Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [181]
The child she had brought all the way from Thessalonika: the child whom Evangelista Donati had called Kuzucuyum bent on her a gaze of reproach. ‘I’m a very wet boy,’ said Kuzúm.
He waited blandly while, detonating mildly, she thudded up the stairs to his side, and continued to gaze up at her blandly as she skidded to a halt and, staring down, said, ‘What’s that on your head?’
‘That’s my little hat,’ said Kuzúm.
‘That’s a wooden spoon,’ said Philippa. She disentangled it from the thick, silky hair. ‘It’s sticky.… Why are you a wet boy?’
‘I sat in my dinner,’ said Kuzúm. ‘Just like Tulip. What did you said?’
‘I said Tulip fell in by mistake, and I wish you had a better grasp of the English language.… It’s not funny.’
‘Laugh again,’ said Kuzúm, his eyes beaming.
One of the négresses, smiling, had come to clear up the mess on the tiling. ‘I’m not laughing. You won’t be, either, in a minute,’ said Philippa with relish. ‘You’ll have to have a clean shirt and a bath.’
The head nurse bathed him, and the noise reached even the room where she was unrolling his mattress. But when he came round the door, he was fresh and pink and filled with a universal and boundless goodwill. ‘Here’s me again!’ he said. ‘Hullo, Fippy darling!’
‘Hullo!’ said Philippa the stalwart, who in between matters which were not funny at all had set herself, with grim humour, to frame a coy letter to Kate.
‘Hullo, darling!’ she added; and dried her wet eyes, as he hugged her, on the bright yellow head.
Ragna, the mother of Worm, she thought later, gazing out of her window. You made a heroic entrance, in a long plait and leggings and a cloud of Teutonic brimstone, and found yourself instead, child on knee, examining the spots on its bottom and trying to correct, irritably, an inadequate siphoning system and a low-pressure nose-blow.
Because of Kuzucuyum, she could recall almost nothing of that hurried voyage from Thessalonika to record in her diary. To Evangelista Donati she owed the arrangement which had brought them to Stamboul safely by sea. No matter what happened to Gabriel now, they were away from the Children of Devshirmé and that shadowy, unknown figure by whose hand Madame Donati had already died.
Here, they were safe. Here in Topkapi, the Sultan Suleiman’s Seraglio, luxury being the steward and the treasure inexhaustible.
Mr Crawford had said that. That besides being a professional mercenary he was highly educated had become plain by degrees to Philippa. He knew for example that Constantinople, which the Turks called Stamboul, had become after the fall of Rome the capital of the whole Roman Empire and the richest city on earth: It hath none equal with it in the world except Bagdat, that mighty Citie of the Ismaélites.
Fragments of what he had told her, briefly, on the rare occasions when he would talk of their destination, came now to her mind. ‘ … Pillars and walls he hath overlaid with beaten gold, whereon he hath engraven all the wars made by him and his ancestors … and he hath prepared a throne for himself of gold and precious stones, and hath adorned it with a golden crown hanging on high by golden chains, beset with precious stones and pearls the price whereof no man is able to value.… Furthermore,’ Mr Crawford had quoted, staring out over the water, ’the Grecians themselves are exceedingly rich in gold and precious stones, their garments being made of crimson intermingled with gold and embroidered and are all carried upon horses much like unto the Children of Kings.… Justinian rode into his new Church of St Sophia, the most beautiful and most costly in the world, and said, Solomon, I have surpassed thee. Christians held it and the city of Byzas before it for nearly twelve hundred years, Philippa. Then the Turks took it all from them.’
‘When?’ she had said. (Kate would have known.)
‘A hundred years ago,’ he had answered. ‘Exactly. They took twelve kingdoms and two hundred cities from the Christian world, and made a stable