The Reign of the Favored Women

by Ann Chamberlin

  “Which may not be long, under the circumstances,” Ghazanfer mused pessimistically.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Although as Esmikhan’s particular slave, the word would have to come directly from her before I faced transfer, nonetheless I had felt great relief at the announcement and did not want to be bothered with clouds that day.

  “Just look,” Ghazanfer Agha told me, and called my attention to the fact that Safiye seemed, in but this short time, to have accumulated far more than her share of the black attendants. “She knew this decree was coming before the Sultan made it,” Ghazanfer explained. “She’d been buying up every black khadim the moment he hit Cairo for months. And if you don’t think there are the ambitious among them...but enough about us. I think it’s clear who has won the upper hand in this harem now.”

  And indeed it was. Almost as if buying that second Mu’awiya eunuch were a final act of desperation, Nur Banu seemed to have signed her own death warrant with it. She retreated to the small private garden palace she owned in her own right near the Edirne Gate and was reported to be ill.

  “Ill? The witch? Nonsense!” Safiye declared.

  But when a fortnight brought no news of improvement, my lady began to worry, particularly when rumors of “poison” began to fly.

  I found poison difficult to believe. “Nur Banu Kadin has always been too careful of such things,” I assured my lady. “She will eat nothing that has not sat upon her celadon plates, and that green ware wall turn black in warning at the first touch of anything unwholesome. She is always vigilant against mercury, monkshood, scorpions—all the usual methods.”

  I thought, but not aloud, that Nur Banu would not be poisoned because she herself was mistress of the art and continued, “Besides, if it were poison, wouldn’t we have heard—Allah forbid—of her death by now? Safiye would not do such a job halfway.”

  “Abdullah, you should not say so.”

  “Or we should have heard of her recovery, now that she is in her own palace with only her own slaves about her.”

  “I mean you should not suggest Safiye could have a hand in poison. It is some secret witch, some infidel enemy, not Safiye.”

  I sighed. Esmikhan would never believe the worst of which I knew her friend was capable. My lady had known she could not befriend both sides of the conflict. She had come to live on Safiye’s side of the demarcation line only after a long struggle with her heart. The deciding factor had been the thought that Nur Banu was Valide Sultan, there-

  fore Safiye was the weaker. Still she refused to credit more than a slight jarring of personalities to the fray: “It is the same with mothers- and daughters-in-law the world over.” I knew it was useless to try to shove a darker sin than simple liveliness and a strong desire for her own way upon my lady’s best friend.

  Still, Nur Banu was my lady’s stepmother, as close a being to mother as she could remember, although nurse had the more tender connotations in her mind. When Nur Banu’s retreat had extended more than a month, Esmikhan knew she must make the effort to cross Constantinople to pay a call.

  Safiye did not thwart her. “Yes. Please go and find out what the old scorpion is up to.”

  “Safiye!” Esmikhan pleaded compassion.

  Safiye was unrepentant. “I’ve no doubt it’s some sort of witchcraft of her own and we must be warned.”

  Safiye even lent the new carriage she had as a lavish gift of friendship from England’s Queen Elizabeth. I’m not certain how the Fair One juggled this relationship at the same time as her continuing one with Catherine de’ Medici, who was more powerful in France than ever. I can only imagine that Catherine and Safiye shared secrets like Italian schoolgirls at the end of the garden when the nuns are elsewhere. And where was the room for a third in this? What fates were decided between the three women will never be known. But I am sure no life from the Sea of Marmara to La Manche was unaffected.

  I would have thought close ties with France would preclude them across the Channel. But then, the unfogged eyes of power know no love of country, no boundaries. Safiye’s correspondence with England’s Elizabeth was a little more public if for no other reason than that it had to go through the dragomans for translation. Elizabeth’s letters spoke of a Muslim East and Protestant West crushing the idolatry of Catholicism between them.

  “Perhaps so,” I heard Safiye reply aloud and offhandedly. Religion—anybody’s—had never been of overriding concern to her. “But if England had not thrown out Latin with the Church, I could have done more for Elizabeth. She and I could have communicated better.” It is my suspicion that Safiye never did take Elizabeth’s envoys more seriously than their persistence demanded. “In that northern climate,” she insisted, “people have no time for culture. They are too busy trying to keep warm.”

  But Elizabeth had sent a carriage.

  It had taken some doing to find Turkish horses who could pull the thing, not to mention the reassembly required after two months at sea. In the meantime the plain wood paneling and salt-spray-stiffened leather seats had been ripped out, replaced by silken brocade divans and mother-of-pearl in a dozen intricate patterns. Shutters and curtains went to the windows. The final result was more in harmony with eastern taste.

  And now, wherever Safiye rode, something was always threatened with being crushed. If not idolatry, certainly local Muslim pedestrians. The question was raised whether the attention the carriage’s passing ignited were in keeping with eastern taste. Certainly the harem’s reserve and dignity must suffer. Others had a more basic complaint: the filth the horses left behind them in the streets.

  “They’ll get used to it,” Safiye said to any and all objections.

  And in friendship Esmikhan could not refuse the offer to take the carriage to Nur Banu’s.

  The ride was a good deal rougher than that provided by well-trained sedan bearers over Constantinople’s streets. The streets had been paved within the last century but not with such contrivances in mind. Still, I had to admit a carriage was faster—it could quite take the breath away. It got us out to the Edirne Gate with a remarkable amount of time to spare between the two morning prayers.

  And a eunuch could ride as well instead of trotting alongside. Safiye’s guardians—except Ghazanfer—rode up on top with the driver. But when there was only one woman passenger—and she congenial—there was room within the cab. I enjoyed that and told myself firmly we must not do this too often. Only by walking had I managed to escape that curse of many in my condition: a mind-numbing obesity.

  The carriage was faster, but Esmikhan required the extra time before the prayer call to recover her equilibrium after such a ride. And where the horses were taken to recoup I cannot imagine: Few palaces were provided with such accommodations in those days. But the edge of town was not far off. No doubt the driver just took the patient beasts out the gate and hobbled them among the grazing sheep beyond the walls.

  In time, we went in.

  The smell of Nur Banu’s rooms, even halfway down the hall, was not that of poison but the vinegar, moldy lemon rind of a malignant cancer.

  LXII

  How long, I wondered, had this dreaded disease been coming on? And the Valide Sultan refused to call retreat?

  The shutters of the room into which we were ushered were draped and drawn. The Valide Sultan could no longer bear light upon her face. The chamber was close and stifling hot, kept that way by half a dozen braziers whose constant stoking with pungent sandalwood was the full-time and single-minded task of one maid. The odors of hot healing herbs—southernwood, jasmine oil—added to the dense, murky atmosphere. But they could not camouflage the stale, sour smell of sweating attendants in health nor that of the patient, her opium, and her nausea.

  Before we could fill our lungs enough to catch our breaths, the heat of this air had us in a sweat, as it did everyone else in the room save Nur Banu. Nur Banu’s torso, stripped to the shalvar, betrayed, even in the half light, the wasting of her flesh. She had shrunk down to the most b
asic harsh angles and jutting joints. These caught what light there was in sharp sheen and shadows, like naked bone, with no softening curve in between.

  This wasting was not the work of but a week or two. The Valide Sultan must have hidden her condition from Safiye’s camp for months under heavier and heavier garments. And Safiye might have interpreted the change, if she considered it at all, as simply more and more greed for finery.

  How ironic, that the final assault should come not from an outside enemy, but by betrayal of Nur Banu’s own body, that body whose very curves had been the route to power in the first place.

  In the flurry of our arrival, a plump yellow cat jumped up among sample silks spread by a seamstress on one of the low tables covering a brazier. The fire-stoking maid shooed him off.

  Nur Banu smiled wryly, patient with a beast’s liveliness when she had so little herself. “That is a sign it will snow.” She gave the usual superstitious interpretation of such an omen. The dull grey haze in her once-remarkable black eyes belied her hope. Personally, I doubted that she had such a thing as a future to divine.

  As if new clothes were a guarantee against death until they could be worn at least once, Nur Banu was in the process of ordering yet more lengths of yet heavier silk worked with yet more gold and gemstones. All this when her doctoring required that she be naked to the waist much of the time.

  The Fig was there, leeching. She shot me a tyrant’s glance, but went about her business wordlessly.

  “I enjoyed a two-week respite.” Nur Banu smiled crookedly at my lady in an attempt at bravery, but hadn’t the vigor to talk of anything but her treatment. “She would not leech as long as the moon was waxing.”

  Nur Banu looked weakly at the Fig for at least the strength of surgeon’s confirmation. The Fig must have given it, but I saw no such return glance.

  “During the waxing of the moon,” Nur Banu found energy to go on, “my blood would be increasing. Good, new, healthy blood which might flow too vigorously, might not clot soon enough if bled. But now that the month is waning...”

  Nur Banu shrugged one hollowed, bony shoulder apologetically. The Fig pressed that shoulder back into the cushions to give herself an undisturbed plane of operations. Nur Banu waved the seamstress around to the front of her to continue her selections. Esmikhan followed, I think to escape the sight I continued to endure.

  The Fig began applying the leeches, the best Anatolian leeches, starved to voracity. She scooped them quickly out of a Chinese porcelain jar and pressed their little heads down to give them the idea, precise spaces apart on the bony white back. In the half-light I imagined the creatures could be slithering slabs of the Fig’s own blue-black flesh. She was layering them upon her patient in an attempt to transfer strength and corpulence.

  The Fig periodically sought out her patient’s pulse throughout the treatment until at last the fat worms began to drop off of their own accord, sated. Then the Fig hissed quietly through the gap in her teeth. The little trickles of blood that wormed down the pallid skin after their makers were likewise red-black. More bleeding would be necessary until the healthy blood flowed, with a healthy golden sheen as its basis instead of choking bitumen—like rubies mined during the moon’s waxing. The patient may at least weaken, I thought, until mercifully death takes her.

  Nur Banu found Esmikhan insufficient as distraction, once the new costumes were ordered. My lady, I suspected, found the proximity of death took her tongue into its grasp. Nur Banu called for a storyteller instead. This large, waistless woman was ordered to “Tell the same again.”

  “The same” was, incongruously I thought at first, an adventure of Alexander the Great. How, “in the time before, when the sieve was in the straw, the camel was a street crier, and I was rocking my father’s cradle,” the ancient king marched his army to the very center of the world. At the center of the world is the Mountain of Kaf, which holds up the sky and which “offers only space enough for a man to crawl beneath its pinnacle and the base of heaven.”

  Alexander sent one of his bravest up to this mountaintop to see what he might see. The man came down quite shaken. All he could report was that at the top he had met, coming up from the other side, “one just like me in every way.” From among his uniform, disciplined ranks, Alexander chose another, then another to attempt the same mission. In the end the king decided he must go up himself.

  And what he met on the summit was something he never expected: another Alexander. He who thought himself unique was confronted by his twin, identical in pride, inimicability, and peerlessness.

  “So Alexander returned,” the tale concluded, “much humbled, having learned there are worlds upon worlds, generations upon generations, and only Allah is One. Three apples fell from the sky,” ran the traditional “happy ever after,” “one went to the one who told the story, the second to the one who wasted her breath, and the third to the one who listened to her tale. As each heart finds its own happiness, may Allah grant each of you find your true love in this narrow world.”

  As soon as she could politely do so after this, my lady took her leave. She offered profuse wishes for her stepmother’s recovery and promises that she would soon return. But I could tell that in spite of her natural charity, Esmikhan longed for the carriage’s confines as the more comfortable surroundings. She would curse herself every day she left those promises unfulfilled. But sometimes charity requires more bravery than my lady had been given to go along with the rest of her nature.

  As I climbed into the cushions beside her, Esmikhan took out a linen handkerchief and began to weep. “It is too bad, too bad, mashallah! Nur Banu Kadin admits defeat.” I think it was my lady herself who admitted defeat. The sudden lurch of the horses compounded her heartache.

  That is another drawback of a carriage: It cut down on intimacy in voice quality if nothing else. Above the head-splitting noise of the ride, I begged Esmikhan not to grieve.

  “To fight against the will of Allah—as the Valide Sultan’s death seems clearly to be—is to deny His mercy and to draw out our own pain. She should not try to fight heaven’s will, Nur Banu Kadin should not. It will only draw out her agony—and that of those who love her.” I took my lady’s trembling hand and she pressed mine in return and gratitude.

  “At least I can report back to Topkapi that there is no poison, no witchcraft here.”

  “Poison would be easier,” I murmured, hoping again that the Fig might at least hasten her patient’s demise.

  And yet I found myself dreading the Valide Sultan’s death not so much for the sake of the woman herself but for the counterweight she had always been to keep Safiye’s ambition in check. Now—but I didn’t want to consider that now through the ear-numbing clatter of Safiye’s carriage. The noise totally engulfed us, offered no escape, and seemed ominous indeed. Who should counter that malignancy now, if only with malignancy of her own?

  No one, drummed the horses’ shoes in answer. And virtue, like the little pat of cream of a hand I held, was no defense against such evil. Like the tallest minaret, perfect virtue probably only attracted the destructive glance of lightning.

  Such thoughts brought tears of fear, of empathy to my own eyes. And though a weeping eunuch is not so extraordinary as a weeping man—our natures allow, nay, demand it—I fought desperately to change the subject. For my lady’s sake, I must change my emotion.

  “I read an interesting series of poems the other day,” I told her, “written by a countrywoman of mine. Only one of the verses sticks in my mind. But shall I recite it?”

  A poetess is not such an anomaly in the harem as it is in the West. Indeed, most of the new poems Esmikhan had ever heard had, naturally enough, been written and published within the harem. The writer’s sex did not impress her as much as it did me.

  But she, too, seemed grateful for the distraction and jumped at it. “Please do.”

  I did:

  “I am safe now.

  But I remember the danger

  When through yo
ur eyes

  And handsome face

  Love held out to me

  His burning torch.

  And intent on wounding me

  In a thousand ways

  He had gathered the flames of my fire

  Even from the river of your eloquence...”

  I faltered, remembering too late why the verse had had an impact. But the little hand in mine gave me a squeeze, lent me courage to go on.

  “I transform my mad love

  Into friendship now

  And, thinking of your immeasurable gifts,

  I reshape my soul to emulate you.”

  And cool friendship eased the carriage’s jarring way.

  LXIII

  Nur Banu died without seeing another snowstorm, on Wednesday, the twenty-second day of Dhu’l Ka’da, the seventh of December in the year of our Lord 1583. Her son Murad put on black in mourning, the first time a sultan had ever done such a thing for his mother. Guilt makes people—even sultans—do unusual things.

  Murad helped to carry the bier as well, out of the garden palace and through the twisting streets to the mausoleum at Aya Sophia. Here Nur Banu would rest eternally next to her lord Selim and the five little princes who had died in order to raise her son to the throne.

  None of the deceased’s new dresses went with her: One goes naked to the grave in Islam. Over the simple shroud of seamless white silk rested Nur Banu’s headscarf, a few favorite hair ornaments, the braids of silk she had added to eke out her own hair as it had thinned towards the end. That was all. And she was gone.

  Now Safiye was alone in her kingdom.

  On the surface, this seemed not so bad. Miraculously, the sudden deaths of little princes stopped. The household multiplied at a rate unprecedented—Murad even became a father twice in a single night. The most serious conflicts were over whose infant should rock in the hammered-gold, jewel-encrusted cradle of the Ottomans. And Safiye’s word never failed to settle the matter.