The Sultan's Daughter

by Ann Chamberlin

  “Though why,” the Quince concluded, “I can’t say.” She passed her hand lovingly over the swollen belly of her angelica jar; angelica, to promote women’s courses. “I’ve always been much more partial to females myself.”

  After this conversation with the midwife, I was completely at ease to have her in our house. I might have accepted Italy’s birthing-demons if I’d stayed in my homeland the rest of my life, never knowing any others. But I was much more skeptical when confronted with a new, different, conflicting demonology. The Quince’s unsentimental dashing of my secretly held hopes strengthened rather than diminished my trust in her. I liked her hard, no-nonsense view of the world and, while trusting souls to her might cause scruple, I had no problem about bodies, either my lady’s or my unborn little master’s.

  It seemed clear that the sense of threat I’d gotten from her came rather from Safiye. And now that Baffo’s daughter was farsakh upon farsakh away—whether by land or by sea made no difference to those who stayed behind—the threat was gone, too.

  ***

  From the first twinge of life she felt inside her, my lady loved that child of hers with a love women dream to find in husbands; later, thwarted there, in lovers, and most are lucky if they are content to find it in fairy tales. It was a passion that did not consume, or turn the possessor inward, but gave her a quiet, joyful strength and compassion for those in the rest of the world who were not blessed as she. So Esmikhan would not allow me to take the mirth in the episode of Safiye and the leaky ship I would have.

  My lady’s joy and strength were like a sore thumb that seemed to catch on everything, and she took great, cautious steps to avoid injuring the weaknesses of others.

  Her new, sublime compassion fell short of Madonna quality in this, however: it did not prove to be immortal.

  Her babe, a boy, though he gave a healthy yell when he entered the world that midsummer, left it again within the hour.

  At first I took comfort with the thought, Time will heal this. She is young. She is not the first mother to lose a child. With time, she will conceive again.

  But instead, that time extended into a hellish eternity for Esmikhan Sultan, who conceived, bore, and then immediately lost another small son.

  I knew nothing of birthing rooms. I only saw the tiny white bundles hastened off to the graveyard with hardly a wink from religious authority. I saw the Quince’s hard, grim look—in want of baking and sugar I thought. And I heard—helplessly—Esmikhan’s grief. My lady, though always patient and submissive to the will of Allah, could not come through this tragedy unmarked.

  During this time, I almost came to believe in the malicious old jinn-hag who was said to haunt birthing rooms seeking to steal infants or their mothers. I heard some of the women speaking of this witch in hushed tones. And though Esmikhan wouldn’t let the hag’s name pass her lips at any time lest she call the jinni to her thereby, I could tell by her fearful glances to dark corners that she, too, believed.

  But the Quince’s hard look did not believe. That’s life, was all I read there. And because she had forced me to accept my life, I accepted her word. Safiye, after all, was never anywhere near our tragedy.

  Yet, there are days, midsummer days, when the sky over Constantinople is a thick, dusty, putrid yellow. Many such days I suffered when I was being unmanned. On just such a day my mistress’ first son was born and died. On such days, the city, usually so divine, shows her mortality like capers, growing in every crack.

  PART II: SAFIYE

  V

  Safiye unfolded herself from the confines of the carriage and, though veils and wrappers still burdened her, she stretched her long limbs to rid them of the cramp. They’d just been visiting within the city. The cramp, she knew, was not so much from being cooped up with three other women in the velvet-lined box for the short ride as it was from seeing yet another winter pass. Yet another martial parade of tulips was splitting its green sheaths with vibrant color in the courtyard of the serai. Yet another winter had passed with the power she had sensed and craved upon first entering the marble harem beast still eluding her—or at least, not growing as quickly as she liked.

  It was the end of winter in the year of Our Lord 1564 as the Christians tell the passage of time. Safiye was sixteen years old; she had been among the Turks now for a full eighth of that time, the oldest, most vigorous eighth.

  Every passing day confirmed her understanding of the workings of this system into which she’d thrown her lot, her appreciation for the magnitude of power it could give her, outstripping anything she’d hoped for in Venice. But the heedless passage of time exaggerated her frustration at the slowness with which she could make that power hers.

  Yes, she knew that paying calls, binding the highest-placed ladies to her with gifts and acts of graciousness was necessary. She exerted herself in this direction; there wasn’t a woman among the Turks now who wouldn’t take seriously her most offhanded comment. But how she wished to pierce the gauze of this veil, to reach—more importantly, to affect—the hard reality of the men’s world beyond!

  How to do this? The tenseness in her limbs demanded some action, but her mind couldn’t name it. It was like sitting passive, immobile, for hours on end while a friend painted your hands with henna paste. Most Turkish women—perhaps because they’d experienced having their hands painted since they were children—were content with such endless waiting. Safiye thought of Esmikhan Sultan as the prime example. The girl might as well be a cushion on her own divan!

  No doubt most women in Venice were the same. Safiye remembered the aches in her knees after a long convent vigil and remembered, too, that she must not think of “home” anymore. As long as inertia was expected of her, she could never really be settled in either place.

  She tried to think where the blocks to her action were. The old man, surely. Sultan Suleiman, after a reign of over forty years, showed no signs of dying.

  Idly, but not for the first time, Safiye wished him dead, just to see how the pieces might fall with that great keystone gone. Interesting chaos, ready for the swift and clever to form at their own will.

  Her thoughts moved to the next step. Poison was the most obvious means for a woman to use on a man: quiet, easy of access, needing no physical strength or even incriminating contact.

  And the Quince would provide.

  Safiye, in the past months, had even checked on the dishes the Sultan preferred and how they were served—only to discover that he had incorruptible poison-tasters.

  Damn these veils that kept her from using her wiles as lavishly as she’d like! Then she’d learned about the celadon porcelain on which every morsel the great lord ate was served. The pale grayish-green of its glaze would reportedly turn an incriminating black if it came in contact with anything the least bit unwholesome. Poison Safiye could consider, but her mind balked to face such magic.

  Nur Banu used the same priceless ware.

  In any case, having watched Suleiman as well as lattices and curtains would allow, Safiye—like most of the vast empire—could hardly imagine the world with him dead. The magnificent Shadow of the Faithful roved from one end of the greatest empire in the world to the other with an energy that would have worn down many a younger man. Indeed, it taxed Safiye’s intelligence to keep up with him in her mind. This season he was north, battering at the walls of Vienna. Next she heard, he was east, beating the insolence out of Persia’s Shah, the Grand Heretic, then ordering the movements of his corsairs out at sea and against her homeland. Now looking ‘round the Pillars of Hercules towards restoring Spain to his Faith, now south, against Yemeni or Ethiopian rebels. Or taking on the Portuguese for control of the Persian Gulf shipping routes to India.

  Well could this magnificent man boast in his inscriptions: “In Baghdad I am the Shah en-Shah, in Byzantine realms the Caesar, and in Egypt the Sultan. Allah’s might and Muhammad’s miracles are my companions.”

  She had observed him in procession on several occasions. Of course the
face was not always easy to see within the press of crowds. Often she saw only the turban, the great turban which, in the blaze of sunlight, assaulted the eyes with the purity of its whiteness. Topped with royal heron feathers, it was nearly a third the size of the man himself. This bulbous creation was formed from fifteen lengths measured from the tip of the monarch’s nose to the end of his outstretched finger, fifteen lengths of the finest silk and linen woven together. And a du- plicate turban was also wound around the end of a pole and carried before him as he progressed, carried by some honored aga who made it bob and nod in recognition of the cheers so that everyone could think he got a good view.

  But she had actually seen the man full on. Then his sharply hooked nose, eyes deeply sunken with wisdom into the tough, bony face, the sparse beard just graying that hid nothing of the force of his mouth and jaw—these had set her heart fluttering to the martial beat of his accompanying drums. Gossips told her he covered a sickly complexion with a red paste makeup, but she saw no sign of it, only a ruddy, healthy glow, tanned with the out-of-doors and vigorous activity.

  And such splendor surrounded that face for the press of a hundred men in any direction that, it was said, more than a few men were made rich each time he passed. This was just from the gems knocked loose of their casings and casually left behind in the dust for the fortunate to bend and claim.

  Although Safiye called him “the old man”—and worse—disparagingly and aloud any time she chose, to herself Suleiman was, in fact, an astonishingly magnificent piece of manhood. Even so little a thing as his arrival in Aleppo the previous fall for overwintering reverberated glory from the inner heart of the harem to the end of Christendom. She would leave the keystone in place, as a pattern of what she might attain. He deserved every honor the world showered on him—nay, more. How she wished to honor him herself—personally. If only to selfishly drink his splendor to her own.

  “I wish I’d been bought for his bed.” Safiye sometimes couldn’t help but openly contradict herself. “Instead of just for his grandson’s, so now I can never know him.”

  “No, you don’t,” Nur Banu always reminded her with a snap when such words were overheard. “He already has a son, a grown son, old enough to be your father. And a grandson. My son, and your lord and master. You just wait your time and do as you’re told.”

  That was the hard part, the waiting. And waiting for this glorious Sultan’s death...Why, any son of his was much more likely to die first. Suleiman had, in fact, already buried three sons and the single heir left to him, Selim, didn’t seem much longer for the world.

  Ah, here was the weakness. Prince Selim was a much more profitable chink to pick at in the bastion of Allah’s will. Upon first glance and, again, from a distance, Safiye had also been impressed by this presumptive sultan of forty as well as by his father. But now she saw easily through the trappings of his inherited station to his short, corpulent figure and the unhealthy flush under his wobbly turban. There were even rumors he was not Suleiman’s son at all, that Khurrem Sultan had smuggled in a lover, and this was easy enough to believe, looking at the man.

  But that such a splendid woman as the splendid Suleiman’s consort was rumored to have been could have so debased herself was difficult to believe. Safiye found it more reasonable to remember that every litter has its runt and, the more vigorous specimens in this case haying torn each other to pieces in their rivalry, Selim was what remained.

  There was no need to consider poison in this case; Suleiman’s heir was busily poisoning himself.

  Here, among the Turks, where indulging in wine was a capital offense, Selim was openly given the epithet “The Sot.” The Sultan wrote to his son over and over again, urging him to “relinquish that mad red thing.” To no avail. Safiye had never known such a serious drunk even in Italy, where wine replaced mother’s milk on a toddler’s tongue. Perhaps, she thought—and prided herself on her wisdom—the religious prohibition added to the drink’s attraction, created the very evil it sought to eliminate. And surely, having grown into his prime and past it, waiting for his father to die—surely this aggravated the prince’s condition as well.

  Selim being what he was, yes, it was best to be loved by his son, Murad. Safiye folded herself more firmly in her wrapper, pressing the memory of love’s attentions to her breast to keep it safe, a prisoner there. Here, at the bottom of power’s ladder, she could mistress not only carnal needs, but the young prince’s education and political interests as well. She had turned Murad from the opium, to which he’d been a slave when she’d first been given to him, to the equally alluring but more influential inner workings of the Divan.

  Even Suleiman, the most powerful man on earth, had sat up and crinkled his eyes in pleasure to see this change in his grandson. The Sultan’s letters to him, which Murad shared with her, contained no scoldings or fatherly threats, but were written man to man and concerned the most urgent affairs of state. If Selim was the weakness, Murad was the tool with which she had to work.

  Someday she would have a son, too, of course, to be her tool. But there was no need to look so far ahead yet. The getting of children was for the less resourceful, the more desperate. Those who had no looks that pregnancy might erase. In the meantime, the Quince’s pessaries of medicated tar and sheep-tail fat conspired to keep Safiye’s present powers unburdened.

  The request to sail down the coast had been a setback. That was Murad’s doing: he frequently let romance clutter his desires. In his wish to delight her, he had pushed too fast too soon. And in a totally irrelevant direction. Murad never fully realized that if he wanted to please Safiye, he should seek the Sultan’s favor and trust, not occasions for voluptuousness.

  Safiye felt herself blush with shame at the memory of the leaky ketch floundering in mid-Bosphorus and was glad, for once, for the concealing veils she wore. She had learned a lesson: she must always keep a careful rein on her lover’s propensity. Every sign now read, however, that the more sober behavior she had demanded of her prince since that escapade had restored him in the old man’s good graces. Perhaps even elevated him higher.

  Mentally, she washed the blush from herself and returned to the question: How best to make use of this favor for Murad’s benefit? And for her own, of course. A young man could grow bored, indolent—self-destructive like his father—if his prowess wasn’t continually challenged.

  So might a young woman, for that matter. This particular young woman, anyway, Safiye thought, hugging herself again.

  “Why won’t you let me buy you a eunuch, my love?” the young prince would always ask her whenever she hinted at these concerns to him. “I’ll give you the money. Get yourself a eunuch, the best money can buy. Then you won’t have to be so beholden to my mother and her khuddam. Anything you wanted, anyplace you wanted to go, wouldn’t have to be screened by those watchdogs first. It would be very liberating for you.”

  “Liberating” seemed an odd word when it was not less she wanted, not out of the harem, but more, deeper, into the controlling heart. Still, she’d agree, “It would be nice. If I could find the right eunuch.”

  Murad would say something like, “I’m sure you could if you’d only look.” He’d nuzzle her neck so she couldn’t tell exactly what he said, other things on his mind. “You’re the cleverest woman I know.” Some such nonsense, stating the obvious.

  She would return the nuzzle, just enough. Then she would hint, “Your sister Esmikhan Sultan has a eunuch. That Venetian Veniero.”

  “Who? Abdullah?” Maybe he’d say it. Or maybe he’d start on her buttons with his teeth.

  “He has some intelligence.” He could even he dangerous, with what he knows. She’d keep that part to herself. What he could tell you about me—“—My love.” That part aloud, with the proper groan of desire as Murad found her breast.

  Everyone considered Veniero a mistake of the cutter’s knife and of the marketplace. They pitied Esmikhan his youth, his unsettled nature, his lack of experience. But compared to every
thing else Safiye had seen—and, my dear princeling, I have looked—Veniero-Abdullah had promise.

  She’d have to be careful: Murad would be in her now and each thrust would bring a new descriptive word to her mind: whiny, shrill, gossipy, silly half-men like so many geese. They were worse than the lay sisters in the convent. Of course she meant the eunuchs.

  He’d hitch up her thighs awkwardly, so it hurt, with no thought beyond the best and swiftest striking of his immediate goal.

  And then the prince would collapse across her, and she’d toy with the cinnamon topknot on the crown of his head and say, “They must cut away part of their brains with the rest of it, my wonderful, glorious master and lord.”

  But she’d think, That’s where all you men keep your brains. One cut takes it all.

  Esmikhan also had the best of luck with her husband. The Vizier, unlike Prince Murad, was already at the peak of his powers. Sokolli Pasha often held meetings of highest state right there under Esmikhan’s innocent little nose. That’s another reason why it was good to visit the princess as often as possible.

  It was just as well that Esmikhan was no more sensitive to her blessings than to call them “the will of Allah.” If she were, poor girl, she would really be a force to reckon with. More than courtesy visits and a midwife would be needed to deal with her.

  Safiye had offered Murad’s sister a great sum for that eunuch. She’d had her prince offer even more. Esmikhan had merely laughed a silly little laugh and refused to sell him “for anything in the world.” Safiye wouldn’t be at all surprised if the eunuch himself had something to do with that refusal. Esmikhan, left alone, would do anything to please. Anything.