Sofia (23 page)

“What is a
sandjak
?” Sofia asked.

“A fief, a province they must govern and tax, sending the revenues to the capital and keeping for themselves only enough to live on. You must know that Magnesia is the traditional
sandjak
of the heir to the throne and, though she tried, even Khurrem Sultan could not move my master Selim from this place. Oh, how I loved Magnesia! Perhaps I loved it so because that is where my son was born and we were very happy together when he was small and could still play at my feet in the harem. From Magnesia, we could often take jaunts to the sea coast and that was pleasant—Ah, but one must not weep over what it is not Allah’s will to have endure forever.

“Four years ago, Khurrem Sultan took mortally ill. Suleiman was mad with grief and decided to fulfill her last request. She had not asked that her favorite Bayazid be moved to Magnesia, only that Selim be moved elsewhere. The rest, she supposed would follow, for she had great faith, not unwarranted, in Bayazid’s ambition.

“But even grief could not blur Suleiman’s eyes to the needs of the Empire altogether. Under the wise counsel of the vizier Rustem Pasha, he decided to move my master here to Kutahiya, which does have the advantage of being much closer to Constantinople. In case of emergency, my master can reach the Sublime Porte in five days of hard riding. Bayazid, on the other hand, was not moved to Magnesia as Khurrem Sultan had desired, but to Amasia in the Pontic Mountains. Because of bad roads and the greater distance, he could not hope to reach Constantinople in anything less than two weeks. In case something, Allah forbid, should happen to the Sultan, Selim would have that much advantage to carry the day. This fact was not lost on Bayazid.

“We were not overjoyed to move to Kutahiya. It was not our beloved Magnesia, after all, and the climate is abominable. But we always made haste to fulfill our sovereign lord’s desire, and when we were told to leave Magnesia, we did. Not so Bayazid. He refused to go to Amasia. Have I told you? No. I guess not. Amasia had been poor Mustafa’s sandjak.

“‘I will not go,’ Bayazid said, ‘for it puts me in mind of my poor dead brother, and how can I rule with such grief on my shoulders?’

“In fact he was thinking, ‘If Magnesia is the place where princes go to grow into sultans, Amasia is where they go to die.’

“Well, still muttering such things, Bayazid finally did go. And he discovered that in that eastern land of Kurds and wild Turks one need only say the name ‘Mustafa’ to conjure up an army, for they all loved Suleiman’s eldest son dearly. In their ignorance they began to say that Bayazid was a resurrection of the strangled Mustafa.

“Soon, entrenching himself with arms and men, Bayazid stood in Amasia in open rebellion against his father. Perhaps it was his mother Khurrem Sultan who encouraged this in him before she died, hinting that his father was old and weak and that a show of force would finish him. Still, Allah was with the right and did not support such blasphemies against the man girded with Othman’s sword. My master joined his armies to those of his father and, loathe as he was to fight against his own brother, defeated him on the fields of Konya.

“Bayazid fled first to Amasia and thence to the court of the Persian Shah, where he remains today. That is where our master Selim is, where he has been since the snows cleared this spring, menacing on the borders of Persia and warning the Shah that Suleiman means business. The Shah for his part has made a solemn vow that he will not give up Bayazid nor his four little sons to Turkish heretics while he yet has breath.

So the matter stands. Allah alone knows how it may all turn out, but I pray daily that He may favor our master and bring this to a speedy, victorious end.”

Sofia nodded her amen to this prayer and her appreciation for the confidences. She thought of them often in the days that followed. More memorable than the words, which she still could understand but imperfectly, was the action she had witnessed. Cool, sedate Nur Banu had risen to her feet and “strangled” the air with a flick of her white, bangled wrists and a twist of her painted red fingertips. There was power indeed, and more than in all those bungling princes and their armies.

Spring gave way to summer there at the edge of the Phrygian highlands. The fields of thistle whitened and dust, once raised, took all afternoon to settle.

Sofia learned Turkish. She also learned the ways of the harem. She learned to groom herself with the help of the lesser slaves and she learned what fabrics and colors were most becoming according to Turkish tastes. She learned to dance. She learned the communal dances when lines of women holding one another’s belts followed the small, bouncing steps of a leader. And she learned the more strenuous individual dances, where one accompanied a lot of movement from hip to navel with the clicking of wooden spoons. At this latter pastime, with her long, graceful limbs, Sofia soon excelled.

She learned to sing, to adjust some of her Venetian songs to Nur Banu’s aesthetics while at the same time giving them an exotic flavor all her own that delighted her audiences. She also learned to play a little on the oud and to accompany others when they performed, but at this she had less patience and so made less progress. She enjoyed being the center of attention too much herself.

But Sofia did try hard to make friends and was extremely good at that. Soon no gathering in the harem could pass without loud applause and the cry of her name. Turkish tongues from the little charwoman on turned “Sofia” into “Safiye,” meaning “the fair one,” a name that suited Baffo’s daughter as well as it suited those who gave it to her. Soon she had almost forgotten she had ever been called anything else.

Toward the middle of summer, there was great rejoicing, for the master returned victorious and tales of the Shah’s capitulation and Bayazid’s ignominious death were circled in the harem versions with great relish.

Still, Sofia—or Safiye, rather—was not quite as content as such news should have made her. Even though she had never seen the master, now a war hero, of one thing she was certain: he was a man of appetite. Besides the boys it was rumored he liked, every evening he would send word into the harem via the great white eunuch. Nur Banu would then deliberate and choose three or four of the prettiest girls to send out for his perusal. One or the other would be chosen, or perhaps a favorite would be called for again, and she would be the one honored to spend the night with the master.

Safiye watched this process closely. She came first of all to admire the incredible power Nur Banu wielded by it. The master himself, though he craved women more than food, had very little notion what went on in his own harem. He did not even know precisely how many souls it contained. “Twenty or thirty” he might say if someone had the rudeness to ask, but most had manners to avoid such topics.

Though the numbers varied, Nur Banu could have told at any moment exactly how many there were, and that it was closer to fifty. In these matters, which concerned a full half of his household, Selim was totally at the mercy of Nur Banu and what she chose to tell him. Though she herself would never share his bed again, she had perfect control over who could.

If one girl won her disfavor, she had only to send word, “Rejoice, my master, for she is with child.” When favor returned, she could just as easily say, “Alas, my master, for the girl has recently miscarried and is much desirous of your company to comfort her.”

And Selim, who included any precise notion of where babies came from among his ignorances, had to believe her.

Safiye was quick to learn that if she were to satisfy her ambition, there was no other way than through these channels. She could be the darling of the harem, but that meant nothing if she had no ties to the public world of men. Only if some daring girl could win the favor of one of the eunuchs behind her mistress’ back was there any hope of her voice being heard on the outside world without Nur Banu’s consent. And Nur Banu kept very tight reins on all the
khuddam
of her harem.

Safiye watched the other girls return in the mornings to gloat or show off little presents the master had given them if he’d been particularly pleased. A much rarer, but much more important event occurred when a girl found herself with child. Allah willing, it would be a son, and then her power in the outside world would be limited only by the power of that son and the devotion she could command in him. Fortunately for Nur Banu, though, there were many daughters born and her Murad had only four competitors for prince-hood, for all Selim’s lust.

Safiye was a quick and willing student of this system, its petty jealousies and little triumphs. Every evening when the eunuch would repeat the master’s desires in an undertone to Nur Banu, she would become instantly alert. When Nur Banu would turn slowly and survey the girls before her, Safiye would try to sit up straight, smooth her bodice, flutter her eyes, fold her hands gracefully in her lap—whatever that day’s musings determined had been missing from her appearance the day before.

But never once in many months was her name among those the mistress quietly murmured when her decision was reached. Never once was she among the girls who jumped instantly to their feet to scurry off to the baths with high color and high hopes to prepare themselves for the master.

At first Safiye felt it must be her newness, her ignorance, her stumbling with the Turkish tongue or with their manners. This spurred her on to evermore concentrated stud v. But soon she began to suspect that none of these was the cause at all. Sometimes she would catch Nur Banu’s eyes upon her as she played with the other girls.

She watches me as my father used to watch young colts frolic in the fields in springtime,
Safiye thought.
Satisfied, proud, as if she had created me herself I see no disappointment in her at all. I am clearly her favorite. When she does not wish to eat with the rest, she never fails to call me to join her alone in her room. She often draws me aside for private talks, and she laughs with delight at nearly everything I say. She gave me first choice of the new cloth we got last week — even before she took the blue silk for herself. And yet she doesn’t choose me! Why? Oh, why?

Such thoughts came to haunt Safiye more and more frequently as the everyday chatter of the harem grew more and more common to her ears, until she knew no great secrets were being told and that she could second-guess nearly everything that was said. She began to feel, for the first time since just after her arrival in the East, that she was a prisoner and a slave indeed. She managed to hide it well, but she even had bouts of homesickness.

The feeling of being trapped was not so easy for her to conceal. It often made her mind wander so she answered stupidly when addressed or sometimes didn’t answer at all. Then her feet began to follow the wanderings of her mind, and she found herself pacing once more, back and forth like a caged lioness. This was not an image she wanted to portray to Nur Banu, that woman who was the constant epitome of control, but some days she simply couldn’t help herself.

One such day came in the heat at the end of summer. All the other women had sought shelter in the baths or with fans and sherbets in the central marble hall. But Safiye wandered out past the untrimmed roses, the dried hulls of earlier lily bloom—these were too depressing in any case—to the very end of the harem garden. There, clinging to the iron bars, she stared through the narrow window in the wall to the furthest distance her eyes could reach. The white thistle fields and the grain golden stretched far below and seemed to taunt her with their free swaying in the puffs of breeze.

Most frustrating of all were the hawks.

“Ah, to be a hawk—!” Safiye sighed. “Their haunt, the sky, has no walls at all from Turkey clear back to the Piazza San Marco in Venice.”

“I thought I might find you here.” A voice interrupted her dreams.

“Lady!” Safiye exclaimed as she turned quickly around to find Nur Banu just behind her, accompanied in the garden by a little black slave and a sunshade.

Safiye knew Nur Banu did not trust a girl who liked to be alone, just as, in her interior decorating, she could not bear to have blank space for anything, but must have pattern upon pattern to feel comfortable. Safiye covered the window with her back as if the view were an extra pastry she had wickedly stolen and with which Nur Banu must not catch her.

But a window cannot be hidden as easily as a pastry.

“What is it you see outside that is so fascinating?” Nur Banu asked, gently pushing the younger woman aside. “I see only sky and fields, the same today as they were yesterday.”

“You are right, lady,” Safiye confessed with a self-critical giggle. “There is nothing to be seen. I have learned that for myself and intend never to look out that window again.”

“And yet you were here yesterday and the day before. There must be something.”

Safiye hung her head, caught in her little lie.

“It will spoil your lovely white skin,” Nur Banu said, “to be so much in the sun.”

“Of what use to me is lovely white skin if I am never to...” Safiye burst before she could stop herself.

Nur Banu smiled and nodded gently, forgiving the outburst even though she could only guess the end of the sentence. “Come here, Safiye. Come under my sunshade and let us talk.”

Safiye did as she was bidden and, though she was defensive and cold, the older woman slipped an arm about her waist with affection. They walked thus for some few minutes until Safiye felt she would soon be driven to make apologies and flee to the baths to join the other girls. Even that would be preferable to this silence.

“Safiye,” Nur Banu began at last. “Aren’t you happy here?”

“Yes, of course! I’m very happy,” Safiye replied with too much energy rather than too little.

“Yes, you are happy,” Nur Banu repeated. “Except that you are frustrated. I know. I can see it in you.”

“I am sorry, lady,” was all Safiye could think to say.

“So am I,” Nur Banu said. “So am I.”

After they had walked a few more moments in silence, the older woman began again. “Have I ever told you about my son?”