Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [233]
So it seemed. Philippa had copied the thing out, correcting the phrases with her heart hammering. The eunuch might read English, although he could not write it: she dared not alter the sense. But she could and did mark it, when no one was looking, with a small star of David close to the seal.
It was done and she was kneeling, awaiting dismissal, when Khourrém Sultán opened the casket and ran through her hands, for the last time, the tespi in diamonds it had contained. Staring at it, Philippa did not hear the words of dismissal. When they were repeated, she looked up at her mistress with her face aghast, as if she had witnessed an accident; and her eyes full of shocked tears. Then she bowed herself out of the room and, stumbling through the harem, curled on her own cushions and cried.
As Lymond had once had cause to observe, Ishiq, the lad who guided the blind Meddáh, took good care of his master.
Holding the story-teller’s purse, with its small store of aspers, he charmed the ferryman at Tapano to take them both over the Golden Horn for a canto of Yúnus the illiterate, the mirror of whose heart, as they said, was undulled by the turbidity of loopings and lines. Once over, he soon established a circuit, as he often had before, with other masters: the courtyard of Ayasofya and the market under the Hippodrome; the covered bazaar and the gardens of the Beyazit Mozque.
They did well. Despite his grey hair, the Meddáh’s speaking voice was sweet and untroubled; and he told the stories people liked best to hear, such as the one of the Persian khoja who played a trick upon a Baghdad khoja and his son, as well as the heroic romances, and tales of his own, shaped to his company. They were given meat and yoghourt and sweet water to drink, and slept most nights on straw: on the third day they were bidden to perform at a wedding, and on the fourth they gave of their art at a circumcision ritual and banquet.
These Ishiq enjoyed. But they were tiring and noisy for a man in ill health, and sometimes Ishiq’s arm ached from guiding his master and tending him when the day’s work was done. Best then he liked the days in the Beyazit garden, with the nightingale-dealer’s birds singing under the walls of the Old Seraglio, even in winter; when one of the children would steal out over the waste ground and stand at the edge of the brazier, listening, until the marvellous tale ended, and Ishiq went round, collecting aspers and bread in his greasy cap, and those who did not want to disperse would gather round the Meddáh, asking for more.
He was kind to the children, perhaps knowing that the black folds round his eyes frightened them. For them he told short, strange stories in which a child always triumphed, even over the great Cham himself, and to the small one from the nightingale shop he was always gentle, talking slowly and clearly, until the boy would stand almost touching, at his knee. Then he would run away.
That day the Meddáh was very tired. It was cold. Although the coarse brown robe he wore was stiff and thick, it was worn, and the bands of fur round the hem and yoke and wide sleeves were bald and glazing with age. When a slender man, well but quietly dressed, called Ishiq over and, after commending his master, offered them both warm food and a bed for the night Ishiq did not hesitate, but listened to the directions given him; and so soon as the crowd was dispersed, he tugged the Meddáh’s worn sleeve, and helping him to his feet, began to guide him as he had been instructed: up over the crown of the hill and down the twisting lanes on its slopes to the north-west, until they came to the long, double-arched line of the aqueduct of Valens, and the lane of rough-timbered houses beside