The Reign of the Favored Women

by Ann Chamberlin

  LVIII

  Summer, the second month of Rabia and a time the astrologers and fortunetellers labeled laconically “the ascendancy of the household,” began on a single day. The Marmara had ironed out its springtime turbulence and lay now like a carpet of honor before the palace enthroned on the Point.

  In certain lights, particularly early morning or at sunset, it caught the colors and patterns of Angora wool besides. But then, honor was still in the making, for the caïques and skiffs with their bright holiday banners trailing sped one way and the other like shuttles. On such a day a seven-charge salute sounded from the Tower of the Cannon and the festivities that would make an adult Muslim of Muhammed, the firstborn Prince, began.

  For much of this two-week period, I stood in my place at the end of the ranks of eunuchs which in turn were behind the scarlet-robed pages, the blue tutors, the violet lawyers and the green viziers spun out like satin ribbons on the court. The sea of turbans was like a field of mushrooms sprung up in the muggiest of weather. It was easy to leave my insignificant place without causing scandal when I grew weary. I had, indeed, been assigned to do so, to come into the harem and give full reports of all the action at every interval.

  I diligently fulfilled this command the first two days, during which Murad received the congratulations of the chief officers, the lords of the tributary states, and the foreign ambassadors. On the third day I described the procession of the guilds of the city to the ladies.

  “They certainly vied with one another in both the richness of their gifts and the amusement of their presentation. The sherbet makers’ guild came first and presented rare lotus and tamarind concoctions to all present.” I paused, hoping someone would ask how I liked these things. I wanted to assure them plain rose or citron was much nicer, but nobody asked.

  I continued: “The pastry makers then showered us with sweets. I myself caught two Little Turkish Bonnets.” I tried to prod interest from Safiye, but she was not moved. Two other conversations started under me in different corners of the room. I began to speak louder.

  “We went from the goldsmiths who presented the master with a filigree bird cage as high as a man, to the jewelers who had encrusted a Koran on every inch of its two-by-two-foot cube, to the animal trainers who presented an ostrich, an elephant, and a giraffe to the palace menagerie. This latter animal, the giraffe, is like a vastly overgrown deer whose neck and legs have been stretched out of all grace.” I’d thought long and hard about this description, but nobody seemed to care. In desperation I turned to the little bit of humor I’d prepared.

  “By wise programming it was the street sweepers who followed after the animals. They must have feared a display of their simple craft might not be worthy of the occasion although none of us, standing in the wake of the animals, doubted it. Their buffoons and fire-eaters were the most elaborate of all and artfully distracted fi-om the janitorial service that scurried on between them.” I was the only one who chuckled—self-consciously.

  Now I began to speak at a breakneck speed, just trying to make it to the end. There were maybe five other conversations going now, full of animation. “Even the tanners and thieves’ guild was not neglected.

  Though out of sight, they have been able to create something that the foreign dignitaries will report back to their governments in wonder. In such a vast congregation of humanity from the highest to the lowest, not a single purse has been cut or pocket picked. One gentleman who, through a faulty clasp and his own carelessness, lost a gold chain in the dust, found it returned to him by a deep blue-black hand. The hand still reeked of tannin and dog dung, but accompanied a gracious salaam and a brief admonition to be more cautious in the future. Even a noble absentmindedness will not be allowed to give the Sultan and his subjects a bad name...”

  I let my voice fade and no one noticed at all. I began to suspect my assignment was just one of the many superfluous ceremonial ones created for the occasion. I went to the grille on the bandstand built especially for the palace women and saw that they had an eagle’s eye view that was better than what I had on the ground. I felt like a fool: Of course Safiye would have many agents she trusted better placed than I to report on things she found more important than fire-eaters and jugglers—a wink passing between vizier and pasha, perhaps. I grew angry. Then I grew afraid. Had I been sent out not for the responsibility, but to have me safely out of the way?

  As the celebration progressed, I became more and more convinced that this was the case. I couldn’t very well stop attending to stay in the harem and investigate, but I did return as often as I thought possible. There were no results, but I had little interest in the festivities after that.

  On the fifth day, for example, for the war games, two great towers had been constructed on the field to be manned by opposing forces, besieged, assaulted, captured, and fired in mock combat. This display so delighted the audience that the engineers worked throughout the night to rebuild them to allow a repeat performance the following day. I was impatient with the show the first time through, however, but could only bite back my anger and mutter: “By Allah, can’t we just get on with the business?” There was still more than a week of procession, pomp, and party to go.

  During this time nothing was seen of the Prince, in whose honor it all was. But finally, on the fourteenth day, he was brought out of the harem in red- and gold-worked robes, cap, and slippers, and presented to his father. The charity boys, too, were presented to their fathers, but on the other side of the court and seated not under canopies but only on low, simple carpets. The clothes of the charity boys, though doubtless dazzling to eyes used only to grey wool homespun, were of the same colors but of less lavish materials than those of the Prince.

  I had not seen the heir for several years, but more recently than his father had. At thirteen years old, he was a son of which even a Sultan could be proud. He had his mother’s height and could look his father straight in the eye already. He had neither his father’s red nor his mother’s blond hair. It was dark, but not quite black, rather dusty, one might say, as that of a wrestler just come up from the heat. It was thin but had a loose, tousled curl, again as if he had just enjoyed an invigorating bout of physical activity.

  His skin was his mother’s, like cowrie shell, with hot spots of color on the cheek bones from the excitement of the moment. But there was color inherited from another source: that finely formed porcelain was cracked by the blue-black of a scar across his cheek he’d gotten as an infant.

  No one else seemed to notice this shadow but me. From the Muslims were echoed exclamations thanking Allah, and even the most hopeful of foreign observers would be forced to write to his sovereign that the Turkish threat was strong for a good many years more.

  And perhaps my eyes were swayed by something I saw more clearly than the vagaries of flesh. Around his left wrist, which he flourished self-consciously whenever the opportunity presented itself, Muhammed had tied a white napkin. There would have been nothing so very remarkable in this were it not for the fact that I recognized the rough-trying-to-be-careful stitch along one edge. I had seen Gul Ruh thread her needle to take that stitch. I realized at once just how surely the two weeks of glorious entertainments had distracted me from the most important maneuvers of all—those inside the harem.

  The Sultan addressed his son in Persian and then Arabic; in both languages the boy acquitted himself fluently. Then the Shadow of Allah posed several questions on the poets, religion, and finally politics. Only in the latter was the young Prince’s response less than perfect. He failed to reflect the results of last year’s campaign in an answer concerning the Persian borders. As this displayed more concern with dusty textbooks than with practical knowledge, the teachers were chided. But the boy was not. The father himself put more weight on poetry than on politics.

  “After all,” the monarch explained, “there are always soldiers around in a hurry to correct you on such matters. But what man has ever seen to the full depth of a poem?”

&n
bsp; “And what poem to the depth of a woman’s heart?” replied the young Prince in improvised meter and rhyme that delighted all hearers.

  The wave of his wrist as he spoke did not delight me. My hand closed reflexively on my dagger. But whom was I supposed to attack?

  “Quite so, my boy. Quite so,” the Sultan replied with a chuckle and laid a fatherly hand on the lad’s shoulder. He seemed ready to say more perhaps about the boy’s own mother—but that would have been indiscreet in company. So, “We shall talk more,” the Sultan said instead. “Before you go off to the duties of a man in the sandjak of Magnesia, we must talk more.”

  “Nothing would honor me more, sir,” Muhammed said.

  I left my station as soon as I dared and hurried back to the bowels of the Serai.

  LIX

  “What is this sudden change of heart that you now look with such favor on your cousin?”

  Gul Ruh met me with a face I could not ruffle with the anger of accusations. Yes, she had seen her cousin several times. Safiye, who always acted as chaperon, had insisted. The boy’s courage needed bolstering, she said, to enable him to face this ordeal. Almost nothing could be wrong on the part of either male or female, she recited, that brought another Muslim to the age and strength of fighting for the Faith. I could find no argument to that.

  I noticed new jewels on my young lady’s neck and wrists. I also noticed she had acquired the same hot spots of color in her cheeks that Safiye and her son had. But instead of a healthy cavalry riding alert on the saddle of cheekbones, hers seemed to be the flush of a fever, blotchy and smeared like bad makeup with tears.

  She is intoxicated, I thought, drugged like the foreign ambassadors by the glory of this show Murad’s court can put on. Pray Allah it is not a permanent addiction and may be slept off as soon as the last of the bunting is down.

  Then I learned that Umm Kulthum had been in the Serai and had been treated not rudely, but with such decided neglect that she had found the festivities were better seen from her own home and had not returned. I bit my tongue in anger and glared hard at Safiye whenever our paths had to cross. But I said nothing.

  I defiantly stayed in the harem after this, but if I wanted to make a point by self-sacrifice, the point was in vain. Now that the Prince had been presented, what was left to see was minor.

  On the fourteenth day in the morning, Muhammed was brought into a pavilion heavily hung with brocade and splashing with fountains. And then, as one hundred holy men recited the Koran for the spectators all at the top of their lungs and all at different paces, the boy was made a man. The operation was announced, by the grace of Allah, as clean and successful. Murad celebrated and, incidentally, covered up any wounded wails there might have been (although I am assured there were none) by calling for two great vases filled with coins. Four men each were required to carry the vessels and the sovereign dispensed the contents to the scrambling populace.

  The afternoon grew hot. For those still in search of diversion there were philosophical debates and recitations of the traditions of the Prophet, but the harem had little taste for such things and preferred to debate among themselves on more personal topics.

  The afternoon grew hotter still—was this heat what the astrologers had seen when they picked the most auspicious day?—and word was brought from the circumcision pavilion that the Prince was in fever. His mother, nurses, and eunuchs had been there from the moment the holy man with his razor left. But now reinforcements were called for.

  Safiye called for Gul Ruh by name. “To comfort her cousin in his distress,” were the words. My young lady rose at once to oblige and at first I let her go without comment because I had never heard of a bride comforting her groom on his circumcision bed. The duties of a bride came later, after the healing. Still, on second thought, I insisted on going with her. She grumbled a bit, but in the end was in too much of a hurry to get downstairs to care just how much extra baggage came along.

  The pavilion was as carefully arranged for dramatic effect as had been any of the public entertainments. The crimson, pearl-seeded cap did much to drain every last bit of color from Muhammed’s face, pillowed against a great gold-tasseled bolster. Matching coverlets of cloth-of-gold and brocade covered him to the chin, the heavy fabric held away from the tender area by other bolsters.

  Besides boxes of exotic dates, the Prince’s diversions included a group of musicians playing in the forecourt outside and a reader reading Persian tales of romance and adventure behind a locked screen closet. Several cages of live birds swung from the arches of the pavilion to muffle the boy’s moans with happy chirps and in a niche by his head sparkled a small cooling fountain. But no diversion brought quite the relief of an opium draught given just before our arrival.

  At the door to the pavilion I stopped to fuss with Gul Ruh’s veil until she sighed wearily and stamped her foot as if to say: “Eunuchs! When they cut you, they turn you into neither more nor less than old biddy hens!” She had Nur Banu’s very tone—or perhaps Safiye’s—and that angered me. But I must confess that that was one time—there have been others—when I looked down at my hands and was both surprised and frustrated to find that they were the big, clumsy hands of a man instead of the small, gentle hands of a mother.

  “Even with the musicians and the reader behind screens, you cannot be too careful in such a public place,” I chided her. “And I do not want your cousin to see too much, either...”

  That did seem to subdue her somewhat and we went in together.

  The afternoon grew hotter still. The pavilion seemed to work like glass, to magnify and trap the heat within. The deep-sleep breath of the boy seemed to pervade the heat with vapors of opium for everyone. Many of the women who had come to nurse decided that the drugs were doing the job for them and that their time could be better spent in the baths that afternoon.

  I tried to suggest this to Gul Ruh. She parted her veil ever so slightly to let some fresh air in and I could see that what was rivulets of sweat on my face turned to steam inside there. But she insisted.

  Even when Safiye herself gave up a mother’s place, Gul Ruh would not follow. Were it not for the fact that I was convinced the girl was trying to shake me with the longest endurance-of misery, I, too, might have succumbed. But at that point I would not leave her all alone in the steamy, fever- and drug-laced room.

  Both of us nodded heavy heads. Gul Ruh propped hers up against the wall at the Prince’s simple, turbanless cap. I suppose the tiles there were somewhat cooled by the little fountain, for she was able thereby to maintain a watchfulness that had me think of stealing a few breaths of fresh air from outside. I must take such air if only to keep up with her level of alertness. So finally, that’s what I did.

  I hadn’t been out very long before I was brought back in a hurry by a most fearful cry. I found Gul Ruh a limp heap on the floor by the door to the reader’s closet, rocking back and forth and keeping time with rhythmic moans of “No! No! Can’t! Can’t!”

  The Prince joined her moans softly, but the drug was too powerful for him to do more, and though at close range it seemed that the agony of her grief could stir the dead, doubtless the fountain and chirping birds were doing their work, for no one else heard or came.

  “What is it? What is it, dear heart’s oasis?” I asked.

  I got no response but that “No! Can’t!” to which rhythm she clung as if it were breath itself. I could do no more than wrap her in my arms and rock and rock with her, giving a croon and a prayer for every moan of hers.

  “Help me, Abdullah,” she mouthed, voiceless as if crying from the bottom of a very deep well. It wasn’t much, but for one moment, the horrible spell of her own agitation was broken.

  “I will, Allah strengthen me, if you’ll but give me some word...”

  She was back under the spell of her singsong now, but it seemed weaker and came in gasps.

  “What is it? Is it the reader? Did he—what? Did he hurt you? Did he try and see more than he should or—?”
>
  She didn’t reply, but my pronunciation of the word reader had a profound effect on her. I got up and went to try his closet door to see...

  “No!” Gul Ruh cried, but it was a “No” totally different from any one she’d given before. “Abdullah, don’t. He’ll kill you.” That stopped the singsong short.

  “I was...” She paused, swallowed, gasped for breath. “I was supposed to let him in.”

  “To?”

  “Kill”

  “Prince Muhammed?”

  “Yes. Oh, Allah, Allah, how could I ever think of such a thing?”

  “But you didn’t think of it, did you?”

  She looked up at me.

  “Nur Banu put you up to it, didn’t she?”

  “She said it would be easy. All I had to do was open the...”

  “Easy for her, perhaps.”

  “It was going to look as if just the infection...”

  “Yes.” I nodded, gingerly stepping away from the closet door as if it were infection itself. “I suspect it would have worked, too.”

  “But I couldn’t do it.”

  “No. Of course you couldn’t.”

  “He’s my cousin. We played together when we were little.”

  “Praise Allah, He made you too good to forget.”

  “But is it good? Am I not just weak? She killed my father and Brabi. I must take revenge.”

  Gul Ruh made a half-hearted scramble towards the closet door again, but gave no struggle and actually fell into my arms with relief when I stopped her.

  “Who killed them?”

  “Aunt Safiye.”

  “Did Nur Banu tell you that?”

  “Yes.”

  Of course, I thought. Certain things began to fall into place for me immediately, but I didn’t say so to my charge. Nor did I indulge in pursuing these things in my own mind right then. Instead I suggested, “Did you ever stop to think it could be a lie?”

  “A lie?”