Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [279]
Then, his face set, Gabriel turned. He looked at them all: Jerott, Archie, Míkál and finally Lymond himself, still standing very still by the throne. ‘Do you think it is finished?’ said Gabriel, in English. Then he added, ‘Bring them!’ curtly to the Chiausi, and, flanked by the eunuchs, walked down the steps of the Divan and over the court to where the leaves of the Gate of Felicity had swung quietly open. A few moments later, the four men followed him through.
Half-way through the inner courtyard Lymond, who had spoken to none of them, suddenly met Míkál’s eyes and said, ‘But why bring back the children?’
‘She ordered it,’ said Míkál. His eyes glittered with hidden excitement. He said, ‘Tell me of the Aga Morat?’
‘Oh, my God.… Another time,’ said Lymond. He was still, Jerott saw, completely steady … refreshed somehow, perhaps, as they moved from the Divan. Jerott said perversely, ‘Yes. Tell us about the Aga Morat. He formed an attachment for you, and you used him.’ It was strange to be able to speak of it, almost in jest. He stared at Míkál, wondering how far anyone was trusting him. ‘What did you use him for?’ said Jerott.
‘All the usual things,’ said Lymond evenly; and, walking ahead, stepped through the wide door of the selamlìk. Archie, catching Jerott’s abashed eye, took his arm grimly and walked him in after. Míkál followed.
Of her two identities, it was Roxelana the Ukrainian and not Khourrém the Laughing One who elected to hold her own tribunal that morning with every harness of power and magnificence owed to her as wife of Suleiman the Magnificent. For it, she chose the largest room in the selamlik: the room used by her husband in winter for his entertainments and his receptions, in which girls from the harem played and danced, and musicians from the outside world performed blindfolded on strange instruments, and poets, blindfolded, recited.
Today it was filled with silence: silence from the mutes and dwarves, the pages and the black and white eunuchs ringing the walls: silence from the immense dome with its ring of coloured glass windows and the speckled tesserae of glass and of gold within, blazoned with the words of the Prophet. The words of the Qur’ân, in gold and enamel, also fretted the cornice; but from there to the ground the walls were tiled in pure white, flowered with blossoms in blue, in cerulean and light and dark ultramarine, the inner petals embossed with a bright coral red, shining like satin. Rugs hung over the tiles, and delicate hangings of silver and taffeta, masked by the long hanging chains bearing lamps of wrought silver and crystal and gold, each fashioned and domed like a mosque, its hanging pendant tasselled with seed pearls and diamonds and each cut from an emerald six inches square.
There was little furniture: open wall cupboards of carved wood and ivory; a marble fountain softly playing against one wall; a few low tables in mother of pearl and cedarwood and tortoiseshell, and some round stools of brass, scattered by the great braziers on the deep carpeted floor. The windows looked on the Bosphorus, and against them a carpeted dais filled the whole width of the room and was divided from it by a low rail picked out in gold, broken by shallow steps in the centre. At right angles to this, on a smaller dais and under the carved canopy and turban of state, sat Roxelana Sultán.
The throne was a network of gold, linked with small gold devices and set thickly with turquoises, interspersed with gold lozenges covered with rubies and pearls. Seated high on her cushions, her feet on a footstool, Roxelana looked stately and small; her face lightly veiled under her headdress; her carnation skirts spread wide around her. She wore peacocks’ feathers, bound in gold thread and thrust in a socket of ivory, from which diamonds trembled over her brow. Jerott, all the levity of reaction struck heavily from him, stared at her numbly, only half aware of the Kislar Agha in his yellow