Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Again, a trap for Mr Crawford? No, hardly. The Ambassador himself could scarcely come, wire in hand, to mend the Sultana’s spinet without causing unusual comment. Gaultier, then; or Marthe. Someone who could bring her a message or take one away; or at very least learn some news of her and the child. It must be so: it must be from Mr Crawford.

  Looking again at the card, Philippa grinned suddenly at its very austerity. Gabriel, surely, of the deep, insalubrious mind, would have signed it F. or F.C. Only Lymond, surely, would have appended that collection of impersonal surnames. And to him, somehow she was sure, belonged that small, picturesque script.

  Philippa pulled the card off and, regretfully, burned it. Then she tuned the spinet quickly and deftly, standing clear as the wire snapped.

  She was still there when Khourrém Sultán came back and comandeered her services in rewriting a letter in English. The coincidence seemed so great: that it should be to Lymond, and that it should refer to herself, that Philippa, rather pale, thought at first it was a dastardly trick. Then she realized that the Sultana had probably not even connected Durr-i Bakht, the Pearl of Fortune, with Philippa Somerville: might not even know in the first place what petition the French Ambassador had made which the Sultan had rejected. She was merely refusing the present Lymond had offered her since she could offer no service in return.

  So it seemed. Philippa had copied the thing out, correcting the phrases with her heart hammering. The eunuch might read English, although he could not write it: she dared not alter the sense. But she could and did mark it, when no one was looking, with a small star of David close to the seal.

  It was done and she was kneeling, awaiting dismissal, when Khourrém Sultán opened the casket and ran through her hands, for the last time, the tespi in diamonds it had contained. Staring at it, Philippa did not hear the words of dismissal. When they were repeated, she looked up at her mistress with her face aghast, as if she had witnessed an accident; and her eyes full of shocked tears. Then she bowed herself out of the room and, stumbling through the harem, curled on her own cushions and cried.

  As Lymond had once had cause to observe, Ishiq, the lad who guided the blind Meddáh, took good care of his master.

  Holding the story-teller’s purse, with its small store of aspers, he charmed the ferryman at Tapano to take them both over the Golden Horn for a canto of Yúnus the illiterate, the mirror of whose heart, as they said, was undulled by the turbidity of loopings and lines. Once over, he soon established a circuit, as he often had before, with other masters: the courtyard of Ayasofya and the market under the Hippodrome; the covered bazaar and the gardens of the Beyazit Mozque.

  They did well. Despite his grey hair, the Meddáh’s speaking voice was sweet and untroubled; and he told the stories people liked best to hear, such as the one of the Persian khoja who played a trick upon a Baghdad khoja and his son, as well as the heroic romances, and tales of his own, shaped to his company. They were given meat and yoghourt and sweet water to drink, and slept most nights on straw: on the third day they were bidden to perform at a wedding, and on the fourth they gave of their art at a circumcision ritual and banquet.

  These Ishiq enjoyed. But they were tiring and noisy for a man in ill health, and sometimes Ishiq’s arm ached from guiding his master and tending him when the day’s work was done. Best then he liked the days in the Beyazit garden, with the nightingale-dealer’s birds singing under the walls of the Old Seraglio, even in winter; when one of the children would steal out over the waste ground and stand at the edge of the brazier, listening, until the marvellous tale ended, and Ishiq went round, collecting aspers and bread in his greasy cap, and those who did not want to disperse would gather round the Meddáh, asking for more.

  He was kind to the children, perhaps knowing that the black folds round his eyes frightened them. For them he told short, strange stories in which a child always triumphed, even over the great Cham himself, and to the small one from the nightingale shop he was always gentle, talking slowly and clearly, until the boy would stand almost touching, at his knee. Then he would run away.

  That day the Meddáh was very tired. It was cold. Although the coarse brown robe he wore was stiff and thick, it was worn, and the bands of fur round the hem and yoke and wide sleeves were bald and glazing with age. When a slender man, well but quietly dressed, called Ishiq over and, after commending his master, offered them both warm food and a bed for the night Ishiq did not hesitate, but listened to the directions given him; and so soon as the crowd was dispersed, he tugged the Meddáh’s worn sleeve, and helping him to his feet, began to guide him as he had been instructed: up over the crown of the hill and down the twisting lanes on its slopes to the north-west, until they came to the long, double-arched line of the aqueduct of Valens, and the lane of rough-timbered houses beside it.

  It was raining. Unlike the principal streets, this was nothing more than rubble and mud, so narrow that the overhung storeys almost met crooked window to window, and the wet had hardly laid the stink of turned fat and cabbage heads rotting. He stopped where he had been told.

  It did not look like the house of a wealthy man. Ishiq hesitated; but his arm ached, and the Meddáh, dragging, felt the threshold with his stick and leaned on it, as on a crutch. Then the door opened and the man who had spoken to them in the garden appeared, smiling, and beckoned them in.

  It was strange inside. The house was crowded with people. Two playing chess on a painted cloth looked up and smiled, and a man, naked but for a wolfskin, turned round, a sheep’s leg-bone held against his ridged brow and snapped it, throwing the pieces away, before picking up an ox’s chest-bone and doing the same thing, absently, on his elbow. Another man, in a corner, was stringing a bow, humming. Ishiq, lagging, turned to see his guide ahead turning and beckoning, and taking a fresh grip of his master, he pulled him doggedly on.

  The next room was a bedchamber, the mattresses already lying unrolled, with the quiet man standing beside them. ‘He is unwell, your master?’ he said gently to Ishiq. ‘Perhaps he should sleep. Or are you hungry? When have you eaten?’

  ‘Not since morning,’ said Ishiq. ‘But the Meddáh has not eaten for more than a day. He feels no hunger.’

  ‘He should eat,’ said the stranger. ‘Wait. Come with me to the kitchen. We shall let him repose while I send for some food I know will please him. Then you will both sleep.’

  He was kind, and courteous. Ishiq went to the kitchen, where he was made much of by the old woman there; and when he went back to the bedchamber it seemed that the Meddáh had already eaten and was sleeping. Assured that his master was well, Ishiq curled up and slept.

  He did not know, some little time later, that the kind stranger knelt down beside him and after listening a moment said, ‘He is asleep. He will stay so for a while. Tell him to come in.’

  He did not see the curtain move and a second man enter, clean and sweet-smelling and clothed all in silk. Or had he been awake he would have seen him move over to the other occupied rug and kneel by the still, blindfolded face of the Meddáh, upturned and silent in sleep.

  For a moment the man in silk watched him. Then he stretched out a long, graceful hand, and turning back the worn fur of the collar, began to slip from the story-teller’s shoulders the folds of stiff, heavy robe, pulling it little by little from under him until he lay revealed in pale, soft lawn and close-fitting breeches, his arms lying still at his sides.

  The man in silk smiled, and from the other side of the bed, the quiet man who had acted as guide caught the smile and returned it. Then the comely man lifted his hands, and running them up the sleeping man’s face, with one movement smoothed away the grey wig, and pulled the black scarf from over his eyes. Underneath, the sleeper’s hair was not grey, but fair and shining and dark-edged with sweat. And the eyes below the bandage were not blind, but half-waking and blue.

  ‘Sweet singer,’ said the man in silk gently. O bird of the dawn. Learn love from the Moth, who yielded up its life in the flame without
protest. The footprints of the dog are like roses. What, then, are thine, coming to me?’

  The sick blue eyes closed. ‘Míkál,’ said the Meddáh, his voice almost soundless.

  ‘Yes, Efendi,’ said the musical voice. ‘And this is Murad, my friend. Thou hast no money?’

  And the Meddáh, who was young and not old, and dressed in European shirt and trunk hose and whose name was Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny, opened his eyes and spoke, in the spent voice which was not a pretence. ‘You gave me something to take, a while ago. What was it?’

  Míkál gazed at him; the beautiful boy whom he had last seen long ago at Thessalonika. ‘That which would ease thee. Hast thou no gold, that thou couldst not buy it thyself?’

  ‘I have money. What was it?’

  For a moment longer, Míkál looked at him. Then, taking a cup from the floor, he held it so that its contents could be seen. ‘This. I did not know how much to give thee. But thou hast need of more, much more than is wise. Thou art ill, Hâkim.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Thou dost not know why?’

  ‘No.… There have been other times like it; but never lasting so long. This time … it was bad,’ Lymond said.

  ‘Until now? The pains have gone?’ asked Míkál.

  ‘Almost.… What did you give me?’

  ‘Hâkim … it was opium,’ said Míkál gently. ‘Enough to send sweet sleep to the strongest of men for twenty-four hours. Yet after an hour thou art awake and in pain, for thy body knows this drug and will not be satisfied. In this cup is the rest of thy sleep; and thy death, if thou must continue its slave.’

  You have all the afflictions of the highly-strung, Sybilla had said to him once, long ago. All your life you will have to disguise them. And so, as with everything else, he had set his teeth through each attack and gone on. Until he realized, with his mind darkened with fantasies and with every nerve burned stark to the quick, that this time there was something finally, fatally wrong. ‘Where is Ishiq?’ Lymond said quietly. He had managed, at least, to pull himself up and sit like a sane man on his rug.

  ‘Asleep, over there. He knows merely that thou hast paid him, as I suppose, to take the place of his master. With thine eyes covered he could not guess thy need of the poppy. Nor did he break faith with thee. For five days I and my friends have sought thee in vain. Thy betrayer, beautiful as a bird, is the colour and form of thy voice.’

  ‘My debt to Ishiq I know. My debt to you I am beginning to learn. Míkál, I do not think it possible that I could have come to rely on opium or anything else without my own knowledge. How could it be?’

  ‘There is an old Turcoman saying, The soul enters by the throat. For many months, thy body has fed on it, Efendi, to make thee thus distempered without it.’

  ‘Without it?’

  Míkál was patient. ‘This illness, lord, is suffered by those who need opium and cannot obtain it. Always before there has been one at hand to give it to thee, in whatever secret manner it is administered. Now thou art away from thy enemies and they laugh, for without it, thou wilt be sick unto madness.’

  Every camp has its traitor, Kiaya Khátún had said. And Francis Crawford knew the traitor in his. He said, Thank you. It is clear now. I have only one thing to ask. Is there a remedy, or must I take opium until …’ He did not finish. He had seen this with other drugs: the mindless dervishes, led by their keepers. The mad, communing with God. Greater and greater doses, to produce less effect, until mind and flesh, besotted, fell slowly to pieces. To end, with nothing accomplished. Know that this world’s life is only sport and play and gaiety and boasting among yourselves, and a vying in the multiplication of wealth and children. Indeed, Gabriel was great.

  ‘There are two paths,’ said Míkál. Thou mayest shun the drug. This is the great illness thou hast tasted, exciting in mind and body a commotion from which the reason may steal away, as the diffusion of the odour of perfume.’

  ‘And the other?’ His voice this time was under control: the Meddáh’s voice, pleasant and light. He could not steady his hands, or marshal the tuned body slipped out of tone, but the soul was still there, thought Míkál. Resting his hands delicately on his crossed legs, he answered.

  ‘The other course is to withdraw thyself day by day from the drug, disregarding thy senses and tied to thy purpose, as to the piece of wood stuck in the wheat pile, round which the bulls and cows tread and turn. It will take many weeks during which I shall stand thee in stead of thyself, for thou wilt be languid and faint, as a man with a wound which will not be staunched.’

  ‘There is no time for that,’ Lymond said. ‘What I have to do must be started now; and I must be able to do it. When it is finished, I can take your first course, or your second.’

  In his purple silk, the fine hair laid on his shoulders, the bells bright on his ankles, Míkál sat still as an image. ‘When it is finished,’ he said, ‘there may be no choice. I have told thee, already thy body accepts and wears as a halter that which in another person would kill. With this drug, thou hast dispensed with the warning of pain. The soul pursues its desires and will not know when the body has failed it.’

  ‘I have no choice now,’ said Lymond; and shrugged; and lifting the cup Míkál had shown him, drank it down to the dregs.

  22

  Constantinople: The Golden Road

  The house Georges Gaultier had bought was indeed exactly halfway between the Bazaar and the Hippodrome of Constantinople. That he bought it after and not before the arrival of his niece Marthe and her learned friend Pierre Gilles from Aleppo was something nobody stressed.

  Jerott helped them take their belongings across the Golden Horn and into the City from their temporary abode with the French chargé d’affaires. No one else seemed particularly interested in aiding them: Jean Chesnau, who ran the Embassy now was not a d’Aramon. And Gaultier did nothing: hanging back green-faced and groaning, nursing the wad of bandaging round his left shoulder.

  Hearing the story of that wound, from many sources, Jerott wondered what on earth had possessed Francis to inflict it. He had hoped of course to make contact with Philippa through Gaultier, but the man was craven and this was his punishment. Its crudity Jerott found troubling. It was unlike Lymond: and a number of other things he heard about the late Ambassador’s behaviour were perplexing also. Jerott wished again, bitterly, that he had not left before they arrived, and that he could have shackled Marthe under the eye of the one person living with the capacity to understand and control her. For reasons of his own, if Marthe was right, Lymond had refrained so far from doing either. But the time was coming, Jerott thought, when he must.

  In the meantime he had disappeared, and Jerott could hardly force his company on a strange ménage. He would continue to stay at the Embassy, but at least he could make a reason for discovering where this odd household of three—and Herpestes—was proposing to stay. Then he had Francis to find.

  He knew they were watched. But he had seen no sign of Gabriel and heard nothing from him, although Chesnau had told him of the palace the new Vizier had occupied, to the south of St Sophia. As soon as Lymond had left the Embassy, the persecution they had been suffering had ceased.

  The damned place was full of hills. Riding up from the waterside behind the packmules, half the time they were climbing a running gulley of mud between the high pavements and twice, without the swarm of half-naked children who ran with them, they might have got stuck. Gilles, digging in his purse, announced, ‘Natura sunt Turcae avari et pecuniarum avide?’ and flung them a handful of coins. His need for a secretary, it seemed, had suddenly vanished. Staring bad-temperedly from under his spicular eyebrows, he had informed Jerott, in plain French, that he would send to him at the Embassy when and if he required him. The anger, Jerott thought, was not directed at himself, but at Marthe and her uncle. In which case, why go and stay with them?

  The New Jerusalem was not looking its best today. The gold-domed mosques and slim minarets among the wet gardens were sp
lendid enough, and so were the baths and the carved marble fountains and the stone palaces of the aghas, with their looted Byzantine porticos from the older, buried palaces of Justinian, for which he had stripped the temples and towns of an empire. But where now were the bronze roofs and gilded tiles of Constantinople; the silver columns; the statues of Ulysses and Helen; of Homer, in talk and dispute, so alive he was thought nearly to breathe? And where the figure of a bronze Justinian, clothed like Achilles, looking east with the world in one hand and his other outstretched, forbidding the barbarian to advance?

  A Barbariis et incendiis deletas esse, said Gilles. Destroyed by those barbarians; by earthquake and by fire. Less than fifty years ago thirteen thousand people had died here when the earth moved and broke the conduits from the Danube to the City, and the waters of the Golden Horn deluged Stamboul and Pera. Seven years ago the Bezestan, the round covered market to which they were now climbing, had been burnt to the ground, and all the houses beside it. Hence the rough shacks and booths which clung to the walls of the mosques, crowding the workshops already tucked into the arches of hammam and medrese. There were other streets, small and twisting and arcaded with pentises of wood, which were lined with booths: passing, one caught the smell of goat fat and uncured leather; of crushed sesame seeds or melting honey; or of new sawdust from a lathe shop making handles for hatches, with outside a stack of new wood, white and red-gold yew from Mengrelia, dripping and satiny in the wet.

  The houses too, Jerott thought, looked temporary: some of white clay bricks and some wooden-framed, the timber filled with sun-dried clay brick, their latticed wooden balconies projecting over the street. They came in all sizes and shapes, but most had no more than two storeys, with a slanting roof of thick-ridged clay tiles, or flatter roofs sometimes planted with orange bushes and shrubs. And everywhere, open spaces and ruins: the arches and columns and fountains and baths, the churches and gardens of the city built to match Rome.