The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer

by Lucille Turner

  ‘I think you have enjoyed Aristotle. That is good. It pleases me.’ His father pushed a seat towards him and began to search through a pile of parchment. He pulled out a roll and opened it on the table.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’

  Vlad looked at the drawing before him, a stretch of parchment full of shapes that wound between each other in snaking trajectories of ink; there were place names he recognised marked upon it in script, and distances were written in figures in between. ‘Is it a drawing for a Roman cursus publicus?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, but it’s more than just one area; it’s a mappa mundi, a record of distance and place. It was drawn by a man called Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria.’

  Vlad leaned over it and put his finger in the centre, a little to the right. Constantinopolis.

  ‘Yes, our patriarchate is on it, so is Antioch, and Rome is marked there.’

  Vlad looked into the deepest corners of the basement room. On a far ledge was a more interesting shape, an old leather scabbard on a ledge. His father saw him looking; he rose from his chair and picked it up. It was a sword. He laid it on the table without unsheathing it.

  ‘But I didn’t think…’

  ‘That I owned one,’ finished his father, quickly. ‘As you can see, I do.’

  ‘But you don’t use it?’

  ‘I chose not to, long ago.’

  Vlad shook his head. ‘Not even against the Turks?’

  ‘I have my reasons. One of them is that it is better to talk than to fight. And while I still have a tongue to speak with I would rather use that than take a risk that could prove irreversible.’ His father looked down at the parchment on the table, his brow furrowed. ‘I brought you down here to show you the mappa mundi, the cursus publicus as you called it, but it does not surprise me that the sword found you first.’ He unsheathed it and ran a finger over the blade. A thin line of red appeared on the tip and he smoothed it away with his hand.

  ‘The Romans are our cousins; we are family now. They conquered us; we conquered them. That was how it was in those days, but without the knowledge of Ptolemy they would have stayed what they always were.’

  ‘Fishermen?’

  ‘No, farmers,’ said his father, distracted by the sword. ‘There was a time, long ago, when a farmer could change the world, but now the world is changing by itself and I hope it will be for the better. There are new ideas abroad, wonderful ideas that will transform everything. One day we will no longer need scribes. Their work will be over. Christendom will enter a new age and I want Wallachia to be at the head of it. I want the Rumani to be great again. What I am trying to say,’ his father said, putting down the sword, ‘is that if you have to choose one day between the knowledge and the sword, you would do better to take the knowledge.’

  Vlad looked from his father’s mappa mundi on the table to the shining blade beside it. ‘And if I can take both?’

  His father almost smiled. ‘Then you will either be a tyrant or a deliverer,’ he said softly. ‘Only first you must deliver yourself.’

  A bolt of understanding passed between them. His father looked away. He reached up to the shelf and grasped the spine of a small book, a folded codex, which he brought down from the ledge. A spider crawled into a crack on the side of the shelf, its legs pressed into a ball. Specks of dust flew into the air and settled in the light that came in from the vent. His father pressed his palm to the codex but did not open it. Instead he wrapped it in a piece of hide and gave it to him.

  ‘I have been meaning to give you this for some time now. It is called the Book of Job, a small part of a much larger body of work and all that I possess of it in my modest collection. When you feel ready, I want you to read it. Soon we will pay a call on the monks. I have asked the monks of Saint Nicholas to further your studies of scripture. Friar Anton will assist you if there is anything you do not understand.’

  ‘Friar Anton is a physician,’ said Vlad. He did not like the friar. Whenever his father took him to the monastery on the hill the friar looked at him as though he was sick. To his father, every monastery in Wallachia was a place of refuge and every monk a friend – even Friar Anton, who was a Bogomil, a type of Manichean that the Catholics called vermin. When the Bishop of Alba Jula informed the Governor of Hungary that the Draculesti were harbouring vermin, their father had been obliged to ride for three days to Buda to defend himself. After that, the friar was sent away and they saw no more of him until these past few years when Father installed him once again at the Monastery of Saint Nicholas, in spite of the protests of the bishop. Vlad did not understand why the friar was so important, but his father said only that Friar Anton was a valuable physician and that he needed him.

  ‘He is the most knowledgeable man I know,’ said his father firmly, ‘whether as a physician or a man of scripture. And you will treat him with the respect that is due to one who knows more than you do.’ With that, his father stood up from the table, closed the basement door and returned the key to a nail hidden in a recess of the wall. Somewhere upstairs, Mircea was playing the dulcimer.

  As he went back to his chamber, Vlad passed the urn on the landing of the second floor. A bunch of wormwood still hung over the rim for protection against the dangers of Saint Andrew’s Eve. He picked out a leaf and folded it into his palm. Back in his room, he pressed the leaf between two pages and hid the Book of Job beneath a pile of cloaks. His father had told him to read it when he was ready, but how did anyone know when they were ready? He’d also said he must deliver himself, but from what?

  A sliver of wormwood fell from his hand as he opened his palm. There was a rash of spots like a spray of red berries. He plunged his hand into a bowl and looked into the water. A phantom face stared back.

  Chapter 9

  The eunuch had probably picked up the boy at one of the bathing houses of the Old Mosque district or perhaps at an inn at Havsa, a caravanserai where boys like that would always find a bed. Certainly at a place where that hungry mouth, missing two teeth in a dazzling row of white ones, would have been fed. It was a delicate mouth with a crude smile that had not yet adjusted itself to the tricks of life. As for the clothes, he would have to be properly dressed. ‘He’s too young,’ Azize said. ‘How old is he?’

  The eunuch, who stood beside the boy as though he might be snatched from his hands without payment, said he didn’t know.

  Azize thought of her own Djem, and measured him against this boy. He could be anything from eight to twelve. She looked into his eyes, daring and restless, and hesitated, wondering if there was still time to send him back. She decided there was not. ‘He is willing, at least?’ she murmured to the eunuch.

  ‘Of course.’ The eunuch looked at her as if to say that nobody says no to the son of a sultan. ‘He is in there now,’ he said, glancing across the hayat to the chambers.

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘I didn’t need to. He saw me bring him in the other day. He was in the garden, then he was watching from the pavilion, then he was watching from the hayat. I used to work in a bazaar,’ explained the eunuch. ‘All you have to do is peddle the goods.’

  It was past midday. Most of the women were either smoking or sleeping. Some, the newest or youngest, were already making ready for the evening. Evenings were important in the seraglio. Comparisons were made between this silk and that, this face and that, this body and that. Disputes were aired and resolved in the twilight of the fourth courtyard. There were always tears, but sometimes there was laughter. There was never peace. Favours were given and tokens received. The favourites, like her, might be called. As for the Valide Hatun, she needed no calling – she was always there. All Murad wanted was to get her out of the way. And now he had; the hatun had removed herself to Manisa. She no longer needed to fight her way up like a cat in an alley of roses. Her son was the preferred son. Her problems were over.

  She pushed
back a wooden slat in the wall and pressed her eye to a tiny peephole from which she could see most of the chamber where Mehmet Celebi was waiting.

  The eunuch and the boy were already in the room. Mehmet’s face fell into relief. He was not bad looking, but he didn’t have his father’s refined profile. In fact he was nothing like Murad. Murad had charm. Mehmet took after his mother, her and his great-grandfather, Bayezid the Treacherous.

  Mehmet waved the eunuch away at once. She strained to see the boy’s face, but all she saw was skin, lots of it. She looked away, her heart beating. A sting of pity caught her by surprise. Why feel sorry for a boy? She had caught a fish and needed to hang on to it. She looked again. Naked in the thick shade of the room, Mehmet made her think of one of those desert plants that takes you by surprise. It sits in the sand for months on end, limp as a thorny scrub until suddenly it starts to rain and the thing blooms like an orchid.

  At the far end of the palace, beyond the arches of the hayat, the fountains of the kiosks and the seven minarets, Murad was thinking of his son. Not the one that lay in the shuttered chamber beyond the fourth courtyard in the heat of the afternoon, but the one that lay wrapped in linen cloth, cold and stone-faced, mouldering in the vault.

  On a day like this one in summer there had been the feast of circumcision, just beside the river there. He could see the tents now, the festivities, the dancing, the fruit and sweetmeats piled on plates. The first Valide Hatun had been young then. In the beginning he had wanted her. Then, as time went by and his affections went stale, like they always did, he had given her the place of honour as the mother of his son, and with the assurance only an heir could bring he had returned to building an empire for his dynasty. How could he have known that fate would tear the boy away years later and leave him in this state? He had taken another wife, made another son. A different son, as all sons are different one from the other. That was only to be expected. And now, Mehmet it must be and Mehmet it would be. If Constantinople was ever to be any more than a dream, a promised triumph to set the Osman higher than the Greek, then it must be Mehmet and his dynasty. The door attendant announced the arrival of Lady Mara, daughter of Brankovic, Lord of Serbia.

  ‘Give me a moment,’ he said. The girl could wait. He picked up the letter before him. It was from the Grand Vizier Pasha. He read it quickly. The Vizier objected. Of course he objected. He had never liked Mehmet. The new heir was too strong for him. The pasha saw spectres in his own shadow.

  Are you quite certain, Highness, that your choice, understandable though it may be, is the right one?

  He flicked the paper aside impatiently and summoned the girl.

  She came in, flanked by two beauty-struck guards, her eyes staring straight ahead as though she had seen plenty of palaces in her short life and this was but one more.

  He looked her up and down as discreetly as he could. He suggested that she sit; she said she did not need to. He told her to sit, since nobody should refuse the Sultan. She sat down reluctantly. He asked her about her journey. It was long and uncomfortable, she said, but that was nothing next to the thought of the journey itself. He asked about her father. She gave him one-word answers, her eyes glazed with water. He watched her for a moment, in silence, then told the gatekeeper to take her away. Then he paced the Audience Room until the Timekeeper came in and told him that it was the hour of prayer in the mosque and that the day was a propitious one.

  ‘Propitious for what?’ he said impatiently.

  ‘For making a journey,’ replied the Timekeeper, glad to be asked.

  ‘I’m not going on one,’ he replied, irritated. The guards appeared with a litter. He refused it. Today he would walk to God, he said, and swept out of the hall.

  Mara Brankovic, perhaps still young by Serbian standards, was to the Turk no longer a girl. In the view of the Turk, she had passed the age of being pliable and had entered the age of danger, when a girl became aware of her beauty and what she could do with it. Either she let a man see it and she became desirable, or she regarded it herself and became a danger. The daughter of Brankovic was of the second kind and Murad knew it as soon as he saw her.

  She was fine and strong featured, like a painting he might have seen in the halls of a palace of Old Greece, or perhaps even like a goddess of the Greeks in whose face was written that staunch resistance to fate and misfortune, so rare in a woman. The face followed him into prayers. He emerged from the shade of the mosque in restless mood, thinking about the word remote. Brankovic’s daughter was not remote. A little self-contained perhaps. Anyway, self-contained or otherwise, she was not really the girl for Mehmet. If he sent her to his son, he would probably reject her. No, reject was not the right word. He would not be able to manage her. She was too old for Mehmet. What Mehmet needed, in reality, was a girl who did not know what desire meant in the first place. In time, such a girl could be easily found. Albania was full of them. The Georgian girl they’d tried earlier had been a mistake. She might have been young, but she’d known what she wanted. Knowledge of that kind in a woman was repellent. Nobody wanted a girl with wile. There was little in the way of wile, he considered, in Brankovic’s daughter. The tears in those eyes had been real. With Azize, every word was weighted with a scheme, and every tear timed to best effect. She thought he did not see it, but she did not know him. How could a woman know what was going on in the mind of a man? He crossed the hayat in deep reflection.

  Three days passed – a time sufficiently long, in his view, to allow a young woman to settle in and become accustomed to her new life. He told the Kizlar, the head of the seraglio, to prepare the girl for conversation.

  ‘Conversation?’ repeated the Kizlar.

  ‘Are you growing deaf?’ he said.

  Full summer had come to Edirne. The midday sun was to be avoided. Mornings in the hayat were full of warm air and scent. Evenings were when serious decisions were taken, encounters arranged and general business done. Now it was morning. He wondered whether she would be sleeping, and walked to the pavilion, irritated. He was not sure he wanted to entertain a bleary-eyed girl. Then he remembered whose eyes he was dealing with, and sat on the divan. The Kizlar would be panicked about keeping him waiting; the girl would be made ready at double speed. Still, that was how things were done at the palace. How they were done in Serbia he did not care.

  When he looked up again the girl was arriving, led by the Kizlar. In the rosy light her skin was white as a Rumani’s and her brows formed a straight line, dense and mysterious over eyes that watched him coolly. For the first time in his life he felt the awkwardness of a woman’s presence. He stood up and took a step towards her.

  ‘Do you have what you need?’

  ‘I have been given food and water,’ she replied icily. ‘I think it is enough to survive on.’

  ‘Certainly,’ he replied, ‘but a beautiful woman needs more than that. She needs fine clothes, adornments, celestial surroundings and…’ he paused for effect ‘…the attentions of a man.’

  Her gaze remained the same. He had hoped it would not. ‘I will wait for celestial surroundings,’ she said. ‘God will be the one to judge my ascension to them. I do not need them here.’

  Another approach was needed. Each flower was different. ‘Have you met the other women of the court? Have the hatuns welcomed you?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she replied, vague. ‘But I have not come here willingly. My father has sent me against my wishes. I know I will miss my home. I miss it already.’

  He sat back, put out. What did she expect him to do? Send her right back? It had been known to happen, but only when a girl was not wanted. In such cases she would be returned with a letter of assurance that she had not been touched in any way and a polite explanation of some kind. Such things were left to the scribes. But in any case, those instances were rare. Most women longed for an entry to the palace, and there was normally one member of the household who would take a liki
ng, since plain girls were almost never sent. That would be an insult to the sultanate – and most of their neighbours strove for the opposite effect.

  ‘I am certain that with a little more time you will adjust to your surroundings,’ he said, gesturing to the roses. ‘You are not a hostage here,’ he added gently. ‘I would prefer it if you would think of yourself as a guest of the Sultan.’ And if that was not enough, he could not see what would be.

  ‘I will try.’ She crossed her long, slender hands in front of her. ‘But please understand that you cannot take a person away from their home and country and expect them to be pleased about it.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ he replied expansively. ‘And for that reason, Madam, I will leave you in peace. I hope that soon your spirits will be better.’

  He had a word with the Kizlar as she left. ‘She needs a jewel. I will give the instruction.’ He thought of the roses of his third garden. One in particular: a bloom like a sunset. A ruby would see it well enough done. Peacock feathers for the crane. He called over the Timekeeper to see if it was noon. His insides crawled with emptiness. He wanted to eat, and yet he did not. Irritated, he set off for the pavilion.