A copse of trees and a hillock blocked my view of what was happening. It centered on the fast moving stream. And before I had time to get to my feet, the chaos’ focus had drifted past the protection of the hollow and into the open. I thought at first a bough of pink Judas blossom caught my eve. But the splash of color occasionally defied the pull of the water and displayed a mind of its own. And the pink was turning such a dark purple as Judas blossom will take on only after a day of wilt.
My heart suddenly pumped aching fear to every limb—as fine satin will the minute it touches water and begins to soak up deadly weight.
LVI
The entire hillside of eunuchs and women was now running like rainwater down to the lowest level. Abd ar-Rahman, too, was drawn on by that color he recognized from his recent interview with his sister. He reached the water first.
A pair of eunuchs quickly formed a solid chain to the bank lest Abd ar-Rahman, like the log burned light and white with study that he was—be likewise caught in the current. But it was the young man himself who made the rescue. Though he staggered a moment under the unaccustomed physical load, with the strong eunuchs’ arms to right him, he insisted on carrying the burden to the safety of the copse. He wanted the personal pleasure of scolding his wanton sister himself.
But it was not his sister. I had suspected the rereversal in clothing all the way down the hill. And as I ran up to the excited rabble that clustered around, hardly giving the drowned soul a taste of precious air, my worst fears were confirmed. She who had become an object of such display was my young lady. That she had nearly drowned was the least of my worries: She’d be better off dead than seen by a hundred men in Friday-after-sermon righteousness.
The same instant I knew the truth, Abd ar-Rahman did, too. Any woman not his close kin was like a jinni to him, something supernatural and as scalding as sparks from heaven. He dropped her none too gently and fled without a word.
Gul Ruh had recovered somewhat, at least enough to recognize her rescuer, likewise a dangerous, awful creature. She was thankful to be dropped, and although part of her stagger was from weakness, it was compounded by a struggle to hide her face.
Gul Ruh’s stumble to the ground was padded by many concerned arms and laps, but even if they had not been there, cutting off air, her recovery would have been slowed by her hands. Her cap and veil had been lost in the water. Finding her skirt too water sodden to lift, she covered her face with simple palms instead. And as soon as there was air in her lungs to carry out a sob, the hands became a handkerchief for her grief.
Gul Ruh shook like a leaf. The ice-cold water had aggravated the usual pearly smoothness and pallor of her skin. The veins were visible beneath, a stark blue as they tried to carry normal pulse again. So had Abd ar-Rahman seen her—a fragile thing so in need of comfort and protection. But few of us thought of what the effect of the sight might have had on him. He had seen her, that made our hearts heavy enough.
Now the Mufti’s daughter, once more in her omi green dress, made her way through the crowd with a warm brew of orchid root. She knelt before Gul Ruh and spoke gently for her friend to take that invigorating drink. But suddenly my lady came to life with a ferocity that startled us all. Were there not so many layers of already-wet skirt on top of them, her legs would have gotten drenched by the potion that spilled as she shoved it away.
“You,” she said, tears dragging across the words like flesh over a rusty knife. “By Allah, Betula, you pushed me! Oh, Allah, I am shamed forever. Abd ar-Rahman! I want to die. And it’s your fault!”
“It was meant in fun,” Betula said in weak self-defense. But every eye on the Mufti’s daughter felt that her dowsing with orchid root juice was but easy punishment for what, it now seemed obvious, she had caused.
We quickly bundled my lady first in her veil (which for the first time in her life didn’t seem heavy enough) and then in numerous quilts to try and keep her warm. We packed her under the canopy on the boat with the curtains drawn as tightly as possible to hold in the warmth of the day. Then we prepared to sail at once. The sharp wind that often comes up at sunset and was the delightful close of many an outing-—teasing the curls and tossing up a wild salt spray to carry on one’s face into the harem again—this wind must now be avoided at all costs.
I had hustled the last of our slave girls on board and was about to follow them myself when I saw Umm Kulthum approaching. In one hand she held my lady’s bedraggled cap and veil which her son, she explained, had found further downstream. She took the opportunity to apologize for the accident.
“Accident!” I repeated. I was very angry. More than pride was hurt. Gul Ruh was young, but I wondered it either of us would recover from the events of that day. “This was no accident. Your daughter did it on purpose. She must have plotted it at least as long ago as their first exchange of dresses.” Then I quite forgot myself and flared, “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were in on the plot. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this whole outing was planned with no other purpose in mind than to humiliate my lady.”
“Not to humiliate her, no,” Umm Kulthum said.
To my surprise, that was as far as her refutation went. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I’d felt ready to apologize for the attack, but now I was glad I’d spoken as I had.
“I only want to see that my dear husband—may Allah favor him—has his last wish fulfilled. I only want to see that Gul Ruh does become my dear, sweet daughter-in-law at last. She shall be the joy of my old age, if only Allah will.”
“But Abd ar-Rahman? Now that he—”
“But that’s the problem we had to overcome, you see. Every time I bring the question up, he says, ‘Oh, Mother. There are a thousand other girls in the Realm of Islam I could marry. Who wants to get mixed up with the royal house when there is a choice? As the old sage Ahnaf bin Qays once said, “Rulers have no friends.” Choose, if you must. Mother, though I’m convinced a wife is only a stumbling block to study. And if you must choose, do not choose a Sultan’s daughter.’
“Well,” Umm Kulthum continued, “as long as he thought like this, he would not ask his brothers to go beg for her hand from her uncle, the Shadow of Allah. And if they would not go, what is the use of me going to her mother? Anyway, his eldest brother is now hatching plans to marry Abd ar-Rahman to the daughter of the present Mufti. Oh, what a scheming, grabbing son my firstborn is, Allah save him! He wants the connection. But the girl? A dull, lifeless thing.
“He’s already sent me to interview her mother, and when I saw the girl, I couldn’t bring myself to broach the subject. I told him the daughter wants time to consider, for she is but young. Young? She’s older than Abd ar-Rahman, Allah shield him. But what my son doesn’t know, hidden in the harem, need not come out in the open. Even five fewer years would not make her better favored. Such an ugly dish clout with a voice like the clang of cheap copper vessels. And dull-witted!
“Now your Gul Ruh, Allah bless her, is a scholar. But this girl? You’re lucky to get her through her prayers once a day. What would my son and she talk about, I ask you? Betula has had more contact with her and wishes she had less, so my daughter came in on this plot with me rather than see that Mufti’s girl brought into our home. If there’s anything that would turn Abd ar-Rahman, Allah forbid, into a tedious old scholar with holes in his brain where joy and connubial bliss ought to be—all before he’s twenty-five—it would be to marry such a girl.
“He’s my favorite, my baby. Can you understand? Though he’s foolishly ignorant of the fact, having never seen her until today, Gul Ruh is the only woman who can make him happy and I want him to be happy.”
“Lady, I am indeed sorry for you,” I said with biting sarcasm. “To be so ignorant of your son, though you say he is your favorite. Abd ar-Rahman is a young man of fierce piety. He would have to be a gypsy or a pagan before he could find shame such as we were forced to display today attractive.”
I turned to go with an angry flourish, but I saw th
at my words had no effect on her. She bade us farewell, her pretty plump shoulders and eyebrows rising in a shrug that did nothing to erase her self-satisfied grin.
LVII
One week to the day later, the palace harem was entertaining Umm Kulthum, the Mufti’s widow, again. But this time she headed directly for Esmikhan in Safiye’s half of the enclosure instead of along her usual path to Nur Banu’s.
She stopped me outside the door. “I told you I knew my own son,” she said triumphantly.
I was in a much better mood that day than I had been when I’d left her in the park. Gul Ruh was strong and had caught but a small cold from her adventure and the sniffles were now all but gone. The gossip, too, seemed to have stayed its tongue at least until it could be seen what Abd ar-Rahman meant to do about the matter. In order to be among the first to learn of his reaction, I stopped to hear Umm Kulthum out.
“Betula went to her brother as soon as we got home,” she said, “and explained to him that it was all her fault he had had to play hero that afternoon. This only confirmed the impression my son already had that Gul Ruh was the helpless victim.
“You should have heard him! ‘So light in my arms,’ he said. ‘So pale and shaking as if my very touch might kill her.’ He saw the accident now not only as Betula’s fault but somehow as his own as well. That his sister is wanton is his fault—he’s never been stern enough with her. That he had gone splashing into the water, too, that is his fault. He knew there were strange women about. They had their own eunuchs who could have saved her just as well. But he had to make a fool of himself and invade another man’s property and a virtuous woman’s modesty.
“Well, there is nothing for it now. To recover the honor of our whole family, from Betula up, he must do the honorable thing. He must send his brothers to the Sultan with a request for Gul Ruh’s hand.”
Umm Kulthum took my elbow and spoke confidentially now. “He talks in brave words like honor and guilt because he is shy and a coward to mention what he really feels, love. That he should go against reason and fall for a girl on no better pretext than that he has seen her face and felt her in his arms—that offends his manhood. He grows red and white at the very thought, stumbles clumsily, then retreats to the safety of his books.
“But I can tell. Soon enough he is back in the mabein. He can’t read any more, you see. He rails at Betula and threatens to beat her. She simply laughs at him, for she knows it is his excuse to be close to women, a thing he finds himself longing for in spite of his better judgment. A thing he is as yet clumsy at. Oh, they will be so happy!”
And so certain was Umm Khulthum of how her plan must work out that she almost forgot to conclude with “Inshallah.”
“Allah willing,” I added to her wish and then noticed that during our conversation, Gul Ruh had arrived. I don’t know how much of our talk she heard, but she was radiant in cloth-of-gold. Her beautiful brown eyes, cleansed by a brief bout with a light fever, sparkled now with crystal-clear health. And perhaps there were tears of excitement there, too.
Unlike her usual manner, Umm Kulthum said nothing to the girl in greeting. She had been announced in Safiye’s sitting room and must not delay. But she did pause long enough to produce a sprig of Judas blossom from her bosom which she proceeded to stick fondly into Gul Ruh’s hair where it looked lovely against the rich black braids. Nobody said it, but it was plain whose hand had picked that sprig. It looked like his hand in a caress, thin and pale and gentle with timidity.
Gul Rah accepted the flowers gratefully and bowed to kiss Umm Kulthum’s hem as a daughter-in-law does to her new mother. Umm Kulthum straightened the sprig once more and then went in to the interview. Gul Ruh and I were left to pace nervously outside the door.
We did not have long to wait. Usually when the proposal has been made, the girl is sent for and given time to dress in her finery before being presented and told the news. I thought Gul Ruh would have to be constrained from springing in too soon and seeming immodestly anxious to be a bride. But as it happened no constraint was necessary. It was not a maidservant who came to the door, but Umm Kulthum herself. She swept by in tears, looking neither right nor left. Gul Ruh and I followed after as close as we dared come to the grief we had seen in that face. It was only when she was safely in the custody of her own eunuchs at the door of her sedan that Umm Kulthum turned to us again.
She did not look at us, but at the gilded and tiled intestinal halls in general as her voice echoed off them. “By Allah, may there come grief to this house to match the grief that they have given to us this day and then I shall be satisfied!”
A man could be killed for uttering such treason. Only a mother bereaved was understood to be so out of her mind that she was forgiven.
“Take your son’s suit elsewhere,” she had been told briefly and in no uncertain language. Safiye was in the room with Esmikhan and it was Safiye who had done the talking. “In the second month of Rabia, less than two months from now, my son Muhammed will be circumcised. Soothsayers have already chosen the day and preparations are well under way. This time, as Allah is true, the day will not be put off again, for my son is now a man and ready to take on a man’s responsibilities. As soon as his manhood has healed, he will take a wife. A wife that is worthy to stand beside a Sultan, not this rabble of slave girls with which we are presently plagued. Before the summer’s end, it shall be so. He shall marry his cousin Gul Ruh, as Allah shows favor to the Muslim people.”
* * *
The dancer, sweating profusely, kicked off her shoes the better to free herself of the world and enter into the seduction of the music. Her shoulders rolled like sea waves. Over them, with a pair of wooden spoons in each hand, she clattered out a rhythm. The rhythm inter-coursed with thrilling shivers amongst the three tantalizing touches on the tenor side of the drum to each heavy grunt on the bass. The shawm squealed, the audience did, too, squealed and blushed and sweated at the suggestion in the merest roll of the dancer’s hips. The hips seemed to have a life of their own, a life far removed from that in the stifle of the harem, a life where all desires were satisfied...
Nur Banu, watching this, her newest slave, with obvious pride, cracked a pistachio between her strong white teeth.
“You know she killed your father, don’t you?”
Nur Banu spat the hull onto the carpet. The dancer was oblivious and danced on it and a spray of others as if on clouds.
“Who did?” Gul Ruh’s heart leapt to her throat with fear on the off -beat.
“Why, Safiye, of course.” Nur Banu picked another nut with care and dealt similarly with it.
Gul Ruh had been ignoring the dancing to vent her grief and anger over the latest happening in Safiye’s section to Nur Banu’s understanding ears. But this revelation caught my young lady totally unprepared and she could say nothing.
“Oh, she didn’t dress up like a dervish and actually do the deed herself. But he was in her pay. Which is the same thing, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Gul Ruh admitted. Then she stammered, “But why?”
“To keep you from marrying Abd ar-Rahman. To keep you for herself—and, incidentally, for Muhammed. Do you think it’s just coincidence that Sokolli Pasha—Allah favor him—died the same day the sons of the old Mufti were to come and make the marriage plans? No. She had to move fast—and she did.”
Gul Ruh was silent, trying to fit the complexity, the duplicity of what she had just heard into the straightforwardness of her mind. Safiye was her mother’s closest friend. Yet Safiye had killed her best friend’s husband?
Before the tortuous task was half complete, Nur Banu spoke again. “And Arab Pasha, too.”
“Brabi?”
“She had him killed on Cyprus. Oh, I know they say they were brigands, but they were brigands as much as that dervish was a holy man—they had the same source for their pay.”
Gul Ruh was shaking her head in a dither of disbelief.
“But it’s true. And for the same reason. Your aunt Safiye k
new only too well what an impediment he was in your heart.”
The ancient commandment of blood for blood clamped like manacles about Gul Ruh’s hands. She stuttered, “Then...then I must take revenge. I must...” She could not say it actively and threw it to the safety of the passive: “She must be killed.”
“It would be nice, yes. But frankly, my dear, I don’t know how it is to be done. Allah knows, I’ve tried. No, she is too closely guarded, she is too strong and clever, even for one like you who may come and go in her presence.”
“Allah is merciful to widows and orphans. He cannot let such crimes go unpunished.”
“Allah is indeed merciful. Safiye herself may be impregnable, but there are others of her blood who will suit the demands of vengeance just as well—blood for blood—and in fact may cause her more grief than just a moment’s twist of the knife.”
“Others of her blood?”
“Prince Muhammed, for example. She cannot be with him every minute of every day. It would not be such a difficult thing for you, his dear, trusted cousin, to win his confidence...”
“Must I kill Muhammed, then?” Gul Ruh’s voice was as weak as milk skimmed of the cream.
“Oh, my goodness, no, my dear! Such a thing for a lady to say! But you might open opportunity...”
“Allah! Allah! Allah!” The audience was shouting in an all-consuming rhythm now, clapping their hands with a particularly sharp resonance. A second woman, as if possessed, could not stay on her cushion any longer. She leapt up, tore the scarf off her head and threw it around the first dancer’s hips. They danced in a vertigo of waists.
“Praise Allah for our new sister who has freed our souls!” was heard from deep in a hoarse throat.
And from another: “Allah, I will give my right hand to be the one to take her to the baths and wash this sweat from her when at last she drops.”
“And ah, to see—to touch!—those hips when the weight of that belt of bells is gone!”
The Reign of the Favored Women Page 36