Reign of the Favored Women (2 page)

Plump before, now inactivity and contentment made her fat.

To me Esmikhan was as dear as ever, but then, I had been forcibly removed from the realm where physicality was important. Huge breasts dominated her entire body. She nursed the child herself for four full years, and then it was Gul Ruh, teased by other youngsters for being a baby, who shook her head and said, “No, thank you, Mama,” of her own accord.

This saucy weaning was as yet far in the future, however, one day of her daughter’s first spring. The women of the imperial palace had invited a jeweler to display her wares, and my lady came, too. More than the jewels, she had wanted to show Baby Gul Ruh the gazelle fawns that always enlivened the Sultan’s gardens at that time of year. Esmikhan caught my gaze over the child’s delight, and the gentle love I read in my lady’s round, gazelle-brown eyes was delight enough for me.

The day was so warm and bright however that we soon retreated inside with the rest of the harem as if the heat of summer were already upon us. Here, behind the bastion of the walls and playing fountains, we sank into the exquisite artifice that was harem reality.

Turkish women called their procurers Kira. Usually Jewish, always female, these were the wives or daughters of merchants who entered the harems to peddle their families’ goods where men would not be allowed. This particular jeweler’s wife was Esperanza Malchi. Her fathers had been expelled from Spain almost eighty years before, in 1492 as Christians tell the years, and had spent some years in Venice before finally ending their wanderings in Constantinople’s jewelry
suq
.

And that particular day, as the culmination of her show, Esperanza Malchi produced a ruby necklace so magnificent it quite made the head reel.

“Come, ladies,” she replied to the “oohs and ahs” with a purr that matched her black-cat features. “To truly appreciate the unique qualities of the major gem, you must view it in the light. Come to the window, if you please.”

As if she were Moses and they the liberated Israelites, the Kira led all the women to the advantage of a high window on the other side of the room. Only my lady, her daughter, and I remained behind because Esmikhan had decided—wisely, I thought—that the pleasure of seeing a ruby in sunlight was not worth the trouble of getting up and moving to the window.

Because my lady was a married woman, not a slave, and a daughter of the Sultan besides, with an income of her own, the Kira had placed the display case right at her elbow, the better to tempt her. Most of the others could only look and sigh. Now, while they were all busy at the window, Esmikhan idly ran her fingers through the box’s contents: the ransom of any European prince. But I think my lady fingered the gems from boredom.

If Esmikhan did look with interest, it was to consider trinkets for her daughter, who, at almost seven months old, lay nestled against her expansive breast. Esmikhan plucked out a pair of pendant earrings and held them up to the baby’s ears: Was it too early to pierce that petal-like flesh?

I was more struck by the look of the father in the child. Remarkable, I mused, how the sunburnt features of a cavalry officer remolded themselves in plump pink baby skin. Surely my lady thought of her lover every time she looked at her daughter. Grief, loss, and guilt tainted each such thought, for Gul Ruh was not the Pasha’s legitimate child. But only my lady and I must ever know that secret.

I sometimes wished I’d stopped the clandestine exchange of letters and gifts between the two lovers sooner—or more effectively. Those wordless missives of flowers and leaves that only the love-blind could read, how dangerous if discovered. And sometimes I knew the stab of my own jealousy, that the dashing Ferhad Pasha offered my lady something I could not. This wasn’t the case with Sokolli Pasha, the old grey Grand Vizier to whom she was legitimately married.

I was never sorry I’d broken the master’s trust to allow the single night’s indiscretion. It had saved my lady from self-destructive heartbreak. It had produced this lovely dear rose to fill her childless arms. And yet, I couldn’t be easy with the memory, nor with people’s comments, given innocently enough, that “There’s nothing of the Vizier in her, is there?” The very hint of adultery could not go well for a great man’s wife in this land: even a Sultan’s daughter could not hope to escape the death sentence if the charge were ever proven. Never mind how it would go for the eunuch entrusted with guarding her virtue. I tried, therefore, to shut the thought out of my mind.

Gul Ruh grabbed at the earrings, so my lady put them back, cooing all the while, and slipped a plain gold bangle on the fat little wrist instead. The child instantly took the bangle off and began to teethe on it. With the little hands and mouth safely occupied, Esmikhan introduced her daughter’s eyes to the intricacies of a locket she fished out of the velvet-lined box. I noticed only briefly that the mosaic work above the clasp was Venetian. Then I closed my mind to all but the sense of contentment in the baby prattle that followed.

“I don’t know what that is, sweetheart,” was the next thing I was aware of my lady saying.

I idly glanced over to see what had caught her and the baby’s attention. Esmikhan had found a scrap of paper concealed inside the locket. She opened the paper, looked at both sides, then shrugged and folded it again.

“My very sweet mountain stream, I think it is nothing. Only scribbling. Or it is a magic spell which, I pray Allah, you may never have need of.”

Esmikhan quickly snapped the paper back in the locket lest uninitiated use of such magic cause bad luck. But before she had time to return the locket to the box, it was snatched a little too roughly from her—by the Kira.

“I’m sorry, most gracious Esmikhan Sultan,” Esperanza Malchi said. “This particular piece is not for sale.”

“I was only curious about what was inside...”

“It is nothing,” the Kira said, and put the locket, instead of back into the box, into her bosom.

“There, see, I told you, honey blossom. It is nothing.” These words gave the impression the world is really good, kind, and free from all intrigue. My lady lied.

The rest of the women had followed the Kira back to the divan and took up their places again. The ruby necklace, I discovered, had found its way around Safiye’s neck.

I was not surprised. How to describe Safiye to those who never saw her? Lover to my lady’s brother. Prince Murad, heir to the Ottoman throne. Mother of his only son to date, Muhammed, who was three years old. This mundane recital of functions falls far short. That she was the most beautiful woman in the world, even seven years after I first fell under her spell in a convent garden in Venice, I was not alone in believing. Brown eyes as cool as autumn leaves, a promiscuity of golden hair, skin as flawless and unchanging as marble. Tall and wallow, she had movements like a ribald song.

And beneath these features lay a soul with perfections of its own. Perfect in ambition, perfectly unflinching of either love or mercy to gain its own ends. Like demon-cold at midnight, she took the breath away.

The exorcism I had undergone to break her spell over me was hardly something I would recommend to the rest of her victims. What the tumble from Venetian seaman to harem eunuch had left me, I’d only just begun to call a life again.

Suffice it to say that Safiye—whom I’d once known as Sofia Baffo—got everything she wanted. My purpose was simply to see that what she got cost nothing more of me, nor more of those souls who, in spite of everything, had become so dear to me.

As far as I was concerned, Safiye could have the Kira’s ruby necklace. It sat against the white flesh of her neck as if it had seeped there from the inside, as if alabaster could really bleed.

“Send the bill to Prince Murad, Magnesia,” Safiye said, admiring herself in a mirror, “for I shall have this.”

“How dare you!” Nur Banu was livid.

Nur Banu had been Sultan Selim’s lover—once upon a time—and had produced Murad, his first-born son. As such, she was nominal head of the imperial harem. Her four hundred ghrush had bought the golden-haired Venetian beauty for her son’s bed. Safiye, of course, had long ago outstripped the older woman’s tutelage. Nur Banu was the only one who still attempted to contain the natural force she’d unwittingly loosed upon the world.

“How dare you demand such things of my son?” Nur Banu asked. “You refused to spend more than three months with him this winter. And half that time you were on the road.”

Safiye smoothed the pearl-button closure of her yelek across her flat abdomen: the unconscious gesture I knew from my lady when she was with child. Was it possible Safiye had an additional reason to be smug about her trip to Magnesia?

She’d come through the birth of little Muhammed with beauty and power unscathed, the latter enhanced here in the East in ways she had not quite appreciated before. If one prince was a good thing, two must be twice as good. So such a condition was possible, even though my lady had no rumor of it yet and the tight, willowy figure didn’t show.

I reminded myself I was a eunuch, with but abbreviated knowledge of such things. I returned my attention to the matter at hand.

Nur Banu was firing these words at her opponent: “I wonder my son doesn’t sell you and spare himself considerable expense.”

“He cannot sell the mother of his son.” Did only my ears hear the echo in Safiye’s voice that indicated, perhaps, two sons?

“Any more than he will marry her.”

“But forgive me, gracious lady.” Safiye’s contrition was obviously a mockery. “Had I known you admired this necklace so much, I never would have presumed to speak for it first. Though Allah knows why it interests you. Against your dark and blotchy skin it would be lost. But—very well—each one is allowed her own taste.” She reached behind her lovely neck for the clasp. “Please, Kira, send the bill to the Sultan himself and say, ‘For his favorite.’ “

This was followed by an awkward silence, for everyone, including the Kira, knew that whoever Selim’s present favorite was—and it was as likely to be a boy he bought rubies for as a girl—it was not Nur Banu. The mother of his eldest son, she had her food and household expenses paid for, but any extravagance was out of the question.

Dramatically, in the silence, Safiye slipped her hands forward and to her lap. The silence persisted. Safiye smiled. The insults were glossed like cheap plating on tinware. The rubies stayed on Safiye’s neck.

Later, after we’d made our farewells, my lady pulled me close and whispered, “There was something written on that paper in the locket.”

“Something?”

“I’ve been able to think of nothing else since I saw it.”

“A Koranic verse, perhaps, to ward off the evil eye?”

“No, Abdullah. I have heard my fellow believers call Christian letters flowers because they cannot recognize them as writing. But you have opened my eyes to much, perhaps too much, since you taught me to read Dante.”

“The note was in Italian?”

“Venetian,
ustadh
,” she teased with pretended formality.

I didn’t need to ask whose hand. “What did she say?”

“Only two words.
Tomorrow
. And
afternoon
.”

“That was all it said?”

My lady nodded. “I fear I have much to learn in your language. I cannot fathom sense from just two words.”

“No better than I,” I said.

That was all the attention my lady chose to give to the matter, turning now to the ever-new delight of her daughter once she had placed the information in my hands.

So I was left alone to mull the message over. My mind raced. Close in the Kira’s bosom, then, these two words were making their way out of the harem and to—where? I couldn’t unravel that end of it, so I retreated to the other end again.

Only one hand could have written those words. I might have seen the feathery hand myself and recognized it as the same that had scribbled “Si” in the stateroom aboard my dearly departed uncle’s galley so long ago. Or from a love note I’d intercepted even before that on a fateful winter’s night in Venice. Yes, only one writer, but there were thousands of possible recipients in Constantinople alone. And what, exactly, did those words mean?

Assuming no clandestine meeting could take place in the harem, the next afternoon I wandered on the off chance into the suq where the Kira and her husband had their shop.

The corbeled roof of Constantinople’s Great Bazaar palled the shops with gloom. Every merchant gave his most dazzling wares place of pride beneath his open grille. Here the goods astonished the alley’s steep inchne between one bulging corner and the murk of the next. But in that light and in such quantities, gold and brass were revealed as yellow, cheap, and tarnished things compared to natural air and illumination.

And when I spied Safiye’s eunuch Ghazanfer walking down the same street at the same time with my same pretended nonchalance, I knew it could not be coincidence. I dove into the shop next door to the Jews’ and waited for him to pass.

“Yes, please?” The shopkeeper came forward to greet me with a bow.

“Uh—” I stammered clumsily, unsure of how to respond.

In that moment, I happened to look up on the man’s wall and see a highly polished brass vase. It was set at such an angle that, reflected in it, I could see a good fifty paces up the street in the other direction. And whom should I see, slowly, coincidentally, making his way down the street, around the belly of the vase, but Andrea Barbarigo, the young Venetian attaché.

“This I simply must hear!” I exclaimed aloud and then turned instantly to the shopkeeper. “Has your shop a loft upstairs?”

“Yes,” the man replied, but almost with a question. I didn’t want to see any of his brass lavers or fine, encrusted goblets?

“Does it communicate with the shop next door?”

A slight smile came to his thin lips. I was not the first who had ever asked him that, but I had no time to demand particulars. “Yes,” he said, smiling. “There used to be a door, actually, but—”