Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [185]
Ignoring it, Kuzúm walked forward steadily over the grass on his short legs and bending over the girl’s foot, his brief robe sticking out over his rump, said in a little voice, ‘Is that a meant shoe?’
The girl laughed, and poked him gently in the stomach with one toe, while Philippa, coming forward, picked him up cheerfully and said, ‘They’re stilts, my lambkin, for keeping her nice slippers dry. We’ll come back, but the gentleman is waiting to take us into the house now. Say goodbye.…’
They kissed him, laughing, and someone put the silver ball in his arms as Philippa, smiling, turned and followed the eunuch again. Her veils, a little torn, lay heaped over her shoulders and her forehead felt damp. With the little gesture he always made when tired or uneasy, the little boy had released one hand from the ball and was lying limp on her shoulder, the back of one soft wrist at his mouth. Philippa, trying to keep her own hands steady, gripped him firmly and followed the eunuch up a long flight of white marble steps and into Topkapi itself.
A labyrinth of courtyards and tall, narrow corridors. Bright tiles in blue and orange and green; soft scarlet carpets; heavy hangings of Diarbekir silk and Saracenic patterns on linen; ceilings caissoned and painted; walls wainscotted in tiles and mosaic and lapidary work with jasper and marble; cedarwood lattices and inlays of glass and enamel. Little windows in stained Cairo glass, throwing sapphire, ruby, onyx lights on the walls. The murmur of light, muted voices; of fountains; the rustle of taffetas; the low, golden notes of a lute. The scent of dried roseleaves and incense and boxwood and flowers; of amber paste burning, and jasmine powder; of lemon oil and something frying in honey. A guardroom, with black faces and white turbans and a dimness cloisonné with steel. An open space, floored with mosaic, where on her left she caught sight of a big doorway, rimmed with sunlight, through which she heard birdsong and sensed the freshness of flowers. Then the eunuch opened a door.
She was in a long, open-air passage flanked on either side by the doors and windows and arcaded pillars of what seemed to be the black eunuch’s living-quarters, which stretched high on either side, plunging the narrow courtyard deeply in shadow. Ahead, there was a fireplace built into the wall, turreted like a turbèh and tiled, but it was unlit. Above her, Philippa could see the windowed tower she had already observed, higher than the rest, with its four-sided spire. Then she was in darkness, following her conductor through a doorway on her right, up a staircase, and breathlessly, into a small room with a raised dais, where a man sat crosslegged, awaiting her.
Beneath the white, sugarloaf hat was a negro’s face; but his robes, spread over the cushions, were of green velvet on a crimson silk ground, and the trimmings were sable. Then she knew this was the Kislar Agha; the Chief of the Black Eunuchs and supreme head of the harem. Philippa put down Kuzúm. Then, holding the child tightly by one hand, she followed, shakily enough, Kate’s universal dictum. When in doubt, curtsy.
The Kislar Agha neither rose nor acknowledged her. Instead, his unwinking black gaze on her face, he spoke, in Turkish, to the interpreter who appeared silently at her side, and the interpreter, bowing, addressed her in English.
The questions were brief. Philippa, her knees shaking with nerves and resentment under her creased robes, answered them curtly. ‘My lord asks, what age art thou, and hast thou heretofore known men? My lord asks, art thou whole, or unfit, or blemished? My lord asks what religion heretofore thou hast practised? My lord asks, what tongue dost thou speak?’
There was only one thing Philippa wanted to ask. She snapped the answer to the last question and said,