Reign of the Favored Women (9 page)

How familiar was that sound! How like home! He had heard it so often as a division of janissaries changed their station through the streets of Constantinople. How often he had stood and watched such maneuvers with an admiration he could not conceal. They were so proudly martial in their yellow and blue, their white and scarlet. Even the will of Allah in the form of a sneeze was not allowed to disturb their perfect discipline.

The sound of their mustering bands could not help but remind him of times when he’d been the happiest: days when he’d had a meeting with Ghazanfer in the afternoon, and the morning had seemed alive with hope of what news the eunuch might bring of his lady’s doings. Or might bring the lady herself. Those were days he had shaken off his father’s hand and felt certain of his own worth, certain it would someday bring him happiness.

As Andrea stood gripping and ungripping his sword by the rail, his father’s mistress walked by him on her way to her cabin where she would await the outcome of the battle. She was a big, brazen woman with red hair. He’d never liked her and resented her presence there in the place of his adored mother, the plump, mousey little woman who had retreated for consolation into religion.

“Kill a Turk for me, Andrea,” the mistress said, tweaking his ear playfully and then swinging her hips off towards the cabin.

Suddenly Andrea wanted nothing more than to see her raped by a dozen syphillic Turks. He would help them hold her down. He could no longer have any respect for any woman who dared to show herself outside either harem or nunnery.

The first shot was fired—one charged only with powder from the Turkish flagship as a warning. By God, how chivalrous! Andrea thought. Don Juan answered for the Christians—with his heaviest cannon—and it was not blank.

The sixty-three galleys under the proveditore of Venice were deployed along the left flank of the gulf’s headland, which would greatly hamper their movements. What rocks and shoals were hidden under these waters were quite unknown, so Barbarigo warned his sailors to keep well clear of the coast.

Hasan Pasha Barbarossa led the Turks, whose waters these were, on this wing. Being his father’s son, as the brilliant red beard beneath the white turban proved, he’d known every inlet of the Mediterranean like the back of his hand almost before he could toddle on deck.

The Turks’ craft had shallower draft than the Christian vessels. And they proved themselves at once to be fearless of the rocks, knowing to the hair’s breadth how close one could risk. Armed with this fearlessness—which was not foolhardiness, Andrea thought, but knowledge cold and keen as a Damascus blade—they began at once to outmaneuver the Christians, catching them up on two or three sides. Even the monstrous galleasses—planted in front of Barbarigo’s force like towers on a city wall—did not daunt them.

The Turks’ quick little galleys skidded past these floating fortresses as if such things could be encountered every day. As if the galleasses were not the new secret weapon Venice had gone head over heels in debt and desperation to build. As if they were only more familiar coastlines instead of multiple decks bristling with cannon and crack-shot harquebusiers.

Through the heavy smoke the Turks sailed. With the loss of only one of their ships to the three Venetians that were now aflame, the Turks had soon engaged the entire left wing in hand-to-hand combat at which, everyone knows, janissaries are unequaled in the world.

Now, over the constant cannon fire, Andrea could hear the very orders being shouted by Hasan Pasha as his galley pulled close, locked oars, and prepared to board the Venetian flagship. By God, how he loved the sound of that language! Even raised in battle cry, it was music to his ears. The things one can say in Turkish that are impossible to say in Italian! They were all things of glory and chivalry and love.

Andrea gripped his sword to meet his first opponent. Now he saw him, a wiry little man stripped to the waist and climbing in the Turkish rigging like a monkey, preparing to swing across to the Venetian rail just at Andrea’s side.

Salaam. I shall greet him with peace, Andrea thought, and bid him welcome to my father’s humble ship as politely as only Turkish can.

Andrea set a pleasant smile on his face, bizarre in that melee of blood and death. He watched as the little man tested the strength of his rope and put his dagger between his teeth to free his hands.

“Here, let me at him, boy,” said old Barbarigo, who seemed all over the ship in his desperation.

Old Barbarigo shoved his stupefied son out of the way and let his pistols crack. He caught the Turk full in the chest. The little man lost his grip in midair and plunged, dead weight, into the water between the ships, splintering oars on both sides as he went.

Andrea looked down over the rail at the sight as if into the very maw of hell. He felt as if he had lost the only friend he had in the world in that little monkey of a man whose name he didn’t even know.

“By God—”Andrea murmured aloud and crossed himself. Then he stopped. No, not by God. By Allah. “By Allah and His Prophet.”

He tried it at first under his breath. Then he began to halloo it. He joined his voice to the rumble of the oarsmen beneath him, to that of the Turks who were using it as a battle cry to urge one another on.

“I surrender myself into the merciful hands of Allah,” Andrea sang out. “Lead me to Allah and His Messenger.”

Now the Turks had established more stable means of boarding than rope swings: planks and wooden ladders. Scimitars swinging like scythes, they reaped a great swathe on board the Venetian ship. Andrea saw that a corner of the main sail was on fire. As there was no wind, it was a slow burn, languidly uncurling its way up the canvas. It grew like weeds about a wilted scarlet lily, the flag of the Republic on top of the mast. It was, nonetheless, a burn that could not be put out.

“I surrender! I surrender!”

Men about him were joining his cry though, as they pled frantically in Venetian, it did not mean the same as his Turkish “I am a Muslim!”

The Turks didn’t have time to heed every cry, and many who surrendered also died alongside their companions who fought to the end. But Andrea, perhaps because his cries were in Turkish, kept the scimitars and arrows from himself and managed to balance his way across on a makeshift ladder to the other galley. There he laid his suit at the feet of a young commander of the janissaries.

Andrea had not offered more than a few words of explanation before his captor panted out the reply, “Well, if you’re to fight with us, you’d better put on this.”

The janissary tossed him the length of fabric from the head of a dead comrade. With it, Andrea showed the man he already knew how to wrap a turban. This seemed proof of sincerity to the janissary, who laughed, clipped Andrea with camaraderie on the shoulder, and said, “Stick with me, O Muslim!”

But already men about them were lowering their bows, swinging the nervous tension of their sword arms against air, or quickly scrambling back to their own ship, for the Venetian galley was clearly doomed. The whole rigging was in flames now, dropping volatile fragments like flower petals down upon the dead, the wounded, the unspent kegs of powder. Andrea saw his father, still shouting orders, standing on what had been the stern but what was now the highest point of the ship as it tilted dangerously.

The red-haired mistress was with him, yowling like a soaked cat. The woman tried alternately to dowse the flames about her petticoats and to get her man to calm himself. For now as he turned to profile, Andrea saw that his father had received an arrow wound near his right eye which, if it were not to prove fatal, would surely require more care than he was giving it.

That vision of his father, standing amid the flames of his ship with the mistress at his side, and half an eye running down his face, would haunt Andrea for the rest of his life. At the time he could only hope the state of his father’s eye would spare him going down beneath the waves with his last vision that of his own son and heir wearing a Turkish turban.

* * *

To the Christian rolls of the dead, next to that of his father the proveditore, was added the name of “My lord Andrea Barbarigo.”

But Andrea was not dead at all. Venice might have discovered this for herself when her ambassador signed the new peace treaty with the Porte. If he had looked closely under the turban third on the left, just behind Uluj Ali, the new Kapudan Pasha, he would have discovered the face of his old attaché among the Turkish naval command. But the ambassador had other worries on his mind.

The allied Christian fleet had carried the day. But Lepanto, Uluj Ali promised as the treaty was signed, had but trimmed the beard of the Turkish navy. It would grow again, and thicker. Even as he signed, the ambassador knew the Golden Horn was bristling with a whole new fleet built overnight it seemed.

“If we have not enough iron, we Muslims can cast anchors of silver, and our sails shall be of silks and brocades when the canvas is gone.”

It was, indeed, a finer fleet than had been sunk, and built in the space of but one winter.

“But you Venetians, by cutting off your island of Cyprus, we have cut off your right arm. You cannot grow another.”

It was true and the ambassador knew it. The treaty confirmed, in very humble terms, that violent amputation.

All the Cypriot wine he wanted was now promised to the besotted old Sultan for as long as his heart could keep beating. And Venice was quickly being eclipsed by greater powers, both East and West.

The operation that makes a man sexless gives him an ancient timelessness as well.

“There is peace in the harem, thanks be to Allah.” Ghazanfer tried to make conversation as he helped me unload my two ladies in the dim shadows before the door to the imperial harem.

I studied his face, which seemed as little altered by years as it did by moment-to-moment changes in emotion. Nor did his costume deviate, summer, winter, or spring, as the season now was. I supposed that whenever the brown sable of his trim began to grow a little thin, he scoured the furriers for just the same shade. The drapers had to produce the identical bottle green in such widths as his great figure required for the ample fall of his robes. Such lot-to-lot dye variations as the normal harem uniform suppliers produced never glanced off him.

I replied with an attempt at equal impassivity. He owed me his life, from that dark alley by my master’s northern wall. But I cannot say this made me trust him anymore. Ghazanfer had not heard, for example, what I had heard while his lady and young Barbarigo spoke together in Italian in that same alley, that same night. Safiye wanted my master, Sokolli Pasha, the Grand Vizier and main prop of the empire, dead. Allah only knew what that would do to my two ladies, Esmikhan Sultan and her little daughter.

Or what else Baffo’s daughter might have in mind for my two charges. I glanced protectively after them, where they paused now, Esmikhan loath to walk too far without me on the opposite side of her cane for stability. In the one spot in that dark alley where there was enough sunlight, a rosebush struggled in a raised stone bed. I remembered my lady claiming the pink blooms to liven her daughter’s soft, dark hair last summer. “A rose for a Rose,” she’d said, playing with the Persian meaning of the name Gul Ruh.

Now they studied the first splitting of greenery to judge how soon they might repeat the ritual. Gul Ruh, over three years old, was calling me in her most saucy, commanding tone to come and lift her up. “ ‘Cause you know Mama cannot.”

Ghazanfer was not the sort of man to argue with, about harem peace or anything else. Nor was he one to talk with much, either. So I agreed with him. “Thanks be to Allah.” But I could not resist adding, “May He not allow the peace to be on the surface only.”

“You look, my friend, for a Battle of Lepanto here within chastity’s walls?”

This hint of joviality was unusual encouragement from Safiye’s monster. I said, “No battleships in the pleasure fountains, no. But what in its own way may equal the Battle of Lepanto on the scale used in the women’s world. With no less ultimate effect.”

“You refer perhaps to the—” He chose the word carefully, “—tension between Nur Banu Kadin and my lady?”

“That creature Nur Banu herself introduced into the sanctum, but who has now grown to have very definite power of her own. And the will to use that power. Safiye the Fair, once called Sofia Baffo.”

Slowly, quietly Ghazanfer spoke. “The harem chooses sides.” Was there threat in his voice, that I had chosen the wrong side?

“At first it was only periods of silence,” I continued to challenge him, “and long icy stares between the factions as they sat together. Then it came that they sat in opposite ends of the room, whispering, and have separate hours set aside for them in the bath. Nothing overt.”

“Nothing,” Ghazanfer told me, “to lose sleep over.”

But I could not agree with him that it wasn’t dangerous. It was much more dangerous, I sensed, than a battery of cannon; and the long, slow wait for the fuse to burn down was often more nerve-wracking than had I been in the front lines on a battlefield.

And was his uncustomary verbosity a warning that my lady, too, must choose sides or be crushed in the middle? Esmikhan, I knew, would die rather than make such a choice, her dearest friend on the one hand, the stepmother who had all but raised her from infancy on the other. And though her mission on this occasion was with Safiye, my lady would scrupulously keep even hours with Nur Banu at another time.

I hurried to answer Gul Ruh’s demands. I caught her up, the bundle of silk that she was, warmed by the life of her tight little body. I took the whip of her stubby little braids in my face. Then the sight of life springing from the rosebush’s severely pruned and manifestly dead twigs made me cling to the preciousness of her being with such ferocity that she cried out I was hurting her and I must let her down.

“Are you certain we must visit Safiye today?” I asked my lady in a low voice and with a glance behind to Ghazanfer as I took her arm.