Pawn in Frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett
‘Appoint anyone you like,’ said Lymond; and flung himself back on his face.
Far from coming on deck in an hour, he did not appear again that day, or until half the next morning had gone. But when he did, the change was quite remarkable. With his fever dispelled; rested and groomed by his new servant Adrian and fed, at two-hourly intervals, by Onophrion’s solicitous hand, Lymond had recovered all the sangfroid that Gaultier most disliked. ‘Idleness: an excellent remedy, don’t you find it, M. Gaultier? Il se gratte les fesses et conte des apologues. Especially when one is fond of fables, as you and your niece undoubtedly are.… But there are snakes in the Valley of Diamonds, M. Gaultier; and a wind that turns stones into wax. And although you throw your meat into the valley, and release a thousand starving eagles, they may pick up the meat, but with no diamonds adhering.… Where is Marthe now, do you think?’
M. Gaultier, against his inclination, humoured him. ‘In Aleppo with Mr Blyth, I should suppose. Or on her way to Constantinople.’
‘With Mr Blyth, I wonder? They say, Dammi con chi tu vivi, M. Gaultier; and to saprò quel’ che tu fai. What do you suppose Marthe is doing?’
‘Filling in time, Mr Crawford: as are we all, until this interminable embassy is at an end.’
‘Patience, M. Gaultier. It is an Oriental virtue. Empty thy head of wind, for none is born of his mother save to die. Wert thou a rampart of well-wrought iron, the rotation of the heavens would break thee none the less, and thou shouldst disappear.’ The levity returned to the pleasant voice. ‘It is not, I am sure, a philosophy beloved of pawn-brokers.’
The weather improved. Tribute at Hellespont paid, they sailed between the two castles, and at Gallipoli they found M. Chesnau, the French Envoy to Constantinople of whom the Bektashi dervish at Thessalonika had spoken, held up by a fever of which his secretary had already died. Since he could not be moved, Lymond made what improvements he could in his housing and comforts and went on his way, his letters of credence as full Ambassador in his hands. They sailed by the Thracian coast, passing Rodesto and Perinthe and rowing all night to cross the Gulf of Selimbrie and get to the castles of Flora and St Stephano. From there, Lymond sent a horseman to warn d’Aramon, the retiring Ambassador, of his arrival.
A day later, the Dauphiné anchored at night below the Seven Towers, the State Prison of Stamboul; and in the morning rowed round the sea wall until, turning Seraglio Point, she entered the creek called the Golden Horn and stood off the Scarlet Apple of the World: the city of Constantinople at last.
In Topkapi, Kuzucuyum heard the guns and the trumpets, and screaming, ‘Bang-cass!’ in ecstasy, turned so fast he sat down. The Pearl of Fortune, hearing him, snatched him up, her shining hair flying, and flew with him to the highest viewpoint she was permitted; when cheek to cheek, they looked down together.
White and gold, the silk pennants ran, fluid as writing from the yardarms of the incoming ship, and the ensigns from her mastheads were of the same colour. Her screens were out amidships, of cloth of silver and gold, and green boughs garlanded her low flanks, below the slow sweep of the oars. Her very wake was silver, in the carmine sea of first dawning: silver clouds rose from her culverin and constellations flashed from her trumpets as she repeated over and over her salutes.
There was a spyglass Philippa, in the person of Pearl of Fortune, had cajoled from a silly lassie from Candía in exchange for a Newcastle kerchief. Putting the glass to her eye, she maintained it firmly against the fat hands of Kuzúm, and peering through the joggling lens, focused over the tops of the kiosks and cypress trees, on the shining strip of water, peopled with caique and galley and galleasse, with ships of war and commerce and pleasure, of fishing and ferrying, until she found again the newcomer she had been watching.
It was a galley. It was a royal galley sliding in at the salute, oars upraised and parallel. And above it there unrolled, white and gold and dearly familiar, the lily banner of France. The glass swept from Philippa’s face and she dragged it back again. ‘Kuzúm! Not now! In a moment, my lamb. In a moment.… Oh, please!’
It steadied, and she saw again what she had glimpsed. On the mainmast was the royal standard of France. On the mizzen was the coat of arms, in blue and silver and scarlet, of Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny.
With fearful suddenness, Kuzucuyum found himself in full possession of the disputed spyglass. ‘Hullo?’ he said uneasily, surveying what he could see of his Fippy.
With children, you have no private life. ‘Hullo,’ said Philippa reassuringly. ‘It’s all right. I … banged my hand.’
The vast blue gaze turned anxious. ‘Is it a little just a scratch?’ said Kuzúm.
‘Yes … it’s all right,’ said Philippa. ‘Let’s go and have breakfast.’
‘Kiss it butter?’ said Kuzúm, who was nothing if not thorough. He delivered the kiss, bending his brushed yellow head, and then turned the appraising gaze on her again. ‘Is it all butter now, Fippy: is it?’
‘It’s all better, my lambkin,’ said Philippa. ‘It’s all better; or if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter a docken.’
Later that morning, anchored off Seraglio Point, Lymond received on board the Deputy Vizier and the Chief Dragoman of the Porte, and accepted for himself and his principal staff five exquisite sets of full-length Turkish robes.
The gifts from the French King, carefully graded and labelled, had already been checked and prepared during the last days of the voyage. The Dragoman and the Vizier, expressing unqualified delight, in turn received theirs, and after drinking, with no sign of theological uneasiness, a full bottle of Onophrion’s Mudanian wine, departed with formal expressions of goodwill all round.
‘We are in time?’ asked Onophrion, at length, coming to clear off the goblets.
‘We are in time,’ said Lymond, turning his eyes from the slow-moving domes; the packed houses, climbing shoulder on shoulder; the white minarets like cactus-fingers crowding the skyline; the old pink and cream sea wall and the green of the gardens and trees, seen through the empty, tiered eyes of the aqueduct of Valens. ‘Sultan Suleiman will receive us on Tuesday.’
They had been given three members of the Corps of Janissaries for the length of their stay, to act as guides, interpreters, advisers and bodyguard all in one. They visited the Customhouse, briefly; then, turning her back on the gold and copper cupolas of Stamboul, the Dauphiné crossed the Golden Horn to Galata.
Built by the Genoese and still the foreign trading-quarter of the great city opposite, Galata sat on one ear on its hillside, locked within its tight walls and protected by the many-eyed tower which rose high in its midst. On the shore, by the wharves and the crumbling warehouses, the sheds for ship-building and artillery, the big trading-galleons lay shoulder to shoulder, their jutting rudders and flat, pear-shaped sterns staring down at the long, slender galley as she rowed smoothly past. She tied up at Artillery Gate, where the great bronze cannon from Rhodes and Tripoli and Gozo and Mohács lay unheeded in the long, weedy grass; and M. d’Aramon, Baron de Luetz, present Ambassador and longtime good servant of France in the Sublime Porte, walked forward from the quay where he and his suite had been waiting, and came aboard to greet his successor.
A man of tact, he gave no sign that he might be comparing the unconscious, half-naked prisoner of Tripoli with the man who came to receive him on deck, his short fair hair ordered and gleaming, his hands ringed, his doublet made by a master. The preliminaries, graceful as they were, did nothing to dispel the little ironies he still perceived and enjoyed, in the back of his mind. Then M. Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny, seating him where the Second Vizier had so lately sat and presenting him, through Onophrion, with an extraordinarily good cup of Muscat, began to ask questions about the status of France in the great Turkish empire; and the shade of amusement left M. d’Aramon’s face.
Long ago by the post; by the interminable exchange of secretary and messenger from Stamboul to Sofia to Ragusa to Venice; across Europe to Anet or Fontainebleau, he had known of th
Now it was here; and the Sultan, accepting it, was about to march into Persia to light a war of more moment to him than a petty investment in France’s affairs was ever likely to be. The timing was bad: one had to accept it; and join in the cultivated and slightly derisory laughter, and make capital out of the pleasures or trials of the voyage.
It surprised the Baron de Luetz to be asked questions: perfectly permissable questions, courteously framed, and with no malicious intent. It surprised him still more to find his answers the subject of speculative discussion, bulwarked by a formidable massif of facts. Somewhere on the Dauphiné, on her dilatory journey from home, there was a tireless mind which had made it its business to observe, analyse and digest; and for whose findings the Baron began to feel considerable respect.
Whatever the aforesaid pleasures and trials of his voyage, Crawford, it was clear, had made it his business to talk to many people, from the eminent to the most casual trader and mercenary. To his observations on the struggle in Italy between France and the Emperor Charles, M. d’Aramon could add his own latest news from dispatches. To his information, political, commercial and social, on the outposts and subject countries of the great Turkish empire, M. d’Aramon found he had little to add. He said, as the unloading went on around them, and the Muscat level slowly receded, ‘May I say, Mr Crawford, that I believe you have chosen a career for which you are decidedly suited?’
The unexcited blue gaze widened, sceptically. ‘Merry Report the Vice, court-crier and squire for God’s precious body? It is an appointment I can hold, I’m afraid, only briefly.… I am told there is some unrest in the army, and that is why the Sultan has decided to march south himself?’
‘That is the rumour.’ M. d’Aramon shifted a little in his chair. For the past week, on this score, the Corps Diplomatique had had to exercise considerable tact. ‘The Seraglio, you will understand, is sealed from the world, and very little is heard unless the Grand Seigneur wishes it. But it seems that the army marched south in the late summer under Rustem Pasha, the Grand Vizier, less to attack than to defend the eastern borders against some inroads made by the Shah. On the way they passed through Amasiya, where Prince Mustafa, the Sultan’s eldest son and his heir, rules the region.…’
‘You speak of the son, not of Roxelana, the Sultan’s present wife, but of his first concubine Gulbehar?’
D’Aramon nodded. ‘He is, nevertheless, as you know, the heir. His wife and son are not in the harem but at Bursa, on the other side of the Bosphorus and he himself, until he succeeds his father as Sultan, will live elsewhere and administer the Sultan’s Asian lands. He is, in my belief, a modest and able young man. But——’
‘But this autumn the Sultan, here in Constantinople, found reason to believe that Prince Mustafa and the army were conspiring against him?’
The Baron de Luetz rose; and walking to the door, pulled back the hide curtain which gave them privacy from the labouring seamen on deck. There was no one within earshot. Nevertheless he left it open, and when he returned to his seat, his voice was pitched low. ‘May I ask how you knew that?’
‘I am naught but the lewd compilator of the labour of old astrologians. I guessed it,’ said the new Ambassador mildly. ‘What I don’t know is, how did Suleiman hear of it?’
There was a little silence. Then, ‘That is not known,’ d’Aramon said quietly.
‘I see,’ said the younger man, tranquilly. ‘But it is true, is it not, that Rustem Pasha is married to Roxelana’s daughter?’
‘That is so.’ He had it, damn him.
‘I have even heard,’ pursued his host softly, ‘that the Grand Vizier was Roxelana’s first … employer?’
‘It may be true,’ said M. d’Aramon.
‘I have a petition of my own to present to the Sultan on Tuesday,’ said Mr Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny, with no change of tone. ‘It will, I think, be granted and should not reflect in any way to the discredit of France. If by any chance it is refused … If it is refused, I shall have to use other means, and I shall resign as Ambassador. If this happens, I strongly advise that no other appointment is made until the situation with Roxelana is resolved. A chargé d’affaires should be sufficient.’
‘Chesnau will be here,’ said the Baron thoughtfully. ‘Since I shall be there to present you … may I know the form your petition will take?’
The arched blue gaze, unwavering, showed no desire to avoid his. ‘I wish an order to remove two persons from the Seraglio. One is a English girl who has just arrived there in error. The other is one of the Children of Tribute.’
None of his amazement revealed on his face, M. d’Aramon put, with diffidence, his last question. ‘I am sorry. But I am sure there will be no difficulty, provided you are willing to be … generous. They are … family friends?’
Lymond rose. ‘The girl’s mother is an old and dear friend of my family.’
‘And the child?’
Outside, a French voice, speaking bad Turkish, was raised in dispute: other, authoritative voices joined in and there was a trampling of feet. Lymond, moving swiftly, said, ‘He is a member of my own family … Forgive me a moment. When I return, perhaps we should go ashore.…’
For a moment the Baron de Luetz sat looking at his successor’s back as Crawford moved towards the scene of the trouble. The quarrelling stopped. Beside him the steward, moving soft-footed round the table, poured M. d’Aramon a last cup of wine and removed the now empty flask. But instead of going away he hesitated and M. d’Aramon, looking up, saw that the man, a Swiss, he thought, with a heavy frame and a pink, overfleshed face, was attempting to speak. ‘Well?’ he said.
Onophrion Zitwitz bowed, the flask clasped to his breast. ‘I overheard.… If you will forgive me, my lord. You should know. His Excellency will not speak of it, but the child in the Seraglio is his son.’
If Lymond found M. d’Aramon’s manner to him at all different when, returning, he disembarked and riding at the Baron’s side, their joint retainers behind him, climbed the steep hill to the French Ambassador’s house at the top, his own did not change from the formal.
From the big white house, with its herb and flower garden, its pebbled walks and its fountains, one could look through the vineyards of Pera and down to where the busy town of Galata descended the hill to the water. Across the creek, on the other side of the Golden Horn, lay Constantinople.
In the six days which must pass before their audience, both the retiring Ambassador and his successor spent some time among the papers in M. d’Aramon’s study, arranging the affairs of the French King and his humbler subjects in Turkey. As he learned to know him better, M. d’Aramon began to recognize the restlessness to which Crawford was sometimes subject; when after a morning of rapid and capable case-work he would walk up and down the low balcony, staring across at the Abode of Felicity, the famous skyline which had taken the place of the New Jerusalem, the holy city, come down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband, whose priests had cried on its completion: O Lord, guide it on the good path for infinite ages …
Then M. d’Aramon would suggest they assume the loose robes they wore, Turkish-fashion, over their Western dress in the street, and with Crawford at his side, and the Janissaries following, would walk down through one of the twelve gates of the century-old walls of Galata to the Tower of Christ, first built by Anastasius, or down through the narrow streets of the merchants to the ruins of the Genoese fort from which, a hundred years before, the chain had stretched over the Golden Horn to Seraglio Point.
It was a walk the Baron de Luetz himself never failed to find exhilarating. Once, walls had been built to divide the town into quarters for the true Peratins, the Greeks and the Turks. Long ago these divisions had risen like multilin
For this was a Christian town as well as a Moslem one, with Christian vices and virtues. As well as mosques there were churches, convents and synagogues: mingling with the voice of the muezzin, proclaiming five times a day the omnipotence and unity of God, was the two-toned chime of iron on iron, the primitive call permitted by Islam to all the Greek churches, in the absence of the infidel bell.
Indeed, to a stranger, the overwhelming force of its noise was the first impression he received of Galata. The vibration of its foundry and craft-shops; the chanting, the calling and hammering from the crowded wharves where the ranked ships up to five hundred tons could berth tied up to the houses, and during winter a thousand vessels could lie in the whole half-mile width of the Horn.
The rumbling of carts and the clatter of mules struggling up and down the steep slopes, laden with cargo, pressing aside the little asses bearing women to church or baths or burial-ground: Armenians sitting sidesaddle in their high linen headdresses, speaking Slav or broken Italian; Peratine French and resident women of other races in taffeta, satin and lace, buttoned with gold and silver, their caps wound about with jewelled silks, their arms heavy with bracelets, as their escorts rode ahead, pressing aside the loud-mouthed, cheerful throng.