The Panther and The Pearl

by Doreen Owens Malek

  “Pasha Kalid requires your presence in the music room again tonight,” Memtaz announced.

  Sarah stood obediently, anticipating another boring evening of reading A Hiker’s Guide to the Cotswolds or A Thousand Years of British Monarchy, obviously relics of the pasha’s Oxford days.

  If this was the punishment Kalid had devised for her, it was certainly effective.

  Sarah was shocked to enter the music room and find Kalid waiting for her.

  Her heart began to pound the moment she saw him. He was once again in Western dress, this time silk chamois trousers and an embroidered cotton shirt. The pale colors complemented his vivid looks and made him seem deceptively like the young accountants and clerks and teachers she had known in Boston. If it weren’t for the Roman nose and the golden honey hue of his skin, he might have been attending a concert at the Conservatory of Music.

  “You seem surprised to see me,” he greeted her.

  “I didn’t go through the half-day hamman ritual, so I thought I would be alone.”

  “Memtaz told me that you objected to the elaborate preparation, so I gave her permission to dispense with it.”

  “So you have been keeping tabs on me.”

  “Certainly.” He was standing next to a large map of the United States set up on an easel.

  “Will this be a geography lesson?” Sarah asked.

  “I wish to learn more about your country,” he said.

  “Where did you get the map?”

  “Almost everything is available to me, kourista. At the right price, of course.”

  “Including people,” she said sarcastically.

  He held up his hand. “I do not wish to argue this evening. I want you to show me the various places about which I inquire.”

  “Fine,” Sarah said. Whatever he wanted. It would keep him happy and it had to be more interesting than the Cotswolds.

  “Where is your government in Washington, D.C.?”

  Sarah pointed to the capital between Virginia and Maryland on the Potomac River.

  “I thought it was in the center of the country,” Kalid said.

  Sarah shook her head.

  “And where is Boston?”

  Sarah raised her hand north and showed him her home town on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

  “And that is in what district?”

  “State. We call them states. Massachusetts.”

  “Massa—bah, I cannot say it.”

  “Mass-a-too-setts,” Sarah said, enunciating carefully.

  Kalid imitated her, with creditable success.

  “And your parents? Where did they come from?”

  “My father was from Boston. My mother came from New Hampshire, here.”

  He peered at her finger on the map. “And all of this,” he said gesturing west. “What is out here?”

  “The rest of the country. It’s big—three thousand miles from coast to coast, between two oceans. How could you have gone to Oxford and be so ignorant about it?”

  “In Oxford I learned about England, not the United States. What did you know about the Ottoman Empire before you came here?”

  He had a point.

  “And your work, where was that?” he asked.

  “In Boston. I taught school there.”

  “School?”

  “Elementary school. Fourth grade.”

  He raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  “The children were about ten years old.”

  “And did you never wish to have children of your own?” he asked, his dark eyes fixed on hers.

  “Some day. When the time is right.”

  “And the man is right?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said cautiously. What was all this chit-chat? In the past he had gone in more for direct assault than polite conversation. Was he changing his methods? He was so tricky that she was almost afraid to look away from him.

  A servant entered with coffee on a tray and set it on a carved mahogany table in front of Kalid. The pasha dismissed the girl with a wave of his hand.

  “Sit,” he said, and Sarah joined him on a damask couch.

  “Coffee?” Kalid said to Sarah.

  “Is it drugged?” she countered, holding his gaze.

  He was gracious enough to smile. “Let me ask you a question. If I had taken you aside at Topkapi and asked you if you would come here with me, would you have agreed?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then what choice did you leave me but to drug you?”

  “Kalid, didn’t it ever occur to you that you might not get what you wanted?”

  “No,” he said ingenuously, and poured a stream of coffee into a delicate china cup.

  “So your only alternative was to kidnap me?”

  “Yes.”

  Sarah sighed. “England obviously didn’t make much of an impression on you.”

  “On the contrary,” he said in his clipped accent, sounding very English indeed. “My grandmother tells me that I am entirely too Western. She finds my intense need to have my desire for you reciprocated a quaint and curious English notion.”

  Sarah looked away, feeling herself go weak in the knees. Hearing him talk about his obsession with her in such a detached fashion had more of an impact than his most ardent embrace; she was glad she was sitting down.

  He handed her the cup of coffee. “Perhaps I did stay too long in England. I seem to fit nowhere now,” he observed.

  “I think you fit here very well.”

  He smiled dryly. “You say that because you are not Turkish. To the Turks, I am too lenient. They admire a strong hand. And the women are puzzled by my . . . discrimination. Here the number of women a man beds is proof of virility, and I am sorely lacking in that regard.”

  Sarah almost choked on her coffee. “I wouldn’t agree,” she finally said, coughing.

  “Kosem is very worried about me,” he said sadly.

  Kosem didn’t witness our last two wrestling matches, Sarah thought. Aloud she said, “Why?”

  “She does not share my taste.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “She thinks you are too skinny and doubts whether you will be able to bear children.”

  Sarah put down her cup. “Kalid—” she began.

  He held up his hand. “Don’t worry. I have reassured her on both counts.”

  Sarah opened her mouth to frame a tart retort and then saw the smile in his eyes. Was he teasing her?

  “Now,” he said, leaning forward to put his cup on the table, “let us continue my lesson.”

  They talked for another two hours, about many different things, and then Kalid let her go.

  It was only when she was walking back to her room between the two eunuchs that Sarah realized this was the first time she had seen him that he had not touched her.

  It was another week before Kalid summoned Sarah again.

  She tried not to admit to herself that she was disappointed. She knew that he was deliberately keeping her off balance; each day she didn’t know whether he would send for her, or if he would touch her when he did, so she was in a constant state of anxious anticipation.

  She was, in short, leading the life of a harem woman.

  When Memtaz bustled into her room in a state of high excitement, Sarah knew that the pasha had spoken.

  “You will attend upon my master this evening, but first, this afternoon, you are going on an outing to the Kahouli Bazaar,” Memtaz said. She clapped her hands delightedly.

  “Oh, is that fun?”

  “The most fun. And you will bring sweetmeats and drinks and stop on the way back for a . . .” Memtaz paused.

  “Picnic?” Sarah supplied.

  “Yes, yes! A picnic.”

  “Whose idea was this?” Sarah asked suspiciously.

  “The valide pashana thought you needed an outing.”

  Sarah filed that away. If she knew her valide pashanas, Kosem had an ulterior motive for this excursion.

  “You are not going?” Sarah asked Memtaz.r />
  “Not this time. But I have been there before and I will go again sometime.”

  “Memtaz,” Sarah said thoughtfully, “you knew Kalid’s mother, is that right?”

  “Yes, mistress. Very well.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Like you,” Memtaz replied, and smiled.

  “Like me?” Sarah said. “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. She came here against her will, too. She was a captive, as I told you. But she came to love the old pasha very much and lived out the rest of her life in happiness here.”

  “She never wanted to go home again?”

  “I think she had a longing, yes, a longing she passed on to her son. He wanted to go to England very much, to see it for her.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Oh, gulbeyaz. Most beautiful. Once the pasha saw her, he was lost to all others. He had no other kadin for the rest of his life.”

  “Was she blonde?”

  “Not so much as you—darker, the color of amber. With the dimples, and the cleft in the chin, that my master has now.” Memtaz looked around the room. “Where is your feradge?”

  “My what?”

  “Your cloak. You must be completely veiled, covered up to the eyes in order to go out in a carriage.”

  “Memtaz, I don’t think I have a feradge. I’ve never been out of the palace since I got here.”

  “Oh, yes, I see. I’ll find you one. You must get ready—the carriages will be here at one o’clock.”

  The feradge turned out to be a sort of wrap, like a blanket, which went over the shoulders and the head and concealed everything but the eyes of the wearer. As the harem women assembled by the Gates of Felicity with the khislar, Achmed, the little procession looked like a line of mummies or ghosts.

  Achmed assigned two eunuchs to walk beside each carriage and a halberdier to drive it. The carriages had canopies of ivory silk fringed with gold tassels, and the seats were padded with plush and strewn with embroidered cushions. Twin lanterns sat on either side of the driver’s bench, and each coach was pulled by a matched team of horses. Kosem’s carriage was in the lead, the pasha’s crest emblazoned on the doors, and the valide pashana gestured for Sarah to join her for the drive down the hill into town.

  The sea gleamed below them as the carriages proceeded at a walking pace, the khislar in the lead, down the dusty, winding road that led from the Orchid Palace to the bazaar in Bursa. This was the first time Sarah had seen the route she’d traveled the night she was kidnapped, and she craned her neck to peer over the side of the coach, trying to memorize landmarks and get her bearings.

  “Planning your escape route?” Kosem’s voice interrupted her reverie. Sarah turned to look at the old lady; her black eyes were the only thing visible above her cloak.

  “You look startled,” Kosem added serenely, smiling. “Was I reading your mind?”

  “It always startles me to hear you speaking English,” Sarah said mildly.

  “Nonsense. You were plotting, as usual.”

  “If you think that, why did you invite me to come on this excursion?” Sarah asked.

  “Because I wanted to talk to you, and my grandson gets suspicious if I request too many audiences with you. He thinks I’m—how do you say it? Up to something.”

  Sarah suppressed a smile. “Are you?”

  “Definitely. I know you want to get out of here, and I have a plan, one that doesn’t involve escaping from the palace in the dead of night and swimming the Bosporus.”

  She now had Sarah’s full attention.

  “I want you to marry my grandson and give him an heir. If you do, I will make sure that as soon as you wish to leave, you will have safe passage from the palace and back home to the United States. I have my own retainers, my own resources, people that I can bribe. Kalid will know nothing of it.”

  Sarah was so dumbfounded that she was silent for a full minute. The carriage wheels creaked on the unpaved road, and the coach weaved as her thoughts raced wildly.

  “Are you talking about my leaving the child behind when I go?” Sarah finally managed to say. She had to make some reply to this preposterous suggestion.

  “Of course. He would take over from my grandson when he dies; the child must remain here.”

  Sarah didn’t know whether to hit her or burst out laughing. When she had her emotions under control she said, “Valide pashana, I thank you for your kind offer, but I could never leave a child of mine under any circumstances.”

  “But my grandson will have no other woman but you! What am I to do? If he dies without an heir, the pashadom will be plunged into chaos. There will be civil war!”

  “How old is Kalid?” Sarah asked.

  Kosem thought about it.

  “Thirty?” she said at length.

  “I think he has a few years left to father children,” Sarah observed dryly.

  “But I will not live to see it! I must know the line is secure before I die, don’t you understand?”

  Sarah sighed. “Your highness, I can’t help you. I think you should talk to your advisors about this, it’s really family business.”

  “I have done so,” Kosem said morosely, staring out the window of the coach. “Nothing comes of it.”

  The sounds of the bazaar were filtering into the carriage, getting louder and more insistent as they approached the center of the town. Sarah turned to look out the window and was overwhelmed by the sights and sounds and smells.

  Striped stalls were set up so close to one another that they seemed to be one, the alleys between them hardly wide enough for a person to walk. The wares displayed were so varied as to dazzle the eye: reed baskets, richly colored blankets and shawls, wool rugs and countless woven items, lengths of silk and other fine cloth, silver and metalwork, jewelry and other finery, herbs and roots for charms and potions, perfumes and lotions and scented oils. And the food! Hanging bunches of dried fish, sweetmeats to be tied in napkins, kebobs heated over braziers, roasted nuts and vegetables, all of it sending out a delicious scent that mingled with the smell of heat and dust and humanity. And transcending everything was the din: the cries of the vendors hawking their wares and the babble of voices speaking diverse languages.

  Sarah stared, fascinated. She had never seen so many different types of people in one place. There were men in caftans and in Western clothes but wearing red fezzes; halberdiers and eunuchs in their white pants and black and gold short jackets; janissaries, the Sultan’s paid military, in dark blue uniforms; veiled women of all shapes and sizes; blacks from Nubia and Abyssinia and the upper reaches of the Nile in their colorful native dress; and European traders of every skin hue and country, all mingled in the crowd like varicolored pebbles on a beach.

  “You may have anything you wish from the bazaar, upon my grandson’s instruction,” Kosem said to Sarah. “Just gesture for it and the eunuchs will buy it.”

  The pashana’s carriage stopped in a cobbled street at the edge of the bazaar, and the other harem coaches lined up behind it. Sarah and Kosem alighted from the vehicle by means of a set of drop stairs, assisted by the khislar. As they walked forward, Kosem took Sarah’s arm, Achmed fell into step beside them, and the eunuchs brought up the rear.

  They had obviously been well instructed by the pasha.

  “What do you think of this?” Kosem asked, holding up a length of poppy silk as they passed a stall displaying bolts of the luxurious cloth dyed every color of the spectrum.

  “Very pretty,” Sarah said, and Kosem signaled one of the eunuchs to purchase it. Sarah realized that she had to be careful; she would wind up with half the bazaar if she approved of everything she saw.

  “Do you need anything?” Sarah asked.

  Kosem looked at her. “Need?” she said.

  Sarah realized that it had been a foolish question. The pashana’s purchases were matters of whim, not necessity.

  They turned down an alley and Kosem stooped to admire a silver urn engraved with twining grape leave
s around its rim. Sarah bent her head and scanned the rear of the alley covertly. All she could see was the dirt packed road continuing to either side and a stone building with an arched entrance facing her.

  It didn’t look very promising.

  Kosem said something in Turkish, and the merchant answered in a flowery speech.

  Kosem shook her head.

  “Are you buying it?” Sarah asked.

  “He wants too much.”

  “Don’t you bargain with him?” Sarah asked, remembering the infamous negotiations regarding a purchase in the Middle East. This bartering was almost an art form.

  “Certainly not,” Kosem replied. “He should be honored to sell to the valide pashana.”

  Sarah looked away, her lips twitching.

  The merchant ran after them as they walked on, and Kosem wound up with the urn, at her price.

  After about an hour of this process, the eunuchs were so laden with booty that Achmed sent them back to the carriage with it. As the khislar stood directing them, Kosem stopped to admire a pair of cast bronze earbobs inlaid with turquoise, and Sarah saw her chance.

  She grabbed two trays of jewelry and upset them, scattering rings and bracelets and diadems on the ground. The stall owner shrieked, and other shoppers jumped back out of the way as Sarah ripped two hanging rugs in a neighboring stall from their hooks and flung them in the faces of those nearest her. Then she whirled and ran for her life as Kosem turned to see the source of the commotion and the khislar looked over his shoulder and shouted in alarm.

  The eunuchs dropped their burdens and dashed after Sarah with the khislar hot on their heels. Sarah wrapped her feradge over her arm to allow her legs more freedom of movement and ran headlong around a corner, where she crashed into a man leading a donkey laden with boxes of green figs. She spun around and headed in the other direction, where people cleared out of her way as she dashed past them. She ran until she was out of the bazaar and the houses were farther apart, with courtyards between them and splashing fountains surrounded by flowering gardens. This was obviously a residential section, but Sarah ran on until the stitch in her side was so painful that she slumped against the wall of a stucco house, gasping for breath. She was wiping her perspiring face with the edge of her cloak when the door to the street opened. A woman came out of the house, wearing the face veil, dumping a pail of water into the street.