The Reign of the Favored Women

by Ann Chamberlin

  The narcotic effect of all this reverence carried me right to the interment. In the cemetery, all the other stones, with the decomposition and sink of soil beneath them, seemed to tilt at angles in obeisance towards the newly turned earth. I had more the impression of rites of pilgrimage at some holy shrine than those of eternal parting.

  It was not until the next day in the First Court of the palace again that the myth faded and the reality of grief and lust for vengeance overcame me. I found myself suddenly face-to-face with the assassin.

  His punishment had been swift and summary, and now his detached head sat in a little niche at just the height it would have been had it still been supported by a body. This display was meant as a lesson in the awesome justice of the Porte to any others who contemplated similar deeds. It was clearly a lesson in why rapid burial was called for if any sanctity was to remain in the memory of a man. Already the face was sagging with corruption and was clearly well on its way to becoming of the same consistency and revulsion as dog’s feces in the swelter of a summer’s day.

  I had not studied the man closely before. Now I saw—beneath the blood and dirt that bruised his face but turned his dirt-grey cap a royal shade—a face of average appearance. The executioner’s blade had neatly cut through a tendency he had to double chins, leaving only a fantasy sight of blackening blood and butcher-shop muscle exposed. He had average black brows, an average mustache, a nose only slightly larger and rounder than the mean. The best distinguishing feature I could see, then, was a round, pudgy chin protruding from a beard only four or five days old (grown as a disguise, perhaps?) pierced dead center by a dimple. His lips, rotting in a bizarre sneer (it wasn’t difficult to see what shape they must have had when plans of murder were hissed) exposed one black gap where an incisor was missing.

  Who was this man and what were his motives. He must have known his deed was suicide, still it had been worth that price to him. What terrible grudge did he bear my master? A grudge born of ignorance, for surely Sokolli Pasha never knowingly caused it. That rag of a cap still declared him a dervish. But was he indeed? Was that merely a disguise (the few day’s beard another clue) that had been adopted with the knowledge that few would suspect or hinder him in such dress?

  I questioned the nearby guards, but in their haste to send the assassin to hell, little attempt had been made to identify him. An obvious nickname, Delilo, the madman, was all they’d taken from him for identification. Tills was one dervish, fortunately, whose death would not make a martyr among the people whether heaven would do so or not. All suggestion, based on what I had heard at the time of the murder, that the man did not speak Turkish as his native language, was a surprise to the fellow I interrogated.

  That was all I had to go on as I stood in the court before that head and let its corruption first kindle and then inflame revenue in my heart. Revenge! Against whom? The man was already dead and had made lit tie attempt to save himself from it. But I had such an impression that he had not worked alone, that others, besides my friend Hajji had known about the plot and they had said nothing. Or, more likely, they had known and openly encouraged, promising him the immortality he had bestowed upon my master.

  I swore I would, Allah willing, find these people, and I sealed the oath by spitting into the felon’s eye. The spittle slipped down one cheek like a slimy tear, leaving a clean trail in the grime. It halted in the mustache and the flies, startled for a moment from their feast, settled down to business once again, which made the mustache seem to twitch as if still alive and the pride and joy of its wearer.

  * * *

  My best lead was my friend Hajji. He had at least known enough about the matter to come and give warning. But one quick trip home had been enough to ascertain that he had vanished as soon as his purpose was acquitted. The gardener’s boy—very distraught, of course, by both the death of the master and the grievous wounding of his father—was able only to say that he had gone for refreshment for the old dervish and returned to find he’d disappeared. And the boy did not have kind words to say about holy men and their madnesses in general at that moment, so I knew it was useless to ask further there.

  But I did ask nearly everywhere else in the city. I asked the donkey boy delivering goods to our door. He admitted to being a novice to a local holy man. I pressed him further, wondering what sort of doctrine he might be learning. His animal shook a cloud of dust and flies from her flank and her master copied her, shrugging carelessly. He was unable to answer even the most basic questions of theology.

  “What is it then that your most reverend teacher is good for?” I asked with frustration.

  “If I do not pay him his sack of beans and salt once a month,” the poor boy confessed, “he grows angry, and his anger is terrible indeed. He can cause all my family to fall ill with a wink of his eye. He has done it before; it’s true. If I am careful to pay him, he may deign to visit us on holy days or at a birth or a wedding. Then he may leave an amulet tied in the window to keep away evil and all our business, Allah willing, may then be blessed.”

  Such leads I pursued no further. The assassin had been unprincipled, no doubt, but in a much more earnest, intelligent and ambitious way than this petty local charlatan. I took much greater heed of the rumors of begging dervishes who appeared suddenly and inexplicably on any street corner. “Such a blessed saint!” I would be told. “His mind Allah has already gathered to Him to sit in Paradise and gaze perpetually at the archetypal Holy Koran. It is only his grosser parts left here below.”

  So I would go and find the fellow, but my skepticism never allowed me to discover more than a blathering idiot or maniac. I, like so many, others, answered his call: “For the love of Allah! For the love of Allah!” with a small coin and so kept him from being a burden to his family. But I, unlike others, never imagined there was anything either divinely clairvoyant or demonically murderous about this lack of wit.

  A visit to every tekke in the neighborhood, city, region (my scope expanded as hope dwindled) seemed the next best plan. But Rome has not half so many cloisters as Constantinople has tekkes. The place is absolutely honeycombed with these holy establishments. Although a local mosque may support a brotherhood beneath its eaves, the two are not necessarily and always partners. One would need the perspective of Allah to look down on the rooftops of the town and pick out a tekke from your average house. Indeed, as the sheikh’s family often lives on the upper floor, even the All-Seeing One would have to be able to sense holiness through the everyday clutter of drying figs and laundry.

  For the poor mortal making his way through the streets, one door slinking with alley cats and mounds of rubbish was too much like the next. And when such camouflage was linked with vows of secrecy among the members, the search was hopeless.

  Some tekkes, however, were powerful and wealthy enough to have come to the notice not only of neighbors, but also of the tax authorities. Though exempt from dues, the holy men had a constant fight to prove they were indeed religious and not political. Into such establishments I easily gained admittance and almost as easily gained an interview with either the sheikh himself or one of his subordinates.

  “Are you a seeker?” It never took long before such questions made me feel the interrogated. “Are you a dervish, one who sits on the door-sill of Enlightenment?”

  Even when I learned to answer, “Yes, praise Allah!” more often than not our dialogue was wasted time. Sooner or later the man would drive from me what my true search was. Then, no matter what I had learned of their membership and religious practices, no matter how devout I tried to appear, the answer would always be an abrupt, “When you come seeking the answer to the nagging unfulfillment that is the curse of all humanity, then we may be of help to .you. The question you ask may eventually lead you to this search. If it is Allah’s will, it might. But until then—I’m sorry.”

  At one of the smaller houses on the hill just north of the old aqueduct, in an alley shared with a tomb of a long-dead—maybe even Christian—
saint, I was quite surprised to find that my contact was none other than Andrea Barbarigo, now called Muslim, the renegade son of the late proveditore of Venice. He was not the sheikh, of course, but of such position that he was trusted as spokesman.

  I had not meant my knowledge of his past to interfere with the business at hand but at last I could no longer conceal my astonishment from him. First I had to apologize for our last meeting, in the bazaar by the Jews’ shop.

  “Your warning was that of a friend,” he said, a wave dismissing the dagger cut that had accompanied my words. “I did not take it—but it proved to be true.”

  “I am surprised” I told him, “by your presence in a tekke. Not only that but by the sober knowledge of the Way you’ve exuded since my arrival.”

  He spoke laconically. “I can no longer be a Christian, and now that Sokolli Pasha is dead—Allah give him rest—without the particular favor of the Sultan, I am unlikely to advance any further in the navy. It is winter now and I cannot be on the seas anyway. So I come here. Here in the tekke I have found friends and new things to strive for. It is simple.”

  Though we spoke for several hours until a call for prayer interrupted us, nothing further of interest was divulged. This once-compatriot of mine quoted the same mystical poets with the same slick liberality as all the others I had spoken to and seemed only to go round in circles with his speech as the whirling dervishes do in their dance. But this was the first place the name Sokolli Pasha arose without my own conjuring and so, though I did not cease probing into any other tekke I came upon, I returned to this one near the aqueduct again and again.

  In Constantinople, where they themselves do not reign, the dervishes are not quite the open hosts they are in the holy city of Konya. They cannot afford to be, standing a ways there in the shadow of the Porte. But as I continued to frequent the place, I found my presence more and more expected, even welcome, though I could not say with truthfulness that I, too, stood on Enlightenment’s doorstep. But, with Muslim’s and Allah’s help, I was able, on occasion, to find myself not too far removed from the feeling of perfect acceptance I’d enjoyed in Konya with my friend Hajji.

  I like to say now it was some power of the spirit that kept me coming back. At the time I doubt very much whether I actually felt anything but very lost, confused, and angry. I certainly wasn’t conscious of spirit. But eventually that spirit—or mere persistence, the skeptic may say—rewarded me. I joined the tekke many nights of that Ramadhan, which began a few weeks later, as I had done in Konya and again I found myself among the brethren on the Night of Power.

  We were praying shoulder to shoulder not only because that is the way one always prays in company, for the feeling of unity, but also because the hall was packed. It was always so on this night. Men for whom even Ramadhan is only an excuse for more materialism are religious this one night. They hope the watchful angels who write men’s fates for the coming year may be fooled into giving them better than they deserve.

  Even though the hall was full, it was still cold and our unified breaths were visible like steam rising from a stew. It made the ranks beginning five or so men away from me on either side seem unreal, like mirror images, or rather, like the fog that condenses on a glass in the bath. One can rub the fog away with the hem of a sleeve. There was great energy there, however, like the intangible sun on gross stones on a summer’s day.

  So ethereal did the edges of my vision seem that at first I thought nothing of it when one of the figures there took on the appearance of my friend Hajji. One of the angels, I imagined, come among us to observe our mortal faith with a critical eye. I remembered another Night of Power, so many years before, when Hajji had spoken to me, told me truthfully how he had come to be a dervish and what it meant for him. Perhaps this angel, then, was only allowed to be seen at times of crisis and only on this most holy of nights—and only by those who were worthy.

  The clouds of steam I breathed in were full of faith of this sort and they intoxicated me—my mind seemed to rise to the dome of the roof with it—and so I humbly lowered my eyes before the vision. My master’s murder? It was a little thing in the eternal perspective.

  We ate, then danced, and throughout these activities, the image of my friend appeared and disappeared at the corner of my vision. Like the reflection of a tree in a slow-moving pond, I thought. And because of humility and the effervescent nature of the thing, I did not stare or approach but waited upon his will. So as the night progressed, devotion, spurred on by his presence, came more and more to replace all other desire in my soul until not only was I content to wait, but it was my own greatest desire to do so as well.

  It was the same hour, the hour of stars, the setting of the moon and the sharp coolness before dawn. I had taken some food and was now coaxing down water in a pious, desireless fashion to steel myself against the rigors of the coming day. My old friend and I found ourselves face to face and alone in the courtyard. I lowered my eyes to my bowl and sipped again, waiting on him.

  “Peace on you,” he said at just the right moment to meet the void of my desire, after a tantalizing pause. But not too late to lose the dither of expectancy.

  “And on you, peace,” I replied. That was enough. I would have been satisfied then if our speech had never gone any further.

  “What do you seek, pilgrim?”

  “It.” I replied the dervishes’ divine “Hu,” beyond which there is no other.

  “You shall find It in yourself.”

  All that followed was afterplay, removed—if not in time or space, then in true reality—from that which went before. As distant from true discovery as are the two stars closest to the horizon north and south, the full arc of the sky from each other. How that vast gap in the fabric of reality is bridged, in the twinkling of an eye and yet so utterly, is one of the mysteries a dervish can feel to the very marrow of his bones. Yet he is unable to describe the mystery but with that one word that is goal and satisfaction, yearning and striving, all at once: “Hu.”

  Bridge that gap we did, with the sweet nonsense of lovers, lovers of God. And when that was complete, Hajji spoke no more than a score of words from the world. They did not catch up with me until morning. “Purpose came not only from desire, but from within, from the harem. Look well, my friend.”

  At that moment under the fading stars, we heard the muezzin together as if we had never heard him before. It brought tears to our eyes as if we’d spent all our lives imagining what the glory of that sound might be—the trumpet of the Day of Judgment—and heard it now at last, all our griefs and martyrdoms rewarded in the end. Then we bade goodbye—in silence and without touching. For how long? Another fifteen years? Who could say but the Most Merciful One?

  We drifted back into the building to say die prayer at dawn. As I raised my hands to the side of my face, the edge of my sleeve wiped my friend from the mirror of my vision.

  XLIX

  “From within, from the harem. Look well, my friend.”

  Upon the death of her husband, my lady fell under the protection of her brother. With no man to sit in its selamlik, the great house and gardens our master had built were deserted. There was talk of turning the area into a mosque with a pleasure park for the public.

  But we moved back into the harem of the main palace. Safiye would hear of no place else, and in apartments right beside her, by Allah! My lady had always been loath to make a choice between Nur Banu and Safiye. When a firm decision such as this was made for her, however, and larded with protestations of friendship, she was helpless to refuse it. What I saw was that Safiye would find it that much easier now to see that her son, the heir, and his cousin Gul Ruh were brought together.

  The move did cut my duties down to almost nothing. I was in favor of dismissing all my seconds, what with the army of eunuchs already employed in the palace. Although the last years of fevered purchase of new girls for the Sultan’s delight had filled the harem to overflowing, under such dense conditions, mere guarding took far fewer kh
uddam. But of course one can never look for reason or restraint when the palace is concerned, and somehow my assistants stayed on.

  At first I was pleased to be relieved of responsibilities. I was spending all my time trying to track down my master’s murderer. But soon I discovered what such ‘freedom’ did to my power to act for myself. Hours and stations of guard were set in the palace by long tradition. And I was trying to fill old bottles with new wine.

  “Hello, khadim. What are you doing here?”

  “I just thought this corridor seemed unwatched.”

  “No, no. I’m here. Don’t you worry. We’ve got it all taken care of. Why don’t you go run an errand for your mistress into town? Surely there is some new jewelry she needs to get, a new case of sweetmeats...”

  And the day after the Night of Power my refocused attention made me discover yet another thing the move had taken from me. I had unwittingly, though quite of my own free will, given up the only responsibility I had left—and it was the only one that was of any real meaning. I had neglected my role as confident and comfort to my lady.

  Her marriage to Sokolli Pasha had been empty form for years. We all knew that. I had supposed her grief would be but form as well. I don’t think she’d even seen her man for over five years. Though they lived in the very same house, their paths never crossed. But I’d forgotten to consider that with this emptiness could come a horrible guilt. And that never seeing him could help create an image of the man in her mind that was worth ten times the mourning the real flesh and blood had been.

  She was never a complainer, but on that day just after the end of Ramadhan, Esmikhan herself reproached me. “What have you to do with those men’s affairs?” she asked me after I’d stumblingly tried to explain that my negligence had really been in her interest and the interest of Sokolli Pasha’s memory. I was seeking revenge, after all.

  “Revenge,” she said with a wave of her hand, “that is for men. Your place, dear Abdullah, is here with me in the harem.”