Reign of the Favored Women (38 page)

I performed this obeisance against my will, and as soon as rationality caught up with me, I panicked: Now he thinks I have capitulated and will submit to his caresses. Even as this thought formed, one of his hands stirred to touch me ever-so-slightly on the cheek.

I raised my head with a jerk as much to escape that touch as to look with fear into his face. There I saw tears, fresher and more copious than he had shed when his daughter left him. But I also saw, through them, that he was resigned to my departure, too. I was free to go.

I managed one final, deep salaam to his greatness at the door, then I fled, like a woman, to the safety of the harem.

My earlier plans to go at once to Gul Ruh and promise her I’d thwart her marriage moved me only in fits and starts. I did look in her room and found it dark. I took a tour of all the usual places, although my mind was so occupied I sometimes forgot why I was there.

I even tried the shutters on the windows over the roof. One where the nail had worked loose I opened, not so much with anger at the shoddy workmanship but with gratitude. It gave me a chance to look out over the tiles, slick with an icing of night rain, to clear my head with the cool, dark air. Had there been signs of Gul Ruh going out there, I certainly wasn’t so distracted I wouldn’t have panicked for her safety. She was no longer the little monkey she had been even one year before. Her limbs were now long and, though graceful while walking and dancing, she would be ungainly on all fours. And on those slippery tiles!

But there were no signs, and the panic that overcame me then was for myself instead. My future in this house stretched out below in a treacherous, endless abyss as deep and friendless as my master’s loneliness. How long I sat on the dark stairs down from the roof and brooded over this I could not say. At last, some noise below (like someone approaching, but it was not) brought my thoughts into cohesion and myself to my feet and to the matter at hand.

My path to the next place I’d thought to look for Gul Ruh took me past her room again. It was still dark as before, but some sense of presence drew me in this time. As my eyes were more used to the dark by now, I was soon able to make out figures on the floor, then the slow and gentle breathing of women in easy sleep. There she was with her maids, just where she should have been at that hour. And from the depth and solidity of their sleep, I guessed they must have been there when I’d passed before. I had only credited to my young mistress the sleeplessness that haunted me.

It is customary to give a bride a week or so of festivities and rituals to get her used to the idea of being a wife before the night of the actual consummation, I thought. But was the nervous bride I spoke of Gul Ruh—or myself.

I returned to my room alone to brood over these matters most of the night. But at one point I was drawn to leave that haven and creep back down into the
selamlik
. The master, I discovered, could not sleep either. More than that, the Grand vizier of all the Faithful had been unable to bear this night alone. The sputtering of lamps had not been enough company for his troubled soul. He had called tor his personal secretary—and though the man grumbled and nodded with craving for his own bed, he was obliged to watch the night with his employer.

The secretary was not like Sokolli’s previous one, Feridun Bey, whom we’d hidden all those days in the mabein. He was a man of the Porte, a slave of the Sultan. Of course Feridun Bey had been, too, but never in quite the sense of this man. We all knew this new secretary to be neither more nor less than a spy of Uweis’s faction. How my heart wrenched with pity to see this great man, my master, reduced to such a one for company!

Of course there could be no intimate conversation with such a man. Sokolli Pasha was having him read instead from the history of Murad’s predecessors on the throne of Othman. Nothing, being reported back to unfriendly parties, could be discovered to be more loyal and pious and at the same time harmless and innocuous. Had he only wanted to be loyal and pious, Sokolli could have read the book for himself, I suppose. But he needed it read aloud. Such was my master’s craving for even so much as the lifeless drone of a fellow human voice on that dark night.

As I stood outside the door, they came to the part in the tale where Murad the First, after all his great victories, is mortally wounded by the Serbian rebels. Here my master waved his hand for the reading to stop.

The secretary who had seemed to be reading with glazed eyes now took on some life. I suspect the coincidence of names—Murad the First with our present Murad the Third—made him hope vent might be given to seditious comments. But it was not so. My master was as true to the present son of Othman as he had been to Selim and Suleiman before him. He simply used the pause to recite the first Sura of the Koran for the dead Emperor’s soul.

That image of my master is branded forever on my eyelids. An unearthly light filled him as he recited, though his body remained so very grey. He huddled with age against contact with the divan beneath him, the dusty old cushions behind him and anything else physical around him. I had never thought him old until that moment. I could not help exclaiming in my heart: Here is one truly good man according to anyone’s upbringing. By Allah, I love...

I did not finish the confession that at any other time would have been disgusting to me. My thoughts were interrupted by spoken words. “Would that the All Powerful might give me,” Sokolli Pasha said with a quiet fervor, “just such a death in His service.”

And I slipped off before I was seen.

Sometime near dawn I must have slept for I totally missed the call to prayers and the master’s early departure in full procession to attend the Divan. But the moment I awoke, all my tumultuous concerns for our future life together, once these confessions had been made, came crashing down upon me again. I began to wish Gul Ruh would soon get married. Then I could ask to go with her to her new home.

But what sort of betrayal was this? I had promised to help her stay unwed, not hurry her enslavement to that shy, dull Mufti’s son. Praise Allah, what wisdom there is in keeping the sexless ones unburdened with matters of love.

Would we could always remain so uninvolved.

My first duty of the day, then, was to think no more about myself, but to find my young mistress and hear her mind on the matter.

Questioning the first of her maids I discovered in the hall, I learned that she had been up since first prayers, had dragged our old seamstress out of bed, and taken her to the main sitting room where, for all the maid knew, they were at that moment busily working on the young lady’s trousseau. For had I not heard the good news? “Our lady is to be married.”

This report I found heady with over-romanticized nonsense. Our seamstress had once declared aloud and to everyone in general that she would rather make a million sheets and pillowcases herself than have to supervise Gul Ruh in one more stitch, for the girl was hopeless with a needle and it took four times as long to unpick every mistake as to do it oneself.

No one had been more relieved than our little monkey to hear that news and she had danced off declaring herself the happiest girl alive if she should never hear the word trousseau again. Obviously the maid had been dreaming her dreams onto another. Nonetheless, I took her at her word and headed off in that direction.

On my way I saw something which made me forget all concerns for the future, both hers and mine. Through a window, my eye chanced to be drawn (although I know now there was very little chance about it) to a figure standing outside in the damp and autumn brown of the garden. It was the figure of an ill-clad dervish.

More than once I had spoken to this same holy man face-to-face without recognition. But I now, in the mystical way of such creatures, knew him at first glance. It was my old, dear friend Husayn—or rather, in his present manifestation, the no less dear but saintly Hajji.

I had known him since childhood. When my family was lost, he had replaced them. He had saved my life on more than one occasion, more than enough to make up for the time I’d saved his, by accident more than design. He had also taken revenge for me, killing the man that had castrated me. In committing this crime, he had willingly given up the comfortable life of a wealthy merchant for the wandering, anonymous asceticism of a dervish.

I had not seen Husayn, I suddenly realized, since leaving Konya, when our girl, old enough now to be a bride, had not even been conceived. And at that first glimpse of my ancient friend, I realized how achingly he had been missing from my life.

My feet shed the years and the steps between us as pitch sheds water. In a moment, I was down in the garden, running towards him and calling, “My friend! My friend! A thousand blessings on your presence here! How my eyes rejoice to see you!”

Hajji stood as stoically as a statue—like a Christian saint instead of a Muslim—and the names of Allah dropped from his fingers (his rosary) like the last of the night’s rain from the leafless branches. He did not move to greet me. But when we were close enough to speak, the precipitate form of his words could only be allowed to one totally indifferent to society’s rules of polite, flowery greeting. He said no more than this: “Your master, my friend. I have information that there is a plot on his life.”

I stood clutching his free hand in both of mine, grinning and panting. He said no more but looked at me steadily until the full import of his words sank in. I swallowed the silliness of my grin away—my teeth were cold beneath my lips—and caught breath to ask soberly, “How? When? Who is it?”

Hajji chose to answer my middle question only, saying, “If he is not warned at once...indeed, it may be Allah’s will that you are already too late.”

“Yes. Yes,” I said with a hard but still puzzled nod between each syllable. “I will go. But you must step inside and accept our hospitality until I return.”

I found the gatekeeper, the gardener, and the gardener’s boy idling by a fire in the gatekeeper’s room. It took a bit longer to convince them—I invented more details than I knew in the end. But finally they were willing to stir from their fire. The boy I sent into the garden to find my friend and honor him with hospitality until we came back.

Perhaps this is all foolishness, I thought as the gatekeeper girded himself about with his token weapon—a rusty old sword—and the gardener and I took up sticks to add to my ceremonial dagger. Did not the chiauses, real soldiers armed with real weapons, accompany my master as they always did? What good shall we do but cause the laughter of sober citizens as if we were the stragglers of a drunken brawl. It was with these thoughts that I warned my companions not to slow down, but to move with care. My friend had brought this intelligence and I knew he wouldn’t lie.

“We do not want to alert the assassin,” I explained, “and give him time to evade us.”

We made our way quickly to the Second Court—as close to the heart of the palace as I could get using the men’s entrance. In spite of my caution, our arrival seemed to be the most excitement that court had seen all day. Because of the weather, the usual crowd of spectators had stayed home from this Divan. Even of the petitioners most, it seemed, had decided their grievances could wait for fairer weather.

A few of the most obnoxious variety of merchants, some craftsmen too indigent to go back to their tools, a eunuch on his mistress’s business (so he dared not return empty-handed) and a single, ragged dervish were the only citizens hunkering in the portico. They sat talking quietly to one another or to themselves with the drop of rosary beads. There were no scuffles as adversaries met, no loud cries for justice as a meeting of the Divan could bring forth on a hot, passionate day.

With a rabble of such proportions, the janissaries set to guard the court were at ease—at least they were until we appeared. Three men bursting in flushed with fear and haste brought them up from their gambling to stand at attention. My companions were immediately struck by the peace of the scene and hung back sheepishly, trying to look like common loiterers. This would only arouse more suspicion, I thought, so I took it upon myself to go and speak to one of the guards.

I walked up to one I remembered having seen before: He had a horrible scar from the corner of his left eye to his chin that even left a thin bare gap in his mustache. I had seen him sometimes with Ferhad, the Agha of the Janissaries. Otherwise, men in blue and yellow all look pretty much the same to me and I always mistrust the violence that uniform represents.

The janissary, for his part, let his hand go to his sword and he fingered it nervously as I approached. He didn’t recognize me. One eunuch’s robe looks like the next in soldier’s eyes, I suppose, and they mistrust us all for being secretive.

“How fares the Divan today?” I asked.

“Fine, fine, thanks be to Allah,” he said, still mistrusting me.

A few more questions drew these details from him: All the business was done for the day and the meal had already been served.

“The meal!” I thought aloud. “Did the usual poison taster clear it first?”

“Of course.”

“And no ill effects?”

“None. Sokolli Pasha is even now enjoying his fill of the pilaf and sweetmeats. By Allah, there are times I envy that man his job.”

I was encouraged to see this drop of guard, even though my first suggestion of poison had set the scar a-twitch with tension. “This seems awfully early for the meal,” I commented. “Why, the noon prayer had not yet been called, has it?”

This, instead of rousing more suspicion, made the man relax further still. “No. Since they’ve sent Lala Mustafa Pasha off with most of the army to Persia, business has been slack.”

“Look here, my friend,” I said, lowering my voice. “I’m the Grand Vizier’s head eunuch and I’ve got to-—”

In the next moment came the announcement that the Divan was disbanding. “To attention!” A double border of blue and yellow—as neat as if sewn by the finest needle—formed itself along the path through which the dignitaries would pass in reverse order, peeling off from their seats like couples in an old Italian dance. My master was the last to enter the Divan so he received the obeisance of everyone lower. He was the first to leave.