Sofia

by Ann Chamberlin

  “You know how he lost it?” Safiye asked.

  I did not.

  “Your Sokolli Pasha did it. With a red-hot iron.”

  I gave an expression of disbelief.

  “Yes, it’s true. Oh, years ago, of course. You wouldn’t expect a pasha to dirty his hands with such business. But years ago, when he was a janissary in his first service. The man who was Grand Vizier then, Ibrahim Pasha, under the shadow of the Sultan Suleiman’s good graces, began to confiscate the holdings of honest, faithful Turks such as Orhan for his own purposes. A certain dervish came preaching to the men to stand up for their age-old rights, which they finally had no choice but to do.”

  I shivered a little at the thought of that dervish in the next room with double meaning in his eyes.

  “Well, they were no match for Ibrahim and his Christian-boy janissaries. Those who were not slaughtered on the battlefield were blinded or incapacitated in other brutal ways so they would not rise again.”

  “I’m sure Sokolli Pasha was only fulfilling his duty,” I said in defense.

  “Yes. The duty of a lackey to fulfill the wishes of a greedy master.”

  “Still Orhan is missing only one eye, not both.”

  “It seems the mercy of Allah called Sokolli away for a moment in the midst of his deed. When he returned, Orhan, in all his unspeakable pain, had managed to escape by hiding among the dead, by crawling over thorns and stones with the fluid of his eye running down his face all the while. But of course he never got his land back, so one eye is little consolation.”

  “I am sure Sokolli Pasha did only what was necessary,” I found myself coming to my master’s defense again. “He is a good man. His pious foundations exist from one end of the empire to the other.”

  “Yes. And who lines up for bread at those places? Men his hand blinded or lamed so they cannot dig for their own bread. Women his hand made widows. Children—not heathen children, but the children of Turks—children his hand left fatherless and without inheritance.”

  I looked uneasily over at Esmikhan and was glad to find her still asleep. I did not want her hearing this.

  “Do not worry for Esmikhan,” Safiye said, watching my eyes. “She has been saved from a much worse fate. Now she will never have to marry that pasha.”

  “Surely you can’t believe Orhan will succeed in his plans for us.”

  “Why should he not?”

  “He is one man. One half-blind man with a handful of followers against an empire. You cannot believe, Ibrahim Pasha or no Ibrahim Pasha, that Sultan Suleiman—he the West calls Magnificent—will let this happen to his own granddaughter in his own backyard. And what about your precious Murad, eh?”

  Safiye shrugged the name off as if it were only water. “Orhan has the hand of Allah behind him in the secrets of these mountain passes.”

  “And in the inspiration of mad dervishes. The time for such fanatic leadership is passed, here in Islam as in our native Italy where Savonarola met his heretic’s doom in our father’s time.”

  “Veniero, it is not like you to be such a cold realist. You were always full of such dreamy idealism before. You were going to save me from the Turkish pirates. You were going to climb walls to save me.” She fluttered her eyelids at me and dropped into a sultry Italian.

  I refused to let such gestures have their desired effect. I spat in anger. “Thanks to you, I have since had done to me something that cured me of such idealism.”

  “Now, now, are we bitter?”

  “By God, I have a right to be. And you, Baffo’s daughter. Just look at you. One moment you want to traipse halfway across Anatolia for a silly necklace to entice one man, the next you are willing to throw your lot with a total stranger. By God, you are like a pat of butter; you pick up the taste and smell of whatever garlicky, oniony man handles you.”

  Safiye tossed her hair—in the half-light it did have the rich color butter gets in spring—as if I’d given her a compliment. “It will not do to underestimate the power of Crazy Orhan,” she said simply. “He is a man seethed in a lust for vengeance these twenty years. And we are his captives. Murad is farsakh upon farsakh’s ride from here.”

  “Yes,” I said, and the weight of this knowledge pried me up from the food and led me to Esmikhan’s side. Something fearful in my lady’s dreams made her call out and thrash away her veils as if at invisible demons.

  XLV

  “The boy has gone where? You let him go all the way to Constantinople on his own—with this kidnapping on his head, by Allah!”

  “He is not a boy any longer, woman. He is a man.” Crazy Orhan tried to appease his wife’s wrath, and he quoted to her a familiar proverb, “‘If you do not give a man a man’s business, he will take it for himself.’ He asked to be the one to take our demands to Sokolli—may Allah take both of his eyes—and to the Sultan.”

  “They will kill him as soon as they look at him!” The woman wrung her hands.

  “I gave him some of the trappings off the litter, and if that’s not enough I should hope he has sense to steal until he gets all he needs to buy himself an envoy into the Porte. If he hasn’t the sense to take such simple precautions, well, he’s no son of mine, and I blame his manhood—if you can call it that—all on your womanish upbringing.”

  “Oh, and I looked to this horrible risk of yours to at least bring the boy a bride. Until now, your blood’s been too hot with revenge to see to that simple father’s duty toward his son. ‘No girl but one worthy of the noble blood in his veins,’ you said. Very well. And I prayed it would slake your awful thirst for Sokolli’s blood at last, after all these years, that we might have some peace and live like normal mortals for a change. Snatch Sokolli’s bride from under his nose. Defile that Christian fiend’s honor and the girl at once and, incidentally, give your son the granddaughter of the Sultan to wife. After all, that is no less than he deserves. But now I see, I see. You are determined to go to your grave without progeny and I must resign myself to Allah’s will.”

  In such shrewish words, Safiye first learned the brigand’s designs for Esmikhan. But she never bothered to tell us, who clung in the back as to the safety of our native harem, fighting off goats, fleas, and bedbugs alike. Safiye could not remain confined like that. She had to be out and about and our captors gave her quite free rein for they had no fear that she could possibly escape the fastness of their hideout. Indeed, escape was, at present, the last thing on her mind. This was not because she feared the wilds about us, but because she relished too much the wilds in the midst of which we found ourselves.

  The head brigand saw Safiye’s almond eyes watching this exchange between him and his wife, and it threw him into a rage. Only the three of them were in the room. There was no threat to the wife’s pride in a young captive girl, but there was to the brigand’s.

  “I, Crazy Orhan, bring the rulers of this world to their knees!” he cried, punctuating his words by hurling the closest thing to hand—a wooden truncheon—in his wife’s direction. It fell harmlessly but with a greatly satisfying crash among her pots and milking pails. “Can I not have some respect in my own home?”

  The wife set about to clean up the mess as if after the tantrum of a young child. Her silence was hardly one of deep impression.

  Safiye, however, ventured into that silence with as much awe and respect as any words could bring forth. “Oh, my master. Is it true that Allah has favored you with but a single son in which you place all your hopes for the future? By my life, such a great man as yourself should not rest so content.

  “If one wife cannot give his heart’s desire to him, what prevents him from taking another?”

  The wife laughed scornfully, partly at Safiye’s accent, which sounded silly and pretentious on her ears, and partly at the notion that any other woman in the world would be such a fool as to let herself fall into the drudgery that was the life of brigand’s wife.

  Orhan was rendered more thoughtful. The word “master” from those carefully pouting lip
s soothed his rage in a way no other sound ever had, and her courtly tones put in his mind a higher, more worthy life than that to which fate had condemned him. He tried to revive his anger and stormed out of the hut, feigning the emotion. But the way he rubbed his burned-out eyelid—a tender spot on his soul, if no longer on his body—destroyed the camouflage.

  “Yes, get outside and cool off,” the wife snorted in contempt.

  Crazy Orhan turned back to the room now in a high state of agitation that, had he not been given his nickname for other reasons, would have given it to him then. Yet another day had gone by with no word from his son, yet another day with the nervous sensation of the Sultan’s women beneath his roof, and his wife would treat these things like child’s play.

  “Another word from you,” he said dangerously, “and I will have your shrewish gizzard.” The woman opened her mouth and he stopped her. “No. I don’t even want to hear your whining apologies.”

  His wife smiled knowingly and pretended to be afraid until her man’s back was gone from the room. Then she turned her violence onto Safiye instead. “Look at those eyes,” she sneered. “A slut’s eyes, squandering what the labor of honest women has bought for her. Whore! I see those eyes, like dice, risking all on a single roll. Whore, I see.”

  Safiye could have escaped to the back room, but she did not. She sat taking the abuse calmly, almost with delight, for its vicarious effect on the brigand, just outside the door, was not lost on her. She had asked for and received, however grudgingly, the loan of the woman’s broken wood comb to substitute for her jewel-studded one that had gone with the brigand’s son to Constantinople. She made certain the brigand was in the hut when she cleaned its teeth of the black and gray strands as if of years of accumulated dust. Then she sat, for hours it seemed, combing out her yards of gold. She combed with the thoughtlessness that in reality bespeaks a deep self-absorption. Such an absorption only workers of spells lapse into over their amulets and piles of golden, fruitful grain in the back recesses of the marketplace.

  “Here,” the wife said, reaching the end of all patience. “Here, girl. You grow pink-cheeked and fair on the toil and sweat of my hands. Why don’t you make yourself useful for a change instead of cluttering my kitchen with your demon-colored hair?” And she thrust a spindle at her.

  Safiye took it, trying to oblige. “But what is it?” she asked.

  “A spindle, stupid girl,” the woman sneered in triumph. Orhan was in the doorway, within earshot, and he could see how stupid this baggage of his was.

  “A spindle?” Safiye did not know the word, and held the tool gently but clumsily so that all the previous work on it was in danger of being lost.

  “Of all the simpleminded...!” The woman snorted, snatching the spindle back to save her last weeks’ efforts.

  Safiye cried out—in affected alarm; there is no chance that she was really wounded.

  “And who is so simpleminded but you, peasant!” The brigand shoved his wife away from Safiye with a snarl. “Can’t you imagine that there are women in this world who have never roughened their hands upon a spindle?”

  “Useless leaches, dressed in the sweat of others,” the woman snapped back, “as you, Orhan, have said yourself so many times.”

  “There are words in the Turkish language this girl knows that would send your simple head spinning, woman. As Allah is my witness, they would set you head spinning with their luxury, though she is but a newcomer to this country and this language.”

  “And you are so fluent in the language of luxury,” the woman mocked, in the fury of the moment quite careless of her gizzard. “‘Bath,’ for instance. Now there’s a luxury you’re a stranger to, and I’m sure the fact hasn’t missed the girl. ‘Bath, bath, bath.’ Now whose head is spinning? I dare say you are even afraid of water, for Allah knows, I’ve never seen you come near it.”

  The brigand rubbed his missing eye, but only for a moment. In the next moment he had snatched Safiye to her feet, sending the comb flying from her hand. It broke in two upon the floor, but Safiye, who had cried out in alarm at a violent movement not minutes before, said nothing.

  “I shall show you who’s a peasant,” the brigand said.

  “I bet you’re afraid of water, like a cat,” his wife retorted.

  “I’ll show you!” the brigand said again. “I’m every bit as good as a Sultan’s son, and can bathe whenever I damn well feel like it. Not only that, but I can bathe with Murad’s very own attendant—whenever I feel like it. A pox on you, woman.”

  And with that he dragged Safiye from the hut.

  After the year’s first bout of stormy weather, it had turned balmy again. But this false return to summer and the warm colors of the leaves could not make up for the fact that the little mountain stream, running a hand deep over iron-cold slabs of stone, was kept from turning to ice overnight only by its movement. Even then, with a morning of sun on its back, it was a far, far cry from the blood-heat in which Murad liked to soak. However, Orhan was nothing if not immune to physical discomfort, especially when his pride was at stake. His clothes were off and he was in that water in a moment.

  But it was not his wife, long out of earshot, almost out of memory, against whom he railed in that state. “Prince Murad, you’re a woman compared to Orhan, the Crazy One. By Allah, yes, you are.”

  Safiye was left standing alone on the banks and I dare say that, braggart though he was, Orhan would have left her there. A mountain stream was his element; with a woman of courtly manners he was a stranger and quite honestly afraid of her. He even avoided her almond eyes as he fumed against her lover, and would have done so till the bath was over, had not a soft noise and movement in that direction wrested his attention. Safiye had removed her robe and stood there in underblouse and shalwars.

  “I thought it best,” she said. “There are pearls on it, and surely, master, you would not want to risk having them wash away downstream.”

  The brigand saw how the breath of a wind through the sheer underblouse tickled her nipples into tight little peaks and his heart pounded in an emotion to which he was a stranger. He called the emotion fear or shame, and clambered out of the water and onto a sun-warmed stone on the other bank to escape it. More disconcerting still was the state of his manhood, that thing he had boasted of all his life for the great control he held over its virility and it over womankind in general. He sought to hide it from her, but in a moment she had crossed the stream to him.

  Even mystics relishing martyrdom will ease into impalement. But Safiye delved coaxingly on, once or twice, before she took him in completely. With her little white knobs of breast bouncing before his face, she whispered hoarsely, “Taste the pearls you’ve stolen from Prince Murad.”

  Orhan caught one as a gasp escaped his lips, and his nails clawed against the stone in a tarantella of gratification.

  The dervish, his meditation among the trees disturbed, moved silently away, thoughtfully smoothing his scraggly moustache into his scraggly beard. But I myself, who could not escape, heard through cracks in the cavern walls, many other times over the next few days when Orhan reveled in the spoils of Murad.

  XLVI

  Esmikhan, bless her heart, was of such a nature that she found it impossible to believe that any woman, Safiye in particular, would ever stay long of her own free will in a place where her honor was even threatened, let alone compromised. Safiye stayed away from us for hours at a time. Well, she was braver than Esmikhan herself, but she wasn’t wanton. I thought it best not to disillusion my mistress; to protect her even from defilement of the mind seemed to be my duty. But, although we were as yet unaware of what it meant for our personal futures, the day did soon come when the young brigand, Orhan’s son, returned from Constantinople.

  “But where’s my father?” he asked, growing impatient with the tears and thanksgiving of his mother’s welcome.

  His words threw the woman back into the dark gray mood she’d been laboring under for days now. “Villainy!” she
spat into the back of the hut. “Your son is here.”

  “Coming, coming.” Orhan muttered, impatient, sheepish, and came out of a small side room still struggling with the wide bands of his sash.

  The young man looked quizzically at his father, but did not comment as he dove headlong into an account of the success of his mission. He had received no firm confirmation of the Porte’s willingness to negotiate. Indeed, Sokolli Pasha, at the head of a small army, had left the city in the same hour with the intention of taking the brigands as one takes a castle or a town.

  “But we know that is impossible,” Orhan said, smiling as he imagined the fastness of his fortress.

  “It is indeed,” the son replied. “I left them in Inönü. Beyond that town, they have no clue as to where to go, no more than the prince does who has been sitting there a week.”

  “Good. Yes, they will soon be ready to talk. I give them till midwinter—at the latest.”

  His deadline grew so much closer that very night; it began to snow.

  ***

  The brigands were up late that night. The young man had brought wine from the forbidden Christian vats of Constantinople, and success tasted sweeter, closer than it ever had before. Safiye sat up, too, wishing she could be in front there with our captors, watching the warm glow flared from time to time by raucous laughter in consolation. Esmikhan herself fell into a fitful sleep, scratching, even in her dreams, at the rawness raised by the bedbugs that had snuggled closer for warmth.

  I think I must have dozed as well, at least the grasp on my shoulder in the dark came as a surprise. The empty hand I put up to defend myself suddenly found itself fumbling around the hilt of a dagger.

  It was a strange voice, yet a voice strange in its almost-familiarity, that assured me in the darkness, “It’s not your own dagger. I’m sorry. They guard that too well, because of the jewels in the hilt. But I think you will find this more serviceable than that eunuch’s weapon time and form have atrophied to little more than show.”