Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [206]
Next day, Philippa was moved out of the little dormitory she shared with nine others, and given a room, along the same narrow corridor, to herself. It was still more of a prison than a room, with tiny windows overlooking a courtyard and a double grille in the corridor wall, locked on its inner side, through which the slaves were able to kindle her lamp. Apart from rugs and cushions and a single low folding table, the room was empty. Her bedding, neatly rolled, was kept on a wide high shelf, reached by a ladder, together with such possessions as she had.
To suit her new dignity, her wardrobe was increased, and the number and quality of her jewels. To look after them she had, in addition to Tulip, a pleasant soft-spoken negress for her own, and a small allowance of slipper-money for presents. And for the first time, that morning, she missed the interminable painting and prinking, and went instead, with her servants and eunuch, down the narrow stairs and along the network of passages until she came to the Black Eunuch’s courtyard, where on her first day the Kislar Agha had seen her. There, in a series of small interlocked rooms overlooking the courtyard, the young princes of the harem were once educated.
Now, since the Sultan’s heirs were grown men and none had been born since except to Khourrém his wife, the daily tutors had little to do but attend a handful of the younger well-born: a vizier’s two sons, and the son of a friend of Khourrém’s. Blowing under her veil, with her new high arched boots pinching, but a vast satisfaction under her flat nacré velvet, Philippa sat down crosslegged with her escort in a row at the back of her juniors, and proceeded, with an eagerness which would have paralysed her mother’s entire sensory system, to imbibe the principles of logic, metaphysics, Greek, grammar and rhetoric, for a start.
The afternoon was a different matter. In the afternoon, painted, trousered, kaftáned, and perfumed to a disturbing degree (one of the Five Sensuous Offerings) Philippa followed Kiaya Khátún with reluctance through the threaded stairways and walks of the harem to a courtyard, and across the courtyard, where a fountain played and carp glinted red in a pool, to the rooms of Khourrém the Laughing One; now Roxelana Sultán.
The wife of Suleiman the Magnificent had a large chamber; bigger than any Philippa had yet seen. Its floors were of coloured mosaics, overlaid with a pattern of rugs and drenched with light from above, where the cupola, gilded within and without, was ringed with a fillet of windows. The walls were of tiles: green and orange and white, masked here and there by the velour of deep hanging rugs. Silver lamps hung on long silver laces from the ceiling carved in a fretting of stucco, and the embrasures all round the walls, where her jewelled ewer stood, and her books and her lute, were each framed in a lattice of cedarwood. A motif of tulips, half concealed by the coloured silk hangings, was inlaid, discreetly, in ivory within the dark wood of the door, and the backless throne on which Khourrém sat, wide as a bed, was padded with furs.
The small figure on the spread leopard-skins had none of the repose or the classical beauty of Güzel. Philippa saw a Roman nose, set in a pure oval face with a pursed mouth and plucked brow wreathed with shivering pendants. The jewelled silk gauze which draped her high headdress like a fragile pavilion fluttered and rolled as she turned her head, speaking in rapid Turkish to a negro page-boy behind her, and then to one of her mutes. Philippa knew how her lips were so rosy and her eyebrows so high and deliciously arched, but the round dark eyes on either side of that imperious nose were Khourrém’s own native beauty, and her speech was articulate and precise. The confidence of a middle-aged woman, who twelve years ago had simply left the Old Seraglio, a thing unheard of, with her slaves, her companions, her pages, her black and white eunuchs, and had joined her lord, here.
She ceased speaking and, at a sign from