Reign of the Favored Women (48 page)

The pavilion was as carefully arranged for dramatic effect as had been any of the public entertainments. The crimson, pearl-seeded cap did much to drain every last bit of color from Muhammed’s face, pillowed against a great gold-tasseled bolster. Matching coverlets of cloth-of-gold and brocade covered him to the chin, the heavy fabric held away from the tender area by other bolsters.

Besides boxes of exotic dates, the Prince’s diversions included a group of musicians playing in the forecourt outside and a reader reading Persian tales of romance and adventure behind a locked screen closet. Several cages of live birds swung from the arches of the pavilion to muffle the boy’s moans with happy chirps and in a niche by his head sparkled a small cooling fountain. But no diversion brought quite the relief of an opium draught given just before our arrival.

At the door to the pavilion I stopped to fuss with Gul Ruh’s veil until she sighed wearily and stamped her foot as if to say: “Eunuchs! When they cut you, they turn you into neither more nor less than old biddy hens!” She had Nur Banu’s very tone—or perhaps Safiye’s—and that angered me. But I must confess that that was one time—there have been others—when I looked down at my hands and was both surprised and frustrated to find that they were the big, clumsy hands of a man instead of the small, gentle hands of a mother.

“Even with the musicians and the reader behind screens, you cannot be too careful in such a public place,” I chided her. “And I do not want your cousin to see too much, either...”

That did seem to subdue her somewhat and we went in together.

The afternoon grew hotter still. The pavilion seemed to work like glass, to magnify and trap the heat within. The deep-sleep breath of the boy seemed to pervade the heat with vapors of opium for everyone. Many of the women who had come to nurse decided that the drugs were doing the job for them and that their time could be better spent in the baths that afternoon.

I tried to suggest this to Gul Ruh. She parted her veil ever so slightly to let some fresh air in and I could see that what was rivulets of sweat on my face turned to steam inside there. But she insisted.

Even when Safiye herself gave up a mother’s place, Gul Ruh would not follow. Were it not for the fact that I was convinced the girl was trying to shake me with the longest endurance-of misery, I, too, might have succumbed. But at that point I would not leave her all alone in the steamy, fever- and drug-laced room.

Both of us nodded heavy heads. Gul Ruh propped hers up against the wall at the Prince’s simple, turbanless cap. I suppose the tiles there were somewhat cooled by the little fountain, for she was able thereby to maintain a watchfulness that had me think of stealing a few breaths of fresh air from outside. I must take such air if only to keep up with her level of alertness. So finally, that’s what I did.

I hadn’t been out very long before I was brought back in a hurry by a most fearful cry. I found Gul Ruh a limp heap on the floor by the door to the reader’s closet, rocking back and forth and keeping time with rhythmic moans of “No! No! Can’t! Can’t!”

The Prince joined her moans softly, but the drug was too powerful for him to do more, and though at close range it seemed that the agony of her grief could stir the dead, doubtless the fountain and chirping birds were doing their work, for no one else heard or came.

“What is it? What is it, dear heart’s oasis?” I asked.

I got no response but that “No! Can’t!” to which rhythm she clung as if it were breath itself. I could do no more than wrap her in my arms and rock and rock with her, giving a croon and a prayer for every moan of hers.

“Help me, Abdullah,” she mouthed, voiceless as if crying from the bottom of a very deep well. It wasn’t much, but for one moment, the horrible spell of her own agitation was broken.

“I will, Allah strengthen me, if you’ll but give me some word...”

She was back under the spell of her singsong now, but it seemed weaker and came in gasps.

“What is it? Is it the reader? Did he—what? Did he hurt you? Did he try and see more than he should or—?”

She didn’t reply, but my pronunciation of the word reader had a profound effect on her. I got up and went to try his closet door to see...

“No!” Gul Ruh cried, but it was a “No” totally different from any one she’d given before. “Abdullah, don’t. He’ll kill you.” That stopped the singsong short.

“I was...” She paused, swallowed, gasped for breath. “I was supposed to let him in.”

“To?”

“Kill”

“Prince Muhammed?”

“Yes. Oh, Allah, Allah, how could I ever think of such a thing?”

“But you didn’t think of it, did you?”

She looked up at me.

“Nur Banu put you up to it, didn’t she?”

“She said it would be easy. All I had to do was open the...”

“Easy for her, perhaps.”

“It was going to look as if just the infection...”

“Yes.” I nodded, gingerly stepping away from the closet door as if it were infection itself. “I suspect it would have worked, too.”

“But I couldn’t do it.”

“No. Of course you couldn’t.”

“He’s my cousin. We played together when we were little.”

“Praise Allah, He made you too good to forget.”

“But is it good? Am I not just weak? She killed my father and Brabi. I must take revenge.”

Gul Ruh made a half-hearted scramble towards the closet door again, but gave no struggle and actually fell into my arms with relief when I stopped her.

“Who killed them?”

“Aunt Safiye.”

“Did Nur Banu tell you that?”

“Yes.”

Of course, I thought. Certain things began to fall into place for me immediately, but I didn’t say so to my charge. Nor did I indulge in pursuing these things in my own mind right then. Instead I suggested, “Did you ever stop to think it could be a lie?”

“A lie?”

“No, of course not. You are too innocent to go around suspecting lies.”

“Do you think it was a lie?”

“I have little doubt.” I lied. “You know what bad blood there is between Nur Banu and your aunt. The Valide Sultan would stop at nothing to see that Safiye’s power is thwarted.”

“She would lie?”

“She would do worse than lie.” Even...

“Yes, even attempt murder at your guileless hands. Thank Allah we stopped that crime in time.”

“Thank Allah...”

“Come. If she were guilty of your sainted father’s death, do you think Safiye could sit there coolly day after day, looking your mother in the eye?”

Gul Ruh shook her head. What this meant was that she was certain she couldn’t do such a thing. She projected the outcome of her contemplated deed into the future with increasing horror.

“So this is what all this recent attention was? Just a ruse to gain the trust of those in Safiye’s camp. You haven’t really fallen madly in love with your cousin, have you?”

She shook her head in despair. “But what am I to do now?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll call soldiers to get rid of him,” I threw my head in the direction of the closet, “and we won’t say another word to anyone about it.”

But suddenly Gul Ruh made a lunge for the dagger on my waist and had it unsheathed and on the way to her ribs before I could stop her. Our hands strained, shook. Her lips quivered like those of the thirsty for water. It was the struggle of madness, for under normal conditions she would have been no contest for me. Sanity returned at last and returned her to more than natural weakness. I put my dagger out of reach this time, but then hurried back to her side. She disintegrated into tears in my arms.

“Angel, angel, you didn’t really want to die, did you?”

“No, no,” she sobbed. “But that should be my punishment for even thinking of such a horrible thing. I should live, marry Muhammed, and live forever among these schemers, never knowing peace or happiness or love again. I deserve it now. Death would be easy compared to that.”

It occurred to me that her “Can’ts” and “Nos” had been more shrinking from the possible futures she envisioned than from the murder. She could only ever think of murder in an abstract less real than the future—of that I was certain.

Then, without warning, I began to tell her of my first days as a eunuch. The presence of the newly circumcised brought the memory forcefully to mind. I told her how I’d struggled to accept my fate. At the time any sort of future at all seemed precluded.

“I remember saying T can’t, I can’t’,” I told her, “over and over again. But somehow, I was able to. Here I am, thanks be to Allah. And it has not been so bad. It has not been the end of the world as I imagined.”

She made an attempt to take comfort from my words, but there was still bitterness in her voice when she said, “Yes, to marry for a woman is what becoming a eunuch is for a man.” I didn’t tell her how closely her words echoed those of her mother shortly before Esmikhan had been given to Sokolli Pasha.

At that moment Safiye and some of her maids returned.

“By Allah, what’s happened?” she asked, looking hastily to make certain her son’s breath was still coming deeply and slowly in sleep.

Gul Ruh couldn’t answer so I did. “My lady had a scare. She...she saw, or thought she saw, someone, a woman...a woman in black who sought to...who sought to, Allah forbid, harm the Prince.”

The maids echoed my prayer that Allah should forbid such a thing. They never doubted my word, for such beings are well known to haunt the pavilions of the newly circumcised, seeking to steal their souls. They have names that are known and incantations by the bookful to which the women immediately fell lest the ghoul return.

Safiye was a bit more skeptical. She looked hard at Gul Ruh and asked, “And you, you stopped this...this woman—whatever?”

“She did, thanks be to Allah,” I replied, ‘but you can see it was clearly a trying experience for her.”

Then I quickly swept Gul Ruh out of the pavilion.

I was not quick enough, however, to catch the reader-murderer. Having overheard our conversation, he thought it wise to break through the lattice window at the rear of his closet and escape. Since no one I knew admitted to ever having seen his face, he was never apprehended.

Safiye appeared less skeptical of our story later, in spite of the broken lattice. She came up to report that her son’s fever seemed to have broken and all, Allah willing, would be well.

Then she said, “It’s curious. He woke from that sleep having dreamed a dream. It took a while to convince him it was a dream, it seemed so real. He dreamed that he had died and gone to Paradise where he was waited on by scores and scores of sparkling-eyed houris.

“‘Of all races and types in the world. Mother,’ he said. ‘Great black Africans like pleasure barges, Russians like pure banks of drifted snow, Circassians like armfuls of apricot blossom in spring. My member,’ he said, ‘grew from the cutting into a flaming sword with which I cut through their ranks, making them melt before me like butter, sweet, sweet springtime butter I ate and anointed myself with and swam in. It was wonderful. It was Paradise indeed. .And was it only a dream?

“‘Mother,’ he asked at last, ‘why would you marry me to my cousin? Marriages and cousins, they are supposed to last forever. But this dream has taught me that girls are of no use unless they’re disposable. I can get fresh every day, every hour, by Allah, every minute if I tire of them. That’s the greatest part of their beauty, its fragility, its ability to fade like cream. Like a dream. If there are no limits to it—and, by Allah, a Sultan has so very, very few limits—it is meaningless. Oh, Allah, Mother, how I crave meaning!’

“Who has been teaching my son such things? To what pagan of a tutor should we quickly give the choice: ‘Islam or the sword, by Allah!’?

“At first, Gul Ruh,” Safiye continued, “when you told me about a woman in black, I thought Nur Banu. I thought...well, I didn’t believe you. Now? Now I’m not so sure. Something...something dark has come over him. Something I am not sure we can control.”

I remembered the black scar on his cheek.

“He has grown up, Safiye,” Esmikhan suggested quietly. “All you put in him from the beginning—of good and evil—has now come to manhood.”

“But he is my son. There must be a way I can control my own son.”

Esmikhan said nothing.

Safiye paused, then: “All I can say is it will take some hard work and maybe even a little shove through Murad—which I’m not at all sure I can manage right now, since Nur Banu’s got that new dancing girl in favor—to bring Muhammed around to this marriage we all want so much. By Allah, control! I need more control...”

Her voice unraveled out into a deep musing which maybe never reached but certainly pushed towards the realization: “I need control like my son, Allah spare us, needs meaning. And perhaps, for people like us, neither ever truly exists.”

The morning after the final boat race and the final fireworks display, when word came to us that the Prince was recovering well and beginning to walk around a little, Gul Ruh sighed and declared to no one in particular that she longed to become a Christian.

“Allah forbid!” her mother cried, making signs against evil as it she had just wished for her own death. “Whatever makes you say such a thing?”

Gul Ruh’s reply showed that she was really too naive of other religions to be taken seriously. The gist of her longing was only that, nun-like, she wished never to marry anyone at all.

As fate would have it, not two hours later we, all three, were commanded to appear before the Sultan himself. Esmikhan had not seen her brother except on formal occasions since his ascension, and for Gul Ruh, the memories of childhood meetings had faded altogether. It was an honor not to be refused and yet one so great as hardly to be borne. Gul Ruh, who thought she could guess its purpose (her aunt Safiye had been busy all morning), clung to me all the way down, as it she were as crippled as her mother.

“Oh, Allah,” she kept praying over and over, “I wish I could be a nun.”

Murad sat on cushions in the cool of the garden, his legs coiled under him and under a sheet of paper on which he was practicing the art of illumination. The recent festivities, he declared had given him great inspiration.