The Reign of the Favored Women

by Ann Chamberlin

  “Allah pray that day is years and years away,” Mitra said. At the moment, she truly meant it.

  “And only then did Mitra go and kiss her own babies,” concluded Gul Ruh, whose busy scouting had brought the rest of the report to my sick bed. “And after all those hours when she thought she would never see them again!”

  Gul Ruh kept close by my side the two days I spent recuperating and by the time I got up to be myself again, Mitra and her sons were gone.

  But it was not three months after this that another horrible tragedy struck. I happened to be sitting with Ghazanfer Agha—to whom I now owed my life—in his usual spot to the side of the central atrium when a sudden movement on one of the balconies across the way attracted our attention. We had time only to focus when what seemed to be a small bundle or a doll passed through the railings and tumbled the full two stories down to the marble paving below.

  Both Ghazanfer and I were on our feet in an instant. He ran to the bundle, but I paused only long enough to confirm my worst fears—that it was indeed a child, the little son of one of Safiye’s gift-girls to the Sultan. I ran then, taking the stairs three at a time to the place from which we’d seen it fall. The spot was deserted. I ran as far as reasonable in one direction, then the same distance in the other, to no avail. By that time, the shrieks of the nurse followed by those of the mother, then the curses of Safiye and all of her suite brought a confusion and crowd to the entire courtyard. It was useless now to try to sort it out.

  I came down the stairs slowly, resisting the earth’s pull all the way, then stood racked with disbelief and horror beside Ghazanfer. Having confirmed that the child was dead, my companion stood aside now to make way for the chief mourners.

  “I saw no one,” I confessed my defeat.

  “No,” he replied. “I didn’t think you would.”

  “But I saw...didn’t you see? Or did my eyes just trick me? I thought I saw someone up there at the railing with the boy.”

  “Your eyes did not trick you. I saw it, too.”

  “But the guardian, even if she was careless, surely she would not vanish like that.”

  “I doubt very much it was a ‘guardian.’ “

  “You mean you think the boy was pushed?”

  “Nur Banu has gotten her revenge for the death of her false eunuch.”

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “Can’t you? You lived a sheltered life with the Grand Vizier.”

  Then I had to admit I could find no other belief to match what I had seen. “A child just learning to walk!” I exclaimed.

  “So it looks like an accident and is impossible to prove as anything else.”

  “But just a child!”

  “A child who is the son of the Sultan and will someday grow up to vie with others for the throne.”

  “Who would do such a thing? Even Nur Banu—”

  “The place is crawling with such people,” Ghazanfer Agha assured me. The subject was as distasteful to him as it was to me, but he knew he must continue. “You are just new among us on a permanent basis, else you would realize it happens more often than anyone would confess. On both sides, I hate to admit, but it happens. One must keep the odds even, after all. So far, his virility and hedonistic life, spurred on by both my lady and the Queen Mother, have given the Sultan thirty-five children, of which twenty-one are sons.”

  “By Allah, I had no idea there were so many!”

  “No, few do. The girls are all still alive, but Safiye’s Muhammed, Mitra’s two, and two to the favorites of Nur Banu—that is all that are left to him now of the sons with the death of this little fellow. Some die to the usual enemies of childhood, disease and weakness, I suppose. But the rate is far too high to be natural. A nurse and her assistants must be awake every moment and even then, as we have just seen, there is danger. Especially when they begin to toddle off on their own...”

  “Always falls?” I asked, cringing with horror, for I had just caught a glimpse of the broken little boy in his grieving mother’s arms.

  “I suppose that is the most favored way, for it can happen in an instant when a nurse’s back is turned and boys especially at that age—or so I’m told—like to explore and be independent. Alas that those same virtues that would make for the best ruler are the very things that see to it that the boy never gets his chance to rule. Yes, there are all too many falls—one of Nur Banu’s camp survived, but he is witless from it, or so the gossips say.

  “Falls, but there have been drownings as well, in the fountain, the bath. Strangulation may be seen when the mother or nurse is blamed for rolling on her child in the night. A piece of candy is dropped in a likely place, the child finds it, puts it in his mouth. It is poison. One plate of poisoned halvah was discovered over in Nur Banu’s rooms just before you arrived here. It was discovered when some birds that had come to feed from it died. The beekeeper was hung for selling the bakers bad honey, but Allah alone knows how many infant bouts with fever and dysentery, vomiting and colic are natural in this place.

  “Then of course there is the evil eye. I myself am skeptical and think, especially in a child so young, that ‘evil eye’ is just an excuse to cover the doctors’ ignorance. But one does begin to wonder when its effects are seen so very, very often.”

  “It is one thing to see my master killed, a man who had lived a long and useful life,” I declared with new vehemence. “But a child?”

  “Mitra is lucky to be in Edirne with her boys,” was all the comfort Ghazanfer could offer me.

  LI

  While I was still recovering from the Persian’s attack (and thinking how curious it was that a man should have his handiwork live so long and painfully after him) Gul Ruh confided in me where she had been when I’d gone looking for her. The word aggravated my headache. I tried to persuade my young lady against such a position. But when she was not moved, I faithfully kept her confidence until after the death of the little prince—nearly four months and a long time for any secret to be kept in the harem. But eventually one of her spies must have told Safiye, and there was sudden and violent furor—as I had tried to warn Gul Ruh there would be—when it became commonly known. Esmikhan’s daughter spent much of her time not in the garden, on the rooftops nor in a hidden corner of the library, but in the company of Nur Banu.

  “Whatever do you do there, child?” was the horrified reaction of all and sundry.

  “I sew mostly,” she replied, which was the truth.

  No one had been more surprised than I to see that wild little head bent over a needle and thread with concentration as wild as it was diligent. Nur Banu happened to have a seamstress who may not have been as skillful as the next, but who had twice the patience and did not mind undoing forty rats’ nests of a thread a day if rewarded with but the first glimmer of interest. Gul Ruh confessed to me that those knots and tears and crooked seams had driven her to more than a few tantrums. There were days when she would run clear to the end of the garden so fast her lungs ached and there she screamed at the top of her voice like one gone mad. But she refused to quit.

  “Why?” I could not refrain from asking.

  “Because,” she said simply, “I am to be married. What sort of bride will I be if I bring no trousseau of household goods?”

  “You could leave it all for the slaves to do. Many another girl in your station would.”

  “No. I want some at least to be of my own hand. It is only right.”

  Then I remembered that last night of Sokolli’s on earth, how he had called his daughter to him and how, in the morning, I had gone to look for her to promise to find some way out of the match for her. I had forgotten—forgotten because I had not believed and also because of the horrors that had immediately followed—what the slave girl had told me. “She rose at early prayers and called for the seamstress to attend her.” I discovered that not only had the maid spoken the truth, but that this passion had continued—indeed, been inflamed—by Sokolli’s passing.

  I came at length
not only to see that this was true, but that this was a reflection on the new Gul Ruh struggling to bloom on the horrible destruction of the old caused by the deaths of first Arab Pasha and then her father. And afterwards I discovered yet another reason she chose to associate with Nur Banu’s suite. Nur Banu was the one with whom Umm Kulthum, the Mufti’s widow and mother of the Mufti’s son, was most familiar. Safiye always declared she could not find room for the woman at her gatherings and no doubt this was because, with the Mufti dead, his widow no longer had anything to recommend her to Baffo’s daughter.

  “You would still marry the Mufti’s son?” I asked my young lady in surprise.

  “Of course,” Gul Ruh replied.

  She said it with such simple faith that if I were to disbelieve it I must be skeptical of the lisped confessions of a million children everywhere echoing the faith they’ve learned at their parents’ knees. The words harked to a time when the world still seems whole and right and, in the end, loving.

  “It was the very last wash of my father,” she continued, blinking back tears I knew were brought on by an almost tangible remembrance of that last clumsy kiss upon her forehead. “And it was his father’s last wish, too. Surely it is Allah’s will.”

  In place of His own will in the world of mortals, I read her logic, Allah had created fathers. It was no use my citing the counterexample of an evil. Godless father to confuse her. In her particular case, I felt, as perhaps never in maiden’s life before or since, such confidence was well placed. He never spoke of love, but Sokolli Pasha, I knew, would have gladly met that assassin’s knife a hundred times over if it could have symbolized the duty and care he felt for this child.

  I might have suggested, very tenderly, that perhaps she should wait. The blessings of true love, not just duty and care, might come to her in time. I almost cited to her the case of her own mother and the night in Konya when she had been conceived in love. But in the end I did not—I could not. There was a new and different happiness in Gul Ruh, one I had not sensed in her before nor even, underestimating her as a mere child, perhaps, thought her capable of. But in the end I had to admit it was indeed happiness, or at least the seeds of happiness. and a perpetual and growing contentment with her life as woman she was cultivating here. And far be it from me to try to root it out by force.

  Nevertheless, I had to warn her now of reality. Sokolli Pasha had planned to meet with young Abd ar-Rahman’s brothers the day of his death to seal the betrothal, but Allah had willed it was not to be. Her guardian was now the Sultan himself. Even so illustrious a family as the Mufti’s could hardly conceive approaching the Shadow of Allah with proposals of their own. Nor was Murad likely, even once approached, to give his approval to Abd ar-Rahman over the scores of favorites that must also be clamoring for close ties with the Ottomans.

  “And haven’t you heard your mother and your Aunt Safiye making plans to break precedent and have you married to your cousin Muhammed? This so you may become a Valide Sultan as powerful as Khurrem Sultan was, the mother of princes. When such glory is held out to you, should you not thank Allah and accept it?”

  “I seek to do the will of Allah,” she said, unmoved by glory.

  I was convinced now of what course would bring her the most joy and I was determined to aid her on it. I watched her with Umm Kulthum, saw the woman’s warmth for the girl grow and be returned if not by love then at least by respect. I wanted to nurture that protective relationship. But frankly, I did not see how even the maddest of dervishes could have said mother-in-law, daughter-in-law were relationships forthcoming for them in Allah’s will.

  Esmikhan and even Safiye had nothing but talk to keep Gul Ruh from crossing the no man’s land into Nur Banu’s territory. As they remained ignorant of her true motives, certainly of her sincerity, they considered it no more than youth’s craving for the dangerous and the forbidden. They left it at that, saying, “Well, you’ll keep an eye out and let us know what the old witch is plotting, won’t you, Gul Ruh?”

  “No, more!” Safiye exclaimed. “You could do the world a favor and take poison to her the next time you go.”

  “Aunt Safiye, no!” cried Gul Ruh who couldn’t be sure if Safiye was joking or not. “I couldn’t do that!”

  And when Nur Banu replied to the retelling of this tale by saying, if the girl really wanted to make herself useful, yes, she could carry poison, but in the opposite direction, her answer to her step-grandmother was much the same. “Oh, no, lady. No, I couldn’t do that!” Gul Ruh remained innocently insensitive to the earnestness beneath both demands.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, the Agha of the Janissaries, Ferhad Pasha, presented the Sultan with a particularly choice bit of booty from the campaigns on the Persian front. It was a history of the life of the Prophet, set in verse and beautifully illustrated and edged in gold leaf. Murad was pleased at the sensitivity of the man’s soul. It caused him to weep for joy. Many another commander, he realized, would have thought nothing of tossing the book in when the rest of the rubble was torched. Or melting down the brass clasps for bullets. How to reward this man of obvious charm and even greater sensibility? There was no higher post than Agha of the Janissaries open at the moment.

  “Is there some jewel,” the Sultan asked, groping, “of which you or your wife is particularly fond?”

  “Me? No, sire.”

  “Your wife?”

  “May it please you, sire, I am unmarried.”

  “Unmarried? Such a romantic soul in one so celibate? What will you be, by Allah, given a chance to taste the feasts of which the poets sing?”

  “No less a man, I pray.”

  The Sultan laughed with pleasure. “No less a man, indeed. Well, we shall not put off the essay any longer. I shall see you married before you ride to the front again. And not to just any of my girls, over twenty-six years old and cast off, by Allah. No, I shall see you have one of the royal Ottoman blood. I’m sure there are one or two appropriate women to choose from. I shall have to ask.”

  “Gul Ruh” were the first words that came to Ferhad’s mind, not particularly because he knew that girl was an Ottoman but because those had become his words meaning “That’s impossible!” Of course he did not say this to the Shadow of Allah. He merely bowed and said, “Master, I am your slave.”

  LII

  My master’s mausoleum was not as large as it had started out to be (how quickly the world forgets!) and it had a sort of amputated look. But the tile work was of the finest: blue and green forests espaliered against the walls and heavy with blossoms of that rich coral color that was recently born in Iznik and is such a closely guarded secret that it may well die there. Neglect had its benefits, however, for real vegetation promised soon to cover up the rough spots and take the edifice to itself as if it had always been there.

  In small depressions in the marblework, rain water collected at which clouds of pigeons drank. Even in death, my master was proving generous. From the roof of plane trees above, herons had slung their nests like saucer lamps, and a recent molt had let a crest of feathers fall down upon the master’s cupola like nothing so much as the plume of the imperial turban itself.

  A row of cypresses, those emblems of eternity, stood sentinel on either side, draped in ivy like shrouds. They kept back the rude press of staring, lesser monuments. Among these surrounding memorials, the men’s were topped with stone turbans in shapes that indicated what station the dead had held in life. Women’s stones were carved to end in flowers.

  And, whereas in life all had bowed towards Mecca, in death they went every which way, depending on how the body beneath returned to the soil. Instead of the uniformity of death the preachers were always threatening us with—”The impious and heretic shall stand before their Maker and know the errors of their ways”—it seemed rather that life had enforced more compliance. And in death each relaxed into the individuality they had always cherished in their hearts but never dared while living.

  Beyond these stones I could
not see far: Heavy mist smeared the distance and then swallowed it whole. I shivered in the damp.

  He appeared suddenly out of that mist and walked toward the mausoleum at a pace the heart takes when approaching a lovers’ tryst: quick, but of uneven rhythm. I remarked at once—he is as handsome and swift as ever. He was early, but I had been earlier, and from my post behind the cypress, I could watch his every move.

  Waiting is not much practiced by Aghas of the Janissaries, but Ferhad Pasha had not forgotten the art learned so well by weeks under Sokolli Pasha’s roof with the fate of the Empire on his lips. Here he was under the Pasha’s roof again, and some of the same thrill was in this waiting, too: the youthful tantalization to be hopelessly, dangerously in love, near and yet so far.

  He waited and I waited. I stood until my legs grew numb, cold slowly creeping up them from the mist-dampened grass. For one used to standing and watching most of every day, this was substantial evidence of the passage of time. But Ferhad Pasha still seemed insensible to it. That there was no sun to judge by was perhaps part of the reason, but here was a man with the responsibilities of all the army on his shoulders. Remembering this, I found his patience even more remarkable. It was hard to imagine: what devices he had used to slip from these responsibilities for the day, lingering now into long afternoon. But no call of duty seemed to disturb his waiting, no thought that he would miss something more important.

  At last, the call of the muezzin came, seeping its way through the mist like blood through bandages, and Ferhad Pasha started from his heavy reverie. He had arrived just after the last call—a good four hours must have passed. He looked around in a sudden panic. Perhaps he felt himself confronted by Sokolli’s presence for the first time, surrounded by the ghosts of the others who slept all around. Perhaps he thought he must have missed something. It put a new focus on his eyes and he saw for the first time the basket set in the shadows just at the entrance to the tomb. He went to it, picked it up, saw it was not something left weeks ago by accident, but fresh, set just that morning.