The Reign of the Favored Women

by Ann Chamberlin

  “The upshot of all of this is that Safiye has realized that though she rules the harem as a general his army, there are some things terror and might have no strength over. She fears poison and the dagger and so she sleeps here and there like a gypsy within her own walls. But that is only because those are methods she uses. She has not yet learned even to put a name to the devices that in the end will be her defeat. They will defeat her because she thinks they are harmless. And I wonder who will be at her bedside when they come.”

  The green eyes grew cloudy and looked away. “Somehow,” Ghazanfer said, “I fear I may be the only one.”

  LXIX

  I saw Ghazanfer one more time. I had been living with Gul Ruh for several years and had endured the hospitality but uselessness as long as I could. I’d found ever more occupation for the long hours with the dervishes, but that year it occurred to me that rather than sitting and waiting for my friend Hajji to appear, I should go in search of him myself. I determined, with that Rajab’s march, to join the rest of the pilgrims on the road to Mecca. Ghazanfer Agha had heard of my plans and came to wish me Allah’s good favor.

  “It is in my power as kapu aghasi,” he suggested, “to have you assigned to the brotherhood of khuddam guarding the holy places. That place of greatest honor in the world.”

  “Thank you, but I am not certain yet I will want to stay in Mecca or Medina.”

  A burst of childish laughter came from the harem. Ghazanfer turned his green eyes towards the sound. “Yes,” he said. “I can see there is much to draw you back again.”

  “And I have never been what one could call a truly converted Muslim.”

  “No. It is Allah’s will that you are a Seeker. But just in case...”

  Without further word he drew a thick legal parchment from his bosom. Curious, I unfolded it. I discerned quickly the formal seals of Sultan and kapu aghasi, then read enough below them of praise connected with my own name to blur my eyes with tears. I folded the paper and placed it in my own bosom. It still held the warmth of Ghazanfer’s very feminine breasts.

  I was speechless, dumb for words to express my gratitude. At length I stammered the most generous thing I could think of: “You...you could come with me. I would like it better if I wasn’t a total stranger.”

  “Not this year. I can’t. I have—one more bit of business to do.”

  “What is that?”

  But he wouldn’t tell me right away.

  Instead, he gave me a small purse of gold that I might carry, along with his name, to the House of Allah. There was such a sense of resolution and new beginning about him. This sense seemed so similar to what I myself had been feeling in recent days that this purse, this physical declaration that he would not be joining the caravan quite took me by surprise.

  It was a day in early spring of glorious sun. The old bones seemed young again and thrilled as if it were several months later in the year. Ghazanfer and I sat in the doorway to the courtyard. We took more interest in the pattern of sunlight tossed through the swelling buds of the fig tree outside than in the sherbets and pistachios between us. The conversation, too, seemed to hold little interest although Ghazanfer pursued it—a tale of one further palace intrigue—because it was what little common ground lay between us now.

  The Sultan’s third-born son was a little fellow his mother had named Muhammed in an attempt to flatter attention away from the Greek girl’s two older boys.

  “When that did not work,” Ghazanfer said, “she turned to magic instead.”

  “Ah, magic again,” I nodded wearily. “That vile thing.”

  “This woman found a dervish who, upon seeing her son on a horse for the first time was moved to prophecy, ‘By Allah, give that child the head of the Islamic army and he will bring the failing Empire back to the ascendancy we knew during the time of Suleiman.’ Of course the nature of our master is such that he will hear such things and believe them. Safiye had to act swiftly. Before Muhammed the Sultan could consult with the Divan on the matter, she had the child, his mother and the prophetic dervish...well taken care of.”

  Ghazanfer coughed and hid his final words in a sip of sherbet for which he really had no desire. Then I saw that this was because my young lady’s littlest son had joined us in the garden. The boy was supposed to be memorizing his lessons for tomorrow and, considering his age, was doing quite well with the obscure Arabic of the Koranic passage. His tutors said he would be like his father and grandfather before him, a great scholar, and have the Book memorized very shortly.

  But the child did like a break from time to time—he could hardly resist the weather. He came and ask us what we were doing, and when our only, boring reply was “just visiting,” he clambered on my knees and helped himself to pistachios. He made fighting galleys from the shells—whole ones Turkish, broken ones the “heathen Christians”—and played at sea battles for a while. And when he got too loud, I scolded him to study once again.

  When the boy trotted off again, Ghazanfer smiled and said, only half aloud, “Perhaps that was one day she had mercy. The day that boy was born. If so, Allah bless her for it, for He can bless her for nothing else.”

  I asked what he meant, but Ghazanfer at first refused to explain. I pressed him and at last he said:

  “A son of the Blood. That lad is a threat to the throne. Even if a very distant one, there are some who might see in him a way to wrench the crested turban from Safiye’s Muhammed. At least I’m sure such a chance is not lost in her mind.”

  His tone sent my mind back past the last little diversion of pistachio sea battles to the dervish-prophesied and condemned prince and I shuddered. “But thank Allah she never meddled with such distant princes.”

  “Didn’t she?”

  “I mean, not with any outside the palace harem itself.”

  “Didn’t she?” Ghazanfer said again. “I mean, wasn’t it obvious?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, my friend.” I laughed nervously.

  He took another sip of sherbet and frowned darkly.

  “Well, I will tell you,” he said, “as it is clear you never guessed. I will tell you because it will ease my blackened soul. Like confession to our village priest did when I was a boy. And because where I go from here, it will be better if people understand. At least people whose good opinion I cherish.”

  “My friend, what are you talking about?” I laughed again at his riddles.

  “I mean the little sons of Esmikhan,” he hissed as if spitting out poison.

  “It was Allah’s will,” I said, shrugging, “that they should all be born dead.”

  “None of them was born dead. Three full-term lads and none of them should live? The girl alone should live? Surely you have a low opinion of your late mistress’s ability to bear children.”

  “What do you mean?” My blood ran cold. “The midwife...”

  “Yes, the midwife. The old Quince.”

  “Safiye told you this?” My clumsy eunuch’s voice betrayed me in a squeak.

  “She did not, not even me, her faithful Ghazanfer.” He spoke his own name and its faithfulness with bitter scorn. “But I began to guess. Especially after the case of Mitra...”

  The great eunuch’s voice faded for a moment. When he recovered, he continued, “Then one day last summer I went to the infirmary.”

  “I thought the Quince was dead.”

  “No. The new midwife. The Fig. I asked her point-blank what she knew of the matter.

  “‘I’m not sure,’ was her reply.

  “‘But you have suspicions?’ I pressed her.

  “‘Things the Quince, my dear, dead lover, said when the fit was on her.’

  “I pressed for details. Nothing very clear.

  “‘But I know how we can find out,’ she said finally. ‘If you’re willing.’

  “I was willing.”

  Ghazanfer paused in his tale, sipped his drink, and rested his sight with unguarded pleasure on a bed of crimson and white tulips. Sometime later I
would wonder at the uncharacteristic effusion he displayed then. All I can say is that it was a very uncharacteristic experience he had to describe. Whenever I wondered. How could he do such things, this taciturn, unemotional khadim? the simple thought that he did this for me, so I would know, kept me listening. Listening with deep appreciation.

  “I was no longer quite so walling as at first,” Ghazanfer said, “when I made my way as directed to a house tucked in beside the aqueduct later that evening. Bizarre, barbaric sights and sounds greeted me before I reached the door.

  “The fanatics at the medrese must hear this, I thought, and hesitated to enter. You know, as a work of charity, I have established a religious school in the neighborhood of the aqueduct. I am ashamed to say that some of my scholars were among the most vicious to Jews and Christians during the recent disturbances. I cut funding to the most disruptive, but I can’t have rooted them all out. They were barbaric to the People of the Book. I could imagine what they’d do to such an assembly as this was, even before I knocked at the door.

  “But then I thought, Well, if I’m in the lodge, instead of here, outside, I may be able to save some lives when the mob comes, just by being recognized. And I suppose I must have been recognized by the sullen doorkeeper or spoken for by the Fig, for I was admitted without question.

  “Every African in Constantinople must have been there. And I, a minority of one. A minority not only in color but in soul. A pair of our like from the black eunuch’s college were flailing on waist-high drums. At least these are colleagues, I thought. But they were not.

  “These khuddam had stripped to the hips, and without the camouflage of long fur robes, the tortures a man’s body suffers without its male parts was grotesquely evident on them: the sunken barrel chest, over-long arms like those who’ve been stretched on a rack—and somehow survived. Together and in turns they beat out the rhythm with hands so bony and twisted they couldn’t lay them flat. When such a deformity overcomes a khadim, he orders the sleeves of his robes cut longer and tucks those hands up under the sable cuffs.

  “But I can hardly say these men were our colleagues. They had no impulse to hide. Their talons flew like birds of prey over the untanned hides of their painted drums. They beat with such vigor! I began to suspect that every man who’d ever hurt them from the first moment of their capture in the bosom of their mother Africa until their last bastinado was getting his just deserts under those twisted hands.

  “The beat was so heavy I could feel each reverberation in the core of my sternum. It twitched in my joints. I could hardly keep from leaping to my feet and dancing myself. None of the others in the room made any attempt to resist such impulses at all.

  “Chickens were brought in to the midst of the dance, black capons, squawking, fanning with their feathers. Their throats were quickly cut, and presently the smell of cooking birds mingled with that of pine smoke, raw blood, and sweat on hot, black bodies. The bodies of porter and scullery maid, laundress and many, many eunuchs seemed to swell in that environment like purple grapes in the sun. They acquired a luscious, sweet juiciness. For here was a mingling of the sexes that would have turned the beard on any medrese studenta premature grey. A mingling, charged with bestiality. And yet somehow totally innocent at the same time. Even the khuddam were affected by the spirit—by the throbbing virility.

  “There is nothing for me here, I was convinced. It’s too wild, too strange, nothing to do with my world. The mob from the medrese may come if they must and do their worst. Against this strangeness I cannot, will not stop them.

  “But as if she had been watching me, as if she read my thoughts, the moment I turned to leave, the Fig made her entrance into the assembly from a curtained inner door. And then I couldn’t leave. You know how buffoonish the midwife usually looks in her Turkish dress, how overdone, how ostentatious. Well, suddenly I saw what clothes Allah had created her to wear.

  “Simple lengths of brilliant fabric in unusual patterns skirted from her hips. Great, simple golden hoops in her ears, feathers of the sacrificed chickens sticking with a little blood but mostly of their own accord in the round, wiry black pincushion of her hair. Her neck was draped in strings of gems, but also other things that seemed more precious: shells. The severed, spurred legs of cocks, talons flexed. Claws. Bones. Between these ornaments and the first roll of cloth at her waist, there was nothing. Only smooth, blue-black skin, smooth, black, purple-tipped breasts that swung slightly with each step as if tossing out a challenge to the world.

  “I thought. Did the Quince ever see the Fig thus? Did the Quince ever come to the lodge, looking for new cures, perhaps? If she did, I no longer question the rumors that they were lovers. Indeed, I found myself envying the Quince her fortune.

  “The Fig moved in and out of the crowd, greeting everyone by name, accepting kisses to her hands, her hem, her feet, accepting gifts and offerings. We exchanged nods, no more.

  “Then the drummers who had seemed to be fading somewhat with exhaustion, suddenly leapt with new life. A new rhythm sprang off the young, tight drumskins. And almost in the same instant I saw—I actually saw the rhythm enter the Fig. Something like a pulsing sheen, just below the black hull of her skin.

  “She moved, but the movement was no longer hers. At first another jerked her joints, sometimes at impossible angles, as if she were no more than a puppet on strings. But then the puppeteer slipped down the strings and molded the midwife’s limbs to her own.

  “It took no more than an indrawn breath for the audience to fall back and give the Fig room. The out-breath mouthed the name, ‘Yavrube, Yavrube!’ This, I knew, was the name of their demon goddess. And now—the name of their priestess as well.

  “Before, the Fig had moved with confidence, as she always does. But how much more so now! She whirled, she twirled, she hopped, she dropped, she rolled, she heaved, she rippled, every space of flesh like small wavelets passing on a dark, moonlit water.

  “Such energy! I have only seen children with such energy before, naughty children, and then the little ones soon drop with exhaustion. But on and on the possessed Fig went. The irises of her eyes had rolled out of sight, a twitch of her head as she passed rained me with sweat. Others crowded together to receive such rain, considering it a blessing. Constricting to the drums, you could hear her breath, nearing the point where mortality must burst, dragging in and out of fraying lungs like an anchor chain in and out of the hold.”

  Can this have been as much like the dance of the dervishes as it sounds? I asked myself. Where every man accepts the divine, not just a leader. Ghazanfer had never been to a tekke or he might have made the connection. But I said nothing, letting him continue.

  “And then—the strings were cut. The bones seemed to fly from the Fig as she melted to the ground, bitumen on a hot day. Some went to roll her gently over, but the eyes were still unflawed mother-of-pearl set in her ebony face, unseeing. Yavrube still animated her limbs. The people stepped back, in awe.

  “And then, the voice came. I recognized the voice, but it was not the Fig’s. It was the Quince’s.”

  “The dead Quince?”

  “Syllable for syllable. As the words shuddered from her, Yavrube moved like a woman under her lover. It was obscene. But somehow, not so in that company, with those drums. And I could not look away.

  “And the voice said: ‘Babies’.”

  LXX

  I couldn’t help but interrupt Ghazanfer at this point by repeating, “Babies?”

  The great Hungarian nodded. “ ‘Babies. Their insides all bled out.’ “

  “In the Quince’s voice?”

  “Exactly. It gave me such a start to hear it coming out of those full black lips instead of the Quince’s thin, tart ones.”

  “I, too, have heard the Quince say those precise words. When she saw my little lady. But what does it mean?”

  “The voice went on to say this. At every lying in of Esmikhan, the Quince, under Safiye’s orders—because she loved Safiye beyond all
reason—”

  “She is not the first to have done so,” I murmured.

  “At every lying in, the Quince was to see if the child was male or female.”

  “So she did. So does every midwife.”

  “And only then was she to cut the cord.”

  “She ties the cord off and then cuts it. I was at the lying in when Gul Ruh was born. I know how such things are done.”

  “Ah, but only if it were a girl child was she to tie the cord. If it was a male child, one who because of his mother’s blood and the high name of his father Sokolli Pasha might prove a threat to Safiye’s son’s throne, then the cord was to be left untied.”

  A shiver crept up my back and spread across my shoulders. I remembered something Esmikhan had begun to say as she watched this business of the Quince’s hand, something she found odd, new, at the birth of her daughter after three tiny sons. But I had not listened. And Esmikhan had been too weak to find the words.

  “Such a tiny little mistake,” Ghazanfer was continuing. “But in a matter of minutes, never more than an hour, the strongest child must succumb. ‘He was weak from birth,’ they say. ‘He was never meant to live.’ “

  Now my mind went blank with the horror. There had been inklings, perhaps, but I had always blanked them out, too. Now could it be true? Our lives, all of our lives had revolved around a truth of a different nature. Much of my lady’s undying love for Ferhad was because he had given her the one thing Sokolli had been unable to. Sokolli had gone to his grave, thinking himself a lesser man, content to be a cuckold. Esmikhan’s crippling—she might have recovered had she not been so convinced her sins deserved a punishment. I had allowed that adultery because all the while I thought...and who could say but what Gul Ruh was the perfect sort of child she was for no other reason than that from her very first day she had sensed...?