Pawn in Frankincense (79 page)

Unable to sleep or eat for frightened excitement, Philippa had counted the hours until today. It had been hardest of all, she found, to act normally with Kuzúm. On her actions today depended his whole life and his future: a future of which he had no conception. For surely, no matter what Gabriel had hinted, this and this only was Lymond’s son? She shut her mind to the other, unthinkable possibility and took in hand, firmly, a wet, loose-lipped yearning to smother the child with treacly emotion. She played with Kuzúm that afternoon; scolded him briskly when he blew his nose with his mouth full of yoghourt, and took him downstairs with the other girls of the harem to see the bears fed.

The elephants were kept at Constantine’s Palace, and the wolves and the lions: the Sultana’s rooms were above the pound at Topkapi, and the Sultana’s sleep must not be disturbed. So there the keeper put the smaller, picturesque animals like lynxes and leopards and ermines in cages; and tethered a brown bear to a stake, with her two cubs humping about her; all upturned toes and high furry bottoms.

Kuzúm loved the bears. He watched them with a fierce adoration: ‘I see two ones. Kuzúm show Fippy where is the bears.… Kuzúm have a see. Now Fippy have a see. Now Fippy lift up me to see all the pussy cats.… Oh, it’s fallened.’

It was a leopard, and it had indeed fallen. Philippa took Kuzúm back to the bears, and said to the keeper, ‘One of your leopards isn’t well.’

The face under the turban was familiar, but he gave her no glance of recognition: only swore under his breath in what she understood to be Urdu, and hurried off to the cage, the chattering girls in their veils following, bright as finches. ‘Is it sick?’ someone asked.

The little mahout answered in Turkish. ‘It is sick, Khátún. It can be healed in the Palace menagerie. I shall take it there later.’ He answered all of their questions, but his gaze, as always, strayed to Kuzúm. With his blue eyes and thick silky cap of bright hair, the little boy in his Turkish jacket and slippers was as sweet as a peach; his swooping voice striving to fasten together difficult words and impossible phrases, his open laughter and quick, warm affection creating a climate of trade winds and sunshine in which they all basked.

His own view of the weather was rather more literal. After he had had his fill of the bears and the ermines, and watched the keeper
push meat in to the lynxes, accepting a piece of animal biscuit from the mahout in the bygoing, Kuzúm announced suddenly, ‘It’s very too cold,’ and yawned, his pink skin stretched like a carp’s round the O of his mouth.

‘You’re tired. We’ll go in a moment,’ Philippa said; and, taking off her own heavy lined cloak, wrapped it round the small boy. The young bears, attracted by the trailing thing on the ground, scampered after him and pawed it, dragging it half off his shoulders, and he rocked and sat down with a bump, his legs stuck out before him. The mahout gave him another piece of biscuit and he held it out for the bears to nibble, absently, before cramming the rest unhygienically into his mouth. Philippa didn’t restrain him.

When they came to go, climbing chattering up the stairs and through the series of courts that led them finally back to the harem, Kuzúm had succumbed, and the mahout turned the folds of the mohair more closely around him. Philippa climbed the stairs carefully, carrying her small burden all swathed in her cloak: it was not yet time to return Kuzúm to the head nurse so she turned into her own rooms instead and, laying her burden down, got out one of her books and sat looking at it until the bustle had all died down and the girls had gone off, as she knew they would, for their music.

From this class she was excused. Philippa waited until there was silence, and then, producing a hairpin, crept out into the corridor and proceeded to put into use all poor Hepsibah’s training.

Khourrém’s rooms were quite empty: today was a religious festival and, in the absence of Suleiman, his wife was at St Sophia, she remembered. Philippa met no one, although she had her excuse ready. She had been summoned by the Sultana to check the offending spinet once more. She saw it as she sped through the great room, stirring like a beast in its sleep, all gold and Badakhshan rubies: it burst into action behind her back as she left, her nerves tight as the wires on the soundboard. She was, she accordingly told herself briskly, precisely on time. She let herself into the small vacant gallery overhanging the compound, and walked to the edge.

As Archie had said, there was a rope hanging, neatly looped round a column. She was supple and strong, for a girl, and not all that many months distant from boisterous games with the stable-boys over Kate’s farm-building roofs. She let herself down and ran like a cockroach for the back of the largest cage, while the mahout pulled down the rope.

Kuzúm was there already, where he had been asleep since she had left the garden carrying her empty cloak wrapped round a bolster. Then Archie joined them, his hand on her hair. ‘Good lass. Are ye frightened?’

‘I think so.’ Philippa, incurably honest.

‘It’s natural. Well, ye’ve no call to fear. That beast won’t wake up
for eight hours, if that, and your wee boy maybe longer. I’ve given him a terrible dose, but it was the only way to be sure.’

‘I know. Archie, we’d better get in.’

‘Aye.’ He opened the back of the cage. She had thought about it, but she hadn’t expected the leopard to be so large, or so heavy, or so warm. He lay on two solid feet of clean straw, with more banked at the back, and it was there that Archie made a small hollow and laid in the sleeping Kuzúm, a fine net bound lightly over his face. Pnilippa fished in her sleeve and pulled out another. Straw made you sneeze, Archie said. Try to minimize all the risks.

It was more difficult to hide a fully dressed girl, however willing and thin. She was half under the leopard to end with, its sleeping weight on her legs as if a great wolfhound had chosen to slumber beside her. Except that if this one woke, it could tear her throat out with a single turn of its head. ‘You’ve got pluck,’ Archie said. He seemed reluctant to close the cage finally: standing, door in hand, he looked again at the leopard, and the little he could see of the girl, her brown hair mixed with the straw and already submerging. ‘You’ll need to trust me; but that you can do. I could put my mother in there, if she wasna stone deid already, and she’d come to no harm.’

‘I’ve taken the leet oath, Archie,’ said Philippa, her voice shaking slightly.
Ye shall be buxom and obedient to all justices in all things that they shall lawfully command you
. Archie, I’ll always be buxom to you.’

‘And cheeky,’ said Archie grinning. ‘Get your head down. There’s a cart and a driver due here in a minute.… I think I’ll fling a wee something over the cage. We don’t want poor Victoria upset by the light and the noises.’

Half an hour later, with Archie walking solicitously at its side and one of the stable-boys cracking the whip over the mule-train, the cage with Victoria rumbled out of the Gate of the Dead, which had other and less picturesque uses, and, having passed the scrutiny of the heavy Janissary guard, rolled out and into the street, where it made its laborious way up and down the painful contours of the Abode of Felicity to Constantine’s Palace.

The Head Keeper also, on Archie’s solicitous insistence, was cleansing his soul in Aya Sofia. The leopard, still sleeping, was detached and placed in a side yard, where there awaited already fully loaded a fine cartload of dung.

‘Oh no!’ said Philippa, warned by the smell. She put out her head and, seeing a sudden, breathtaking vision of marble pillars and archways, of gardens and houses and even, distantly, streets and chimneys and trees, gave a sudden hysterical gasp.

‘Aye: you’re out,’ said Archie. ‘Now ye have my apologies for the next bit, but it’ll be worth it, as ye might say, in the end. I’ve left a clean bit at the back end of the cart. If ye can slip out of the cage and up this side—I’ll give ye a lift—I’ll hand the bairn in beside you.’

‘What is it?’ said Philippa, tears pouring out of her eyes, as she lay at length, the sleeping child in her arms, under Archie’s clean bit of straw.

‘It’s elephant muck,’ said Archie. ‘You get a fair price for that. Anywhere in the world. You’d be surprised at the demand.’

‘Oh, Archie: I’m sure I should,’ said Philippa. ‘I’m not surprised you sell it, either. Archie, what a blessing Kuzúm’s asleep.…’

She lay, her cheek in the straw and her arms round the small sturdy body of Kuzúm, and heard the hollow roll of the wheels as they passed through the Edirne Gate and out of Stamboul into the green fields of Thrace.

Because of the forthcoming Festival the crowd round the blind story-teller was small that afternoon in the Hippodrome and he was able to speak to everyone in the way they liked best; inviting their comment on his stories and talking gravely or lightly, as the mood took his audience. A smaller boy than usual brought round the bowl: Ishiq, he explained, had been called to a sick brother. If the Meddáh himself missed a still smaller child, who used to stand outside the Beyazit Mosque, his hand on his knee, no one could have guessed.

He stayed a long time, and his friends were bidding him rise to warm himself at their brazier and eat at their tables when Ishiq skipped lightly in and, taking the bowl, murmured in the blind Meddáh’s ear. The story-teller smiled, and turning to the murmur of voices said, ‘It is well. His brother is better: thou seest him shaking his shoulder-joints? Praise be to Allah, the Knower of Subtleties. May Allah the Bestower of Sustenance walk with thee.’ Then, Ishiq holding his arm, Lymond rose, and walked for the last time in the robes of the story-teller to the house of Míkál.

He changed as he listened to Ishiq’s long story, peeling off the coarse robes of the Meddáh, the wig and bandage and beard already dropped on the floor. Míkál, sitting crosslegged and silent, said nothing, but watched the way he moved; the unhurried fingers; the intent, constrained profile as Ishiq told how the child Khaireddin, safe in his cage, had been brought out of the city and taken well to the west before being placed, as arranged, in the big barn of a farmer who was anxious for money and indifferent about his method of getting it. There one of the Geomalers was awaiting him: a familiar face whom he would trust. Then, joined by Philippa, Kuzúm and Archie, they would continue their journey.

‘And what of Philippa Khátún?’ Lymond said. He had dressed European-style in dark tunic and hose, with fine Turkish buskins laced on for quietness and speed. Over a chest lay the loose, hooded surcoat he would wear in the street, and the staff, to account for his stooping.

‘She is safe,’ Ishiq said. ‘And the child.’ Again, he recounted the story, and, listening, Lymond ran his hands over his disordered hair and, bending, began transferring possessions quickly and deftly from
one robe to the other. One supposed, thought Míkál, that he had spent at least some hours of tension, telling his tales and awaiting this news. But it might have been of no moment at all.

Míkál said softly, as the account came to an end, ‘So you have achieved all you promised. The girl Philippa and both children are free.’

‘They should be,’ said Lymond. His pallor had become greater in these last weeks and was now marked: in it, his eyes now appeared of a deeper and more brilliant blue, their lids architectural in a spare structure of bone.

Old in the ways of the drug, Míkál had watched this man fighting it. Since he could order the measure for himself Lymond was no longer vulnerable to the violent changes in mood and in temper which had made him a tormenting companion ever since Malta. Under a high, steady intake of opium he was keyed up to a level of intense nervous activity: as capable of quick action and imaginative thinking as he had ever been: perhaps more so; and able, if he were called on, to sustain pain or intolerable effort without evident difficulty. It was the great virtue of the drug and, of course, the great danger. Míkál had seen a dromedary racing to Cairo on opium: it had travelled three days and three nights without halting or slackening pace; and on arrival had died where it stopped.

In small things, the drug made one careless. It was Míkál who cared for him physically: who brought food and saw that it was eaten, and who restored the clothes of which Lymond, so uncharacteristically, took little care. He saw too that he had regular sleep while he could, although its quality was now restless and full of turbulent dreams from which he woke silent and running with sweat. There had been times when to Míkál, too, it had seemed that this day would never come: the day set for release, when Archie and Jerott between them would guide the children to safety, and Lymond would be free to pursue his own fate, and Gabriel’s. Míkál wondered what would become of the girl whom the man Blyth had compelled to go to the Seraglio without Lymond’s knowledge. Lymond had sworn at him, but mildly, when he had come to confess it. They hadn’t known then that the girl would be detained, nor had they made plans to free her. The Embassy, perhaps, would take care of that.…

Lymond was ready. By now, in the unlit farmhouse barn in the dark fields to the west of the city, Philippa and the two children should have met, and Archie would be setting out with them on the long, fast journey home, where bribery had already marked the stages and ensured them protection and shelter and food so far as was humanly possible in the time he had had to spare. Then they would be within reach of his own friends and thence from station to station until they reached France and Sevigny.

The planning was over: the meticulous arrangements with money
running shorter and shorter; the talk and the listening; the making of a net out of cobwebs and a rope out of sand. His surcoat on, his hood still on his shoulders, Lymond turned to Míkál. ‘Ishiq has what I can give him, and so have the others. What do you lack, that I may give it to you?’

Míkál’s handsome, fringed eyes filled with a half-angry, half-affectionate scorn. ‘Thou knowest too well,’ he said sweetly. ‘What I desire, thou dost not possess for thyself. How canst thou render it then to another?’

For a moment Lymond did not speak. Then he said, ‘You have a tongue, have you not, which breaks backs? I have madness in many forms, but that which springs from the passions of the heart is not in my nature. That is all. We are all fashioned differently.’