The Quince showed her the latrines, one large room containing five separate closets and space for ablutions. A flush of cleansing water harnessed on its wash from mountains to sea perpetually sounded in the bottom of the dark holes.
Hard by, in a little cubicle, a girl of eight or ten was occupied full time cleaning and carding the soft absorbent wool required by over five hundred women. Concealment of the offending fluids of one’s body would not be possible here. In fact, Sofia mused, the entire palace probably knows a woman is pregnant before she knows herself. But then, she carried the thought further, perhaps it was only trying to shuffle their lives into life paced by men that made women’s concealment necessary.
“But don’t toss all of it with the wool down the latrine hole,” the Quince said, handing her a palm-sized earthenware pot with a rough cork stopper.
It took Sofia some time to understand what the midwife was asking her to do with this pot because she could not believe that what the charwoman translated could possibly be true. But eventually, by question and gesture, she confirmed the sense.
“As long as you remain a maid, save as much of your flow as you can. I can get a good price for it. Why, don’t you know? The monthly blood of a virgin, either taken internally or used as an ointment, is the best cure known for the scourge of leprosy.”
Sofia was so impressed by this value placed on what she was accustomed to considering the vilest of things that she didn’t think to ask if she could profit herself from the project until it was too late to do so with any tact. They left the little jar on a shelf in the latrine until her next visit and went on.
After that, the Quince introduced her to the kitchens. Her time of month, it seemed, was Sofia’s introduction to the whole complex, as if the buildings were actually clustered according to her need. Her condition was the key to their layout, not whatever it was that dictated dwellings where men were lords.
The three women could actually only peer at the kitchens—ten double domes all smoking at once—across a broad courtyard. Every one of the cooks, not even considering the hewers of wood and drawers of water needed for such a vast operation, were men.
“Usually food is brought over at mealtime by the halberdiers,” the Quince explained. “Such a man you see across the courtyard now. When he comes here to the harem, he will drop the two long side tresses of his wig-hat down before his face so he can look neither to the right nor to the left and thus invade our privacy. Periodically, the halberdiers also bring us a supply of wood for our braziers.
“At mealtime, a bell will ring, and you must make yourself scarce from this entry hall until the halberdiers have set the platters down, exited, and the eunuch rings the bell a second time. Then you know it is safe to come into the hall and—if it is your duty—retrieve the platters from these banks of marble. You see the counters are so contrived that hot dishes remain hot and cold dishes cold. The accepted order among us is to serve and enjoy one dish at a time, and that is how they must be served. You will eat with the rest of the girls in your mess. I will introduce you to one or two of them shortly and they’ll help you find your way.
“As you’ve already missed your breakfast today, I will have a eunuch run across the way and bring you something. Something special for your time of month. Yes, special orders are always possible. Salt and pickles are not good. Nor meat, not during your menses. But we will send for hot water for some tea. I will provide my usual preparation for this time of the month from my dispensary: angelica with a touch of myrrh and lots of cream and honey. Yogurt is good. Parsley, chickpeas, pomegranate, if we haven’t seen the last of them this year. A cucumber, but, alas, they’re out of season. Some fresh hot bread and—”
“And taratir at-turkman?” Sofia asked.
The Quince smiled at something that needed no translation. “Yes, one or two of those won’t hurt. The cook in the Crown Prince’s kitchen makes the best pastries. I will be certain you get some of his.”
The warm tea and good food amazed Sofia with its ability to perceptibly ease the tension in the heart of her pelvis. She tried to thank the midwife for what seemed little short of a miracle with as much grace as the clumsiness of translation would allow.
The Quince answered the thanks with a snort and looked away. Sofia couldn’t tell whether that snort meant, “I’m only doing what any fool should have known to do for herself,” or “Don’t mention it. I’m only doing my job.”
Faridah gave no translation for the snort. The midwife took the gratitude as an invitation to say more which, in any case, she needed no encouragement to do. If the little charwoman could hardly keep up with the transfer of words, that didn’t matter, either. Over many years, Sofia would come to have the Quince’s lectures memorized. Health was a subject the harem never tired of and the midwife never tired of exhorting in that direction, even when her hands were not needed.
“It’s good to have new blood,” the Quince began. “We are always looking for new blood. You don’t know how difficult it is to provide the masters with bed partners sometimes, as no matter what schedule she’s on when she enters our realm, it doesn’t take too long before any girl’s cycle is drawn to coincide with that of our Valide Sultan.”
“Valide Sultan.” Sofia tried the word on her own tongue and found it as sweet as the honey in her tea. “Who is that?”
“Who is that? Only the most powerful woman in the empire. The most powerful woman in the world. The mother of the Sultan.”
“And who is that?”
“Technically, there is no Valide Sultan at present. Our master Suleiman the Lawgiver—Allah save him—he lost his mother long ago. Since the death of his beloved wife and the mother of his heir, Khurrem Sultan—Allah have mercy on her soul—the household has been divided. The Shadow of Allah’s daughter Mihrimah Sultan takes care of our lord’s most immediate needs. For the rest, we have only the mother of the son of the heir to be our head.”
“And who is that?”
“The woman whose four hundred ghrush bought you— Nur Banu Kadin.”
Sofia knew without being told that this was the name of the wonderful woman with the piercing eyes. Baffo’s daughter also looked carefully beyond the translator to the face of the midwife as she replied. The Quince doesn’t like the marvelous woman. The thought surprised the harem’s newest slave; she would not have thought it was possible to be in the presence of those eyes and not be impressed. Then she remembered how the midwife’s tongue had caressed the syllables “Khurrem Sultan” and decided maybe it was only a matter of missing a dead woman and the difficulties of accepting anyone else in her place. Still, the caution with which the charwoman hedged her translation spoke of looking to her own neck.
This was all very interesting, Sofia thought, and useful information to have from the very start. There was something more, something she couldn’t quite put words to. It had to do with the Quince. She didn’t have to listen to the midwife long to realize the midwife loved women and their bodies almost to distraction. To her, they were divine, perhaps the only sort of true divinity in creation. There was something, too, in the way the Quince had handled Sofia from the very start, that very first inspection in Nur Banu’s presence. Gentleness, reverence were sensations that came to mind. Sofia had sometimes felt the same from men, even from their eyes alone. From the best sort of men, the men she knew would be the easiest to manipulate although manipulation seemed absurd with this strong and self-possessed woman.
Whatever it was, Sofia would gladly hear treatises on women’s health all day long to glean such tidbits.
“Sometimes we’re even obliged to send some girls to other palaces,” the Quince continued. “To the New Palace just outside the city walls or even farther afield, to the summer palace in Edirne—just to get them on a different schedule so they can serve the master when everyone else cannot. The birth of a baby gives one the strength to set her own rhythm for a while. Change of life, a girl just starting out, these, too, can cause oddities. We did have s
uch a struggle getting the young Princess Esmikhan Sultan on a regular schedule. Exposure to the full moon helped. Now she cycles with her mother to the day.
“A woman at her time is at the height of her powers.” Did the Quince even blush and turn away under what she thought was the cover of Faridah’s translation? “You don’t need to worry about this yet, but that is why she should not be with a man until she has visited the baths and washed holiness from herself afterward.”
An incomprehensible argument ensued between the two women at this point. The charwoman translated something about “gross impurity” and “the curse of Mother Hawa— Mother Eve” by which Sofia understood that not everyone in the East believed what the midwife’s study had led her to. Probably very few in fact did, else the timid charwoman would never have dared to contradict so. Clearly, if she’d a mind to feel sinful, Sofia would feel right at home here in the land of the Grand Turk. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go as far as the Quince finally got their go-between to urge her, either.
“This is your Sabbath, as men have imposed one holy day on us once a week according to their schedules, Friday in Islam, Saturday among the Jews, Sunday where you come from. You should not waste this holy time on everyday tasks, nor should you allow your attention to be broken by male concerns. You should experience all of your being exactly as it is, and concentrate on its messages. This is the way to health, in the body, in the mind, and in the world at large.” Sofia decided that, with the Quince’s aid toward ignoring what she couldn’t change about her physical being, she at least wouldn’t let her curse time distract her again. She would hold as tight a rein as ever woman held upon the maverick of her body. No guilt or any other further discomfort would mar her concentration on her goals. She did intend, in any case, to let no one draw her to their cycle, not even Nur Banu Kadin with the piercing eyes.
***
“But now, as midday prayers will soon be upon us, we must hurry and finish the business for which Nur Banu Kadin sent me to you in the first place,” the Quince said. “We must perform an engrafting, child.”
The charwoman had no idea how to translate the word into Italian. She interpreted the word with long, detailed explanations and gestures. She even brought Sofia to a grilled window on the second floor. Here they watched a number of gardeners, recognizable by their tall cylindrical hats of red felt, busy in a potting section of the grounds. Among heaps of manure and cabbage seedlings, the gardeners moved with stubby, curved blades and balls of string along a row of saplings. All Sofia could learn was that they managed to put new twigs into young trunks where there were none before.
“This is engrafting,” the charwoman said.
“But surely you don’t mean to put a—a new limb on me!” Sofia exclaimed.
Everyone laughed at the preposterousness of the idea, Sofia a little more hesitant than the other two. Who knew what the Turks had in mind to do to her? They were barbarians, after all. She was in their power; her search for power had brought her to this and there was no doubt power could be dangerous as well as attractive.
“Let me try another tack.” The charwoman gestured to the Quince and then turned to speak her own words to Sofia, for the first time that day and with an earnestness Baffo’s daughter could not ignore.
XXVI
“When I was a child,” the charwoman began, “a long, long time ago, I lived, like you, among an ignorant people.”
Sofia did not believe the Serene Republic to be a den of ignorance and the thought must have registered in her face, for Faridah’s earnestness increased until it brought tears to her eyes.
“No, no. They were ignorant. Ignorant of a great means of health that merciful Allah has vouchsafed to the people who worship Him. If this were not true, would I wear the scars of ignorance in my face?”
“Smallpox?”
“Yes. I had it as a child. Most of my family died of it and I was left, left like this. Ruined.”
“I’m sorry.” Sofia didn’t know what else to say to such intensity and pain.
“You have never had smallpox.”
“No, thank San Rocco.”
“Thank Allah, not a saint. It reads in your beautiful face.”
“I have been lucky.”
“Allah has preserved you. Until you could come to know the Quince. The Quince, in her wisdom, will engraft a bit of smallpox into you.”
“What? You mean give me smallpox?”
“Yes.”
“Make me sick?”
“Yes, a little.”
“No!”
Sofia looked to the hairy, slightly greenish face with horror. She saw her world on its shaky pillars of good luck crumbling around her into unredeemable ugliness and along with it, powerlessness.
“I’ve no desire to come anywhere near that plague,” she reiterated when she could find more words.
What were these people, jealous? Did they crush any threat to them with such ferocity? Is this how they ruled the world?
“I have been fortunate enough to avoid smallpox until now.” Sofia took a few steps backwards. “I intend to do everything in my power to avoid it in the future.”
“The Quince will make you sick, but only a little sick. After that, you will be immune. Like me.”
“But my face—”
“Yes, some pustules may grow on your face, but they will scab and then fall off without scars. The Quince does this to preserve your health and your beauty, Madonna. Trust her. You don’t want to run any risk of ending up like me. Such beauty is too great a gift of Allah not to put it under His protection. The girls we get, from all over the world. Who knows where they come from, what diseases they bring? All are engrafted when they first arrive, even—no, especially those who are destined for the honor of the Sultan’s presence. They are engrafted to prevent what could only be the worst of disasters among these, the most beautiful women in the world, living so on top of one another and confined as we do.”
Sofia looked from the charwoman to the midwife now in wonder. The Quince had been listening to this tirade of words she couldn’t understand with complacency, her hands folded quietly across the girdle at her waist.
“You—she can do this?” Sofia asked, her voice echoing with awe.
“She can,” Faridah said.
The Quince nodded after her with the same quiet confidence.
“Nur Banu Kadin wants me to have it done?”
“Yes. Please, you must undergo it.”
“I suppose you would force me if I disagreed.”
“We would, but it needn’t be that way. Please. Do not be afraid. For your beauty’s sake.”
“Very well. Very well, I will undergo the—the engrafting ; “
“Mashallah! That’s good, Safiye.” The charwoman couldn’t contain herself and reached out to press Sofia’s arm.
“Sofia,” Baffo’s daughter said. “My name’s Sofia. With an o.
“No. Safiye,” the charwoman insisted with all the intensity of which her already intense face was capable. “Safiye. It means ‘the fair one.’ And fair you will stay. I promise you, as Allah is Merciful.”
“Come then, to my infirmary,” the midwife said.
She led the way down a hall of a dozen doorways that must all be opened at once to catch a glimpse of trees in their first green haze of spring at the end. Under the trees, as the women made a right turn at the end of the hall, Sofia caught a brief look at the freshly shooting perennials in a carefully tended and well-stocked herb garden.
The bellies of row upon row of Chinese porcelain, Japan-ware, and blue Persian jars leaned in upon the patient from the walls of the narrow infirmary. On a matchingly narrow table were stacks of books, mortars and pestles in three sizes, scales, a filigree stand to hold a small glass bowl over a lamp’s flame.
Sofia couldn’t tell Turkish labeling from the elaborate tendrils that twined about the pharmacopeia, but her nose was assailed by the smells of their contents. Sweet cloves and cinnamon, sharp garlic and bitter ge
ntian. There were the darker odors of moss, clay, and virgins’ blood, as if she’d walked into the very heart of her own pelvis. Animal parts preserved in brine—all slaked with a wash of alcohol. For ever after, the sharp, clean odor of alcohol would return the scene to Sofia’s mind, the scene and the pervading sense of power.
She had seen apothecaries before, of course. There was even a sister in the convent. The Quince’s domain differed on two counts. The first was that any Venetian herbalist, when he wanted to praise a remedy as the best, most powerful of its kind, most fail-proof, even bordering on black magic, would never hesitate to dress it up in adjectives indicating “secret of the East,” “the Muslim’s cure,” “ripe with the wisdom of the most wise Avicenna.” Turks, from Avicenna down, were known to be the most skilled physicians in the world. The wealthiest Western noblemen hired them when they could, and here she was, Sofia Baffo, in the presence of one who treated Eastern nobility. The Quince had no need to point elsewhere for her justification.
The second impressive point was that this was a woman. The best medicine in Venice came from men, for women were never allowed in medical universities, in Padua or Seville. The convent herbalist made it clear—and Father Confessor behind her made it clear as well—that she was only good for the day-to-day comfort of women. Serious ills required male power and a man would certainly be called when they occurred.
There was none of this in the Quince’s air. She was the best money could buy and she knew it. Ironically, a great deal of her confidence came from the harem walls and the close society they created. Here, plainly, even if more serious disease did crop up, a man could never be resorted to.
And now this woman was going to work a miracle and make Sofia impervious to smallpox.
Ever after, when she’d smell alcohol, Sofia would remember the sense of power in that room. A shiver would run down her spine every time she thought of it, remembering having to strip naked in that unheated room. Remembering the Quince’s scrutiny of her. And remembering all that power focused on her unprotected skin. This, for once in her life, was not power she could aspire to. A power of life and death, a power to thwart even the almighty will of God. She shivered again for neither cold nor nakedness.
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