Presently, two viziers came into view, picking their way cautiously on horseback through the clog of soldiers. I recognized the younger man as Sokolli’s second, Pertu Pasha and the older as the veteran Ferhad Pasha. A coincidence of names with this second official reminded me of the young spahi whose courage and endurance had saved the empire—and nearly lost me my lady—barely a month previously. And a sudden chill along my spine made me take note rather belatedly that some of the officers whose backs and turbans I’d seen milling about our door that morning had been wearing the violet of the same elite corps. But otherwise the young officer, still with only the title Bey after his name, had nothing in common with the reverend gray-bearded gentleman who, along with his fellow pasha, controlled my attention now. And the events before me were too riveting to give place to any other concern.
“Come, come, comrades,” the younger pasha said. “Your rebellion is an offense to the majesty of the Sultan.”
“Good!” a voice cried from the crowd. “There is entirely too much majesty in that man.”
And before anyone quite knew what had happened, the second vizier had been tumbled off his horse and into the dust. His turban tumbled after him accompanied by the cheers and a few bits of flying debris from the crowd.
Now old Ferhad Pasha spoke. “If it is revenge you want for any unknown crime,” he said, “pray, take my life and no other. I am old and willingly make this sacrifice for the good and peace of my country.”
The offer was refused and down Ferhad Pasha came, too, suffering no more than indignity. Now anger and violence began to move through the ranks like waves, and to rock the spectators as well. A very dangerous explosion was building—a number of stones had already been thrown, and there were drawn swords—when suddenly my master appeared.
Shoving back the massed soldiers with the butt of a lance, Sokolli Pasha made his way to the head of the column. I saw one particularly unruly man turn on the Grand Vizier after receiving a bruising whack. I think he meant to unsaddle this pasha as well, but before he got close, he was swiftly hit again, full in the face. This time, however, the weapon was not the lance but a small pouch full of aspers, and as the silver spilled to the ground, it was like cool water splashing on the very roots of the fire.
There were many more pouches where that one came from. Sokolli Pasha threw them liberally from a great sack he had slung at his side. The soldiers scrambled for the coins, and even some of the citizens managed to snatch a few, though they were at a disadvantage, being unarmed. Sokolli Pasha’s steed paced forward, up and over the hill of hay with hardly a backward slide. The cart was righted in an attempt to find some coins that had rolled under it. Then it was dragged to one side and soon even the straw had been sifted away. The column was on the move again, faster, if with slightly less dignity, than before.
The spectators scurried back to their places and let their tension out in a sigh that grew to cheers by the time the Sultan and his vanguard appeared. But it was not the name of Selim they called, not that red-faced, bleary-eyed man whose great weight stodgily crushed his little pony, and whose cheap and uncontrollable flesh seemed out of place beneath the intricate luxury of the crimson, tasseled canopy, and the tight, smooth, plumed, and bejeweled turban.
“Sokolli! Sokolli Pasha!” was the cry, and my voice joined all the rest.
I was still cheering when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a familiar sedan chair slipping out of the entrance of the cousin’s harem. Moving quickly alongside with his fingers protectively touching the tightly closed shutters was the unmistakable figure of the khadim Ghazanfer.
XXXIII
Back in the Pasha’s palace, a sacrifice was killed and all the master’s favorite dishes prepared to welcome him home. Esmikhan put on her best clothes and sat in the mabein waiting for his return. Alas, she waited in vain, and the food was cold before it was ever eaten.
As the hour grew late, I sent a boy over to the Serai to find out what the trouble was. He brought back the word.
“The janissaries are in revolt.”
“That was this morning,” I told him. “The master paid them off and they gave it up.”
“But they’re in revolt again,” the lad insisted. “They got as far as the courtyard of the Sultan’s palace. Then they barred the gates and won’t let Selim into his own house. Selim has had to retreat outside the walls again to one of his villas, and Allah knows what is to become of us.”
“What will become of the harem?” Esmikhan asked, wringing her hands. “Do you suppose the soldiers will have the audacity to violate the harem? Oh, how I wish that Safiye were safe back in Magnesia!”
You don’t know how we all wish that, I thought, but had worse to tell her. “There is a greater fear, lady. My lord Sokolli Pasha is also behind the gates to the palace. They are holding him hostage.”
She sat up that night in her best dress, sleeping in fits and starts, not even bothering to lay her head down on a pillow, wondering (fearing? hoping?) whether she was an orphan, a widow, both, or neither. And I waited with her.
A day, a night, a day, and another night passed in the same way. We heard of perhaps a dozen deaths caused by factions brawling in the streets, but they were just the sort of eruptions, like cankers in the mouth, that indicate a general infection throughout the body. Our gatekeeper’s son got a cuff at one shop and was refused service at another because they knew he was buying for Sokolli’s house. But then at last we pricked up our ears and heard the boom of cannons from the fortress, not in aggressive, but in joyous rhythms, and we knew the rebellion was over. The Venetian fleet had faded back into the Mediterranean and Selim was at last safely installed behind the Sublime Porte. “But at what a cost! What a cost!” My master shook his head wearily. We spoke together in the selamlik upon his final, safe return, and I had to endure several interruptions during our interview from many pressing concerns as he tied up the ends of the rebellion.
“What was the price, my lord?” I asked.
“Well, they ruined the Empire, that’s all. Ruined the Empire. They couldn’t see. All they cared for was their own satisfaction.”
The entire treasury, I learned, was gone. All the spoils from the Kapudan Pasha’s recent conquest of the island of Chios had to be handed out besides a hefty installment of the personal jewelry and real estate belonging to Esmikhan’s Aunt Mihrimah. This venerable lady had made this sacrifice to ransom her drunkard brother and herself and the other women of the Serai harem from disgrace.
“Still, that is not the worst,” Sokolli Pasha said.
“There is more? Allah preserve us, what more could they ask?”
“The treasury is nothing. Taxes will come in, and we will replenish it “my master said. “But they demanded concessions and they got them. The ancient laws have been changed at the very roots. Janissaries are now allowed to marry. Yes, to marry! Not only that, but they may pass their positions on to their sons. And the corps has been opened up to enlistment—to Turks as well. It is the end of the army, that’s what it is. And the end of the army means the end of the Empire.
“I’ll wager if you listen closely, you can hear them—the elite, hand-picked corps that once had no thought but for training and battle, the army that none in the world could defeat—I’ll bet you can hear them in the streets now, wildly scrambling for brides as they scrambled for those aspers on the morning of the parade. No man’s daughter is safe; they will all want a month off for honeymoons, and soon they will delight more in the bandying of sons than of lances and spears. How can you fight barbarian Christians with such a mob, I ask you? It’s gone. The Empire is gone. And I was the one who bartered for her downfall.”
“But wouldn’t you, my lord, delight to see a son of yours join the corps you love so much?” I ventured.
“A son of mine? I have no son.”
“But you might, Allah willing, someday.”
Sokolli Pasha turned away, his exhaustion showing in the crow’s-feet of his eyes, and in the h
ollows of his temples. “No, I would rather he live a quiet life as a merchant or the owner of a workshop. Especially if he is a scrawny sort of lad, which I suppose any son of mine who might deign to live would have to be. Certainly not the sort I would want protecting this Empire and any daughters Allah may see fit to give me besides. Haven’t we in our present besotted Sultan, son of the great Suleiman, a perfect example of how generations rot in hereditary posts?”
“So far, master, I must compliment you. You have covered for him remarkably.”
“Yes, well, I suppose I can keep the Empire going for a little while longer. If I’m left free to choose good men beneath me. And if Allah favors us. But when I am gone...”
“Allah willing, that dread event is many years hence.”
Sokolli Pasha now turned to contemplate the future’s awesomeness in silence. As focus for his meditation, the Grand Vizier happened to select the old wooden chest against the wall. My eyes followed his idly, and then they were riveted to the spot.
There, on top of the chest, was the blue and white Chinese vase filled with another singular bouquet. The rather large branch of an apple tree arced against the wall. Its leaves had turned and the three apples that still clung to it blushed pink as if the roses, now all withered in the gardens, had bequeathed their color to the apples on their deathbeds. The branch recalled at once the famous lines by Qatran:
Red begins to show on the golden apple
like a blush on a lover’s cheek...
It looks as if camphor dust had been sprinkled on the mountaintops,
and as if a steel sword had attacked the stream.
The evenings become as long as the day
when you part from a beautiful woman,
And the days become as short as a night of lovers’ union...
If tears rain down my cheeks longing for you, let them fall,
for rains make the garden beautiful in time to come.
It took me but a minute to decipher the message, but a moment longer to realize that young Ferhad, as I’d feared, must have been among the soldiers our master had sent to protect the house; I had seen the faces of only two or three of them, and Esmikhan had said nothing. So Ferhad had proven his worth so well during the month that Suleiman’s death had had to be kept a secret that he had been trusted not to side with the rebels.
And yet here, beneath the master’s very eyes, was treachery of a much deeper and more devastating variety. His choices might save the Empire. But from the point of view of the harem, they were devastating.
My master looked directly at the apple branch for a long time, but he did not see anything amiss in it. Sokolli Pasha had never been one to read poetry on the written page, much less in the symbolism of flowers. I don’t think he even stopped his thoughts long enough to think what an odd bouquet a branch of withering apple made, or to wonder where it might have come from. There were no apple trees in our garden, but he never thought that it must have come from the orchards north of the city through which the army had marched. He had marched through those same orchards with them, worrying about rebellion and not love.
Fortunately, we were interrupted again at this point by another messenger with papers to be read and signed. By the time he had gone, I thought I could speak without betraying what I held in my mind.
“My uncle,” I began with a slave’s euphemism for ‘my master.’ “My uncle, excuse my bringing this up tonight, this first night that you’ve been returned to us, but I have been quite concerned lately that we should have more guardians to properly keep your harem.”
“How many are you now?” Sokolli Pasha asked me in the same tone he would use for tallying men on the battlefield.
“Nearly thirty women serve your wife, my lord,” I said, “including the musicians, seamstresses, maids, and cooks.”
“No, I mean khuddam,” he said. “How many are there of you?”
“Just me, sir,” I replied, surprised that he should ask. “There has always been just myself.”
A brief chuckle was wrenched from my master’s throat as he said, “Just you?”
“Yes, my uncle,” I assured him.
Other chuckles came in the same fierce, rough way, until my master was laughing heartily, but in a clumsy, guarded manner that told me his throat was unused to such entertainment, and laughter to him was like stones dragged over tender flesh.
“Oh, forgive me, Abdullah,” he said at last, gasping for breath. “I wasn’t laughing at you. I was laughing at myself more than anything. And at the confounded absurdity of it all.”
“My uncle?”
“I mean, here I’ve been the past month and a half, guarding a dead corpse with an army of half a million, while at home I’ve let my wife—a woman no doubt very much alive and very bored and restless, the poor soul—go guarded with but a single khadim, and he hardly more than a boy. All these years I’ve been married—how many is it now? Three?”
“Over four, my lord.”
“Four, by Allah! Well, it really is too ridiculous. If I had failed to carry out the succession, Allah forbid, history would have forgiven me. It is humanly impossible to keep such a vast empire as ours quiet and content on all fronts. Any man who’s ever ruled could tell you that. But even the most common gutter sweep manages to keep his common wife in line. If one loses honor at home, it’s pretty useless to hope to gain it in the Divan, but I...”
We were interrupted here by yet another messenger, but Sokolli Pasha waved him away. When he turned to me again, he said, “I remember the day you first came here. You seemed so young and innocent, and I saw a deep, fresh hurt in your eyes. ‘By the Merciful One,’ I remember thinking. ‘I hope old Ali finds a good head eunuch to train this one or there will be one spoiled and skittish khadim on our hands.’ I meant to speak to him about it later, when you were out of the room, but I see now that either he didn’t hear me or I forgot to speak to him. Actually, it was probably the latter. I am so used to having to keep my own counsel that I could easily forget to give an order like that. I often find things so blatant, I assume others do, too. Then there was the business with the brigands and it turned out so well that I just assumed...
“I am a self-made man, you see,” he interrupted himself. “Certainly Suleiman, may he rest in peace, raised me from place to place, but it was I myself who saw and did what needed to be done in order to win his favor. You are a man of the same mold, I see, and have gone ahead and made yourself indispensable, even when instruction was not given. I wonder at this, and I wonder, too, what has happened in my absence to make you think that only now, after four years alone, now you need assistance.”
The hawk-like stare with which he fixed me had disarmed many a more deadly schemer, but I was prepared and met it with an ease which did not betray my lady.
“When one is young,” I said, carefully balancing pith with calm, “one thinks oneself capable of everything. If there is one thing I have learned in your absence, my lord, it is to dispel this youthful exuberance or at least to temper it with more caution.”
Sokolli Pasha gave another ragged burst of laughter and said, “You know at twenty what I am only just beginning to learn at sixty. While on campaign this year, I decided I really must get someone to help me keep my accounts, and you will soon have to go through such a fellow with requests like this. Until then, I myself will say, certainly, buy all the khuddam you need. Make this the best-guarded harem in the Empire if you please. My only stipulation is, buy only fellows you can control, for I would hate to lose you as head eunuch, and I don’t care what anybody says about your youth.”
“Thank you, my uncle.”
“And why don’t you buy a likely-looking boy or two—just cut. I know the market will be glutted with them soon, just arriving with the army from our last campaign. Allah knows I don’t allow it among my soldiers, but He also knows I can’t be everywhere at once. You’ll be able to get some very good bargains and then train them exactly as you wish. Having had no training yourself,
I’m sure you’ll make the best of instructors. Somewhere the tradition of a decent Ottoman household must be carried on. The Almighty knows we must stop looking to the Grand Serai for an example.”
My master sighed and shook his head once again at the new Sultan duty compelled him to sustain against his better judgment. “You mentioned this mother of Murad’s son might have had something to do with this rebellion?”
“My uncle, I am sure of it.”
“I suppose that is something I will never know, the archivists will never know. Only you, khadim, can say. And the mysteries of the harem are never spoken of in public.”
“No, master.”
Then a new thought came to him which I noticed had a profound effect. The normally severe lines in his face grew softer and more round—from fear? was my first impression.
“I say, Abdullah,” he mused. “How fares the princess, my wife?”
“Her health is well, praise Allah.”
“The child...? There was a child?”
“Died just after birth, sir, early this spring you will recall.”
“Yes, I assumed as much when I didn’t hear. Or did I hear?”
“I think, sir, you did.”
“They would have told me if I’d had a son. How many is that now? Two we’ve buried?”
“Three, sir.”
“Well, it is Allah’s will, as they say.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Do you suppose, Abdullah,” he hesitated. “Do you suppose she would see me this evening?”
I saw little creases of white at the corners of my master’s mouth, and I suddenly got an inkling of how helpless he felt. Being surrounded and sorely outnumbered by the enemy could never have reduced him as much as this. Three days spent as hostage to his own rebellious men was nothing compared to having to face a woman, to have to think of endearments, consolations on the death of the child—things foreign to his tongue. He would be clumsy, he knew it, and that foreknowledge would make it worse.
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