Reign of the Favored Women (28 page)

As his companion in the hunt, however, Murad had taken Uweis the Turk, and that man returned to the smoldering city with him.

Surely I have mentioned this man Uweis before. He was one of the faithful four who stood in the wind and the rain that night when Selim was dead, Murad not vet Sultan. When he’d stood there, he’d been a short, quiet man somewhat afraid of his first trip to the city. Like some exotic woodland beast, we all thought when we first learned of him. But years in Constantinople among the favorites had changed him.

Uweis had put on a lot of weight, which did not set well on his short legs, relatively long waist, and stubby neck. It gave him the proportions of a dwarf. A huge mustache he vainly curled and tended and the yards of gaudy-striped turbans he affected made this frame seem top-heavy and unstable. From one ear he dangled a foppish parade of jewels, and his trousers were shimmering satin, shot with gold, and so voluminous they would be useless for horseback. Someone must have told him that tying the layers of a sash around his midriff accentuated the fat. He’d taken to wearing it bound tightly around his hips instead (or maybe it simply wouldn’t stay up on the globe of his stomach), tourniqueting his legs. Such a sash forced the belly out into an even greater bulge, which sagged despondently over the bands like a merchant’s pouch. It was ironic that the costume designed by the original Turks who rode lean and fast off the steppes with scimitars flashing should suit this Uweis, the only man of pure Turkish descent I knew, so ill.

One who had never met the man before would have sensed something incongruous about him at first glance. Then one had only to wait ‘til he opened his mouth for the mystery to be made plain. His Turkish was rarified—the language of peasants and thieves. In the palace, even the simplest page keeping the back door peppers his speech with gracious allusions to the Persian poets or the Arabic religion. And Uweis had tried to pick up these affectations, too. But they came to his throat in hiccups of bad grammar and botcheries. If he’d had any sense, he’d have kept his mouth shut. But of course, such restraint was foreign to Uweis.

We often wondered what it was that made Murad keep the man about. Murad was, after all, one who strove for high culture. It seemed the Sultan might have done better to leave the Turk, like a favorite horse, at his hunting lodge where he could be kept and groomed and exercised to be in good shape when the master wanted him. That was always the excuse given for his perpetual presence—Uweis could track anything over any terrain for any distance. Those of us who’d never been hunting with the royal party wondered how that could be so, at least any more, when those dwarfish legs must send him crashing through the brush like a wounded bear, that awkward weight might well make even a workhorse stumble.

I suppose, like the poet who wrote of the fresh mountain breeze blowing through the heavy, scented garden, Murad liked the aesthetics of sharp contrast. Uweis was allowed to stay like a jester to give life at court perspective. Still, I cannot understand why Murad sought sense from mere shadows, no matter how dark and full of contrast they were.

After the fact, I learned of a particularly graceless remark Uweis made in the Divan which, because of that Turk’s favor, Sokolli Pasha had to let pass unchallenged.

“By Allah,” the little man had said between his teeth in language that made the hearers cringe, “what is a born Christian doing, dictating virtue to those of us who were born to the muezzin’s call, whose fathers have taught us Islam since his father was still a barbarian? Watch him, my lords. I wouldn’t be surprised if beneath that holier-than-thou mien there lurked a heart plotting mischief.”

That four or five others present were also originally drafted from the subject peoples and the quotation of the old proverb, “There is no faith like new faith,” left him still unsubdued.

Coincidentally, it was that same day my mistress mentioned she had been visited by Nur Banu while I was out.

“What did the Valide Sultan want?”

“The same old pleasantries. No new gossip. She did seem disappointed that Sokolli Pasha had not yet returned from the Divan.” Esmikhan took a stab or two at her needlework and then said, almost to herself, “Strange.”

“What is strange, my lady?”

“Do you remember that wonderfully heavy golden girdle the Queen Mother used to have?”

I didn’t, but I pretended to because Esmikhan grew impatient with me whenever I indicated that fashion was not among my major interests.

“She didn’t wear it today?”

“Oh, she did,” Esmikhan replied, “But it used to have such a wonderful pearl on the end of it. As big as a bantam’s “

“And?”

“And it didn’t today. You can’t imagine that she could have lost something like that, can you? The whole palace would have been turned inside out until it was found. And if it were stolen, surely we would have heard about it.”

“Yes. Well, she must have given it away.”

“Yes. But to whom? Whom does Nur Banu favor so?”

I had no answer.

My master did curious things under stress. That Sunday—for some reason the Divan did not sit that day, though its pressures pursued him—Sokolli Pasha insisted that the entire household join him for a sail on the Bosphorus.

Most of the girls, of course, were ecstatic with the prospect of such diversion. My job keeping them from becoming too diverted and my hope of pleasure practically canceled each other out. My lady had to be bodily carried onto the boat, but once made comfortable with cushions and sherbets I think even she enjoyed herself.

On the strait, in the sunlight, a stiff breeze sent wavelets flying like a swirl of so many autumn leaves. The air was good and strong and the heave of the rowers and the smell of fish and salt and tar brought days of my youth to mind. Gul Ruh and a few of the other girls pressed me and so I regaled them with memories. Sometimes in the midst of a recollection, I would catch Esmikhan’s eyes and we would smile at one another, remembering. It was a healthy day, indeed, for I managed to tell my tales without expressing or even feeling bitterness.

Any man passed thirty-five has learned that his life will not be all they promised when he was a boy. Perhaps my youth as I told it was a little more lively than the reality, but I could leave it behind now with less regret.

Gul Ruh grew bright-cheeked and laughed, and she and the girls went to the side of the boat and pretended to catch fishes like we sailors used to do. I scolded and told my seconds to keep an eye on them. The girls pretended to repent, but when I went out on the prow to enjoy the hill, fresh spray on my face, I continued to see a flash of white arm creep out between the red and gold curtains from time to time. They pretended to repent and I pretended not to see their later transgressions. Those flashes of white, I thought, could not be seen by any but the closest passing ship. And even to them, those arms must remain anonymous.

I looked back at my master’s boat. Yes, he had come with his family, but in a separate, smaller boat and never so close as to make it appear to any that there was any relationship. The Grand Vizier sat cross-legged under a fringed awning, yet without the close curtains a harem bark was obliged to carry. The only companions he had brought along were not for pleasure, but for work: A pair of secretaries and a pasha visiting from an eastern sandjak kept him thoroughly occupied. Did Sokolli Pasha realize we were on the water at all?

We had crossed the strait now and were halfway through the excursion. The far shore of the Golden Horn, beyond the enclosure of Galatea, spilled unrestrained by walls or fortifications down to the very water—unpainted wooden houses with rickety balconies on stilts dipped in like hasty bathers. This was Pera, the main colony of Venetians and other Christian foreigners.

“Careful some housewife doesn’t come out and throw her slops down on us,” I cautioned the captain as we sailed very close under the railings.

He saluted and we laughed together. He would try. Although that was a distinct possibility—as the rubbish we floated through testified—it was much more likely that we would be spied on by some foreign diplomat. These houses on the shore, though old and shabby, were great favorites for such men because they could sit on the balcony, gaze over the water at the domes of the Serai and imagine for their reports home all sorts of things one could never actually see.

So let them look! I said to myself.

I gave one brief thought to Andrea Barbarigo, now Muslim, the navy’s dragoman, to wonder if he missed that diplomatic life. One good whiff of sea air assured me he didn’t. I sat back to enjoy the journey.

Presently I heard sounds that reminded me of another thing for which these seaside houses were popular. Christians, to whom wine is allowed, keep public houses there to attract sailors—and anyone else desirous of a quaff. In the realm of Islam, Sunday had ceased to be the very different color from any other day of the week a pious nurse had given it in my childhood. But had I stopped to think that it was Sunday, it might not have taken me quite so long to notice. The explosions of laughter carried on by riotous talk and snatches of song that reached our ears from a festooned balcony up ahead had curiously unchristian tones in them. We had rowed close to the inn’s back door before what I saw made me unable to trust my eyes. I referred to equally bewildered ears.

The balcony was crowded with janissaries like a harvest basket with fruit, their blue trousers pressing through the railings like plump, ripe plums through wicker. Their songs were Turkish and familiar—my master would recognize them as those that came from the camp of the Faithful after Allah had granted them victory. Now these songs were being blasphemed.

That was my first reaction: to wish to throw up a curtain before my master as if he were part of the harem, to keep these renegades from seeing his nakedness and dishonoring him. Or is it the harem we would protect from profanation with the world? At any rate, God alone knows where I might have found a curtain so big as to keep Good from Evil in the world. By the time I’d freed my gaze from the powerful latch impiety has, I saw that Sokolli Pasha, too, had already seen, and his reaction was now beyond my power. All I could do was to command our rowers to do their best to bring the women, at least, away from there.

I saw my master giving orders to his sailors to find a landing on the beach and then to one of his servants to run quickly and find the first sober squadron he could to come and arrest these miscreants. The servant, I could tell, didn’t much like the idea. He’d rather they were on the Hungarian front and he’d been asked to run espionage behind enemy lines. Surely the chances of death were no greater; it was the grade of honor attached to the death that worried him. Nonetheless, when the beach was hit, he got off the boat and disappeared up among Pera’s firetrap jumble of raw wooden houses.

I’ve always had the impression that our outing was known and that the entire episode was staged. What happened next tends to confirm this.

Drink had made the lookout in the inn (if indeed the caution to post such a man had been taken) very lax. Now at last we were sighted from the shore. The vision of my master in white and gold beneath his canopy—and only the Sultan himself is allowed more rowers, more pomp, and more horsetails on the prowl for a pleasure outing—could not help but silence even the most indigent lush, and the words passed back from the railing in a hush: “Sokolli! Sokolli Pasha is come!”

Up from their midst there arose—if a man of just over five feet can be said to rise in the midst of the finest figures of manhood the western provinces can produce, all topped by the tall turbans typical of the elect troops—the round, bloated figure of none other than Uweis the Turk. He heaved his great belly onto the railing for support and the two antagonists stared at one another across it for some time.

A jewel even more remarkable than usual hung in the little man’s ear: It was a pearl the shape and size of a bantam’s egg.

Then the little Turk, the bantam-egg pearl a-dangle from his ear, raised his right hand in a salute. In that hand was a goblet full of the forbidden drink. With great but mock solemnity, he toasted: “Sokolli Pasha, your health.”

Behind him, all the troops stood as to attention, likewise raised their flasks and repeated, “Your health, Sokolli Pasha!”

Then they all drank deeply and in unison. But the riot of laughter into which this formation disintegrated was like no other loss of discipline the Ottoman army had ever seen before.

A shower of rotten fruit and vegetables pocked the water like cannon charges. There was also a skin or two of wine thrown as the revelers invited the Grand Vizier to join them in a practice that was “as lifting to the heart as if we’d all died and gone to Paradise already. To hell with martyrdom on the battlefield!”

But wine was too precious to spend in a jest so. The men soon toppled one of their number over the rail and into the water to flounder drunkenly about in an attempt to retrieve those skins. Throwing one man over offered such amusement that two or three soon joined him, along with the innkeeper’s wife...

Our rowers were laying to as hard as they could, and after this, distance added to the general chaos so I could no longer tell details. I could no longer bear to, either.

For the women behind their curtains, the episode passed without effect, almost without comment. Even if they did understand in a vague sort of way what it meant, certainly none of them took it to be a personal threat to themselves. The rest of the excursion was so pleasant, in fact, that my lady played at seasickness in an attempt to make it last longer.

The segregation of sexes, we are always told, is to keep the weakness of women from interfering in men’s more important business. Once again I wondered if it isn’t also to keep women in honor above the ugly mire that men’s business wallows in.

My master returned much, much later, having spent hours arguing his case with Murad. To no avail, of course. The Sultan would not hear of injuring the honor of one with whom he’d just enjoyed the pleasant camaraderie of the hunt, much less injuring his neck on the chopping block. Even the honor of a Grand Vizier, the honor of the State, were trivial matters in comparison.