Reign of the Favored Women (13 page)

“I don’t think I could make it there. Besides, you remember the last time I saw the Quince?”

I did, the haunted look that had come over the midwife’s eyes, the harshness in her tone. I might almost say fear, though what the tough old Quince had to fear from my lady was impossible to guess. “Then I’ll go for you.”

“Would you please, Abdullah?”

“You won’t mind staying here?” I looked anxiously over at the other two women, the noise between them having risen another notch. I marveled how little Aysha could be sleeping through it all and thought poppy-head water again. “I could take you to the sedan first.”

“I’ll stay,” Esmikhan said. She made another ineffectual attempt to speak between the antagonists, then filled her mouth with a sweet laden with buffalo cream. She always ate when she was distressed and helpless to do anything about it.

In the doorway I met Ghazanfer, red in the face and puffing for breath. He had obviously heard the row corridors away and come on the run. His errand, then, had been within the palace. But I didn’t care to scrutinize it more than that. I just gave him a look as to say. So this is the peace of your harem, khadim? I’m taking a risk leaving my lady here with you.

And then I saw Gul Ruh standing in the big man’s shadow. Her little hands, working anxiously, clung to the door frame from the courtyard. Her brown, doe eyes widened and swam with tears as she tried to call, “Auntie? Grandmother? Auntie? Grandmother?” over and over again to no effect.

“My lady,” I called past my shoulder to Esmikhan, “I’m taking the little one with me to the Quince.”

Esmikhan replied, “Very well.”

But the eunuch tried to stop me. “I’m not certain you should, brother. The little one to the Quince? It is not wise.”

“Well, I’m not about to leave more than one of my ladies here in the midst of this catfight you call harem peace.”

And with that, I scooped Gul Ruh up into my arms and hurried off as fast as I could go.

The moment the sounds of squabbling died, Gul Ruh wriggled to get down and I let her gently, taking the sweet, soft petals of her hand instead. Esmikhan would always have clothes made too big for her daughter, certain, with an uncharacteristic disregard for the will of heaven, that “she’ll grow.” The heels of Gul Ruh’s too-big slippers clattered merrily beside me, echoing off the long, marble halls as if to frighten off evil spirits.

The harem corridors wound this way and that, upstairs and down again, like the tendrils of a luxurious jasmine vine—or, as I’d once heard Safiye say—the intestines in the belly of a stone-hearted beast. There were always at least two ways to get from one place to another, depending on what one wanted to see or to avoid. Or, alternatively, there was no way at all. I took the roundabout route to the infirmary, knowing how every woman from mistress of the wardrobe to the lowest laundress would be hovering where she could hear the brawl between the two leading women, laying her bets as to the outcome and what it might mean for her own life. I’d let Gul Ruh avoid that gawking if I could.

Door after door arched, mitred, squared, tunneled down to the size of a mouse hole in the gloom at the end of perspective. Now that the women’s voices had been swallowed in a gulp, off to our right we could hear a tumult of young boys’ voices, full of fear-propelled enthusiasm, all reciting Koranic verses at once, at different speeds, perhaps even different verses. That was the princes’ school, where the brightest of the young levy boys also studied with their future masters.

“My cousin Muhammed is in there.” Gul Ruh stated rather than asked it, pulling lightly on my hand until I stopped in the corridor to listen with her.

“That’s right—may Allah favor his future.”

“We can’t go in there.” Another statement.

“No. But I could take him a message if you like.”

“I’m a girl.” She was very definite about this, though I could see her little mind working strenuously at something behind the intelligence of her big brown eyes.

“Would you like me to take Prince Muhammed a message?”

“But Abdullah?”

“Yes, love?”

“How can you be here with me?”

“I will always be with you, my dearest,” I promised wildly.

“I mean, aren’t you a man?”

My silent struggle for the right answer allowed her to rattle on elaborations.

“How can you be here with me and also go to Muhammed? And with Father and out in the market? And here with me and Mama?”

It is the nature of God she’s trying to grasp, I thought with bitterness. Finally I said as simply, as unemotionally as I could, “I am a khadim, mountain spring.”

“What does
khadim
mean?”

Khadim
means what I am and all I’ve suffered, seemed too broad, yet too circular an explanation even for a three-year-old. “It means ‘servant,’” I said instead.

“But not any kind of servant.” She was definite again. “A servant who wears long fur robes and has no beard. And yet no breasts like Mama.”

I rubbed the straggly hair on my chin in shame and said, “Yes.”

“Aunt Safiye says Muhammed must be...cir...cir...” She struggled for the word and then found
cut
instead. “Muhammed must be cut first before he is a man.”

“That’s right.”

“And until he is cut, he can still come and visit us sometimes.”

“That’s right.” My heart lightened. She was leaving the painful subject.

“Were you never cut?” No. I was wrong. “Is that why you can come and go as you please?”

I flinched. “I was cut, sweetheart. Only much, much worse than your royal cousin will be, inshallah. And that’s why I’m a khadim.”

She allowed me to walk her a step or two further, then she stopped again. “Could you cut me?”

“Sweetheart!”

“Cut me like you were cut so I can come and go, too. I would like to do that.”

I found my knees sunk to the floor before her like dead weights. I folded her precious little form into my sable-furred arms and held her tight, pressing the firm little globe of her head into my chest, stroking her braids, her little back possessively, releasing the already-too-feminine smell of her to fill my mind. Hunger that was all life had taken from me fed at last on her.

“I can’t do that, sweetheart.”

“You are a servant. I order you.” She pushed me away firmly. Her feet in their too-large slippers scuffled, trying to escape me. “Or I will sell you in the market.”

Only the comedy of adult insistence dwarfing her tiny body allowed me to laugh instead of crying. “Then I must go to the block which, by Allah, would kill me. Still I cannot cut you.”

I remembered the possibility of rape. My lady had once equated that with what gelding was for a man—only worse, because it could happen over and over again. I needn’t burden Gul Ruh with this weight of feminine life. But I did swear to myself she would never know the possibility as long as I drew breath.

My little lady read my thought, at least part of my thought. I guess my face always softened when the image of Esmikhan passed behind it. “We needn’t tell Mama if you think it best,” she said. “And I’d be brave. I promise I wouldn’t cry. Not too much.”

Tears mixed with laughter in my eyes, blinding me. “I can’t. As Allah is my witness, no power on earth can do that. And I wouldn’t cause you such harm even if I could.”

“Why? Why?” she insisted, anger setting her on the verge of tears as well.

“Because...because, thank Allah, you are a girl. When I was your age, I was a boy.” That was a difficult thing to say, with all the memories it conjured, and I blinked against them.

“Oh.”

“This girl business again,” echoed behind the syllable.

Gul Ruh was silent a moment, thinking. Into the pause drifted the princes’ recited words:

“In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Be mindful of your duty to Allah and reverence the wombs that bear you. Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which Allah has gifted the one above the other. Verily, Allah is High, Great.”

“Why?” she repeated, intensity dropping the word to a whisper.

“Because,” I said helplessly. It was too big a question for me to answer. “Because it is Allah’s will.”

No sooner had I said this—an answer I had meant only to be as safe, trite, and formulaic as any other recital of such words—than the full wonder of the theology hit me. I felt myself shaking on the hard marble floor of that harem corridor at the mighty, ineffable, incomprehensible power eternity hides in such moments.

“Poor Abdullah,” Gul Ruh said, reaching up a little hand to gently touch the curse of my naked face. “Did you cry when they cut you?”

“I did, little one.” I choked, the memory breaking through my body with physical force. “And screamed and cursed Allah, begging him to let me die.”

“Are you sorry now you didn’t die?”

“No, dear heart, no. I—” And this was the first moment I realized it myself. “—I thank Allah every time I look at you.”

In my mind, my thought went forward. I was even grateful I was such a man as I was, for no other being on earth save only her mother could have been present, nay, responsible both for her getting, when the sanctity of harem walls was defied, and at her birthing. And there was her teething, her every step which no man saw, no man but the Divine—and Abdullah the
khadim
.

“I thank Allah, too,” she said, in the perfect faith of a child.

Still shaking slightly, I got to my feet and took her little hand in mine. Dear Allah, I was going to spoil her rotten!

“Come, my heart,” I said. “Let’s go get the physic to help your mama feel better.”

Light appeared at the end of the corridor, a door open to trees in their first green haze of spring. Under the trees, fresh manure on the newly turned beds and the freshly shooting perennials hummed with flies and hornets in the Quince’s herb garden. We turned to the right before leaving the building, and entered the surgery.

The bellies of row upon row of Chinese porcelain, Japanware, and blue Persian jars leaned in upon my little lady and me from the walls of the narrow room. The smells of their contents assailed our noses. Sweet cloves and cinnamon, sharp garlic and bitter gentian. There were the darker odors of moss, clay, and virgins’ blood, as if we’d walked into the very heart of a woman’s pelvis. Animal parts preserved in brine—all slaked with a wash of alcohol and a pervading sense of power.

Gul Ruh’s little fingers shifted nervously in my hand and I pressed them tight to reassure her.

There was another smell, and I remembered the buzz of opium tasted under a piney disguise of mastic gum. For all her skill—or perhaps because of it—I had known the Quince to medicate herself into oblivion since before Gul Ruh was born. And, as is the way of such habits, there was very little chance the poppy had loosened its hold on the midwife during the intervening years.

Indeed, as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I found that the room was not deserted, as I’d first suspected. The old Quince was there, slumped behind her table, snoring quietly. She appeared little more than a heap of shabby olive-green clothes, much slept in.

“Perhaps we shouldn’t wake her,” I suggested to my little charge.

“Yes, we must,” Gul Ruh said firmly. “So she can make Mama not hurt anymore.”

“Madam? Madam?” With no response, I turned to Gul Ruh again. “Perhaps another midwife would do as well.”

“No,” she replied firmly. “Mama says the Quince is the best. She brought me into the world and saved my mama’s life when there was little hope.” Gul Ruh tried her shrill little lungs: “Madam?”

At this point another woman bustled herself into the room. I recognized her as the Quince’s new apprentice, a black African everyone was calling the Fig, “to make a regular fruit basket of the infirmary.” She was as blue-black as a fresh fig—and who knew what seeds her heart contained? A large gap between her front teeth exposed only shadows within, as if even enamel couldn’t quite close over the African in her.

The Quince and her apprentice were rumored to be more than coworkers. I didn’t think it was my business to probe further into such affairs, certainly not among women the Sultan and princes were not likely to claim. Slaves must find comfort where they can.

Other rumors were more disconcerting. I’d heard the Fig had been powerful in her homeland—a priestess. No, more. The incarnation of a deity called
Yoruba
. Yavrube would come to the call of a drum and possess her. And the aura had been exported with her.

The Fig certainly dressed like a queen. Contrasting richly with her skin were more pearls and golden sequins than all but the most favored odalisque was likely to earn. The Fig’s countrymen, I’d heard, would deposit with her any treasure they might earn—or steal—from their masters against the possible purchase of their freedom. Sick or ill-treated slaves might find refuge, and all this she protected under the brilliantly flowered skirt of her power.

Whatever the truth of all these rumors, I sensed them—and more—in the cypress-shadow chill the woman brought into the room with her. The Quince had chosen her replacement well—or perhaps it was the Fig who had chosen. That thought, too, entered my mind as the African came to stand protectively between me and her still-snoring mentor. Finding comfort in slavehood was one thing, fomenting rebellion—and certainly demonic polytheism in the heart of Islam could be nothing else—was another thing all together.

Still, since I had no proof—more than the distinct feeling, a knot of fear in my stomach, that it was actually Yavrube I addressed—I kept my thoughts to myself and merely stated my errand. Wordlessly, she went about fulfilling the order. I read birch and willow on the jars into which the black hand dipped.

“No opium. We want no opium,” I said, casting a glance at the Quince, exposed in her helplessness again.

The Fig honed her ebony eyes—shooting her demon out to scrutinize me?—but said nothing.

Then, as if
opium
were the word that conjured, the Quince began slowly, slowly to rouse.