Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [184]
In her arms Kuzúm was quiet, and she felt Tulip falter beside her. She smiled and spoke to them both while at the back of her mind, sinkingly, Philippa recognized the true object of these barrier screens. They were not to prevent her from viewing the garden. They were to preserve the Sultan’s new personal property from all other impious eyes.
The walk led to another wall and another gate, this time roofed and encased in elaborate porphyry. Here, when the gate swung slowly open, her interpreter spoke briefly and turned away, leaving Philippa face to face with a powerful negro in a white sugar-loaf hat and a gown of pale blue brocatelle which fell to the ground. This one bowed gravely, hand on breast, and snapped his fingers. Slaves (she supposed?), rushing from nowhere, assumed her baggage and vanished with it, while the eunuch (she supposed?), turning, led the way down a long flight of steps.
Kuzúm, who had the same dead weight as a young hippopotamus, clung to her shoulder-blades with a good handful of robe and half her hair excruciatingly in his grasp: turning her head, to the limited degree she was able, Philippa saw, towering above on her left, the colonnades and the glassy walls of the palace she had just seen from her ship with their ranks of domed roofs in leaf-gold and lead. Then, turning, she followed the eunuch.
Later, she knew that she had been taken through the maze of low courts—playgrounds, gardens and pools, exercise-ground, animal compound—which lay under the west walls of the Topkapi buildings and led in their turn to the honeycomb of ancient vaults and arcades which was all that was left of the sacred palace of the Byzantine emperors, on which they were built. At the time, she had an impression only of a procession of scents: animal, herbal, citrous. There was the smell of damp wood and old and new stone and mortar; and a stream of scent she did not recognize until, passing from wall-shade and tree-shade and the empty spaces tenanted by silent, white-hatted negroes or hurrying, black-skinned women slaves, they burst into a sunlit pleasure-garden filled with perhaps three dozen young women, playing at ball; and the scent was as strong as if the clouds had opened and sprayed them with civet and rosewater.
There was nothing like it in Hexham. Staring belligerently, Philippa saw that, with variations, they all wore calf-length trousers and pale chemises in sarsenet, or something quite as transparent, covered just by a short damask waistcoat and, sometimes, an open, floating kaftán. Pinned on their heads were small, cylindrical caps, vizored with veils: they were plastered with jewellery, and their hair, Philippa noted, plaited or loose, twined with pearls or ribbons or laces, was by some curious chance either bright red or soot black without exception. Then they came running.
Until that moment, when they came jostling around her, plucking with little, stained hands at her soiled robe; dragging back her pinscratching veil, and she heard their high, foreign voices and their laughter, it had not occurred to Philippa Somerville that these girls and no others were henceforth to be her daily companions. With them she must learn to live in a wholly enclosed society, closer than sisters. And in their company the whole of her life from this day onwards must be spent. The whole of her life, from the age of sixteen.
In that moment, as she came to a halt, they took Kuzúm from her. Her hand to her bared head, she suddenly realized it, and whirling round, saw him silent in the arms of a chattering girl, mute, his blue eyes filled with unshed tears and his chin wobbling. ‘Well!’ said Philippa, in English. ‘I don’t suppose there’s another boy east of the Isle of Wight with so many good-looking aunties. They’ve got a ball. Do you see the ball? Do you think they would let you play with it? Tulip, ask them.’
Tulip, his black face