Sofia (39 page)

“Abdullah? What is it?” she murmured.

“It makes sense. Finally, it makes sense.”

“What makes sense?”

I doubted she could make much sense of anything, still half-asleep as she was. “Just a mystery that’s been preying on my mind for a while.”

“What mystery?”

“Nothing. Go back to sleep, lady. I’m sorry I disturbed you.

“I’m awake now. Besides, it seems late.”

“The sun is past its zenith. We should be on our way soon. Rest until then, to build your strength. It was only something I dreamed.”

“Now you must tell me. A dream untold brings misfortune. It must be told and analyzed.”

“Is that a Turkish custom?”

“Custom? It is only common sense.”

“Oh, I see.”

“It will help me lose the drowsiness. Of what mystery did you dream?”

“Just something having to do with Salah ad-Din’s death.”

She sat straight up now without a hint of sluggishness. “Salah ad-Din is dead?”

“Yes.”

“The man who made you a slave and mutilated you is dead?”

“Yes.”

“
Mashallah
! You never said that.”

“I didn’t?”

“
Mashallah
! How?”

“Murder.”

“Abdullah—? Not you—?”

I gave a brief laugh at the horror in her face. “No, lady. Calm yourself.”

“Well, I have seen what you did to the brigands. I know you’re fully capable.”

“Certainly I wished his death, wished it at my hands, every waking moment.”

“
Mashallah
. Allah turn the evil of that thought from you.”

“At first, of course, I was too weak to consider it. Later, as I mended in spite of myself, I began to look for opportunities. But he was wily, that Salah ad-Din, very wily. Mostly he had his wife see to me and kept his distance.”

I continued: “Coward! Damnable coward, hiding behind his woman. I was allowed no knife. My food was heavy on the sweets and dairy foods they say make tractable eunuchs. Once in awhile a little veal, but not often, because of the cost and then always prepared in bite-sized pieces.” “It’s a wonder you healed so well without flesh to eat,” Esmikhan commented.

“And the other knife with which I would have taken my revenge on the wife, they’d done away with that as well.”

“You never tried to escape?”

I had to smile at my lady’s explicit faith in the proportions of my heroism. “I thought of it, yes. But you know Pera. I was kept in the center of Pera.”

“It is the home of your countrymen.”

“Exactly.”

“But you could have escaped to them.”

“Could I? And what sort of life was there for me back in Venice? Now?” I couldn’t keep the cry of anguish from my voice.

“Your women have no khuddam?” Her voice was full of sympathy—for Venetian women more than for me.

“Of course not,” I snapped.
We are not barbarians,
I almost continued. Then I thought better of it and sought to ease any hurt my curtness might have caused with: “Unless they can sing.”

“With you they make khuddam just to sing?”

“Now, that is odd, isn’t it? Well, I can’t sing. I’ve never had a voice. In any case, I couldn’t bear the shame. I’ve already told you about those two countrymen of mine I overheard in the bazaar, how mortified I was for them to see me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized what an effective fence Salah ad-Din had created in his location. What other life had he left for me to return to?”

“I see. But the murder, Abdullah. Get to the murder.”

“I’m coming to it. As I was saying, I had about decided just to kill myself and at least deprive the bastard of the profit of his deed. I had even fashioned a rope from old sheeting that

I hoped could bear my weight. I had it hidden under my pallet for the hour I should get my courage up. I was about to do it, too.”

“Speak not of that, Abdullah, only to thank Allah your hand did not succeed against yourself. But the
murder
—”

“I actually had the rope swung over a dubiously rotten rafter when they brought the body home.”

“From where?”

“Salah ad-Din had gone across to the City that day to see to his shop in the bazaar. Most days, actually, this was his custom. He often slept across in Constantinople, to save himself the trip. Whatever there was between him and his wife—and a mismatched pair they were, too, he so thin and she so fat—it was nothing the Greek prostitutes—or his own merchandise, for that matter—couldn’t see to just as well. They had no children. In this he resembled his merchandise .

“So usually, it was just the wife and me in the little house, she with the keys to the door hung safely about her waist. She was trying to train me in a eunuch’s social graces: how to serve at table, how to run errands, how to shop in the bazaar with a woman’s eye, how to lard my Turkish with elegant phrases as opposed to sailor’s talk, how to hold the curtains as she got in and out of a carriage, all of that.

“And she tried to make a Muslim of me. ‘That you were uncircumcised when you came here is no longer an issue, is it?’ she told me. ‘That is the biggest fear most men face for conversion—unless they’re Jews to begin with. You know, there is honor for your kind among us. Only khuddam are allowed to be attendants in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Didn’t you know that? Female pilgrims need guides as well as male, of course. And khuddam stand guard at the boundaries between sacred and profane as well as be- tween men and women, that other boundary Allah in His All-Knowing wisdom ordained. Perhaps, if you embrace the Faith with your whole heart,
inshallah
, this could someday be your calling.’

Esmikhan asked with some concern: “She didn’t make a Muslim of you, Abdullah?”

“One who is neither male nor female can stand at the boundary between Christian, Jew, Muslim, and pagan, can he not?”

I suppose.

“She was a nice enough woman, I guess, in her own sloppy way, though my thirst for revenge found it difficult to see her as anything but vengeance’s object. She did favor capers in her cooking—even a eunuch’s food—entirely too much. A Turkish woman married to an Italian turncoat who gave her no children, not an enviable fate. She might have been more apologetic for the way in which her husband earned his living at my expense. I suppose she would have been, too, if the fact that he usually couldn’t afford to provide her with a eunuch—just a little Armenian girl in the kitchen—didn’t tempt her into taking full advantage of one when she had him.

“In any case, I did my best to learn as little as possible— of everything.”

“Oh, Abdullah, you are too modest.”

“Salah ad-Din came from time to time to have a home-cooked meal and see how we were coming along, how soon the profit could be turned on his investment. His wife had a vested interest in this. Her sash frayed right in two while I was dawdling along.”

“But the last time this man came home?”

“Dead. Throat cut. In the bazaar. The men who found him—other slavers—ferried him over and brought him up to the house, laying him out on a low wooden couch covered with a white sheet in the courtyard. It was summer, hot, and the flies had already found and followed him. He stank. The new widow was beside herself. It was, in fact, her screams, that made me leave my purpose with the sheet just tossed over the rafters. Oh, she could wail! Keening until the rest of us would fain lose our wits as well.”

“Poor woman.”

“Anyway, I was sent down to the local mosque for the imam at once and I had to help with the washing of the corpse.”

“Yes?”

I shrugged. “I was sent for sheeting and I pulled the stuff down from my rafter and used that to wash him with.”

“Yes?”

“It was then that I saw what the men who brought him had been careful to conceal from his wife. The man who’d cut his throat had also castrated him, leaving a gaping red-black hole alive with blue bottles. It was impossible to say whether he’d bled to death from the neck or the groin first.”

“So it must have been someone with revenge on his mind. Someone who knew—”

“Revenge. For me? Or others? I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. It was enough that he went to his grave without his manhood, without children and that hope of eternity—if he has the faith of your Chinese. Same as he condemned me to do.”

“Allah balances all, they say.”

“In any case, very shortly thereafter—within two days— the widow learned that her husband had vast outstanding debts, never mind her sash money. With him gone, so was his credit. She had to sell it all—including me—to save a pittance to take back home to her brother’s house. That was when I went to market, cheap. When Ali, unable to resist a bargain, even with a master the likes of Sokolli Pasha, bought me. Since then, there have been so many new things on my mind, I haven’t thought about Salah ad-Din’s end—except with brief feelings of warm justification—since then.”

“So you don’t know who did it?”

“I didn’t. I didn’t care. Some angel. So I was content to think until this morning.”

“What happened this morning? Your dream?”

“Yes, partly. I also remembered the mutterings of the men who brought the body home.”

“They had seen the murderer?”

“Someone had. ‘A dervish,’ they kept saying over and over again. ‘A dervish. A crazy dervish.’ That such a madman could never be found or put to death for his crime was clear to them.”

“Dervishes have that ability to vanish in thin air.”

“We saw that last night, didn’t we?”

“A coincidence.”

“More than a coincidence.”

“So they never did find him?”

“I suppose not. But I have.”

“You? How?”

“It was the same dervish that helped our escape last night. As I said, more than a coincidence.”

“How can you be so certain? There are hundreds of dervishes. Thousands. And this one wasn’t so crazy. More like a guardian angel.”

“Exactly.”

“You can’t know it wasn’t just the coincidence of two dervishes—two dervishes and a dream.”

“But I know.”

“How, Abdullah?”

“Because if your added gold teeth to that man’s gap-toothed grin, a month’s good eating to his skinny waist, trimmed his beard and hair, gave him a bath and the clothes of an Aleppo merchant, you’d have an old friend of mine. Husayn.”

“He seemed familiar to you?”

“At first, familiar yet strange. But now, in the dream, I am certain of it. In some miraculous way I cannot say—”

“But that it was the will of Allah.”

“Yes. In this case, I’ll join you, lady, in saving it was Allah’s will. By Allah’s merciful will, my dear friend Husayn has given up his luxurious life of trade and become a homeless mendicant.”

“It sounds to me as if his home is your constant aid. Abdullah, you are blessed indeed to have a friend like that.”

“Yes. Yes, I am.”

Truth to tell, at that moment, I had forgotten completely that there was ever any such thing as the secrets of Venetian glass.

I got to my feet and looked through the brilliant clarity of the afternoon wilderness about us, sensing I should be able to discover this dervish, my friend, Husayn, if only I looked hard enough. Like the mantle of Allah’s will. But this was only the hope of a swelling gratitude with no place to put itself. Because there was nothing left for us to do to find our way back to safety but set one foot in front of the other, I knew perfectly well that no dervish would be found.

For the first time in my life, I truly appreciated the Turks’ addiction to baths, the hotter the better. I came to stand before my master and Prince Murad, clean, warm, fed, rested, and my arm doctored—yes, with comfrey and myrrh—to kill the heaviness of infection. I felt like a new man, quite literally.

At the end of one afternoon of miserable wandering, we had found a goatherd who’d given us directions, a bed, and cheese in return for a single pearl torn from Esmikhan’s dress. We got the better of that deal. At the end of two miserable days, his directions brought us to a scouting party of janissaries who, in turn, brought us to their leaders in Inönü.

But a bath washed all that misery away to no more than the cozy memory of thick, warm quilts, and crackling, warm braziers. I had the feeling of having been reborn, an exultation of immortality.

I felt so good that it was quite a shock to see how grim the faces of Sokolli Pasha and the prince were.

The girls had been given time to recover, too: baths, new clothes, sweet salves smelling of aloe and myrrh for their flea bites. Esmikhan wore her veils. They had been washed, but the hem of one was fraying: gone to our fire under the outcropping. Safiye had had to borrow veils to make herself presentable. Anyone who knew her could see that these drapes were of an older, more provincial style than she was used to. The prince could not raise his eyes to meet hers through them.

Safiye and I flanked the princess like an honor guard at this first and irregular meeting with her betrothed. But there was something even more irregular about the men we faced across Inonu’s divan. They were flanked by two others, big, burly creatures. Anyone in the palace knew enough to sidestep these monsters, not so much because of their size, though that was awesome enough, but because of the fact that they had no tongues. They committed private executions— and were trusted to tell no tales afterward.

As if he, too, showed only a tongueless cavern of a mouth when he yawned, Sokolli Pasha silently placed three instruments on the low table in front of him with his long, talon-like fingers. His face was firm with duty. Just such a mask he must have worn as he came upon Orhan with a burning poker before the man went crazy.

Two of the weapons were daggers. The third, the one in the middle exactly opposite Esmikhan, was a bowstring made of silk. Ottoman blood may never be spilt, whatever the crime. It must be strangled.

A long silence followed. Perhaps we were meant to defend ourselves in it. But Esmikhan simply bowed her head humbly under the silent weight. She was ashamed in front of her betrothed. And now she was quite convinced that what had happened to her in the brigand’s hut deserved death.

I, too, could think of nothing to say. My lady was innocent, but death would be easier to bear than the guilt she felt. As for Safiye, nothing could be said in her defense, but to blame her would be to condemn myself.