Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [230]
Onophrion flinched. ‘Forgive me. I believed I had told you. On resigning, His Excellency left the Embassy quietly. We have not heard from him since.’
‘I think,’ said Jerott, ‘it is perhaps time we did something about that. Would you kindly inform M. Chesnau that we and M. Gilles are all here, and have M. Gaultier told that his niece has arrived? He should perhaps know,’ said Jerott acidly, ‘that he has bought a house half-way between the Bazaar and the Hippodrome, and that M. Gilles is going to stay with him. With his ichneumon.’
Despite his thinness and pallor, and the dark rings which came so easily under his eyes, the child called Khaireddin grew daily more handsome; flat-backed and blue-eyed, with arched feet and small, well-made hands, and yellow hair curling like silk. His manners were pretty, because he was beaten daily, where it would not show, when he made a mistake; nor was he allowed to taste his broth, his rice, his bread and sesame oil until he had recited the words he did not understand and practised the other things he had to do.
It was better than the boat filled with sponges, for there the grown-ups had forgotten to feed him at all, and had flung him off when he tried to beg, frightened and smiling, in the only way he knew how. He seemed to remember when it was better still, on a long, long journey inside a boat, when he ate a lot, and always seemed to be sleepy, and had no lessons at all. But that was a long time ago.
Názik, the nightingale-dealer, saw that all his charges were watered and fed, and kept in good looks. Alone among the bird merchants and fowlers of Constantinople he had a house, instead of dwelling in gardens and heaths, his nets and lime-sticks spread; his falcons and gled-kites taking partridge and woodcock and duck to fill his customers’ pots and to feather their arrows.
Built of timber, secure under the arched walls of the Beyazit Mosque, the house was long and narrow, with an upper storey for his own private purposes, and behind, a netted enclosure for the free-flying birds. His talking birds he kept separately, and his cages, and his children.
Of the last, Khaireddin was perhaps the most amenable: he was certainly the youngest by far, and the source of a large part of his master’s income. Thinking of the future sometimes, Názik wondered if the great lord whose money he was receiving would one day die, and the child be left on his hands. Once the boy was older and more skilful, and free of the infant ways which made him so hard to keep clean, no matter how often he was shouted at, he could be trained to bring in a fortune.
There was a cage, in onyx and pearl, which Názik longed to buy for him. He had already shown him the other, the iron one which could be heated on charcoal, into which he put boys who disobeyed. In fact he had used it only once, on a young Jew who had hacked off a customer’s hand. The noise had upset the nightingales.
His orders were never to let the boy out of his sight, nor far from the shop. Within those limits, he could use him as he pleased, so long as his life was not endangered. For that amount of money, no less than the threat which came with it, Názik would have kept the boy under lock and key, had he proved wild or unruly. But he was too young to be cunning, and too weakly willing to be troublesome, except out of stupidity. Názik had found him once touching the bright, fruit-laden ships in the stalls of the fruit merchants, and twice with the story-teller. In each case he had let him come home unmolested. Allow him to be seen, his instructions had said. His shop was watched, he knew, to see if they were carried out.
About the reasons for it all, Názik felt no curiosity. There was no limit, he knew already, to the whims of mankind.
In the Seraglio of Topkapi, the child called Kuzucuyum was divested of his leaf-green silk tunic and trousers and whipped, as Gabriel promised. It is fair perhaps to say that Roxelana Sultán had not expected it, or she would not have kept Philippa,