Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [264]
As Archie had said, there was a rope hanging, neatly looped round a column. She was supple and strong, for a girl, and not all that many months distant from boisterous games with the stable-boys over Kate’s farm-building roofs. She let herself down and ran like a cockroach for the back of the largest cage, while the mahout pulled down the rope.
Kuzúm was there already, where he had been asleep since she had left the garden carrying her empty cloak wrapped round a bolster. Then Archie joined them, his hand on her hair. ‘Good lass. Are ye frightened?’
‘I think so.’ Philippa, incurably honest.
‘It’s natural. Well, ye’ve no call to fear. That beast won’t wake up for eight hours, if that, and your wee boy maybe longer. I’ve given him a terrible dose, but it was the only way to be sure.’
‘I know. Archie, we’d better get in.’
‘Aye.’ He opened the back of the cage. She had thought about it, but she hadn’t expected the leopard to be so large, or so heavy, or so warm. He lay on two solid feet of clean straw, with more banked at the back, and it was there that Archie made a small hollow and laid in the sleeping Kuzúm, a fine net bound lightly over his face. Pnilippa fished in her sleeve and pulled out another. Straw made you sneeze, Archie said. Try to minimize all the risks.
It was more difficult to hide a fully dressed girl, however willing and thin. She was half under the leopard to end with, its sleeping weight on her legs as if a great wolfhound had chosen to slumber beside her. Except that if this one woke, it could tear her throat out with a single turn of its head. ‘You’ve got pluck,’ Archie said. He seemed reluctant to close the cage finally: standing, door in hand, he looked again at the leopard, and the little he could see of the girl, her brown hair mixed with the straw and already submerging. ‘You’ll need to trust me; but that you can do. I could put my mother in there, if she wasna stone deid already, and she’d come to no harm.’
‘I’ve taken the leet oath, Archie,’ said Philippa, her voice shaking slightly. Ye shall be buxom and obedient to all justices in all things that they shall lawfully command you. Archie, I’ll always be buxom to you.’
‘And cheeky,’ said Archie grinning. ‘Get your head down. There’s a cart and a driver due here in a minute.… I think I’ll fling a wee something over the cage. We don’t want poor Victoria upset by the light and the noises.’
Half an hour later, with Archie walking solicitously at its side and one of the stable-boys cracking the whip over the mule-train, the cage with Victoria rumbled out of the Gate of the Dead, which had other and less picturesque uses, and, having passed the scrutiny of the heavy Janissary guard, rolled out and into the street, where it made its laborious way up and down the painful contours of the Abode of Felicity to Constantine’s Palace.
The Head Keeper also, on Archie’s solicitous insistence, was cleansing his soul in Aya Sofia. The leopard, still sleeping, was detached and placed in a side yard, where there awaited already fully loaded a fine cartload of dung.
‘Oh no!’ said Philippa, warned by the smell. She put out her head and, seeing a sudden, breathtaking vision of marble pillars and archways, of gardens and houses and even, distantly, streets and chimneys and trees, gave a sudden hysterical gasp.
‘Aye: you’re out,’ said Archie. ‘Now ye have my apologies for the next bit, but it’ll be worth it, as ye might say, in the end. I’ve left a clean bit at the back end of the cart. If ye can slip out of the cage and up this side—I’ll give ye