Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [188]
Philippa got to the mud at the bottom of her cup, and put it down. ‘The prospects for advancement,’ she said, ‘seem rather limited.’ Gideon’s farm-manager had once said that, and Gideon had laughed.
Güzel smiled. ‘Roxelana will not live for ever. Nor, for that matter, will Sultan Suleiman; and his son Prince Mustafa, though married, is not as his father is. Suleiman, as is known, has since his marriage taken no woman but Roxelana to his bed.’
Philippa felt herself, rather unpleasantly, go perfectly white, and then scarlet. Her heart was behaving like a very old blacksmith. She said, ‘So he won’t … I shan’t …’
‘The chances are,’ said Kiaya Khátún blandly, ‘that you will remain a virgin. Unless you cannot resist the other blandishments you will meet. But hard-headed Border common sense, I am sure, will prevail.… The Mistress of Baths, I am told, is awaiting you.’
The eunuch had appeared on the threshold. ‘Kuzúm,’ said Philippa quickly. ‘What will happen to the child?’
‘Ah, the child,’ said Güzel. ‘He is privileged. He will live here for three years in the care of the Head Nurse: you may see him as much as you wish. Then he will be given tutors and will join the older children here in the harem for schooling. At eleven, he will leave the harem, and you will not see him again. It will be your loss, not his. With such training, the highest office is open to such a man. Everything, naturally, except marriage.’
‘Why?’ said Philippa. ‘Don’t they allow——’
Kiaya Khátún rose. With small, tapered fingers stained rose, she smoothed down the stiff folds of the silk and pulled the dark hair more becomingly round her straight shoulders. ‘My dear child,’ she said, and signed, imperceptibly, to her servant. ‘The game of posterity is not one that this Sultan chooses to play. By the time Kuzucuyum is of marriageable age, Mr Crawford’s son—if he is Mr Crawford’s son—will not be a man, but a eunuch.’
In the scented steam of the baths, stripped, kneaded, scoured and anointed; made smooth from her head to her feet, Philippa faced the hardest battle of her day. From the lined, painted face of the Mistress of the Baths to the half-naked women who attacked her tanned skin, giggling, with their rough cloths she was vouchsafed no mercy; and as she lay helpless on the marble, not over-clean; knot-boned and flat as a boy, with her tangled, mouse-coloured hair and unremarkable face, nothing spared her the comments of the other girls of the harem who came and went, rose and ivory, half veiled with steam, and touched and stroked and prodded her, laughing their silly cackling laughter, until the Baths Mistress pushed them away, commenting, lewdly and cruelly, in the Turkish she was not supposed to understand.
She lay prone, her wet eyes sunk deep in her sweating wet arms while they worked on her back; and sought grimly some styptic for tears. In her mind she saw her mother Kate’s soft brown eyes, and heard her speaking serenely. There are four ways to meet persecution. Ignore it, suffer it, do it better than they do. Or just make them laugh. It had been the head cowman’s son, that time. ‘He hasn’t got the least sense of humour,’ she remembered saying despairingly. Kate had been unperturbed. ‘I know, dear. You’ll just have to be funny for two.’
Her ear caught Greek in two—no, three voices. And somewhere, someone said a sentence in French. She had some kind of lingua franca then. She needn’t be dumb. When they turned her over, and someone said something, and there was a general laugh, Philippa said forbiddingly, in Greek, ‘In case you haven’t noticed, you are now viewing the side which bites. You may, if you wish, paint a cross on it.’
Someone laughed. One of the bright voices in Greek said, ‘Not a cross, English One. What is thy name?’
‘I don’t remember,’ said Philippa. ‘Pearl of Fortune, I think. What’s yours?’
The Greek girl was red-haired, with a retroussé nose and a mouth full of flashing white teeth. ‘I am Laila,’ she said. ‘And my other friend here Perfume of the Desert. What other tongues hast