The Sultan's Daughter

by Ann Chamberlin

  Nonetheless, though Safiye did not hear it, she knew she was not alone. Confidently she sensed the shadow of Ghazanfer’s feet behind her. She saw no more than his hands as they opened the intervening doors, but she felt their surety as they closed those doors behind her against the harem’s chaos. She wondered as she walked, about the strength of such hands. Such hands, so solicitous, could overcome a man stumbling home drunk, even empty of any weapon. Such hands had forced more on the man’s unconsciousness with a Quince-provided potion. Then those hands had hoisted that Effendi up to broad shoulders and carried him through the fresh palace night to a place where the body couldn’t be missed.

  “I dowsed him with more drink afterwards,” the great eunuch had reported in the laconic, hissing way the lack of teeth and outward masculinity forced him to. “A whole bottle of raki.”

  She saw gratitude in his eyes then as he spoke, perfect gratitude. She knew if she cared to look back she would see it now, flooding the hard green with their only softness. She had given him revenge—as he had helped her to take her own ambition by the horns.

  “Get out!”

  Nur Banu screamed, out of all control. But the eunuch’s torture-scarred hands gently closed one final door and the sound dropped to nothing.

  Then Safiye could set words the older woman didn’t say—that she would never say—into the calm of the oval of her own mind.

  So you have won, you bitch, you demon from hell. You have won the heir’s sandjak for your lover. My son, whom in your presence I can no longer control. You’ve won it for him, for yourself Along with the sandjak you gain your own harem to add to your new eunuch. A harem free of my scrutiny. It puts my Murad—and your own accursed self—even further from my reach. We remain in Kutahiya, you go alone to Magnesia. Murad grows even closer to his grandfather, to his grandfather’s throne when the old man should vacate it.

  And I? I am condemned not only to that fiendish overland journey and the desolation of yet another summer in Kutahiya, the end of the earth. But all my future is condemned to dependence on this man, this Selim, who forgets-—in his drunken stupors and love of boys—that I ever existed.

  This is what Safiye heard, all she cared to hear. Still, the ears of her mind could not help but hear one further echo off the face of the naked tile, the echo of accusations Nur Banu had once actually flung at her.

  “This you have won, this battle, you they call the Fair One, you whom I bought on the slave block. I might as well have purchased an afreet from the depths of hell. But the war is not over. Not by far. Do you know why?

  “You have no son, you selfish slut. Murad may always tire of you, as Selim did of me. But unlike my good fortune, you have no son.

  “And we have yet to see if you can conceive. May not the Quince’s potions destroy you as readily as they destroy others? May they not rot out your insides? If not in the original formula, in one she may be bribed to concoct?

  “And if you can conceive, you know girls are born into this world as frequently as boys. More frequently, it seems to be Allah’s will, when their presence is least desired.”

  Safiye denied all this, then as she did now. Heaven would never so betray the beauty it had given her. Would God betray holy writ? Still, her mind couldn’t shake the words.

  “As long as you have no son, Fair One, you must know. You are vulnerable. You are more vulnerable, even, than I.”

  XI

  The sea journey to Magnesia was everything harem envy promised. The time did not dawdle away in the same spirit of languid indolence that most of the inmates imagined, however. She wouldn’t have liked it, Safiye supposed, if it had.

  For example, she delighted in the sight of the Turk’s naval might from the vantage of the Sea of Marmara, the all-important shipyards, the arsenal on the soft, southern underbelly of the city’s peninsula. She counted five new war galleys under construction, like the skeletal ribs of beached sea monsters. On the water itself, she tallied every hull crested with Saint Mark’s banner. She nursed no interest to escape to them, but debated if she might know a captain or an owner and what he might be sailing for. She weighed their presence against the arsenal’s production.

  Lacking more direct information of the Venetian vessels, she made Murad tell her the names and capacities of all the crescent-flagged ships in the harbor instead, their tonnage, their armament. She made him find out their captains if he didn’t know them, then entertain the cream of these corsairs—in a place where she could hear everything from behind a screen of sailing shroud—while they yet rode at anchor.

  Then, at the Dardenelles, Murad took her ashore and together they inspected the two solid fortresses, built by the prince’s ancestors, that guarded the waterway from either side of the narrow strait. “So you need never fear, my Safiye,” the prince said, “or worry your pretty little head about an attack on the heart of our empire, Constantinople. You see the approach is impregnable.”

  Safiye picked her way around the forts for a while with no reply. She knew her veils gave her the attitude of silent wonder at men’s accomplishments. But presently she had to speak what had been obvious to her even from on board the ship. She might have chosen to keep her knowledge to herself, sell it to the next Venetian galleon they happened on.

  But “Impregnable?” she asked her prince instead. “Perhaps, yes. When your ancestors built them and hoped their crossbow bolts might reach the decks of invaders’ ships.”

  “Now we have cannon in each fort and so that much less to fear.”

  “But the enemy has cannon as well. Not as in the days when Muhammed the Conqueror, your great forefather, turned firepower against the Byzantine Greeks who were as yet unarmed with guns.”

  “But, you see, my sweet—” Murad took the tone with which one explains things to a child.

  Safiye didn’t mind. She flattered him where she could. The prince still even thought he was responsible for his own advancement to sandjak hey.

  “A cannonball has much less difficulty falling down”—the prince’s tutorial continued—”as, say, from those battlements, than flying up.”

  “Precisely my point.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “In their effort to reach the invaders’ decks, your ancestors failed to claim the highest points on either side for their fortifications. See the precipice here—and across, there. Naked and unprotected as newborn babes—and peering right down into the fortress’s yards. An enemy would only have to get his guns up there—no light task, certainly, but perfectly possible in a single dark night—and he would control both forts and the strait.”

  Murad ran from vantage point to vantage point in a paroxysm of denial until he could deny it no longer. Then Safiye helped him compose a letter to his grandfather the Sultan delineating the problem—as if the prince himself had discovered it, of course—and urging immediate action to remedy the situation.

  At Izmir, Safiye saw the harbor, still silted up from the rapacity of Tamerlane.

  “After over a hundred and fifty years, they might have re-dredged it,” she suggested.

  “But we don’t want too many foreign ships coming to Izmir,” Murad said, the blush of a sea breeze riding above his beard.

  “Why ever not? Foreign trade will make the region bloom.”

  “The region feeds Constantinople and, most importantly, the armies of the faithful. If unbelievers help themselves, Muslims will go hungry.”

  Safiye remarked that there were plenty of foreign merchants scrambling for bargains of silks and cottons, figs and malmsey, in Izmir’s bazaars anyway. She liked to stop the sedan and overhear the talk of Venetians with Genoese incognito. And she noted the species she had never seen before but learned to recognize as Englishmen. Those Englishmen who had not adopted Turkish dress sweltered irrationally in heavy woolens. Their faces were sunburnt and burnt again peeling, pink as fresh fig flesh.

  And everywhere, everywhere along the coast were the classical ruins. Colonnades of teeth-w
hite pillars leered down on the sea from deserted promontories. Great bowls of theatres echoed emptily against their drab hillsides, still able to seat tens of thousands in comfort. Agoras and villas and streets and temples were empty save for the occasional shepherd with his flock. Yet, the permanence of their stones, glaring an impervious white under the best efforts of a malevolent sun, seemed to need only the quick addition of a few softening touches: awnings, strings of laundry, cushions, a few potted plants, perhaps, to make them thriving metropolises once more.

  Ruins such as these defied the word “ruin.” They would stand for as many generations again as they already had, generations, Safiye hoped, which would not be slaves of such prudery as the present one. Sometimes Murad found the stuff of their sightseeing objectionable. There were so many shamelessly naked figures with marble skin and unveiled beauty that no conqueror since their making had had time to chisel out all the eyes and privates to suit his higher standards of modesty and iconoclasm. Safiye pleaded with her prince not to complete the task for which his predecessors hadn’t had time.

  “Not this one,” she counseled. “But consider—if the polytheistic Greeks and Romans could sustain such wonders on this land, there is no reason why the Turks cannot as well.”

  And she felt the force of his concurrence in that night’s love.

  XII

  Time passed. For lovers, it was but moments. And regular mortals knew it as seventeen or eighteen months, sometimes long, sometimes short in perspective. It was late summer 1565, according to how Christians tell the years, and now in Magnesia, rides in sedan chairs had lost the odium for Safiye that they had for the harem in Constantinople. For one thing, Murad nearly always traveled with her, in the roomy, double chair he’d ordered.

  He traveled with her now, on the hunt, urging open the sedan’s shutter to get as much of the early morning sun as possible on the day’s dispatches.

  “You will not take Safiye on a hunt with you, my son,” he read from the top missive. “To expose yourself to such censure!” The mischievous sparkle that filled his eyes and the mimic in his voice told Safiye this letter could only be from his mother, Nur Banu.

  Murad continued, or rather, Nur Banu did: “Safe in her harem, nothing a woman can do brings shame on her man. But in the public eye, one ill-timed giggle, and people will think not just her, but you, silly and frivolous. One slip of a sedan bearer, one twisted ankle as she passes from sedan to tent on uneven ground and in her veils, as she must. My dear, a twisted ankle, and folk will never let the prince of my heart live down the name as one who has no care for his women. Have we yet lived down the shame of the brigands, even though all of them were killed, and your indiscretion was neatly covered by saying your grandfather—may his realm last until eternity—made the roads safe for travelers?

  “If you insist on taking her, the hunters will say you are one who is addicted to women, even if—Allah willing—no ill befalls her. ‘He is a man who cannot leave his harem behind, even to go into battle. What sort of Sultan can he make?’ they will ask themselves. And, ‘No wonder he cannot get a—’”

  “Well, go on, my love,” Safiye prodded, knowing full well the word he could not read was ‘son.’ “What else does she say?”

  “More of the same,” Murad said, taking his own voice again. “And then she closes with her usual effluence: ‘Allah’s mercy keep your eyes...May he exalt you as the exalted constellation of the Big Dipper...This worthless slave...Your eternal mother.’“

  “You read that very well, my love,” Safiye said. “I could almost hear her in the sedan with us.”

  “Thank Allah she’s not.”

  And the shutter, which Murad had earlier opened, now slammed decidedly shut behind him. Over her own giggles, Safiye heard the chair’s bearers curse. The prince had made a lunge for her and the men outside struggled to keep the conveyance upright against such a heated shift in the balance on their shoulders.

  Perhaps it would be better to say she traveled with him, to any place the governorship took them. She was pleased to think that she was never further from the bey of the entire sandjak—and hence its most inner workings—than the bearers could bring her.

  And often much closer than that, as they were at this instant, rocking the chair in a lover’s embrace.

  Safiye hitched her hips, hindered by Murad’s weight and the deep nap of the sedan’s velvet upholstery against her layers of summer silks. That Murad could read her his mother’s letters in the midst of defying them was a reassuring sign. It was so reassuring that she smoothed her henna-stained fingertips up under Murad’s jacket and down into his waistband.

  She pressed his forehead to her lips as she urged, “Your mother writes such things and you defy her?”

  “Let her rail all she wants,” Murad punctuated with kisses, on Safiye’s throat, on her eyes and cheeks. “This letter’s two weeks old or more. What does it matter what she thinks, here where I am bey and her notes but one scrap of paper out of a hundred?”

  “And yet you won’t defy her in the one thing that is most important to me and...”

  Safiye didn’t finish the sentence. She felt Murad’s whole torso stiffen and withdraw. The topic of marriage was a constant between them, though she tried to avoid it precisely because of this reaction. She often feared she nagged, though she never meant to. She sounded like a parrot trained with but one phrase.

  And like a parrot who doesn’t please, she thought, I can just as easily be sold.

  “I’ve never promised Mother anything—anything but that,” Murad bit back on the full voluptuousness of his lips, making them but a thin line between moustache and beard. “She is my mother. She must be content with that. And you, too, must learn to be content, my fairest one. You are with me all the time.”

  “That only makes it harder, not to have the dignity of being your wife, being something people only snigger at.”

  “Perhaps they snigger at you in Venice. Here, no one would dare. Please, love, be content that there is nothing I would rather do than make you my legal wife before all the world, as my honored grandfather made my grandmother—Allah’s blessings on her.”

  “Do it then.”

  “I gave my mother my word.”

  “Break it.”

  “I—I can’t.”

  “You won’t.” Safiye turned from him sulkily. “And no woman would ever be good enough for her precious boy.”

  Even without looking, Safiye knew he winced at the word ‘boy.’ “But she does have a point,” the ‘boy’ defended himself. “The reason the sons of Othman do not usually marry dates back over a hundred years...”

  “I know. Tamerlane.”

  “When we were but a small people, Tamerlane overcame us.”

  “And you still haven’t redredged the harbor at Izmir.”

  “Tamerlane carried off the beloved wife of my ancestor Bayazid the First in chains. Did unspeakable things to her. It took his sons years to overcome the shame of that and win the respect of their people again. Now that we are great, there are no princesses in either Europe or Asia worth polluting the royal bed for the political alliance...”

  “Pollution! I like that!”

  “I didn’t mean you, my love.” He touched her shoulder and she shook him off.

  He tried a different tack. “Slaves don’t offer the threat to our honor that a wife does.”

  “You are telling me you are so weak—now, under your grandfather whom the world calls magnificent—that you must fear a Tamerlane’s chains?”

  “No, I swear I would die rather than let such a thing happen to you. But even in such a time, there are things...”

  “What things?”

  “You forget the brigands who took you from me? I was prostrate with grief all those ten days.”

  “Brigands will not happen again.” The promise in her voice might have suggested that she herself had been responsible for their capture and could have prevented it.

  “As Allah is my shield, t
hey will not. But it was during that time of grief that my mother extracted this vow from me. I have only to remember how sharply my honor was cut at that time to recall the feelings—and renew my vow. Allah witness, my love, I cannot break it while she lives.”

  “You want a child first,” Safiye accused.

  “I’d like a son, yes. What man does not? But such is my love for you that I’d as soon have my brother ascend to the throne at my demise...”

  “Allah forbid it!”

  “...Than to abandon you, whom I love more than life. She is my mother, Safiye.”

  “I see.” Safiye knew the ice in her voice would fire him.

  “Perhaps—perhaps I may talk her into rescinding the vow she made me give her.”

  “If I don’t go hunting with you, perhaps.” Safiye felt Murad squirm uncomfortably as she retreated from him.

  “Perhaps, if you, Safiye, with your gift of words, may help me compose another letter.”

  “You’re the poet, your majesty.” He hated it when she gave him that royal title. “She will not allow it for jealousy. Your father never married her. She could not bear to see us happy where she is not.”

  “Perhaps.”

  She could not bear to see me a queen in my own right rather than attendant on my sons, Safiye thought but didn’t say.

  Murad mused aloud, “Perhaps if Allah were to give us a child...She could not then contain her grandmotherly joy.”

  “Yes, that’s what it would take.”

  “Or maybe when she knows you better.”

  “I fear we know each other all too well now.”

  “She doesn’t know you as I do.”

  “For that I’m glad.” Safiye planted a kiss on the point where Murad’s turban met his brow and began to wind him back from this distraction.

  “So until then, love, please...” Murad fought to resist her touch but failed.

  “Until then. Or until she dies.”