Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [220]
They stood silent; slot upon slot of deep colour and quick shifting fragrance: the White Eunuchs in bright taffeta coats and loose trousers and slippers; the hundred dwarves, sullen and scimitared; grotesque in gold satin and squirrel fur. The Imams, in crimson. The two hundred Imperial Pages, in tunics of cloth of gold to the knee, their sashes of bright coloured silk; their boots of red Spanish leather, and the long locks of hair curling, under the cloth-of-gold caps, from the shaven heads of the Sultan’s own household. And the deaf mutes, their stiff elaborate hats in violet velvet, their robes of cloth of gold flashing as their hands moved: the only human beings in all that magnificent courtyard allowed, through affliction, to talk.
The kiosk of Suleiman the Magnificent was three-sided, its marble sides inlaid with jet and porphyry and jasper and arched with legends in silver; its coloured windows laced with wrought gold. Inside, over all was the deep Indian yellow of leaf gold in shadow. Hangings of silver tissue, dimly sparkling on silver gilt columns; an icy crust of carved stucco; an enamelled glint of white and emerald tiling; a ceiling deeply inlaid and gilded, supporting a crystal-paned lantern of silver, its rim set with turquoise and opal.
From the open, third side, a carpet of embroidered carnation satin led to a low dais, whose own carpet was worked in silver, turquoises and orient pearls. On it sat enthroned the master of all this magnificence: Suleiman, by the grace of God King of Kings, Sovereign of Sovereigns, most high Emperor of Byzantium and Trebizond; most mighty King of Persia, Arabia, Syria and Egypt; Prince of Mecca and Aleppo; possessor of Jerusalem: Sultan Suleiman Khan, the Shadow of God upon Earth.
He wore cloth of gold, figured with deep, crimson velvet and edged, fluting on fluting, with a white fur pinned and studded with rubies. Rubies burned from the scimitar hung at his side, and in the cluster of pigeon’s-egg jewels set in gold which held the peacock plumes in his white turban and clasped the enchained jewels which lay swagged in its folds.
The face was aquiline, bearded and dark. Not the face of a happy man; but a face of authority, thinned by indifferent health. More than thirty years Emperor, Suleiman, now nearing sixty, belonged to the age of England’s Henry VIII and the first King Francis of France: the age of magnificent despotism and supreme theological rule. He sat, a shadowy figure within his glorious casket, as still as the cipher; the symbol, which for this occasion was all he was expected to be.
Behind the cloth of gold and the diamonds and the blank face of ceremony was a living, powerful emperor. Following the Kapi Agha and his successor to take his place, with his fellows, under the arcade opposite the wide throne-room door, M. d’Aramon wondered what hope Francis Crawford could sustain now of disrupting that sovereign calm.
Standing still at the head of the gentlemen of his suite, Lymond’s face was unreadable above the stiff magnificence of his gown, black fur upon white, each lattice pinned with an ermine tail. Breathless under the weight of his own brocade, d’Aramon could guess at the malice behind the costly gesture, and admire the self-command which could ignore it. Then there was a movement behind them, through the arch of the Gateway of Felicity, and two by two, as they waited, the Ambassador’s pages filed into the court, and pacing slowly to the Sultan’s kiosk, displayed to their recipient the gifts of the Most Christian Monarch of France.
To d’Aramon it was familiar. In so many countries had he stood and watched the wealth of his master lavished, like this, upon some petty king, some heretic figurehead: the bales of lawn and velvet and brocade; the vessels; the swords in their jewelled velvet sheaths; the furs and chains and belts and