Reign of the Favored Women (52 page)

* * *

Muslim, formerly Andrea Barbarigo, was the last to leave the tekke that night. He had stayed long hours listening to the sheikh expound on the mysteries. Others grumbled that the old man just liked to hear himself talk. But Andrea stayed. It was true: He never did get to express himself. But here was someone who cared if he came or went.

He should have accepted the invitation to stay overnight, he chided himself. What was at home? A tiny room in the corner of a poor shopkeeper’s home. The shopkeeper’s colicky kids at night, shrewish wife by day...

He entered the empty street with dread, but that dread suddenly exploded into a terror. A huge figure came upon him out of the deep shadows like a blow to the head. He thought for an instant that he was going to die. Another instant would have resigned him to the fact.

But then he recognized the figure. Not that it was any less frightening then: the huge, tortured figure of Sofia Baffo’s head eunuch. By Allah, it had been years since he’d seen the creature!

A salaam. Stiff. But maybe it was only from waiting in the cold. Then no word, but one fur-cuffed arm motioned for him to follow.

“I have business,
khadim
—”Andrea began, then stopped himself.

Idiocy! Ghazanfer could break his neck right there in a moment if he wanted to. Best do as he asks.

Around a corner, down a blind alley. Then Andrea stopped short. So would any other Muslim have done, finding himself confronted by a woman’s sedan chair. Still the eunuch waved him on. He took one tentative step toward the vehicle and jumped when a ghost-white hand appeared from the deep shadows, sliding the grille to one side.

“Hello, Andrea.”

It was Italian. But of course he had guessed it would be. Knotted around that hand and its wrist—creepers around a ruin of old Roman statuary—was the chain of his mother’s mosaic locket.

“Do you sometimes find it hard to sleep, Andrea?” the voice asked.

Andrea was still having difficulty imagining the sedan as holding a live person. It was like a jewelry box and now he found it had some wonderful mechanism that could make it talk. No more.

But she took his silence as an affirmative. “I do, too.

“Perhaps,” the voice said then. “Perhaps we can help one another.”

The grille slid shut, the hand disappeared. Bearers were called from their huddle at the end of the alley. He was not quite sure how, but Andrea knew he had been given orders to follow. He did, up one street and down another and finally in through a courtyard door to a place he’d never been before, nor did he think he could find it again. There was a strangely familiar smell, however. Fish, was it?

* * *

Dawn hung in the sky like panels of mother-of-pearl. Andrea found himself in the street again and he stopped short. Had he dreamed it all then? A night vision sent by the Evil One to make him think he had come to the end of the Search? No, there was that smell again. It was too real. He also remembered now where he had smelled it before. In the brothel where he’d gotten the welt on his face so long ago.

Thoughtfully fingering the scar a well-tended beard usually covered, Andrea turned around to look back at the door. But he found the great monster of a eunuch standing there, dour as ever. He turned at once to leave, but just to show he was not too terribly intimidated by this symbol of Muslim virtue, he began to whistle. It was an old Italian song. He and Sofia had sung it together, quite astounding one another with how well they remembered the words after all those years. It was called “Come to the Budding Grove, My Love.”

* * *

Ghazanfer watched the man go. He thought: He thinks I am angry. Well, what has he given my mistress this night, after all? He thinks it is himself. It always does that. Inflates one’s self-worth when most one should be humbled, at least before the majesty of Allah. No, fellow. Whistle on your way. It’s not you. You are but a minor character. This—this is between me. Me and her.

We should thank Allah that in his last days Sultan Murad found comfort in the art that seeks not praise in this world, but in the world to come. They say, indeed, that this man began to prefer that the girls in his orchestra should sing the words of the mystic:

“I feel myself sick of languor.

Come, o Death, come lie this night next to me.”

Death, so unexpected, came in the midst of these very verses, they say, as Murad lay contemplating the flight of clouds through the windows of his kiosk. A loud salute of cannon in his honor from two Egyptian ships shattered the glass in a skylight and sent it in a rain down to his feet. Now, many a salute had sounded before without ill effect and many a time he had listened to those verses. But this coincidence of events he took as an omen, an answer at last from the mystics’ Beloved, and that night he closed his eyes for the last time and dutifully responded to the call.

We, of course, were kept ignorant of the death until Safiye and her lackey, the Grand Vizier, should have time to bring the heir Muhammed from Magnesia, I was not one of them, but still there were those whose sixth sense told them what was afoot. They began to try and consolidate their positions.

* * *

I remember one day in particular on which, had I been able to read such things, the very air should have told me something. Ghazanfer and I were walking through the inner harem when, for no reason we could name, we paused in one of the smaller courts. No wider than two men laid foot to foot, and yet three stories high, the court was very like a well, and this was added to by the fact that there had been rain in the morning that left the walls and flags in the floor grey and slick with moisture.

A clematis not yet brought to bloom in that shadowy place clung to the wall like moss. Pigeons fluttered through the blue so far overhead, and somewhere on the third story a girl—scrubbing floors, perhaps—let her youthful exuberance out in a song. It seemed disembodied and far away as if it came from the next field, the next hillside, and was the product of wind on stone.

More real to us at the bottom of that pit came a heavy sound, like a drone, the sound of someone weeping. We set out to find the source of that sound and it took us longer than one might imagine. It was coming from the last place either of us thought to look—the little room where only months before one of the girls had died in childbirth. Until that episode could be forgotten, the place would be avoided as too rife with evil spirits.

“Mitra!” Ghazanfer cried when our eyes adjusted to the gloom and the sight. “Allah spare you, but you should not be here in your condition.” Mitra was just beginning to show her third pregnancy, brought on by her great skill at reciting Persian mystic poems, “Allah forbid, but might not the brokenhearted soul of our dead sister, Allah have mercy on her, seek to infect you here?”

Mitra looked up, her face swollen and grey as death from the weeping. “And what if she should? We are dead anyway, all of us: me and my sons and this little one I carry. To go at her phantom hand would be more merciful than at. . .” Here her voice dropped to a whisper and she turned her head to the wall again so I had to guess that she finished the sentence with the name “Safiye.”

It was then that I got the first inkling of what might be afoot in the rooms of the Sultan.

Ghazanfer tried to allay her fears, but she protested, “No, he is dead. I know he is dead. Three days now, four, I have not been called to his side to recite.”

“You know he is disturbed to see women with child,” I soothed her. There was only one person anyone meant by “he” in the harem.

“But that’s never stopped us before. I can recite from behind a screen.”

“He is sick,” I suggested, “and Allah may grant him a rapid recovery.”

“No, no, it is always in sickness that he loves my voice best. Nay, he is very sick, beyond hearing. He is dead. And so...so am I.”

I tried to think of more comfort and turned to Ghazanfer for aid. But Ghazanfer was one of those who already knew or guessed. He could offer no comfort. And that was more comforting to Mitra, somehow, than all my vain words. She turned to him now, full of hope.

“You know,” she said to him desperately. “You know, don’t you? You know that once her Muhammed is on the throne, my sons and I are useless to her. Worse than useless. Dangerous, for who knows what sort of rebellion might form around my little boys? I swear by Allah we have no such interest in power, but such vows are of no use here. By Allah, all we want is to live in peace. All I ever wanted, from the time I was a child, was to live in peace. And she made a bargain with us. You know, Agha, the bargain she made with us. ‘When Murad is dead...’ she said. She said she would free me and I could return to Persia, to my home, with my babies. And my brother, he fulfilled our part of the bargain. He killed the man. But they killed him and now I have no one to speak for me. I fooled myself all along into thinking—But now I know I was a fool. She’ll never keep her half of the bargain.”

Mitra’s words would not stop, a torrent. “She has the right—nay, the obligation according to the ancient law of the Ottomans—to kill all brothers to the heir, whether living or yet unborn, in order for peace to reign in the Empire. What is the peace of one little slave girl compared to peace in the Empire? And she will do it, too. I have seen it in her eyes. Those eyes I thought had picked me out with favor, raised me to the imperial bed. All the time that glint of cold steel was there.

“Once I took it to be true affection, but as I’ve watched my sons grow—the oldest is eleven now and already a comely young man, Allah bless him—I’ve come to know it is something else. I know it is the gleam of someone who has found something truly useful, complaisant to her will—and dispensable.”

I murmured some condolence or other which, under the circumstances, could be no more than an appeal to Allah’s mercy. Out of the corner of my eye, I was watching Ghazanfer. What was his reaction to this? Did he confirm with a glint of green, a shift of his shoulder, that all Mitra suspected was true? Could he offer some hope? Or would he report the woman’s faithlessness back to their mistress?

“I’m sorry. I cannot help you,” I said.

“No, but you can,” she exclaimed, suddenly animated. “You, khuddam, can help me escape. Help us escape, me and my boys. To Persia, that would be best. Persia, if it is Allah’s will. But somewhere, anywhere. It doesn’t matter to me if I spend the rest of my days in a fisherman’s hovel, so long as it is away from here.”

Ghazanfer Agha looked up—to the door. Did he merely check that we were not overheard? Or did he look towards her he would tell?

My heart raced at the threat. Though we were counted friends, Ghazanfer and I, I often felt friendship was on the surface. It was an adjunct of the fact that we were the only two white eunuchs left with the women from the days before the reorganization. Yes, something was wrong with the Sultan. I could read that in my fellow eunuch now. But I hadn’t before. And he hadn’t been the one to tell me.

And I still could not read that stoic khadim’s loyalties.

I knew no aid for this poor woman weeping before us. But stopping such betrayal as his eyes might be seeking at the door would have to be a first step. I couldn’t delude myself. There was no way, either physically or by suggestion of loyalty, that I could counter the monstrous Hungarian on my own.

Presently the
kapu aghasi
turned back to us—to my surprise but gratitude—with vague words of hope. “I will think on it,” he said.

Mitra was surprised, too. She was surprised enough, at least, to let us bring her out of that ill-omened room. And to cease—for another week or so at least—her terrifying plaint that Murad the Sultan was dead. When she did weep again, her voice joined that of all the palace, indeed, of the Empire from one end to the other.

Muhammed returned from Magnesia a Stronger figure than any of us remembered him going. There were several hectic days of funeral and investiture and reception of obeisance from the outside world first. But when he did at last make his triumphant entry into the harem—”like a bridegroom into the bedroom”—he had only rested from the hard forced ride from the sandjak. He had not yet lost any of the burnished bronze of his skin to the pampering of gold-fringed canopies.

That bronze was set with rubies like a masterpiece of the jeweler’s art. A ruby the size of a quail’s egg dangled from one ear. On the pure white silk of his turban was fastened a second stone like a pool of blood caught in the palm of the hand and clotted there. That gem held heron plumes aloft and radiated three strings of diamonds to either side. His fingers were jeweled as if to cut off circulation, and the Sword of Oth-man, strapped at his waist, had received new gems to its hilt for the occasion.

Dazzled by the jewelry, few can have noticed the robe. It was cream silk of the highest grade with an unusually dainty floral pattern worked in a peach-colored velvet. Yet it, too, had effect. “Under this power and pomp,” that cream and peach seemed to say, “is a man of pure and gentle motives, whose love would be worth the price of twenty gems, if only it can be won.” It was womenfolk who heard this message most clearly. How it made the hearts of the harem sing!

Only a slight scar on Muhammed’s cheek seemed to mar the picture of a merciful new sovereign.

Throughout his residence at Magnesia, Safiye had seen to it that her son’s needs were satisfied by a single plain but very complaisant Greek. His eunuchs, over whom Safiye had complete control, were under strict orders to get nothing from the slave market on their own unless it was women of proven barrenness, and indeed, their allowance permitted nothing else.

But Muhammed was still young. At twenty-four, ardor comes hot and swiftly enough that one does not stop to consider the shortcomings of one’s partners. Nor does it occur that failing passion is the very shadow of death, to be beaten back with all means possible. The Greek was obedient and willing enough and had presented her master with two sons. If Muhammed ever thought more could be asked for, he thought it must only be an opium dream.