Reign of the Favored Women (23 page)

“Except in our own persons.”

“Except in us, yes.”

I shifted on my cushions in my discomfort. “Which is, nonetheless, an uneasy state.”

Another half-smile. “As Allah wills.”

“And if we fail in our duties?”

Ghazanfer looked at me hard—and yet not without kindness. Once again I got the firm impression that he was not at all ignorant of the breach I had allowed in my sanctuary wall, the breach that had allowed my heartbroken lady, once in her life, to know the blinding force of a true lover. That conjunction was responsible for Gul Rub, the little girl child that was such a light to our lives. Did the kapu aghasi begrudge her—us—this? Did he condemn our mortal failings? Worse, would he try to take the pleasure of that breach from us?

“The righteous pilgrim must not be denied entry to the sanctuary,” he said instead of what I had imagined from him. “Nor as many of its blessings as he can contain. It is up to a khadim’s pious wisdom to know what to let in, what to keep out.”

“Awesome responsibility.” I wasn’t certain I believed his tales of lightning bolts from the blue but still I found my voice a whisper. “It cannot devolve upon mere mortals such as myself.”

“Yet it can and does. This is the will of Allah working in us. The knowledge of when to keep the boundaries He Himself has set—and when to let the curtain down, if but for an instant. Such is the work of the truest servants of Allah.”

Ghazanfer grew quiet, pensive. “I cannot say I have always used my power in the wisest way. But I must say I am grateful for the calling I’ve recently received. To better help me understand what the will of Allah must be, how to serve Him. I think it is easier for you, Abdullah.” And he said my name as more than just a name.

I would have held this thought and driven it further, but suddenly the tea had done its work and there was something more urgent I could hold no longer. With a groan I said, “Excuse me a moment. I must—”

Ghazanfer half smiled. “It works quickly, doesn’t it?”

I could only nod as I struggled to get to my feet, biting back the pain with clenched teeth.

“Here, let me help,” Ghazanfer said. And I welcomed the bone-cracking strength of his arms.

“Oh, God!” I gnashed my teeth over what wanted to be a scream when we finally reached the privy. “I’ve forgotten the catheter.”

“I’ll go,” Ghazanfer said, helping me to sit on a bench for the agonized wait. “In your turban?”

“Where else does a eunuch carry his parts? It’s on the table.”

He will find another maidservant to send for it, I thought. I begged God—whatever God there might be, for certainly Ghazanfer’s merciful, half-smiling deity was not in the swirl of my pain—to let me die quickly of the shame. And of the pain.

But Ghazanfer Agha did not delegate this, no matter what a kapu aghasi’s natural reflex must be. He returned, and the heaving of his breast told me he’d forced his huge bulk much more quickly than his usual dignified gait.

The kapu aghasi helped me up and held me while I began my straining business. The catheter shook in my hands.

“I cannot,” I moaned. “The way is clogged.”

But it was only the silver tube choked with hot pus. Ghazanfer rinsed it out and then let me try again.

Relief left me shaking with weakness as great as a child’s. The huge khadim all but carried me back to my room, helped me to plumped-up pillows, plied me with yet more juice. I never wanted to have to pass anything else in my life again, but I drank at his insistence and my lips wavered in thanks; speech was beyond me.

Then my guest settled back on his rugs and took up all the burden of talk for himself. His tones were those with which he might lullaby an invalid child. But rather than a child’s fables, these were a eunuch’s. Too full of wonders to be believed, and yet, in my fevered head—

Ghazanfer told how Medina’s guardians sat all day on a raised platform between the sacred tomb—veiled with black silk and latticed with scent-releasing aloewood—and the gateway to the mosque. Here, in happy brotherhood, they sat, read and prayed. The scene entered my fever-forged brain, grew vivid by the vivid force of Ghazanfer’s words.

From this platform, the khuddam had a perfect view of every pilgrim who ventured in. They could instruct the ignorant, male and female, in the proper worship to make. They could mediate with the greater Mediator on the pilgrim’s behalf, calling into the shrine, “O Prophet, a faithful one comes” as we everyday eunuchs warn the women that a man is about. Should a khadim’s keen eve detect impiety, he could be down off the platform in a moment, brandishing the cane he carried (no other weapons being allowed in the precinct) to soundly teach the careless a proper fear of Allah.

Scholars even kept the biographies of the tomb’s most famous guardians, so their names and great deeds might not be forgotten. The present head agha had sent his Constantinople counterpart a leather-bound collection of such histories. Ghazanfer had many of them memorized, the heavy swing of their Arabic.

One of the khadim of olden time, one awesome Kafur Agha, so the story ran, had possessed a wondrous voice. “Such a wondrous voice—” Ghazanfer’s own high tones made this seem rather ludicrous. And yet—”That when he raised it to chide misbelievers, the very ground would shake and glass could shatter. One day the muezzin, concealing secret sin within his heart, heard that voice from high up on his minaret and plunged—for fear—unto his death.”

Medina’s eunuchs, so I learned, tended the Garden of Fatima, two dozen date palms clinging miraculously to the desert sand in the open space between gateway and shrine. Ghazanfer described how the dates could not propagate without the eunuch’s hands. The long spurs of the male tree must be cut off in the proper season and hung amidst the female blooms. In due time, the eunuchs gathered the fruit and sent it as gifts to those in the world they felt most deserving of such divine favor.

“Such favor is not bought,” my guest assured me, then added laconically, “It is for the humble, the weak, the truly pious as only Medina’s khuddam know humility and meekness, as only they can teach it. For the greatest of men, from the world of men, must come and kiss their hands and hems, these sexless creatures they have scorned elsewise. You would not, for example, see an imperial kitchen explode into flames over Fatima’s dates.

“When it comes time to replace the sanctuary’s black silk curtains, six of the most pious khuddam alone are chosen. They fast, they pray. Then they blindfold themselves and thus bring the ladders. They climb and replace the worn drapes with new, all blindfolded to spare their eyes the fearsome
baraka
of that within.” There was, Ghazanfer reminded me, such a veil in Jerusalem’s temple of old.

“And then, every evening as dusk begins to fall, the eunuchs rise up off their platform. Solemnly, they drive every worshipper burdened by sex out and lock the great silver-studded doors after them. Then they take up lamps, our brothers do, in the gathering dusk, and solemnly circumambulate the darkening shrine. With their own hands and the purest oil, they kindle the wicks hung from silver and golden chains that will illuminate the holy place in the still desert air until dawn.

“It may be—yes, the head agha told me it is so—that some whole man or other sometimes makes pious supplication to the guardians. He is desirous to watch this final, private rite. The agha then may scrutinize him, obtain references, train him for months. And if, at length, the supplicant is deemed worthy, he is permitted within yet a while after the gates have closed. And he may—just may—even be allowed to carry oil and fire, to light the lamps, to pray. But if it is to be so, he must give up the trappings of a man for that one night. He must wear the long, spotless white robes with full, long sleeves that are the eunuch’s dress. He must wear a eunuch’s turban; he must gird his virile loins with a eunuch’s sash. He must become, in other words, one with us, before he may safely enter that most holy of spaces.

“Then, at length, this final duty done, the faithful khuddam retire to their platform once again where they sleep in turns, some always watchful, always on guard. There—twixt heaven and earth.”

The tale ended with sleep, as many a child’s tale does, happily ever after. And I murmured from a deep drowse of my own the traditional tale’s beginning: “Once there was a man—and once, there was not.”

Perhaps I slept a healing sleep, perhaps not quite yet. I was aware of some commotion as one of my seconds came to the room, bowed deeply before the kapu aghasi and informed him that he was wanted “by many great lords in the selamlik.”

I heard Ghazanfer sigh as he heaved himself up to his feet. “Duty calls, my friend,” he said. “I told no one where I was going, but the world has found me out anyway. Allah grant you—” He seemed to want to wish me much more but in the end limited his prayer to “—Allah grant you health.”

And he was gone. Sleep came almost instantly to me now. There was room, however, for two more thoughts. And most curious ones they were, too.

The first was a feeling I couldn’t shake. Everyone who knew the details of the kapu aghasi\ appointment, including my master, assumed the great eunuch had taken the post at Safiye’s behest, to work her will as a counterpoise to that of the Grand Vizier. But then, with the eunuch’s presence still lingering in the room, it seemed quite otherwise. Perhaps even Safiye assumed she had nothing but the firmest of allies. And yet Ghazanfer himself gave off another purpose—-if you looked hard and close enough. Was it possible that the khadim had taken sanctuary in the office so heavily charged with religion, with
baraka
? Was this his way to escape in some measure from the demands of his mistress instead, Safiye’s spell being, as I knew only too well myself, difficult—dangerous—to break?

My second thought was to wonder about the tale I’d overheard Ghazanfer Agha tell Andrea Barbarigo concerning the death of the page boy at Selim’s hand. Throughout the three and more years since, I’d thought it hardly a thing one told to an unbelieving stranger. Ghazanfer would speak so? Ghazanfer, usually so taciturn even to those who knew him?

I remembered, in the moment before sleep, the flit of green eyes towards the chink in the Jews’ wall where, I’d thought, I was so cleverly hidden. And it occurred to me: Maybe he meant the tale not for Barbarigo, who had been, after all, a lovesick fool, dragged helplessly towards his fate by the codpiece.

Perhaps, like all that afternoon’s effusion, Ghazanfer Agha had meant the tale for me.

I have often been disquieted by the thought, then as I am now: Isn’t a manufactured virgin very like a eunuch, likewise manufactured? It is clear that Safiye’s new Persian girl Mitra always suffered pain in being a woman. This—coupled, perhaps, with the pains of her earlier life, more than any sort of training—made her the remarkable reciter she was.

It could be seen in her eyes. Plain eyes as God made them, they became heavenly blue through experience and seemed always filled to the brim with a sort of petulant vulnerability. They not only made her more attractive—one wanted to swim in those eyes like in shivering cool pools on a hot summer’s day—but they lent to her poetry a beautiful, wounded longing that I have never heard matched before, even by those who claim more art.

Now Safiye, with her two new weapons, gave a party to celebrate her return to the palace and, as she said, “To repay Nur Banu’s kind hospitality,” sorry only that it had taken her several months to do so.

It was the excitement. The heat. The shock the sight of Mitra gave her. The pressure Nur Banu poured out upon her afterwards. Nur Banu’s sudden increase in the magical regime she had the girl on to insure a male child. All of these were put forward as causes for the very serious trauma the little Hungarian went through that night in which she almost lost her child.

I have my own suspicions about the matter.

I know for a fact that Safiye had gotten a vial from the Venetian doctor that very morning. She said it was part of her own treatment, but I also happened to see her wave one particular dish to the little Hungarian that evening and saw, when she turned from the slave, that she had hidden something about the size of a vial in her bosom.

I said nothing of my suspicions at first because I could not believe in anything so horrendous. Then, too, I had no proof and no one else to share in my conjecture—unless it were Ghazanfer and he was busy with his new office.

The Quince, however, must have suspected something immediately. She roused herself from her haze and managed to halt the untimely contractions, bringing the pregnancy back to normal. But she was very jittery—and sober—after that. Or so I heard. She wouldn’t let Safiye near the Hungarian girl when she came to offer her condolences and congratulations on her recovery. And the midwife, aided by the Fig, did her best by calumny and gossip to try and undermine the power of that man, the doctor, in “their” harem.

On the whole this made for an ironic Ramadhan, that month when Islamic unity asserts itself stronger than at any other time save perhaps during the pilgrimage. We managed to maintain something of the usual air under Sokolli’s roof by inviting the imperial ladies by turn, Safiye one night, Nur Banu the next. Even so, ambiance was delicate and my lady, who hadn’t a malicious bone in her body, felt like a constant conspirator. She had to bite her tongue more than once having started a comment with, “But only yesterday Safiye told me...”or “Somebody was saying it wasn’t like that at all. Who was that, Abdullah?”

And I would give her a look that said “Nur Banu” and she would blush and say “Oh, yes,” apologize, and fall into a confused silence for the next half hour.

It was Nur Banu’s night and some such careless phrasing sent the Hungarian, who had seemed volatile ever since we’d known her, flying from the room in tears. Esmikhan was in great distress and blamed herself although I couldn’t remember anything threatening that might have been said.

“It’s pregnancy, you know,” Nur Banu assured us. “She cries all the time—for no reason. But, thanks to Allah, she gets over it just as quickly.”