Pawn in Frankincense (63 page)

Philippa stared at Kiaya Khátún. Then she drew a long breath. ‘I know the tune. The words are not very … I know only one version.’

‘There
is
only one version,’ said Kiaya Khátún. ‘If you know it, sing it. I shall translate.’

And she did, very adequately, Philippa thought, singing her way doggedly through fifteen verses and all the double-entendres.

Roxelana enjoyed it. She began to smile half-way through, and by the end had broken into open-mouthed laughter. Then, summoning Philippa, she pulled off and gave to her a jade pin from her robe. Philippa, who yearned above rubies for one swig of the sherbet, thanked her stiffly in Turkish, and drew a smile and a word of dismissal. The page came for the lute. Philippa bowed, backed and fled.

Later, Kiaya Khátún summoned her. ‘You did well. Your work was acceptable: Khourrém Sultán finds you witty. Next time you will be alone. You will perform for her only classical works: you will
find she has a taste for them, and is perfectly knowledgeable, so she will demand a high standard of playing. But you will notice also that she enjoys laughter. Your invention must suggest what you do.’

‘Clown?’ said Philippa, without further surprise. Here, lunacy flowed with the fountains.

‘With grace. Always with grace,’ said Kiaya Khátún warningly. ‘Khourrém Sultán makes a powerful friend.’

It had been a long day. ‘… If I can go?’ said Philippa pleadingly. ‘I promised him bubbles if he behaved in his bath.’

‘I suggest,’ said Kiaya Khátún gravely, ‘you restrict your use of the personal pronoun. Misunderstandings occur. And in Topkapi, the sentences are irreversible.’

‘Let us be common,’ had said His Excellency the French Ambassador, sitting at his desk in the Embassy in the days prior to his ceremonial presentation to the most high Emperor and mighty king, Sultan Suleiman Khan. ‘Our clothes wrought upon goldfully, glorious as Assurbanipal with a dab of clove-gillieflower scent on the pulses. Let us be common and arch.’

On an annual income from the French Crown, supplemented from one’s own estates, one might live generously but not extravagantly as Ambassador at the Sublime Porte. M. d’Aramon et Luetz, whose own presentation years ago had cost him over three thousand pounds in entertainment and gifts, was silent as Onophrion’s preparations drew to a close; and he began to have an inkling of the amount of gold the Controller had been permitted to spend.

By custom, all those in the Ambassador’s party must be uniformly clothed. That meant livery for, say, twenty servants and two pages; robes, or short gowns over matching doublets and breeches for the dozen chief French citizens of the city who would accompany them, and court dress of the most elaborate kind for the Ambassador and M. d’Aramon, presenting him, together with lesser suits for the half-dozen Embassy officials with them. Cloaks, tunics, caps, shoes and jewels for forty or more.

Most of the garments, M. d’Aramon knew, had come on the
Dauphiné
. The last week had been spent fitting and enriching them. Submitting, courteously, to Master Zitwitz’s deft, measuring hands, the retiring Ambassador approved without comment the ice-blue velvet proposed for his doublet, and the massive blue and silver over-robe the Controller lifted like a child from its coffer and offered for his admiration. ‘Cloth of silver, Monseigneur, with an ogival frame of blue velvet and raised knots and leaves in pulled loopings of silver silk. There is a matching cap in blue velvet with aigrette feathers. All the household are in blue and white satin, and I have put the merchants, with His Excellency’s agreement, in black silk lined with scarlet. The shirts for yourself and His Excellency are of lace, edged with silk Florentine thread. I thought a pleated collar instead of a stiffened wing, as I gather the Turkish robes you will be required to wear may be collared and heavy. I should advise you to unclasp the over-robe and give it to me before assuming the Turkish attire.’

‘And what,’ said M. d’Aramon, with gentle amusement, ‘will His Excellency be wearing?’

‘The same as M. le Baron, if you will forgive the liberty,’ said His Excellency’s soft voice from the doorway. ‘Onophrion couldn’t face the
problems of precedence and neither could I, so we had two lots made. I’m sorry about the useless blue velvet. It is supposed to indicate that you are prepared to wear it once and then throw it away. You could wear it afterwards, perhaps, at a large, vulgar banquet.’

‘I gather,’ said M. d’Aramon dryly, ‘it is necessary to impress.’

‘It is necessary,’ said Lymond briefly, ‘to beg.… I came to tell you, there was a blind and somewhat sickly descendant of Sohâib Rûmi downstairs requiring help to write a letter in French. Your secretary swore that both he and the boy with him were probably rogues, and they certainly couldn’t pay an asper, but I thought it might be politic to help them. If any harm comes of it, it’s not your secretary’s fault.’

‘My secretary is wrong. We are here to assist,’ said M. d’Aramon firmly. He had watched his successor in the past week, with the merchants who came to kiss his hands; the suppliants; the formal, inquisitive calls from his fellow Ambassadors of Venice, Ragusa, Epidaurus, Chios, Transylvania, Florence and Hungary. The French Embassy had a name for generosity. Its doors were open to travellers: its purse—even his, d’Aramon’s, private purse—had been ready to help the stranded visitor with clothes, money and horses: at his own expense also he had bought and freed not a few Christian slaves, whatever their country, from the hands of the Turks.

It was a tradition he would like to see followed. He hoped, not for the first time, for many reasons, that Crawford’s petition would be swiftly successful.

At dawn on Tuesday, a cool autumn day, the Mehterkhané, the Sultan’s musicians crossed the Golden Horn to the French Ambassador’s house, and with the low roll of drum and kettledrum below every unlatticed window, commanded the household to its duty. Onophrion, his supreme moment arrived, calmly holding in his plump hands the whole tangled skein of the ceremony, roused and fed, dressed and gathered his charges, hardly aware of the thundering of trumpet and cymbal outside. The Baron de Luetz, for all the times he had experienced it before, still could not avoid the extra beat of the heart; and this time, the knowledge that it was the last time: that for him, without greater title or honour, it was quite finished.

Georges Gaultier, uncomfortable in fur-collared black, was uneasy about many things.… Marthe’s long absence, and the performance of that damned spinet. It had gone yesterday to the Seraglio, uncrated, touched up; erected, on the special litter made for it; and he had handed it into the gateway himself.

They said it was safe. Lymond had said that if anyone nicked off an emerald pimple it would be a God’s blessing. He had seen the gloves Lymond would be carrying today, and the matched sapphires set in his chain, with a diamond pendant the size of a crown.… He wondered again, furiously, where that fool of a girl had got to.

Plan of Constantinople drawn by Giovanni Vavassore about 1520.

Lymond was already awake, standing silently at the window in his trailing bed-gown, when the drumming began. In the Golden Horn, a porcelain mist rose like steam from a dish of bright liquid brass, blanching tone from the undulating skyline of the city over the water, a mosaic of olive and grey, the sun touching gold from its domes.

On the headland climbed the dark cypresses and the crowded roofs of the Seraglio; the Divan Tower, the minarets, the domes, the dentelé toothpicks of the flues. On the right, the twin minarets and the piled yellow whaleback of what had been St Sophia. The snail-domes of mosque upon mosque: Beyazit, Mohammed the Conqueror, Selim. The half-finished building of Sultan Suleiman himself.… For the True Believer, the ways to Paradise were legion. One built khans, mosques, hospitals, fountains. One repaired bridges, and gave bread to dogs, and bought and loosed singing birds from their cages. About caged children, the Prophet was less explicit.

The light was brightening. Francis Crawford turned away, abruptly, and began, with care, to dress.

Two hours after that, the Sultan’s golden caique came for them, with its eighty red-capped oarsmen; its prow a gilded feather curled round its cable; its curtained pavilion inlaid with mother-of-pearl, gold and tortoiseshell and with rubies and turquoises edging the exquisite marquetry of its roof. They embarked smoothly, in a living pattern, this time, of silver and satin and jewels, leaving the music and crowds on the waterfront and gliding out on the bright water, where the fishermen poled over, calling, and the carved stems of the merchantmen were crowded with faces.

The mist had gone. Half-way across, the
Dauphiné
, rowed out to midstream from the berth which was costing the French Crown twenty pounds daily, let off two volleys of small shot, and then two rounds of each of her guns, followed by an outburst of fanfares from her trumpets, her banners lifting in the first morning wind. On one of the hills someone was putting up kites: the small chequered shapes twitched and spiralled and floated, drawing the gaze to the sky. On the waterline below the seawall of the Seraglio one could also distinguish for the first time a jostling line of pale colour and dark beside the Seraglio quay. ‘The welcoming party, with horses,’ said d’Aramon. ‘The two Pashas will have silver staffs: the Kapijilar-Kiayasi, the Grand Chamberlain, and the Chiaus Pasha, the Chief of the Ushers. The rest are a guard of honour: thirty or forty. Two gifts here.’

‘And one for the helmsman,’ said Lymond. French-fashion, his white cap-feather dropped rakishly over one cheekbone. His face, underlit by the sun and the silver, was perfectly cool, and his short bright hair crisp, like a cat’s, in the damp. There had been an argument with the man Zitwitz about perfume, in which Lymond, acidly, had capitulated. (‘Many here smell strong, but none so rank as he.’)
It occurred to d’Aramon that it was a long time since he had witnessed a display of cold-blooded thoroughness to equal it.

They landed. The light Arab horses, trellised with pearl and trailing velvet and tassels, were not easy to collect and control, when oneself in the fanciest costume. But two by two, formalities finished, the procession was formed, and passing the sea gate of Topkapi, the Sultan’s kiosk of marble and crystal, the Fish Gate, the Imperial mill, bakery and hospital set against the outside Seraglio wails, and the broken marble of the older civilization which had shared Seraglio Point, turned its back on the sea; and following the high turreted wall of the palace, climbed the low hill to the summit, where shone the vast golden dome of St Sophia, and the tall, white marble tunnel of the Bab-i-Humayun; the Sublime Porte itself; the Gate to the Royal Seraglio.

Like a carnival party; like a company of playactors, whose painted cloths and sparkling glass jewels were real, thought d’Aramon grimly, the two Ambassadors with their gentlemen and their escort rode between the two lines of white-feathered door guard and into the square quarter-mile of exercise-ground, green with trees and lined with strange irregular buildings, which was the first of the four courts of the Palace. ‘I wish you good fortune,’ said the Baron d’Aramon to his companion. ‘May you return through this gate bearing your son and the child of your friends. You have travelled far for this moment.’

A brief, one-sided smile pulled at the new Ambassador’s mouth. ‘Thank you,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘
Aussi Dieu aide
—perhaps—
aux fols et aux enfants.…
What are the buildings?’

D’Aramon told him. On the right, the long hospital, with its red tiled roofs, and the low freestone buildings of the main well and waterworks. On the left, the dome of the old Byzantine church of St Irene, once filled with the weapons and armour of Greeks and Crusaders. An arcade and horse-trough, a wood- and tool-yard; and the cupolas of the Mint and of the Pavilion of Goldsmiths and Gemsetters, where worked the shield-makers and cutlers and sword-smiths, the gold-chasers and engravers, the workers in amber and copper and silver, the glovers and upholsterers, the carvers and makers of musical instruments, whose art, like the dials of the spider, clothed and veiled the precincts of mastery.

This was the courtyard of the Janissaries, the children of Hadji Bektash, the first standing army in Europe since the days of the Romans. They stood on either side, rank upon rank of blue robes, unmoving; silent; the bird-of-paradise feathers of ceremony in the copper sockets of each high white felt bonnet, curling and falling knee-length behind. Riding from end to end of that long double column, with the doors of the Sublime Porte closing behind, the Baron de Luetz felt again the fear which never failed to grip him,
after all these years, on finding himself inside these high walls: the awe forced on every stranger by the weight of the silence.

It was a court used by many outside the Seraglio: a court of business and training, a place full of affairs, the laden mules passing to and fro between the guard and the buildings, and turbaned men of many races bearing burdens or bent on swift errands. Nevertheless, there was complete silence. A cough could be heard, distantly, in the still, heavy air. The tread of their horses’ feet, as they moved over the flat unpaved dirt and then crossed some broad, cobbled path, formed alternating patterns of tone, and the chime of bridle and bit and the soft tread of their escort echoed back from the buildings. In silence, they crossed the wide court, and in silence halted before the Inner Wail and the true entrance to the Seraglio: the battlemented gatehouse and twin octagonal towers of the Ortokapi; the Gate of Salutation.