The Sultan's Daughter

by Ann Chamberlin

“Soon the two men of Allah came to a tree and beneath the tree was a young child asleep. The child was so beautiful and peaceful and so well favored that Moses could not help but wonder. But just as he was about to form a word of praise to the Creator, Elias came and struck off the child’s head in one blow.

  “Now Moses was so appalled that he could not speak, even if he had wished to, and by the time he had gained his tongue again, they were far from the city, in an abandoned field. In the field was an old stone wall which was crumbling through neglect, but for this Elias stopped and had Moses spend the heat of the afternoon repairing the breach.

  “At last Moses could hold his tongue no longer. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I do not understand. This is useless work. The wall and the field are clearly abandoned and why should we stop to do something that will benefit no one? Why, indeed, when our day has already been filled with senseless destruction and violence. To destroy those poor sailors’ boat and to kill that fair-faced child surely go against all the laws of Allah. I wonder if you are Elias at all and not some satanic impostor.’

  “‘How much you have to learn of the ways of Allah!’ Elias sighed wearily at this breach of faith on the part of his disciple who was meant to become a prophet. ‘I had you mend the wall because beneath it is buried the inheritance of two poor orphaned children. Had we not mended it, others would have come and found the treasure and taken it away before the children have grown to their majority and are able to dig it up for themselves.

  “‘You do not understand the boat, either. There are wicked men in that city who would have stolen that only means of livelihood from those two good sailors. They will not bother to steal a boat with a hole in it, and by the time our friends have made their repairs, the wicked men will be converted to Allah and will molest them no more.’

  “‘And the child?’ Moses asked. ‘Surely there can be no excuse to kill a child in the Mind of Allah.’

  ‘But there is,’ Elias replied. ‘Had that child become an adult, he would have been a very wicked man. His fair features would have remained and he would have deceived many with them. Not only would innocent people have had to suffer the loss of their goods, but hundreds would have died most miserably had that small hand grown large.’

  “Sometimes,” Husayn concluded, “the man of Allah can best fulfill the will of the Merciful One not by obeying His laws, but by breaking them.”

  My friend and I let the story sit in silence, and then we went without another word to eat some breakfast, for it would soon be dawn and the fast would be upon us again.

  The story stayed with me throughout the coming weeks as the fast ended and we began to prepare to return to Constantinople. It seemed especially clear when I accompanied my lady to the tomb of the saint on the last Wednesday of our stay. It was as if Rumi himself, who, the dervishes say, had Elias for his instructor, were reciting the story to me in hollow echoes from the grave:”... Not by obeying His laws, but by breaking them.”

  When we had completed our devotions, Esmikhan indicated that she wanted to sit in Rumi’s seat one final time. I knew that repetition was believed to erase the efficacy of a wish. At first I thought she was so desperate that she didn’t care, but when I helped her step down, I knew that over our stay her wish had changed. At first she had prayed for a child and the answer, so it seemed, had come in the vision of our young spahi. Her new wish I could guess at, and the way her eyes met mine made me feel that whatever power she had derived from that chair convinced her that its fulfillment lay in my good will alone.

  “Not I!” I declared when she indicated again that I, too, should make a wish. My tone spoke in answer to the hope in those eyes, not to the suggestion of her tongue.

  “Perhaps you have no desires, Abdallah. But can’t you even pray for the happiness of your poor Esmikhan? It cannot be pleasant to serve a woman whose heart is breaking,” she murmured.

  Again I refused, but her words struck me with disquiet as if they had indeed come from an otherworldly source. So much so that, once I had packed her and her maids into their sedans, and sent them off with the porters and the other eunuchs, I took the first opportunity to escape even when that excuse was the appearance of none other than Ferhad himself.

  I knew he would be there. He had been there in the public place outside the mosque compound every women’s day since the end of Ramadhan and many before. “He mingles among the men we must govern, and discovers their feelings and their desires,” our host excused him. “He is more useful to me there than he would be here while I hold court.”

  I was not so easily beguiled. I knew his only true desire was to catch another glimpse of my lady as she entered and exited the mosque.

  My lady, too, sensed this and always sat straight and arranged her hair with care and blushed so prettily even though I made certain there always remained four or five opaque barriers between his eyes and her. If I had had any doubts before, I had none that day, for a dark afternoon drizzle had driven all the more sensible townsmen to their homes, leaving only the Master of the Imperial Horse sitting there as if he were some village halfwit. There was no one for him to spy on but the ladies. That he kept his back discreetly to us did not fool me for a moment. It only allowed me to creep up on him without his knowledge.

  The face that turned to me had tears distorting its handsome angles. I pretended I thought they were only raindrops, but I could not hide my surprise to see the other out-of-character thing about him: in his right hand was an unsheathed dagger.

  Now the spahis are men of war and they undergo a little ceremony when they are issued their first dagger during which they vow “to use this blade against none but the enemies of Allah and of His Shadow, the Sultan of Islam.”

  The enemy of Turkish society against which he now turned his knife was himself.

  He had been holding it with such real intent that when my greeting startled him, he actually cut the flesh of his left wrist. It was not such a deep cut as to be dangerous but both he and I watched with startled fascination as beads of blood began to make a dainty woman’s bracelet on his arm. Only the reflex of ritual greetings and pleasantries kept a morbid silence from stifling us. The pleasantries allowed him, too, to gain some degree of composure with which to chuckle as if the scratch were nothing.

  “Abdullah, my friend,” he said, “I have faced wild Austrians and Kurds as well as trained Persians on the frontier without a flinch. I am only wondering if I will have the courage to face what must come on Sunday next—your departure. I fear death from that, my friend, more than from any Persian lancer.”

  “You are mad,” I wanted to tell him. “Love has made you mad.”

  But he knew that. He knew better than I the tragedy it was for helplessness to overcome one of Turkey’s brightest hopes. So great was his intimacy with that tragedy that he could not but long for death. What use was there for appeals to reason? I spoke only more pleasantries as he bound his wrist with a scrap of his sash—”Got in the service of the Grand Vizier,” he attempted a little joke—and I accompanied him back to the palace.

  Surely if Allah loves His people He will not let them lose such a wonderful defender of the Faith by his own hand for the sake of a woman, I thought as we walked. Surely He could not let one of the most devoted among His women pine away the rest of her life never knowing either the love of a man, nor the pleasure of a child, even when she had crossed all of Anatolia to pray for these things.

  And yet, what right had I, a Venetian, and Ferhad, born an Albanian, to second-guess the will of the God of these people among whom we were strangers? And Esmikhan, though the daughter of the Sultan, had a Circassian mother. No doubt even she was undeserving of a special dispensation from this God’s age-old laws. Such thoughts kept the more rebellious ones in check.

  Then, however, I thought of the sanction I had received—or thought I had received—from Husayn. A wandering dervish is considered by all to be the most beloved of Allah.

  “Sometimes the man of Allah can bes
t fulfill the will of the Merciful One not by obeying His laws but by breaking them.”

  Still, I was not certain Husayn’s vision was altogether holiness. Sometimes, I feared, it was madness, too.

  XXXIX

  Thursday, Friday, Saturday came, following one another as they have since the world began. Saturday night. I surveyed my defenses as the general of a besieged town might walk along the parapet on the eve of an attack. I had insisted that my seconds keep watch through the night, waking in shifts so if the slightest noise came from the grille between the worlds, they would hear it. I tested the doors and the windows as if the enemy might try to break in with battle-axes. No, all was safe. The siege would be lifted tomorrow. We, the defenders, leaving rather than the attackers. And the only weakness was in my heart.

  I went to bid my lady good night and found her weak with tears. She lay in the arms of the governor’s wife and his daughters, who had vowed to spend the night with her. They thought it was leaving them that caused her such sorrow and were doing everything they could to return the compliment to so great a lady.

  I helped the slaves bring out bedding and went to lower the lights, but Esmikhan protested that she had no wish for sleep that night, and darkness would only haunt her more. Then I sat on, helpless, having no desire to return to my lonely room to face my conscience burdened by her flushed face and eyes, so puffy and bruised they looked as if someone had been beating her.

  Outside the lattice at the window to her room, a nightingale began to sing. It was the first any of us had heard that year—sweet warbling like the quaver of a sob—and we all held our breath at the cool evening beauty of it. Poets say that the nightingale is the rose’s lover, but the two can never meet, for the rose is guarded by jealous thorns. Hence, the exquisite sadness of the bird’s song.

  Had I not known it was impossible, I would have sworn this wild creature was the final farewell message of Ferhad to his own well-guarded beloved.

  I have never heard a poet call the song of the nightingale the voice of Elias, and perhaps that would be considered blasphemy, but that is what it suddenly became to me. Seeming neither mortal nor yet quite divine, it taught me, or rather made me remember what I had learned the first time I stood in a head eunuch’s room and saw the two doors. Being neither male nor female, I was yet able to unite the two and make them whole. What power was there! It was divine, I could call it no other: to bring together what men had torn asunder, to create harmony out of discord and joy out of sorrow. By imposing the harem and all other separations between His creatures according to class, race, nationality, and species, Allah had created the discord and sorrow. Though these were necessary, they were only to teach us the opposites. If the work and glory of the God of Islam were not to finally show compassion and mercy, then I understood nothing of my adopted religion, nor of the one I had abandoned either.

  The bird’s song also had a profound effect upon my lady, but, because she was only half of a whole, it sent her into a pit of even greater despair. She was too weak to give anymore force to her tears so they collapsed in upon her, and I thought perhaps she had fainted. The governor’s wife and her daughters cried out with sympathetic sorrow, and began to bathe my lady’s wrists and forehead with rosewater and rue.

  I spoke to them, matching my words to the rhythm I heard from the nightingale. “Perhaps, my gracious hostess, it would be better if I spent the night with my lady. It would be less wearing upon your delicate selves and less sorrowful for her.”

  The women were shocked and hurt. Would I deprive them of these last hours of joy and companionship? I, nothing but a cold, dowdy eunuch who can never have known true attachment even as they enjoyed between the same sex?

  I was too sure of myself to be hurt by their words. I was sure and, though the others missed it, Esmikhan must have felt my confidence. She opened her eyes and met mine with the first look of interest I had seen from her in days. I replied to that look with one of calm—one might almost say pious—resolve and she sensed that, too. She found the strength to raise to her elbows and, when her attendants tried to stop her, to push them away.

  “Leave us. Just a few minutes,” she begged of them. “I will certainly call you back if I need you.”

  The women left with many doubting and grumbling glances backward. The maids, too, were waved out of the room, then my lady sat right up and asked, “Will you, Abdullah?”

  “It is not a question of my will but of Allah’s,” I said. “But I will do what I can.”

  I left her then at once and found Ferhad sitting with our host in the selamlik.

  “Why, Abdullah!” the governor greeted me. “You are just in time. Ferhad has finally agreed to join me in a glass of wine. He actually asked for it. I did not press him at all. Will you join us?”

  Ferhad raised his goblet to me, giving me all the credit for his fall from perfect discipline like a naughty boy blaming his comrades. When he took a sip, I could tell he did not enjoy the burn of alcohol, but he thought it might help him face what the morrow would bring. Even at the rate he was going, I knew I had to stop him soon or he would be of no use to himself or to my lady. I politely declined our host’s invitation, and then I was inspired to say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just had a small request. It is such a little thing, it can wait ‘til we get to Constantinople. My master has a good knowledge of Persian.”

  “What is it, Abdullah?” the governor demanded.

  “Nothing, really. Only my lady was reading some poetry and the poet makes too many classical Persian allusions for her to manage it on her own. The poem is very beautiful—an old one about the nightingale and his beloved rose—but unfortunately we can’t quite make sense of it. I have the manuscript in my room and..”

  “I’m afraid my Persian was all learned in the barracks.” The governor laughed.

  “But I have had experience with the poets,” Ferhad said. I had guessed both answers before I asked.

  “But I can see you are not in the mood,” I said.

  “I don’t know...” Ferhad began.

  “If sometime tonight you do feel you could spare the time. I’ll be awake all night alone in my room with the manuscript. I have packing to do…”

  I bowed to leave but even as I did, I saw that the young spahi, so used to making cryptic love messages of his own, had had no trouble reading through mine. He set down his goblet and was abruptly his former, stalwart, hopeful self.

  Back in the harem, I discovered that my lady had put on a fresh gown of deep pink and red that became her so well. She had also washed her face and fixed her hair. Had I not seen her just half an hour before with my own eves, I would have found it hard to believe such a drastic change could come over anyone. But still, she was not altogether of one mind. The same thoughts and fears that had been plaguing me for months were now transferred to her.

  “What if... “ she said, and that beginning was finished in the pause by everything from…he should not come or coining, should not find me to his liking? to...we should be discovered? It is death to commit adultery. But such thoughts only added to the thrills that swept cold up her back and then fired her cheeks at intervals.

  For my part, I was calmer than I had been in all those months. The decisions were now all out of my hands and I felt wonderfully free. I took her hand and pressed it, and she surprised me with a little kiss on the cheek. Then I left the room as if to use the lavatory. When I returned, Esmikhan’s room was empty. I thought I would be nervous, waiting up like a mother whose daughter is undergoing the test of virginity on her bridal night. I thought I would start at every sound, expecting any moment to be discovered. But I blew out the lights, unwound my sash, set aside my dagger, and climbed into the bedding as if I were in my own room. I fell asleep almost instantly, exhausted with relief, and I do not think I have slept better since.

  I returned to my room when I awoke in the morning. My bedding was neatly folded as if it had not been touched, but in the air was the defin
ite, though delicate smell of sex, so incongruous in a eunuch’s room. I opened the window and it faded at once without a trace—like dew before sunlight. The nightingale gives way to the morning lark.

  Never have I seen my lady so radiant as when I held the curtain for her to climb into her sedan to begin our long trip home. That that night had been one of a kind did not matter. She had been loved and cherished truly and completely and that was more than she had ever hoped to enjoy in her life. Our hostesses must have been somewhat insulted by the cheer with which she could leave them now it was day. Esmikhan was so full of joy that she sang. The notes carried through the sedan walls and lightened the porters’ steps. I think it was even heard by Ferhad who, on pretense of a morning ride, saw us some little way out of town.

  The good humor lasted for days; we made excellent time and it rubbed off on the whole party, including the maids, who were remarkably free from quarrels and grumblings about having to be kept cooped up so long.

  Whatever happens, I told myself, I shall never regret having done this for her.

  Such good moods, no more than spells of good weather, cannot be expected to last forever. But this one seemed to—over two weeks—and it was only stopped by something very physical. My mistress suddenly became violently ill. We stopped for a few days but she showed no signs of recovery, even with the best attendance. Finally she insisted that we try to continue, in spite of the fact that we had to stop every hour or so for her to spill her insides over the Turkish landscape. This even when there was nothing in her stomach but sour fluid to spill.

  At first I thought it must be bad water, but none of the rest of us got it, and spring, when the water sources are cool and swollen with melting snow, is hardly the season for dysentery. I did not know what to think, only began to fear what the master might learn or guess. Instead of the bright, blooming rose promised him from the gardens of Konya, what I brought him was faded and brittle instead, as if it had spent the entire journey crushed in the bottom of a saddlebag.