Pawn in Frankincense (56 page)

They came to Constantinople in the morning, sailing in sunlight through the blue waters of the long harbour creek called the Golden Horn; the Bosphorus and the green shore of Asia receding behind them. Philippa took her two children by the hand and went up on deck.

Wreathed with cypress; bossed with the golden fruit of her domes and the sunlit stalks of her minarets, the Abode of Felicity girdled her seven low hills, green and white and gold in the sunlight as an enrichment of Safavid jewellery; and against the clear cobalt sky, the gilt crescents flashed on their spires like a garden of sequins. Before her, the seawall, toothed and towered, curved out of sight, the deeper blue of the Golden Horn washing the wharves and sheds at its base; and on her right the same water touched the opposite shore, where the tile-roofed white houses of Pera rose to the vine-covered top of the hill, and there were church spires among the pale minarets. Somewhere there, the lilies of France flew over the French Ambassador’s house, where a Special Envoy bringing gifts for the Sultan was no doubt still awaited, in vain.… The Special Envoy she had last seen in Algiers, about to encompass the death of Graham Reid Malett; and perhaps himself Gabriel’s victim by now. If Archie found him; if he learned of Kuzúm’s existence, he would come: he might even manage to purchase the child. But one could not, of course, expect to buy one of the Sultan’s own personal odalisques.…

In spite of herself, Philippa grinned. Then the interpreter who had been among her small escorting party of Janissaries touched her arm, and pointed to a tongue of land on her left where, bowered in plane and willow and cypress trees, glimmered a crowded chiaroscuro of marble-flanked buildings and coloured arcades; of towers and cupolas in gilt, in copper, in bronze; of the glitter of faience and coloured mosaics; the reiterated sheet gold of the crescent of Islam and the reiterated red coiling silk of the Islamic flag. ‘Topkapi,’ said the dragoman, and smiled. The Seraglio of the Sultan Suleiman. There, too, his harem.’

Then, her hand on the shoulder of either child, for a moment Philippa stopped smiling.

She had to wait some time before the Janissaries reporting her presence transmitted the order for herself and the children to land. Then, unmistakably, she saw activity round the long, low boathouses on the Seraglio shore, and soon after that, to Kuzúm’s shrieks of joy, Philippa and the children and their minimal possessions were descending into a bright golden caique with the throat and head of a dragon, rowed by silent men, all alike in Phoenician-red nightshirts. ‘My goodness:
look
at the cushions,’ observed Philippa, settling in. ‘You wouldn’t need to keep cats.’

The sea gate to the Topkapi Seraglio was of iron, intricately wrought, and Philippa, bearing the dead weight of her protégé (‘Kuzúm have a see!’) in her arms, counted ten men guarding it; speechless also; their headdress pillows of white feathers. (‘What kind is that hat?’) She stepped through on to a path made of smooth, coloured marbles which, as far as the eye could reach, had been flanked on each of its sides by a continuous barrier of cloth, higher
than Philippa’s head. Because of it, the garden which lay on each side of her was invisible save for the tops of its trees and its tallest flowering shrubs. Walking along the strange, roofless tunnel, Philippa could hear the spray of multiple fountains and the low murmur of voices: smell the odour of wet grass and flowers and newly turned earth. Behind her, the tall gates were shut.

In her arms Kuzúm was quiet, and she felt Tulip falter beside her. She smiled and spoke to them both while at the back of her mind, sinkingly, Philippa recognized the true object of these barrier screens. They were not to prevent her from viewing the garden. They were to preserve the Sultan’s new personal property from all other impious eyes.

The walk led to another wall and another gate, this time roofed and encased in elaborate porphyry. Here, when the gate swung slowly open, her interpreter spoke briefly and turned away, leaving Philippa face to face with a powerful negro in a white sugar-loaf hat and a gown of pale blue brocatelle which fell to the ground. This one bowed gravely, hand on breast, and snapped his fingers. Slaves (she supposed?), rushing from nowhere, assumed her baggage and vanished with it, while the eunuch (she supposed?), turning, led the way down a long flight of steps.

Kuzúm, who had the same dead weight as a young hippopotamus, clung to her shoulder-blades with a good handful of robe and half her hair excruciatingly in his grasp: turning her head, to the limited degree she was able, Philippa saw, towering above on her left, the colonnades and the glassy walls of the palace she had just seen from her ship with their ranks of domed roofs in leaf-gold and lead. Then, turning, she followed the eunuch.

Later, she knew that she had been taken through the maze of low courts—playgrounds, gardens and pools, exercise-ground, animal compound—which lay under the west walls of the Topkapi buildings and led in their turn to the honeycomb of ancient vaults and arcades which was all that was left of the sacred palace of the Byzantine emperors, on which they were built. At the time, she had an impression only of a procession of scents: animal, herbal, citrous. There was the smell of damp wood and old and new stone and mortar; and a stream of scent she did not recognize until, passing from wall-shade and tree-shade and the empty spaces tenanted by silent, white-hatted negroes or hurrying, black-skinned women slaves, they burst into a sunlit pleasure-garden filled with perhaps three dozen young women, playing at ball; and the scent was as strong as if the clouds had opened and sprayed them with civet and rosewater.

There was nothing like it in Hexham. Staring belligerently, Philippa saw that, with variations, they all wore calf-length trousers and pale chemises in sarsenet, or something quite as transparent, covered just by a short damask waistcoat and, sometimes, an open,
floating kaftán. Pinned on their heads were small, cylindrical caps, vizored with veils: they were plastered with jewellery, and their hair, Philippa noted, plaited or loose, twined with pearls or ribbons or laces, was by some curious chance either bright red or soot black without exception. Then they came running.

Until that moment, when they came jostling around her, plucking with little, stained hands at her soiled robe; dragging back her pinscratching veil, and she heard their high, foreign voices and their laughter, it had not occurred to Philippa Somerville that these girls and no others were henceforth to be her daily companions. With them she must learn to live in a wholly enclosed society, closer than sisters. And in their company the whole of her life from this day onwards must be spent. The whole of her life, from the age of sixteen.

In that moment, as she came to a halt, they took Kuzúm from her. Her hand to her bared head, she suddenly realized it, and whirling round, saw him silent in the arms of a chattering girl, mute, his blue eyes filled with unshed tears and his chin wobbling. ‘Well!’ said Philippa, in English. ‘I don’t suppose there’s another boy east of the Isle of Wight with so many good-looking aunties. They’ve got a ball. Do you see the ball? Do you think they would let you play with it? Tulip, ask them.’

Tulip, his black face stiff under his little yellow cap, said something in Arabic, not looking at anybody; and the girl holding Kuzúm laughed and put him down, while another girl on tall, velvet pattens bent down, not without difficulty, and smiling, rolled the silver ball towards him.

Ignoring it, Kuzúm walked forward steadily over the grass on his short legs and bending over the girl’s foot, his brief robe sticking out over his rump, said in a little voice, ‘Is that a meant shoe?’

The girl laughed, and poked him gently in the stomach with one toe, while Philippa, coming forward, picked him up cheerfully and said, ‘They’re stilts, my lambkin, for keeping her nice slippers dry. We’ll come back, but the gentleman is waiting to take us into the house now. Say goodbye.…’

They kissed him, laughing, and someone put the silver ball in his arms as Philippa, smiling, turned and followed the eunuch again. Her veils, a little torn, lay heaped over her shoulders and her forehead felt damp. With the little gesture he always made when tired or uneasy, the little boy had released one hand from the ball and was lying limp on her shoulder, the back of one soft wrist at his mouth. Philippa, trying to keep her own hands steady, gripped him firmly and followed the eunuch up a long flight of white marble steps and into Topkapi itself.

A labyrinth of courtyards and tall, narrow corridors. Bright tiles in blue and orange and green; soft scarlet carpets; heavy hangings of Diarbekir silk and Saracenic patterns on linen; ceilings caissoned and painted; walls wainscotted in tiles and mosaic and lapidary work with
jasper and marble; cedarwood lattices and inlays of glass and enamel. Little windows in stained Cairo glass, throwing sapphire, ruby, onyx lights on the walls. The murmur of light, muted voices; of fountains; the rustle of taffetas; the low, golden notes of a lute. The scent of dried roseleaves and incense and boxwood and flowers; of amber paste burning, and jasmine powder; of lemon oil and something frying in honey. A guardroom, with black faces and white turbans and a dimness cloisonné with steel. An open space, floored with mosaic, where on her left she caught sight of a big doorway, rimmed with sunlight, through which she heard birdsong and sensed the freshness of flowers. Then the eunuch opened a door.

She was in a long, open-air passage flanked on either side by the doors and windows and arcaded pillars of what seemed to be the black eunuch’s living-quarters, which stretched high on either side, plunging the narrow courtyard deeply in shadow. Ahead, there was a fireplace built into the wall, turreted like a turbèh and tiled, but it was unlit. Above her, Philippa could see the windowed tower she had already observed, higher than the rest, with its four-sided spire. Then she was in darkness, following her conductor through a doorway on her right, up a staircase, and breathlessly, into a small room with a raised dais, where a man sat crosslegged, awaiting her.

Beneath the white, sugarloaf hat was a negro’s face; but his robes, spread over the cushions, were of green velvet on a crimson silk ground, and the trimmings were sable. Then she knew this was the Kislar Agha; the Chief of the Black Eunuchs and supreme head of the harem. Philippa put down Kuzúm. Then, holding the child tightly by one hand, she followed, shakily enough, Kate’s universal dictum. When in doubt, curtsy.

The Kislar Agha neither rose nor acknowledged her. Instead, his unwinking black gaze on her face, he spoke, in Turkish, to the interpreter who appeared silently at her side, and the interpreter, bowing, addressed her in English.

The questions were brief. Philippa, her knees shaking with nerves and resentment under her creased robes, answered them curtly. ‘My lord asks, what age art thou, and hast thou heretofore known men? My lord asks, art thou whole, or unfit, or blemished? My lord asks what religion heretofore thou hast practised? My lord asks, what tongue dost thou speak?’

There was only one thing Philippa wanted to ask. She snapped the answer to the last question and said, ‘May the child …?’ but the Kislar Agha was already speaking again in the brisk, sexless voice.

‘Now thou art in the palace of thy lord. To the Mistress of the Harem thou wilt make accounting for thy body; and to the Imams for thy soul. Thou wilt embrace henceforth the teachings of Islam: the tongue of Osman will replace thine own, and with infidel speech and ways thou wilt lay aside the infidel name thou bearest.
Durr-i
Bakht:
Pearl of Fortune is thy name. To me and to the Mistress of the Harem and to thy teachers thou owest service, obedience, humility. To our Sovereign Lord the Sultan Suleiman and Khourrém Sultán his wife, thou art as a grain of rice beneath the foot. Conduct thyself well, and thine will be the blessings of Paradise. Ill, and thou wilt weep tears of blood.’

Philippa said, her voice cracking, ‘May the child …?’

‘The Ethiopian may serve you.’

‘But the other——’

‘The white child is already provided for.’ It was the Kislar Agha’s final pronouncement. He had lost interest in her even before the translation was complete, although she heard a command in Turkish which she did not quite catch. As the eunuch who had brought her came forward to take her, she said quickly, ‘I want to take both the children with me.’ Kuzúm was clutching her skirt.

The eunuch hesitated and it was the interpreter who spoke. ‘The child goes to the Head Nurse, Lady; and thyself to the Mistress of the Harem. They dwell in the same courtyard.’ And backing, with Kuzúm by the hand and a smiling Tulip behind her, Philippa got out.

Afterwards, Philippa remembered only a brief journey to the oblong courtyard, at the bottom of a shallow flight of white marble steps, where the Mistress’s suite lay. Too brief: for soon, now, Kuzúm would be parted from her and soon she must face the woman now ruling her life: the Mistress who was also controller and head housekeeper of the harem as well as the Kislar Agha’s own deputy.

However frightening and distasteful the last interview had been, at least she had suffered no physical indignity. But to the Mistress of the Harem fell the responsibility of ensuring the health and seemliness of all the girls who might be invited to receive the embraces of the King of the World. Something fairly abominable, Philippa recognized, was about to happen; and she chatted, cheerfully and continuously, to Kuzucuyum, and helped him down his stilted descent of the first few steps, and when he came to a halt, dragging behind her, lifted him in her arms and reminded herself, with his lashes brushing her cheek, that he was his mother’s unwanted firstborn; born into danger and loneliness; and that he had no one else.

The suites of the Head Nurse, the Head Laundress and the Mistress all led off from the same pleasant courtyard, with the serving slaves’ kitchens and dormitories tiered around the same space. The Head Nurse was black, and came out of her quarters to meet them; chuckling at Kuzúm and speaking to him in Turkish. Philippa said impulsively, and uselessly, in English, ‘Oh, please.… He doesn’t understand. He speaks English. Could I stay with him just a little, until he gets used——’