Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [183]
Philippa cried, briefly, and then went in to take away the empty yoghourt bowl and kiss Tulip. Kuzúm, his face still a featureless mosaic in pinks and his ears full of tears, regarded her without expression and then said in an uneven whisper, Tm a very wet boy.’
The first and biggest obstacle was over. She felt her way; building up trust; piecing together for him a new day and a new night; a new vocabulary of word and intonation and catch-phrase to take the place of the one he had lost. The Aegean went by. She did not notice Gallipoli or the Hellespont: the Sea of Marmara might have been the duckpond at Wall.
They came to Constantinople in the morning, sailing in sunlight through the blue waters of the long harbour creek called the Golden Horn; the Bosphorus and the green shore of Asia receding behind them. Philippa took her two children by the hand and went up on deck.
Wreathed with cypress; bossed with the golden fruit of her domes and the sunlit stalks of her minarets, the Abode of Felicity girdled her seven low hills, green and white and gold in the sunlight as an enrichment of Safavid jewellery; and against the clear cobalt sky, the gilt crescents flashed on their spires like a garden of sequins. Before her, the seawall, toothed and towered, curved out of sight, the deeper blue of the Golden Horn washing the wharves and sheds at its base; and on her right the same water touched the opposite shore, where the tile-roofed white houses of Pera rose to the vine-covered top of the hill, and there were church spires among the pale minarets. Somewhere there, the lilies of France flew over the French Ambassador’s house, where a Special Envoy bringing gifts for the Sultan was no doubt still awaited, in vain.… The Special Envoy she had last seen in Algiers, about to encompass the death of Graham Reid Malett; and perhaps himself Gabriel’s victim by now. If Archie found him; if he learned of Kuzúm’s existence, he would come: he might even manage to purchase the child. But one could not, of course, expect to buy one of the Sultan’s own personal odalisques.…
In spite of herself, Philippa grinned. Then the interpreter who had been among her small escorting party of Janissaries touched her arm, and pointed to a tongue of land on her left where, bowered in plane and willow and cypress trees, glimmered a crowded chiaroscuro of marble-flanked buildings and coloured arcades; of towers and cupolas in gilt, in copper, in bronze; of the glitter of faience and coloured mosaics; the reiterated sheet gold of the crescent of Islam and the reiterated red coiling silk of the Islamic flag. ‘Topkapi,’ said the dragoman, and smiled. The Seraglio of the Sultan Suleiman. There, too, his harem.’
Then, her hand on the shoulder of either child, for a moment Philippa stopped smiling.
She had to wait some time before the Janissaries reporting her presence transmitted the order for herself and the children to land. Then, unmistakably, she saw activity round the long, low boathouses on the Seraglio shore, and soon after that, to Kuzúm’s shrieks of joy, Philippa and the children and their minimal possessions were descending into a bright golden caique with the throat and head of a dragon, rowed by silent men, all alike in Phoenician-red nightshirts. ‘My goodness: look at the cushions,’ observed Philippa, settling in. ‘You wouldn’t need to keep cats.’
The sea gate to the Topkapi Seraglio was of iron, intricately wrought, and Philippa, bearing the dead weight of her protégé (‘Kuzúm have a see!’) in her arms, counted ten men guarding it; speechless also; their headdress pillows of white feathers. (‘What kind is that hat?’) She stepped through on to a path made of smooth, coloured marbles which, as far as the eye could reach, had been flanked on each of its sides by a continuous barrier of cloth, higher than Philippa’s head. Because of it, the garden which lay on each side of her was invisible save for the tops of its trees and its tallest flowering shrubs. Walking along the strange, roofless