Sofia

by Ann Chamberlin

  Sofia

  Ann Chamberlin

  OTTOMAN EMPIRE TRILOGY: BOOK 1

  Copyright © 1996 by Ann Chamberlin

  All rights reserved

  Map by Ellisa Mitchell

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Distributed by St. Martin’s Press

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Jacket art, Lelia, by Sir Frank Dicksee, courtesy of The Fine Arts Society

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN-10: 0312861109

  ISBN-13: 978-0312861100

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  Contents

  THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE EMPIRE OF VENICE IN 1562

  PART I: GIORGIO I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  PART II: SAFIYE XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  PART III: ABDULLAH XXXVIII

  XXXIX

  XL

  XLI

  XLII

  XLIII

  XLIV

  XLV

  XLVI

  XLVII

  XLVIII

  XLIX

  L

  LI

  LII

  THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE EMPIRE OF VENICE IN 1562

  PART I: GIORGIO

  I

  Of all the days in my long life, I remember the day I met Governor Baffo’s daughter more than any other.

  I, Giorgio Veniero, had climbed a convent wall.

  This was no youthful Carnival prank, though it was both the year’s season and mine. I’d been told I must do it. I must climb the convent wall to deliver a message. The message was unusual not because of what I must say—which was what the Doge of Venice would say to any young lady under the circumstances—but because of the lady herself. His Serenity’s secretary had decided to humor this lady’s own singular demands of secrecy.

  My blossoming sense of romance and adventure had tingled to life from the first suggestion: I’d jumped at the chance.

  I’d never seen a convent garden before, of course; I was no priest. I guess I’d envisioned it in the hull-splitting life of spring. But the naked branches of the plane tree—like hoary, shedding antlers—provided very little cover apart from their woolly winter tassels. Nor did the air—hard, cold, and clear as a diamond.

  It was the bare-bone structure of a garden, odorous of moist loam and worms working. The beds were damp but barren, turned over for the season, and against anything but the sky I must stand out like a sapphire on sackcloth. Afraid this would happen, I’d climbed high in the tree. But I was going to be very dependent on the lady’s skills of subterfuge, a position of helplessness for which I didn’t care.

  And my fingers were beginning to grow numb and clumsy with the chill.

  She was in the company of her aunt when I saw her. The pair had appeared against the gray stone of the refectory at the far end of the garden. If I stood out like she did—a garnet on a weathered grave marker—I was in serious trouble.

  The older woman was part of the stone—and she had her face to me.

  My heart skipped a beat and my hands, grown stupid and senseless, slipped their hold. How careless of Madonna Baffo to bring her aunt out into the garden! Or, if this were a chaperon she could not avoid, to let the older woman look directly into my hiding spot—A young man hiding in the convent gardens! Whatever would the old woman say if she saw me?

  The aunt’s face was a crab apple at winter’s end—chafing, red, soft, and wrinkled out of her wimple. It was full of bitterness, the bitterness of a fruit left neglected at the bottom of the bin, the bitterness of virginity consigned to a sisterhood, a sacrifice to the consolidation of the family fortune.

  I dared no more than glance at this unhappy nun. If the girl were foolish, I would not add to her foolishness with a misuse of my eyes. And yet I had time to see, besides her features, that the older woman was enthralled in her companion. I can only think that Baffo’s daughter knew she had control over her aunt and was playing with the danger as a tightrope walker may pretend to lose his balance for the thrill of having the audience gasp. And why, I ask myself, does the audience stay and watch, but for the thrill of gasping?

  When next I dared to look, the older woman was gone— vanished, I knew not where-—and she, the younger, was walking toward my hiding spot, whistling the popular tune by which I had been told I would know her. “Whistling girls and crowing hens are sure to come to some bad ends.” I laid no particular store by this old wives’ cant, only wondered how a patrician girl, raised in a convent, should have contrived to learn such a sure, brazen pipe.

  She walked toward me in a manner that let me know I was not the first she had ever met there beneath the plane tree. Although slightly disappointed, I was not surprised. That she had so often managed that conjuring act with her aunt and that she was so young did surprise me, however.

  I slid down the tree trunk quickly, hoping to impress with my rigging-learned grace.

  Madonna Baffo was tall and womanly for a fourteen-year-old. But most of all, I was surprised by her beauty. Like demon-cold at midnight, she took my breath away.

  Others have said it and I, who saw her in her youth before these eulogists were even born, will say it, too. When she walked, it was dancing. She came down the flagstone path with steps that swept like the galliard to the very tilt of her head. It was movement full of fascination to both viewer and executor, sensuous steps matching the popular and ribald tune she whistled. The tune was called, as I remember, “Come to the Budding Grove, My Love.”

  When she approached, I was compelled to sweep the cap off my head and brush its blue-tinted ostrich feather across the earth before me in a deep bow.

  “Madonna Baffo,” I said. “May I present myself? I am Giorgio Veniero, at your service, if you please.”

  “You’re the Doge’s man.”

  She stated rather than asked it and her business-like tone made me straighten up at once. But I gained no sobriety looking at her. Convent life was seen in the breach rather than in the compliance of her costume. The “brown” of her dress would really better be called the blush of sun-ripe oranges, and it was trimmed with peach and gold. Like a wanton giggling at her grille, the satin fabric flirted with the sheen of opulence quite naughtily.

  Pleats, the depth of my thumbnail, crowded together four times the fabric more modest skirts would take to encircle that same slim waist. The confinement of a fashionably firm bodice was foreshortened and gave plenty of suggestion, through an almost sheer chemise, of the yielding reality beneath.

  I thought there was a story in the great puffs of her sleeves: the stern old aunt had been cajoled to a limit of two yards a sleeve. But when her back was turned, the girl had snatched several fistfuls more; even made up, the fabric retained an avidity in the billows. So might Eve’s stolen apple have looked in both appeal and wickedness.

  “At your service,” I repeated, consc
ious now of an uncomfortable and out-of-place tightness in my codpiece which before had seemed natural and pleasant, and which my foppish bow had aggravated.

  I had dressed with care that morning. Knowing I would have walls to climb, I had refrained from my best, knee-length doublet of Turkish velvet, dark blue and shot with gold. That must remain for embassies of a more respectable sort. But I had not been disappointed in the effect of a sleek new pair of hose in varied green and blue, and a blue velvet doublet tucked and slashed to display a clean linen chemise beneath.

  Life spent astride the rock and thrust of the sea had given me a fine, strong pair of legs, I knew, fine buttocks, and a fine, lean waist where the doublet pinched in tight and met the top of the hose with a gap for yet more chemise. For all the chill, I had not wanted to spoil the effect with overgarments, so I wore only the shortest of fighting capes. I was at the point of actual periodic shivering now from the long, inactive wait and from the feverish effect she had on me, but I tossed the cape behind my shoulders with a studied attempt at rakishness as I faced her and rubbed at my chin.

  I had fussed more than usual with my beard—there wasn’t much of it yet—combing and encouraging. In the end, I had shaved it off completely, hoping Madonna Baffo would like the clean-shaven look of the West better than the beard of the East I could not yet attain.

  Now I doubted the wisdom of that decision—of anything I did—and it was not just that the only stubble I found on my chin after two hours was in my mind. At fifteen, I had already turned several more experienced hearts, but the self-confidence this had given me now wore thin.

  Baffo’s daughter fixed me with eyes as cool as brown autumn leaves. Her mouth, which I would later learn to know in its usual pout of delicious fullness, was set thin and firm for our interview. Her study of me was intense, minute, and not without desire. But it was not the complement of the desire which I had suffered as I watched her approach. That desperation so many other girls conceal so ill with blushes and fans was not even hinted at. If she pierced through my young nobleman’s trappings, she sought not the flesh beneath, but something else.

  I can give that elusive thing a name now, so many years later, whereas then I stood merely baffled and ashamed of what my own feelings were. That part of manhood she coveted of me—of every man she ever met—was power, even though in my case it was no more than the power to climb a convent wall.

  Baffo’s daughter danced when she moved, not like a courtesan but like a horse at the gate before a race. That afternoon when she was only fourteen years old, the passion that already burned in her was ambition.

  “So state your message.” She grew impatient with my confusion.

  “I have been sent by the Doge with a secret message for you...”I blustered, then faltered.

  “It must be a full hour that you’ve been here.” Her impatience exaggerated wildly. “And yet nothing you have said so far is news. I know you are the Doge’s man, you know you are the Doge’s man. Does every urchin in Venice know you are the Doge’s man by now?”

  I couldn’t answer for watching how her flesh was pillowed against the opulence of her sleeves. She had beautifully sculptured shoulders, collarbones, and a long neck that vied with a string of pearls in whiteness. Her face was a fine oval like a Florentine alabaster egg with a pinch of chin and nose. Its shape was reflected in the heavy, teardrop pearls that hung from her ears, and her eyes were like almonds—that color, large and luscious.

  “Come,” she insisted, “what does His Serenity the Grand Doge of the Republic of Venice say to my suit? I, Sofia Baffo, daughter of the governor of the island of Corfu, have lately been ordered by my father to join him on that island in the middle of nowhere. It seems he has found a husband for me—some petty noble of the island—by which match he hopes to secure his position so as to govern with efficiency and as little bloodshed among the natives as possible.”

  Watching her as she spoke, I determined that the most remarkable thing about Baffo’s daughter was her hair. Many Venetian ladies endured agonies with lemon and vinegar solutions only to have their hair bleach out to a harsh, lifeless, brittle shock of straw. Her blond, on the other hand, was real and full of life that could not be contained. Like polished gold filigree, it spilled from the somber white linen of her veil, a promiscuity of which, I decided, she was not totally innocent.

  She was not innocent, but at the moment totally unaware of her effect. “I am to marry a Corfiot!” she despaired. “I who deserve—! God above, a peasant with dirt under his nails!”

  Abashed, I shifted my cap and my hands behind my back, for I am always rather careless of my nails.

  “I, Sofia Baffo! I, who should always be at the center of things. In the heart. That is all I ask. In the very heart!”

  “Corfu is a lovely island.” I tried to redeem myself with some display of my knowledge of the world. “I have weighed anchor in her lovely harbor four times. And I even met your father once. A striking gentleman. Much like his daughter.” I nodded the compliment toward her and took her silence as permission to continue.

  “And Corfu is not so far from the center of things as all that. She lies on the throat of our trade routes to the East, at the very mouth of the Adriatic Sea. A secure Corfu is very important to Venice.”

  “Fool!” she exploded. “You think I don’t know that? My father writes very pretty letters, yes. But what is Corfu...? What is any place on earth compared to Venice? Here in the Piazza of St. Mark, here where the Doge sits and governs, here in the Great Basin where every merchant ship must finally dock from every corner of the world. Here is where I intend to stay-—here, whence things are truly controlled.”

  I found it curious that she imagined the world in this guise—and that she felt such feelings so keenly here in the peace of the convent.

  “So tell me,” she continued. “What does the Doge say? Has he not found some husband for me a little better than a Corfiot peasant?”

  “The man is not a peasant.” How anxious it made me to be speaking another’s suit! I couldn’t make it sound honest to save my soul. “His family’s name is listed in the Golden Book.” So is mine, so is mine! my heart, if not my tone, kept saying. And I am the only male left of our branch, and so allowed—obliged, dying —to marry. “The name must be in the Book, or a marriage to a noble Baffo would be unthinkable.”

  Baffo’s daughter brushed my words away with a wave of her hand. Just so easily could she brush away the Golden Book as well. “There is the Doge’s nephew, I hear. A fine young man, unmarried...”

  Now it was my turn to be impatient, for I knew the nephew to be a fool though he was twice her age, hardly a match for this creature before me. “Yes, the Doge’s nephew. You did have the audacity to make that very suggestion in your letter to His Serenity, didn’t you?”

  “Well, why not? I am a Baffo, after all, and though my father may have belittled our name by taking that governorship, I will not be as he. I will speak as I see fit to any man on earth. To the Doge, to the Pope, if I care to. No, I would not hesitate to speak my mind to Saint Mark himself, and if he doesn’t listen to me, then it will be his own fault if he passes by an excellent opportunity.”

  “Saint Mark is hardly one to be in need of opportunities for self-aggrandizement,” I said, having felt a shudder at the blasphemy—in a convent garden, no less. “And a young woman should not go about arranging her own marriage. Even widows are rarely given that privilege. Young women...”

  “Women, fie! A flock of silly geese. I have to live among them; you do not. Well, I never intend to behave like one, for they are all too whiny and ridiculous. Tell me, what does the Doge say? Am I to marry his nephew or not?”

  “I think not,” I replied.

  “No? Well, who shall it be, then? One of the house of Barbarigo? Andrea Barbarigo would not be a bad match, for all that he’s young.”

  Ready for action, the blood surged to my heart at the familiarity with which she mentioned that young nobleman’s na
me. But what action? I only managed to shift on the gravel beneath my feet, and it made a sound that accented my awkwardness.

  She ignored me and forged ahead. “A Priuli, perhaps? A Barbaro?”

  She did not mention Veniero. Ours was a house as favored as any she had mentioned—once. Our fortunes, however, were on the wane. I grew more determined than ever to repair these fortunes personally.

  “Well, what is the Doge’s message, then?” she demanded. “Since he has sent you at the appointed time and the appointed place, he must have something to say to me.”

  By now I was angry, as much at myself as at her. “His Serenity the Doge says you are to get on the ship bound for Corfu and do exactly as your father bids you or he will personally turn you over his knee and thrash you as he would his own daughter.”

  “What sort of message is that to a daughter of Baffo? I shall have you pilloried in the Piazza, you scoundrel, for speaking to a gentlewoman so.”

  “Forgive me, Madonna, but those were his words exactly. If you wish to confirm them, come with me to the Palace, and we will stand before the Doge together.”

  It was not quite the truth I told. I had never actually been in the presence of His Serenity at all, but only in that of a lowly secretary whose task it was to answer routine letters. But I was not going to let this girl have the power of that knowledge over me. Governor Baffo was, after all, one of the citizens responsible for the Doge’s election. A petty secretary knew how Governor Baffo must be obeyed, even if his own daughter did not.

  Baffo’s daughter believed my little lie that was almost the truth with a wash of angry pallor. “Very well. Good day to you, Signore.”

  “Veniero.” I repeated my name for her. If she could not grant me noble status as I had done with the title “Madonna,” she could at least get the cognomen right—and know it was as noble as hers.

  “And if you are considering writing any notes directly to the Barbarigo”—jealousy put a sharpness in my voice—”you may erase it from your mind. You might as well know that I will be sailing on the same ship as you. The great galley Santa Lucia —I am her first mate.”