The Sultan's Daughter (13 page)

“No. No, my love, I believe you.”

But if this mosque was being built to petition the One who could give the prince a son—well, Allah’s will had nothing to do with it. The great Muradiye mosque and its complex of pious and charitable buildings was, in fact, built to no one else’s honor but her own.

Far off to the west, white clouds marked the horizon where, although she couldn’t see it, Safiye knew the Mediterranean lay. The clouds swelled and clustered—like the ripening grapes on the vines they’d passed in the valleys below. But for the sky, this was just practice. It would be a month, probably, before such a sky actually ripened, full of white wine, before it marshaled its drunken troops to march inland with the season’s first rain. For the moment, most of the vault was un-veined lapis lazuli, too rich, too weighty, too parched for use, or for the use of anything under it.

The land in all directions panted under waves of heat, reflecting off that sky and yearning towards harvest, towards the olive press and the satisfied smell of fresh-filled granaries. Safiye looked over it all to the clouds, thought
Mediterranean
, thought beyond, to Constantinople, then had to force her thoughts back to the present. Magnesia wasn’t Constantinople, but it was a step in the right direction. She must perform this stint well, no matter how impatient she grew, in order to earn the next one.

Ghazanfer had set up a lovely little spot in the shade with cushions, rugs, and a repast of stuffed grape leaves; sliced cucumbers in salted, vinegared olive oil, flecked with sweet basil and pepper; napkin-wrapped flat bread, still warm and puffing at the black blisters; honeyed yogurt; fresh peaches to close. It was too hot to eat. Mostly Safiye concentrated on the pomegranate sherbet, tanged with lemon. No matter how much she drank, it still crunched with ice. How Ghazanfer managed that on such a hot day did not concern her.

That there was enough of everything for two was a little more disconcerting. The fluff of the lining velvet still itched on her sweating skin, but Safiye knew there would be no return to the stifling sedan after this rest. Thankfully, Magnesia, its prying eyes, its tattling tongues, was far enough behind them; it would be horses from now on. Murad had gone to see to the horses and then sent word back through Ghazanfer that the officers of the corps had detained him. He could not refuse their invitation to eat with them.

From time to time she could hear their coughs of rough male laughter carried around the intervening outcrops of limestone. She longed to overhear what sparked those flashes of merriment, the solid kindling and fuel beneath, almost as much as she wished to be back in Constantinople where the magnificent heart of the empire beat.

But the longer she sat where Ghazanfer had set her, the quiet, rustic pageant curling about her feet distracted her more and more. At first she thought the eunuch’s sole purpose in placing her here was the shade. She certainly had to crane her neck to see those clouds over the Mediterranean and she was maddeningly far from Murad and the officers.

But then Ghazanfer presented her with a handful of flowers he’d plucked from the wayside: asters, mostly, the lavender blossoms tiny, pale, dusty, brittle, weedy with drought. And then she realized that the spot gave her an excellent view of a shady grotto let into the steep side of the hill. A small stream trickled from the rock here, pale and thin as her heat-bleached flowers.

And within the grotto was a white stone the size and shape of a woman.

Safiye shifted from one end of the rugs that bounded her space to the other. No matter at what angle she sat, Safiye could not escape the impression that this was a real woman, her hair veiled, standing rigid with her arms pressing to her breast in a tight, hopeless grief. The fact that the source of the little stream was out of the rock near the woman’s head and that it pursued its ageless trickle across her hardened person—this exaggerated the impression of sorrow.

The hand and chisel of man had aided the natural form of the stone, roughed in a waist, the edge of an arm, a chin. This artifice was much older than the Greek and Roman sculptures she had seen, cruder—but this made it all the more compelling in a wild, barbaric sort of way. The individual moment of beauty captured by the classical style was superseded here by mere suggestion that encompassed every woman, indeed, the universe itself in a shapeless, basic anonymity.

“Niobe,” Ghazanfer said. “All tears.”

At first Safiye didn’t ask for any more explanation, no more than she asked her attendant how he happened to know this or how he kept the sherbet icy. She was used to giving explanations, not asking for them. But the longer she sat before this stage she had the distinct impression her eunuch had set for her, the more compelling it became, the harder to pretend omniscience.

Safiye was not alone in her attraction to the site. A stream of local women as thin but as steady as the fountain on the stone female’s face found its way to the primitive shrine.

“Greeks?” was the first thing she asked.

Ghazanfer’s sugar-cone turban nodded.

The twinge of regret she felt at this reply surprised her. She had suspected this would be the answer: most peasants in the neighborhood kept their ancient faith. But now she knew for a fact that she would not be able to speak to her associates at this revered spot. Whereas Greek men might learn enough Turkish to make their way in a man’s world, their women steadfastly spoke nothing but their ancient mother tongue. She’d never regretted her inability to speak to Greek women before. And she had seen them, standing on their balconies or low tile roofs, placidly dropping their spinning whorls into the courtyards below to get the right tension in their wool. Or—particularly the old ones—sitting on their doorsteps, knitting their weatherproof stockings, the traditional patterns inside out on five hooked needles, and crooning to the small children about their feet.

Greek women were not as secluded as Muslim women, but she didn’t envy them. This was doubtless because they were poorer, not from any lack of desire for the status of seclusion. And there was nothing like a sedan chair accompanied by janissaries—the conquerors’ army—to send them scurrying.

But suddenly, here in the grotto’s shade, Safiye wished for communication.

Although some of the visiting women wore the striped skirts, white with deep blue or red, traditional to the race, most were widows. Like crows they flocked, every garment down to underlinen and pocket handkerchiefs having been sent to the dyer’s on that fateful day and returned a unanimous black.

What have I to do with those on whom heaven has thus turned its back?
is what her usual reaction to widows might have been.
Whose lives are, for all intents and purposes, over?

But for the first time she saw them as individuals and saw that not every petitioner was irredeemably old. A woman could be hardly more than a girl, and pretty, too, when an awe-full heaven—St. Agnes preserve us!—might plunge her into black and send her praying to springs and rocks for her solace.

Many of the petitioners brought offerings. Some brought only flowers—asters like hers—and left them in little lavender clouds at the impassive stone’s feet. Copper trays of boiled wheat were more popular. Even cold from a long hike on some black-swathed head, the dish exuded an earthy fragrance. And when the covering kerchiefs were removed, Safiye could see that designs of leaves, flowers, and inscriptions in colored sugar, almonds, basil, cinnamon, sesame seed, raisins, and dried figs ornamented the tops of these vulgar heaps.

“A dish for the dead,” Ghazanfer said. “It harks back to Mother Ceres and Persephone, her child.”

Mostly the petitioners ate the grain themselves with one or two friends and a skin of wine, quite joyfully al fresco, then returned with the copper tray, empty, balanced on their heads as they had come.

But an ancient woman begging among them saw to it that there were no leftovers.
She is much like the rock itself,
Safiye thought, though her clothes, in rags, did not have the luxury of a single color. Inevitably, this mendicant shuffled her way with an incomprehensible, singsong whine and a head sunken into her shoulders in a caricature of humility to the edge of the royal rugs. Then Safiye surprised herself by handing those wizened hands all the
dolmas
and gesturing that the old woman should keep the platter, too. Giving away a large part of her meal was the only way Safiye could think of to achieve the communication she craved.

The woman pulled the gift to her, bowed once, getting her clown-colored bodice in the dish’s oil, muttered blessings as in- comprehensible and fretful as the begging, then scurried off like a mouse to her den with a prize.

“Lady—”

Safiye started from the abnormal glow charity gave her, something like eating too much spicy food. The usually silent giant beside her had sucked in his breath with unmistakable horror.

“Ghazanfer, my lion? What is it? You feel there is something wrong with my largess?”

“Not at all, lady.” The khadim was tight-lipped.

“Well? What is it?”

“Only this charity.”

“Explain yourself.”

“Don’t you believe, lady, that ill fortune will follow a gift that goes directly from your table to the beggar’s hands? Didn’t you see how careful the other donors were to set the old woman’s portion in a neutral place for her first?” Such a long speech spoke to the earnestness of the eunuch’s words. “You don’t believe—or fear—you may become as destitute as she?”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing. No, I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it. And I order you not to believe it as well.”

“
Mashallah
.” Ghazanfer bowed in compliance.

But Safiye didn’t like the panic which stung her own eyes as she watched, helpless, her disappearing tray.

She breathed once or twice, deeply, until she convinced herself that this was only a foolish superstition of her eunuch. He was so solicitous of her that he sometimes went too far; she would have to keep the head of reason between them. When they cut a lad, they often left him a child in more ways than one.

But in spite of such wisdom, she couldn’t shake herself free of the spell of the place, a spell of which she was quite certain Ghazanfer wasn’t totally innocent. She had to ask: “Ghazanfer?”

“Lady?”

“Who is she?”

“An old woman Allah has blessed with poverty. I know not, lady.”

“Not the beggar. I mean the stone.”

“Ah. Niobe.”

“Niobe.” Yes, he’d said so earlier. Safiye felt she should know the name without the eunuch’s help, from some fresco imitating the classical in some rich relative’s entry hall at home. But at the moment she couldn’t remember and hoped Ghazanfer would answer her implied question without her having to actually raise the last syllable herself.

He did. “Niobe was a woman. A mortal woman.” She couldn’t expect Ghazanfer to warm to his tale like the best of wayside storytellers. “Niobe was blessed above the usual course of mortals.”

“Blessed with riches? She was a princess?” It wasn’t too self-effacing to urge the story on like this, else they might be at it all day.

Ghazanfer nodded but added: “The gods had given her many children, seven boys and seven girls.”

“
Mashallah
!” Safiye exclaimed in spite of herself, not at all certain that this was indeed a blessing.

“But she forgot.”

“What did she forget?” The eunuch had to be pulled out of his usual infuriatingly laconic style again.

“That it was the gods that had blessed her in the first place. She had the temerity to boast that she was greater than the goddess Leto, whose only two children were Apollo and Artemis.”

“So what happened?” Safiye tore nervously at the eunuch’s gift of asters and their brittle foliage.

“Leto’s children avenged their mother’s honor by showering their divine arrows down on Niobe’s offspring so they died, all fourteen of them, all in an instant.”

“
Mashallah
!”

“Niobe, in her grief, could not cease weeping until the great Creator took pity on her and turned her to stone. She weeps still, but at least she no longer suffers.”

“And this is the stone?”

“So they say.”

Having been chided once in an afternoon for superstition, Ghazanfer was not going to commit himself so readily. It was all Safiye could do to resist ordering him to do so at once. Such was the compulsion of the place, a power she desired, like all power. Unlike other power, however, she didn’t know how to claim it. Thus unnerved, she wanted to leave the place, but couldn’t begin to imagine where she might go to escape such a spell or even, she realized, how to get to her feet to begin to try.

Murad’s appearance with the horses was a great relief. The officers must have helped him to rewind his turban. He looked as neat and attractive as the entire meal she had failed to eat.

“My love, what’s the matter?” the prince asked as he helped her to her feet, helped her to rediscover what those appendages were for.

“Nothing. Nothing at all, my heart’s desire. Only missing you.”

For once, her lover’s patter was true and heartfelt. And her clinging to him somewhat embarrassed Murad in such a public place.

Fortunately, at the prince’s approach, the black flocks of pilgrims had taken flight like crows before a sling stone. Safiye suspected they and the spell would return as soon as Murad was gone, and she wanted to leave, with him and as quickly as possible.

Leaving Ghazanfer and a menial or two to pack up the re- mains of the meal, she let Murad lead her to the horses. She greeted her dappled mare with a hand to the muzzle and filled her head with the smell of horse, the smell of freedom—escape from the harem, the sedan. The smell, finally, of power.

Murad held the stirrup for her, promising all of this, but just before she lifted her foot to claim it, Ghazanfer interrupted.

“Lady?”

“What is it,
khadim
?”

Oddly, he approached no nearer, carefully keeping the horse’s flank between him and the prince as if he had something to hide. Safiye had no choice but to join the eunuch on the other side, leaving Murad with a little reassuring pressure on the arm—but was the reassurance for her lover or for herself?