Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [209]
Georges Gaultier, uncomfortable in fur-collared black, was uneasy about many things.… Marthe’s long absence, and the performance of that damned spinet. It had gone yesterday to the Seraglio, uncrated, touched up; erected, on the special litter made for it; and he had handed it into the gateway himself.
They said it was safe. Lymond had said that if anyone nicked off an emerald pimple it would be a God’s blessing. He had seen the gloves Lymond would be carrying today, and the matched sapphires set in his chain, with a diamond pendant the size of a crown.… He wondered again, furiously, where that fool of a girl had got to.
Plan of Constantinople drawn by Giovanni Vavassore about 1520.
Lymond was already awake, standing silently at the window in his trailing bed-gown, when the drumming began. In the Golden Horn, a porcelain mist rose like steam from a dish of bright liquid brass, blanching tone from the undulating skyline of the city over the water, a mosaic of olive and grey, the sun touching gold from its domes.
On the headland climbed the dark cypresses and the crowded roofs of the Seraglio; the Divan Tower, the minarets, the domes, the dentelé toothpicks of the flues. On the right, the twin minarets and the piled yellow whaleback of what had been St Sophia. The snail-domes of mosque upon mosque: Beyazit, Mohammed the Conqueror, Selim. The half-finished building of Sultan Suleiman himself.… For the True Believer, the ways to Paradise were legion. One built khans, mosques, hospitals, fountains. One repaired bridges, and gave bread to dogs, and bought and loosed singing birds from their cages. About caged children, the Prophet was less explicit.
The light was brightening. Francis Crawford turned away, abruptly, and began, with care, to dress.
Two hours after that, the Sultan’s golden caique came for them, with its eighty red-capped oarsmen; its prow a gilded feather curled round its cable; its curtained pavilion inlaid with mother-of-pearl, gold and tortoiseshell and with rubies and turquoises edging the exquisite marquetry of its roof. They embarked smoothly, in a living pattern, this time, of silver and satin and jewels, leaving the music and crowds on the waterfront and gliding out on the bright water, where the fishermen poled over, calling, and the carved stems of the merchantmen were crowded with faces.
The mist had gone. Half-way across, the Dauphiné, rowed out to midstream from the berth which was costing the French Crown twenty pounds daily, let off two volleys of small shot, and then two rounds of each of her guns, followed by an outburst of fanfares from her trumpets, her banners lifting in the first morning wind. On one of the hills someone was putting up kites: the small chequered shapes twitched and spiralled and floated, drawing the gaze to the sky. On the waterline below the seawall of the Seraglio one could also distinguish for the first time a jostling line of pale colour and dark beside the Seraglio quay. ‘The welcoming party, with horses,’ said d’Aramon. ‘The two Pashas will have silver staffs: the Kapijilar-Kiayasi, the Grand Chamberlain, and the Chiaus Pasha, the Chief of the Ushers. The rest are a guard of honour: thirty or forty. Two gifts here.’
‘And one for the helmsman,’ said Lymond. French-fashion, his white cap-feather dropped rakishly over one cheekbone. His face, underlit by the sun and the silver, was perfectly cool, and his short bright hair crisp, like a cat’s, in the damp. There had been an argument with the man Zitwitz about perfume, in which Lymond, acidly, had capitulated. (‘Many here