The Reign of the Favored Women

by Ann Chamberlin

  The little Hungarian collapsed with a fearful sob—on the safe side of the railing. And it was there, just moments later, that Nur Banu found her and caught her in her heavily bangled arms.

  “There, there, don’t cry, my little mountain stream,” Nur Banu crooned as if the girl had been an infant. And when, after a time, the sobbing failed somewhat, the crooning turned into a sort of singsong, the words of which were these:

  “Have I ever told you, angel? No, I suppose I have not. Of when I was a girl. I don’t tell many. There isn’t much to tell. I left, of course, when I was only four. Paros is the name of the island where I was born. Paros. And when the Turks conquered—” She limited this train of thought to: “Well, my life has never been the same.

  “But still I do remember. We had a festival, too, during the winter. A festival called Purim. I don’t remember now what that means or what it was about, Purim. All I remember is that there was a very wicked man—Haman. Oh, how that name still sends shivers up my spine! They would say his name. I didn’t dare say his name with them. The very posts of the house would shake with fear. Grandfather pounding the floor with his cane. Grandmother shaking dried beans in her cooking pot. Brother battering the woodbox with the flat of his little ax. I was so afraid. I thought I should die.

  “But there were my mother’s arms. ‘Esther, Esther,’ she crooned. Esther, that was my name. She placed on my head a crown made of woven palm. ‘Esther. Esther. Queen.’ And the darkness of Haman vanished. There was calm. And smiling. And sweet food. And finally, wonderfully, sleep, safe sleep to the sounds of ancient, ancient songs with words I do not know. Only the melodies linger. I always thought...I always thought, since that night...”

  Here the singsong stammered to a self-conscious halt.

  “Lady, what did you think?” the Hungarian had recovered enough to ask.

  Nur Banu’s tone was more prosaic now and matter-of-fact. “In my saddest days, when I was sold and hungry, cold and alone, I would always remember that night, that crown. ‘Esther the Queen,’ I remembered, and I knew I was born for higher things. And you see, here I am. I can pin this diadem into your lovely black hair and it is not simple palm but real, emeralds and pearls. No, keep it on, my child. It’s for you. A gift. To remember this evening by as I remember that one so long ago. A queen. My sweet little cloud from a foreign land, rise and be a queen.”

  And they did and went back into the festivities.

  I have often wondered if the fact that that crown was real made the feeling it could convey to the heart less real in the more important realm of the mystical.

  * * *

  It was another night not too much later in the same month that I happened to be out in the streets breaking my fast on some sherbet bought of a street vendor. Since sundown he had been turning such a thriving business that he hadn’t had to clink his glasses together once for advertisement. Who should happen to be just behind me in line but Ghazanfer?

  We exchanged polite salaams and then I asked, formally rather than from real interest, whether there was anything serious that caused him to be out instead of feasting at home.

  “I was at the Fatih Mosque,” he explained.

  “Come, come, my friend! This is Ramadhan,” I said. “We sit famished in the mosque all day, drowsing to the recitations, trying to find the strength to be interested in the relics which are on display these days and no others. But once the sun sets...”

  “I had a vow to fulfill.”

  I saw at once that the holiday had made me more jovial than I had meant it to, or than Ghazanfer was able to imbibe at the moment. He bade me good holy days and then went on his way. It was only afterwards that I realized what events lay behind the brief lines he had given me. I remembered then that he had made a vow to donate enough money to feed all the children of the orphanage associated with the Fatih Mosque for a year should his mistress be safely delivered.

  Safiye had had her baby, then. And since I hadn’t heard the cannon boom from the fortress except to greet sunset, I knew it was a girl, and the fusiliers would put off announcement of the humiliating fact with three blasts until the morrow.

  Safiye had paid the doctor a lesser price—but Ghazanfer had paid Allah all. The child’s name was set in the harem book as Fatima. Another simple, pious name. I guessed who’d had a hand in that naming.

  Safiye’s face was not as black with shame as one might have expected. I noticed this at once the next time I saw her. It was the final feast of the holy month, and we’d been invited to spend it at the palace.

  But why should she be downcast? Her Mitra was also carrying the Sultan’s child, and with the Venetian doctor to oversee the pregnancy from the beginning, it was sure to be male. Mitra was in such favor that, despite her condition, Murad insisted that she spend every night of the holy month with him. She had so enlivened his interest in the arts that when she was not in the presence, it was his old poets and musicians he called for, no other girl.

  Even on the twenty-seventh night, the Night of Power, Mitra had been at his side, reciting in her sweet Persian singsong. Most men refrain from visiting their harems on this most holy night of the year. This is the night when Allah took all creation in His Hand, gave them their fates, and then demanded, “Who is your Lord?” To which we are all said to have replied, “Thou art, O Lord.” A visit to the harem might, I suppose, make some men give divinity a different answer.

  To the Sultan, however, this sober prohibition does not extend. Should he sire a child on this night, it is seen as one destined to be very powerful indeed.

  “So even though we knew already that Allah had filled her womb, we were very thrilled and flattered by Murad’s choice,” Safiye explained. Mitra had been returned to the harem now and Safiye sat holding the girl’s hand and speaking as if for both.

  Safiye, dressed in lush ruby reds set with golds, riveted the eye with her beauty. She had already regained her former willowy figure: No one would ever guess she was the mother of three—and the little dead prince besides.

  Mitra herself did not look so well, although in the glare of her mistress few would notice. Pregnancy excuses one from the rigors of the fast, still I could see that the month of sleepless nights had not been easy on her. And Mitra wept outright when the traditional roast lamb was brought in. Her memories of previous lambs included the encirclement of her mother’s arms.

  And I could not help but think that, even though her new Fatima was only a girl, Safiye was missing out on a great claim to power by allowing a nurse’s arms to hold the babe at that time instead of her own.

  XXIX

  I was not present, being safe in Sokolli Pasha’s palace with my ladies at the time. But the events were discussed so often over the next weeks that I might have been and can reconstruct the story well.

  The Quince had fallen asleep over her water pipe. Most remembered the old midwife as one who understood and controlled the workings of things too well to have to resort to hysterics. Fussiness or a sharp bite of sarcasm were her old methods of dealing with life’s difficulties. So when she woke up screaming, it curdled the blood. Such a sound could only be imagined coming from unearthly realms of ghosts and jinn. Or from the flaming pits of the damned.

  “Babies!” was the first coherent word the Fig, who came running with rose water and valerian, could make out.

  Then, “Their insides all bled out.” As she had done on that day in the presence of my little lady and me.

  When the Quince had recovered herself somewhat, the Fig adjured her to tell what horrors she had dreamed. But the old midwife pursed her lips tighter than ever, turned green, and would not. She would not tell even when the nightmare came again. Again, and then when she dared not go to sleep days on end because it came every time she closed her eyes.

  Thinking the drug was the cause, Nur Banu and the Fig tried to keep the pipe from the old woman. But they could not keep her from her pharmacopoeia because her skills were needed, now more than ever as the Hungaria
n came near to her time. If anything, the prohibition served to intensify the Quince’s intoxication.

  And the Hungarian came to her time, but without the Quince. At first the old woman said to her assistant, “Well, see how she does for a while and call me if you need me.”

  At the end of the first day the Quince sent potions to help, but no one was ever quite sure they were administered correctly. At the end of the third day, Nur Banu had her eunuchs drag the midwife to the birthing room by force.

  The Quince, it was clear from her staggering and stammering, had fortified herself—not the laboring woman—heavily with drugs. But to no avail. As soon as the midwife stepped over the line of gunpowder into the smell and warmth of the birthing room, the dream came to her awake. Her screams evidenced more torture than those of the Hungarian.

  In sore straits now Nur Banu sent for Safiye’s midwife. The closest assistance turned out to be the Venetian doctor. She let him come, but it was too late. Or it was too early, and he was the final cause. What happened depended on whom one asked. The Hungarian died and her child as well, that is all we know for sure. The girl, like her country, could no longer bear the battles of empires being fought over her small body and what it contained.

  Some shook their heads and said, “Four days of labor and then death. But think if she had lived, she and her son. What ravage then…? Allah favored her with mercy.”

  Nur Banu lost her Hungarian, but Safiye lost her doctor; he was not trusted in the harem again on anybody’s word.

  As for the Quince, her mind slowly stewed to the viscous consistency one gets if one cooks the seeds of that fruit with a bit of pulp for a long time. I don’t think she spoke another coherent word, although her babble was perpetual. I never saw her again, for as I had already noted, she had developed a particular aversion to my mistress. The mere report that Esmikhan was visiting sent the older woman in a frenzy to the highest parapet or darkest cellar of the harem. Sometimes we would hear her, the sharp, inhuman barks of a tortured soul, and they sent shivers down our backs.

  The Quince lived on in this state for years. Indeed, I don’t remember her death at all. She simply faded away, mind first, into the world that tormented her so, the voice lingering on last of all, finally coming only at haunting times. One came to think of it as no more than the sound of rain on the harem’s copper roof.

  * * *

  Nur Banu bought two or three promising new girls in an attempt to replace the Hungarian and to break the spell cast on her son by Safiye and Mitra. In a market inflated by demand of her own making, they must have cost her a small fortune. I know even a scullery maid I went to buy for my mistress cost over three hundred ghrush at the time. But so far, Nur Banu’s money had only been wasted, and with more girls than she could reasonably keep busy, their idleness got them into mischief. They were not maintaining a good name for themselves as is absolutely necessary if one would see the Sultan.

  One day I happened to be passing through the newly reconstructed Black Eunuchs’ Quarters where I heard a most dreadful sound. It was someone crying out in pain, yet one gone so far beyond humanity that it took effort for me to consider it human and to go and see if I could be of some assistance. I shouldn’t have gone. Two burly blacks had a girl laid out cruciform while a third turned her bare white back into deep red furrows with a rod.

  “By Allah, they will kill her,” I exclaimed to the first unoccupied khadim I met. The screams were all-permeating and our conversation was marked by severe distraction on both sides.

  “By Allah’s will, not,” the man replied. “At least, not yet. Their orders are to give off as soon as she is unconscious. Then they must wait ‘til she rouses, then try again.”

  Though all khuddam are called upon to administer discipline from time to time, it is rarely more than a few heavy blows to the soles of the feet. If the girl suffers the embarrassment of an ungraceful walk afterwards, that soon passes. But blows to the back mean her career is ruined. The Sultan will never put his arms about scars, no matter how pretty the face.

  “What can be wrong,” I asked, “that calls for Nur Banu’s destruction of her own property?”

  “It’s not Nur Banu’s slave,” I was told, “but Safiye’s.”

  “Ah. But would she destroy every girl Safiye buys so that none may come to the Sultan again? What a waste!”

  “The charge is more serious than mere jealousy.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Witchcraft.”

  The girl stopped screaming at that moment and my overtaut nerves leapt into the silence and onto that word like biting onto a cherry pit when one expects a smooth, well-cooked sauce.

  Witchcraft. No more heinous crime can infest the soul of a harem than that.

  “Murder and treason are less insidious.” I found my voice shawled in a whisper.

  “Yes,” the man replied, “for in those cases the culprit is swiftly dispatched and that is the end of the business.”

  “With this darkest of crimes, however, the witch herself may be unaware of what she has done.”

  “What other explanation can there be for the Quince’s sad end?”

  “Indeed.” I hadn’t considered that.

  “If a woman of such intelligence can be turned mad, almost rabid—”

  “This is true.”

  And I couldn’t help but think of the assistant Fig, her reputed familiarity with the world of spirits. But what reason would the Fig have to harm her mentor?

  “Confessions drawn under torture,” I suggested, “may only ever uncover a fraction of plots devised in the company of demons and jinn.”

  “And who could say what are lies? All has to be taken as real.”

  “But, my friend,” I suggested, “even death is no answer, no safeguard against the power to lurk from beyond the grave.”

  “Indeed. And insubstantial spirit may haunt in silent talismans, in any dark corner, and under every flagstone.”

  I felt suspicions rise from the very paving stones as I left the khadim to go about my business. There was the Fig, of course, but I seemed to be the only one who considered her.

  Mitra’s blue eyes had made her suspect from the first day of her arrival. Safiye herself had taken to pinning a little mirror to her bodice so that the evil inherent in such eyes, even if inadvertent, might be reflected back again. It must be unnerving even—or especially—if a woman has no malice, to find her face reflected back off every soul she meets. But because she was still carrying royal blood, Mitra was immune from all but the most irrefutable of implications, and this Nur Banu never was able to extract, though she tried.

  Safiye, as mother of Murad’s only children to date, shared this immunity. And in the end, it was only a few poor serving girls—some from Safiye’s suite, three who had waited on the Hungarian or the Quince, two Persians, and a Genoese, who, because of their origins, were suspected of setting their sympathies where they ought not to—only they ever felt the rod.

  The Genoese and one of Safiye’s own girls were all who paid the supreme penalty: Tied in weighted sacks, they were rowed out into the Golden Horn one night and then pushed overboard. One could not pity them too greatly. By then the black eunuchs’ rod had wrecked such havoc on their limbs that they could never hope for more than a life of meanest drudgery.

  After that, Murad, who had never seen full pregnancy before except as a child too young to remember, grew uneasy around Mitra and the swelling fruit of his own loins. He sometimes had her recite from behind a screen but without the magic of her eyes, the spell was somehow broken. He began to choose others for his bed, others his mother held out to him. By the time Mitra was delivered of a fine, healthy boy she called Mustafa—for some dear brother, perhaps, or her father, long dead—the Sultan had a new infatuation.

  And witchcraft was allowed to sink for the time being into the dark and bottomless pit from which it had arisen.

  I lose track of Murad’s infatuations now. One seemed much the same as the next,
and as Safiye and Nur Banu were pretty well matched in determination and skill at choosing, the crown went first to one camp, then to the other. The only effect was to make the Sultan all the more defenseless before the onslaught.

  What experience I have had with love—or, rather, I should keep to the word infatuation, for to use that other here is blasphemy—convinces me that there is indeed something of the dark powers in it. And time and again throughout the coming years the word witchcraft was heard, first from one side of the harem, then the other.

  Some strange signs scratched on the post in the hall to the baths. A pile of decomposing bones and skin found in a corner. No more, and no real indication that accident rather than malice might have caused these things. No matter. The great black eunuch would bring out his rod again, like a shadow from the dead himself.

  I never liked that khadim. The cutters would have done better had they left him a man and sent him to the front lines somewhere to defend the faith and put down heresy. He enjoyed his job too much.

  Even if you profess no superstition yourself, an awful shiver must come to you when you hear the word witchcraft, once you’ve seen what it can do.

  * * *

  It was that same year that another kind of witchcraft made its presence felt in Constantinople. This was the effect, or so it was said, of Murad’s first words as Sultan: “I’m hungry.” There was famine in the land. The first year of his reign the harvests throughout Anatolia had been bad, and this year they failed altogether, with the drought spreading to both the northern coast of the Black Sea and into Europe.

  Bread reached twenty aspers a loaf in the markets, and not everyone could pay. No one in Sokolli’s house went hungry, of course. I actually gained a little paunch as I fed more on rice and bread to thicken up the thin meat and vegetable stews. My master increased his gifts of charity to the mosques so they could feed more of the poor in their soup kitchens. As for the imperial palace, I suspect some there have forgotten there ever was a famine. Their bread remained as white as ever and the goats’ production of milk, whenever it dropped off, was augmented by greater flocks that fed on the Serai’s irrigated lawns.