The Sultan's Daughter (17 page)

“The Quince has already departed. We will not have the comfort of her company on our way.” Remembering the buzz of opium on my tongue, I wasn’t at all certain that this was such a bad thing. It didn’t deter my lady either.

“We may catch up with her in any case—if you aren’t too slow. If not, she at least will be there when we arrive to provide—
inshallah
—some fertility drug that may enhance the prospect of those few days I will have with my husband.”

“But lady, you are still in your time of uncleanliness.” I feared more for her health, her soft little body put through yet more all-consuming pain and exhaustion without a moment’s rest. But I couldn’t deny that the very idea of this stress—to which I could compare only one thing in my life—seemed to enliven rather than intimidate her. She had learned all her life to take her greatest meaning from the fruits of such torture, I guess. Whereas my torture had been the means of removing that meaning from me altogether.

“I won’t be unclean by the time we get there. Certainly not if you persist in dawdling so.”

With that, I ran out of excuses. And when a scouting trip down to the wharves restored my arsenal, my lady’s exuberance soon dispelled that as well.

“The Golden Horn is quite ominously full of ships,” I told her. “The Kapudan Pasha, Piali, is amassing a great flotilla to sail against some benighted enemy of the Faith. I counted eighty galleys while I stood there. Come to the window. You can see some of them, at least, for yourself.”

Esmikhan looked disinterestedly through the lacework of lattice in the direction I pointed and shrugged.

“As Allah is my witness,” I persisted, “I wouldn’t be anywhere on the seas with such an armada about.”

“But these are my grandfather’s ships, Abdullah. I need have no fear of them. Besides, we are only sailing to Izmir, never losing sight of Turkish coast the whole way. Piali Pasha sails to some distant land, of that you may be certain.”

“Perhaps my lady is right. I did hear a rumor that they mean to lay siege to Malta, the lair of the Knights of St. John, to punish those pirates’ depredations of Turkish shipping.” I did not mention how this intelligence made me feel: almost a Turk myself, for it was in large part due to a Maltese knight—under the influence of Sofia Baffo, of course—that I found myself in my present shadow life.

“The bastion of Malta defied them last year,” I elaborated. “Yes, I wouldn’t be surprised if Piali Pasha meant to renew the assault with reinforcements and better weather.”

“There. You see? Piali Pasha’s galleys mean nothing to us. I’ve thought it all out while you were gone.”

“Lady?”

“My brother and Safiye are in Magnesia, as well as my husband. I will rely upon their hospitality of course so I won’t have to consider camping out primitively with the army. And after my husband leaves about his duties, I can stay until Safiye has her child,
inshallah
, and help her with that.”

Yes, I saw that the reasons my lady could produce to go had multiplied in my absence while mine to stay had only increased by the vague unease caused by Piali Pasha’s ships. And that discomfort might only be the last reflexes of my former life I couldn’t quite shake, the sudden leap of the heart in the throat, the charge of desperate energy to every limb. The Turkish crescent would probably always cause that, no matter where they cut.

If anything, the planning offered Esmikhan distraction, filled her with hope and life in place of loss and despair. I couldn’t line her empty womb for her, but I could do this. I was a fool to oppose her.

“Abdullah, you waste time. Find us a boat to sail on—at once. I will go to Magnesia.”

So down I went to the docks to try again.

I suppose the lodestone of nostalgia drew me on. Like an addict with his drug, I had avoided the sights and sounds of the sea with sober success for four long years. But now, one breath of the spray-thick air and I was hopelessly intoxicated again.

How many times had I made this very promenade at my Uncle Jacopo’s side? Is it any wonder that the call of the sea is legendized in sailors’ minds as the mermaid or siren, the most beautiful image men removed from their doxies for months on end can imagine? And I had tried to deny this pull which was, after all, my birthright and my very weaning. For four long years I had denied this lost world, knowing that the first sip would make me feel the pain of the cutters’ knives all over again.

Indeed, it did. But having now, at my lady’s insistence, endured the first harrowing of memories, the sea’s addiction had me numb under its spell once more. And as I wandered up and down the salt-sprayed hem, heedless of exhaustion and the futility of my search, I wondered how I had stayed away so long.

I think I had truly been ashamed for the sea to find me in my maimed state. But I knew the moment I saw the sun, just past its pale spring zenith, silvering the wavelets like streaks of age in a mother’s hair, that she would have me any way at all.

The wharves and docked ships tamed the sea’s hair like a lace cap. The red Turkish flags—and no one dared fly either cross or saint’s emblem under Piali Pasha’s nose—pulsed in the wind like a mother’s heartbeat. They were the throb at her temples, the blush of pleasure on her cheeks. The creek of planking, the whisper of empty rigging, and the cry of gulls between them—these were a mother’s songs, her lullabies. They were her call of encouragement to her toddling child to take the narrow leap over the vacillating slash of dark water between wharf and deck. To escape from the weight of earth. To take the canvas wings of flight.

Whenever I reminded myself that we were going to attend the motherhood of Safiye Baffo, the image lost some of its poetry. What I should be doing was reclaiming what Safiye had stolen from me.
What she has stolen from Esmikhan.
That was a bitter, unfounded thought. It only rose because it rankled:
Why should she become a mother and my lady not?
That was like asking why Murad should become a father and I not. Simply because there was no justice in the world—never had been, never would be any.

Getting my lady to Magnesia, however, grew perceptibly more difficult by the moment. Piali Pasha’s admiralty drew every available bark to it by sheer mass. Provisioning skiffs and flat-bottomed ferries as well as the more substantial craft for which I sought were all detailed to outfitting the master of Allah’s seas.

The last of the seaworthy ships owned by the harem of my lady’s grandfather had just departed, bearing the midwife to attend on the birth of Murad’s heir. I supposed this was an errand equal to the supplying of Piali Pasha. We could wait until that one returned, but I knew Esmikhan—and her empty womb—would give me no peace until it did. Otherwise, the demands of war had requisitioned every chunk of wood that could float within two days’ sailing.

My lady owned a neat little caïque, like all women of her station, for pleasure outings on the Bosphorus. She didn’t use it much—seasickness came quickly when she was with child. Instead of finding the ship I wanted, I got incredibly inflated offers to use the caïque for the provisioning instead. I could almost hear my lady accepting every one that came along with an irrational flush of partisan enthusiasm. There are reasons women stay in the harem.

I resisted these offers, not requiring much imagination to picture what one trip out and back with a load of gun grease or leaky flour sacks would do to the velvet curtaining and the mother-of-pearl inlay. But this didn’t help me to find the transportation I needed either, for which the caïque was equally un-suited.

There were foreign ships, of course, skirting the arsenal’s menace warily, trying to stay invisible lest they be suspected of spying out what Piali Pasha might have in mind for those at home. I rejected these out of hand. It would never do to entrust a princess of the blood to an infidel hull. Nonetheless, desperation finally brought me to the foreigners’ wharves at Pera. My legs were beginning to ache, unaccustomed as they were to hours of fruitless wandering about the wharves.

Wherever boats gave an arm’s length of space between hull and prow, fishermen grounded because their boats were with the navy dangled their lines. The black of their doublets clanged with the metal of their trade: hooks, scalers, knives. The offal of last week’s catch sloshing in the gray-green water below their feet offered the predominant smell to the place and attracted mangy cats who slunk about for their own share.

But such smells might have been a mother’s perfume to me. And the great baskets of fingerling
hamsi
fish—anchovies, we called them at home—appeared to me in their silver sheen like a princess’s dowry.

A man could take his pick from the top of the heap, still wriggling, their eyes popping, mouths agape at death’s surprise. The fishermen would thread your choice on a skewer—with yet more wriggling—and shove them over the coals of his brazier. In a moment, the fish were smoky, blackened, fragrant, and delicious. That might have been mother’s milk to me.

I was downing my second
shish
of the day, aided by sea-whipped appetite, chased by tall glasses of minted yogurt drink. The yogurt vendor was wiping out the glass from the last customer with the corner of his sash to pour me another when that last customer introduced himself to me.

“You won’t be drinking and eating like that in a day or two, will you?” he asked, winking.

“Ramadhan.” I nodded, not knowing what to make of the wink in connection with the soon-to-begin holy month. Perhaps the man only had a tic.

“Yes,” he said carefully, as if to say “Make of it what you will.” And he repeated, “Yes, Ramadhan.”

Watching the shipping, but mostly the hypnotic roll of the sea, we fell to talking, and the cryptic messages fell away.

The language we used was the traders’ patois. My companion expressed no surprise that I, a khadim, should be conversant in the jargon, mixed like the bastard blood in any Mediterranean port of Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and Italian. Perhaps this fellow’s experience of the Ottoman realm, circumscribed by water and wharf as it must be, made him believe the patois was indeed court Turkish.

His habit of falling back on the Italian whenever a word failed him helped me to place him in the patois’ stew. That this Italian had Liguria’s whispering silibations and horror of consonants helped me place him even closer. The man was from Genoa. I couldn’t hear that duplicitous dependence on vowels without painful jabs echoing on my person. Such an accent would always recall the man who took my manhood and life from me, the renegade Genoese who called himself Salah ud-Din, with exquisite irony. But even before that, my family had held the Venetians’ traditional hatred against anyone of that city which was our keenest rival.

I tried not to let my past color my dealings with this man in the present. As always, I dreaded anyone knowing what I had been. And besides, he didn’t seem to hold it against me that I was a eunuch as many another of his kind would. Or did he perhaps not know our costumes?

Then the sail of my mind recaught his name—Giustiniani—and I navigated to the realization that he was not really Genoese at all. He hailed from the island of Chios which, since Muhammed Fatih’s conquests, was the one eastern outpost remaining to that city across the spine of Italy from my homeland. All Italian Chians called themselves Giustiniani whether they originated from the first colonizing couple or not. I wasn’t certain the name actually had imperial Roman roots, as it sounded. In any case, it gave their settlement and their trading organization a certain familial solidarity. They were a force to be reckoned with in foreign parts. My guess was quickly confirmed. My new acquaintance described how he had set sail with the first clearing of the lanes that year as part of the escort for Chios’ ambassador, come to pay the island’s annual tribute money to the Porte.

“Actually, he comes to negotiate terms,” Giustiniani confided. “Even with trips to the usurers, there is no way Chios can pay the forty thousand ducats owing.”

After some exclamation of disbelief and sympathy, I assumed to myself that I had misheard. Such a vast sum was clearly impossible.

But, encouraged by my sympathy, Giustiniani went on, explaining that since their first offer to buy the Turk’s oversight for a handful of silver less than a hundred years before, the annual dues had steadily risen. The present sum was the culmination of three unpaid years of that steeply inflated tribute. And it was exaggerated by the fact that, whereas the Chians were counting by the Christian calendar, as was their custom, the Porte was expecting payment according to the Muslim book of days, which came round just that much faster every year.

“And I will not hesitate to tell you—because it cannot be kept a secret anymore—that we have been raising this money for years on the backs of bad investments. No Giustiniani likes to remove fee from his own purse when he can take it from the moneylenders’. “The wink his obsidian eyes gave me imitated the glinting gold cross that dangled from his ear, asking for sympathy if not conspiracy.

So I hadn’t heard wrong at all. The debt really was forty thousand. And all this posturing after ancient honor was a sham. Whenever we used to anchor in the smile of Chios’ harbor, my uncle had always warned our men to be careful how they cursed the name of Genoa in the taverns on shore. But there had been contrary rumors even then: “Drink up now; you don’t know how long before this harbor is as dry as the rest of the Turk’s realm.” Such rumors were closing in on confirmation, then. The Empire which held the rich and strategic bit of soil bracing the Izmir coast was hardly Roman; it very nearly belonged to the Turk, in deed if not in name. But I kept my thoughts to myself where politics were concerned and spoke of neutral ships instead.

“Ah, I can see you are a good judge of seaman’s timber.”

Giustiniani was now showing me the ship, rather pretentiously christened
The Epiphany
, of which he was master. And some comment I had made in passing caused him now to rub his chin, appraising me as thoughtfully as I had been appraising the keel. I’d seen that the ship was quite unladened, the keel bobbing high out of the Golden Horn’s very ungolden scum. The seams were excellently made and pitched, with a new coat of tar and tallow against shipworm on the hull.