On the other hand, Veniero, though smart, might not prove biddable enough. Indeed, he showed only signs of rebellion. Towards anyone but Esmikhan.
No, Safiye decided, she had better keep looking. She would find some khadim, intelligent but perfectly beholden to her as well. Courage, too, would not go amiss; he should be willing to die for her. Such criteria were easier expressed than met. Her beauty, the key to most of her power over men as well as women—women usually made quick treaty with her open threat—seemed to have but uneven effect on the sexless.
With such thoughts—and a sigh—Safiye made herself move from one velvet-lined box to another, the harem roomier but no less confining than the sedan.
From the sedan through this long passage, a woman had to remain veiled. She took them blind, these uneven stone floors and surprisingly stepped thresholds, plunging from the light of the yard into the narrow, windowless corridor. Safiye negotiated it only by the knowledge of frequent use and by passing from hand to flaccid hand of the ever-present colonnade of eunuchs.
And by the sounds. The brassy, open, official, tantalizing sounds of the Second Court milling for the session of the Sultan’s Divan grew fainter and more unreal as if being gargled by this throat of marble and tile. And then swallowed completely by the rhythmic lash—heard almost as frequently—of punishment dispensed in the eunuch’s courtyard.
Then Safiye realized what sound was missing today. The whistle and beat of the scourge was unaccompanied by any lament from the tortured. Brushing aside the next pair of guiding hands, she took an unguided turn to the left. Stopping to adjust her eyes to a return to light as she stepped to the edge of the eunuch’s courtyard, she watched. The shadow of a plan condensed in her brain.
VI
Six free-standing columns opened onto the eunuch’s yard. Their gray stone capitals, sharply, newly carved with lotuses in relief, declared them to be the exquisite work of Sinan, the imperial architect. Incongruously, a rough wooden canopy hazarded against them, protecting the tilework and the dormitory rooms on the southern wall from extremes of weather. And under this canopy, Safiye saw a pair of great black eunuchs, bulls more than men, rhythmically executing the grim punishment.
The other eunuchs, whites, who were supposed to be guiding Safiye forward to her own rooms, had a keen interest in their black brothers’ proceedings. With their tall, sugarcone hats, fur-lined robes in cinnamon red and candied-violet blue, their too-sweet smells, they seemed to be confections, left in the sun and melted to the spot. They ceased paying any attention whether their other veil-wrapped charges tripped and fell while scurrying through the dark passage to the inner chambers. And they made no grunt of protest when Safiye stopped to watch along with them.
One of their own, lying on his back at such an angle that Safiye couldn’t see his face, had his legs hoisted up and caught in the wooden bastinado stocks. The black eunuchs laid onto his naked soles with thin, whip-like canes.
This was a preferred form of punishment for odalisques: they might not be able to walk for a month afterwards, but their beauty remained intact. Ten blows was a good number for women; the most recalcitrant rarely required more than fifteen to learn proper obedience.
But Safiye counted twenty lashes as she stood and watched before she gave up counting. The victim was not a black man. White, or rather, earth-colored, tawny, like a lion. His publishers’ reeds caught bits of bruised and swollen pink flesh. Tiny droplets of blood arced up and behind the bullmen’s dark, felty heads with each swing of their great black arms. But still there was no sound from the victim. The shudders that ran through his prone body seemed due more to the vigor of the blows than to his own quailing.
“Come away, my Fair One.” Nur Banu was at Safiye’s elbow, speaking gently. “This is not a scene you need to watch. It may linger with you and spoil you for my son’s bed tonight.”
This concern for the sensibilities of Murad’s favorite was something Nur Banu hadn’t shown in a long while. Jealousy and competition had welled up too divisively between the two women; Safiye knew Murad’s mother could see her only as a supplanter. Safiye, in one part of her mind, knew she should accept the overture with open arms. She had been waiting for just such a move, looking for the chance to make one of her own. It was not helpful to have the harem’s head woman so constantly at odds with her, suspecting every move she made.
But the spectacle before her wiped all good intentions from Safiye’s mind. “Who is he?” she asked, and budged no more than the beating’s victim in response to Nur Banu’s pressure on her arm.
“Hyacinth. You remember him, a khadim that belongs to Mihrimah Sultan. Ah, well. She is lax in her discipline, that daughter of our master.”
Yes, now Safiye remembered the man. She hadn’t recognized the topography of his stripped, well-muscled chest—its valleys and high, flat plains—nor the tangle of mousy brown hair on his head. These features had always been hung with furs and capped with white linen before.
And that mincing name! Hyacinth, for such a figure of a man! It was enough to confuse anyone.
“But what’s he accused of doing? Deflowering Mihrimah’s virgins?” Safiye nearly laughed at the notion.
“They found him with Selim’s current favorite.” The subject put bile in Nur Banu’s voice.
“When I said ‘virgins,’ I only half jested. I’d believe this particular khadim not only capable but anxious to do so.”
“Not with Selim’s girl,” Nur Banu fairly spat her disgust. “With his boy.”
Now, Safiye made it her practice not to let anything surprise her. Surprise was the first sign of an irredeemable weakness.
So she said: “I can’t imagine this sordid little affair can please our master the Sultan’s ears.” She looked at the older woman with a hard pity. To be unable to wean her man from his drink, let alone a boy! “His heir a bugger as well as a drunk. Or...? Yes, perhaps it is better to keep quiet about it.”
Nur Banu answered the barely concealed threat in Safiye’s words with a look such as a potter might give a vase that displeases and shames him just before he dashes it to the ground. The older woman restrained herself, however, and Safiye swallowed her own spittle into meekness.
There was no reason, Safiye realized, why she couldn’t be standing here waiting her turn in the stocks rather than just observing. Her relationship with the harem’s first woman had disintegrated to the point where it seemed only a matter of time before Nur Banu decided this pleasure was worth incurring Murad’s wrath. Of course Prince Murad was the only male his mother had any control over anymore—this sordid affair with the boy was proof of that. Nur Banu would attack Murad’s beloved—and risk his wrath—only with the greatest caution. Still, restraint was best, Safiye decided. It was no use frightening off the game by making it too jumpy too soon.
In spite of her prudent thoughts, Safiye couldn’t suppress her next comment: “I for one doubt he’s guilty.”
She meant her words to more than defy authority. She timed them carefully to the quiet between two blows. They’d carry.
“He says he’s not,” Nur Banu confirmed, settling her anger with dignity. “But they all say that.”
“I believe him.” Safiye punctuated off the pulse again.
“He says he only let the boy crawl into his bed for comfort after the rigors of my lord’s passion.”
For a moment, Safiye imagined herself crawling into that bed. Though she would never confess to the need of such comfort, she felt the pleasure of that warmth, the silent dark, those enfolding arms.
Nur Banu continued: “Hyacinth says he only let the lad cry on his shoulder. But again—they all would say that.”
“By Allah, I believe him.”
The eunuch in the stocks shifted his tawny mane, ever so slightly, to fix Safiye with a pair of icy, feral blue eyes flecked with green. And she, in return, ever so slightly dropped her veil. He’d recognize her when next they met. If the pain he then shut those eyes against were not too nu
mbing. She hoped it was not.
“Come, Safiye,” Nur Banu said. “They won’t be at it too much longer. He’s bound for the Seven Towers as soon as they’ve finished here.”
“The Seven Towers” Safiye had a hard time telling whether she felt fear or thrill. She often did.
Safiye had never been to the Towers. She had never even seen them, though she knew the ancient fortress, dating to the Christian era, was within the vast palace compound, off where the land walls and the sea walls joined. There, far from—and yet always at the edge of—the mind of the world, prisoners moldered. And there was equipment for more serious tortures than this mild caning. There, only the torturers could hear the screams and extracted confessions over the sounds of the sea and the silencing distances.
The sea also provided a quick and discrete disposal site for those prisoners who did not survive their stay. Most of the rest walked—or were dragged, broken men—to the blocks before the Executioner’s Fountain where soon enough their bodiless heads would be displayed as an example to others.
“Yes, take him to the Seven Towers,” Safiye said, turning to comply with Nur Banu’s urging that she move on. “This bastinado is child’s play to such a man.”
But she was careful to say this away from the courtyard and under cover of the sound of the lash.
VII
With the help of a mirror, Baffo’s daughter could always shut a lattice in her mind against the noise and brilliance of the harem just as the harem shut its lattices against the world. The Quince’s green headdress with its gold-coin fringe flashed for a moment in the mirror, but Safiye adjusted the angle and then saw only her own face. The reflected oval fit the mirror’s gold enameled rim perfectly.
Tight oval echoes were also formed about her person by the hummingbirds’-egg emeralds in her ears, the matching wren’s-egg at her throat—new gifts from her prince. The reverberation of shape gave her pleasure.
Even dearer than pleasure was the image of concentric self, like rings round a pebble dropped in a pond but flowing inward instead of out. This image helped her to focus her being which otherwise, in the harem, was liable to dissipate. Dissipation happened to too many other women she met, women otherwise intelligent and firm of purpose. Such women lost concentration to the diversions of this place, became as silly and vacuous—as it was hoped they would become.
We are kept here for just this reason, Safiye mused. Shortly Murad will send for me—if the Sultan does not keep him too long tonight. My entire day’s purpose is for this end. At least they mean it for this end. But she concluded this thought with a brief consideration of what she had in fact accomplished that day—and of her new eunuch, Ghazanfer, who proved useful in that accomplishment.
Having thus established her sense of purpose—if not to say superiority—Safiye allowed herself to reach out. She took an oval fingertip full of almond and jasmine cream and rubbed it into her face, releasing the cloying scent into the air about her like curls of blood in a warm bath. The alabaster of her face firmed and whitened under the cool smoothness in further layers of perfection.
When one girl’s complexion is praised as being like feta cheese, Safiye thought, another’s like Turkish delight, I still rejoice in the alabaster of my own. Cheese is too spongy, Turkish delight too tinted and transparent—both too easily dissolved, digested.
Confirmed in the solidity of her being as well as in its centeredness, Safiye reached out again, letting her attention go further, to the delicate blue glass phial that held her beauty cream. Glass made in Murano, she noticed with no twinge either of homesickness or self-banishment, but rather with an affirmation of the state of trade and policy between her old homeland and her new one.
She looked beyond to the hands that held the vessel towards her, the Quince’s greenish knots of knuckle. Then she allowed those hands to take up their own daub of cream and conform it to the oval. Safiye knew that while she herself was alabaster in response to that touch, the midwife’s hands, otherwise so confident and calm, would quiver.
They did, like stone-scraped flesh.
Prince Murad’s reaction was the same when he caressed her.
The linger of the Quince’s fingers grew so long as to annoy. But Safiye took care to keep her annoyance shut behind her mind’s grille.
Nor did she bother to break the boundaries of her own oval perfection to wonder about the older woman’s fascination. Safiye only knew that the midwife—otherwise so incorruptible-—remained vigilant at Esmikhan’s. And returned again and again to sit on the cushion next to Safiye with new Venetian glass filled with this new potion and that.
Baffo’s daughter wasn’t convinced of the efficacy of beauty rituals. She never had been. In this as in everything else she felt self-sufficient, above a groveling slavery to fashion. She was certain she had won Murad and continued to hold him not because of any human concoction but by a touch of God.
Safiye had the feeling that her face had, in fact, been made in much the same manner as divine fire honed the prophets of old. She had an innate right to be beautiful, and heaven would allow no hindrance to the authority beauty gave her, that same heaven’s open gift. This was perhaps the extent of her theology in either her native religion or her adopted one. If pushed to a corner, however, or even on the rack, she might confess nothing more: Safiye Baffo recognized no divinity beyond the rim of her own face.
Still, if cloves and ginger were no fail-proof way to attain irresistibility for those God had not blessed, Safiye saw no harm in the spices. She saw no harm in any ritual—whether prayer or fasting or feasting—she discovered here among the Turks.
The tingle in the Quince’s fingers: Well, it might be the burn of cloves, of ginger, nothing more. But Safiye needed very little convincing to see that these rituals did serve beyond the surface. Their rare ingredients did have efficacy greater than merely translating her God-given gift to the Turkish vernacular.
And then the Quince let the quiver affecting her olive-green fingers move to her tongue. “Pepper is cheap in the spice market,” the midwife said, following the curve of Safiye’s cheek down to oval chin as if touching holy relics and uttering prayer instead of venalities. “It’s so cheap, I’d almost scrub my pots with it in place of sand. A pity there’s little beauty benefit in pepper, my sweetest mountain flower. But I’ve stocked up on enough sacks of the stuff to poultice a hundred winters’ coughs.”
“That’ll be the twenty thousand quintals of pepper Sultan Suleiman’s ships have confiscated from the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean.” Safiye spoke, and watched in the mirror how entranced the Quince’s fingers were by the slightest movement of her lips.
“You care a lot about the source of your spices,” the midwife commented. “More than about the spices themselves, I think.”
Safiye smiled and condescended to speak some more. “This cargo has been brought to Alexandria. Thence some comes to us in Constantinople, much to the Venetian traders for an excellent price.”
“You favor the traders of your homeland, fairest of the fair?” The Quince asked it as if she would willingly capture the moon for Safiye if that would please as well as a coup for Venice.
“In this case, what helps the Venetian Republic helps the realm of Islam, too. I do not pick sides except against the Portuguese who, ever since their ships rounded Africa, have had unfair—uncustomary—advantage of the Indian seas.”
“No wonder the cooks have been over-peppering the sauces lately.”
“Your ambition, my Quince, extends no further than your belly?”
“While yours, my fair one, encompasses the entire earth.” Was that a note of exasperation in the midwife’s tone?
‘Where the pepper goes, there goes the gold,’ was a saying when I was a child.” Safiye unfurled her eyelids and drawled, letting the midwife think she was half a-swoon with caresses. “I remember the smell when, as a child, we’d pole through the canals where the richest merchants warehoused. Sometimes cloves, sometimes cinnamon, but
always, always pepper. The smell of wealth. The smell of power.”
“Come to my surgery, heart of my heart.” The Quince quieted to a whisper in her intensity. “Leave this silly, garish communal hall. You shall smell that smell again.”
Safiye pushed a smile up into the cream on her cheeks as if the offer were a great temptation. She was, in fact, delighting in another brief reverie of her new eunuch. Finally, she had found a khadim of her own, and such a one as might be an extension of herself. It seemed to be the Quince’s touch that thrilled her. But it was in fact a more mystical thrill, a sharing with Ghazanfer of what she knew he must be accomplishing at that moment.
Safiye didn’t reply to the midwife’s invitation. Instead, when the tantalization of clairvoyant union with her eunuch had past, she spoke in another vein. She retained in her voice, however, the note of husky desire which, she knew, drew the midwife to her like a lodestone.
“How the war with Portugal goes will affect how willing you are to slather my face with any of your concoctions, my dearest Quince.”
“Fair one, I would not hesitate to do so if almonds were as dear as gold.”
Safiye sighed as if the entire world conspired against their mutual attraction. “I wish—” She let the Quince’s imagination fill in the wish voluptuously, then continued, glancing at the crowded room about them as if that alone thwarted the mutual granting of that wish.
“—I do wish our lord the Sultan would free enough men from other arenas to complete construction of that canal joining our Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea at Suez. That would defeat the upstart, renegade Portuguese once and for all, have them on their knees before us to spice their sausages.”
“What can a ditch through some desert possibly have to do with you here, my heart?”
“Sometimes you do surprise me in the narrowness of your thinking. You are an intelligent woman, my Quince. The most intelligent in this harem.”
“Do I take that as a compliment?” The Quince struggled a bit with her veil, the first effort in that direction she had evidently made all day.
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