The Sultan's Daughter

by Ann Chamberlin

  “Of course.”

  “I’m not certain. Sometimes I’d rather hear you call me beautiful.”

  “Well, my Quince, you’re clearly not...”

  Safiye bit her tongue and was much relieved to hear the midwife laugh, as if this were no matter.

  “Sometimes I think you equate beauty with wisdom,” the Quince said, “as if anybody with any sense would choose to be beautiful if she could.”

  “Well, certainly, any woman...”

  “And so this makes you not only the fairest in our harem, but the most intelligent as well?”

  Safiye was glad to hear the other woman laugh again, although it was a fuzzy, bitter laugh, like her nickname, the Quince. Safiye did not trust herself to make a reply, however. How could she, without offense? Or without striking the phial from the midwife’s hand.

  The Quince spoke first. “I’m not so certain as you are. Oh, not that you aren’t fair and intelligent, my Safiye, but that the two keep good company most of the time. Or that beauty is to be preferred above intelligence. And both outweigh a certain sweetness, kindness, concern for one’s fellows. Love.”

  “Oh, my Quince! Who are you to speak of loving kindness and tender mercy? You have a heart, we all know, as hard and tart as your namesake fruit.”

  The midwife shifted on her cushion, clearly made uncomfortable by the barest hint of accusation, of blackmail.

  “But do the narrow walls of this harem cramp your mind as well?” Safiye continued.

  “My Safiye, does the lure of a distant mirage blind you to what is here, this that is more real than realms and principalities?”

  “What can be more important than the spread and security of our master Suleiman’s empire? That empire that will be Murad’s. And our son’s.”

  “And yours?”

  “Yes, and mine.”

  “Allah willing.”

  “Allah willing, of course.”

  After a pause spent conforming the movement of her heavily used hands to the ellipse of Safiye’s skin, the Quince’s cause, whatever it was, subsided. The midwife regained her contentedness to give Safiye anything, even her topic of conversation.

  “In spite of the distance,” she said, “I understand our lord receives ambassadors from Calicut, Malabar—as far away as Sumatra—pleading with him in the name of that Islam we share to come to their defense against these heathen Portuguese.”

  The Quince took up no more almond cream on her fingers, for Safiye’s alabaster was already slick with it. But she kept working on that face. From temple to lips, from bridge of nose to point of chin she slipped, as loathe to part contact as a lover at dawn.

  Safiye closed her eyes and sighed, trying to set the tone between the satisfaction the Quince was hoping to evoke and the disappointment and frustration the conversation made her truly feel.

  Safiye said: “And to each supplicant our lord gives a cloth of gold coat of honor, a sack of silver aspers—but not the artillery and master gunners they want. They deserve.”

  “I suppose a man, even a sultan, cannot be everywhere at once, and must pick and choose his battles.”

  “And the harem, a woman’s country, denies a woman the right to be anywhere.”

  “But that same denial allows her to be much more omnipresent than a man’s world allows him.”

  This again. What was the midwife driving at? Let her keep to her potions and magics, things she can understand. But for an instant, Safiye felt herself drawn in by the sweep of the hand across her face and she kept her thoughts to herself.

  The Quince continued, lulling: “A woman is invisible, yet the touch of her finger is everywhere.”

  “Like Allah?” Safiye purred.

  “Like Allah,” the Quince replied.

  VIII

  Safiye smiled at the notion of an invisible woman as God. She saw her smile shoot through the midwife’s body, the Quince’s eyes half close with the rigor of emotion.

  “But I—no less than the Sultan—must pick and choose my battles,” Safiye said. “I think—if it’s Allah’s will—I shall know better than the old man how to choose, when I am there.

  “In the meantime, the site of the old man’s war with the Portuguese is so distant, the hostilities so scattered, it takes forever to hear word of what has happened and even longer to decipher what it may mean afterwards.”

  “What it means for the Sultan. For his grandson.”

  “For me. Your price quotes from the spice markets are as good—and as rapid—an indicator as any other I’ve discovered.”

  The Quince seemed to take more compliment than Safiye had meant. But it was a sign that, secure in this ally, Baffo’s daughter could expand her attention to the rest of the room.

  Here, harem walls contained the brilliant splinters of life created by close to two dozen young women yet uncontained within themselves. The young women’s native integrity imploded under the pressures of grille and veil. Although beautiful, indeed chosen first for this beauty, they were not naturally favored quite enough to be free of beauty’s thralldom—and all the other slaveries fashion brought in its wake.

  The Quince sighed. “Your prince will call for you soon.”

  Safiye hummed a half-attentive response.

  “Too soon.”

  After another circle of Safiye’s face, the midwife said: “Will he love the smell of jasmine on you as much as I do, my doe?”

  Safiye could tell her lack of attention galled the Quince. Speaking would help, even if it were mindless repetition of thoughts she’d shared before.

  “On my first visit to the harem,” Safiye said therefore, “before I’d even been bought and guaranteed a place here, I felt the pulse of power in these inner rooms. It was as if, in a body apparently dead, there had been this forceful sign of life. Can you appreciate that, my Quince? Have you ever come upon a body like that?”

  “No. Mostly what I find dead is genuinely dead.”

  “It was not just life, but a vigorous, splendid life, the most glorious life I could imagine.” And I claimed it for my own, she told herself with a fierce glance in the mirror.

  “There is something in the harem I have tried to explain to you, my Fair One, but words have failed me. Something—between women. Was that what you sensed?”

  Safiye shook her head, not so much at what the midwife said, which she hardly heard, but at her own discovery. “I realize now that the power I sensed came from Nur Banu.”

  “Well, a woman and her mother-in-law are always at odds.”

  “Mother-in-law?”

  “That is what Nur Banu—Murad’s mother—is to you, though I suppose ‘law’ has nothing to do with this case. These troubles are proverbial among us.”

  Safiye decided to humor the midwife and follow that train of thought for a while. It took less thought; the words came of their own accord.

  “In Venice as well.” The husband’s mother is the wife’s devil,’ I was warned. Still, for much of my life my aunt and her fellow nuns were the women I knew. They would have had the Blessed Virgin Mary as their mother-in-law, wouldn’t they? A curious concept. I never thought of that before. I don’t suppose they could complain about her. Or aspire much to her position, do you think?”

  The Quince said something about heathen Christendom and its abuse of women, so formulaic Safiye assumed she was not required to listen.

  “No,” Safiye reverted the conversation to the line of her own thoughts. “I felt no repulsion from Nur Banu that first time I met her. Envy, perhaps. But I certainly thought we could be friends.”

  “You didn’t know then that you’d have to share one man’s affections. “The Quince dropped her voice to her whispered intensity again. “You don’t have to, you know.”

  “I wanted to be friends. I did. I wanted it desperately. I wanted to share her power, you see. The power of this place I sensed from her—in this carcass—like blood beat from the heart.”

  “The other girls—women—they were not worthy of y
our attention?”

  “The other girls, Nur Banu’s slaves, were mere veins through which her heart’s power coursed. Even when she was not in the room, she dictated their purpose. Why, it is the same tonight as it was then. Look around us. A girl might chat to a parrot or take individual joy in these last tulips of the season.”

  Safiye gestured towards the closest vase, one of many, ladening the close harem air with their metallic scent. “Still,” she insisted, “every girl’s purpose here is dictated by the first woman.”

  “The bash kadin. Because she has borne a son. Shall I stop making you the pessaries? Shall I make you a fecunding charm of coriander seed and salt crystal instead?”

  “Just look at them this evening! Every girl’s main focus is the packing of chests and trunks, the rolling of mattresses and rugs for the spring journey across the bosom of Turkey for summer quarters in Kutahiya.”

  “You yourself do not join in this project.”

  “It’s not required of me.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “I’m not a menial slave, after all. Must I appear before Murad all hot and sweaty?”

  “That wall come soon enough after you meet him, I warrant.” The Quince did not conceal a sigh—and a smile. “A pity, however, you do not lend some of that effort to things in here.”

  Safiye said nothing but looked in the mirror, feeling the point taken.

  The Quince elaborated: “I mean socially, with the other girls, it would be helpful to join in. And to solidify your relationship to Nur Banu.”

  “But since I have laid claim to Murad’s heart,” Safiye said, “I am a heart of my own.”

  “Are you certain you are not too much his heart? Such dependence on men is common among your countrywomen, I understand. But you need not transfer it here. The harem helps us escape that.”

  Escape in the harem seemed nonsense to Safiye, so she made sense of her own. “I have weaned Murad from his mother as surely as I weaned him from his opium. It is for this cause that I am at irreconcilable odds with Nur Banu. There is no reason to pretend otherwise.”

  “Can you imagine, my Fair One, that I could have the freedom of my work if it were exposed to the men’s world? My work—my art would be taken over by men. If they let me practice at all, it would be according to their rules. It would be men telling me—and you—when to have a child and when not to.”

  “Any other woman’s whims—like another heart’s veins are a mere distraction from my own.”

  Safiye was relieved that the Quince interjected no more of her endless refrains. Here in this self-same harem room where she had snatched destiny, Baffo’s daughter could now feel little more than annoyance—at anything and everything.

  The packing, the bundling up of a smooth, seamless life into any number of various, separate bundles—that annoyed her.

  And there was the women’s chatter accompanied by two competing musical renditions, one vocal and sad, the other an instrumental for lively dancing. The plash and purl of an indoor fountain, in play for these warm spring evenings, contributed a third rhythm, all its own.

  There were the crazily mingling scents of tulips and perfumes and sweets and sherbets, and a brazier smoking with sandalwood chips and ambergris at which three or four women were fumigating the folds of their garments.

  The glint of jewels collided with rich fabrics and the explosions of color and noise that were the pet parrots—

  All this tossed together, all collided, jarred, intensified, then was thrown back at the observer with double the force from the walls of tiles and mirrors.

  The Quince spoke with an indulgent smile, as one might warn a child: “Nur Banu must call your retreat rudeness if not out and out insubordination.”

  “At this moment, I don’t care.”

  Safiye retreated into the mirror. Was this self-defense as she waited for the call from Prince Murad—and dissipation of another sort? Perhaps it was true, but she wouldn’t hear the Quince say it.

  “Two years ago, Prince Murad’s mother paid four hundred kurush for a Venetian girl of breathtaking beauty, outbidding the Sultan himself. This is an investment Nur Banu hoped—in a most irreligious way—would gain value with the years, not slip from her control like so much quicksilver through her fingers. Insuring such devotion was no simple task. You must know that, having undertaken to work for loyalties among the women yourself, behind Nur Banu’s back.”

  “I have to do something with my leftover garments: Murad, like his grandfather, is shown the honor of never seeing me in the same dress twice. I give them away.”

  “Does it become tedious after so many months, this nudging of a man towards endless fascination?”

  “What? Don’t you like tonight’s outfit? I liked the green flowered damask particularly well when I first saw it. But now you mention it, that was by daylight. Those saleswomen! It does lose something by lamplight. The colors muddy, somehow.”

  “My heart, you would look beautiful in anything, and rags turn to riches by your touch.”

  Safiye was silent, enjoying the sound of that flatters.

  Presently, the Quince had to coax her out of her silence. “On whom will you shed tonight’s used petals, beloved rose of my garden?”

  Safiye whispered, no louder than the sound of her hand over the damask’s nap: “Even with such gifts, I know never to trust over much beyond the rim of my own being.”

  “The girls who are not favorites of one Ottoman male or another—with their own sources of riches—they have to dress in strict livery every day but holidays, don’t they? Novices in green, menials in a rust.”

  “Nur Banu can tell at a glance who’s who, who’s out of place. A woman has to be in harem service a very long time before she’s allowed fur trim. Look! Those who have it wear it even on a warm evening such as tonight, to show off.”

  “You are beyond that stricture in any case.”

  “But I know most of what I give away has to be sold outside the palace for a little spending money.”

  “Not what you give me. Everything you’ve ever given me I have still, in a special place, treasured.”

  “You never wear them.”

  “Dear heart, I never even wash them. They smell of you.”

  Safiye laughed her knowing skepticism at such flattery. “When my gifts are sold, that limits their effect. And in any case, none of it has effect outside the harem.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “None that I can see.”

  “Perhaps your own treatment of your lover’s mother teaches you that gifts are no hedge against treachery.”

  “You don’t like Nur Banu, either.”

  “No. An old—difference of opinion. Your dislike seems more tinged with—remorse or guilt, shall we say?”

  “I am simply reminded that Nur Banu never sees Selim—her son’s own father—at all anymore. She cannot afford to be so self-sufficient. And her influence dies at the harem’s grate. Ah, when I am mistress of a harem of my own...”

  All at once, Safiye found herself in the center of a profound hush, as if a gale had suddenly dropped. The parrots had reduced their chatter of Koranic verses and “Who’s the fairest of all?” to sporadic chuckles, throaty with the tension even they could feel. And Safiye knew that she had been addressed from somewhere outside the circle of her being and that she had failed to respond. Perhaps even her alabaster face had betrayed more of her thought than she usually hoped for. Or had the splash of fountain failed to keep her conversation to the Quince’s ears alone—?

  Then Safiye saw what the intense concentration on herself had allowed her to ignore: that Nur Banu—who had left the entourage to twitch without her for a while like some beast with its heart torn out—Nur Banu had now returned to claim her place in the room.

  IX

  Nur Banu claimed the central seat on the divan—always left vacant in her absence—leaned back and draped one arm on the cushions to either side of her. Bracelets swagged with the elegance of silk
from her arched wrists, one pearl-seeded slipper dangled with studied nonchalance from a single toe. Nur Banu was no longer young, though she seemed younger tonight than she had for a while, Safiye thought. And the cords in her neck, the slight sag of her cheeks—attended to, though no longer much aided by almond cream—commanded in a way tauter flesh could not.

  The girls on the floor to either side of Nur Banu had turned towards her, their feet tucked up under their identical green robes in attitudes of enthrallment. So did Murad’s mother impose focus on the shattered fragments of sight, scent, and sound in the room—and was intent upon sucking Safiye in with them. Nur Banu had said something; the entire room awaited the Fair One’s reply.

  Somewhat cautioned, Safiye said, “Beg pardon, madam.” The humble inclination of her head was not too much to ask. Newly confident in her own purpose, Baffo’s daughter could afford to give this consolation to her rival. “Forgive me, but I’m afraid I did not attend your words.”

  Nur Banu snorted with sharp disdain, her obsidian eyes flashed. But Safiye was pleased to see that the older woman was full of news that pounded toward success too assuredly to use much caution.

  “I said, insolent miss, that we shall all shortly know the pleasures of a sea voyage.”

  “My prince promised me one, yes.”

  “This is thanks to my prince’s father, not to yours. As we can all plainly see by your disgracefully flat belly, you have no prince.”

  “Life and death are Allah’s will,” Safiye said, working on her humility.

  “But some things we on earth can, with the help of Allah, effect. Like the promise I have extracted from my son. He will never marry you. He has promised me, as he loves his mother.”

  “You have taunted me with this before, lady, but I have known promises to be broken. With the right allurements.”

  “He will certainly never marry you as long as you remain childless.”

  “And I have made an oath of my own, lady. I shall not have a child until I have the full power of a wife.”