The Sultan's Daughter

by Ann Chamberlin

  “My brother, then, can’t be ignorant.”

  “Oh, he is fully aware of her condition, yes.”

  “But what would she have said to him if she’d lost it?”

  “‘I miscarried. These things happen.’“ She captured Safiye’s very shrug in that quote.

  “And does Murad threaten to leave her, as she always feared he would, now that her shape is vanishing?”

  “Of course not. I’ve never seen a man more thrilled about his heir than your brother the prince. On his knees in thanks to heaven twenty times a day, pouring money into that mosque of his, showering his love with gifts, scratching out stacks of poems as the spirit moves him.”

  “So when you wouldn’t do as she asked, Safiye dismissed you?

  “There was that, yes.”

  “And something else?”

  “As long as your child, majesty, was yet unborn, she wanted me here with you. I was ordered—yes, ordered to attend you. ‘There’ll be plenty of time, afterwards,’ Safiye said. ‘Months and months. You can deliver...deliver the princess and then return and see to me. And should you not make it back? Well, there are good women here. I’ll be fine.’

  “Good women?” The Quince grunted with scorn. “Women who don’t have the first idea about getting rid of a child. So how can they hope to save one?”

  Esmikhan murmured something kind and full of confidence in the midwife’s skill. “And I am also most grateful that you would make this long journey—at this time of year—to attend me.”

  The midwife grunted again—she often did—as if to say, “Yes, thank me when you’ve reason to.” Then she leaned back into her supporting cushions, suddenly overcome with exhaustion. She closed her eyes like one in the throes of some dream.

  Esmikhan had no desire to disturb her guest. As she always did when in doubt, my lady reached for something to eat instead. Having had her fill of everything else on the table, she thought to help herself to one of the two or three comfits left on the Quince’s kerchief. They were of a variety not usually fabricated in our kitchen.

  The morsel was just before her lips when the Quince suddenly bolted upright and knocked the candy violently from her hand. “My lady, you mustn’t,” the midwife exclaimed, as close as she’d come to an apology. “These candies—though wholesome for...for some of us—are very bad for a woman with child.”

  “I see,” whispered my lady, the fear of how close she’d come to harming her child strangling any other response.

  As if my lady had accused her of having something to hide, the Quince lighted on what must have seemed the most harmless of creatures—me—when she assured further: “Khuddam like them. I mix up these goodies for khuddam all the time.”

  And the dialogue moved to other things.

  Not too much later, the Quince’s belongings arrived.

  “Oh, they’ve forgotten my best garments—and most of the drugs,” the Quince sighed out her exasperation. “I shall have to make another trip myself.”

  “But another day,” my lady said. “Surely you’ve done enough for today and can rest until tomorrow. Anything that’s mine belongs to the guest of Allah as well.”

  “Yes, it can wait,” the midwife agreed.

  So, in the meantime, the women got up to see what could be done about getting her settled before the noon call to prayer was heard. This left the menials and me to clear away the remains of the meal. The girls took off the trays of pilaf, as they’d done any number of times before, to go and eat the leftovers themselves in the kitchen. The Quince’s kerchief, the only unfamiliar thing on the table, remained for me.

  For all intents and purposes, the midwife had finished off the whole lot herself. Still, there were some fair-sized crumbs left among the gold and green threads. Out of idle curiosity—and being hungry myself, since the midwife’s arrival had disrupted our usual schedule—I licked a finger and brought it to my mouth covered with crumbs. Well, the woman had said—hadn’t she?—that this concoction was good for a eunuch’s ills.

  I dropped my hand at once—and the kerchief as well.

  “Good God!” I couldn’t help exclaiming aloud—and in my most basic tongue.

  Under all the coating of sugar and mastic, a familiar buzzing sweetness filled my mouth. My gorge rose to meet it. In my memory, the taste was too closely tied to an ineffective attempt to strip me of my senses as the cutters stripped me of everything else in the dim little house in Pera.

  These candies contained opium in an edible, concentrated, candy form instead of the more popular and milder smoke.

  The midwife must have just ingested enough to fill a thousand and one nights with heady dreams.

  XVIII

  When that third infant son was born, taken to Paradise and buried all on a single cheerless winter’s day, I truly feared for my lady’s sanity. The Quince departed for Magnesia after nursing Esmikhan through but three weeks of indifferent recovery. I cannot say I was sorry to see her go, having caught her with her golden comfit balls on at least two other occasions and having noted a decided distraction in her attentions as well. But I wasn’t certain I could bring my lady out of the serious slump into which I saw her sliding. I would have liked some sort of second, just so as not to feel so helpless and alone.

  The moment the midwife and her veils were out of the door, however, things improved immediately. I would have suspected some sort of slow, wasting poison went out the door with her—if I hadn’t taken to tasting my lady’s food myself as a precaution. And if Esmikhan didn’t instantly explain the reason for her rally herself.

  “Why, I must go as well,” she said, clapping her hands with the thrill of it.

  “Beg pardon, lady?” I could hardly condemn what I thought she meant when she grew so suddenly cheerful. I hadn’t seen her eyes so brightly polished with excitement—no, not since those first few days I knew her, before her marriage, I decided.

  “I must go to Magnesia as well.”

  “My lady? In your condition?” Although at the moment her condition seemed much improved, not harmed, by the prospect, this might be the frenzy of delirium. The journey she suggested was certainly madness enough to jump to that conclusion.

  Before I could protest further, Esmikhan made her purpose clear by saying, “And what is my condition but that of a childless woman? Didn’t you tell me my husband is in Magnesia?”

  “Yes. Yes, I believe that’s true.” I’d told her when the dispatches came, but then she’d seemed to spare not the slightest care for Sokolli Pasha. Because she didn’t remember, I didn’t bother either.

  “I had no reason to remember,” she said now, reading my thoughts, “before the baby—-Allah preserve him. My need was to stay here then, to give him the best health I could.” She swiped impatiently at a tear or two in her sense of repeated fail- lire—and at what she had tried so single-mindedly to do. “But now...now I remember that you told me this.”

  “Yes, Magnesia is indeed where the master is. He, along with my lord your brother, is charged with mustering the troops and reserve units from that western portion of the Empire at Bozdag. Later, he is to march them northward and meet up with the rest of the army under your grandfather’s direct command. Together they will undertake this summer’s campaign against Hungary and Austria.”

  “You see? I must go to him at once.”

  “My lady, is it advised? When the master will be so occupied and you...?”

  “And on his march north, won’t he be even more occupied? How many days do you suppose he may spend in Constantinople?”

  “Two, perhaps three. You know how it goes.”

  “I know. And you are trying to placate me, Abdullah. I’m no fool. I’ve been the wife of Sokolli Pasha too long. He’ll be here one day at the most. If he doesn’t send word that he must not leave his men for ‘his own personal pleasure’ while they are already sworn to battle. And what if I should be suffering my time of uncleanliness on that one night he may deign to give me? Abdullah, in that case I ma
y not go near him. Don’t you see? That means I will not see him—even if Allah favors me—for nine whole months or more. I could not bear all that time without hope of a child.”

  She caught my hands in the desperation I had expected all along, considering the tragedy she’d just been through. “If I can have—oh, just a week with him in Magnesia, I shall know I have done my best—and the rest is Allah’s will, whether I conceive or not.”

  “Lady, he will be much occupied with the affairs of the army in Bozdag.”

  “Of course. But he will not refuse me. He cannot, when I have gone all that way, just to be with him. When you tell him...”

  “It is a long journey. You may not feel well enough to see him at the end.”

  “The journey’s by sea, as Safiye always likes to gloat. Not nearly so strenuous as by land.” Esmikhan withdrew her hands now, sulking—which she knew had its effect on me—rounding her face, pouting her lips. Had she been clamoring for my bed, there would have been no more discussion. “Besides, any discomfort is worth the hope of getting a child that might, inshallah, live.”

  “The Quince has already departed. We will not have the comfort of her company on our way.” Remembering the buzz of opium on my tongue, I wasn’t at all certain that this was such a bad thing. It didn’t deter my lady either.

  “We may catch up with her in any case—if you aren’t too slow. If not, she at least will be there when we arrive to provide—inshallah—some fertility drug that may enhance the prospect of those few days I will have with my husband.”

  “But lady, you are still in your time of uncleanliness.” I feared more for her health, her soft little body put through yet more all-consuming pain and exhaustion without a moment’s rest. But I couldn’t deny that the very idea of this stress—to which I could compare only one thing in my life—seemed to enliven rather than intimidate her. She had learned all her life to take her greatest meaning from the fruits of such torture, I guess. Whereas my torture had been the means of removing that meaning from me altogether.

  “I won’t be unclean by the time we get there. Certainly not if you persist in dawdling so.”

  With that, I ran out of excuses. And when a scouting trip down to the wharves restored my arsenal, my lady’s exuberance soon dispelled that as well.

  “The Golden Horn is quite ominously full of ships,” I told her. “The Kapudan Pasha, Piali, is amassing a great flotilla to sail against some benighted enemy of the Faith. I counted eighty galleys while I stood there. Come to the window. You can see some of them, at least, for yourself.”

  Esmikhan looked disinterestedly through the lacework of lattice in the direction I pointed and shrugged.

  “As Allah is my witness,” I persisted, “I wouldn’t be anywhere on the seas with such an armada about.”

  “But these are my grandfather’s ships, Abdullah. I need have no fear of them. Besides, we are only sailing to Izmir, never losing sight of Turkish coast the whole way. Piali Pasha sails to some distant land, of that you may be certain.”

  “Perhaps my lady is right. I did hear a rumor that they mean to lay siege to Malta, the lair of the Knights of St. John, to punish those pirates’ depredations of Turkish shipping.” I did not mention how this intelligence made me feel: almost a Turk myself, for it was in large part due to a Maltese knight—under the influence of Sofia Baffo, of course—that I found myself in my present shadow life.

  “The bastion of Malta defied them last year,” I elaborated. “Yes, I wouldn’t be surprised if Piali Pasha meant to renew the assault with reinforcements and better weather.”

  “There. You see? Piali Pasha’s galleys mean nothing to us. I’ve thought it all out while you were gone.”

  “Lady?”

  “My brother and Safiye are in Magnesia, as well as my husband. I will rely upon their hospitality of course so I won’t have to consider camping out primitively with the army. And after my husband leaves about his duties, I can stay until Safiye has her child, inshallah, and help her with that.”

  Yes, I saw that the reasons my lady could produce to go had multiplied in my absence while mine to stay had only increased by the vague unease caused by Piali Pasha’s ships. And that discomfort might only be the last reflexes of my former life I couldn’t quite shake, the sudden leap of the heart in the throat, the charge of desperate energy to every limb. The Turkish crescent would probably always cause that, no matter where they cut.

  If anything, the planning offered Esmikhan distraction, filled her with hope and life in place of loss and despair. I couldn’t line her empty womb for her, but I could do this. I was a fool to oppose her.

  “Abdullah, you waste time. Find us a boat to sail on—at once. I will go to Magnesia.”

  So down I went to the docks to try again.

  XIX

  I suppose the lodestone of nostalgia drew me on. Like an addict with his drug, I had avoided the sights and sounds of the sea with sober success for four long years. But now, one breath of the spray-thick air and I was hopelessly intoxicated again.

  How many times had I made this very promenade at my Uncle Jacopo’s side? Is it any wonder that the call of the sea is legendized in sailors’ minds as the mermaid or siren, the most beautiful image men removed from their doxies for months on end can imagine? And I had tried to deny this pull which was, after all, my birthright and my very weaning. For four long years I had denied this lost world, knowing that the first sip would make me feel the pain of the cutters’ knives all over again.

  Indeed, it did. But having now, at my lady’s insistence, endured the first harrowing of memories, the sea’s addiction had me numb under its spell once more. And as I wandered up and down the salt-sprayed hem, heedless of exhaustion and the futility of my search, I wondered how I had stayed away so long.

  I think I had truly been ashamed for the sea to find me in my maimed state. But I knew the moment I saw the sun, just past its pale spring zenith, silvering the wavelets like streaks of age in a mother’s hair, that she would have me any way at all.

  The wharves and docked ships tamed the sea’s hair like a lace cap. The red Turkish flags—and no one dared fly either cross or saint’s emblem under Piali Pasha’s nose—pulsed in the wind like a mother’s heartbeat. They were the throb at her temples, the blush of pleasure on her cheeks. The creek of planking, the whisper of empty rigging, and the cry of gulls between them—these were a mother’s songs, her lullabies. They were her call of encouragement to her toddling child to take the narrow leap over the vacillating slash of dark water between wharf and deck. To escape from the weight of earth. To take the canvas wings of flight.

  Whenever I reminded myself that we were going to attend the motherhood of Safiye Baffo, the image lost some of its poetry. What I should be doing was reclaiming what Safiye had stolen from me. What she has stolen from Esmikhan. That was a bitter, unfounded thought. It only rose because it rankled: Why should she become a mother and my lady not? That was like asking why Murad should become a father and I not. Simply because there was no justice in the world—never had been, never would be any.

  Getting my lady to Magnesia, however, grew perceptibly more difficult by the moment. Piali Pasha’s admiralty drew every available bark to it by sheer mass. Provisioning skiffs and flat-bottomed ferries as well as the more substantial craft for which I sought were all detailed to outfitting the master of Allah’s seas.

  The last of the seaworthy ships owned by the harem of my lady’s grandfather had just departed, bearing the midwife to attend on the birth of Murad’s heir. I supposed this was an errand equal to the supplying of Piali Pasha. We could wait until that one returned, but I knew Esmikhan—and her empty womb—would give me no peace until it did. Otherwise, the demands of war had requisitioned every chunk of wood that could float within two days’ sailing.

  My lady owned a neat little caïque, like all women of her station, for pleasure outings on the Bosphorus. She didn’t use it much—seasickness came quickly when she was with child
. Instead of finding the ship I wanted, I got incredibly inflated offers to use the caïque for the provisioning instead. I could almost hear my lady accepting every one that came along with an irrational flush of partisan enthusiasm. There are reasons women stay in the harem.

  I resisted these offers, not requiring much imagination to picture what one trip out and back with a load of gun grease or leaky flour sacks would do to the velvet curtaining and the mother-of-pearl inlay. But this didn’t help me to find the transportation I needed either, for which the caïque was equally un-suited.

  There were foreign ships, of course, skirting the arsenal’s menace warily, trying to stay invisible lest they be suspected of spying out what Piali Pasha might have in mind for those at home. I rejected these out of hand. It would never do to entrust a princess of the blood to an infidel hull. Nonetheless, desperation finally brought me to the foreigners’ wharves at Pera. My legs were beginning to ache, unaccustomed as they were to hours of fruitless wandering about the wharves.

  Wherever boats gave an arm’s length of space between hull and prow, fishermen grounded because their boats were with the navy dangled their lines. The black of their doublets clanged with the metal of their trade: hooks, scalers, knives. The offal of last week’s catch sloshing in the gray-green water below their feet offered the predominant smell to the place and attracted mangy cats who slunk about for their own share.

  But such smells might have been a mother’s perfume to me. And the great baskets of fingerling hamsi fish—anchovies, we called them at home—appeared to me in their silver sheen like a princess’s dowry.

  A man could take his pick from the top of the heap, still wriggling, their eyes popping, mouths agape at death’s surprise. The fishermen would thread your choice on a skewer—with yet more wriggling—and shove them over the coals of his brazier. In a moment, the fish were smoky, blackened, fragrant, and delicious. That might have been mother’s milk to me.

  I was downing my second shish of the day, aided by sea-whipped appetite, chased by tall glasses of minted yogurt drink. The yogurt vendor was wiping out the glass from the last customer with the corner of his sash to pour me another when that last customer introduced himself to me.