Sofia (30 page)

“Abdullah.” At least it was male. “That was the name my friend Husayn always teased he’d give me if I came to play Turk in his homeland. Like I called him Enrico.”

“Do you mind?”

What did it matter? What did anything matter anymore? I shrugged my acquiescence.

“Abdullah it is then.” She wrung her cloth out in its bowl with renewed determination. “Yes, I do think it suits you. Much better than Lulu. You are different from other khuddam. Perhaps you are newer at it than others?”

“Perhaps.”

“Is this your first post?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps that explains it.”

“Perhaps.”

“Well, I shall do my best to see it is the only one you ever have. It isn’t easy, so I understand, for khuddam to change mistresses once they’ve become attached, like family.”

Attachment to anything seemed impossible, but I said, “At your service, my lady.”

For the first time, I felt some gratitude for the patience Salah ad-Din’s fat, sloppy wife had had in trying to teach me the stiff formalities of my new station. She insisted on teaching me when becoming a more marketable commodity was the last thing I wanted to do, when I was too consumed with rage to breathe evenly for days on end. There was some purpose in these forms. They were an escape.

“Is there truth in what the others were saying?” Esmikhan began again.

“What others?”

My lady bit her lip, flattening its usual roundness, until it was more like an average mouth. “Sokolli Pasha—my betrothed—perhaps he made a mistake in sending you, one so young and inexperienced.”

“I think he hasn’t much experience with eunuchs, lady, that is true.”

With a sigh, she turned more merry. “Well, I see nothing wrong with you. The way you stood up to my brother— I’d trust you on my side against anyone.”

“It’s only when I knew he was your brother that I let him get off so easily. Anyone else—”

“I appreciate that, ustadh. Anyone else would need more help than Safiye can offer him tonight.”

She finished with the water. It was getting cold in any case. She tossed the cloth into the bowl with a little splash and gestured for the maidservant to remove it.

When the girl was gone, she said: “You know Safiye, don’t you?

“Safiye? Is that what you call her?” Not she-demon? Not bitch?

“You know her? From before?”

“From before.”

“She is Italian, too. Is it such a very small country? You Italians certainly give my Grandfather the Sultan trouble enough in battle and on the high seas.”

“Italy was a long, long time ago.” Couldn’t we finish with the subject?

“I see.” I think she did make an attempt to change the topic, though it wasn’t far enough for me. “Well, Safiye has certainly brought life to this harem. Life to my brother, too, which you tried to knock from him again tonight. I have never had such a dear, dear friend as Safiye is.”

“What pleases my lady pleases me.” Another one of those good, noncommittal phrases.

“I do hope Sokolli Pasha will allow me to continue to see her.”

“I am sure that what pleases my lady will also please my master.”

Selim’s daughter chuckled.

What was so humorous about the way I ran through a eunuch’s dialogue? “My lady?”

“Nothing. Just—wasn’t it funny when my brother finally discovered that he, not you, was the intruder here in the haremlik? How he soon skulked back into the mabein with his seriously wounded pride? He is such a blustering bag of hot air. You mustn’t mind him.”

“I shouldn’t mind him so much if my eve wasn’t throbbing like it is.”

My lady laughed again, louder. “And Safiye, how she turned so indignantly from you and quickly followed her lover. Nobody ever brought her to heel before like that.”

“She would follow her lover.”

“Oh, not Murad. She only does what Murad says when it pleases her. You, Abdullah. You, with your put-down. ‘Looking for lovers among the khuddam?’ I wonder who’ll recover sooner, Murad from his black eyes or Safiye from your words.”

My lady and I had met only briefly before, just long enough for me to register her plump, healthy youthfulness in my mind. I had weighed it sadly against the sharp middle age of my master, who was to be her husband—and even more sadly, equated it with a younger form of Salah ad-Din’s wife. But now, I saw how truly pleasant she was to look at. Not overwhelmingly beautiful, perhaps, with her round face and round, dark eyes, black curls and round mouth dimpling with her laughter over a round chin. A prominent mole marred the left side of her nose. But she was good-natured and pleasanter still when her personality bubbled unhampered to the surface.

I laughed in spite of myself and she laughed back.

Then, with sudden and inexplicable unity, Esmikhan and I laughed together. It was infectious, a fever of laughter. We laughed and laughed until the tears flowed, until our sides ached. We couldn’t look at one another without falling into another fit. Finally, first she and then I collapsed to the cushions of the divan and rolled and laughed and cried until we were spent.

***

“Good night, my lady.”

How long had we lain thus side by side until a chill brought me to myself? Selim’s daughter had laughed herself into an immobile exhaustion. She didn’t reply. Perhaps she even slept. I shivered again in the autumn chill that had crept into the room. I found a quilt and tossed it over her sleeping form. Her little hennaed feet curled up under it in gratitude, but her breath came deeply now. She slept.

It was good for Esmikhan Sultan to laugh. As a bride, she must have been under a lot of tension, and would come under more.

But it was also good for me. I hadn’t allowed myself to laugh since I’d slept in Husayn’s guest room so very long ago.

I’d been afraid it might hurt my mutilation. I found now that it did not.

We moved through the autumn hills that were thick with the acrid smell of asphodel like smoke to the flame-orange turn of the leaves. The bridal train was more glorious than I had dared to hope. The master had meant to send only his old black retainer, Ali, and myself. He was too busy with duties of state at the moment, though he promised he would travel a day’s journey out of Constantinople to meet us.

At the last minute, some word of conscience, perhaps from the Sultan himself, had reminded Sokolli Pasha that this was a princess of the blood he was marrying, not just any old peasant. For duty’s sake, he had increased our numbers to thirty out of the capital. Our escort, however, was not composed of musicians, mimes, acrobats, and other merrymakers common to wedding parties, but a squadron of janissaries. It was as if our charge were a chest of taxes in pure gold traveling through a land of barbarians rather than a bride crossing the very bosom of the Turkish homeland.

Now, on our return, Prince Murad himself was in the company. The most trustworthy harem gossip told me this was Safiye’s doing. Nur Banu and most of her suite were retreating from the mountains for the winter, as they always did. A skeletal harem only would be left to see to the needs of Selim during these cold months, and Safiye had no desire to be part of the powerless dregs. Yet now she could not be permitted to leave Murad’s side. Her only alternative was to convince the young prince to convince the sandjak and his father that he should winter in Constantinople, too. This Safiye accomplished in ways known not to the daylight disputations of the divan, but only to the secret nights of lovers.

Whatever the gossips said, I could not help but think that part of Murad’s purpose in making this journey was that he did not really trust me with the honor of his women. I could feel his suspicion like whiplash on my back every time I approached one of the curtained sedans. I did notice, however, that he was rather careless of my dealings with his sister, so I suspect he was more jealous of the curt Italian Safiye and I exchanged and the tension of a past he could feel between us than he was of Esmikhan’s virginity.

For her own purposes, Safiye handled this very well. Though my mistress barraged her with messages and tidbits of gossip all day long, sent on my feet and through my tongue, Safiye initiated nothing in response. All of her attention went elsewhere—via other eunuchs to the prince, who rode on his horse at the head of the column.

On our third noonday halt, I returned once again empty-handed to Esmikhan.

“What says Safiye?” my lady rose to ask.

“She said nothing, only took the message through her grille in silence.”

“She will not come and join me. Again.”

The hurt in Esmikhan’s voice was deep. She sat down once more, but found no comfort on the cushions her maids had fluffed up for her under an oak gone crimson and making the ground rough with its dropping fruit. Her maids tried to tempt her with dainties from the kerchiefs full of lunch, but they made the mistake of offering a little Turkish bonnet first.

“Safiye’s favorite,” Esmikhan sighed, and pleaded no appetite after that.

“Lady, Safiye is busy with her love,” one of the maids coaxed. “Soon you’ll have enough love of your own to keep you as busy as she is. Think of that. Think forward to your husband-to-be and do not be sad.”

The other girls murmured their agreement with these sentiments, but Esmikhan avoided their words and, while trying to avoid their circle of eyes as well, her gaze fell on me. I had not been dismissed and stood clumsily by, wondering if I should dismiss myself. The sudden excitement that beamed through the clouds of tears in her velvet brown eyes momentarily increased my apprehension. But when she saw me, Esmikhan suddenly let out a little laugh. Forced though it was, it was nonetheless an echo of our laughter three nights ago in her room in Kutahiya.

“Abdullah,” she said.

“Lady, I am at your service.” She held out her hand and insisted I take it in mine. Her hand was soft and warm. “You shall come and sit here on the cushions, Abdullah, right by me, and tell me everything there is to tell.”

“Lady?”

“Tell me all you can about Sokolli Pasha, who is to be my husband.”

“My lady, I’m afraid I do not know much at all.”

“Surely you have met him?”

“Yes,” I replied. “But only once.”

“See? That is once more than anyone else I know. All these silly women mean either to terrify me or to placate me with their false rumors. But they have never even seen him and I refuse to believe them. I will believe only you, Abdullah, so you must tell the truth. They say Sokolli Pasha is old. Is he so terribly old?”

The maids left off their protests of Esmikhan’s breach of etiquette to listen, for they were almost as curious as she was.

“He is not young,” I confessed. Then, to still the murmurs of disappointment this brought forth, I continued, “But, lady, this is said only because you yourself are in the bloom of your youth, Allah protect you, and would prove his better were comparison made between you on this count. You know well no man can bear defeat in any matter from his bride. He is the one who is supposed to defeat her.”

The disappointment turned to titters of delight at this statement.

But, “No, don’t you tease me, Abdullah,” Esmikhan said. “The others tease me; you must not. I understand Sokolli Pasha has been in my grandfather’s service for almost thirty years. I can do sums. He must be forty at least.”

“May Allah double his years,” I said. “My master is fifty -four.”

“No! Do not pray to double those years! Fifty-four! That is three times—almost four times my age! My father is younger than that!” Esmikhan wailed.

“Sokolli Pasha is a man of strong, fit body and keen mind. He is a soldier who will endure, Allah willing, at least two more decades of warfare, diplomacy—and love.”

“But I am just a child, with my whole life ahead of me. Allah, I am to be married to a grandfather!”

“If it is any comfort, lady, rumor has it, and my meeting with him did nothing to dispel it: Sokolli Pasha is as much a stranger to the ways of love as you are.”

“If he’s a healthy man, as you say, how is that possible?”

“Do not forget, lady. Sokolli Pasha was raised from his youth in the Enclosed School.”

“He is one of the tribute boys, then?”

Had Esmikhan been a Christian girl, with centuries of crusade in her upbringing, there might have been a tremor of horror in her voice. That, or at least deep pity to think that her betrothed had been one of the thousands of lads taken as a tribute from the Empire’s Christian communities every five years. These lads became the Sultan’s personal slaves, forcibly converted to Islam, never to see their families and homes again.

But Esmikhan knew only the Turkish side of the story in spite of the fact that in her seclusion she had never actually seen a tribute boy. She knew that Christian parents were as often as not glad to give up their sons and would try to cover up their defects in an attempt to get them chosen for the levy. To be taken away from the misery of poor, war-ridden lands on the border to the glittering capital with every chance for education and advancement usually outweighed any considerations of religion and family togetherness. It was not unheard of for Muslim families to put off circumcision and pay the local priest to pass their sons off as Christians, too, for even True Believers rarely knew such a good life as the most favored of the Sultan’s favored slaves.

Neither did Esmikhan turn up her little round nose to think that her husband would be a slave. Although the first lesson boys learned in the Enclosed School was absolute obedience to no master but the Shadow of Allah, the Sultan, they learned plenty ol other things, too. Those with brains were taught to read and write, those with brawn to fight; most were as handy with the pen as with the sword. There, in the barracks that became their home, nothing counted but individual ability, neither family’s prestige, wealth, nor the prejudice ol acquaintances. Some became gardeners, some cooks, some men of religion and study. The greater part ol them filled the ranks ol the janissaries, where their tierce devotion to the Sultan made them tight as one man and put even life a lowly second place. It one showed his devotion particularly well, he joined the Sultan’s private bodyguard.