The Reign of the Favored Women

by Ann Chamberlin

  “Esmikhan, the widow Huma’s daughters were taken nearly twenty years ago.”

  “By the Knights of Saint John.”

  “So was I. So was I.” Safiye could not resist a glance in my direction. We’d been taken by the Knights together, she and I. And though she might acknowledge this, the fact that our misfortunes must be laid squarely at her door was not admitted even in her eyes.

  “The girls were on their way with their father and brother to Holy Mecca,” Esmikhan said. “The sanctity of their pilgrimage was violated by those pirates.”

  “As ships going to Mecca have been known to suddenly turn pirate when it suited them and attack Christians heading towards Jerusalem.”

  “They haven’t. They wouldn’t.”

  “You, my dear friend, have little experience of how the world works.”

  “I don’t want to know. Not such a world as you see, Safiye.”

  Safiye shrugged her perfect shoulders up into her perfect blond braids. “The fact remains that Huma’s daughters have been in France twice as long as I have been in Turkey—most of their lives, in fact. They can hardly remember anything else.”

  “How can you say so? That any girl would ever, ever forget her mother. I haven’t forgotten mine.” Esmikhan’s eyes misted with tears. “And she died when I was born.”

  At that moment, the little girls—Gul Ruh and Safiye’s Aysha, just toddling—came running in from the fountain and plantings of the private courtyard. As mother of a prince, the Fair One was entitled to this perquisite of air and space in the harem world, otherwise rather sterile and cramped in accommodations. Aysha stumbled on the threshold and it was Gul Ruh who picked her up and mothered her out of her tears, although there was less than a head’s difference between the two. Aysha already had Safiye’s long, dancing limbs under her.

  Aysha’s bevy of nurses came secondarily. One changed the bands of diaper cloth covering the little girl’s sex, of which she was as yet carelessly unaware. A child graduated to such swaddling when she would no longer stay put in a cradle. One nurse swept the soiled bands off to the laundry. The third stopped her mouth with a knob of marzipan knotted in a square of linen. Safiye herself did nothing but drape her graceful arms over her desk to protect the work.

  I had to wonder if the marzipan had been soaked in poppy-head water as well, for very soon the toddler had suckled herself to sleep. She was allowed to nap just where she fell, a little hillock of flowered red-and-gold silk amidst the blooms of the finest Isfahan rugs laid three deep on Safiye’s floors, the year as yet too early for the tile beneath to be exposed.

  “Hush. You mustn’t bother Aysha Sultan now,” Esmikhan told her daughter. “Come here and sit by me.”

  Grudgingly, Gul Ruh took the second option offered her, to go and toss a ball in the yard with the now unemployed nurses for a while. Encrusted with jewels whose gold casings could cut skin if thrown too hard, the ball was in fact not much of a plaything. But it was the best to hand in this world where the most common everyday objects were too readily gaudied past all usefulness.

  “Isn’t Muhammed here yet?” my little lady pleaded of Safiye, leaning back as long as she could on a nurse’s hand.

  Esmikhan gave a little cough of warning and Gul Ruh remembered her manners. “I mean, my honored cousin Prince Muhammed—may Allah smile on his house until Judgment Day.”

  “You know the single-reason-for-my-being has lessons with his eunuchs and tutors during the day.”

  The way Safiye rattled off the euphemism to avoid using the preciousness of her son’s name mimicked Gul Ruh’s attempt at manners. At the very least Baffo’s daughter was irritated at yet another infantile interruption. Fortunately, I think the nuances of tone were lost on the child. my little lady probably did believe Muhammed was her aunt’s reason for being. She was her own mother’s reason for being, Esmikhan made no secret of that. And a child of Gul Ruh’s same age in Italy, I reckoned, would still be encouraged to believe in the old witch La Bafana to keep up the good behavior until Epiphany. There was no reason to confuse a childish mind by insisting on a distinction between the prince himself and the power he represented to his almond-eyed mother.

  “Can’t I go to him?” my little lady asked.

  “Goodness, no,” her mother exclaimed. “To the palace school?”

  “I should like to learn at the palace school. It would be less boring than tossing a ball around.”

  “Perhaps, when you’re older, my treasure,” Esmikhan said, “We might get you your own tutor at home. A nice, pious woman.”

  “It would be more fun with Muhammed—may his final hour be blessed.” The two phrases existed in two different childhood worlds.

  “I know, my mountain spring,” Esmikhan said no. “But you could still come and sit with me. I could comb out your hair for you.”

  “Oh, Esmikhan. You won’t leave that child a hair on her head by the time she’s ten with all your fussing.” Safiye spoke with an impatient shuffle of papers.

  Gul Ruh chose the nurses then, and thoughtfully invited the little dwarf girl Murad had recently given his lover to come and play, too. Still, in a way she couldn’t quite express, my little lady fully understood that the slaves, who would treat her always like a princess, might well render her as useless for her task of living as the jeweler’s enthusiasm had made the ball for play.

  XI

  During this interruption by the children, Safiye had gone on with the day’s correspondence. Between her and her scribe, they had gotten off half a dozen letters. Safiye’s correspondents, those I saw, included viziers and sandjak beys, as well as the Persian ambassador: a bellicose note. Words even went to Joseph Nassey, consoling him that it wouldn’t be long now before he got the Cypriot kingship Selim had promised him. Hadn’t the island fallen, true to the Sultan s oath? Wasn’t Safiye herself pulling in every favor she could on his behalf? But Nassey must be patient. What good would a war-ravaged countryside be for a king, anyway? It was better to wait and let the janissaries clean up the place yet a little more.

  One letter Safiye even snatched out of the scribe’s hand, saying with a mixture of conspiracy and impatience, “Let me deal with that one.”

  In no time at all, she had jotted off a note in her own hand and folded it before the ink could quite have time to dry. Safiye did not give her product the distinguishing mark of her seal, but handed it at once to waiting Ghazanfer, who knew without telling where he must go, and did so with a silent bow.

  Esmikhan, for her part, could contain no other thought in her mind when children were present. Only when the rhythmic toss of the ball accompanied by a childish rhyme droned in from the courtyard with the laziness of dust motes did my lady manage to pick up the thread of her purpose where she had dropped it.

  “Huma’s daughters have been forcibly converted to Christianity.”

  “There are worse fates,” Safiye said, setting aside her writing with a sigh. “Besides, why would the mother want them back now that they are so corrupted with heresy and would have to bear the punishment for apostasy if they came?”

  “The law of Allah is merciful. It understands that we women are weaker than men and is not so severe on us in such cases.”

  “The girls’d go to prison at any rate, even if not to the gallows. I say those girls are better off where they are. Catherine has made one her treasurer. The other is a lady-in-waiting, a post of honor, not of servility as you and Huma may imagine. Besides, I understand they are married in France.”

  “They were forcibly married. To strangers. And too young.”

  “Like me, Esmikhan? Like you?”

  Esmikhan shifted, and I went to help her plump the cushions up more comfortably.

  “The girls must have children of their own by now,” Safiye suggested. “How can the mother think it a mercy to move them from their own children? What that widow really needs is to remarry herself. I may even be able to suggest someone suitable if I set my mind to it.”

 
“Do you think so, Safiye? And would you do that?”

  “It would certainly give her something else to do so the rest of the world could get on with business.”

  “Perhaps the king of France would be willing to put up the brideprice so some poor but worthy gentleman could—”

  “That is asking quite a bit, Esmikhan.”

  “A widow is in no hurry, not like a younger woman.” My lady’s memories of her own youthful infractions were a little too transparent in the self-condemning tone of her voice. I silently pled with her not to betray herself, for there could be no worse person to give such information to than Safiye—if the Fair One didn’t already know.

  Whether she did or not was difficult for me to discern, but she did snort something like a laugh.

  Esmikhan forcibly set down her own memories and returned to the matter at hand. “And I think the daughters also ought to write to their mother. One little note at least, to assure her they are happy and well. If they cannot write themselves, they must go to a scribe. And I think you could write to France’s Valide Sultan to order them to give their poor mother ease.”

  “Very well,” said Safiye, letting out her breath with the force of her decision. “Luck is with you. This is my day for letters. One more cannot hurt.”

  I came fully alert. Safiye could be talked into doing nothing for others she hadn’t already decided to do on her own. I must watch carefully.

  “Oh, Safiye. You will not regret it.”

  To my horror, Esmikhan was trying to get up to bow her gratitude. I managed to settle her back down. No matter what Safiye’s promise, I knew it could not be worth the trouble of sending for seconds to help my lady return to the divan should her constitution not prove up to the exertion.

  I was greatly relieved that my lady contented herself with saying, “Allah will reward you in the next life if not in this.”

  Safiye waved the possibility of God away with a flash of her long, elegantly hennaed and many-ringed fingers. “This must be the most formal of letters,” she then instructed her scribe. “Queen to queen.”

  The scribe I recognized now as Belqis, a girl of beautiful Tatar features originally bought for Murad. Safiye’s greater charms, if not to say skills, had long ago supplanted her. Realizing her hopes in this direction must come to naught, Belqis had diverted her energies to the pen instead. That Safiye trusted her correspondence to this hand said something of Belqis. So did the fact that the scribe no longer bothered to conceal a premature grey creeping down the long, straight strands of her raven hair. The stains on her fingers were ink, not henna.

  The conclusion of all of this was that Belqis and her art were a pleasure to watch, as fascinating as a dancer who takes equal care to hone her skills. Belqis began by taking a fresh sheet of paper out of her tooled red cowhide portfolio. The paper was thick and clearly of Eastern make, yellower than what they were making in Venice, and without watermark: Muslim paper-making firms were never so anxious to advertise their names as the profit-conscious West. The size of a large napkin, half as wide as it was long, the page’s thickness and color gave the impression of parchment, which Eastern paper-makers continued to yearn for even when that medium was too dear.

  Belqis draped the paper like a tablecloth over the low, portable desk she wrote at, her knees drawn up under her on the floor. Finding by close inspection that she had the rough side up, she turned it over to the smooth, so that no fibers would clog her pen. Here again was Eastern manufacture evident, for the Turks had not the mechanical hammers, a recent German invention, and relied on hand burnishing which left uneven streaks on the smoothed side.

  Belqis took an agate stone that exactly fit in the palm of her hand and finished up the poli.sh to her personal .specifications. Her actions released the hard, sharp, new-paper smell of animal-hide sizing like a knife into the harem’s usually cloying, heavy scent of too many women wearing too much perfume. In their sizing, too, the Muslims liked echoes of the ancient parchment.

  Belqis studied her page with satisfaction, smeared now as it was with the midmorning light that dappled in from the courtyard through the lattices. The whole document, when it arrived in France, would .speak of things exotic, the integrity of an ancient tradition and its opulence, even before the first word was read.

  This dappling did not seem to mar the paper’s perfection in her view; women are used to seeing things, half-light, half-dark, like that. Their eyes adjust from earliest infancy. “If the sun had not been female, even she would not have been allowed in the harem.” An Eastern pundit had once written those words, playing on the fact that in Arabic, sun is feminine. Unlike the male sun in Italian, a beneficence, the Arabic is a malevolent fury, a barren woman who seeks to scorch the entire world to her own fate. Under the harem’s lattices, even women condemned to childlessness like Belqis were protected from all but the most innocent of that celestial female’s wrath.

  Belqis laid out her pens, her inks in five colors. Deciding after the morning’s labors she would have to grind more black, she did so, oak galls on a slate palette. Rose water turned the powder to liquid.

  Now Belqis set a straight edge down the right-hand side of the paper, leaving a generous margin at least as wide as her own palm, and marked a crease at this point the full length of the page with the rounded tip of a stick of sandalwood. In France, they would smell that fragrance, and the distilled roses in the ink.

  Then the scribe sat back on her heels and waited orders to begin.

  Something did not seem quite right to me, not about Belqis but about Safiye. I could never have ease in the Fair One’s presence; I told myself there was probably no more to suspect than usual. Yet I couldn’t help but probe the deceptively still and murky waters a little.

  “How did you become a correspondent of Catherine de’ Medici?” I asked. “She is the Queen Mother and effective ruler of France.”

  “Quite simple.” Safiye displayed no hesitation to answer directly. “Catherine sent customary gifts with her new ambassador and Ghazanfer had only to suggest to the Divan that since these were gifts from a woman, it would not be appropriate for men to accept them. They were meant to be kept behind the curtain of modesty.”

  “That makes perfect sense.” Esmikhan’s tone was warning me off. My distrust of her best friend always grieved her.

  “Ghazanfer saw that they came to me,” Safiye continued. “They were nothing much, nothing the outer treasury would miss: some lace, a casket of onyx engraved with nude figures.”

  Esmikhan said, “Such things are better suited to the harem in the first place—if not to be tossed out at once for obscenity.”

  “What we thought exactly. Still, any gift requires a thank-you note.”

  That was as far as I dared carry my questions. So I fell silent, as a eunuch ought, and determined to watch all the more carefully instead.

  “The usual sort of formulaic opening.” Safiye turned to instruct her scribe.

  And in firm black, Belqis wrote “Allah” in what would be the largest letters on the page, leaving again an elegant, opulent margin at the top.

  “Allah is the Helper” centered carefully in the field of yellow-white.

  “An excellent choice of invocation on a letter that would beg the receiver’s aid.” Esmikhan gave her blessing, whether Heaven would or no.

  I suspected the whole elegance of the parallel would be totally lost in France’s court, even in a direct translation. But I couldn’t dampen my lady’s spirits so.

  The scribe, meanwhile, dropped down a line and without dictation went on, lavishly praising the lords of the universe in descending order, all in rhymed prose couplets. Allah was “the Absolute and the Veiler,” the “Originator of shapes and colors...exalted be He above His Creation.” And that Creation was “ornamented by the perfumed sepulcher and pure soul of Lord Muhammed, the Seal of the Prophets...the beautiful reflection of the Garden of Paradise in the dark pool of earth...the crown on the head of happiness, the pearl in the shel
l of existence.”

  Over every skillful turn of phrase, Esmikhan exclaimed, sometimes so struck at the verbiage that she could manage no more than a “Mashallah,” of wonder.

  For her part, Belqis, to whom such turns of language were second nature, most of them trite repetitions and mainstays of the imperial scribal schoolroom, had her own pleasure. For each phrase, she changed to a different color ink, until the scarlet, blue, black, crimson, and gold alternated all down the page. And the flourishes of her final letters, the great sweep of loose tails and flight of upper and lower curves gave the impression of vines and tendrils, even of birds, in a full-color garden of visual delights.

  Belqis’s heart was towards illumination, obviously, towards delicate and intricate replication of Allah’s most beautiful handiwork on the tight, formalized confines of her page. But since Allah Himself, perhaps in jealous rage, had prohibited such blasphemy to those of His creatures who worshipped him, her art took this form instead, splitting the bounds of her casing quietly, subtly, as the rosebush did in the harem entryway.

  All at once my mind jerked back from such musings as if it had been burned. I had suddenly realized that under cover of Belqis’s riveting performance, Safiye had taken out a sheet of paper of her own. So may sleight-of-hand masters work their magic in the public squares. Or pickpockets.

  I looked closer. Thin, white, and watermarked with a crown, I recognized Safiye’s paper as coming from a Venetian firm. No one would connect it with the harem. And the Fair One had taken up a pen of her own and been writing for I knew not how long. On pretense of keeping an eye on Gul Ruh out in the yard, I slipped around so I could read some of Safiye’s writing instead.

  Safiye wrote in Italian, of course. Her pen was outpacing the scribe’s, each painstakingly executed syllable of the Turkish equaling three or four words of the quick, hard Italian letters. And in the place of airy, meaningless flattery came much of substance.