The Sultan's Daughter (28 page)

Women chatted quietly together under the comforting—if not to say stifling—quilt of holy words. Children played together between their mother’s knees. All in all, two sessions were more than enough to assure me I could expect a most soporific forty days. But then, on the third or fourth day, Nur Banu put in an appearance. What was even more startling-—we thought them still in Magnesia for the winter—Safiye came with her and the young prince Muhammed.

My lady’s squeals of delight totally buried an ominous recitation of the terrors of hell. And she and Safiye greeted one another with embraces and busses on both cheeks.

Crossing the room to overhear their words did seem too hovering. But without moving I could eavesdrop on Nur Banu as she greeted her own best friends.

“Yes, she has abandoned my son in Magnesia,” the older woman said. “‘It is best to be in Constantinople for the health of the child,’ the Fair One says. ‘The Quince is here.’“

I stole a glance across the room to witness the warmth with which the midwife greeted her prize patient, then returned my attention to hear the rest of Nur Banu’s recitation, competing with the Recitation of Recitations, the Koran.

“‘The center of government will be instructive for a young prince,’ she says. For an infant? I don’t think so. Before summer, he’ll be running,
inshallah
. Where can the cool spring of my eyes run here? Besides, what can be wrong with learning how his own father runs a sandjak? That was the instruction I gave my Murad—may Allah keep him—when he was my grandson’s age. He has turned out well, I thank the Creator. But—this is what the Fair One says, and my son believes her. I say she has abandoned him, but who cares what I think in all of this? Be sure I’ve sent Murad replacements for his bed. A number of other beauties so he will not be cold this winter. What does she say to this? What can she say? She chose to abandon him. She must live with the consequences.”

One woman asked with as much tact as her curiosity would allow: “And how are things between you and her?”

Nur Banu replied smugly: “She is much humbled, thank Allah, that Selim inherited instead of Murad as she was plotting for.”

“You have the Grand Vizier to thank for that.”

Nur Banu scowled at the speaker and then defended her former lover with the vehemence of a current one. “Selim inherited because he is who he is, his father’s only living son, not for any other reason.”

“Well, I have heard Sokolli Pasha saw to it that Selim came to the throne so he—the Grand Vizier—will have a freer hand to run things his way. Selim is not a man to try to thwart him in anything.”

“Don’t wise ones say, ‘Never trust the harem’s gossip?’“

The gossiper blushed and stinted.

“It is true,” Nur Banu went on, anxious to display her own knowledge of affairs, “that the Fair One curses Sokolli Pasha day and night. But she must have someone to pin blame on for her disappointment. It is Allah’s will. She must learn a pious submission or she will be among the troops the angels herd hell-ward on Judgment Day. Of this you may be certain—and Allah knows best.”

So the interest of the women in the
kadin’s
entourage returned to the recitation at hand. I helped myself to a cup of anise tea, hoping it would warm me of the chill that had suddenly crept up my back and perched there, for all the sable weighing on my shoulders. The thought of Safiye’s curses turned against my master was what first set off the shivers, certainly. I knew Baffo’s daughter far too well to imagine any curse she uttered consisted of no more than empty air.

I turned a protective glance in my lady’s direction. Safiye had now shuttered herself against Esmikhan’s friendliness, but that was the usual way of things. I detected no new threat there, though I did notice a new string of Murano glass beads around Safiye’s alabaster neck. Such a necklace could cost as much as the real gems my countrymen so successfully mimicked; still, the obvious provenance was odd. Well, perhaps Murad had given them to her, a reminder of her home.

And my lady seemed in no need of consolation as she usually did upon Safiye’s neglect. The young prince offered ample diversion. Little Muhammed had more personality than the creature, amorphous save for his sex, that we’d last encountered. He seemed an awfully sullen child, rewarding Esmikhan’s antics with never a smile, only long, big, brown-eyed stares. But he could sit on his own now, eat more halva than was good for him with four pearls of teeth and, propped up with pillows, held a miniature divan as if already come to his inheritance.

Safiye watched the proceedings with a detached air, with less mind than she gave to an adult divan, easily—and perhaps that was where her mind wandered, after all. I heard her say very few things—and these seemed to have nothing to do with anything else happening in the room at all.

“The army is two days’ march away,” she said, “with Selim and the Grand Vizier. There are some that would have us set aside our grief over the loss of Suleiman our Shadow and Lawgiver. We should immediately prepare to greet Suleiman’s successor with the pomp and triumph that, they say, he deserves. A large, triumphal parade of all the armed forces is planned to enter through the Golden Gate. I, for one, am not so rapidly over my sense of loss.”

I detected formula and not a little sarcasm in this speech, but no one else seemed to notice. Esmikhan gave her friend a comforting squeeze. The speech had the effect, in any case, of turning the discussion to just how much of this upcoming pomp the ladies could or ought to share.

A cousin of my lady, daughter to the ill-fated Bayazid, had a house near the mosque of Yedi Kule. “That’s not far from the Golden Gate on the Triumphal Way,” this lady said. “From my harem’s shuttered windows, we would all be able to see all the procession. Aunt Mihrimah, madam, Diadem of the Veiled Heads, we could move all of this solemnity over there and not miss a thing.”

The great Mirhimah Sultan had black looks for this idea. She did not like to be moved and preferred that the world came to her instead. Nor did she care to have her hospitality overshadowed.

But other women, including my lady—though I did see the throes of guilt to be relinquishing her mourning so soon cross her face—decided the opportunity could not be missed.

“It is for one day only, after all,” justified one.

We eunuchs were consulted as to how and when our charges could be brought to the neighborhood of Yedi Kule in two days’ time.

“The word of Allah,” justified someone else, “is so powerful, it does not need us to go on.”

“Well, I will hire reciters at my house, too,” said the cousin. “There cannot be too much recitation of the Holy Word.”

“Safiye, you will come, of course,” my lady urged.

Safiye shrugged with what I felt to be feigned nonchalance; it was not feigned very carefully. I found it very hard to believe, particularly from one who wouldn’t miss a Divan if she could help it, that she was not bursting to see which captains had won honors for themselves in the campaign, who got precedence over whom, how the various viziers fared. Yet she said, “It is up to my son’s grandmother, my gracious hostess. I am at her disposal.”

When consulted, Nur Banu hesitated as well, taken aback, I think by Safiye’s uncustomary deference. She, too, prorogued.
She will wait to find out more precisely what Safiye wants,
I thought.
So she can act in exactly the opposite fashion.

Then I noticed Ghazanfer’s absence from the eunuch’s ranks. His presence always discomforted; in the ease without him it was difficult to go looking for trouble. But when I got the chance, I asked Safiye about him, being as indifferent as possible in my phrasing.

I was pleased that she did not suspect my suspicion. She treated the matter as if I were a child asking why another child had not come to play. “He doesn’t come to Mirhimah Sultan’s. He doesn’t like it here—for some reason. You, perhaps, may understand the caprice of a eunuch. I confess it’s beyond me. At any rate, whenever I want to come to pay my respects to the great daughter of Suleiman—on whom be peace—I must depend on Nur Banu’s khuddam.”

Then, with another outward show of insouciance, I made my way around to the other side of the room and asked Nur Banu the same thing.

“I don’t know,” was her reply. “Something about visiting friends from his homeland. And she let him go! Safiye has no control over her eunuch, none. A slave needs to visit friends when it suits him? And he’s done nothing but visit since they got here.”

“What is his homeland?” I attempted one more question.

“Hungary, I believe. Some place westward, in any case.”

I couldn’t think of anything to ask after that.

Along towards sunset finally came the chapter contradictorily entitled “Daybreak,” which rails against the mischief of weird women working magic. And then the final verse “against djinn and men,” “the stealthily withdrawing whisperer who whispers in man’s breast,” and the day’s labor was done.

The aged mother and her two daughters whose recitation we had enjoyed—they spelled one another—rose to go, accepting the thanks and small gifts of all present. They lived at the Suleimaniye mosque on the charity foundation.

“Will you see them home, Abdullah?” my lady asked. “Give them the honor of a khadim which usually they cannot afford? That is the least we can offer them since they refuse to stay overnight with Aunt Mihrimah—they say they do not mean to insult her hospitality, but it is a statute of their holy order.”

So that is what I did, after seeing Esmikhan herself safe in Sokolli Pasha’s palace. As I left the Suleimaniye, the men’s recitation was just breaking up as well. I picked my way back through the dispersing crowd and as I did I suffered the odd sensation of being watched.
How can you think that?
I wondered.
Among so many hundred pairs of eyes?
And usually a sense of being watched only meant that someone averted his eyes from what discomforted him to look at—like the crippled or very deformed.

For all the bustle, the mosque’s dome settled an austere calm over the gathering gloom. The air above and around me winked now with lamplight and the first stars like an inversion of the flashes of black-on-white on an ermine stole. Heaven seemed very close, grappled to earth by the chain-gray of the monument’s four minarets. The casual elegance of the vast courtyard reigned like a man born to his station, like the personation of the departed monarch whose spirit so permeated the place. It hung above me like a canopy as I took the retreating steps. I had no more business. It was time to go.

Then all at once what fading light remained congealed upon a bit of white and my eye was riveted. I saw a small glass vial, set carefully on the stone sill of one of the barred arcs of window that pierced the perimeter wall. As all the world moved around me, I stood and gazed without moving a muscle at the wonder of it. How could such a delicate thing not be crushed in the press? And then I wondered, if it had attracted my attention, how had it managed not to be picked up and claimed by the first passerby.

Then I saw it was
vetro a filigrana
, the delicate canes of white glass embedded in clear that was a hallmark of the Venetian factories. I could not resist, any more than most men could resist averting their eyes from me. I picked up the bottle and claimed it as my own.

And next I knew it
was
mine. A gift. Within the vial’s narrow mouth I found a scrap of paper. I tipped the fragile glass upside down and knocked the paper free.

It was too dark to see clearly. I sensed more than saw what this note might mean. With a pounding heart, I dashed to the nearest streetlamp just lit by the passing lighter with his coals and long pole, there at the boundary between the mosque’s precincts and the profane world. I read. The words were Venetian. I knew the hand. It was as if I could smell my friend. Husayn. But in fact, with some sense deeper than knowing, I had expected this all along.

I gave the ascending mosque stairs quick scrutiny. Turbans drifted by in the half-light like so many bubbles, and, among them protruded plenty of round, tight felt dervish hats like so many shoals in a smooth-flowing stream. Just the crowd a Koranic recitation could be expected to attract. But among them I could not distinguish Husayn, my family’s friend since I was a child, the man who, blaming himself for my sorry fate, had renounced the merchant’s life and taken on that of a wandering dervish. He had taken on the part of a guardian angel as well. Now he had come again.

“The signorina plots the overthrow of the new Sultan and of your master who holds him wobbling on his throne,” the note read. “Keep your lady away from the triumphal procession.”

Upon arriving home, I learned that a message had arrived there, too. It was from the master, addressed, as usual, to me. “You know you could read these yourself,” I told my lady who had stayed up with anxiety. She watched me break the formal seal bearing the
tugra
of the Grand Vizier with such intensity that I grew clumsy. “He means them for you.” I didn’t even believe my own words. I knew by now that her scruples would never allow her to open something addressed to someone else, particularly not through the Grand Vizier’s seal. But I also knew the man I served would never write directly to his wife, the daughter of his present master.

“What does he say? What does he say?” Esmikhan had to clap her hands to contain herself.

“Merely that he is at the farm he owns on the outskirts of the village of Halkali. That is less than a day’s ride from here. He means to wait with the army, tomorrow see to preparations for your royal father’s entry, and then be with you the evening after. That is good news, lady, isn’t it?”

“But if he is less than a day’s ride, why can’t he come tonight? Or tomorrow at least? Be with me at night, then ride back out to his duties in the morning?”

“Duty calls him, lady. There is much he must see to with the army.” More than I would tell her. More than perhaps even Sokolli Pasha knew. The small glass vial was making a very heavy lump in my sleeve.

“Go see him, Abdullah,” my lady insisted. “Take him my welcome.”