Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [195]
Then M. d’Aramon would suggest they assume the loose robes they wore, Turkish-fashion, over their Western dress in the street, and with Crawford at his side, and the Janissaries following, would walk down through one of the twelve gates of the century-old walls of Galata to the Tower of Christ, first built by Anastasius, or down through the narrow streets of the merchants to the ruins of the Genoese fort from which, a hundred years before, the chain had stretched over the Golden Horn to Seraglio Point.
It was a walk the Baron de Luetz himself never failed to find exhilarating. Once, walls had been built to divide the town into quarters for the true Peratins, the Greeks and the Turks. Long ago these divisions had risen like multilingual yeast and most bountifully overflowed: Franks, Jews, Moslems, Ragusans, Florentines and Sciots thronged and spilled up and down the ill-cobbled streets: sailors, joiners, caulkers; Armenian merchants in long Greek dress and blue, red and white turbans, calling the charms of their cloths and their carpets; Ragusans dressed like Venetian merchants; yellow-turbaned Jews interpreting, smooth-tongued, or hurrying between shop or broker or printing-press; Janissaries; gardeners from the vineyards and occasionally, as nowhere else in the realms of the Sultan, a drunk man, ejected from one of the town’s two hundred taverns.
For this was a Christian town as well as a Moslem one, with Christian vices and virtues. As well as mosques there were churches, convents and synagogues: mingling with the voice of the muezzin, proclaiming five times a day the omnipotence and unity of God, was the two-toned chime of iron on iron, the primitive call permitted by Islam to all the Greek churches, in the absence of the infidel bell.
Indeed, to a stranger, the overwhelming force of its noise was the first impression he received of Galata. The vibration of its foundry and craft-shops; the chanting, the calling and hammering from the crowded wharves where the ranked ships up to five hundred tons could berth tied up to the houses, and during winter a thousand vessels could lie in the whole half-mile width of the Horn.
The rumbling of carts and the clatter of mules struggling up and down the steep slopes, laden with cargo, pressing aside the little asses bearing women to church or baths or burial-ground: Armenians sitting sidesaddle in their high linen headdresses, speaking Slav or broken Italian; Peratine French and resident women of other races in taffeta, satin and lace, buttoned with gold and silver, their caps wound about with jewelled silks, their arms heavy with bracelets, as their escorts rode ahead, pressing aside the loud-mouthed, cheerful throng.
Snatches of laughter, and a song from a wine-booth. A shrieking block in one alley as a long chain of Armenian porters, arms interlaced, brought up from the harbour a great two-ton fat-bellied keg on a pole. The clangour, night and day, outside the gates from the new arsenal with its hundred arches or vaults for the building and dry-docking of galleys.
D’Aramon took the new Ambassador everywhere: even to the foundry and barracks at Topkhane, on the Bosphorus shore, where the viziers and Imams sat on sofas crying Allah! Allah! as the stokers threw wood on the furnaces; and the founders, naked but for slippers and caps and the thick protective sleeves on their arms, mixed gold and silver for the True Faith with the bubbling brass in the foundry; and sheep were sacrificed, screaming, in the red glare of the furnace as its mouth was forced open with long iron hooks, and the white metal flowed to the moulds.
That day, they were too late for dinner, and M. d’Aramon took his colleague instead to a Greek tavern serving a good Ancona wine and spiced white bread and honey and Tomourra caviare, cut whole and salted. ‘As you know, I dare say … in Stamboul you will find cook-shops, but no taverns or inns as one would expect