Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [269]
They came after him, shouting. Someone stepped in his way and he knocked him over: there was a shriek and a clatter and an appalling stench of cheap scent, followed as the Janissaries came up with a good deal more stumbling and some half-muffled grunts. It had been a pedlar’s pack, he concluded; possibly even with pins in it. The contents of the pack stayed behind, but the contents of the spilled flask continued redolent as Lymond, running quickly and easily, led them up street after street to the biggest congested area he could think of: the covered bazaar.
It was open because of the festival: lane upon small twisting lane of low buildings of clay or of wood: three-sided boxes within which the merchants and craftsmen of Stamboul made and vended their goods, for Allah had declared trade (by men) to be lawful, though usury was prohibited. Now torches smoked in their sockets outside all the booth doorways, and the smell of tallow fat rose to the awnings which closed out the sky, mixed with the sharper reek of geranium from Gabriel’s Janissaries. With only a matter of yards between them and their quarry they plunged into the first smoky alley to find their feet treading on sawdust and their way barred by a puzzled man in a round cap and apron, a low wooden bench strapped broadside-on to his head. He turned this way and that, bewildered, as the Janissaries danced threatening before him, and finally revolved where he stood, admitting three or four, it was true, but felling three or four others as well. Behind him, someone had upset in passing a stack of small stools which rolled and oscillated on the uneven ground as the pursuers, stumbling and jumping, flung themselves after their vanishing victim.
In the next lane they were quilting: inoffensive craftsmen seated crosslegged with their curved needles and rolls of bright silk, the coarse sacks of cotton wool open beside them. Lymond darted through, smooth as an auk under water, and the air was dappled and dancing with cotton: the Janissaries ran full tilt into a blizzard of it, settling into their eyes and their noses, convulsing them with sneezes as they reeled on through empty sacks and furious quilters. ‘Opus ptumarium,’ someone said. They followed the voice.
They followed it through bright rolling copperware and the upturned vats of the cloth-dyers, the wooden blocks printing their robes with small elegant flowers in bright colours as they slipped and slid in the pigment. They stepped moaning on bagpipes and were pierced with gazelle horns in the street of the knifehandle-makers; they slithered in linseed in the place of the oil- and soap-merchants and in the lane of the pastrycooks waded through a glue-field of dough scuttled in trayloads on its way between housewife and ovens.
It became a game in the thronged alleys; a game played in rough mime with much shouting and laughter by men of mixed races; who carried along for the length of a street and then dropped back to allow new faces to range alongside, pilfering, calling; grimly savouring the fun. No one laid a hand on the Janissaries; no one would dare. Until they came too close, and Lymond reached the place where daggers and scimitars were cheaply damascened, and furnished with sheaths of glass jewels. He took a handful of small knives in passing, and turning, studied and threw.
He killed one Janissary and wounded two others. If it was a game, it was one invented by a harsh and mischievous brain: a fertile brain which brought its owner finally out into the fairground before the Beyazit Mosque, pursuit now failing and farther behind, There,
Lymond threaded his way quickly through the performers, upsetting the man walking barefoot on scimitars and cannoning into another who was standing, his brow lined, transferring a three-hundred-pound vertical galley mast with