Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [305]
Perhaps she had seen Ottoman power at its height at this moment, in this city lying under its uneasy winter, awaiting the flowering season when the sharp lilac-pink of the Judas tree would cloud the gold of the cupolas, and the tulips bar the short grass in the Seraglio gardens, where the gazelles came to graze and later the soft wind would be filled with the smell of carnations.
Past Suleiman’s Mosque and the high walls of the Old Seraglio, with the house of Názik the nightingale-dealer at its foot, now shuttered and closed, the birds silent and gone. The covered market, the channelled chords of its commerce vibrating with sound: a bright-winged aviary like Názik’s of deep-throated men. The pigeons, before Beyazit’s Mosque, where another story-teller sat, telling the tale of the Forty Viziers, but not as the Meddáh used to tell it who had now joined the First Story-teller Suhâib Rûmi in Paradise, where the ground is pure wheaten flour mixed with musk and saffron, its stones being hyacinths and pearls, and of gold and silver its palaces. Or so the boy Ishiq said.
Ignorant of these things, Philippa followed Míkál until the donkey stopped before a stone house set in waste ground where a dog nosed in a courtyard full of sour rubble and weeds, and the door was fast locked.
Míkál tapped while she stood by the donkey; and presently, the warped door creaked open, and the frightened face of a negress, peering through, retreated to allow Míkál and Philippa to climb the steps and slip in. Then they walked down a passage and into a room full of people.
‘Enter, children of sloth,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘My God, I thought you were never coming. Míkál …?’
‘They are watching the house. You say there is only one boat? For nine people?’
Nine people. Philippa, pulling the veil wide-eyed from her face, saw with a leapfrogging heart that they were all there, Jerott and Marthe, Archie and Gaultier. A large old man with white hair whose extreme placidity struck an odd note in the feverish air of the room. And … Tippy!’ someone screamed, and flung himself into her arms.
‘Dear, dear,’ said Philippa, hugging him, weeping. ‘You can’t get rid of some people; no matter how much you try.’
‘Actually,’ said Lymond, ‘we’ve one boat and a raft. While we were in the Seraglio, Master Gilles has been busy.’
‘A raft?’ said Gaultier. He turned round, his fingers closing on air, his face ashen. ‘A raft? My God, the thieving old bastard.… He’s taken the treasure!’
The old man’s bushy eyebrows reared in his big face. ‘Quiet yourself, Pharisee. Turpe est Doctori, cum culpa redurgit ipsum. One set of thieves is enough. I have merely completed my inventory.’
Míkál was peering through a crack in the shutters. ‘More are coming. There is little cover, were one to shoot. There are no muskets?’
‘There are no muskets,’ said Lymond. ‘Don’t be blood-thirsty.… We have two vehicles. Suppose we employ them.’
It was not easy, climbing one by one down that vertical ladder into the small rocking boat at its foot. Jerott took the small raft, with Philippa and Kuzúm, while the other six crowded into the boat. Lymond, closing the cupboard and bestowing the trapdoor neatly up above, was the last. Then they were afloat in the great underground cavern, in the world of green water and dim drowning pillars, the roar of the fall in their ears.
To Archie and Lymond himself it was no great surprise, after Jerott’s description. Míkál clearly also knew what to expect. But to Philippa, holding Kuzúm still at her side, it was like the last mysterious station, dark, enchanted and cruel, of some terrible Odyssey. Ahead, the light of the boat slid between the black pillars and sank green into the waters, filled with flickering fish. Jerott, lightless, poled his silent way after until, distant from the thundering