Reign of the Favored Women (27 page)

So I was somewhat startled to see, as I happened to pass it one day, a eunuch from Nur Banu’s suite entering under the shadow of Cyprus’s wooden coat of arms. But Nassey, when he was in favor, was favored by Safiye. I could find no explanation for the khadim’s presence there, and I had business of my own to attend to, so I soon forgot the event.

I remembered it again in a hurry as things progressed.

At the time, that afternoon was more memorable to me for another reason. I was the last soul to leave the street in front of our house. The heat had closed all shops and driven all other errand-runners indoors some time before. I was grateful for the cool that greeted me in the cavern of cypress trees and jasmine of the master’s garden. It was cooler still within the house and there I was welcomed by Gul Ruh’s joyful shouts. Their echoes were to my ears like sherbet to a dry tongue. I decided to put off entering the haremlik for a moment to follow the sounds and refresh my eyes on her as well.

A fountain splashed in the middle of a courtyard in the selamlik where, when he chose to pray at home, the master could perform his ablutions. About this, like sparkling water herself, the young mistress was scampering, skipping, playing tag. Whenever I saw her like this, I was always glad for the sin that caused her to be, even when the master looked at me and commented that she seemed to have nothing of him in her at all.

She was a beautiful child—young lady now, almost nine years old. She had her father’s (her real father’s) height as well as his fine features translated into feminine terms so she could have been older. Her coloring was burnished and healthy—Esmikhan’s, only brought to life by exercise and sunlight. Whenever she lost that color occasionally during a childhood illness, it always came back quickly with more vigor than ever. Each scrape, however, drained Esmikhan with worry and her bloom did not return. Sometimes it seemed that the transfer of health and strength between mother and child had not ended when the midwife cut the cord. Or even at weaning.

When the girl was healthy, which was most of the time, Esmikhan needed something to fret about and she found it in her daughter’s hair. True, it was not curly, thick, and luxurious, “strong” hair, as fashion preferred. “You’ll have to eke it out with skeins of black wool when you are older,” Esmikhan told her daughter with a sigh nearly every day. But it grew long instead and the two braids which bounced behind her that afternoon seemed to have life of their own that heavier hair could never possess, and life of a more ethereal sort. No thicker than heddle ends, still when they flew, they could set the sleepiest old cat in the weaver’s shop to playing.

Gul Ruh was playing with Muhammed the Prince who was, I think, at our house more often than his own, at least as often as he could escape his tutors. That afternoon their play was even livelier than usual, for they were joined by Arab Pasha.

Arab Pasha was the son of the old black slave woman who had served Sokolli Pasha before I even came. Although deaf and nearly blind, she seemed to shed twenty years to have him home again. I’m not good at picking out features when they’re set in dusk, but I’ve never doubted that old AH was his father. Still, some gossiped that Sokolli himself had sired the man in a time when a purchased African was all the progeny he hoped to ever deserve.

It is true that Sokolli Pasha had given Arab Pasha all the advantages a father could: a splendid education among the palace pages and then the influence to secure him the best posts. Yet, had the young man not had so much intrinsic ability, I’m sure Sokolli wouldn’t have seen him past a scullery job. Now that he had earned three horsetails to his standard practically on his own, Arab Pasha was the name the Grand Vizier had put forward as the new governor of Cyprus to replace Muzzaffer.

My master admired and loved (in as far as he was capable of such emotion) the young pasha; while neither beauty nor weakness moved him, ability always did. My young mistress in her own, much more open way, adored him, as sister never loved brother before, and it was her name for him, “Brabi,” given before she could talk straight, that composed half her shrieks around the fountain that afternoon.

From the breast of his shirt, Gul Ruh had stolen Arab Pasha’s pouch of Turkish tobacco. They were playing keep-away all around the fountain with it, and the girl, who had Muhammed on her side, managed to keep ahead of the pasha’s great long legs for quite some time on her dancing thin ones.

Prince Muhammed thought by his devotion to win back some of his adored cousin’s attention, which always suffered when the black man came home. The prince served her long and well in the fray and then could not understand why, when the pasha cheated and won—leaping right over the fountain with his long black legs and pouncing on the girl like a panther—why she curled and giggled in his arms as if they had been conspirators from the first.

Initially, Gul Ruh struggled, leaping like a little puppy after a table scrap for the pouch the young Pasha held high over his head. She had force enough to tumble him, with her on top, to a seat upon the fountain’s edge. Here tickling and toying slaps fell exhausted at last to a cozy embrace, with her head on his shoulder and her hand still in the breast of his caftan. I noticed the contrast of skins: hairless white against the thick, curled black.

Muhammed sat to one side of the pair like a discarded cloak by the bedside; I couldn’t escape the image. He scuffed his crimson slipper against the flags and whined from time to time, “Gul Ruh. Gul Ruh. Let’s play...”

Then the master arrived. He entered by the same archway I had. A few steps behind me, he said, “Ah, Arab, I was just—”

A few steps beyond me he stopped stock still for a moment. Then another moment passed. He had taken the scene in and knew what he must do. His only struggle now was with his own awkwardness. He could command armies, but this put a blinding glare in others’ eyes and in his own at how helpless he was in the shadows of the harem. Times like this made him wish that between this awkwardness and the last he’d taken some time out from the Divan and the training field to practice these black arts.

“Daughter, come here,” he said.

The two faces, the white and the black, looked up from themselves, startled not only by the sound but by the recollection that there were other people in the world. Once over her shock, Gul Ruh smiled and luxuriated her head back against the young pasha’s shoulder.

“Hello, Papa,” she cooed.

The uncomfortable softness her voice gave him put an edge on his. “I said, come here.”

Her eyes grew big with wonder, almost—should it be?—fear. She got to her feet and came to stand before him. A single toss of his head said, “To the harem.”

She went, her braids as stiff as rods. The only backwards look she dared was for her father.

The Grand Vizier now motioned me to him. That was easier. I was at least half a man. He took my elbow as if for support, but was very firm when he said, so quietly neither of the others could hear, “It is time. She is your charge now.”

I understood and bowed. Later I heard the voice of Prince Muhammed wailing, “I want to see Gul Ruh. I have to see Gul Ruh again,” echoing into the heart of our harem like the disembodied voice of the jinn in the cypress on a windy night. It was the same wail he’d given as they’d driven his nurse away when he was a baby, only now there were words to it.

Only then did I finally feel the full impact of the day and realized that, for the two cousins, this was a very real sort of death. From now on, even when she went to call on the boy’s mother, Gul Ruh would have to veil closely if ever the young Prince came in the room. And I would have to speak for her while she quickly withdrew.

Muhammed was beyond the prohibited degrees of relationship: father, brother, and uncle. Sex was conceivable beyond that pale, hence, face-to-face contact was inconceivable. From this I understood that Arab Pasha was not the master’s son. If he had been, then their contact would not have startled Sokolli Pasha into seeing how close his daughter was to puberty, for brothers and sisters are always allowed to be intimate.

Gul Ruh had no brother. Until she married, her male companionship, beyond her father, was at an end. Her grief, unlike her cousin’s, was soundless.

And some weeks later Sokolli Pasha freed, then married one of our slave girls to Arab Pasha. It was the master’s rather awkward (awkward because so extravagant, especially on top of the appointment to Cyprus) way of showing his protégé his affection.

When we took the bride for her day in the bath, Gul Ruh had to run back to her rooms in tears. She barely survived the Henna Night, and the wedding night she couldn’t endure at all.

I’m not certain what particulars of the marriage bed Gul Ruh knew. Unlike in the West, women safe in their harems never curb their tongues in the presence of children when discussing such matters. Esmikhan was somewhat more inclined to modesty than most, probably because any mention of intimacy must call to her mind but a single event, and that stolen event was one she must not, under any circumstances, divulge.

Gul Ruh knew at least that marriage entailed great intimacy. She knew that this freed slave of a bride was allowed to go with honor and ritual to the presence of her adored Arab Pasha, whereas she, a princess of the blood, could only ever catch a glimpse of him through the lattice again. The hurt, grief, and jealousy was almost more than Gul Ruh could bear.

Something else about this marriage should be mentioned, not because I found it important then but because of what happened afterwards. The guests were eating wedding soup spun with threads of egg and plenty of lambs’ fat making rainbows on the surface, such a pottage said to give the couple the strength they need for their exertions. There were also great pyramids of party pancakes, dipped in orange blossom syrup, heaped with buffalo cream, and sprinkled with pistachios. My lady was an expert when it came to filling the house with the smell of warm butter and sugar.

In the midst of these festivities, Nur Banu put in an appearance, by which we were much surprised and professed great honor. The Queen Mother at the wedding of a slave! Esmikhan offered her stepmother a seat of honor next to the bride, and Nur Banu took it as if she would have demanded it had it not been immediately forthcoming.

Here she spent a great deal of time speaking to the bride in an undertone. That is, of course, a matronly guest’s prerogative and it is thus that a girl learns what she might expect from the married state. Many women take this opportunity to exercise their souls of griefs and disappointments in their own lives. So I suspected nothing. Even the words I did happen to overhear as I offered the Valide Sultan a narghile, though I found them odd, did not make me suspicious.

“Too bad he is black,” Nur Banu said. “The seed of a black man can curdle your inside. It is work, I tell you, to get healthy children by them.”

Here she stopped to screw the mouthpiece she had brought with her—it was the old, mellowed jade one—to the smoking apparatus. Then she continued, “It is the same with the governing posts they are sent to. They begin by serving as well or better than any white man. But soon, Allah alone knows why, their affairs turn muddy, black...”

It is unfortunate the girl was so young and fresh from the hills of Caucasia, too, where people are very isolated and superstitious. She believed, her eyes wide and frightened, what the Queen Mother told her.

Christians in Constantinople will remember this time. Their solemn feast celebrating Our Lady’s Ascension was tragically interrupted that year. The janissaries were restive because Murad had declared no war at all that season—something that had never happened in the history of the Ottomans before—in consideration of the famine.

Having nothing better to do, a band of soldiers were spending their seventy-five akçe “tax” on wine. The wine sellers were wise to the debasement and only offered drink three-quarters water to match the three-quarters copper in the coin. Still the men had managed to imbibe enough to get rowdy and they began to take as their entertainment a mockery of the Christian solemnities. Some young acolytes, seeing what a small and disorganized band the soldiers were, decided to defend themselves. The brawl that ensued ended only with the death of a priest, the rape of several pious Christian matrons, and the church itself a pile of smoldering ashes.

Muslims will remember these days as well. Not for the brawl: that had little effect in their quarters but a few bumps and bruises, all imported. Nonetheless, it was the day after the brawl that my master entered the Divan smoldering like the apse of the ruined church.

“By Allah,” he said, “these Christians are our wards. They are People of the Book, people who pay tribute into our coffers—practically all we have coming in now—-so that we will protect them. We must let them live their religion—inferior as it is—in peace. We are honor-bound before Allah to shield them. How shall it be when word of this comes to our borders? There are people—Christians and Jews—recently surrendered to our sway because we gave them our word they would receive protection and rights far and above what they had under the rapacious, petty Christian kings before. ‘Well,’ they will say, ‘even in the capital, Muslims do not keep their word.’ “

Sokolli Pasha was also unnerved by the unquiet mood he sensed in the troops. If such a mood were indulged at this moment, when there was nothing left with which to buy them off, rebellion was just around the corner. Sokolli Pasha conferred with the Agha of the Janissaries and got clear support from the Mufti, whom he never failed to impress with piety. The measure passed easily and in a matter of moments went from the Divan to the courtyard where it was read: “Any Muslim found drunk on wine against all command of Allah and His Prophet will suffer the pain of death.”

Heavy sobriety met the announcement and reigned, only slightly appeased by the return of the Sultan from a late summer hunt in the mountains near Edirne. Murad was not like his father, an incurable sot, to seek to overturn the law himself. He did indulge from time to time, but the way he did it—always eyeing the red crystal closely like a miniature painting, sniffing and sipping at it with an artist’s care—made drinking, to go along with the liturgy of his poems, something more like a sacrament. If left to himself, Murad might have let the whole thing pass, like the twenty other times such a law was on the books, as a useful piece of present discipline to be slowly relaxed, conveniently forgotten over time.