Then he dismissed the mutes with a wave of his hand.
LII
I have since heard lavish descriptions of how Sultan Suleiman gave his granddaughter away out of the palace in Constantinople. I’ve heard of the festivities that accompanied the occasion, how the viziers vied with one another for the honor of walking—not riding as is their usual right—before the pavilion draped in blinding cloth-of-gold that covered her horse from mundane view. These marketplace historians confuse the occasion—in their nostalgia for the empire’s past glories, perhaps—with another princess’s bridal day.
I, who was in Inönü on the day, don’t bother to correct them. Their memories comfort me that our efforts to conceal the true irregularities of the case have worked completely.
The worthies of Inönü did their best, but even helped lavishly from Sokolli’s purse, their resources were but pitiful compared to those with which the Sultan would have feted his granddaughter and Pasha in the capital. Haifa day’s warning was insignificant against the months of planning for weeks of celebration Constantinople would have provided. The governor’s home in that small provincial town was like a closet when one thought of the Imperial palace, Sokolli’s palace, and the arena of the hippodrome between them in which the guests, spectators, and entertainments could spread.
Nonetheless, it was thought better this way. If things did not work out, the shame could be quickly buried in the provinces, and the capital never the wiser.
Of course, there was little here that conjured the idea of “wedding” to my mind. There were no silk- and flower-draped gondolas on the Grand Canal, no high mass in St. Mark’s with the formal procession of bride and maids. Nothing I had always imagined along with the words “happily ever after.”
Esmikhan didn’t even put in an appearance. If a woman is without male guardian, she may send a eunuch to the ceremony in her stead. But my lady had her brother and, while the legal documents were drawn up, Murad stood in his best brocades, brown and blue silk turban with the pheasant-feather aigrette, facing the imam opposite Sokolli Pasha.
Even as a eunuch I had little notion what the women did all the while in the harem. I stood guard, arms crossed in defensive stance over a new ceremonial dagger, at the stairs to the forbidden area. Only once in a while was I sent: “Out for more henna!” “Khadim, more scarves to drape the bed!” “What? Have all the taratir at-turkman gone to the men? The Fair One will not have it. Fetch us a tray at once, ustadh.”
But like Venice there was music. The folk of Inönü managed to foot an orchestra, aided by musicians from Sokolli’s squadron of janissaries. The instrumentation relied heavily on the drums and played only haphazardly on any beat but the martial. This, however, they set to with a good will and vigor until the seams of the old stone house where the formalities were reaching their climax seemed ready to split with trying to contain them. Nowhere in the building—or in the neighboring ones, either, I dare say—could one go without the rhythm coming in pursuit, sending jolts up and down the skeleton. To this rhythm the local singers did their best to fit the traditional wedding songs, but the tunes had the thrust of war. Clearly the ease of bride, or more particularly, of groom, could hardly be hoped for against such odds.
Old dust and drying herbs thumped down on our heads, as the beat rocked from the heavy center of the drum skin to the rattling rim and back again. There was no help for it: my attention was continually drawn up through the rafters and the floor boards where fate rested on a marriage bed in Sokolli Pasha’s hands. In Allah’s hands, my lady might have corrected me.
Prince Murad’s mother, sisters, and retainers had continued on to Constantinople from the moment of the brigand’s raid so as to be out of harm’s way. Without their calming influence, the prince was anxious. Perhaps something I was missing made him contain his anxiety worse than I did, standing still at my post.
Murad paced back and forth like rude gusts of winter wind among the strangers he should have been entertaining. The drums openly rattled his heart like a dried gourd. He seemed close to bursting, and the local men, not fully comprehending the reasons, thinking their prince had only a sister’s honor at stake here, stood in awe of the sensitivity of royal blood.
One reverend gentleman with age to protect him ventured to suggest, “Patience, young prince. Who of us has not had a sister marry? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, all is well, thanks be to Allah. And Allah, who smiles with favor on the house of the Ottomans on the battlefields of Asia, Africa, and Europe, surely He will not frown now on so small a field as the marriage bed.”
“But why is he taking so damned long?” Murad exploded.
“Now, majesty, love does not come so fast after a certain age as it does in youth.”
“That Sokolli Pasha will drive me to my grave! My grandfather adores him, but I say it is because they are both so old and doddering...”
“Fie, son!” the old man said, and hastened to add words to protect the souls of his rulers from evil spirits. “The Pasha is an excellent man. He has not the haste of youth, perhaps, but certainly it has been replaced by firmness and good, solid sense, not senility. If he moves slowly, it is because he knows she is a virgin. No one spills Ottoman blood unadvisedly.”
The little old eyes glittered mischievously between age-weighted lids, but Murad passed them by with impatience. Two strides brought him to the foot of the stairs that led to the wedding chamber, ten strides and he had escaped that sight to hide at the other end of the hall, nine strides and he was back again. He cocked his head and listened, his brassy beard suggesting a wild beast that remembered the freedom of a jungle through which it had once roamed. Murad listened as if anyone could hear anything over the throb of those drums. As if he could hear not only the rain that was falling outside on the already-saturated road to Constantinople, but every breath taken in the room upstairs.
Suddenly something was heard over the janissaries’ drums: women’s trills of joy from the infinity of the harem above and behind us. Murad shoved others out of his way to see: an old, old woman, whose task it was to be judge of such things, was making her way down the stairs in full state. She was reciting from the Koran. Murad waited only to hear that they were verses from the Sura in which evil men sought to disparage the honor of the Prophet’s favorite wife. After a night spent lost in the desert in the company of a strange young man, Heaven vindicated her: “‘Did not the faithful of both sexes...say, “This is a manifest lie”...?’”
Murad stayed long enough for only half a glance at what the old woman held stretched out between her fingers like a tent between its gnarled stakes: the fabric of his sister’s shalvar, stained with blood. Murad nearly ran into me in his haste, and stopped long enough to meet my eyes. He said nothing, but dropped his lids for one brief second—as close as a son of Othman may ever come to a bow acknowledging indebtedness to anyone. Then he was gone, up the stairs three at a time and into the mabein where he’d told Safiye to wait.
The drums struck up a triumphal march and the old woman and her burden were paraded around and around as if it were the personal victory of every man there. I got out of their way by taking the stairs. I stood and watched the festivities from the balcony for a while, a window open for the cool night air at my back. Then I turned to retire. Imagine how startled I was to find, in the shadows at my elbow, my master, watching likewise.
I bowed, clumsy in my surprise. “Felicitations, master,” I managed to say.
“Thank you, Abdullah.” Something struggled under his rich bridegroom’s robes. “Excuse me a moment,” he said.
I looked away, embarrassed, as he turned to the window. The dark night air possessed just the quality it had had on the Grand Canal from the Foscari’s chamber so many lives and deaths ago. A dark cloud of jealous grief swept over me for what he had that I didn’t.
But then the most absurd squawk made me turn back to him with a start. I was just in time to see a paroxysm of black feathers disappear into the night. In a momen
t, the capon my master had loosed crowed prematurely and ineptly to set his ruffled dignity to rights under cover of darkness.
“My master,” I couldn’t help but laugh. “What on earth that?”
Over the hawk’s beak of his nose, his right eve almost winked. “I took him to your lady’s chamber with me. In case things hadn’t—worked out.”
“You would have killed him?”
“Cut his throat and used his blood instead of hers.”
“You would have done that? To cover for me?”
“I never doubted you, Abdullah. Nor your lady. Only Murad’s fair one. But what can one do with the favorites of princes? They make life difficult for the rest of us, don’t they?” He took a deep sigh. If I needed to cover for—in case—There is no reason either of you should suffer tor my deficiencies.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant but didn’t feel it was my place to pry. “So the bird flies tree, master. Congratulations I say again.”
“But more congratulations are due to you, I believe. A group of my men went up into the gorge, according to the directions you gave them, and found the brigands’ hut today. They’ve just returned with nothing but an old woman, half-mad, whom I suppose we shall have to release onto charity. More pious donations are due, I suppose, out of my purse to commemorate the event.”
“Allah’s will,” I murmured. He sounded nothing like a groom on his wedding night.
“Yes, but it is more than that. My men reported the scene in the hut; seven burly, hard-bitten criminals dead these three or four days and unburied. Abdullah...”
I blushed under his gaze. “Believe me, sir, I’m not responsible for a half of those deaths. There was another, a dervish...”
“A dervish?”
“Yes. He killed most of them. While I merely acted as diversion.”
“What sort of dervish? What did he look like?”
“To tell you the truth, sir, he resembled an old friend...but maybe I only dreamed. No, I cannot say.”
“No. It is hard to say with dervishes. Most of them look alike. It is the anonymity of being lost in Allah.”
“Yes, master.”
“And, as they’re all elusive as shadows, I think you must not hesitate to take most of the credit for this in his stead. Abdullah, I thank vou. I could not have faced my master, the Sultan, again with the dishonor of his granddaughter on my head. From the bottom of my heart, thank vou.”
He touched my arm then as if he, my master, were half afraid of its strength. “I thank Allah my trust in you was not misplaced.”
His words moved both of us unaccountably. I was glad to be able to bow now and escape something in his eyes that asked—or offered, I could not tell which—so much more.
I turned to move away without dismissal, a breach of form which Sokolli Pasha quickly spoke to cover for me. “Yes, Abdullah. Get your sleep. You have earned it well indeed.”
“Good night, master.”
“Good night, Abdullah.”
As I turned, I noticed a smear of red-brown on the back of his neck. More blood? Or was it henna that had not had time to soak into my lady’s hands properly in just one hurried half a day?
But I left him standing there over the celebration of his victory which he took little notice of, and certainly no credit for. Nor did he return to the marriage chamber that night to take his victory again.
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