I saw he had not understood the import of my message. The heir to the Ottoman throne was dead, and with him my pretty little mistress, the joy of all our lives. But before I could say so in so many words, he continued.
“As soon as I regained some sense after my ordeal, I sat with the casket between my knees and I grew angry. All I went through—and for what? That woman—whichever one it would be in the end, the mother or the grandmother—she would give me a ghrush or two for my pains and take the prize to the boy to win the glory for herself. As if she had dived into the flames to get them!
“‘Fool! Fool!’ I cursed myself. ‘You may be a cripple for life, set out on the street with no pension to beg, and no one will ever hear of you again.’
“Then I thought. By Allah, there is so much confusion here. Surely everyone will consider it a miracle that these dates were saved and got to the Prince’s hand at all. They will never stop to care by whose offices. But if I give them to the Prince myself, he will remember me as the others would not. He will remember me when, Allah willing, he is Sultan. He would never let me go begging then.
“And just then, as luck would have it, whom should I spy but the young Prince Muhammed and his lady cousin.”
“You’ve seen them since the fire!” I cried. “Alive?”
“Oh, very much alive, Allah bless them. They’d heard the fuss and come running to see. They were really a nuisance to the firefighters as well as a danger to themselves. Here is something I can do, I thought, to help the struggle, even though my hands are now useless.
“So I went at once and salaamed before the young Prince and offered him my gift. Then, as I led them out of harm’s way, I told the two of them something of how I’d saved the casket.” (Knowing him, he probably drew it out with great detail.) “The little lady—oh, such a tender soul! She wept so delicately at the tale, and, though the Prince, being so superior, was at first loath to say anything to me, she insisted that I honor them with my company.”
“You have been with them?”
“The honor was mine, I assure you. If nursemaiding is always this pleasant, I wonder that it is not the most sought-after job in the Empire.”
“Where were you?”
“Down at the bottom of the garden.”
“At the end of the garden!” Why hadn’t we thought to look there? Perhaps because it was the safest place.
“In such a pretty little bower...”
“How long?”
“Oh, hours and hours. I only left them when the sun began to sink and I knew I must pray soon.”
“Are they at the end of the garden now?”
“Well, I don’t know.” The man seemed surprised at my eagerness. “I told them they should try and find their mothers. They might be worrying now that it was coming dark.”
“Oh, if you only knew!”
“You know, his highness, the young Prince, let me have a bite of one of those dates. The young lady held it for me, and fed me like a little bird so I wouldn’t injure my hands. I tell you, I shall not taste anything so divine ‘til I, with Allah’s favor, enter Paradise. And when I got up to leave, the young Prince rose on his feet, to his full height—oh, and he looked the very embodiment of his great-grandfather, Suleiman, may Allah have mercy on him.
‘By Allah,’ he said, ‘and you, Gul Ruh, are my witness. I swear this day that when I, by divine favor, wear the sword of my father Othman, I shall not forget this man and the bravery he has shown this day. I swear I shall...’ “
But by now I was laughing so hard with relief that tears were streaming down the sweat dried on my face. Convulsed with sobs and chuckles, I could do nothing but hug the fellow, then leave him standing there, muttering, that he never could understand the sexless ones.
I found my lady in the same state, laughing and crying by turns as she washed the remains of the priceless dates off her little daughter’s face with the edge of her veil. She tried to scold, but she was too relieved to make much of it.
I remember Muhammed standing by, too, his sulky self again now that he was in public. He was crying, and that exaggerated the scar on his cheek, a reminder of a time when his mother in her ambition had had other things on her mind. Someone had told the Prince, in haste more than unkindness, that that was the end of it. He would have no circumcision now, for the fire had thrown everything into disarray and besides, it was an awful omen. They had forgotten to add that the ceremony would surely only be postponed a year or two. He was quite convinced this meant he should never be a man.
If he could not be a man, then he would have his nurse. At this they told him hush, no, he couldn’t have his nurse but they would run and get his mother instead, who would be greatly relieved to see him alive and well. Muhammed knew, as only a child can, that he would get no comfort from his mother. But what he didn’t know, and what they couldn’t find words to tell him, was that his nurse would never comfort him again either. Mad with worry, she had thrown herself back into the flames to try and find her charge. Some had gone after her and dragged her back by force, but the agony of her burns would not let her live the night.
It had been a common curse under the boy’s tyrant of a great-great-grandfather to say, “May you be Selim’s vizier.” Those officials lost favor so quickly and were so short-lived, it was said, that they never left the house without their last testaments on their persons. Some in the harem took to saying the same sort of thing with reference to Muhammed—”May you be chosen as the young Prince’s next nursemaid”—for he had lost two under very bitter circumstances in the eight short years of his life.
I could hardly help but pity the boy. Nor could I blame him when the next person he threw his much-agitated affections towards was neither nurse nor tutor. The one with whom he hoped to share his own immortality of childhood was my own little mistress Gul Ruh. I instantly wished to turn his affections otherwise.
XX
With the fire contained but by no means cold, and with what had been their home only ash and black, heat-cracked marble, the immediate problem became u-here to house the nearly eight hundred women of Selim’s harem. The janissaries and male attendants could sleep on the ground in the garden. Indeed, they were trained for nothing if not such hardship. But to have his women sleep exposed to a naked sky was a dishonor even—or especially—a sultan could never live down.
We took over a hundred women into our horn i night. Such a perturbation! Sokolli Pasha removed himself and went to sleep in the Divan so we had use of the selamlik as well.
By the end of the week, however, we had no more than one of my lady’s stepmothers and Safiye with their two suites. This came to less than fifty extra women, which we thought we could manage for a while. The others had moved to other places Constantinople, some as far away as the summer palace at Edirne.
During the summer, when there were all the gardens for this trebling of our household to disperse into, we managed quite well. The young prince and Gul Ruh, one might have thought, had indeed died in the fire and gone to Paradise, so blissful was their small existence together. We only had to watch they didn’t try bathing or sleeping together, as they would have loved to do.
And Safiye was pleased to have daily access to the grille overlooking Sokolli’s main guest room.
With these three happy, we were all pulled along to contentment, too.
As the cold weather descended, however, tensions which had been covered or at least tempered by sunshine and flowers erupted quite unbearably. My master grew wise and took to holding his most sensitive councils in the Divan. Denied access to the Eye of the Sultan altogether, Safiye was always irritable. I suppose we should have been glad that Nur Banu, the only one Safiye could justly accuse of malice against her—was in her private garden palace near the Edirne Gate—even further from the powers of government than she was.
Safiye herself was obliged to admit that she was at times unreasonable, like a caged animal who may strike at the hand that feeds it. Sometimes she even apologized.
But that might just have been the child everyone at last knew to be growing within her. It is common wisdom that a woman is not herself when she’s pregnant.
And that was how Safiye’s third child, a second prince, came to be born in our harem. Cowardly, I sent one of my assistants to fetch the midwife. But the Quince, who had refused on some excuse or other to be watchful under our roof all summer, did not appear even for this. The Fig came instead, and so late there was little at all for her to do. Safiye did always get her woman’s business done in a hurry—although this time Allah willed not successfully.
The little prince died without a name.
“It was the fire,” some said. “It came at a very delicate time in the pregnancy—before she’d even told anyone. It did great harm to the unborn child.”
But Safiye had the gracelessness to accuse my lady’s rooms of cursing births. Esmikhan did not shake off this accusation very well. The memory of her own three dead little princes did not rise off our hearts for weeks. Even Gul Ruh proved a poor antidote for a while.
And I was more disturbed than I could even tell my lady by the word the Fig left me with as I helped bundle her back into her sedan. “Revenge,” is what I thought she said, looking straight at me. Her thick African accent made me hope I’d heard wrong. But even more unnerving was the impression she gave me that I should be glad of this information.
Safiye recovered from the tragedy faster than anyone. A stint at the grille overlooking Sokolli Pasha’s selamlik was tonic enough for her. She did have Muhammed and Aysha in compensation, growing quickly as children will.
Still, I think we were relieved—all but poor Muhammed and Gul Ruh, who wept as if their little lives would end—when Safiye finally conceded to Murad’s entreaties to join him in Magnesia. At any rate, they were gone before the worst of winter set in.
* * *
With Esmikhan and her stepmother there were no personality problems whatsoever. In fact, after all the excitement of having Safiye with us, I would at times find myself suddenly and excruciatingly bored. If one of my lady’s stepmother’s handmaids had not been among Selim’s current favorites, I think I might have gotten into some mischief of my own, just to keep in shape.
This girl was not foremost of the favorites: Those had been given a room close at hand in what was left of the main palace. And Selim’s desires were not what they once were: The burning palace had put some fear of Hell in him and he had taken to calling for the Mufti for long religious discussions almost as often as he called for debauch.
But every once in a while he would send a messenger to us for the girl. She had no attributes to speak of save this alone: She was the best of the booty Cyprus had to offer after the fourteen months of starvation and disease that were the siege. He sent for her on days when he wanted to drink the wine so much blood had been spilled for, and to glory in the one great success of his reign—the conquest of her island.
For my own diversion, whenever the girl was called for, I would see to it that I was free to accompany her. Some may see no great excitement in a long evening reading poetry or playing chess with a colleague while I waited for Selim to grow sated. It is true I would have whiled away the time in much the same way at home. But at least here the rooms were not quite so familiar. There were new faces in the company who might have new tales to tell, and I could stop by and observe how the rebuilding of the palace was coming along. Progress here was but very slow, for Selim’s heart wasn’t in the task. Nonetheless, this provided other news to bring home to my mistress. The new foundations ran along the same outlines as the buildings that had burned, so she imagined it easily.
I did keep thinking I might someday pick up some news there so close to the Sultan that would prove of more importance. But Selim had long ago forgotten there was a world outside that would shake if he but spoke. My own master Sokolli Pasha was in full control of the vast empire in all but name. Selim had retreated more and more into his own pleasure-—or, as relief from that, into his own morbid guilt, equally indulgent because it was likewise of no practical application.
I was disappointed in everything I learned—until one late afternoon just shortly before Muslims were due to begin the month of fasting in their nine hundred and eighty-second year. Christians were in the midst of Advent in the last months of 1574.
I remember I was alone in the eunuchs’ sitting room, reading a collection of pious tales. Lack of activity more than anything else had sent me to seek such reading. I was on the story of how Moses asked Allah where in the universe He was. And the ancient prophet received the reply, “Know that when you seek for Me you have already found Me.”
I had looked up for a moment from the manuscript to contemplate that divine answer, but was denied inspiration of my own by the appearance of the Cypriot girl. Every retelling of that old tale brings the events that followed so vividly to mind that I sometimes fear I shall never be able to seek Allah properly because of this stumbling block.
It was evident at once that the girl had not finished her stay. She was not dressed to go, but had only a bath towel to hide her nakedness in; because of her agitation, it wasn’t serving very well.
He’s been more perverse to her than usual, was my first thought. But things will only go worse for her if she seeks to escape him. There is no escape for a slave of the Sultan. Allah help me. How shall I convince her?
But then I noticed a high glow in her cheeks, rather more of excitement than of fear or disgust. It made her actually radiant, and if I had thought before that being a Cypriot was her only claim to favor, I now decided there was some other beauty present.
“Abdullah, please come.” She did not squeak it in a passion or shout it in fear, but whispered it, as conspiracy.
I was confused. “Into the presence of the Sultan?”
“Please, just come.”
So I marked my book with a scrap of silk and followed the naked kneading of her buttocks.
They had been in the bath. It was Selim’s fancy to lay the girl out in the pool like an island reposing in the Mediterranean, and to move upon her like the Turkish flotilla out of Latakia. She would be obliged to feed him—peeled grapes and draughts of her people’s wine like their blood—as the island had fed the invaders, with nothing reserved for itself. He would move over her curves as the Turkish cannon had rumbled over the terraced hillsides until he besieged the prize—Famagusta on its harbor—where victory was won with the utmost violence and revenge...
I went in prepared to make my deepest salaam, and to keep my eyes averted as was proper in the Sultan’s presence. But the room seemed to be deserted.
The Cypriot led me down three tiled steps to the cooling room in the center of whose octagonal piers an octagonal fountain bubbled. At the bottom of the steps of the far pier lay a body.
It was hard to believe that the Sultan of all Islam could be found in such indignity. A slave, perhaps, or a beggar at the end. He was spread-eagle, stark naked, and where it was not pale and flabby as a fatted, plucked hen, too much liquor blotched his flesh the color of dried liver.
“Is he dead?” the girl whispered.
I forced myself to overcome not awe but revulsion and to bend and find out. When I put my hand at the back of his head, it felt mushy and came back bloody. But the movement made him open his eyes and catch the girl’s face. She drew back, startled and afraid.
A tongue thick with wine moved in the Sultan’s mouth and I bent to hear what it said, “Cyprus...shall...”
“Cyprus shall what, majesty?” I asked, but never heard. A pulse continued, very faintly, but there was no consciousness to accompany it.
“He slipped,” the girl explained. She had given up the towel as a cover altogether now and was wringing it anxiously in both hands.
I stood up and looked at her. Yes, that seemed reasonable. Stumbling drunk, he’d been pursuing her around the fountain. The floor was wet. He slipped, fell, and cracked his skull.
There was, of course, another possibi
lity. Even as I stood there, I thought I heard a voice echoing from the dark recesses of the bath where, the superstitious say, are the haunts of jinn. It seemed to be the voice of the Sultan saying, “Come, my splendid Cyprus. Give me a hand.”
And she gave him a hand: to his tipsy feet a firm, well-placed shove.
I looked in her eyes and saw that vision was a very definite possibility. Those sad brown eyes had seen her whole family and all her friends starved or butchered, the indignity of the slave block, the continued embraces of the rotting man whose fault her entire sorrow was. Unlike other favorites, she never thought the getting of a son might improve her lot. A hardness in her features hid other ambitions. That was why she could never be very pretty and why, perhaps, Selim still called for her when he wanted to tempt his vulnerability.
“You may pray,” I told her quietly, “he doesn’t live to speak again.”
Then I looked away from that hardness, for even I could not stand in its presence.
I found a towel to cover the man’s nakedness so that the next to find him should not be exposed to the same shock I’d suffered to learn just what frailty we’d all been subject to for eight years. Then I told her she had better learn to weep for her master quickly before I returned with help to carry him to a bed.
What was done was done, I thought. Even boiling the girl in oil for treachery would not improve matters, only give ideas to others who might not have considered it on their own. To this day she and I alone know that what was everywhere pronounced an accident, “Allah’s will,” was really the revenge of Cyprus from a cask of its best wine and the hand of a hard-faced slave girl.
XXI
It took three full days for the ghost to pass from him, but even before we got the dying Sultan to his bed, the messenger was on his mad dash to Magnesia with the word for Murad: “If you would inherit your father’s throne, come at once before the news gets out and other claimants have a chance to mass.”
The Reign of the Favored Women Page 13