Reign of the Favored Women (17 page)

We took over a hundred women into our horn i night. Such a perturbation! Sokolli Pasha removed himself and went to sleep in the Divan so we had use of the selamlik as well.

By the end of the week, however, we had no more than one of my lady’s stepmothers and Safiye with their two suites. This came to less than fifty extra women, which we thought we could manage for a while. The others had moved to other places Constantinople, some as far away as the summer palace at Edirne.

During the summer, when there were all the gardens for this trebling of our household to disperse into, we managed quite well. The young prince and Gul Ruh, one might have thought, had indeed died in the fire and gone to Paradise, so blissful was their small existence together. We only had to watch they didn’t try bathing or sleeping together, as they would have loved to do.

And Safiye was pleased to have daily access to the grille overlooking Sokolli’s main guest room.

With these three happy, we were all pulled along to contentment, too.

As the cold weather descended, however, tensions which had been covered or at least tempered by sunshine and flowers erupted quite unbearably. My master grew wise and took to holding his most sensitive councils in the Divan. Denied access to the Eye of the Sultan altogether, Safiye was always irritable. I suppose we should have been glad that Nur Banu, the only one Safiye could justly accuse of malice against her—was in her private garden palace near the Edirne Gate—even further from the powers of government than she was.

Safiye herself was obliged to admit that she was at times unreasonable, like a caged animal who may strike at the hand that feeds it. Sometimes she even apologized. But that might just have been the child everyone at last knew to be growing within her. It is common wisdom that a woman is not herself when she’s pregnant.

And that was how Safiye’s third child, a second prince, came to be born in our harem. Cowardly, I sent one of my assistants to fetch the midwife. But the Quince, who had refused on some excuse or other to be watchful under our roof all summer, did not appear even for this. The Fig came instead, and so late there was little at all for her to do. Safiye did always get her woman’s business done in a hurry—although this time Allah willed not successfully.

The little prince died without a name.

“It was the fire,” some said. “It came at a very delicate time in the pregnancy—before she’d even told anyone. It did great harm to the unborn child.”

But Safiye had the gracelessness to accuse my lady’s rooms of cursing births. Esmikhan did not shake off this accusation very well. The memory of her own three dead little princes did not rise off our hearts for weeks. Even Gul Ruh proved a poor antidote for a while.

And I was more disturbed than I could even tell my lady by the word the Fig left me with as I helped bundle her back into her sedan. “Revenge,” is what I thought she said, looking straight at me. Her thick African accent made me hope I’d heard wrong. But even more unnerving was the impression she gave me that I should be glad of this information.

Safiye recovered from the tragedy faster than anyone. A stint at the grille overlooking Sokolli Pasha’s selamlik was tonic enough for her. She did have Muhammed and Aysha in compensation, growing quickly as children will.

Still, I think we were relieved—all but poor Muhammed and Gul Ruh, who wept as if their little lives would end—when Safiye finally conceded to Murad’s entreaties to join him in Magnesia. At any rate, they were gone before the worst of winter set in.

* * *

With Esmikhan and her stepmother there were no personality problems whatsoever. In fact, after all the excitement of having Safiye with us, I would at times find myself suddenly and excruciatingly bored. If one of my lady’s stepmother’s handmaids had not been among Selim’s current favorites, I think I might have gotten into some mischief of my own, just to keep in shape.

This girl was not foremost of the favorites: Those had been given a room close at hand in what was left of the main palace. And Selim’s desires were not what they once were: The burning palace had put some fear of Hell in him and he had taken to calling for the Mufti for long religious discussions almost as often as he called for debauch.

But every once in a while he would send a messenger to us for the girl. She had no attributes to speak of save this alone: She was the best of the booty Cyprus had to offer after the fourteen months of starvation and disease that were the siege. He sent for her on days when he wanted to drink the wine so much blood had been spilled for, and to glory in the one great success of his reign—the conquest of her island.

For my own diversion, whenever the girl was called for, I would see to it that I was free to accompany her. Some may see no great excitement in a long evening reading poetry or playing chess with a colleague while I waited for Selim to grow sated. It is true I would have whiled away the time in much the same way at home. But at least here the rooms were not quite so familiar. There were new faces in the company who might have new tales to tell, and I could stop by and observe how the rebuilding of the palace was coming along. Progress here was but very slow, for Selim’s heart wasn’t in the task. Nonetheless, this provided other news to bring home to my mistress. The new foundations ran along the same outlines as the buildings that had burned, so she imagined it easily.

I did keep thinking I might someday pick up some news there so close to the Sultan that would prove of more importance. But Selim had long ago forgotten there was a world outside that would shake if he but spoke. My own master Sokolli Pasha was in full control of the vast empire in all but name. Selim had retreated more and more into his own pleasure-—or, as relief from that, into his own morbid guilt, equally indulgent because it was likewise of no practical application.

I was disappointed in everything I learned—until one late afternoon just shortly before Muslims were due to begin the month of fasting in their nine hundred and eighty-second year. Christians were in the midst of Advent in the last months of 1574.

I remember I was alone in the eunuchs’ sitting room, reading a collection of pious tales. Lack of activity more than anything else had sent me to seek such reading. I was on the story of how Moses asked Allah where in the universe He was. And the ancient prophet received the reply, “Know that when you seek for Me you have already found Me.”

I had looked up for a moment from the manuscript to contemplate that divine answer, but was denied inspiration of my own by the appearance of the Cypriot girl. Every retelling of that old tale brings the events that followed so vividly to mind that I sometimes fear I shall never be able to seek Allah properly because of this stumbling block.

It was evident at once that the girl had not finished her stay. She was not dressed to go, but had only a bath towel to hide her nakedness in; because of her agitation, it wasn’t serving very well.

He’s been more perverse to her than usual, was my first thought. But things will only go worse for her if she seeks to escape him. There is no escape for a slave of the Sultan. Allah help me. How shall I convince her?

But then I noticed a high glow in her cheeks, rather more of excitement than of fear or disgust. It made her actually radiant, and if I had thought before that being a Cypriot was her only claim to favor, I now decided there was some other beauty present.

“Abdullah, please come.” She did not squeak it in a passion or shout it in fear, but whispered it, as conspiracy.

I was confused. “Into the presence of the Sultan?”

“Please, just come.”

So I marked my book with a scrap of silk and followed the naked kneading of her buttocks.

They had been in the bath. It was Selim’s fancy to lay the girl out in the pool like an island reposing in the Mediterranean, and to move upon her like the Turkish flotilla out of Latakia. She would be obliged to feed him—peeled grapes and draughts of her people’s wine like their blood—as the island had fed the invaders, with nothing reserved for itself. He would move over her curves as the Turkish cannon had rumbled over the terraced hillsides until he besieged the prize—Famagusta on its harbor—where victory was won with the utmost violence and revenge...

I went in prepared to make my deepest salaam, and to keep my eyes averted as was proper in the Sultan’s presence. But the room seemed to be deserted.

The Cypriot led me down three tiled steps to the cooling room in the center of whose octagonal piers an octagonal fountain bubbled. At the bottom of the steps of the far pier lay a body.

It was hard to believe that the Sultan of all Islam could be found in such indignity. A slave, perhaps, or a beggar at the end. He was spread-eagle, stark naked, and where it was not pale and flabby as a fatted, plucked hen, too much liquor blotched his flesh the color of dried liver.

“Is he dead?” the girl whispered.

I forced myself to overcome not awe but revulsion and to bend and find out. When I put my hand at the back of his head, it felt mushy and came back bloody. But the movement made him open his eyes and catch the girl’s face. She drew back, startled and afraid.

A tongue thick with wine moved in the Sultan’s mouth and I bent to hear what it said, “Cyprus...shall...”

“Cyprus shall what, majesty?” I asked, but never heard. A pulse continued, very faintly, but there was no consciousness to accompany it.

“He slipped,” the girl explained. She had given up the towel as a cover altogether now and was wringing it anxiously in both hands.

I stood up and looked at her. Yes, that seemed reasonable. Stumbling drunk, he’d been pursuing her around the fountain. The floor was wet. He slipped, fell, and cracked his skull.

There was, of course, another possibility. Even as I stood there, I thought I heard a voice echoing from the dark recesses of the bath where, the superstitious say, are the haunts of jinn. It seemed to be the voice of the Sultan saying, “Come, my splendid Cyprus. Give me a hand.”

And she gave him a hand: to his tipsy feet a firm, well-placed shove.

I looked in her eyes and saw that vision was a very definite possibility. Those sad brown eyes had seen her whole family and all her friends starved or butchered, the indignity of the slave block, the continued embraces of the rotting man whose fault her entire sorrow was. Unlike other favorites, she never thought the getting of a son might improve her lot. A hardness in her features hid other ambitions. That was why she could never be very pretty and why, perhaps, Selim still called for her when he wanted to tempt his vulnerability.

“You may pray,” I told her quietly, “he doesn’t live to speak again.”

Then I looked away from that hardness, for even I could not stand in its presence.

I found a towel to cover the man’s nakedness so that the next to find him should not be exposed to the same shock I’d suffered to learn just what frailty we’d all been subject to for eight years. Then I told her she had better learn to weep for her master quickly before I returned with help to carry him to a bed.

What was done was done, I thought. Even boiling the girl in oil for treachery would not improve matters, only give ideas to others who might not have considered it on their own. To this day she and I alone know that what was everywhere pronounced an accident, “Allah’s will,” was really the revenge of Cyprus from a cask of its best wine and the hand of a hard-faced slave girl.

It took three full days for the ghost to pass from him, but even before we got the dying Sultan to his bed, the messenger was on his mad dash to Magnesia with the word for Murad: “If you would inherit your father’s throne, come at once before the news gets out and other claimants have a chance to mass.”

Again I had to wonder at the cool way in which my master, the Grand Vizier, carried off the change of power. Of course, had he done otherwise, he might well have been out of a job—nay, out of his life. But cucumber flesh could not have been slower to color and betray itself. Me he trusted, the girl he ignored, and only the two I’d called to help me when the Sultan fell had their tongues removed as a precaution. Otherwise, even Esmikhan was not told, Nur Banu did not guess, and the other viziers and officers of the Divan did not have an inkling until Murad himself arrived at Moudania.

Sokolli had the imperial galley on alert, ready to ferry the new emperor across when he should come. But Murad was not expected for another day, and had not been told of these arrangements, so he hired his own passage on a little fishing boat. Thus he arrived on the deserted shore of the Topkapi peninsula.

Now, Murad had been camping out on the fourth day of a hunt when he was alerted. He did not bother to change clothes before riding and sailing like a madman for ten days. For speed he had limited his suite to no more than four trusted companions. Ghazanfer was among them—Safiye’s eyes and ears, her fist of power—and there was also Uweis, an illiterate and rather wild Turkoman of original stock whom Murad favored because he knew the mountains and steppes and could hunt them like a fox. It would take more than just a change of robe to give that man a dignified appearance.

So this road-worn party had come to knock on the empty seaside gate to the palace wall after midnight. My master had warned the gatekeepers to be on their guard and, on their lives, to admit no one without his express orders. These men took one look and then did not need to look or think more before following those orders—and shutting the little peep window again and firmly.

A winter storm was blowing in off the Black Sea. The winds were high and the waves left precious little shore—and that very exposed—for five men to stand on before the rise of the great walls. Perhaps Murad had seen through the peep window, past wind-whipped cypresses, to the blackened carcass of a palace he was to inherit; he had heard of the fire, of course, but not yet weighed the reality of it. Tired, hungry, cold, shut out from his own palace—a ruin—and now it was beginning to rain. The new Sultan must have been very discouraged indeed. Even stray cats had deserted that exposed spot that night.