The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  Summoning the last of his resolve, he lay down flat and began a series of deep belly breaths. A few minutes of this drill and he was breathing normally. But he was still nauseated and woozy when the team began to arrive in the dressing room.

  The captain, a giant who went by the name of Oxy, saw immediately that something was wrong. Danilo felt a comforting arm around his shoulder and heard softly in his ear, “Is your gut in a twist?”

  He nodded, eyes downcast, ashamed.

  “Here’s what I used to do. Lie on the bench. Flat. Now sit up. I’ll hold your feet so you don’t cheat. Up!”

  Danilo groaned with the pain.

  “Lower yourself slowly. I know it hurts, but do it. Again.” Oxy was implacable, impervious to the grunts and groans that issued from the bench as Danilo forced his rigid muscles to flex and relax, flex and relax. He had seen other athletes suffer through this exorcism before a match. Now he understood why they did it. He was not the only one who had ever panicked.

  Slowly, as he gained control over his balky muscles, the cramp lessened and the only pain he felt was the terrible weight of Oxy sitting on his feet. Best of all, the whole thing had been handled so smoothly that nobody seemed to have noticed.

  “Drink some water. No wine!” And Oxy was off to attend to captain’s affairs.

  He sounds like my father, Danilo thought.

  By now, the temporary stands along the western side of the racecourse were filled, and those who missed out on the seating had spread out into the standing room above the north and south substructures. In bygone days viewing stands were permanently maintained on all four sides of the course and could accommodate a hundred thousand spectators. But that accommodation was abruptly cut in half when, just a few years into his reign, Suleiman appropriated a wide swath of land on the eastern border of the hippodrome for the site of the palace he was building for his Grand Vizier and boon companion, Ibrahim the Greek. Now, all that remained on the east side between the track and the magnificent stone edifice that housed the Grand Vizier was a narrow strip of lawn roped off today to give space and air to the Sultan’s viewing platform, thus reducing even further the seating capacity of the stadium. Still, from the vantage point of the riders emerging into the daylight from the underground vaults, it seemed as if the entire city of Istanbul was here today.

  For all their numbers, it was a fairly quiet crowd that had been gathering since early morning. But when the first rider of the Sultan’s team galloped out of the cavernous depths of the substructure and stood before them framed in the center vault, the shouting began. Each player would have his moment of recognition in the stone doorway before he galloped around to take his place in the starting lineup — the Sultan’s team at the southern end of the arena, the Grand Vizier’s men on the north. Since there were twelve members on each team, the process was somewhat tedious, certainly a far cry from the farrago that Signor Gritti described in his report. But this was only the beginning. Like many events in Ottoman public life, the gerit tended to start slowly and gather momentum gradually until the moment when all hell broke loose.

  Once the riders lined up at either end of the oval, the huge front doors of the Grand Vizier’s palace swung open and out came the Sultan’s musicians blasting appropriately raucous music (that is, Turkish rather than Persian). They were followed by a group of the Sultan’s senior pages, magnificently attired in crimson caftans, carrying a rolled-up length of cloth-of-gold fabric, which they unfurled and tossed expertly over a set of poles already in place around the raised platform, thereby creating a golden canopy for the Padishah.

  Next to emerge, a second platoon of pages, holding high a golden throne, which they placed front and center under the canopy.

  Now came the Grand Vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, accompanied by his own attendants, even more gorgeously dressed than the pages who preceded them. Compared to his attendants he was nothing special to look at — medium build, greasy hair, and a trace of kohl around the eyes — a typical Greek. But appearances are deceiving. He made his way to the platform and stood respectfully at the right of the throne. It would be unthinkable for anyone to seat himself ahead of the Sultan.

  Now, for a change of pace, a contingent of Janissaries shambled in from the south end.

  “Make way, make way,” bawled the heralds.

  And the standing crowd, always respectful of Janissaries, parted like the Red Sea to let them through as they make their way along the spina and proceeded to surround the royal enclosure. The Sultan’s parade band played a flourish of trumpets. The horses lined up at either end of the stadium danced in anticipation. The stage was set for the chief actor in this tableau. In any setting that the Sultan condescended to honor with his presence, he was always the star attraction. Today, even his riders took second place to him.

  All eyes were turned to the bronze doors of the Grand Vizier’s palace when they opened to reveal the Padishah, Father of All the Sovereigns of the World, resplendent on a milk-white steed. As always the poor beast had been stretched on a strap overnight to give it a slow, majestic gait.

  Whenever the Sultan went out among his people — officially — he was always positioned above them, occasionally in a sedan chair, most often mounted on a horse. Today, when he dismounted, he stepped directly onto the raised platform so that not for a single moment was he on the same level as his people. Always raised, like a god.

  Elegant, unsmiling, and ramrod straight, he bent to the waist, nodding first to the crowd at his right, then to the left. He raised his right hand.

  On cue the Chief Herald stepped forward and in a stentorian tone announced, “Let the games begin!”

  At a signal from their captains, the riders took off from a standing start toward the center of the field, driving their mounts furiously — but not so furiously as to overtake their captains. The etiquette of the game demanded that no player overtake his leader in this first rush, a stroke of luck for Danilo del Medigo. As he urged his horse forward, he wondered if he had done the right thing when he insisted on riding Bucephalus. He had been warned that the horse at this age was no longer a viable contestant in a speed race. And, when they took off, Bucephalus seemed sluggish. Was it the after-effects of the colic? Was the animal past his prime? Should he have requested a younger, faster, more agile mount? Then the gerits began to fly and there was no time for thinking.

  A quick glance told Danilo which of the Grand Vizier’s riders had picked him out as a target. His gerit clasped in his bare hand — no gloves, as leather could slip — he reined Bucephalus to the right, a standard move before the swerve to the left to deflect the opponent’s thrust. He narrowed his eyes to a slit, blurring his focus, rendering the other rider faceless — a crouching form, coming straight at him. Slowly, as the space between them narrowed, the eyes of the other rider were revealed. Coal black. Merciless.

  At the very last possible moment, Danilo had to lean to the left to put himself out of the way of the dart that would be coming at him, while at the same moment hurling his own pole at his opponent’s chest — the best way to knock him off his mount. In these moves, timing was everything.

  Danilo raised his throwing arm as he shifted his body and jerked the horse to the right. This was the moment for the thrust. But before he could hurl his weapon, he was struck with terrible force on his right chest. Weakened by the blow, his right hand loosened its grip. His weapon fell to the ground. Before he could grasp what had happened, he was flat on the turf and everything that surrounded him appeared as if through a mist. He strained every muscle in his body to lift himself up, but pain pinioned him to the ground. His body, which he had learned to trust, had betrayed him.

  Sprawled on the ground, a defeated warrior, he blinked to hold back the tears. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, “so sorry . . .”

  Then through the fog he heard a voice, a voice he knew well. He raised his eyes to heaven.

  “As l
ong as you live, I will be with you.” His mother’s words as she lay dying. “If you need me, call out. I will answer from a place deep inside you.”

  “Mother,” he whispered softly.

  As if in response, a soft white hand reached down from heaven to pull him gently to his feet. He stamped his foot to assure himself that the ground beneath him was solid. And there he stood in the middle of the hippodrome, clear-sighted once again and steady on his feet but without a mount or a weapon.

  Through force of habit, he lifted two fingers to his mouth, pursed his lips, and delivered an ear-splitting whistle. And, halfway across the field, a riderless horse disengaged itself from the pack and trotted toward him. Bucephalus was coming to rescue him. This was a move he and Bucephalus had practiced a hundred times, in preparation for just such a moment.

  As he hoisted himself up onto the saddle, a deluge of sound washed over him, thousands of voices cheering him on. He strained to listen, but the voices were drowned out by a second sonic torrent — the pounding roar of hooves. His gerit lay on the ground between him and the tangle of horsemen galloping toward him. Once he had lost his weapon the rules of gerit would force him to retire from the match, an ignominious defeat. There was no time to think. He turned Bucephalus away from the safe harbor of the sidelines and galloped forward to rescue his honor, veering wide from a straight-ahead course so as to cut across the opposing team at an angle.

  “Go,” he shouted into the horse’s ear. “Go!”

  As they neared the spot where his weapon lay, he slipped his left foot out of the stirrup and slid down along the horse’s midsection. There was nothing now to hold him to the animal but the reins and one stirrup. At precisely the right instant he stretched his body the last perilous inches to where his weapon lay on the ground and, with only seconds to spare, picked up his gerit, reversed his direction, and galloped away to the sidelines, clasping the weapon to his heart.

  After that, the day belonged to Danilo del Medigo. Back in the game, back to himself, he rode through the tumult and the mud, his timing perfect, his aim unerring, his mind clear. He had, as they say, hit his stride. And each time he scored, the crowd rose to its feet and cheered wildly. But nothing that followed could equal for them the thrill of the first few moments of the contest when the rider lay on the ground, perhaps unconscious, perhaps even dead, then suddenly came back to life, resurrected before their eyes.

  During those tense moments, the harem ladies up on the balcony edged forward and stood pressed against the balustrade, their faces squeezed between the lattices, shouting encouragement to the downed rider — a most unusual lapse for harem ladies — shrieking bravos when he struggled to his feet and remounted his horse and — most dazzling of all — deliberately thrust himself across the path of a pack of riders to retrieve his grounded gerit.

  “This proves what I have always said,” the Second Kadin burbled on, as was her habit, up on the balcony. “The pages in the Palace School are superior to those in the Grand Vizier’s. And that is because the Sultan himself supervises every aspect of their training.”

  She had failed to observe that, when the rider fell, the princess gasped and turned white and was forced to retire to a divan at the rear of the balcony. Nor had it come to her attention that since the girl had come back to her seat at the railing, she had not uttered a word.

  Only after some time did Saida collect herself sufficiently to speak and then only to request that she be excused.

  “I am unwell,” she explained, “and must return to the harem.”

  In vain, Hürrem tried to bully the girl out of it. She had secured permission for them to stay on at Topkapi for another night. The Sultan had expressed a desire to see his daughter. He might invite her to dine with him this evening in the selamlik — an honor rarely bestowed on any woman, never yet on his daughter.

  But the girl would not be swayed. She must return to the old palace. She had been absent from her grandmother for too long. The Valide liked to be read to sleep by her granddaughter.

  “I never forget,” Saida advised the Lady Hürrem, “that my father put the Valide in my charge. He will most certainly understand when you explain that I felt it my duty to forego the pleasures of his palace to fulfill my duty to his revered mother.”

  Reluctantly, Hürrem agreed to summon a cart to carry the princess back to the harem. And to that haven Saida repaired as soon as the gerit contest was over, leading Hürrem to conclude that if this princess was ever to occupy a position of importance in the Second Kadin’s close circle, she had better begin to understand that opportunities to kindle a light in the Sultan’s eye came far ahead of any other duty, certainly one’s duty to an old woman who would be dead soon anyway.

  20

  REWARDS OF THE DAY

  When a flourish of brass announced the end of the gerit match, the judges credited Danilo del Medigo with four hits, the exact number by which the Sultan’s team had defeated the Grand Vizier’s. At this announcement Danilo’s teammates hoisted him up on their shoulders and carried him off the field in triumph. Held aloft by his mates, he soared off the field as if on a cloud, with the cheers of the crowd resounding in his head blotting out the boisterous locker room horseplay of his teammates. His delirium was not shattered until his captain, the giant Oxy, grabbed him by the hair and overturned a pail of icy water on his head.

  “Time to shape up, my boy.” The captain whacked his protégé on the buttocks. “The Sultan awaits.”

  In short order the captain had his team scrubbed clean, dressed, lined up double file and on the march into the Grand Vizier’s palace.

  “Remember,” he warned them as they approached the huge brass doors, “keep your heads down at all times. Never look straight into the eyes of the Padishah, and never, never speak in his presence.”

  “What if he asks us a question?” asked one of the younger players.

  “If that happens, a short answer is allowed. But keep it brief. And low. The Sultan dislikes loud voices. But you needn’t worry. Chances are he won’t talk to you. I’ve been received twice before — and rewarded handsomely, as you will be today — but he has never spoken directly to me,” the captain said. “Are you ready? Good. Let’s go. Walk slowly. Don’t jostle. Don’t chatter. Slow. Quiet. Dignified. Respectful to the Sultan from whom all of your blessings flow.”

  For Danilo, there was no need to dissemble respect. Pacing the long corridor to the Reception Salon, a truly awesome space, its vault easily reaching to three times the height of any structure in Topkapi Palace, he was astonished by the grandeur of the anterooms of the palace that the Sultan built for his boon companion, each one warmed by a glowing fireplace. This vast vaulted space, hung top to bottom with magnificent Persian rugs, brought to his mind the grand Italian palaces he had known as a child and presented a striking contrast to the small, low Ottoman kiosks that made up Topkapi Palace. It was a palace in the European tradition, the like of which he had never dreamed existed in the east.

  When at last the gerit team reached the threshold of the Great Hall where their team’s audience was to take place, he was once again overwhelmed by the grandeur of the space — a striking contrast to the Sultan’s own audience chamber in the Third Court of Topkapi. That was a fine place too, but it was modest by comparison. If I were a Sultan, Danilo thought as he proceeded slowly along the rich red carpet to the raised dais at the far end of the room, and one of my men showed me up so blatantly, I would not be pleased. But there they sat, the Padishah and his Grand Vizier, each man on a golden throne, their two heads bent toward each other, the Vizier’s only slightly lower than the Sultan’s. So intimate that they might be brothers.

  As expected, the Sultan did not engage directly with any of the athletes. He left the duty of conveying his congratulations and dispensing the gold purses to his Grand Vizier. In conformity with the Byzantine protocol of the Ottoman court, each recipient marched forward
stiffly, head lowered, when his name was called. At the dais he held out his hand, head still bowed, and received a “Well done!” whereupon a jingling purse was placed by an attending page in the hands of the Padishah, then passed by the royal hand to the Grand Vizier and thence to the recipient, who stepped backward gracefully from the exalted presence. An awkward and somewhat demeaning procedure, but at least the athletes walked backward on their own steam, unlike foreign dignitaries who were routinely disarmed for a royal audience, then hauled into the Sultan’s presence with their arms pinioned behind their backs and roughly dragged away after they had been welcomed not by the Sultan himself, who remained a silent, remote presence elevated above them on his throne, but by his Grand Vizier.

  “Danilo del Medigo, step forward.”

  Prepared by the example of those who had preceded him, Danilo stepped forward, head lowered. But no purse was placed in his outstretched hand and no word of commendation was heard. Instead, an ominous silence.

  Above him Danilo heard a whispered exchange between the Sultan and the Grand Vizier, too muffled for him to make out. Then came the Grand Vizier’s slightly Greek-accented voice: “The Sultan has a question for this page. Step up, del Medigo.”

  With visions of the hangman’s rope swinging before his eyes, Danilo climbed onto the platform, careful to keep his eyes at the level of the jeweled boots peeking out from under the gold hem of the Sultan’s caftan.

  Now, a new voice, not yet heard this day — low-pitched, steady, and precise: “You have given us great satisfaction today, young man. Your father will be proud of you.”

  To speak or not to speak. Oxy had imposed an Oriental command of silence in the royal presence. But Danilo del Medigo had been brought up to be a European gentleman.

  “Thank you, sir,” he found himself saying. Then he waited for the axe to fall.

  But instead, a question. “How long is it since you first came to my court?”