But she could aspire to make such power subservient to her own.
“Engraft away!” she ordered.
“We usually do this in the fall,” the Quince described as she made her preparations.
Sofia sat and waited with a quilt about her shoulders on a small cot with Faridah translating beside her.
“After the hot weather is past is the best time, but Nur Banu Kadin agreed with me that we were early enough in the season that there will be no complications.”
“Inshallah,” Faridah added.
“And that your beauty was too precious a thing to trust to the tender mercies of a summer.”
The Quince went on. “All those to be engrafted—children around seven or eight are our prime subjects, but all the new girls, too. All these we usually take on something of an outing to the Sweet Waters of Europe. It is a diversion. Women ask their friends, ‘Shall we take the children to get smallpox next week?’ much as they may ask them to come for sherbet.”
“I can hardly believe such a thing,” Sofia said, fishing for assurances.
“Well, you wouldn’t. Men don’t know the secret, actually. No male physician could engraft you. The secret is kept among women, and mothers get their sons protected before they leave the harem, before they can remember just what happened to them.”
The Quince had availed herself of a large, sharp needle which she heated over her lamp. In her left hand, she held a walnut shell filled with a yellow, pus-like matter.
“The best smallpox,” the midwife described it. “Sometimes we have to send for it from quite a distance, although the foreign communities in Constantinople are usually able to provide. Sealing it in a shell keeps it from drying out before it is needed. There is cowpox here, too, taken from the udders of cows. It was the observation that maids who milked cows with the pox were immune to the pox themselves that first taught my teachers this method.
“Now, the Greek Christians,” she went on, “when they perform this engrafting, believe one should mark each arm, the breast and the middle of the forehead as a sign of their cross. But as each place I touch with this needle will leave a scar, I prefer to let the forehead alone. And the breast where a lover may rest his head. Let the Christians have their superstition. I will mark four spots instead, one on each hip and on each arm. Believe me, if the master gets so far with you, he will not contain himself for a little dimple in each of these places.”
The Quince eased down the quilt and made a quick jab at Sofia’s right arm. The newest slave flinched, but it was no more painful than a scratch. Then the midwife gathered up as much of the pus as would fit on the end of the needle and smeared it into the blood beading at the wound. The application was a little cold, but it didn’t sting. Faridah helped to cup the place with another walnut half which she bound on with linen strips. They repeated the process on each limb and then Sofia was allowed to get dressed.
“That’s it.”
“That’s it?”
The Quince nodded. “Now we would just let the children romp about if we were on an outing, feed them sweets, weave garlands for their hair. I’m sorry I can’t pamper you with that diversion today. I don’t suppose you’re quite as frisky as an eight-year-old, either, but you are free to go. Your time is your own—and that of the moon—until the mistress comes for your religious instruction.”
XXVII
“Religious instruction” smacked much the same as it had in the convent. Prayers and scriptures memorized in Arabic were not much different from prayers and scriptures in Latin, although they presented themselves much deeper in the throat. The postures and prostrations had parallels, too. Sofia concerned herself with the meaning to the same degree.
The main difference—and benefit—she found in Islam was that in a harem, unlike the theoretically feminine world of a convent, no bishop or priest would ever come to catechize her. The religious instructress certainly took her duty just as seriously as Sister Seraphina had, but she was much more content with a mindless mimicry. Greek and Armenian girls balked at declaring God to be One and Muhammed his Prophet. They, who clung to their native beliefs with tearful fervor and cared to argue Trinity and Transubstantiation, took much more of that woman’s attention than Sofia, who held her tongue. Of course one recalcitrant girl in the whole convent declaring when pressed (and there was a lot of pressure) that it was all a waste of time did not present quite the challenge of a shipment of a dozen new girls a week from as many different lands and creeds.
Reprieve also came with the fact that, on account of her menses, Sofia was barred from the harem mosque for the whole first week of her stay, for all that it was a shrine exclusively for women to begin with. She was expected to pray on her own, which she never did unless someone was watching, not till the end of her life.
By the time she was required to take her place in the ranks of new girls, her personality, bleeding or no, had made its mark. Everyone had already forgotten that she was a novice and that all eyes should scrutinize her every move. Since prayer and recitation were always performed in groups, Sofia perfected the skill the convent had first taught her of keeping no more than one syllable or posture behind the leader. In this fashion, her dissent—if passive lack of care deserves the name—was never remarked.
But with the end of her period and the dropping of the walnut shells from her limbs of their own accord, Sofia began to feel the limits of her new station. She had impressed everyone there was to impress among the charwomen and frightened new girls who shared her quarters. Already she was their undoubted leader, even over the language barrier. The religious instruction turned quickly into reading and writing at which she studiously remained no more clever than was necessary. Here, too, nothing taxed either mind or soul. But she had yet to see the wonderful Nur Banu Kadin again. Or anyone else of more than menial or spiritual account—which meant no account at all.
Sofia grew restless.
The Italian word seraglio is actually derived from the phrase meaning a cage for wild beasts and, like a beast, Sofia began to pace the halls of the warren in which she found herself. Her steps measured the hallways from one dour guardian eunuch to another until she thought she would roar with tedium. And this was only after a week!
One evening of particular restlessness, she found herself unwatched in the dim corridor she recognized from her first visit to the palace. Here was the door which had taken her into the presence of those dark, piercing eyes. She measured the shadows of the hall in front of it for several minutes. No one came. The door remained shut. At length, Sofia could contain herself no longer. She dared to let herself into that room once more.
To her dismay and confusion Sofia found the room dark and deserted. Had what she’d seen that first day been only a reflection in a mirror, it could not have vanished more quickly and without a trace. Not only was the room deserted of people, but it was also in the process of being stripped of most of the furnishings that had made it so elegant as well.
Rugs and mattresses lay stacked in coils against the wall. Fine sweetmeat services and copperware peeped out of their shipping crates. Chests of silk and damask sat open and half full, while other garments in neatly folded stacks and heaps of jewelry, all like so much dross without people to animate them, waited nearby.
Nur Banu was clearly deserting the place—harem walls could never be a barrier to such a powerful woman. Nur Banu and all her glittering, lively suite—
And Sofia Baffo would be left alone in this—this prison. The thought overwhelmed her, flooded her with heat and fear. Her knees grew heavy, her head light, and she sank to the empty, echoing floor with a gasp.
Later Sofia had only a vague memory of how the great white eunuch came and quietly led her away, closing and locking the door behind him. She remembered how, when she couldn’t walk, he picked her up in his arms like a child and carried her up to her narrow bed on the third floor.
At some point, through a haze, his face took on the aspect of someone she knew. Yes, that y
oung Veniero from the convent garden, from the ship. Inexplicable guilt overwhelmed her at the recognition, coming in tangible waves and roughness. Veniero—Giorgio—come to save her once again, but this time...this time she would take him at his word.
No. This was a eunuch. She remembered the paper in the lurching candlelight of a ship’s cabin. No children... no virile young Venetian sailor...
Later she recognized it all as delirium.
“Smallpox.” The word entered her fevered brain. The pustules on her face had the telltale indentation in their centers. Her face reflected that of the ugly little charwoman. Her face, her life, it was all over, worthless. “No, no.” Sofia heard the Quince’s calming voice and its little Faridah echo. “The wounds—where I engrafted the venom—they remain open, weeping. See? It will be necessary to keep them clean, but that is the way the poison leaves the body, so it never becomes acute. I haven’t lost a patient yet. Believe me.”
“Inshallah,” Faridah added.
Sofia became aware of time again two days later, which finally convinced her of the Quince’s power. Victims of real smallpox, even if they were destined to live, could not hope to be over the fever and delirium in less than a week. Nonetheless, she was left feeling like the burned-out hull of a ship, as empty as a marble hall with the rugs packed away, tile and mirrors reflecting only emptiness, tired and listless.
“It is something else that ails her,” the Quince said firmly, “not my medicine. See? The scabs have sloughed off as clean as you can wish. Only the entry cuts remain and they will heal. Because she is full-grown, not an eight-year-old, they will not expand as she grows, but remain as they are, no bigger than a fingernail. No, it’s something else—”
After Sofia’s second week in the harem, the Quince pronounced her fit to travel and vowed she wouldn’t come to visit any more.
“And no, I will not believe it’s witchcraft until I have much more proof than this, you superstitious chit,” were her parting words to Faridah. “Depression. All too common a condition in here, and I won’t prescribe drugs for a case as minor as hers. Travel is the best therapy. The new girl is fit to travel, and travel I order her to do.”
Faridah wept as if losing her only friend in the world.
Fit to travel didn’t mean willing to travel. Sofia’s listless-ness lingered on to the next morning when eunuchs with whom she couldn’t communicate, and wasn’t expected to, once again swathed her in veils. Where they led her she was too hollow to care, but it turned out to be through the gardens by another route until she reached the water’s edge. As passive as a doll, she was put in a boat and ferried across the Bosphorus until she arrived at the dock at Scutari on the Asian side.
Once more she was loaded in a sedan chair, but this time the journey did not end until nightfall. And, come morning, it began again. And all the next day and the next. Sofia soon realized that the wonderful city of Constantinople, harem or otherwise, was not to be her home after all.
Sometimes her chair halted for an hour or two in a bit of afternoon shade. Sofia would find herself in the middle of a muddy field with muddy peasants tending muddy crops and she would despair. She might have married the Corfiot after all. At least she understood what that play for power was all about. Here was no one to tell her where she was going or why. Even had the porters been able to understand her questions they dared not respond under the careful eye of the great white eunuch.
The journey lasted a full week.
***
Fortunately, on the third day, Sofia’s single sedan overcame a much larger company and joined it. She had closed her curtain tightly against the dreariness of the countryside, and when she first heard the noise of these new com-pardons, she thought it was only another crowd of peasants on their way to market. She imagined them with scabby donkeys loaded to breaking with wives, children, hens, and cabbages, and she closed the shutters even tighter against their noise and dust. When they halted at noon and the noise persisted, she refused to come out, even to stretch her legs or relieve herself, though she needed to do both quite badly.
Presently, however, the shutters were thrown open from the outside, and a heavily veiled face, startlingly spectral, peered in at her. A hand to her mouth betrayed Sofia’s uneasiness to which the other face replied by removing a corner of its veil.
Sofia recognized the revealed eyes at once and gave a squeal of delight. All lingering exhaustion left her. She and the wonderful woman were traveling companions after all!
“We stopped to visit friends along the way. To give you time to recover from the pox.”
So much she understood of Nur Banu’s greetings, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter, either, where Sofia was carried, even to the end of the earth, as long as that woman came along. That the woman’s wagon had room for one more added to the new slave’s delight. Needless to say, at the end of two weeks, Sofia’s command of Turkish had grown by leaps and bounds.
Kutahiya was the name of their final destination, not that it mattered much to Sofia. It was Nur Banu’s destination, that was enough for her to know.
It was a small town: if every soul there had been taxed half a ghrush, they would not yet have the price to pay for a Sofia Baffo. Nearly as large as the area covered by the tile-roofed houses of the natives was a sprawling citadel that crowned the hill. An ancient building, its foundations and cellars predated Islam; only repairs had been made in current memory. Here the governor of the neighborhood lived with his family.
Sofia was installed in the harem of this citadel.
XXVIII
“Kutahiya is a terribly tedious place to have to spend one’s days,” Nur Banu Kadin said.
Nur Banu, Sofia soon learned, meant “woman of splendor,” and she continued to think that no woman had been more aptly named.
“The winters are undoubtedly the worst, damp and cold. Can you blame me if I use every ruse to be able to spend them in the Grand Serai? Unfortunately, the complaints that work for winter do not serve for summer, for Constantinople is far more humid and full of fevers than this place in the mountains.”
To be given such confidences turned Sofia’s disappointment at the smallness of the place into the same sort of abiding patience her mistress showed.
“We must simply be content and wait our time. The old man cannot live forever, Allah have mercy on him.”
Sofia put a fervent hope in these words of the older woman, though at first she had no idea who “the old man” might be.
“Let me tell you, my little cloud from a foreign land, who we are, and how it is we came to Kutahiya, for it will help you to know your new master and how we live, even if you do not yet understand every word I say.”
Sofia nodded her willingness to hear the tale, which promised to be of some length. Such attention flattered her. To be reminded of her “new master” was not irksome. She had not even seen a man since her arrival except for the great hulk and several others of his kind whom she now knew were eunuchs. Rather than prison keepers, she grew to understand that they were her guardians. When she should come to need such services, they would act as emissaries between herself and the outside world. At the moment, she learned only to trust the constant gaze of their eyes and to call them, not a name that referred to their less-than-whole status, but either khadim, “servant,” or ustadh, “teacher.”
And Sofia had ceased to mind references to her “master” altogether when she learned that Nur Banu was also a slave to the same master.
“I was taken from my poor parents at the age of four. I have never really known any other life than that of service to the whims of a great man. Of course, my position is somewhat augmented by fate, which had made me the mother of that man’s oldest son.”
“Are you married to the Sultan’s heir, then?” Sofia asked in awe.
Nur Banu sighed. “No, I must give up on that. It is not Allah’s will that Selim will marry me as his father married his favorite, Khurrem Sultan.”
“So then you are
a slave—like me.”
“Yes. Though on the books I will never be anything other than a slave, there is a very good chance, if Allah is favorable, if He wills I live long enough, that I will find myself in the position of Valide Sultan.”
“Mother of the Sultan.” Sofia tasted the word again and found it as delicious as ever. “Few men can entertain such high ambitions.”
She learns quickly, this one. Sofia could read the thought in Nur Banu’s eyes and felt proud.
Certainly nothing but pride sounded in the older woman’s voice as she continued, “My master is Selim, the eldest of four children born to the great Sultan of all the Muslims, Suleiman—may he reign forever—and his only legal wife, the beloved Khurrem Sultan—may Allah have mercy on her soul. Their third son, Djahangir, was always a weak boy and crippled—may Allah spare you from such offspring—and he died many years ago. The only daughter, Mihrimah, Suleiman gave to his Grand Vizier, Rustem Pasha, who has died this last year. Though Mihrimah Sultan suffers his loss greatly, poor thing, he left her an incredibly wealthy woman. I hope she may be well enough to make your acquaintance when next we are in Constantinople.”
“Mihrimah keeps her father the Sultan’s private household, doesn’t she?”
“That is true.”
“And as such she is a detriment to your power.”
“Who told you so?”
“The Quince.”
“The midwife, eh?”
“On my first day.”
Perhaps my lack of skill in Turkish made the statement too blunt, Sofia thought, reading the older woman’s face carefully. Perhaps it is better to keep such observations to myself.
Nur Banu did take some time to regain the composure in her flashing eyes before she continued, changing the subject. “Between my master Selim and his younger brother, Bayazid, there has always been fierce competition. My master is the elder, but their mother favored Bayazid. Indeed, it is said she never would have killed Mustafa for Selim, but only for Bayazid.”
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