Murad’s appearance with the horses was a great relief. The officers must have helped him to rewind his turban. He looked as neat and attractive as the entire meal she had failed to eat.
“My love, what’s the matter?” the prince asked as he helped her to her feet, helped her to rediscover what those appendages were for.
“Nothing. Nothing at all, my heart’s desire. Only missing you.”
For once, her lover’s patter was true and heartfelt. And her clinging to him somewhat embarrassed Murad in such a public place.
Fortunately, at the prince’s approach, the black flocks of pilgrims had taken flight like crows before a sling stone. Safiye suspected they and the spell would return as soon as Murad was gone, and she wanted to leave, with him and as quickly as possible.
Leaving Ghazanfer and a menial or two to pack up the re- mains of the meal, she let Murad lead her to the horses. She greeted her dappled mare with a hand to the muzzle and filled her head with the smell of horse, the smell of freedom—escape from the harem, the sedan. The smell, finally, of power.
Murad held the stirrup for her, promising all of this, but just before she lifted her foot to claim it, Ghazanfer interrupted.
“Lady?”
“What is it, khadim?”
Oddly, he approached no nearer, carefully keeping the horse’s flank between him and the prince as if he had something to hide. Safiye had no choice but to join the eunuch on the other side, leaving Murad with a little reassuring pressure on the arm—but was the reassurance for her lover or for herself?
“Yes, Ghazanfer, what is it?” She began with an exaggerated show of patience, indicating that patience was about to run out.
Ghazanfer closed the green of his eyes as he looked down. Following that look, she saw what the matter was. In each hand the eunuch held one of the silver cases in which she kept her pessaries, the farazikh that prevented conception.
“I found them in the sedan while I was packing up,” Ghazanfer elaborated.
“Of course. That’s where they ought to be. In case—” Did she have to spell it out for this sexless creature?
But now she saw more. The eunuch held the cases, protecting his flattened hands from the metal with the ends of his sash. Both cases lay open. The sheep’s tail-fat in one, the black tar in the other, had melted in the sedan’s heat leaving no body-ready fingers, but large, shapeless, useless puddles of swirling simples instead.
“Is everything all right, Safiye?” Murad called over the horse’s flank.
“Just fine,” she assured him. Then to the eunuch she said, “Never mind, Ghazanfer. Keep them safe. With the sherbet ice, perhaps. I’ll reform the mixture later.”
“Inshallah,” she heard her attendant say as she swung up onto the horse.
The saddle leather, smooth and sun-warmed, embraced her legs and soothed her cares. Finding the bunch of asters still burdening her hand, she tossed the flowers from her, grasped the reins, and gave the dappled flanks a good nudge with her yellow kidskin slippers.
XV
Across her reaching shoulder blades, Safiye felt the rousing whip of the ends of her six braids. She’d dropped the stiff golden brown outer wrap off her back perhaps half a farsakh ago, hardly out of Niobe’s tear-bleared sight, and brought it around to rest in front of her over the horse’s neck. The golden crepe extending her braids allowed her hips to feel the stimulating lash as well. The wind made by her ride on an otherwise still day penetrated the thin shirt over her forearms and breast until gooseflesh rose and her nipples bunched as if wrung of sweat.
She felt her breath competing with the sun for enough moisture to find any scent in that late summer countryside. All she did smell held the dryness of tinder and, as it filled her head, she felt herself ready to burst into spontaneous flame. She rode harder—to escape that potential? Or to ride directly into it?
Certainly she felt the wind carried her veils behind her like a banner on the battlefield and Murad, she knew, would follow like the good soldier he was. Did soldiers, she wondered, feel such urgency as they rushed towards the enemy? And was glory what they longed to embrace? Or the beautiful maidens, the hour is of paradise?
The idea the Koran gave her that she might be riding towards a celestial court full of doe-eyed and divinely insatiable page boys pressed a groan up from the warmth of her saddle leather. For she had never attended to religious discussion carefully enough to know if this pious promise was meant for her or only for the appetite of a Selim. Used as she was to making the world over in her own image, Safiye assumed she led the ranks of the blessed herself, and the thought brought a rigor to her thighs. The horse, a sensitive, spirited creature, took this pressure as an urging to go forward faster still.
Attendants, guards, and hunters dropped like the sun behind the west-riding hills at her back. Ahead rose the Boz, the Gray Mountains, her destination, but untrue to their dull name in the golden afternoon sun.
There was no rush. They planned no more than to reach the encampment by nightfall. Slaves were even now setting up the tents and seeing to supper, others sorting out the hawks and hounds, jesses, pistols, pikes, beaters, and net men. Her haste was unwarranted.
She knew she wasn’t trying to escape from Murad. Through Murad’s power lay her own. And she remembered how handsome he had seemed, his turban neatly re tied, fresh from the inspiring company of officers. She could look over her shoulder now and see him still as attractive, pursuing just behind the screen of her dust. But she also knew the urge she felt was not toward the highly staged world of the hunt, either. In spite of her direction, didn’t she long for escape from this actor’s box where the prince could hardly prove himself a prince? Didn’t she long to have him succeed in a world where mistakes were not impossible?
At that moment Safiye saw an opening in the trees to her left. As if in confirmation of her theory, she spontaneously dragged the bridle in that direction, off the cart-sized and rutted road, onto a path that quickly closed chestnut branches over her. The foliage was close enough to stroke her hair and pluck at the red silk shalvar on her knees.
“Safiye, don’t.” Finding that first order useless, Murad, behind her, amended it. “Wait!”
But the throb of horse hooves in her ears overrode him. Over her shoulders along with her braids, she threw the prince a laughing dare to follow.
The warm, leathery smell of tannin bit her flirtatiously on the nose, for besides the still-green burrs on chestnuts, the sky was erased by oaks and the ground by thickets of sumac. It was perceptibly cooler here in the shade than on the road, and the sudden half-light threw a second veil over her face.
Thus half-blinded, an unexpected scramble in the underbrush made her think either Murad had closed quickly or her own horse was scrambling on the tangle beneath her hooves. But when, five steps later she still had her seat, she knew it was neither.
Before either panic or confusion could touch her, the shadow she heard more than saw took on definite form, and that form was a deer. A stately fallow doe leapt off at an angle towards her right. A good omen for the hunt. But even with so quick a glance, Safiye saw the velvety nose, quivering with terror, and the big, sad eyes—the eyes of a paradisiacal houri.
Such a vision was enough to make her breath pull up sharp and her heart stop, not for fear, but in wonder mixed with desire. The doe has a fawn with her somewhere, seemed an obvious thought. One still young enough to hide while she draws the hunter’s attention off.
She pulled up at the perfect awe of such a thought and her mare sidled to a halt. Safiye had seen deer before on other hunts, both dead and alive. But mother love and self-sacrifice were otherworldly wonders to her. She sat frozen, matching her heavy breathing to that of the horse beneath her, and fought to overcome this debilitating reverence enough to go on. Mother love and self-sacrifice she would condemn as weakness in a fellow human, but in a dumb animal it was difficult to disparage.
Safiye couldn’t fathom the instinct. She could never accept
it, but she couldn’t deny it either. This instinct, like the ancient weeping woman of stone, plunged her into confusion. She’d ridden on the horns of that confusion since she’d left the shrine. Confusion was the enemy she battled.
The sight of the deer was powerful enough to make her sue for a momentary truce. She would turn the mare and go back, comply with the world’s expectations until morning renewed her strength.
A ride like she’d enjoyed today would never have been hers in Venice. She took consolation in this thought. She had done some riding in her youth, but never as much as in the past five months. Even if the nuns had approved, she would have had to go sidesaddle in order not to tangle her skirts.
And never on such a lively little mount as I’ve had to work with since coming to Magnesia. Intelligent, yet so willingly obedient...She relished the use of these horseman’s terms which six months ago she could not have appreciated. Yes, I know. Ghazanfer would have me say “Thanks be to Allah” after a thought like this. But with a final restorative turn to her rebellion, she refused to do so, even in her mind.
Then, in the middle of this thought, and the middle of drawing the bridle off to the right, the horse beneath her suddenly screamed and lurched up and out from under her.
The last thing Safiye saw was a stand of sumac coming up fast.
XVI
Safiye was not badly hurt. More than two breaths could not have been knocked from her before she found both breath and senses again. Broken sumac twigs were sticking into her at odd places, clinging to others, hampering movements, rendering any action uncomfortable, filling her nose with their sharp, bruised smell. But a few tentative maneuvers, though they sank her deeper in among the foliage, and the sumac deeper into her flesh, revealed nothing serious.
The first thing she saw when she was half upright again gave her a serious setback, however. Safiye found herself in something of a hollow and, almost level with her eyes, her mare’s legs thrust towards her like four gray ashwood lances. Even as she watched, the top rear leg quivered once, twice, and then lay still, deathly still.
Unable to grasp what could possibly have happened, Safiye lay back again, gasping for breath and consciousness.
“Allah! Allah! I’ve killed her!”
Murad, having left his own horse at the edge of sight, rushed to the mare. Then, moaning “Allah!” once more, he lifted up Safiye’s gold-brown wrapper that draped the horse’s shoulders—along with the broken nock end of one of his own arrows. The rest of the shaft was buried in the mare’s heart. Now Safiye’s senses truly did spin from her.
She awoke with an ache of black, tightened vision clogging the bridge of her nose. She was caught in her prince’s arms. He didn’t carry her far, only out of sight of the attendants who had rushed up to see to the fallen animal, away from the heavy sound of flies that had already found the place.
He carried her to a less treacherous embankment where he knelt and set her down. As if from far away, she heard him offer praises to his God for her survival. Closer were the protestations for the innocence of his mistake: He saw the deer. He thought to start the hunt early without the crutch of beaters. Such an easy shot. He lost the deer for a moment. He thought he saw it again. He realized, just the instant he released the arrow, that what he saw was his lover’s wrapper instead. And he couldn’t remember that she had shrugged it off.
And now he was closer, promising her a new horse, promising her twenty, promising her the earth and paradise as well if she’d forgive him. There’s always marriage, she thought, but before she found breath to make the suggestion aloud, an ache of hunger crawled through her limbs for the beauty of his speech. And it was hunger, not for a tray of pastries, but for a most basic and hearty pilaf.
And now he was very close indeed. Murad felt her for in-juries she’d already dismissed and her veils had vanished somewhere, tangled up in her exertions. Instead of faint and sumac, bruised masculinity now filled her nose.
When he’d convinced himself her worst injury was a scratch on her cheek, he kissed it better. He unbuttoned her jacket to check her ribs, her breasts—desperately seeking more, hidden ruptures in her love for him.
How Murad is changed since the first evening I saw him, Safiye mused, considering the change her handiwork and loving it for that reason. He was much handsomer now with flesh on his bones. His cheeks—no longer sallow—were glowing from the day’s exercise like oil-filled lamps of which his eyes were the flames.
Marriage, she thought to press again.
And then she saw him no more as a separate being, but as herself. For he was rooting kisses from her like weeds and the soil of her being crumpled in his hands.
Safiye gave a little yelp of surprise as the loss of self swept over her. She was surprised to find all her manifold ambitions focused so suddenly on the hard underridge of her pelvis—she always was. She, who made an effort to avoid being taken unawares.
Once ambushed, however, there was no time for retreat. She was indeed a prisoner, a slave. She groaned that her platform was never firm, or never firm enough. Never enough for the hard press up a hill that love drove her to—either frantically towards something or away. Whatever the desperate goal of that moment was, she didn’t know because she’d never reached it—or escaped its pull.
Oh, she knew orgasm all right, but whenever it came, it seemed a pallid return for the desperation driving her. Some unnameable game beyond tantalized. She never managed to demand quite enough before the softer heart beyond was pierced and the scalding urgency lost itself in a blur like a warm water bath.
Knobs of acorn and chestnut burred under her. She rammed her flesh onto them hard, desperate for the leverage silk on silk failed to give, with no time in the midst of her hunger to remove any garment completely.
Murad’s consummation was quick and bruising, even more so, perhaps, than being thrown from the horse. Safiye was hard-pressed to turn her cries of pure pain into those of a satisfied lover. She bore the fierce weight with patience, however, convinced this was still the path on which her own desires would be met—sooner or later.
A gap of hurtful, brilliant summer indigo hummed with insects over Murad’s turban, which was unraveled once more. Fringes of jagged oak leaf hemmed the blue, like some Venetian dandy’s sleeve.
Safiye felt the acorns and chestnut burrs again, more mortifying than before, though now in her mind they provoked images of deep winter afternoons by the fire, roasting nuts and wine. Imagining such surroundings instead of the present ones, she gently stroked Murad’s red hair, twisting it about her fingers.
Now is not the time for my wants. How to give my prince the words he needs to leave the violence of this place and go on?
She asked some crooning, innocent question, then let him talk.
It was not the first detail he mentioned, but Safiye knew at once by the sudden drop in his voice that it was the one she should set off after in wild pursuit.
“There was the doe...,”he said.
When he seemed reluctant to continue, Safiye said, “I saw her.”
“Yes. She was very beautiful.”
“My heart stopped to see her, even from a distance,” Safiye agreed.
“You should have seen her up close. Those eyes!”
“The eyes of a paradise houri,” she coaxed into his hair.
For one brief instant, she assumed he would kiss her on the eyelids, bridging the metaphor without words. She even closed her eyes for the moment. But then Murad leapt to his feet as if her touch burned him. He began to dress in a fever. The sight of her might almost have disgusted him.
Safiye prodded yet more carefully, rising on an elbow and reaching a hand to narrow the space between them again. “I...I suppose she has a fawn in a thicket nearby. She will return to it...”
This seemed precisely the wrong thing to say. Murad sank into a crouch on the littered forest floor as if her words were arrows. The prince hugged himself into a ball, nursing the wound she couldn’t see. In his gold a
nd rusty colors, he seemed a premature autumn there.
On hands and knees Safiye crawled across the verdant summer floor towards him. The fallen fruits and twigs concealed by grass and infant trees were harsher on her knees than they had been on her buttocks, and she was shaking with the pain of it by the time she reached him. Pain, and a good deal of distress. Still, she pressed through the tightness, like the moment of lost virginity, in order to lay a questioning hand upon the brown and yellow summer silk of her lover’s shoulder.
The prince shuddered, as from a hurt rather than a comfort. He was weeping.
Safiye was taken aback. Murad had railed, whined, even struck her before. But he had never, never cried. She hadn’t known he could cry. She herself had cried but once since the Turks had captured her, and then only in secret. A man in tears turned her stomach with disgust. And this man...
Safiye fought down her nausea. Much as she wanted to slap him, shrew him into finding his lost manhood, shame him forever for such tears, she could not. Perhaps it was the dead horse, the living doe. Perhaps it went back even so far as Niobe, solid rock, weeping for eternity. Safiye could only crouch and stare with awe, and when that grew awkward she had no other choice but to crawl around to a different angle and take the shuddering ball of silk, brocade, and tender, tender flesh into her arms.
The violence with which Murad returned the embrace frightened her, but she couldn’t flinch. Nor would she confess, even to herself, that she was daunted. Soon the fabric on her shoulder had turned hot and wet, like a poultice.
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