Pawn in Frankincense (55 page)

The body which cannoned into the swordsman at that second was a big one, and solid, or it could not have thrown the assassin off his balance as it did, and collapsed the group of men intent on their victim. It hit the delly as if a block of the marble cistern had fallen on him, and as he staggered and half-fell over Lymond’s body and the kneeling forms of his fellows, the newcomer produced, without fuss, a short, broad-bladed sword, and sank it into the assassin’s heart up to the hilt.

It was Onophrion Zitwitz. And as Lymond, wordless for once, lay and stared up at him, the Janissaries on his heels poured over the courtyard, sweeping men like rubbish before them. The men holding Lymond rose and scattered until, scimitars falling, shoulder to shoulder, the white caps engulfed them as well, and nothing living was left in the courtyard of those who had taken part in that excellent ambush but the dying. No one escaped.

Lymond saw it as a shifting embroidery round the dark bulk of Onophrion Zitwitz, bending over him, anxiety on his sweating pink face. ‘Your Excellency …’ said Onophrion; and Lymond, who had borne the title for less than half a day, began to laugh and stopped because it hurt so much, and said, ‘My dear Onophrion … 
Tes mains
sont des nuages
. Another moment and the pie would have burned.’

‘You are wounded. Your Excellency …’ The high-stranded voice faded. ‘I saw, but I could not help. I had to leave you to summon the Janissaries.’

One man could do nothing. You did right. You expected this, then?’ The laughter of relief and reaction had gone.
Salablanca … Salablanca … Salablanca
 … But give this man his due first.

‘I was uneasy, Your Excellency. It fell to me to keep watch outside. Salablanca watched in your chamber. We did not bring it to Your Excellency’s notice.’

But it had come to His Excellency’s notice. And His Excellency, ruffled more than he would admit by a trying episode with an importunate boy, had ignored Salablanca’s presence and given him neither instructions nor thanks. If he had, that first would-be assailant would never have left his bedroom alive. ‘Salablanca?’ said Lymond.

‘Is dead, Your Excellency. They have carried him inside.… You cannot rise. I will find you a Utter.’

‘No. There is no need,’ Lymond said.

It was possible to sit, and to stand, and to walk. It was possible to see Salablanca where he lay, his eyes open and sightless in his blood-sodden clothes, and to close his lids and take from his neck the prayer-beads he wore, to send to his household in Algiers where there were, comfortingly, so many brothers. It was possible next day, with no humiliating swathe of bandage revealed beneath one’s high shirt and tight cuffs and impeccable doublet, to stand in the graveyard among the stony forest of turbans and hear the Bektashi Baba’s calm voice addressing his Maker.

O God, be merciful to the living and to the dead, to the present and to the absent, to the small and to the great who are among us.… Distinguish him who is now dead by the possession of repose and tranquillity, by favour of Thy mercy and divine forgiveness. O God! increase his goodness, if he be amongst the number of the good; and pardon his sins, if he be ranked among the transgressors. Grant him peace and salvation, O God. Convert his tomb into a delicious abode equal to that of paradise and not into a cavern, like that of hell. Be merciful to him, Thou most merciful of all Beings.

‘Lord, great and true, Thou buriest day in night and night in day. Thou leadest forth the living from the dead and the dead from the living. All things come from Thee and return to Thee again. Forgive the sins of mankind for Thy glory’s sake. And lead us to the Light, for Thou art the Light of Light.’

And it was possible to sail then, in all one’s wealth and magnificence for Constantinople, with the words of Míkál at the graveside, buried deep as the tomb in one’s memory:

‘Duty; friendship; compassion. Which moved him to die for you?’

Dear Kate. As you will see from the address, I am staying as a concubine in the harem of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, son of Sultan Setim Khan, son of Sultan Bayezid Khan, King of Kings, Sovereign of Sovereigns; Commander of All that can be Commanded, Sultan of Babylon, Lord of the White Sea and the Black Sea, most high Emperor of Byzantium and Trebizond, most mighty King of Persia and Arabia, Syria and Egypt, Supreme Lord of Europe and Asia, Prince of Mecca and Aleppo, Possessor of Jerusalem and Lord of the Universal Sea
.

You will be glad to know lam keeping well, thanks to a lot of exercise and a good loosening sherbet the first day. The food would not be very acceptable in Hexham, but I am appending a very good recipe for Turkish Delight, for which you will need the pulp of white grapes, semolina flour, honey, rose-water and apricot kernels. Perhaps Charles can get them in Newcastle
.

There are two hundred and ninety-nine other girls here: but no one else from Northumberland. Tell Betty I have the dearest little black page. She will laugh when she hears that he answers to Tulip.…

‘
Fippy!
’

Philippa, who could recognize that cry over two courtyards, also recognized that some people answered to funnier names than Tulip, and grinned, lifting her pen from her diary. She lowered it again to write, in her black script, a large adolescent
Ha-ha!
under the foregoing, and shutting the book, went off at speed indoors to locate the calling Kuzúm.

He was standing at the top of the stairs to her sleeping-quarters, the cone of yellow hair fanned out with exertion; a wary expression in the round cornflower eyes. ‘Hullo?’ he said.

That ingratiating tone was all too hideously familiar. ‘Hallo,’ said Philippa to the light of her life. ‘What have you done?’

The child she had brought all the way from Thessalonika: the child whom Evangelista Donati had called Kuzucuyum bent on her a gaze of reproach. ‘I’m a very wet boy,’ said Kuzúm.

He waited blandly while, detonating mildly, she thudded up the stairs to his side, and continued to gaze up at her blandly as she skidded to a halt and, staring down, said, ‘What’s that on your head?’

‘That’s my little hat,’ said Kuzúm.

‘That’s a wooden spoon,’ said Philippa. She disentangled it from the thick, silky hair. ‘It’s sticky.…
Why are you a wet boy?
’

‘I sat in my dinner,’ said Kuzúm. ‘Just like Tulip. What did you said?’

‘I said Tulip fell in by mistake, and I wish you had a better grasp of the English language.… It’s not funny.’

‘Laugh again,’ said Kuzúm, his eyes beaming.

One of the négresses, smiling, had come to clear up the mess on the tiling. ‘I’m not laughing. You won’t be, either, in a minute,’ said Philippa with relish. ‘You’ll have to have a clean shirt and a bath.’

The head nurse bathed him, and the noise reached even the room where she was unrolling his mattress. But when he came round the door, he was fresh and pink and filled with a universal and boundless goodwill. ‘Here’s me again!’ he said. ‘Hullo, Fippy darling!’

‘Hullo!’ said Philippa the stalwart, who in between matters which were not funny at all had set herself, with grim humour, to frame a coy letter to Kate.

‘Hullo, darling!’ she added; and dried her wet eyes, as he hugged her, on the bright yellow head.

Ragna, the mother of Worm, she thought later, gazing out of her window. You made a heroic entrance, in a long plait and leggings and a cloud of Teutonic brimstone, and found yourself instead, child on knee, examining the spots on its bottom and trying to correct, irritably, an inadequate siphoning system and a low-pressure nose-blow.

Because of Kuzucuyum, she could recall almost nothing of that hurried voyage from Thessalonika to record in her diary. To Evangelista Donati she owed the arrangement which had brought them to Stamboul safely by sea. No matter what happened to Gabriel now, they were away from the Children of Devshirmé and that shadowy, unknown figure by whose hand Madame Donati had already died.

Here, they were safe. Here in Topkapi, the Sultan Suleiman’s Seraglio, luxury being the steward and the treasure inexhaustible.

Mr Crawford had said that. That besides being a professional mercenary he was highly educated had become plain by degrees to Philippa. He knew for example that Constantinople, which the Turks called Stamboul, had become after the fall of Rome the capital of the whole Roman Empire and the richest city on earth:
It hath none equal with it in the world except Bagdat, that mighty Citie of the Ismaélites
.

Fragments of what he had told her, briefly, on the rare occasions when he would talk of their destination, came now to her mind. ‘
 … Pillars and walls he hath overlaid with beaten gold, whereon he hath engraven all the wars made by him and his ancestors … and he hath prepared a throne for himself of gold and precious stones, and hath adorned it with a golden crown hanging on high by golden chains, beset with precious stones and pearls the price whereof no man is able to value.… Furthermore
,’ Mr Crawford had quoted, staring out over the water,
’the Grecians themselves are exceedingly rich in gold and precious stones, their garments being made of crimson intermingled
with gold and embroidered and are all carried upon horses much like unto the Children of Kings.…
Justinian rode into his new Church of St Sophia, the most beautiful and most costly in the world, and said,
Solomon, I have surpassed thee
. Christians held it and the city of Byzas before it for nearly twelve hundred years, Philippa. Then the Turks took it all from them.’

‘When?’ she had said. (Kate would have known.)

‘A hundred years ago,’ he had answered. ‘Exactly. They took twelve kingdoms and two hundred cities from the Christian world, and made a stable of St Sophia under ceilings covered with gold. The ceilings are still there, though they have picked out the eyes of the saints and broken the statues. St Sophia is a mosque, and Topkapi, the official home of the Sultan and the centre of the Ottoman Empire, was built on the ruins of the sacred palace of the Byzantine emperors, on a tongue of land surrounded by sea. The city was renamed Stamboul, or Dâr-es-Sâada, the Abode of Felicity. The seat of government of the richest country in Europe; the most cosmopolitan race since the Romans. It is referred to all over the world as the Sublime Porte. And over the Imperial Gate is written
May God make the Glory of its Master Eternal.
’

Its Master the Sultan. Her master. And the master of this, Lymond’s son.

Embarking at Thessalonika, Kuzúm had been interested in the ship; and had gone with her confidingly, and had allowed himself to be rolled in a real rug in a real hammock for his afternoon sleep. Only when he awoke and neither his nurse nor Madame Donati was there, and he was still on the ship, and his meal was late, and different, and in different bowls, did his chin tremble; and when Philippa told him, slowly and clearly, that Madame Donati had had to go away but that he was going with her for a little holiday to a big house to find some new toys he bent his head so low that only by kneeling could Philippa see the tears run slowly off his round cheeks and catch the one whispered word: ‘
Home.
’ It was when she had to deny this that the real crying started, developing into a fragmented screaming that could be heard all over the ship, with the same word gasped over and over. She left him after a while, when he would not let her touch him and her every word seemed to make matters worse, and sat listening in the next chamber, the tears making unnoticed furrows in her own dirty face; powerless to help.

What was home? Djerba? Algiers? He had been too small to recall that: probably too small to recollect his first nurse or even his mother. Home was probably that formal, unfriendly house at Zakynthos, where he must have stayed with the Donatis for the better part of a year before being taken away on his travels with the Children of Tribute.

But Madame Donati had gone with him. And however unaccustomed
to small children she was; however unbending and acid, she had loved him. With astonishment still, Philippa remembered the yearning in the sick woman’s eyes as the child came to her; and the look on her face when she embraced him for what she knew would be the last time.

From her, Kuzucuyum had had love, and a grounding in English which someone else had also obviously begun, long ago. He had become used to travelling because, whatever the change in surroundings, his routine, Philippa guessed, had been kept uniform, a feat which must have required something approaching fanaticism. And that was the root of the difficulty now. Kuzucuyum had taken to her. He was quick and happy by nature, she thought; and affectionate. But all the rest was his world. It had fallen apart, and she could not put it together again.

He cried, at intervals, all through the night, and even when quiet was shaken, in sleep, with single, spasmodic sobs. He ate nothing. The sight of her, Philippa found, was enough to start an eruption for the whole of next morning: in the afternoon she sent in her new little black slave Tulip with some yoghourt and sat with her head aching, listening.

Silence. Tulip was eight. One of the Children of Tribute, he had been picked by Madame Donati to serve her because, although he had joined them from Egypt, by some freak of chance he spoke not only Arabic but English. Sitting beside him the previous night, when he also had shed a few tears, very easily assuaged, Philippa guessed that his mother had served in a renegade household, perhaps of a merchant or seaman turned Moslem corsair. At times his accent had distressing overtones of Cockney. At the moment, to Philippa, listening next door, it had the timbre of angelic choirs. He was speaking; there was silence; there was more speaking: and then Kuzucuyum repeated a word, and both little boys laughed.

Philippa cried, briefly, and then went in to take away the empty yoghourt bowl and kiss Tulip. Kuzúm, his face still a featureless mosaic in pinks and his ears full of tears, regarded her without expression and then said in an uneven whisper, Tm a very wet boy.’

The first and biggest obstacle was over. She felt her way; building up trust; piecing together for him a new day and a new night; a new vocabulary of word and intonation and catch-phrase to take the place of the one he had lost. The Aegean went by. She did not notice Gallipoli or the Hellespont: the Sea of Marmara might have been the duckpond at Wall.