Sofia

by Ann Chamberlin

  “So usually, it was just the wife and me in the little house, she with the keys to the door hung safely about her waist. She was trying to train me in a eunuch’s social graces: how to serve at table, how to run errands, how to shop in the bazaar with a woman’s eye, how to lard my Turkish with elegant phrases as opposed to sailor’s talk, how to hold the curtains as she got in and out of a carriage, all of that.

  “And she tried to make a Muslim of me. ‘That you were uncircumcised when you came here is no longer an issue, is it?’ she told me. ‘That is the biggest fear most men face for conversion—unless they’re Jews to begin with. You know, there is honor for your kind among us. Only khuddam are allowed to be attendants in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Didn’t you know that? Female pilgrims need guides as well as male, of course. And khuddam stand guard at the boundaries between sacred and profane as well as be- tween men and women, that other boundary Allah in His All-Knowing wisdom ordained. Perhaps, if you embrace the Faith with your whole heart, inshallah, this could someday be your calling.’

  Esmikhan asked with some concern: “She didn’t make a Muslim of you, Abdullah?”

  “One who is neither male nor female can stand at the boundary between Christian, Jew, Muslim, and pagan, can he not?”

  I suppose.

  “She was a nice enough woman, I guess, in her own sloppy way, though my thirst for revenge found it difficult to see her as anything but vengeance’s object. She did favor capers in her cooking—even a eunuch’s food—entirely too much. A Turkish woman married to an Italian turncoat who gave her no children, not an enviable fate. She might have been more apologetic for the way in which her husband earned his living at my expense. I suppose she would have been, too, if the fact that he usually couldn’t afford to provide her with a eunuch—just a little Armenian girl in the kitchen—didn’t tempt her into taking full advantage of one when she had him.

  “In any case, I did my best to learn as little as possible— of everything.”

  “Oh, Abdullah, you are too modest.”

  “Salah ad-Din came from time to time to have a home-cooked meal and see how we were coming along, how soon the profit could be turned on his investment. His wife had a vested interest in this. Her sash frayed right in two while I was dawdling along.”

  “But the last time this man came home?”

  “Dead. Throat cut. In the bazaar. The men who found him—other slavers—ferried him over and brought him up to the house, laying him out on a low wooden couch covered with a white sheet in the courtyard. It was summer, hot, and the flies had already found and followed him. He stank. The new widow was beside herself. It was, in fact, her screams, that made me leave my purpose with the sheet just tossed over the rafters. Oh, she could wail! Keening until the rest of us would fain lose our wits as well.”

  “Poor woman.”

  “Anyway, I was sent down to the local mosque for the imam at once and I had to help with the washing of the corpse.”

  “Yes?”

  I shrugged. “I was sent for sheeting and I pulled the stuff down from my rafter and used that to wash him with.”

  “Yes?”

  “It was then that I saw what the men who brought him had been careful to conceal from his wife. The man who’d cut his throat had also castrated him, leaving a gaping red-black hole alive with blue bottles. It was impossible to say whether he’d bled to death from the neck or the groin first.”

  “So it must have been someone with revenge on his mind. Someone who knew—”

  “Revenge. For me? Or others? I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. It was enough that he went to his grave without his manhood, without children and that hope of eternity—if he has the faith of your Chinese. Same as he condemned me to do.”

  “Allah balances all, they say.”

  “In any case, very shortly thereafter—within two days— the widow learned that her husband had vast outstanding debts, never mind her sash money. With him gone, so was his credit. She had to sell it all—including me—to save a pittance to take back home to her brother’s house. That was when I went to market, cheap. When Ali, unable to resist a bargain, even with a master the likes of Sokolli Pasha, bought me. Since then, there have been so many new things on my mind, I haven’t thought about Salah ad-Din’s end—except with brief feelings of warm justification—since then.”

  “So you don’t know who did it?”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t care. Some angel. So I was content to think until this morning.”

  “What happened this morning? Your dream?”

  “Yes, partly. I also remembered the mutterings of the men who brought the body home.”

  “They had seen the murderer?”

  “Someone had. ‘A dervish,’ they kept saying over and over again. ‘A dervish. A crazy dervish.’ That such a madman could never be found or put to death for his crime was clear to them.”

  “Dervishes have that ability to vanish in thin air.”

  “We saw that last night, didn’t we?”

  “A coincidence.”

  “More than a coincidence.”

  “So they never did find him?”

  “I suppose not. But I have.”

  “You? How?”

  “It was the same dervish that helped our escape last night. As I said, more than a coincidence.”

  “How can you be so certain? There are hundreds of dervishes. Thousands. And this one wasn’t so crazy. More like a guardian angel.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You can’t know it wasn’t just the coincidence of two dervishes—two dervishes and a dream.”

  “But I know.”

  “How, Abdullah?”

  “Because if your added gold teeth to that man’s gap-toothed grin, a month’s good eating to his skinny waist, trimmed his beard and hair, gave him a bath and the clothes of an Aleppo merchant, you’d have an old friend of mine. Husayn.”

  “He seemed familiar to you?”

  “At first, familiar yet strange. But now, in the dream, I am certain of it. In some miraculous way I cannot say—”

  “But that it was the will of Allah.”

  “Yes. In this case, I’ll join you, lady, in saving it was Allah’s will. By Allah’s merciful will, my dear friend Husayn has given up his luxurious life of trade and become a homeless mendicant.”

  “It sounds to me as if his home is your constant aid. Abdullah, you are blessed indeed to have a friend like that.”

  “Yes. Yes, I am.”

  Truth to tell, at that moment, I had forgotten completely that there was ever any such thing as the secrets of Venetian glass.

  I got to my feet and looked through the brilliant clarity of the afternoon wilderness about us, sensing I should be able to discover this dervish, my friend, Husayn, if only I looked hard enough. Like the mantle of Allah’s will. But this was only the hope of a swelling gratitude with no place to put itself. Because there was nothing left for us to do to find our way back to safety but set one foot in front of the other, I knew perfectly well that no dervish would be found.

  LI

  For the first time in my life, I truly appreciated the Turks’ addiction to baths, the hotter the better. I came to stand before my master and Prince Murad, clean, warm, fed, rested, and my arm doctored—yes, with comfrey and myrrh—to kill the heaviness of infection. I felt like a new man, quite literally.

  At the end of one afternoon of miserable wandering, we had found a goatherd who’d given us directions, a bed, and cheese in return for a single pearl torn from Esmikhan’s dress. We got the better of that deal. At the end of two miserable days, his directions brought us to a scouting party of janissaries who, in turn, brought us to their leaders in Inönü.

  But a bath washed all that misery away to no more than the cozy memory of thick, warm quilts, and crackling, warm braziers. I had the feeling of having been reborn, an exultation of immortality.

  I felt so good that it was quite a shock to see how grim the faces of Sokolli Pas
ha and the prince were.

  The girls had been given time to recover, too: baths, new clothes, sweet salves smelling of aloe and myrrh for their flea bites. Esmikhan wore her veils. They had been washed, but the hem of one was fraying: gone to our fire under the outcropping. Safiye had had to borrow veils to make herself presentable. Anyone who knew her could see that these drapes were of an older, more provincial style than she was used to. The prince could not raise his eyes to meet hers through them.

  Safiye and I flanked the princess like an honor guard at this first and irregular meeting with her betrothed. But there was something even more irregular about the men we faced across Inonu’s divan. They were flanked by two others, big, burly creatures. Anyone in the palace knew enough to sidestep these monsters, not so much because of their size, though that was awesome enough, but because of the fact that they had no tongues. They committed private executions— and were trusted to tell no tales afterward.

  As if he, too, showed only a tongueless cavern of a mouth when he yawned, Sokolli Pasha silently placed three instruments on the low table in front of him with his long, talon-like fingers. His face was firm with duty. Just such a mask he must have worn as he came upon Orhan with a burning poker before the man went crazy.

  Two of the weapons were daggers. The third, the one in the middle exactly opposite Esmikhan, was a bowstring made of silk. Ottoman blood may never be spilt, whatever the crime. It must be strangled.

  A long silence followed. Perhaps we were meant to defend ourselves in it. But Esmikhan simply bowed her head humbly under the silent weight. She was ashamed in front of her betrothed. And now she was quite convinced that what had happened to her in the brigand’s hut deserved death.

  I, too, could think of nothing to say. My lady was innocent, but death would be easier to bear than the guilt she felt. As for Safiye, nothing could be said in her defense, but to blame her would be to condemn myself.

  Safiye didn’t speak, either. At the time I thought it was because her very true guilt had caught up with her, and shamed her, for once, into holding her tongue. I know now it was because she didn’t realize any defense was required of her.

  Sokolli Pasha swallowed and shifted his firm, thin face under the firmer, more pinched mask of his duty. He raised a hand and the mutes rocked with anticipation on their heels.

  And then a groan escaped from Murad’s lips. One pale, pasty hand crossed over his eyes and smeared tears down across his cheeks. They seemed to wash away the little layer of healthy tan he had only recently acquired.

  “Ten days,” he moaned. “Ten days we searched these hills for you, my angel, my most fair one, and knew not where to find you. What I have been through,” he choked, then recovered, “in those ten days.”

  Safiye spoke lowly and her voice seemed to build the privacy of a bed between them. “But I am back with you now, my prince, my charm and my strength. Let us thank Allah and rejoice.”

  “Rejoice! I shall go to my grave,” the prince choked again, “without you, my love. My death shall follow so quickly upon yours, my beautiful, beautiful, faithless one. My faithfulness shall pursue your faithlessness across all the vaults of eternity.”

  “My death...” Safiye began to realize.

  “Yes, yes!” Murad said, and rose to flee the room. “Kill her!” he cried to the mutes. “Kill her first of all. I cannot endure her faithless presence in this world one moment longer.”

  “I am condemned, then, on suspicion. Mere suspicion of. . .” She swallowed and picked up her defense as a reckless young soldier does his shield when he prepares to dive into battle. “Is not the vow of my eternal faithfulness enough for you, my love?”

  Murad looked at her for the first time, seeing through the veils as a lover can see through any garment. He wavered on his fleeing feet. His head raised itself to nod in violent emotion. But then he tore his eyes away and shook his head instead.

  “But all ten days,” Safiye said. “All ten days when I thought the world would end without you, Esmikhan and I were under the most careful protection of Veniero—Abdullah, the khadim here.”

  I hadn’t the slightest desire to say anything in defense of Baffo’s daughter. But she had shifted the blame to me and I refused to take it, particularly not at the verge of death. I had to say something, with five pairs of mute eyes on me and only heaven to prove my innocence against the devilish enticement of her beauty, leaking even through veils.

  “I have enjoyed the baths of Inonu,” I said, “and this puts me in memory of a way Allah may be called in to try the proof of guilt in this case. It is customarily reported that an innocent woman may walk through a bath full of men with no ill effect while the guilty—”

  I looked at Sofia Baffo and she parted her veils ever so slightly to meet my stare. Her eyes over the film of silk were as hard as almond shells. I had to look away first.

  “—The guilty have their shame exposed.”

  Well, Baffo’s daughter’s galliard to the tune of “Come to the Budding Grove” just might bring a wind into a men’s bath strong enough to blow her skirts over her brazen head.

  I felt rather than saw a shift of hope under Esmikhan’s veils beside me. She believed in the custom and would be willing to try it. A pain in my belly—above my scars—suddenly prayed she could. I cared not for my life, not for Baffo’s daughter. But all at once, I was fighting for my lady’s honor—and for her life. I urged: “My lords have heard of the custom, perhaps?”

  I read my master’s face. He didn’t particularly believe in this superstition, but he was a man of violent justice. He did believe in allowing victims to prove their innocence when possible, and was willing to fight for that possibility when not readily granted. I also read a glance of gratitude in my direction. He appreciated that my quick thinking was helping him out of an unpleasant duty.

  “That is an old wives’ tale!” Murad suddenly exploded. “Only foolish women and eunuchs would believe such prattle.”‘

  I’d missed what had passed between Sofia Baffo and her prince. Perhaps Baffo’s daughter believed just a little too much in the wind of a man’s bath. I liked to think so, but liking didn’t help us around the fact that this proof of innocence was now rejected.

  “I do not trust that eunuch,” Murad bit the words off fiercely. “I haven’t from the start. I should have killed him that first evening in the mabein at Kutahiya.”

  I saw my master struggle to gain control from the brief flinch that lashing caused him. I was, after all, his responsibility. He touched the dagger that pointed at my heart.

  Murad went on: “Besides. One eunuch against a dozen brigands. For ten full days. Brigands with no honor, with axes of their own revenge to grind. Even if he were a giant of a man, I cannot, I cannot believe this Abdullah could defend you.”

  Yes, kill us all, I thought, bowing my head. I’ve wanted to die for six months and now—well, better late than never. Now is as good a time as any, than to face such continued insults from such as calls himself a man.

  Beneath her borrowed veils, Safiye moistened her lips. It was an invisible gesture, but one that bound the magic of shared quilts even tighter between the two.

  “My vows are of no use,” she said (and one could hear the delicious moistness of her pouting lips in those words). “Neither are the tokens of my body because, as Allah is my judge, you know I gave them all to you—gladly, joyfully—on the night of Idal-Adha.”

  Murad turned from the memory with a moan as if it had struck him a physical blow.

  “Save in that it yearns to return to yours as a pigeon to its roost, in my body there are no proofs,” Safiye reiterated. “And yet in Esmikhan’s there are.” She paused to let the meaning of her words sink in.

  Then she continued: “My prince, your sister and I shared this trial together. And, by the mercy of Allah, we also share in the deliverance—unscathed, by my life. Prove my faithfulness by hers. Please. Marry her to the honorable Pasha as planned. Look for the tokens of virginity. I swe
ar by my honor and hers, you will find them. Then you will know for certain that what I say is true.

  “If the marriage bed is not stained, then, yes, you will have every right to kill us, all three of us, and with perfect conscience. If, however, you find the tokens present, you will know that our guardian, Abdullah, did not receive the wound on his arm in vain as he put his body between us and those who would have defiled us. You will know that by his diligence, and by the mercy of the All-Knowing One, we were spared the fate you imagine for us. You will know that you may reclaim us without shame or dishonor, but with twice the joy that was all our sorrow during that nightmare often days.”

  Murad stood intoxicated by her words and by their promise. Color flushed his cheeks and even his beard seemed to grow ruddy with health and hope. I think he would have rushed across the room, and taken Safiye in his arms then and there. But he remembered, suddenly, that there were others present, and he turned to Sokolli Pasha instead.

  My master had been looking steadily at me ever since the middle of Safiye’s speech had called attention to my feat—what it had been, if indeed it had been. My master’s eyes seemed to wonder if even the best of his janissaries could have fulfilled such a dangerous assignment with such success. And under his gaze, I began to feel a little remarkable, too. He made me almost proud to hold that post of such great trust, proud to have traded manhood for that trust.

  But quickly I humbled myself and dropped my eyes from Sokolli’s gaze. Of course he looked at me because, in all decency, and even though she was veiled, he could not look at Esmikhan, not until ritual—and duty—demanded it.

  As soon as my eyes were gone from him, Sokolli Pasha spoke. “Very well,” he said. “I am content with this test—as it also clearly pleases my master, Prince Murad.”