The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  Without waiting for an answer the woman had continued in a harsh, bitter tone that Saida had never heard from her before, her eyes fixed on some dim, distant point in her past. “I was fifteen years old. No man had ever touched me. They stripped me and brought me to the Kizlar Agasi, who ordered me to open my mouth and keep it wide so he could check my teeth. He ran his finger inside my mouth and checked my gums as he would have a camel or a horse. Then he ordered another eunuch to lift my hair and tweak my nipples to make sure they held no liquid. Shall I go on?”

  “Please, no.”

  There had been times during her presence in Hürrem’s household that the girl had suffered terrible pangs of jealousy of this woman who seemed to hold such power over her father. She had envied Hürrem his letters, the poems he wrote to her, his protestations of eternal love. But now she could feel only sympathy. Hürrem had taken her in as a daughter, had brought her out into the world. Without Hürrem, she would never have been included in the royal party that would visit the hippodrome the next day.

  Across the Third Court in the Sultan’s selamlik, Hürrem was sparkling, her eyes brighter than her jewels, adoring her Sultan. Suleiman was weary. Even for a man of iron, it had been a long, trying day. But Hürrem knew how to revive him. She had brought a packet of the potions that she purchased regularly from one of the so-called bundle-women who service the harem. Applied to certain parts of a man’s body in certain ways, these unguents never failed to stimulate the male member. Hürrem had been patronizing this bundle-woman ever since she first entered the harem as a young girl almost ten years ago. By the time she was called to the Sultan’s bed, she had acquainted herself with the entire contents of the harridan’s pharmacopeia, plus a variety of ways to administer them. As they said in the whorehouses on the waterfront, the Second Kadin had quite the little bag of tricks. And she meant to make full use of them tonight.

  On the other side of the Gate of Felicity in the Sultan’s stables, a different kind of elixir was working its wonders on Danilo del Medigo’s horse. By midnight, Bucephalus was able to stand on his feet. His eyes were clear and his belly was almost down to size. Hours after midnight, the Sultan’s Master of the Horse finally showed himself, just in time to witness the last of the cure. A man with a fine sense of hierarchy — and of the precariousness of his own position on the court ladder — he had made certain that every last one of the Sultan’s parade horses was examined and safely ferried across the Bosphorus before he got around to answering the page’s cry for help. Even so, when he finally managed to reach the stables, he had the gall to order a complete review of the problem as if he had been in charge of Bucephalus all along. He also directed that the horse be spared the stress of the gerit that day, a piece of advice that Danilo dismissed out of hand. He had, after all, been assured by his father — backed up by Hippocrates — that once the symptoms of colic subsided, the best medicine for the animal would be a cleansing, sweat-producing workout. What could be a better remedy than an outing in the gerit? Yes, Danilo del Medigo would definitely ride Bucephalus in the games, and to hell with the Master of the Horses. That decided, he left the horse in the hands of Abdul and headed for his dormitory to catch as much sleep as he could.

  Actually, the boy’s chances of recouping his strength were better than those of the horse. The boy was young, the horse middle-aged — truth to tell, too old for the gerit. But Bucephalus was now more to Danilo than just a mount, even more than a treasured thoroughbred and a gift from the Sultan. The animal’s miraculous recovery had turned Bucephalus into a talisman. Danilo was now convinced that he was destined to triumph in the gerit on the back of this mount and no other. Why else had Fortuna kept the beast alive? Yes, Fortuna. Danilo’s mind, the product of a humanist education, had no difficulty embracing both the pagan goddess and the One God of Judaism. His father, an observant Jew all his life, had for years played an active role in Lorenzo de Medici’s Platonic Academy in Florence, where he had always lit a candle for Plato beside the Shabbat candles on his Friday night table and saw no incongruity in it. In emulation, Danilo slept secure in the oversight of both Fortuna and the Jewish God Yahweh — with the princess’s amulet pressed close to his chest.

  In the guest kiosk at the far end of the Third Court, Princess Saida was enjoying a sleep so deep that it took more than one determined poke to wake her.

  “Get up, lazy girl.” The Second Kadin, very playful this morning, reached under the silk comforter and began to tickle Saida’s toes. “Wake up. Open your eyes. I have let you sleep until the last possible moment.”

  The girl looked up to find herself facing a glowing, wide-eyed Hürrem. What was it about this woman? She certainly was not beautiful. Her nose was too sharp. Her face was too long. And her eyes were really quite small. But her liveliness — the power of her pleasure at being alive — more than made up for her physical defects. There she stood, legs akimbo, arms stretched out like an Amazon.

  This woman is as young in spirit, as hopeful as I am, thought Saida. For her, every day is an adventure. Then came the thought, She must be a wonderful lover.

  “You aren’t listening to me.” Hürrem broke into her thoughts. “We are due to leave for the hippodrome by the end of the second prayer. The Sultan is sending sedan chairs to carry us there. Yes, sedan chairs,” she repeated, relishing the words, “will carry us to the Grand Vizier’s palace.”

  “Is it a long trip?” asked Saida, still mindful of the bouncing carriage ride of yesterday.

  “Of course not. Don’t you know where you are? Don’t you remember coming here last night?”

  Saida looked around her at the unmistakable reds and the vibrant blues of the Iznik tiles, then up at the coffers of the gilded ceiling. She had heard stories of a luxurious guest house set aside in Topkapi for concubines fortunate enough to be invited there. Had she actually spent the night in that coveted hideaway? Apparently.

  Fully awake now, she studied Hürrem. Yesterday, in the incessant flow of chatter that issued from the woman’s mouth, the Second Kadin had managed never to allude to the kiosk that was being prepared for them. Such a smooth dissembler. She may have come from some coarse Russian hovel, as they said, but she behaved as if she had been born and bred in the harem — full of secrets and mischief. Altogether the perfect odalisque. But with a difference that set her off from all the rest. Within Hürrem burned a white-hot inner fire that no amount of training could have instilled. If I were to get too close to this woman, Saida thought with one long last look at her benefactor, she could burn me to a cinder.

  18

  THE HIPPODROME

  The first time Danilo del Medigo made the circuit of the hippodrome racecourse was at the age of eleven, as part of his father’s efforts to entice him out of the deep sadness that no remedy in the doctor’s pharmacy could alleviate. When medicines proved to be of no value he tried offerings of tasty food also, which the patient ate when he was bidden but which brought no flush of pleasure to his pale face. Nor did tasty tidbits bring a request for a second helping.

  The doctor turned to nature. Long walks in the sun were equally unrewarding. But perhaps he might be able to delight the patient’s eyes with wonderful sights and deluge his mind with vivid stories of long-ago events. Worth a try. But where to go? The hippodrome, of course. No question. What better place to start than that ancient racecourse whose stones still held the imprint of Greek chariot wheels? Whose walls resounded with the roar of the lions unleashed against the Roman gladiators. Whose depths echoed the cheers of a hundred thousand citizens welcoming home from one of his triumphs their emperor Justinian and his empress Theodora, former circus girl and whore.

  They entered the huge space under the towering vaulted arch on the north side. It was through these majestic arches that the Greek chariots thundered into the arena from the substructures that housed the dressing rooms, stables, chariot docks, and animal cages below. For Judah, schooled in the lore of
the ancients, the cobblestones still resonated with the thundering hooves.

  “If these old stones could talk,” he told his son as they took off down the paved central spine of the arena, “what stories they would tell.”

  The boy took the bait. “What kinds of stories?” It was his first question, Judah noted with pleasure.

  “Stories of courage and cowardice, triumph and slaughter, great victories and great upheavals,” came the reply.

  And it was true. From the time of Constantine until the time of Suleiman, no important event had been celebrated anywhere else in the city but at the hippodrome. And, truth aside, no other approach could so unerringly have found its way to Danilo’s heart. A didactic history of the city would have fallen on deaf ears. But tales of high heroism and great triumphs were meat and drink to a boy nurtured by his mother, Grazia the scribe — a mother now lost to him but constantly in his thoughts — on the tales of Homer.

  Encouraged by a suggestion of interest in the boy’s eyes, Judah beckoned him toward the eastern track, a spot said to be a thousand-year-old killing ground.

  “Listen. Do you hear anything strange?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “There are those who swear that, when they walk over this end of the course, they hear the sound of men screaming and catch a whiff of blood.” The boy’s eyes widened. “It was here on the very ground where we now stand that Justinian’s general, Belisarius, trapped a force of thirty thousand rebels and slaughtered them to the last man. Tradition has it that the dead were buried where they fell and that their bones still inhabit the site. Some say that when they walk here, they hear the dead calling out.”

  “And you, sir, have you heard them?” the boy asked.

  A second question, Judah noted.

  “Good God, no,” he answered, “I am a scientist. But I thought you might have the gift.”

  The boy shook his head, no.

  No matter. It was enough that he had been drawn out of himself far enough to ask not one but two questions. Sufficient unto the day, thought Judah, taking a leaf from the Christians’ book.

  “Let us make the complete circuit around the racecourse” — he took the boy’s arm familiarly — “and head for home.”

  It was at the turn onto the western edge of the arena that, quite unplanned, he found himself making one final effort to unlock the boy’s imagination. “This is the squarest corner of the oval and the turn where most of the chariot accidents happened. And this side of the bleachers was the most coveted place to sit. Probably because, facing east in the afternoon, you didn’t have the setting sun in your eyes. See there” — he pointed to a truncated flight of narrow stone steps — “in the time of Constantine, rows of seats lined both sides of the course and reached dizzying heights. They say that, after he restored it, Justinian’s hippodrome accommodated one hundred thousand people. Imagine it! One hundred thousand people yelling their lungs out as the chariots rounded this curve for the final push. If you close your eyes and listen hard, you may hear those shouts echoing down through the years.”

  Danilo hesitated. Then, unable to resist the lure, he closed his eyes tight shut and waited for the magic. His hardships have taught him patience, Judah thought. And, to be sure, after several moments, the boy began to nod slowly.

  “I think I heard them, Papa,” he whispered. “I couldn’t make out the words. But I believe they were shouting in Greek.”

  After that day, the hippodrome became a place Danilo returned to again and again, sometimes with Judah on the way home from their Saturday morning prayers, often alone. In spite of hours poring over the vocabulary lists his mother had compiled for him, searching out the Greek words for “Hurrah,” “Faster,” and “Bravo,” he never was able to identify the sounds he thought he heard in his head. But, in the course of many visits, he began to see — with his eyes shut — dim at first, then increasingly clear, the faces of the Greeks, tier upon tier of them, the cords in their necks bulging as they shouted words of encouragement to their favorite charioteers. And, after some time had passed, he began, when he closed his eyes, to see himself rounding that corner mounted on a magnificent charger, galloping full tilt across the finish line, the victor in some grueling contest.

  Never in the course of those flights of fancy did Danilo come close to hoping — even thinking — that such a thing might actually happen. But when the riding master at the Harem School offered him the opportunity to join the gerit team, he did rush to accept. And he did practice to perfect his aim and his horsemanship with unfailing perseverance throughout his years in the Harem School and now in the Sultan’s School for Pages. But this dogged pursuit of mastery, and the visions that came to him when he stood in the hippodrome with his eyes shut, ran on parallel tracks that had never met — until now, five years after he had first walked the pista with his father and heard a dim echo of the Greeks shouting in the stands.

  And now, on this day of the gerit match between the Sultan’s team and the Grand Vizier’s team to celebrate Suleiman’s great victory, the two paths converged and Danilo del Medigo’s fantasy became reality.

  19

  THE GERIT CONTEST

  In his villa in the Pera section of the city, the Venetian bailo, Alvise Gritti, was up at dawn scratching away at the report he wrote each week for his masters in the Venetian Senate.

  “The Sultan’s victory celebration,” he wrote, “is a spectacle halfway between our Carnival and the Roman games. Today, all attention will center on the hippodrome, where a contest is planned, named after a three-foot javelin with a steel dart at the business end called a gerit. It is played by two teams on horseback: one from the Sultan’s School for Pages, the other from the Grand Vizier’s school of his pages.

  “The gerit is the favorite sport of the Turks, and they play it the way they fight their wars. There is no manoeuvering. Each rider simply charges boldly and directly and, up close, hurls the gerit at his selected opponent with enough force to knock him off his horse. All hangs on the accuracy of the throw. Success is judged by the aggregate number of hits scored by the winning team and depends not on leadership or team play, as it would with us, but solely on horsemanship and the raw guts of each player. So once the match begins, it quickly turns into a chaotic melee with riders hurling their weapons wildly in all directions and often — because they wear no armor other than a leather jerkin — results in serious injury and sometimes death. The randomness of it all defies the reason of a thinking man.

  “I know of nothing in Europe to compare with this gerit,” he continued, “which resembles a battle more than a jousting contest. That it should be the favorite sport of the Turks in both town and country, played enthusiastically by artisans and sultans alike, should tell us something about these people. By now, I have witnessed countless of these contests but have yet to fully grasp the point. To one not caught up in it early in life, the gerit is simply a war of each against all.

  “To this mad display I will shortly repair. There is no avoiding it. I have been assigned a preferred seat in a balcony on the east side of the Grand Vizier’s palace overlooking the hippodrome. At least I will not be blinded by the setting sun at the end of the day. I am further honored by an invitation to dine in the Great Hall of the Grand Vizier’s palace, where those members of the winning team who have not been mutilated or killed will be rewarded by the Sultan, this to be followed by the typical Ottoman banquet of twenty courses or more. If I do not fall ill from sun poisoning or the surfeit of rich food without the digestive amelioration of even a single glass of wine, a report on the damned gerit will follow.”

  Such were the expectations of Signor Gritti, a typical Venetian — vain, dyspeptic, and convinced that there was no other civilized spot on earth except his beloved Serenissima. For most Istanbulians — the citizens who would overfill the bleachers and bellow their hearts out that afternoon as their Greek and Roman predecessors d
id before them — the day held the expectation of a splendid entertainment. To Princess Saida, it promised rapturous fulfillment. To the Second Kadin, it meant her first time ever riding in a sedan chair like the Valide Sultan she intended to become. For Danilo del Medigo, today was the day he had been preparing for all his life.

  Among his teammates, Danilo was known to be mild-tempered, even phlegmatic. Not one to give way to anger, cry out from pain, sulk in defeat, or gloat in victory. But, with it all, a fierce competitor. In his years on Suleiman’s gerit squad he had become something of a pet. “The kid with bronze balls,” they called him. But no one, not even the most hardened veteran, was ever totally immune to pre-game nerves. Danilo knew this. He had seen the evidence of it in the changing room. Still, he was unprepared when he lost his nerve for the first time.

  On the short walk from Topkapi to At Maydani (or Horse Square, as the hippodrome was still known to born-and-bred Istanbulians), his stomach abruptly turned into a hard knot and his breath began to come in short bursts. He barely made it through the giant arches that led to the dressing rooms underneath the course without stumbling. By then, his knees were weak and he felt a rising gorge of vomit in his throat. When the other contestants peeled off to check up on their horses, he quietly continued alone down the wide tunnel to the dressing room, hoping that his absence would not be noticed. He managed to get to the bucket just in time.

  Panic was not familiar to him, but he recognized its symptoms. This is not fear, he told himself. This is the fear of fear. The time to be afraid is when you are lying on the ground, too hurt to move, hearing the pounding hooves of the horses that are going to trample you to death. That is fear. What you are feeling now is a phantom. You can blow it away. Fill the belly with air, like a bladder. Suck the air in all the way down to the crotch. Hold it, hold it, hold it. Blow it out slowly. Repeat until the breath flows evenly.