Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [192]
It was a galley. It was a royal galley sliding in at the salute, oars upraised and parallel. And above it there unrolled, white and gold and dearly familiar, the lily banner of France. The glass swept from Philippa’s face and she dragged it back again. ‘Kuzúm! Not now! In a moment, my lamb. In a moment.… Oh, please!’
It steadied, and she saw again what she had glimpsed. On the mainmast was the royal standard of France. On the mizzen was the coat of arms, in blue and silver and scarlet, of Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny.
With fearful suddenness, Kuzucuyum found himself in full possession of the disputed spyglass. ‘Hullo?’ he said uneasily, surveying what he could see of his Fippy.
With children, you have no private life. ‘Hullo,’ said Philippa reassuringly. ‘It’s all right. I … banged my hand.’
The vast blue gaze turned anxious. ‘Is it a little just a scratch?’ said Kuzúm.
‘Yes … it’s all right,’ said Philippa. ‘Let’s go and have breakfast.’
‘Kiss it butter?’ said Kuzúm, who was nothing if not thorough. He delivered the kiss, bending his brushed yellow head, and then turned the appraising gaze on her again. ‘Is it all butter now, Fippy: is it?’
‘It’s all better, my lambkin,’ said Philippa. ‘It’s all better; or if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter a docken.’
Later that morning, anchored off Seraglio Point, Lymond received on board the Deputy Vizier and the Chief Dragoman of the Porte, and accepted for himself and his principal staff five exquisite sets of full-length Turkish robes.
The gifts from the French King, carefully graded and labelled, had already been checked and prepared during the last days of the voyage. The Dragoman and the Vizier, expressing unqualified delight, in turn received theirs, and after drinking, with no sign of theological uneasiness, a full bottle of Onophrion’s Mudanian wine, departed with formal expressions of goodwill all round.
‘We are in time?’ asked Onophrion, at length, coming to clear off the goblets.
‘We are in time,’ said Lymond, turning his eyes from the slow-moving domes; the packed houses, climbing shoulder on shoulder; the white minarets like cactus-fingers crowding the skyline; the old pink and cream sea wall and the green of the gardens and trees, seen through the empty, tiered eyes of the aqueduct of Valens. ‘Sultan Suleiman will receive us on Tuesday.’
They had been given three members of the Corps of Janissaries for the length of their stay, to act as guides, interpreters, advisers and bodyguard all in one. They visited the Customhouse, briefly; then, turning her back on the gold and copper cupolas of Stamboul, the Dauphiné crossed the Golden Horn to Galata.
Built by the Genoese and still the foreign trading-quarter of the great city opposite, Galata sat on one ear on its hillside, locked within its tight walls and protected by the many-eyed tower which rose high in its midst. On the shore, by the wharves and the crumbling warehouses, the sheds for ship-building and artillery, the big trading-galleons lay shoulder to shoulder, their jutting rudders and flat, pear-shaped sterns staring down at the long, slender galley as she rowed smoothly past. She tied up at Artillery Gate, where the great bronze cannon from Rhodes and Tripoli and Gozo and Mohács lay unheeded in the long, weedy grass; and M. d’Aramon, Baron de Luetz, present Ambassador and longtime good servant of France in the Sublime Porte, walked forward from the quay where he and his suite had been waiting, and came aboard to greet his successor.
A man of tact, he gave no sign that he might be comparing