Pawn in Frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett
The inquiry, it seemed, was on his own account. Philippa stared down at him, astonished. He said, ‘In thy country girls marry, do they not, at fourteen; at fifteen? Thou hast nothing? No lover, no sweetheart at home?’
Philippa choked, and covered it up as well as she could, dismissing the image of some stiff-necked young Tynesider, cap in hand, knocking at Flaw Valleys’ front door. ‘I’m Philippa’s intended, ma’am. May I come in?’ And her mother’s expression.
She said, ‘I can’t think why, Míkál; but when I was at home we didn’t think of it; and of course I’ve been travelling since.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Míkál, ‘one must travel to find what is love.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Philippa stoutly, ‘one must travel to find what is kindness. I know what is——I know what love is.’
‘Thou knowest the love of old women,’ said Míkál. He sounded cross. The youngsters who had been running at her side had moved away, tired of the foreign speech. He said, ‘I read thee Anvari, Jelál and thou dost not tremble. The fountains make thee thy bride’s veil; the lyre spins thee thy ribbons; the mallow under thy foot is the hand of thy bridegroom.’ In the torchlight, the deep, dark eyes opened on hers. ‘Khátún, what is his face?’
‘A lemon?’ said Philippa.
Much later that night, when they had spread their mattresses at a farm which had made them all welcome, and all was silent at last, Philippa wrote up her diary. We are close now, I think. The Children passed through quite recently. They took the bride’s little brother Philocles, but no one spoke of it except to extol the brave new life he would have. I have had two poems addressed to my liver. I have solved a mystery. Do you remember the boy in the buttery who grew a hairline moustache when he was courting, and lost a sock in the milk? That, my dear, is a four-eyebrowed beauty.
You didn’t ever happen to mention, Kate dear, whether you wished to start curing a son-in-law ready to lay in, so I take it you don’t. I very much don’t, rather. I want to grow old and sour all by myself, at Flaw Valleys, modelled on my old and sour mother. Anyway, who could be sure of a husband in this country? Sneaking off, for all one knew, to some four-eyebrowed lout in the buttery.…
They caught up with the Children of Devshirmé on the outskirts of Thessalonika. Since the night of the wedding Míkál had been less adhesive, though he spent a little time eliciting precisely her interest and indeed her irritating single-mindedness on the subject of this unknown child Khaireddin.
He received no satisfaction, since Philippa had no satisfaction to give. Kate approved of the child’s father, and so did she. Kate all her life had championed the underdog, and so therefore did she. And what more oppressed puppy in all the world was she likely to find than this one?
‘It is a crusade,’ said Míkál at last. O Soul Sensible, when wilt thou waken?’
Philippa knew that one. There are three degrees of souls: Soul Vegetable, Soul Animal and Soul Sensible. Common Sense is a pond into which the five streams of the outer senses flow. Soul Sensible has two faculties: Virtue Motive and Virtue Apprehensive. Virtue Apprehensive. ‘He’ll have grown. They change a lot. You maybe won’t know him,’ said Philippa.
‘He may be dead,’ said Míkál, hopefully. ‘If he is dead, where shall we go?’
They were testing the tribute-money by the Arch of Galerius. As each person brought forward his tax, the gümüsh-arayân, or silver-searchers, weighed the coins, and then poured them into the little oven within the big iron charcoal-burner. The metal was red-hot, but in spite of the fumes and the blistering air the people of Thessalonika pressed round, watching uneasily. No one would expect all the coins to be true. But over a certain proportion of base metal and double the fee must be paid in these little horned aspers, with their message drawn in the silver: KING OF KINGS, RULING OVER KINGS.
Philippa reined in her mule. She had passed, at Míkál’s insistence, the tented city ringed with Janissaries which lay on the brown grass outside the walls. She must speak, said Mikal, to the Chief Commissar of Devshirmé, or to an Odabassy of Janissaries, at least. In this, the richest city of Thessaly, taking tribute would be a long affair, conducted in the city itself by the Commissars and their clerks, with the Janissaries to keep discipline and the strong arm of the Sanchiach who, with his Spahis, governed Thessalonika for the Beglierbey, the Lieutenant-General who ruled over all Greece on behalf of the Sultan. So to the town, said Míkál, she must go in her turn to pay tribute and buy back the child.
She had seen his point; but was prepared to argue. How could he expect her to buy something she had not even seen? What if she could not find him; if he were not there; if they took her money and then denied his existence?
Last night Míkál had burnished his leopardskin and combed out his long, fine, dark hair. He had sung to himself, she thought, as if he were very happy, swaying his body so that the little bells of his sash and his dress accented the verses. Now, smiling and calling to those who greeted him in the press, he said, looking up in surprise, ‘Thou readest, Khátún. In the Commissars’ books each boy’s name is written, and his birth, and his price. He will be brought to you.’ And as the crowd opened out before them, and she found herself in the Via Egnatia, with the crowded figures of Galerius’s great arch alive in the sun, Míkál said, ‘Give me your money.’
And taking from her the gold which last night she had unpicked from all the hidden corners of her clothes and her baggage, he moved with his magnificent walk past the stinking heat of the brazier, and flung it, chiming, on the deal table where the Commissars sat. ‘The lady pays,’ said Míkál. Philippa, dismounting, followed him in a hurry and stood, panting, beside him.
‘For what does she pay?’ asked the Chief Commissar. He had black moustaches and wore a very white cottage loaf on his head. He had a long jewelled knife in his sash. Philippa opened her mouth and said in squeaky but impeccable Turkish, ‘I wish to buy back the boy-child bought of the merchant Marino Donati, Zakynthos.’
The Commissar’s small black-rimmed eyes studied her. ‘I see. The name of this child?’
‘His name is Khaireddin, or … I am told his nurse calls him Kuzucuyum. He is between one and two years old, with yellow hair,’ said Philippa. ‘If you will have the money counted, I am sure you will do us the honour to agree.’ There were twenty Venetian zecchinos in Míkál’s handkerchief lying there on the bench. Two thousand five hundred aspers. And a five-year-old girl had been bought the other day for five ducats.
The Commissar did not lift the handkerchief. He did not call for his registers or turn to his clerks. He said, ‘Take thy bounty. Alas, the child you mention cannot be resold.’
Philippa’s heart began to beat very heavily. She drew a long breath. ‘Thy pardon, lord; but I cannot think you know the child of whom I speak. He is of no account, base-born of Christian parents, and too young as yet to train. I assure thee, if he is sold to me, there will result nothing but goodwill for the Sultan.’
The black eyes, narrowed against the sun, were not even derisory. ‘Through a base-born son of a Christian?’
Philippa took another enormous breath, which promptly evaporated, invisibly, through her pores. ‘His father,’ she said threadily, ‘is at this moment bearing to Stamboul for the Sultan a gift of some price from his master, the Most Christian King of France. To reunite son and father would be an act of which surely the Grand Seigneur would approve.’
The Commissar raised a finger. Released by the signal, the clerks opened their books; the slow procession of tax-payers began to move forward; the little weights clinked in the scales as the aspers were poured out for weighing. ‘The child you mention,’ said the Commissar briefly, ‘came from the harem of Dragut Rais at Algiers. I fear thou hast mistaken his origins. He is not for sale. You may have the aid of my Odabassy to find your way without harm out of the city. Allah be with thee.’
The gold thrust into her hand, she was dismissed. Philippa looked round wildly. Míkál had gone. The other pilgrims,
Philippa looked again at the table of Commissars. The chief, his back to her, was transacting some brisk matter of business; the rest, writing or questioning, had resumed the wearisome routine which had already occupied them, week after week. She realized that even if her voice were operating properly, making a scene was unlikely to do any good. To begin with, they held a low opinion, she knew, of women who conducted their own affairs. And to change one’s mind in public before one’s fellows was a thing no man would countenance.
Philippa shoved the gold under her veil, hoping her sash would prevent it from falling promptly straight down to her feet, and fought her way to her mule.
The saddlebags weren’t rifled. The stall-holder hadn’t even complained over the mish-mish. A Janissary, in his tall, white felt bonnet sat on horseback holding the reins of her mule. He wore a long knife tucked into his coat; a scimitar on his thigh, and a straight sword and a little axe on the side of his pommel, with a bow laid across the saddle-front and a quiver strung on his back. He carried a steel gurj, and as the wide sleeves slid back, she saw the mark of his oda, slit into the skin of his forearms with gunpowder. He had a silver quill driven straight through a pinch of skin above his left eyebrow and left there, like a one-eyed eagle owl, and his gaze bore an icy disfavour, like the gaze of a sergeant inspecting a constant deserter. He said, ‘If it please thee to mount. We are in haste.’
Philippa took a last quick look round. No Míkál. Well: his business was love, not argument and the rough ways of the military. At the gates, when they freed her, she would no doubt discover the Pilgrims. And between them, surely, they would hit on a way of tracing the child in that seething city of tents. If she could have him no other way, she was quite ready to steal him, Janissaries or nothing. What was a Janissary, said Philippa (to herself) stoutly, when one had made the acquaintance in Scotland of the Crawfords, the Scotts and the Kerrs? She mounted; and, the corps falling in quickly behind, she and the Odabassy rode in silence out of the city.
Outside the gates, she was irritated and also uneasy to see, there was no Míkál either, and the other Pilgrims of Love were conspicuous by their absence. Her thin lips tight, Philippa looked up at the Odabassy, whose ambling pace had not changed, and said, ‘I fear sir, my friends are not here; but if thou wilt set me by some honest house, I shall remain there till they find me.’
The silver quill turned in her direction. ‘Presently,’ said the Odabassy; and rode speechlessly on.
‘For example, that house?’ said Philippa, risking it, after five minutes more.
‘Presently,’ said the Odabassy; and continued to ride.
‘I think,’ said Philippa, ‘I should like to stop now.’ And she pulled, hard, on the reins.
A strong hand, coming from beside her right elbow, reached up and taking the reins clean out of her grip, flicked the little mule on. Blazing scarlet under her veil, Philippa swung round on the Odabassy. ‘The orders of thy Commissar were to set me outside the gates of Thessalonika!’
The quill turned and inspected her, with lofty indifference. ‘My orders, Khátún, are to bring thee immediately for questioning to the presence of my lord the Beglierbey of all Greece.’
The Viceroy of Greece had been hunting. That indeed was the purpose of this modest lodging in Thessaly; and to preserve his vigour for primary demands, he had brought only two or three of his seraglio with him. The courtyard of the viceregal house, when Philippa entered it, perforce with her Janissaries, was full of dogs: not the flop-eared mongrels, shaggy as Cretans, which she had seen in every village since Petrasso, but white greyhounds, large and slender, their legs and tails stained red with kinàh. She saw some hawks, hooded, being taken indoors, and the small horses, mixed Tartar and Arab, whom she saw being led away by the saisies, had drums hung on the pommels.
The grooms were Berberine. The servants she saw moving in and out of the stables and service buildings which lined three sides of the yard, were of aggressively mixed stock, a great many of them coloured, and some of them walking in chains. She was prepared to be angry when she saw that all the faces which turned towards her in the bustle of the courtyard were perfectly cheerful and instead of angry she became frightened, at the kind of servitude which could bring resignation and active acceptance so easily in its train. She dismounted, and led by the Odabassy, walked up to the tall timbered building, overhung with galleries and enlaced with admonishing texts, which occupied the fourth side of the courtyard.
In the doorway, an Ethiopian awaited her; quite different from the Moors she had seen carrying saddles outside: a big man, his glossy black skin sheathed in lawn and a pale figured weave. As he dismissed her escort and turned, signing her to follow him, Philippa saw the rings on his plump fingers and thought, suddenly, he is a eunuch. Then he opened the door of the selamlik, and stood aside as she walked in.
The room was vacant. It was bigger than any she had yet seen. In the centre of the floor was an elaborate brazier, now empty, set in a pattern of tiles. All the rest of the room was a dais covered in carpets, on which thick mattresses, two or three deep, had been piled at intervals round the far wall, and heaped invitingly with coloured silk cushions in each window embrasure. The walls were white, with a calligraphic frieze of phrases from the Qur’ân picked out in blue and gilt: Hasten to forgiveness from your Lord: and to a garden.
Philippa smiled, her wrestling hands stopped for a moment; then, folding her arms solidly over her stomach, she stumped up the three little steps to the dais and marched to one of the windows. All right: they liked flowers. They liked music. They liked animals and birds. You never saw a badly used dog; and the granaries in Cairo, so they said, were never closed from the sky, so that the pigeons might feed when they chose. But they killed by ganching and slicing and cautery, and by doing what they had done to the woman Oonagh O’Dwyer.
Philippa gazed down on the kitchen courtyard. There were serving-women there; one or two; and a big marble bath full of water, and some cloths laid out bleaching on the sparse grass by the wall. Underneath her some shallow trays were also spread in the sun, filled with a golden mess she did not at once recognize. Then the open lattice under her fingers stirred against a warm breath of air, and the perfume of peaches pressed into the room.
She had tasted that in Larissa … peach jam, confected by sun-heat alone cooking the trays of ripe peaches and sugar and syrup as they lay, day after day.… If they would not sell her the child it meant, of course, that Gabriel had found out and warned them. Perhaps the merchant Donati, writing another of his bills of lading, had described his strange visitors too well. Perhaps Sheemy Wurmit, arrived in Malta to discredit Graham Malett, had told too much too soon, and Gabriel had been able to send his instructions.…
She was English, and allied to Spain, Turkey’s most implacable enemy. Turkey had nothing to lose, materially or politically, by her death. She had wondered, working it out, why the Beglierbey’s sanction was necessary, until she recalled mentioning that a French embassy to the Sultan was involved. Just at present, Turkey did not wish to fall out with France. There was a chance, then; a slim one; if she could persuade the Viceroy that this child was indeed the son of the King of France’s Special Envoy. Or were Gabriel’s services so valuable that, in spite of that, he could persuade the Turks to do anything that he asked?
A child had come into the yard, jostled by three lambs on a string. It held them with difficulty, its fat bare feet braced in the dirt, and shrieked with delight, its shirt of striped Joseph silk smeared with their muzzles. Inside the kitchen a woman spoke sharply.
The child heard, too. Philippa saw its capped head turn, rocking its balance; as it tried to recover, the lambs tugged, ears flopping, pink tongues out, baaing, and pulled the string from
It looked down, Philippa noticed, as it stepped into the first tray of jam, hesitated, and for a moment was even in danger of sitting. Then, with admirable devotion to duty, it stepped into the other four trays without pausing and pursuing the clear imprint of twelve jammy hooves over the bleaching cloths, heeled precariously round the gate into the garden and disappeared, followed by a growing number of adults. The last Philippa saw of it was a flash of wary blue eyes, a hamster grin, and a cone of thick yellow hair, resting levelly on its belligerent eyebrows. Under her veil, Philippa’s larynx shrank to a pinhead and her eyes swam with unwanted water. She snorted.
‘I speak,’ said a voice behind her in English, ‘to Mees Somerville?’
You cannot whirl round in a floor-length robe and two veils. Achieving the change of direction with dignity, Philippa found herself opposite an elderly Imam quite unknown to her: a soft-skinned Turk in the turban of the Haji who has made the sacred journey to Mecca, his grey beard brushing white woollen robes, his prayer beads hanging in his sash. He smiled. ‘Forgive me: I frighten you,’ he said. ‘I am Bektashi Baba, an elder follower of Haji Bektash Veli, of whom you may have heard. The Beglierbey, who prays to be excused, has asked me to see you. You will do me the honour to seat yourself and take qahveh?’
Now where, thought Philippa, seating herself warily on a pile of fat cushions, have I heard that before? And then she remembered: the house of the Dame de Doubtance in Lyons, and the harsh voice saying, ‘My cousin will bring you some qahveh, which you will dislike until your taste is formed.’ Philippa sat very straight, remembering not to pull on her veil, until the tray was brought with two cups by a Greek slave in a snowy tunic and laid on a small stool before her; and the Bektashi Baba, slipping out of his soft shoes, climbed the three shallow steps and, after seeking permission, seated himself at a discreet distance on the same divan. The slave poured the hot coffee, and waiting as Míkál had taught her until he had left, she unhooked her veil and lifted the cup.