Reign of the Favored Women (53 page)

Now Safiye had once explained to the girl how one could keep pregnancies from occurring. The girl was complaisant. But those two sons indicated that she was too complaisant to try and thwart the will of Allah, too simple to practice even the rudiments of the apothecaries’ art.

Safiye had hoped to put off the day when there would be a new woman in the harem with solid claim to power in the world of men. This had made her harder on the Greek girl than she had need to be.

But now the unavoidable day had come. No more than let him appear on the throne in rough wool could Safiye let her son go without the further trappings fit for the world’s most powerful ruler. The flood gates must be opened, but she was careful to see that she was the one to open them.

Yes, one could see in the face of Baffo’s daughter that she would rather have scattered the Golden Way with a few old laundresses and two or three girls with heavily poxed faces that day. But Muhammed was Sultan now. If she would wield power through him, it would not do to try and curtail his power in any way. It would not do to try and keep him content with a little Greek girl when his hand—and through it, his mother’s—reached from the Danube to the Indian Ocean.

But Safiye had had many years in the harem on her own to prepare for this day. She trusted that every one of the maidens that lined his triumphal way into the inner sanctum was not only the most beautiful the Empire had to offer, but also totally dependent upon her will. The will of the new Valide Sultan.

There were two hundred of Safiye’s girls, a material recreation of the dream Prince Muhammed had once dreamed of Paradise. There were blondes and brunettes, blue eyes, brown eyes, and green, the svelte and agile, the cushiony and comfortable, all blushing in the perfect bloom of youth. The presence of a man brought them to their peak, like roses with dew. For some of them this was the first man they’d seen since their seclusion and careful training began as toddlers. For all of them, this was their man, the only man they would ever know, if Allah were favorable.

And Muhammed strode between them with an equal glow. In his cream-peach robes he walked and scattered a handful of coins from the tray borne by the coffee-colored eunuch behind him. The coins were a mere pretense of generosity, as the earlier ritual of placing their hennaed hands under his mother’s foot had been pretense of sudden submission. The girls hardly bothered to scramble for the money, except as a scramble might better show a cleavage or an ankle. Those who thought modesty or long lashes were their best features did not move at all but blushed and giggled.

Studded with rubies, the Sultan was twenty-four years old and come at last to his own.

I saw no more of this ritual than that. For Ghazanfer had contrived to get Mitra there among those scrambling—or not scrambling—in the Golden Way.

She was heavily disguised and veiled, of course. Had Muhammed actually laid eyes on her, his father’s concubine, it would have been rank incest. The even greater threat was that Safiye might see. Or guess.

Still, it had to be risked, under the celebratory confusion. The Golden Way was but a few steps from the antechamber where Ghaz-2infer had a sedan chair waiting. To what safety he meant to carry her, I never learned. My job was only to see that she got out the back door and into that sedan before Muhammed passed, before Safiye noticed she was gone. It was safer that I knew no more.

I was, in fact, grateful that the monstrous Hungarian seemed intent on protecting me as well as the girl. I did my job without a hitch. We slipped out of the stale, overused air of the harem’s bowels and into the fresh winter chill.

But only my part of the plot was ever fulfilled.

“Where...where are my sons?” Mitra turned to me from the caver nously empty sedan.

“Ghazanfer Agha has them safe somewhere,” I said quickly, perhaps too quickly. In fact I had no idea what he had in mind for the boys. “Get in now, lady.”

“No. I will not go without my sons.”

“They are safe, I am sure. Come now. Let me give you a hand.”

Still she hesitated. I did not know how much longer the giggles and shrieks in the Golden Way would cover us.

“Will you swear by the Most Merciful they are all right?”

“Allah is merciful,” I said. “They are in His hands.”

“It’s curious.” She sat down on the edge of the chair but would not yet swing her feet up into the box so we could close the door and be on our way. “That is just the line Mustafa, my eldest, wrote in a little poem last night. You know he’s quite a poet. Already! At his age, Allah shield him.”

“Well, with such artistic parents...” I said, trying anxiously to humor her.

She smiled gently. It seemed all the long afternoons she had sat in the cool of a kiosk reciting to our dead master passed across her face like a breeze from the Bosphorus on one of those afternoons...

She took a scrap of paper out of her bosom and unfolded it. Then she read the poem aloud. But I could tell, with her gift of memory, she had already committed it to heart, and needed the paper only as the physical evidence of one whose round, youthful hand had so lately touched it.

The hand was childish, but the words seemed those of a stoic old man who has looked Death in the face and smiled in recognition and welcome. “We are in His hands.” She finished the verse and there was a silence neither of us could break for a long time, a dangerously long time.

Then she said, “I am sorry, Abdullah. Forgive me.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” I said. “Or, rather, you should forgive me that I can’t do more for you.”

“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. It was I. Well, my brother and I. In my desire to be free and to live, I killed him. Your master, Sokolli Pasha. I killed him.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “I was there. It was a dervish.”

“A dervish who was my brother,” she said. “You see, she promised...”

Her chin quivered. And I saw that it was the same round chin I’d seen on the executioner’s stand, pierced by the same round dimple.

Just then came the flurried entrance of Ghazanfer Agha.

“Make haste!” he hissed in a whisper. “There is no time. You should be gone!”

Mitra collected herself as she collected the folds of the little scrap of paper. “I will not go without my sons.”

Ghazanfer’s face could not hide the truth when it was demanded of him like that. He was unable to save the boys. Only Mitra herself and that offspring she cradled under her heart.

“Pray it may be a girl,” he said fiercely, “then Safiye may forget your threat and not spend the rest of her days pursuing you.”

Mitra stood up firmly from the sedan. “I will not go without my sons,” she said one more time.

“Your sons are the next to greet the new Sultan,” Ghazanfer said. “Muhammed has decreed he wants them and all the young princes circumcised today.”

“But that is nonsense.” Mitra smiled, stretching the dimple out of her chin. “Princes are not circumcised without a party, a celebration...”

“Yes.” Ghazanfer said no more. There was no need for more.

It was not a religious man with a razor, but the deaf mutes with the silken cords that met the young princes in the circumcision pavilion. There were twenty in all who survived their father. The nineteen youngest were buried next to him in miniature little mounds by the mosque before the soil of his own grave had lost its clammy moistness.

As for Mitra, she did not have long either to mourn or regret. On the chance that their children might be male and threats to the throne, she and six other members of the harem in various stages of the same condition were rowed out to sea by night. Here they were stuffed in weighted sacks and sent to the bottom whence divers retrieved tales for years to come, tales of seven sacks waving like seaweed in the current: this one trailing an amber curl, this one a hand the late Sultan had kissed so fondly and decked with an emerald ring.

Her sisters went down cursing the she-devil whom they had trusted as their guardian and mistress and a thousand bargains broken. Mitra, I was told, recited poetry. Her final bubbles formed the shape of Allah’s all-encompassing hand. And sometimes, they said, the current moaned in the tones of a Persian poem.

That evening after he’d wept over his brothers’ corpses, laid out in size and age from Mitra’s eldest to the youngest infant but three months old, Muhammed took to his bed a pair of the girls from the Golden Way. They were the two who had been most coy and artfully hid their faces to catch his fancy. The next night it was...

But I forget them all after that. And it doesn’t really matter. To the outside world, a new reign had begun. But within, we still had Safiye.

As his Grand Vizier, at the suggestion of his mother and his sister, Allah chose Ferhad Pasha. My lady Esmikhan made the supreme effort on one occasion to be carried and hauled up the narrow stairs to join Safiye in the Eye of the Sultan to see her beloved at work in the Divan. After that she protested that affairs of state had no interest for her and that she was uncomfortable to be so close to the world of men.

I suspect these were just catchphrases anyone would accept to hide the real cause of her refusals. And the real cause was that peering down on the man through the Sultan’s Eye was too reminiscent of the first day she’d seen him, wet and exhausted fi-om his three days’ ride. It was similar, and yet too different.

For she was no longer the young woman she had been to bloom like a rose at the first touch of the sun. And he was a man married to someone else. There was grey now beneath his beard, a dignified carriage and a caution brought on by weariness, perhaps. There was a definite and deep weariness in his eyes that had never been there before.

Safiye was his mother-in-law.

Then, too, the masculine form that had given Esmikhan the most exquisite of joys now wore the green robes of a grand vizier. It was the same costume she had seen so often on Sokolli Pasha. To look upon that costume was almost to look upon a second cuckolding. And now that she, too, wore streaks of grey, the all-justifying passion of youth seemed but an uncomfortable foolishness. She didn’t like to think of her love in such terms, so she never went again.

In spring, when word came that the snow had cleared from the mountain passes, Ferhad Pasha left at the head of the army to war in Hungary against a coalition of Austrians and Germans. Ibrahim Pasha was temporarily elevated to take his place in the Divan.

And then it was heard that, hardly at the borders of Bulgaria, the janissaries had revolted.

Among the measures Ferhad Pasha took in the field to put down the rebellion was to exile two of the army’s leaders whom he felt were responsible. This move infuriated Safiye, for those men were her protégés, sure to do her will even when Ferhad would not. One of them, in fact, she had been grooming for the post of Grand Vizier when Ferhad should become dispensable. I suspect the man had grown tired of waiting, as ambitious men will.

But other news grieved my own lady more. It was said that in his wrath, Ferhad cursed the unruly troops and swore by Allah that no janissary should ever have the virility to get a child again until the Judgment Day. Whether the report was true or not, Esmikhan took the words to heart and rode them up and down through all possible double meanings meant just for her.

Ferhad wished that he, too, as a young soldier had never gotten a child. Or he wished to berate Sokolli, dead and in his grave, forever allowing the men to marry. Esmikhan thought this unworthy of the man she loved. My lady and this man had not spoken to one another for a quarter of a century, and yet his words still had such power to move her.

In the Divan, this report was also taken seriously. The janissaries, even in rebellion, were the might and power of the Empire, the right hand of Allah. The power of their arm was equal to the power of their other parts and to curse either was tantamount to cursing the future of the Empire and Islam as a whole. It was treason; worse, it was blasphemy. Ibrahim Pasha was immediately sent with a contingent to find out if the rumor was true. Ibrahim assumed from the first that it was and would find what he looked for. What Safiye promised he might find. He went to depose Ferhad and to claim the post of Grand Vizier for himself.

Only my constant trips from my lady to Safiye and then of Safiye’s eunuchs to the Sultan’s private apartments finally got the precious firmen written and sent. Ferhad was under no circumstances to be killed.

When the message was received on the front lines, Ferhad Pasha and a few of his faithful troops were holed up in a manor that was his personal property. The smell of blood had brought most of the janissaries in line—behind Ibrahim—and they had Ferhad Pasha totally encircled. Grudgingly, Ibrahim complied with the firmen. And that was the last word we had.

* * *

Some few nights later I was awakened. Darkness was thick and heavy everywhere I looked, but what had disturbed my sleep I could not tell. All I could hear were the sounds of my colleagues asleep in the little cubicles around me. Their snores and sighs drifted in and out of the open windows like moths in search of light in which to immolate themselves.

Suddenly, something knocked against the edge of my bed. It knocked again and then would not stop, shaking things with such a violence that the corners of the earth seemed to roar.

“Who is it? What do you want? Stop it!” I wanted to cry, but by the time the words had formed, I realized it was no mortal hand and no attack against me personally, but the hand of Allah shaking all the earth as if it were no more than a feather bolster and He a housewife giving a thorough cleaning.

I did not move from where I was. It would be useless in any case, for if I did manage once to get to my feet, the earth would drop from beneath them between steps. And where should I go if I could walk? The violence attacked the palace from sea wall to sea wall and from the dungeons to the highest minaret.

My colleagues were all awake now. I could hear some of them trying to murmur prayers, but the rest were silent, holding their breath, closing their eyes tight. We began to hear things now, the crashing of crockery. Something fell from the ledge three stories up and shattered in the courtyard just outside my door. The collision of other possessions was as if a thief were rummaging through an old trunk, careless of what he would leave behind, seeking only in a mad rush that which was of the most mundane value. Children cried and a woman or two screamed, but that was all. The rest of us held our breaths and waited.