Reign of the Favored Women (11 page)

Belqis draped the paper like a tablecloth over the low, portable desk she wrote at, her knees drawn up under her on the floor. Finding by close inspection that she had the rough side up, she turned it over to the smooth, so that no fibers would clog her pen. Here again was Eastern manufacture evident, for the Turks had not the mechanical hammers, a recent German invention, and relied on hand burnishing which left uneven streaks on the smoothed side.

Belqis took an agate stone that exactly fit in the palm of her hand and finished up the poli.sh to her personal .specifications. Her actions released the hard, sharp, new-paper smell of animal-hide sizing like a knife into the harem’s usually cloying, heavy scent of too many women wearing too much perfume. In their sizing, too, the Muslims liked echoes of the ancient parchment.

Belqis studied her page with satisfaction, smeared now as it was with the midmorning light that dappled in from the courtyard through the lattices. The whole document, when it arrived in France, would .speak of things exotic, the integrity of an ancient tradition and its opulence, even before the first word was read.

This dappling did not seem to mar the paper’s perfection in her view; women are used to seeing things, half-light, half-dark, like that. Their eyes adjust from earliest infancy. “If the sun had not been female, even she would not have been allowed in the harem.” An Eastern pundit had once written those words, playing on the fact that in Arabic, sun is feminine. Unlike the male sun in Italian, a beneficence, the Arabic is a malevolent fury, a barren woman who seeks to scorch the entire world to her own fate. Under the harem’s lattices, even women condemned to childlessness like Belqis were protected from all but the most innocent of that celestial female’s wrath.

Belqis laid out her pens, her inks in five colors. Deciding after the morning’s labors she would have to grind more black, she did so, oak galls on a slate palette. Rose water turned the powder to liquid.

Now Belqis set a straight edge down the right-hand side of the paper, leaving a generous margin at least as wide as her own palm, and marked a crease at this point the full length of the page with the rounded tip of a stick of sandalwood. In France, they would smell that fragrance, and the distilled roses in the ink.

Then the scribe sat back on her heels and waited orders to begin.

Something did not seem quite right to me, not about Belqis but about Safiye. I could never have ease in the Fair One’s presence; I told myself there was probably no more to suspect than usual. Yet I couldn’t help but probe the deceptively still and murky waters a little.

“How did you become a correspondent of Catherine de’ Medici?” I asked. “She is the Queen Mother and effective ruler of France.”

“Quite simple.” Safiye displayed no hesitation to answer directly. “Catherine sent customary gifts with her new ambassador and Ghazanfer had only to suggest to the Divan that since these were gifts from a woman, it would not be appropriate for men to accept them. They were meant to be kept behind the curtain of modesty.”

“That makes perfect sense.” Esmikhan’s tone was warning me off. My distrust of her best friend always grieved her.

“Ghazanfer saw that they came to me,” Safiye continued. “They were nothing much, nothing the outer treasury would miss: some lace, a casket of onyx engraved with nude figures.”

Esmikhan said, “Such things are better suited to the harem in the first place—if not to be tossed out at once for obscenity.”

“What we thought exactly. Still, any gift requires a thank-you note.”

That was as far as I dared carry my questions. So I fell silent, as a eunuch ought, and determined to watch all the more carefully instead.

“The usual sort of formulaic opening.” Safiye turned to instruct her scribe.

And in firm black, Belqis wrote “Allah” in what would be the largest letters on the page, leaving again an elegant, opulent margin at the top.

“Allah is the Helper” centered carefully in the field of yellow-white.

“An excellent choice of invocation on a letter that would beg the receiver’s aid.” Esmikhan gave her blessing, whether Heaven would or no.

I suspected the whole elegance of the parallel would be totally lost in France’s court, even in a direct translation. But I couldn’t dampen my lady’s spirits so.

The scribe, meanwhile, dropped down a line and without dictation went on, lavishly praising the lords of the universe in descending order, all in rhymed prose couplets. Allah was “the Absolute and the Veiler,” the “Originator of shapes and colors...exalted be He above His Creation.” And that Creation was “ornamented by the perfumed sepulcher and pure soul of Lord Muhammed, the Seal of the Prophets...the beautiful reflection of the Garden of Paradise in the dark pool of earth...the crown on the head of happiness, the pearl in the shell of existence.”

Over every skillful turn of phrase, Esmikhan exclaimed, sometimes so struck at the verbiage that she could manage no more than a “
Mashallah
,” of wonder.

For her part, Belqis, to whom such turns of language were second nature, most of them trite repetitions and mainstays of the imperial scribal schoolroom, had her own pleasure. For each phrase, she changed to a different color ink, until the scarlet, blue, black, crimson, and gold alternated all down the page. And the flourishes of her final letters, the great sweep of loose tails and flight of upper and lower curves gave the impression of vines and tendrils, even of birds, in a full-color garden of visual delights.

Belqis’s heart was towards illumination, obviously, towards delicate and intricate replication of Allah’s most beautiful handiwork on the tight, formalized confines of her page. But since Allah Himself, perhaps in jealous rage, had prohibited such blasphemy to those of His creatures who worshipped him, her art took this form instead, splitting the bounds of her casing quietly, subtly, as the rosebush did in the harem entryway.

All at once my mind jerked back from such musings as if it had been burned. I had suddenly realized that under cover of Belqis’s riveting performance, Safiye had taken out a sheet of paper of her own. So may sleight-of-hand masters work their magic in the public squares. Or pickpockets.

I looked closer. Thin, white, and watermarked with a crown, I recognized Safiye’s paper as coming from a Venetian firm. No one would connect it with the harem. And the Fair One had taken up a pen of her own and been writing for I knew not how long. On pretense of keeping an eye on Gul Ruh out in the yard, I slipped around so I could read some of Safiye’s writing instead.

Safiye wrote in Italian, of course. Her pen was outpacing the scribe’s, each painstakingly executed syllable of the Turkish equaling three or four words of the quick, hard Italian letters. And in the place of airy, meaningless flattery came much of substance.

I could not read everything over Safiye’s shoulder, draped with her thick blond braids. I did not dare let on that I suspected too much, raising either her scorn or her increased caution—I’m not certain which I feared more. That she did not scrupulously hide what she wrote convinced me that, as far as this letter was concerned, she did not care too much that I knew what message she was smuggling abroad.

Then Safiye noticed my attention and smiled, thick with more diversion—flirtation. Such a look would always send a stabbing memory pain to my groin—and set me even more on guard.

Safiye addressed my watchfulness: “Any letter in Turkish would have to go through the outer clerk’s office to receive a Divan-approved translation into whatever foreign language necessary. But you see, since Catherine and I are both native speakers of Italian, there is no need. I make my own translation as we go along and spare the clerk’s office the trouble.”

The points of almond in Safiye’s glance dared me to call her on this, and I almost did.

But though Esmikhan might not see the danger in a parallel letter, she did see it in my opening mouth. “Pray Allah, you two,” my lady said. “Don’t start your bickering in Italian again. I can’t bear it.”

So, for my lady’s sake, I resisted. Still my face burned under the almond sweetness of Safiye’s triumphant smile. I knew she was diverting my attention, so I redoubled it, yet under such a veil that it may seem to have halved instead.

Obviously, what Safiye wrote in Italian on paper with a Venetian watermark was not going to be a faithful translation of the Turkish. I suspected she’d already written two or three lines while Belqis was still smoothing and creasing in the margin.

Just as obviously, this was not the first time the Fair One had employed this means of smuggling correspondence, not just to lovesick Venetian attachés but to foreign heads of state. France had refused to join the Christian alliance at Lepanto, I recalled. Was this due to Safiye’s hand? How many other foreign states received her letters-within-letters? What else could be laid at her deceptively cloistered door? What did she offer them? And what did they grant in return? The answers to such dangerous questions were impossible to answer at the moment. But I must try to begin.

As opposed to Belqis’s flower garden, Safiye limited her letter’s greeting to an affectionate “My dear sister queen.” This gave her plenty of time to thank Catherine for the recent gift of a copy of a work that had been dedicated to the French queen’s father, Niccolo Machiavelli’s
The Prince
. “Perhaps no one but yourself can understand how like inspiration the words came to me as I read,” Safiye’s quick hand wrote. “I devoured the whole in a sitting, and have since reread it many times.” Reading this over the blond-haired shoulder made my blood run cold. I knew
The Prince
, having found a copy of it myself in a shop specializing in foreign texts near Beyazid Square. There’d been booksellers in that place since their wares had been Greek on parchment scrolls. I often browsed there, looking for things to delight my lady—such as the Homer that had once brought us so close together—and particularly now that her health precluded many other activities. From such a title, I had supposed this man Machiavelli to have penned some innocent little romance.

I realized Machiavelli was only putting into print what plenty of people practiced anyway, instinctively, in spite of religion’s best efforts, without his instruction. Safiye, for example, had been Machiavellian long before Catherine’s gift arrived in her hands. My life was clear evidence of that.

Now, as I watched the dual letter to the Queen Mother of France taking shape, phrases from Machiavelli’s book ran through my mind like the horrors of the little house beyond Pera where manhood had been tortured from me. “Because people are bad and will not keep faith with you, you too are not bound to observe it with them.” I couldn’t shake such words, though a merciful God would have allowed me to, as He ought to have allowed me to forget Pera. Both memories had the same effect, a sickness in the bowels, a dampness in the palms, a tendency to lose touch with the present when, if anything, both such words and the scarred-over event should have taught me to keep my wits—to prevent further tragedy.

“Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot.”

Did Safiye consider I had been crushed beyond threat? Was that why she so nonchalantly taunted me with glimpses of what she was doing? I may have felt so crushed at one point in my life, but caring for my lady had changed that. At least it had once more given me something worth avenging—if attacked.

My thoughts were interrupted as I noticed that meanwhile, Belqis had progressed to Sultan Selim. For his pious honoring of Allah and His Prophet, her flowery language honored him in return as “Khan of the seven climes at this auspicious time, the Shah en-Shah in Baghdad, in Byzantine realms the Caesar, and in Egypt the Sultan. May he live long and attain what he desires.”

My lady Esmikhan sighed with wonder at the artistry the scribe displayed.

But Safiye’s letter was where my vigilance must stay. She was discussing French politics with a familiarity that made it difficult for me to follow. But, as well as I could make out, her words were, “How clever of you, my dear sister queen, to have maintained the interest of England’s Elizabeth in your son Alençon, albeit he is more than twenty years her junior. And in spite of the necessary unpleasantness of St. Bartholomew’s Day which might well make a Protestant queen think twice. I understand your son has grown taller and managed to produce a beard, which may do much to hide his youth and imperfections. As long as Elizabeth continues to call your son her ‘little froggy,’ I fully expect I may soon hear that you are the mother, not only of the king of France, the king of Poland, but of England as well. You are indeed the mother-in-law of Europe, and that is not the term of shrewish powerlessness we often imagine, but praise for the greatest of Machiavellians.”

Aloud, Belqis tried out her honorific formulas for Selim’s son Murad. “The straight-grown cypress in the garden of kingship.” Esmikhan particularly liked that description of her brother, who had begotten His Highness Muhammed, “possessor of the crown of twelve illustrious ancestors.”

Safiye’s letter continued in a different vein: “Further as to what you might do with these Huguenots is difficult for me to advise. I must tell you the reflex here in Turkey is to side with Protestantism, if for no other reason than that we both share Catholic countries as our nearest and most inimical neighbors. Protestants run about destroying Catholic shrines and holy pictures; Turks share the same attitude towards ‘idolatry.’ For this cause I find it most difficult to plead on your behalf against Protestant England here in the Divan.”

A look in Safiye’s almond eyes made me think she enjoyed taunting me with bits of this letter. If there was anything here I’d been able to thwart, certainly she would have put off the correspondence until later.

I read more: “Your refusal to ally against us at Lepanto was helpful. But you must know that news of the measures taken to quell your internal rebellion with the fierceness demanded to prevent a rekindling from the coals, your ‘St. Bartholomew’s Breakfast,’ was met here with nothing short of outrage. Nonetheless, if we assume you can forge a mixed alliance with England as successfully as you did with your daughter and Protestant Navarre, things may proceed much more in our favor.”