The Venetian Contract (5 page)

Feyra thought for a moment. It was too late for her mistress – now it was all about who she could save. The Odalisques were all beauties, all virgins, they all had
material value to the Sultan. The Odalisques would be left alone. ‘Leave us, all of you,’ she snapped to them, and watched them exit.

Kelebek remained, Kelebek who was plain and five-and-twenty. Feyra saw in her mind’s eye a sack darkening with water, being pulled down until Kelebek’s screams were silenced in a bubbling final cry. Feyra strode to the window where a gold filigree box caught at the filaments of the morning sun. She snatched off her headscarf and wrapped the box around and around, till there was not one telltale glimmer. She thrust it in the girl’s hands. ‘Kelebek, take this box and –’ she rummaged in her breeches ‘– three
dirham
. Take a boat to Pera. Where is your father’s house?’

‘Edirne.’

‘Sell the box at Pera and buy a mule and ride it there. Ride all the way to Edirne, and don’t stop. Then have your father find you a nice man from the village and marry him. Your time at Topkapi is over.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The Valide Sultan is going to die, and you gave her poisoned fruit.’

Kelebek began to tremble. ‘How … but I didn’t … I didn’t
know
…’ Her head weaved from side to side, and she moaned, as she struggled with this information. ‘Can you not … there must be … have you nothing in your medicine belt to aid her?’ For Kelebek, and the concubines too, Feyra’s belt was nothing short of miraculous, a panacea for all illnesses, cures brought forth from each little stoppered bottle. Feyra looked the girl in the eyes and shook her head.

It was enough. Kelebek took the box and hurried away.

Feyra leapt back up the stairs to the bed and tore back the
curtain. Fear made her strident. ‘Who is Cecilia Baffo?’ she demanded.

Nur Banu Sultan, relaxed on her embroidered pillows, laughed again; but this time it was a nervous, false trill. ‘I’ve really no idea, Feyra. Now, please get my writing materials.’ But Feyra did not budge. Her mistress had not known that she had been ill, had not remembered those dreadful few minutes when she twisted and writhed in her coverlet, but she knew very well who Cecilia Baffo was.

Feyra sat down on the bed, unbidden, and looked Nur Banu Sultan full in the eyes. She spoke very clearly, and a little loudly. ‘Listen to me, mistress. The grapes the Dogaressa left you were poisoned with the spores of the Bartholomew tree. When you first ingest the spores, for half of an hour, you feel dreadfully sick, as if death is at your door. Then, very quickly, you feel better. Your skin has a bloom on it, your eyes sparkle. You have no memory of what has happened to you. Your body is fighting the spores, and your humours even find some benefit in them from the opiates within the poison. You will feel, for an hour or so, better that you have ever felt. I will order you some goat’s milk and some hard tack bread to slow the absorption. But soon, very soon, you will feel worse again, much worse, and soon after that you will not be able to speak. Knowing this now, is there anything you wish to say? Something you want to tell me? Do you have any messages for your son, bequests to your family, directions for your interment? Or,’ she said with significance, ‘the identity of Cecilia Baffo?’

The Valide Sultan drew herself up on her pillows, her eyes flashing. ‘I will say that goat’s milk and hard tack be damned. What nonsense, to speak of death on such a golden day! I will have my breakfast, Feyra. And the
Genoese Dogaressa is my friend. I will hear no more of this nonsense.’

Feyra nodded. ‘I know at present you do not believe me, and I understand you. Your spirits feel well, your body tingles with health. But it will not last and there is no antidote. The poison is tasteless and takes some time to work, so even your taster, had she been on time –’ here she mumbled shamefacedly, ‘– would not have saved you. As a judicial poison it cannot be rivalled. And that is why, I suppose, the Genoese favour it so. I must leave you now, and wait for your body to tell you what I cannot.’

Nur Banu Sultan opened her mouth to shout but Feyra stood her ground braced for battering. The Valide Sultan’s anger could be great, and she could be as fearsome as she was kind. Feyra had never, in all her years of service, had the rough side of the Sultana’s tongue, but she understood. No one wanted to accept that they were dying.

She had seen all the reactions in her years as a Harem doctor; denial, anger, dread. Some broke down at once and pleaded for a cure. She had had to tell women with a canker on the breast or the womb that death was coming for them, but that it could take weeks or months or years. But her mistress would be dead by noon, and that was something it was impossible to comprehend. Bracing herself for a blast of recrimination, she knew that it was futile to stay. The Valide Sultan had to come to terms with the truth and then put her affairs in order in the short time she had left. At last Feyra thought of something to say. Feeling as if she were throwing a stone into a storm, she said quietly, when Nur Banu paused for breath, ‘Cecilia Baffo.’ At the sound of the name, Nur Banu fell silent, breathing heavily. ‘When you were in your greatest suffering, and did not know what you
said, you asked not for your son, nor for me, but for Cecilia Baffo. She is clearly very important to you.’ Feyra knelt by the bed. ‘Time is short, mistress. If you want me to find her, or get a message to her, tell me now.’ She got to her feet again. ‘Only think of this. I have
never
lied to you. But
you
have lied to
me
. You know who Cecilia Baffo is.’ Feyra spoke with utter certainty. ‘And when you are ready to tell me, I will be in the Samahane.’

She hurried down the steps from the dais, tore open the door and found the five Odalisques crowded eavesdropping at the keyhole. ‘Attend your mistress,’ she snapped, and she walked out of the room and away, on swift slippers, until she could no longer hear Nur Banu’s angry calls.

Feyra walked through the quiet courts to the Samahane, the ritual hall. She entered and climbed to the mezzanine, for women were forbidden to attend the rituals. She seated herself beneath one of the ornamental arches and drew the silken curtain behind her. She needed time and space to think.

She peered down over the balustrade. The Mevlevi order – the Dervishes – were whirling. Nine of the order revolved around their priest in the centre of the group, white skirts flying out to a perfect circle, tall brown hats seemingly motionless, forming their central axis as they turned. Their feet spun almost noiselessly on the tiled floor of the Samahane, pattering gently like rain.

Feyra fell into a trance, her thoughts pattering in her head like the soft footsteps of the Dervishes as they turned. She knew the symbolism of the order’s attire – their white robes were the colour of death, and their tall brown hats, like an elongated Fez, represented a tombstone. Their apparel brought them closer to the afterlife, to the other
side.
White for death
, she thought,
and brown for the tombstone
. The Dervishes were harbingers of death. Nur Banu would soon be wrapped in a white shroud and buried in the crypt with a stone at her head.

Feyra’s legs grew stiff, and her arms ached where they rested on the stone balustrade. What would become of her? Would she be pursued and imprisoned because she had been too late to taste the deadly fruit before the Valide Sultan ate it? Because she could then not cure her mistress of her malady? Should she run, like Kelebek? And what of her father? Could he intercede for her with the Sultan? Or should they run together? Would he sail her across that sea she had wondered about, only this morning?

Feyra was suddenly visited by a vivid memory, as bright and over-coloured as the fruit and her mistress had been. She saw, as clear as day, herself as a six-year-old-child, outside her father’s door, playing in the dust with her friends. One of the boys had a top, and he spun it for what seemed like infinity. Feyra had seen magic in it, as it hung there, barely moving, held by some invisible celestial force. Then, at last, the stillness broke into a tremor, then a wobble, before the white top fell into the dust to skitter away between the children’s feet. Feyra captured it and spun it once, twice, until she had the trick of it; and while it spun round its still centre it held her gaze; she and the top unmoving, fascinated that something could move so much that it became still. The other children melted away in search of another game, bored, but Feyra stayed, watching; waiting with excitement and something akin to dread.

Now, fourteen years later, she understood that seed of dread. She had been waiting for the top to fall, wanting it but dreading it too, hoping with some small fibre of will
that the top would spin for ever; knowing that it would not. Now she watched the Dervishes, waiting for one of them to fall, until she heard the rasp of the curtain being drawn behind her. She turned to see one of the Odalisques, and knew what she would say before the girl spoke. ‘
Come and see
.’

As she rose, stiff in every sinew, Feyra turned back once, to the Dervishes.

They were still spinning. It was Nur Banu who had fallen.

Chapter 3

^‘
I
am Cecilia Baffo.’

Feyra was seated on Nur Banu’s bed. The Valide Sultan looked weak, and her pale skin was darker than ever, the veins mottling. The poison was gaining on her. Feyra might have thought her mistress was raving, but she was still alert and lucid. Feyra shook her head in confusion.

‘What do you mean?’

The Valide Sultan tried to raise herself up a little on her pillows. ‘What do you know of me?’

Feyra parroted what she had heard from Kelebek. ‘You were captured by corsairs and brought here to the Sultan Selim, may he rest in the light of Paradise.’ Feyra knew that Turkish horsemen were feared the world over; supreme in battle, descending from the hillsides upon their enemy ululating like banshees.

‘Captured by corsairs.’ Nur Banu gave a small smile. ‘Yes, that is my legend.
Captured by corsairs
; but this is not the half, the quarter, no, not the slightest piece of my history.’

‘I thought I knew everything,’ said Feyra, bewildered, for they had shared so many secrets over the years.

‘Speak to me in our tongue.’

Feyra knew her mistress meant Phoenician. If they were to speak in that tongue, she was about to hear a great secret.
Greater than the time when Nur Banu had concealed her husband Selim’s death from the world for three days until their son and heir, the current Sultan, could be recalled from the provinces. Greater than the times when Feyra had helped her mistress divert money from the treasury, and take caskets of money to put in the hands of the architect Mimar Sinan who was building a mosque in Nur Banu’s name. Greater than all the times when Feyra had arranged meetings between Nur Banu and her allies from various nations around the world, to oppose or attenuate her rash son’s policies.

‘I find Phoenician difficult.’

‘Feyra. Not Phoenician:
Venetian
.’

A word misheard as a little girl was now the password that opened a map for Feyra. Her mouth opened too.

Nur Banu exhaled in a long sigh. ‘Yes, I am Venetian. I have allowed everyone to forget it. I have almost forgotten it myself. But when I lived in that life, I was Cecilia Baffo, daughter of Nicolò Venier.’

‘
Venier
?’ Feyra uttered the name that was a curse in Constantinople.

Nur Banu caught the intonation. ‘Yes. My uncle is Sebastiano Venier, Admiral of Lepanto and Doge of Venice.’

No wonder the general population had been allowed to forget this. The Venetians had been enemies to the Turks for centuries, had taken their gold, raped their women, and even desecrated the graves of their Sultans. Mehmet II’s crown had been taken from his tomb by Venetian marauders with the hairs still attached. And worst of all, most reviled of these pirate conquerors, was Sebastiano Venier, the figurehead on the warship that was Venice. The Doge’s reputation was trampled daily in the pamphlets sold on
street corners and his image burned in the alleys. Since he had crushed the Ottoman fleet a few short years ago at the Battle of Lepanto, the Sultan and all his people breathed revenge day and night.

‘Yes. You will have noticed my son holds no love for me. He thinks my policies are pro-Venetian, that I have a partiality for my old home. And he is right.’ The Valide Sultan looked from the window with eyes that now saw a different view. ‘Oh Feyra, have you ever seen a city that floats on the sea? Have you ever seen towers that reach like spears instead of crouching in domes; have you seen a blade that is straight and not curved? Have you ever seen glass that glows like a jewel and palaces where hard stone is rendered as delicate as lace? Now my son plots the worst of all things against Venice, and only you can prevent it.’

‘
Me
?’

‘Yes, Feyra, you. You are my
Kira
; you go between me and the world. But the world is bigger than this city. I’m going to send you on the hardest errand of all.’

‘Why me?’

‘To understand that you must know my history. I was born Cecilia Baffo, daughter of Nicholas Venier and Violante Baffo. My father was Lord of Paros, governor of the thousand small islands off the coast of Greece called the Cyclades, under the rule of the Republic of Venice. Although I lived, at that time in Venice, I was staying on the islands with my father in the summer of 1555 – 962 by our reckoning.’