“Allah forbid it!” Murad turned the passion of this prayer back onto Safiye, eliciting another curse from the bearers.
And Baffo’s daughter knew she should drop the subject there. She worked her fingers up into the prince’s tightly bound turban, over the familiar bumps and planes of his meticulously shaved head. Until then. Until then there was no reason not to lie back and relax, enjoy the love of her prince, how her every touch made him gasp and sigh. They had a long ride to get to the Boz mountains where the army encampment and the hunting would be. It would take the better part of the day at bearers’ pace.
Safiye took a moment to fumble behind her among the sedan’s folds of velvet for her silver cases of farazikh, the compounds the midwife had taught her to make that would prevent conception. The trick would be to get one inside before Murad got there first, and without his knowledge. This had presented challenges before, but she’d always managed it. Murad was naive in such matters—and, in the heat of passion, oblivious to the point of distraction. Of course, night provided good cover, and she always took care to go prepared whenever she was called into the prince’s presence.
Daylight had its drawbacks, even in the gloom of the shuttered sedan. But she got the proper case open and one of the medicated sticks in her hand without detection. The sheep’s tail-fat, very soft in her fingers, released the familiar scent of powerful drugs—rue and myrrh predominated. Their odor must also stimulate Murad, for his passion stiffened against her thighs. She gave a groan of encouragement and thought she must only wait ‘til he loosened the tie of her shalvar. She doubted he’d bother with anything else this time.
Meanwhile, with her free hand, she returned to work on his head. Under his turban’s muslin she found first the fine linen undercap and then his topknot. She twisted the shock of hair between her fingers till the scent of the musk he used filled the cramped sedan to every seam of its paneling, covering her telltale drugs. Safiye reached up to meet Murad’s lips, swollen again and panting in his ardor. She drew those lips to hers with her tongue as though on a leash, but as the kiss began, the flex of her hands knocked the turban free.
Murad sat up with another jolt and yet more blasphemy from the bearers. He might have had cold water thrown on that naked scalp of his and that single, dangling hank of rusty, Russian-red hair he’d inherited from his grandmother. Safiye thought this, but could not imagine what the matter was.
“My love, what is it?”
With a lurch, then, she felt the chair sink to the ground beneath her.
“We’re here.” Murad panicked.
“Here? Where? The mountains are farsakhs away. My love, in truth you must find new bearers. These who can’t mind their own business and keep discreet about a little—”
“A plague upon this infidel turban,” Murad said, quite forgetting in his distress that nothing was, in fact, more of the Faith than a turban. “I will have to rewind it without valets while those fools of bearers hem and haw and smirk out there.”
“Let them smirk, then get rid of them.”
“I never meant for this to happen.”
“Oh, didn’t you?” Safiye asked him, taking a passing squeeze at the stake of the tent formed in the lap of his shalvar, betraying just how urgent was the desire from which the cursed turban distracted him.
The sedan was suddenly full of white muslin. What had fit so tightly and neatly on Murad’s head before now left room for little else. She tried to lend a hand, but a royal turban—each extra span a sign of higher nobility—demanded the length of an audience hall to achieve the proper tautness, the interweaving of layers in a smooth dovetail over the brow.
“Forget the turban for the moment.” Safiye lost an important tuck at this juncture. They would have to start again, either turban or love, and she’d rather do the second one first, so as to have the trouble with the turban but a single time. Love was better with efficiency. “Just yell at the fellows to move on. We’ll get to it later.”
“But I told them to stop here,” Murad said, finding one muslin end and determined to start the winding once again.
“We’re nowhere near the mountains. You can tell. It’s getting too beastly hot in here and the muslin is taking up all the air.”
“Not near the mountains, no. But they are waiting for us. I have to get out. And I can’t go like this!”
He’s about some governing business, Safiye thought. We haven’t even left town yet. But nothing too important, she decided, or she would know about it already.
Murad said: “There’s something I wanted to show you first.”
“Here?”
“I assume it’s here. They wouldn’t have stopped before. They are good men, for all your complaints.”
Winding a turban is something like braiding, Safiye thought. She picked up quickness in the task, once she’d tucked the farazikh—the heat of her hands had melted this particular dose too much in any case—secretly under a cushion and wiped most of the stickiness there as well.
When the pass of palm over smoothing palm freed one of his hands for a moment, Murad used it to open the wooden shutters a crack.
“Yes, we’re here,” he announced, breathlessly.
Safiye helped the prince tuck the end of the muslin in at the back of his head. Then she brought her fingers forward and let them dawdle, still hopeful they could change his mind, on his neck where the thick body hair turned into even thicker beard. Thwarted in this, she hurried to fasten the aigrette set with diamonds and its three rust brown pheasant feathers over an unsightly bulge of fabric in the turban’s center front. Finally, she shoved the prince out the door and settled back to wait, hoping he wouldn’t be too long as the sedan grew hotter by the minute.
“Hurry up, Safiye,” he hissed.
His turban seemed dangerously close to the verge of unraveling, grotesquely large and lumpy, for they’d come nowhere near the tight, compact ball of which such fine fabric was capable. The feathers wobbled. It was all she could do to keep from laughing.
“I thought I’d just wait here until you’re finished. Please your mother.”
“No,” Murad insisted. “I mean to please you. I mean for you to see this as well.”
So the two of them undertook yet another scramble with fabric, this time with the heavy outer wrapper, head veil, and none-too-fine gauze for the face necessary to make Safiye presentable.
And then Murad stepped aside to let Ghazanfer be her eyes. For even if she was veiled, it wasn’t seemly for the public to see a virtuous woman too close to any man, not even her husband—if she were legally married. How much more so when she was not?
Any other woman in a similar position must have shrunk conventionally back into her veils for shame at such thoughts. Safiye felt her determination harden instead, her ambition piqued rather than thwarted.
XIII
The midmorning summer air burned like clear, unwatered raki as it went down the throat. The sedan’s iron fittings throbbed audibly, expanding, creaking like live things. Even through a veil, her dark-accustomed eyes found the great expanse of sun on naked soil too brilliant to stare at directly. Safiye bowed her head—some would be pleased to read modesty there—and kept her attention close by, no further than the dust-trimmed hem of Ghazanfer’s skirt.
Just outside the sedan chair, she sensed rather than saw the bearers squatting at rest, passing a skin slick, almost obscene, with seeping water among them. Those six bearers from the poles on the other side had already taken the liberty of coming around to the door, for they had thoughtfully placed this facing west. All twelve of them now crowded together in the little bit of shade allowed by a sun rising rapidly over the sedan’s roof.
So tight was the press that Safiye felt her wrapper drag across one bony knee. She sensed that the man was fully aware of the difference between her body’s active heat—encapsulated as it was, concentrated—and the surrounding world’s passivity. The quick exchange of husband for eunuch couldn’t have fooled the bearers. They
knew what sort of lurching rubbed their shoulders raw. No doubt they’d make some comment among themselves once she was out of earshot. She’d told Murad horses were better.
Still, after all, what was the discomfort of a few bearers to her? The lower sort of humanity existed to carry the upper, both physically and as the burden of their tongues.
We must be in a desert, Safiye thought, considering the heat, the glare, the total lack of vegetation, and the puffs of yellow dust that pillowed every step she took. She did not know Magnesia—or any place in Turkey for that matter—more than descriptions of land rents in the Divan or the view between a sedan’s slats or from a lofty upper-floor lattice allowed her to imagine. That such sources might tend to an illiberal view of the world seemed impossible to her mind. But she knew of no desert in the provincial capital’s environs.
She might have known from the sounds that this was no desert, though: the ring of metal on metal, the thud of iron on dead earth, the call of many men to their fellows like the chorus of some unmusical lyric. And as her eyes adjusted to the assault of light and singing heat waves, she began to see things no desert would contain. Numerous crews of men populated the space, not just ordinary men, but well-fed, well-muscled janissaries. She could tell because, though they had mostly stripped to the waist for the work they were doing, they maintained their white headgear with the telltale drape down to their shoulders at the rear.
The work entailed digging, deep digging in at least two spots that she could see. Relays carried the fill away in baskets and dumped it off the hillside. Lines of little donkeys also tiptoed up under great weights which, when unloaded, proved to be blocks of fine white building ashlar. Other janissaries stacked the stone here and there, in readiness.
“This must be the site of his mosque.” Safiye adjusted her original judgment away from ‘naked desert.’ “Ghazanfer, ask him if it is.”
The eunuch hastened to comply and brought back an affirmative. Safiye had heard of the project, of course, although when Murad flushed with aesthetic details, she listened less. Like his evenings with poets and scholars, she let him indulge alone. The legal battles challenged her more.
“This buying up enough land to clear for the scheme is taking an inordinate amount of time,” she had commented to Murad on several occasions.
“I don’t want it so far out of town that no one will pray there,” had been the prince’s reply. “It must be close to water as well, for ablutions. That makes a suitable plot difficult to come by.”
“Who are these people holding up the business, then?”
“Just small landholders. Old families with too many children, not enough land.”
“I thought they must be great lords or something, by the trouble they raise. If such people will not sell at a decent price, surely they can be removed by force.”
The idea had clearly shocked Murad. “Many of them have lived here—their families, at any rate—since time out of mind. Who’s to say but that their ancestors were here to watch the Greeks sail in to avenge Helen at Troy? Long before we Turks arrived on the Gediz River, in any case.”
“They’re not even Muslims?”
“Many are Greek Christians, yes.”
“What is your compunction, then? At home, in Venice, it happened all the time, particularly on the mainland. Water projects, you understand. Any small holders would have to move if the Council determined it was necessary—for the good of all, of course.”
“That’s barbaric.”
“Sound business sense, my dear prince. A sense of progress.”
“Against not only the spirit but the letter of our most merciful law.” Murad had smoothed dignity into the feathers of his aigrette. “As you’ve just heard the mullah declare—if you were listening, as I’m sure you were, behind the Divan door—’Being an orphan himself, the Prophet—blessings on him—would never sanction the removal of property from the unwilling and underprivileged.’
You are the law in Magnesia, my prince. Can’t you act like it? Safiye had said this, but not aloud.
The convulsions of circumventing this law took up Divan time second only to the most contentious thing: trying to stop the locals from turning their grapes into wine or from selling their raisins, grape syrup, and dried figs to any but the empire’s agents. Of course the farmers wanted the high prices red-nosed Englishmen and other foreigners would pay for these commodities that were luxuries in their distant homelands. But the Turkish laws were unstintingly clear—and annoying—about the evils of “tulip-colored wine.” Since Magnesia was close enough to Constantinople—one of its attractions, Safiye reminded herself—the law could not be circumvented; the capital demanded and consumed all the fresh produce at fresh, local prices. Domestic workshops required local cotton, too, if Ottoman subjects were to have work. So the sandjak bey had to see that selling abroad was severely punished.
Such cases made up, along with the usual petty thefts, tawdry adulteries, and inheritance squabbles, the majority of pleas that Murad—and Safiye curtained behind him—heard day in and day out. That, and the efforts, often maddeningly futile, to get a decent-sized plot on which to build a mosque.
Seeing this hard-won plot of dirt now in heat-seared substantiality was gratifying. There were some holdouts who still clung to the orphan Prophet’s mercy; Safiye saw their physicality now, too, their ramshackle houses making uneven tumors at the edges of her sight. But she was certain they’d soon be brought to bay—or at least Murad would be brought to see his legitimate rights as a ruler—and she could easily erase their existence from her mind’s construction of the projected edifice.
“The man to whom the prince my master speaks is called Mustafa Effendi,” Ghazanfer bent to inform Safiye. “He is the head architect.”
“But I thought Sinan, the Royal Architect himself, was to build my master’s mosque.”
Ghazanfer obediently queried Murad on this point as well and then passed the following dialogue back and forth.
“Sinan did draw the plans with his own hand. But the Royal Architect is old and so has sent his disciple Mustafa instead. Sinan is older, even, than my grandfather the Sultan—Allah grant that his reign may last to the end of time.”
Safiye knew the prayer was formulaic, but still she wished her prince would not ask quite so fervently for something that was so decidedly against his own interest—and hers.
“The only traveling Sinan thinks of doing,” Murad continued through Ghazanfer, “is the pilgrimage. Perhaps if he goes this year—if building projects in the City of Cities do not keep him yet again—perhaps he may stop in Magnesia and see the site. Allah willing, he has promised to try.”
“So what are these two holes the men are digging?”
“For the minarets, their bases. A group of craftsmen skilled in the special art of raising these fingers of stone that point towards heaven is directing the work. These men rove from town to town throughout the empire, wherever they are needed. Mustafa Effendi had news of this gang with a few months free so he thought he’d get them while he could and set them to work. We will have galley slaves to help as well, but only when the shipping lanes close for winter.”
“Two minarets, my love?”
“I know.” Murad blushed more than the sun would have caused. “Only a sultan’s foundation is allowed two. Perhaps I tempt heaven.”
“Your aunt Mihrimah’s foundation in Üsküdar has two.”
“That is because, in theory at least, her father built it for her. Still, it was her money. And certainly her taste.”
“You think perhaps you will be Sultan by the time the building is completed?”
“Allah knows best.”
So, whatever his pious and filial veneer, Murad would not really be content for the Angel Israfil’s horn to blow before he got to be Allah’s Shadow on earth. Safiye was pleased he harkened to her in this much, anyway.
At that moment, Baffo’s daughter stumbled over an unevenness in the ground. Another woman might have tho
ught her pride caused the difficulty. Safiye only knew it was one or the other of her many obstacles preventing good sight. Ghazanfer quickly reached out a hand to stop her and prevented a spectacular tumble.
“This is quite a severe slope you’re forced to conform to,” she had the eunuch comment to the prince.
“All Magnesia is steep,” Murad replied. “Either coming up or going down.”
Safiye already knew this geological fact by the slipping first one way and then the other inside her sedan. Shifting her veil the tiniest bit, she now got a clearer idea of just how truly Murad spoke. Two mountains whose tops she could hardly see pinched the settlement at their feet as though in a vise. Behind each rocky peak, rank upon rank of other precipices followed, much like mosque domes themselves, only steeper. Each one shimmered hazier than the one before it, bluer, until the sky hit the final, purest degree. Magnesia was a divine setting for a memorial to defy the ages.
The town was blessed with another imperial mosque already, the one Suleiman had built for his own mother, Murad’s great-grandmother. Safiye caught a glimpse of it now across the edge of her view and knew the architect had been no Sinan. A heavy, primitive thing, the low dome seemed but a flattish blister such as days spent hiking up and down these hills might well raise on unaccustomed feet. She hoped silently that Sinan would have more success in dealing with—and matching—the terrain.
Murad had every confidence in his grandfather’s man. “...Sinan says that a severe rectangle cutting straight across the slope will be the best plan.” His parallel hands gestured the direction.
“A rectangle will not be too mundane?”
“The light angelic touch of Sinan with arches and domes will remedy that. Then, there will be room behind on a different level for a medresse—a religious college—a public kitchen to feed the poor—”
Safiye happened to catch the eye of an old woman watching them with dull interest from the closest of the hold-out houses. Silently, the prince’s favorite tried to send a message across the distance that separated them: See? You’ll be perfectly well cared for if you give up that shack of yours. A public kitchen! Peasants in Venice never had such fortune.
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