tune it properly now, it would break.

  And someone would have to come from the Embassy to repair it. There were no spare wires: she had asked.