Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [129]
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