Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  He had got to the door and the Janissaries in a sweep of blue had stood out of his way when the daylight was blocked by a massive figure: the person of the head of the black eunuchs, the Kislar Agha himself. Gabriel hesitated, and the eunuch, looking at no one else, addressed him direct.

  ‘Lord, I bear a summons from Roxelana Sultán, for thyself and thy prisoners, together with the women and children and all concerned in this accusation today to present themselves forthwith in the selamlìk, in the Hünkâr Sofasi. There is an escort outside.’

  There was, of eunuchs and Chiausi. Gabriel hesitated. The Mufti, his green robes rustling, rose gently and stood at his side. Tray do not hesitate on our account,’ he said thinly, ‘to do thy mistress’s bidding. Thy ruling is paramount and the court is concluded.’

  Then, his face set, Gabriel turned. He looked at them all: Jerott, Archie, Míkál and finally Lymond himself, still standing very still by the throne. ‘Do you think it is finished?’ said Gabriel, in English. Then he added, ‘Bring them!’ curtly to the Chiausi, and, flanked by the eunuchs, walked down the steps of the Divan and over the court to where the leaves of the Gate of Felicity had swung quietly open. A few moments later, the four men followed him through.

  Half-way through the inner courtyard Lymond, who had spoken to none of them, suddenly met Míkál’s eyes and said, ‘But why bring back the children?’

  ‘She ordered it,’ said Míkál. His eyes glittered with hidden excitement. He said, ‘Tell me of the Aga Morat?’

  ‘Oh, my God.… Another time,’ said Lymond. He was still, Jerott saw, completely steady … refreshed somehow, perhaps, as they moved from the Divan. Jerott said perversely, ‘Yes. Tell us about the Aga Morat. He formed an attachment for you, and you used him.’ It was strange to be able to speak of it, almost in jest. He stared at Míkál, wondering how far anyone was trusting him. ‘What did you use him for?’ said Jerott.

  ‘All the usual things,’ said Lymond evenly; and, walking ahead, stepped through the wide door of the selamlìk. Archie, catching Jerott’s abashed eye, took his arm grimly and walked him in after. Míkál followed.

  Of her two identities, it was Roxelana the Ukrainian and not Khourrém the Laughing One who elected to hold her own tribunal that morning with every harness of power and magnificence owed to her as wife of Suleiman the Magnificent. For it, she chose the largest room in the selamlik: the room used by her husband in winter for his entertainments and his receptions, in which girls from the harem played and danced, and musicians from the outside world performed blindfolded on strange instruments, and poets, blindfolded, recited.

  Today it was filled with silence: silence from the mutes and dwarves, the pages and the black and white eunuchs ringing the walls: silence from the immense dome with its ring of coloured glass windows and the speckled tesserae of glass and of gold within, blazoned with the words of the Prophet. The words of the Qur’ân, in gold and enamel, also fretted the cornice; but from there to the ground the walls were tiled in pure white, flowered with blossoms in blue, in cerulean and light and dark ultramarine, the inner petals embossed with a bright coral red, shining like satin. Rugs hung over the tiles, and delicate hangings of silver and taffeta, masked by the long hanging chains bearing lamps of wrought silver and crystal and gold, each fashioned and domed like a mosque, its hanging pendant tasselled with seed pearls and diamonds and each cut from an emerald six inches square.

  There was little furniture: open wall cupboards of carved wood and ivory; a marble fountain softly playing against one wall; a few low tables in mother of pearl and cedarwood and tortoiseshell, and some round stools of brass, scattered by the great braziers on the deep carpeted floor. The windows looked on the Bosphorus, and against them a carpeted dais filled the whole width of the room and was divided from it by a low rail picked out in gold, broken by shallow steps in the centre. At right angles to this, on a smaller dais and under the carved canopy and turban of state, sat Roxelana Sultán.

  The throne was a network of gold, linked with small gold devices and set thickly with turquoises, interspersed with gold lozenges covered with rubies and pearls. Seated high on her cushions, her feet on a footstool, Roxelana looked stately and small; her face lightly veiled under her headdress; her carnation skirts spread wide around her. She wore peacocks’ feathers, bound in gold thread and thrust in a socket of ivory, from which diamonds trembled over her brow. Jerott, all the levity of reaction struck heavily from him, stared at her numbly, only half aware of the Kislar Agha in his yellow robes deferential at one side, and on the other a woman, also veiled, in attendance.

  On the carpet below the dais there were two velvet cushions, widely spaced; and on these, by her orders it seemed, Gabriel and Lymond both knelt in silence. In silence also, Jerott with Archie and Míkál were pushed into line a little behind the two cushions, the mutes at the back. Then, with a leap of his pulses, Jerott saw Marthe come in unveiled, her bright hair bound in a fillet, her brows raised; her walk graceful and careless, self-possessed and touched with contempt. He saw, as she walked, the blue gaze, without cordiality, find Lymond and stare at him, and Lymond’s eyes in turn lift to meet hers, of identical colour. To Jerott’s breathless fancy, a challenge, or something near it, for a moment seemed to pass from one to the other. Then Marthe was past, without glancing at Jerott, and had joined the black eunuch standing beside the Kislar Agha, to one side of the throne.

  She was followed by another girl, whom Jerott did not at first notice; and then, startled, identified. It was Philippa Somerville, her glossy brown hair swept back from her high schoolgirl’s brow to lie on her shoulders; her body slender under thick tawny silk, its new softness overlaid by a rope of gold and white jade, clasped with an infant tortoiseshell, high on her shoulder. It was indeed Philippa, although she walked as Jerott had seen women walk from the bathhouse with their servants, slim and straight as an elif. But the brown eyes under the thin dark brows were the same, anxiously searching; lighting with a small, relieved smile first on Lymond, then on Archie and himself; with puzzlement and a little hauteur on Míkál. Then they swept on, still searching, Jerott did not know for what, until he saw, on the big dais, a negress sitting, a child by her side.

  It was Khaireddin, a fixed smile on his white, old man’s face: the face Jerott had seen twice before; in the shed of the silk merchant of Mehedia and not long ago, playing with shells on a carpet while Francis Crawford lay, soft-voiced and motionless, trying to undo the damage which Gabriel had done.

  Philippa’s eyes fell on the child as a man groping in water might lift, flinching, what he had found. She stood by the Kislar Agha, her gaze on the boy, and as he watched, Jerott saw her lips open and then shut tight, her eyes very bright. She was still standing like that when the second child came in and was led to sit by the negress’s other side. A round-faced boy, sturdily built, with a cap of bright yellow hair, whom he had not seen before. Unlike the other child he looked round at once, complete consternation printed on his plump face, saw Philippa, and screamed ‘Fippy!’ at the top of his voice.

  The negress gave him a small slap and he looked at her, his face crumpled, and then wriggled close and sat still. Philippa smiled at him, and then at the other child, and Jerott, looking at Lymond’s impassive face, thought, My God: it’s a bloody crèche … the ultimate humiliation. The last hand-to-hand light with this man who can win empires with abominations and rot them with evil, all stickied over by babies in napkins. The last tomb, whoever should occupy it, furnished brightly with ridicule.

  Then the doors closed. Roxelana Sultán made a slight movement, and, at a sign from the Kislar Agha, both Gabriel and Lymond rose to their feet. For a moment the Sultana studied them without speaking. Then she addressed them in Turkish, lapidary and precise.

  ‘You are assembled here because it seemed to us that the good name of the State and the security of the Ottoman peoples are touched by the matters opened in the Divan Court this morning, and that the rest of the hearing should there
fore be held and concluded in private.’

  She paused. No one spoke. No one asked how she knew what had passed in her absence in the Divan Court: and although Philippa looked at Lymond he did not answer her glance. Roxelana continued, her voice firm behind the light veil. ‘One of you has been accused of spreading lies which stain the honour of Suleiman Khan through me, his wife. For that, the punishment is torture and death. The other has replied with a counter-accusation, to the same effect. Both of you have cited as witness a Geomaler who appears to have borne allegiance first to one side and then to the other. You are here to prove to me each your case, in any way that you can, so that I may judge between you. First, Jubrael Pasha.’ And Gabriel stood forward and set forth his charges.

  Listening to the golden, persuasive voice, Jerott was carried a long way back: to a loch-side in Scotland, to a cathedral in Edinburgh, where the same beautiful cadences had spread falsehood and havoc through a small nation, until before the altar at St Giles it had come to a finish. This time Graham Malett fought under a handicap: he could not call on Míkál and dared not cite, as he had expected, Míkál’s allies and friends with whom to bolster his story.

  But he had other suborned witnesses: men who had heard Francis Crawford as Meddáh maligning Khourrém and Rustem Pasha, and stirring men’s hearts to rebellion; those to whom the Jewess Hepsibah had confessed the Meddáh’s command that all to the discredit of Khourrém should be sought out and, if need be, manufactured.

  It was Philippa, then, no longer stricken by ceremony, and used to the ways of the court, who moved quickly round to the throne and bending, in a flutter of robes to kiss Roxelana’s foot, said swiftly, ‘Princess, may I speak? This is an untruth. The Jewess Hepsibah had been warned of a plot against you by Jubrael Pasha your Vizier, and how he had invented falsehoods in his secret writings to you, the better to colour it. Punish me if you must, for I confess I have opened your secret places, and read what is within. But this was done for you, not against you.’

  The veil over Roxelana’s face told nothing, but the voice was even and cold. ‘Explain then,’ said the Sultana, ‘the fluency thy tongue now commands in my language, so recently gained?’

  Philippa had not risen. She said, her brow on the floor, ‘I believed that in this way I might obtain freer access to Your Grace’s apartments. Forgive me.’

  ‘It is the word of a lying English infidel against Hepsibah’s dying confession,’ said Gabriel. ‘If what the girl claims was in fact true, why should she run away? Why not stay and claim the rewards of her faithful care for the Sultana’s honour?’

  ‘May I answer that?’ said Lymond’s voice pleasantly. Philippa rose and stepped back, her aching head bent; while Lymond went on. ‘She was taken away, with the child, to remove her from Jubrael’s vengeance. Only through his machinations were the girl and the child placed in the harem in the first instance; and, but for his advice, the mighty lord Suleiman would surely have freed them as he was asked. We hoped to expose the Vizier to Your Highness’s judgement. We were afraid in so doing that these innocent lives would be destroyed. For they are innocent, Princess. The girl Philippa merely sought, as I have said, to detect what would harm you. The girl Marthe merely came, against her will, to deliver the message which would enable the others to leave the harem.’

  The veil stayed turned on him for a long moment; then a ringed hand signed Philippa back to her place. ‘Proceed,’ said the Sultana to Gabriel; and listened in silence to the rest, which was uninterrupted.

  It was a good case, thought Jerott. Not watertight, but circumstantially good. And Gabriel had the wealth and the standing and all the confidence of the Sultan behind him. He was glad it was possible to feel so detached. And Gabriel, of course, had made much of the weakest part of Philippa’s statement: if they were purporting to search for evidence of Gabriel’s sedition against Roxelana, why look for it in Roxelana’s own rooms? The explanation did not really satisfy Jerott either; but Lymond had looked neither relieved nor concerned. Jerott, shifting his stance, began to worry, suddenly, about the length of time the whole thing was taking, with Lymond’s own submission not even begun. One of the children said something in a swooping treble, and was hushed. Then Roxelana signed to Gabriel to stand down and, after a brief conversation with the Kislar Agha, called upon Lymond.

  He stood facing the veil: looking at it, thought Jerott, as if he could pierce it; or at least in some fashion send his own mind close to the brain behind the plumes and the diamonds. He said, ‘Princess, Míkál’s testimony has been heard, and although the evidence of him and his helpers is true, doubt has been thrown on his integrity. You know perhaps of the history of your Vizier Jubrael Pasha, and of the changing allegiances of his recent years, which have closed Europe to him. You know perhaps of his ambition, which is not of the kind which easily acknowledges a master, whether this be the Grand Vizier or the Sultan himself. It seemed possible, to us who knew him well, that he would not be content as the wise servant and counsellor he seemed, and that his intentions were of a kind which would be tragic for Turkey.…

  ‘It has not been concealed from you that my pursuit of the Vizier has been also for personal reasons. I cannot prove to you that my son is one of the two boys whose lives he has warped and commanded, any more than he can prove that his son is the other: the trail is now too faint and too many who knew the true facts are dead. All I can say is that from the evidence both he and I know it to be so. One of my concerns therefore has been to remove both children and the girl Philippa, Durr-i Bakht, who became involved with them, out of his grasp. My other purpose was to destroy him; and if I could not do this myself, to bring him to receive his deserts from his masters.…

  ‘Much has been spoken of evidence, but little has appeared. I think the time has come for witnesses, not hearsay; and words fashioned of ink and not air. I call on Kiaya Khátún.’ And smiling, the woman beside the Sultana flung back her veil.

  Gabriel cursed. Jerott could hear the words in English stream from his lips: words whose meaning he hardly knew, from lips which had gone purple. Lymond, who had inexplicably gone very white, in the sudden way that happened to him, gave the woman a faint smile in answer, the colour coming back into his face. Jerott’s tongue came out, insensibly, between his teeth.

  Kiaya Khátún. A bright, hot morning in Djerba, and a clear olive face with a Greek nose and black hair and brows. And a low voice saying teasingly, I am Güzel, Dragut Rais’s principal mistress. But I should like you, if you will, to address me as Kiaya Khátún.

  Jerott put his tongue in. Philippa, he noticed, savingly, was also staring as if she had been struck on the head. Míkál was smiling. And Marthe … Jerott looked again at Marthe’s face. Marthe’s face was filled with a strange, contemptuous anger.

  Then Kiaya Khátún spoke, in her pleasant contralto; coming forward as Philippa had done, with the same low, pleasing obeisance. ‘Princess, hear me; for I also have been your servant in these matters. By my agency the Geomaler Míkál set out to win the confidence of Jubrael Pasha, and undertook for him certain services, all of which he reported to me, or to Crawford Efendi, whom Jubrael has accused. All Míkál has told you is true. All Mr Crawford has said of Jubrael Pasha’s designs on the children is true, and Míkál can vouch for it. I in turn, myself, can swear to you that the parts played by Philippa, Durr-i Bakht, and the girl Marthe were of no evil design, but merely to obtain evidence, again, about Jubrael’s efforts to dupe you and those all around you.… Mr Crawford spoke of witnesses. These I have, and shall bring now before you. Among them, you will hear from the Agha of Janissaries himself how the Vizier has attempted to suborn him. He spoke of letters. These I have also taken from Jubrael Pasha’s own house. In them you will see in Jubrael’s own writing how the rumours were spread and how the so-called evidence against you and Rustem Pasha was to be used, to denigrate both you and your heirs, and leave Jubrael Pasha himself in command, in the twilight of our gracious lord’s life.…’

  Ga
briel’s mellow voice said, darkened with pain, ‘Now Allah protect us! That my enemies should share the same roof as my Sultana: that the serpent should eject venom from its mouth into her dish. This woman is a creature of Crawford’s, conspiring against this great empire at Djerba many months ago, when, escaping with her aid, he sought to help the infidel attacking Zuara, even to killing myself. Ask thyself, who in this Seraglio would obtain the most power on the downfall of Roxelana Sultán? This woman: this she-camel common to men, who will turn her back on Dragut and set her eyes even on Suleiman Khan, so great is her yearning for power. What punishment do these things demand?’

  Kiaya Khátún looked at him, her perfect dark eyes astonished. ‘I have had it,’ she said. ‘When you said on your knees, Be my bed-fellow. You did not question my honesty, that I remember, on your couch.’

  A single trickle of sweat was running down the splendid framework of Gabriel’s face. For a moment he said nothing at all. Then he said, quietly, direct to the Sultana, ‘If these spies tell the truth, then they have what they should not have, and know what they should not know.’

  And like an answering chord, Lymond’s voice spoke equally quietly. ‘You forget. There is nothing to know.’

  Then the veil lifted, but the small pointed hands kept their grip of the letters. The precise, ringing voice said, ‘Jubrael Pasha … I have to tell you, after reading these letters and hearing the evidence that I think your guilt is undoubted …’

  Jerott closed his eyes. He opened them and saw how white Lymond was, and that his hands were laced closely together, to still them. Archie’s head turned the same way, and back. The voice went on, ‘… and would beyond doubt merit the severest death in our power to bestow. On the other hand, it is also clear that others, accredited and without authority from western and infidel nations, have chosen to meddle in our affairs, have penetrated the Seraglio and attempted to enforce their own justice, even though the Sultan himself should give them welcome and be answered with falsehoods.… This also cannot pass unnoticed.’