SERAGLIO (12 page)

Galata

The carriage was just an oblong box on wheels, painted with flowers and fruit, no different from a hundred others in the city. It clattered through the filthy alley and stopped outside an anonymous two storey house painted yellow, like all the others in this predominantly Jewish quarter. A page opened the door and Julia stepped out.

She, also, was anonymous beneath her
ferijde
, the long sleeved cloak worn by all Turkish women in the street. It was black silk, the only clue to her station in life; poor women wore alpaca, while women of the court wore lilac or rose silk. She wore two veils; the gauzy
yashmak
that covered her face nose and mouth and then over that a black
cazeta
that fell from her head to her waist, with just a square cut hole for her eyes.

She hurried into the house, leaving her pages to wait by the coach.

Abbas.

He was even more obese than when she had known him as the Kislar Aghasi in the Harem and unrecognisable as the beautiful boy who had courted her in Venice. He was sweating, even though it was still early morning and not yet warm. He dabbed at the pillows of fat bunched under his chin with a silk handkerchief. Sweat stained the edges of his huge white turban.

She tried to reconcile her memory of the passionate, bronzed boy on the gondola with this nightmarish creature with one white vacant eyeball and bloated face. This ugly falsetto eunuch who had grimaced with outrage at their very first meeting inside the Harem and whispered such strange endearments as she waited to die one early morning by the Bosphorus was the same boy who wanted to her to run away with him when she lived in Venice.

This was still her Abbas.

He looked up and stared at her in astonishment. 'Who are you?' he said. But she guessed that he already knew. He tried to struggle to his feet and clapped his hands for his pages to come and assist him.

After they had him back on his feet he sent them outside. 'Julia,' he breathed.

She lifted the
cazeta
, let it fall behind her, like a cape. Then she unpinned the
yashmak
. 'Hello Abbas.'

He covered his face with his hands and turned his back to her. 'You should not have come,' he moaned.

'I had to see you once more.'

'I told Ludovici I never wanted to see you again. Why do you wish to humiliate me like this?'

'Please, Abbas …'

'If you knew the pain you cause me, you would not have done this!'

She felt like a fool. How did she think this meeting could go otherwise? 'Abbas … ?'

'Why did you come here? Why did Ludovici allow this?'

'Please turn around.'

'So you can gaze on my beauty?'

'Abbas, I do not care how you look. I have always loved you and I still do.'

'Stop it!'

'Turn around. Please.'

When he turned back to her his face was mottled and his one good eye stared at her with grief and with outage. 'Go away! What good can this do now? My love for you has cost me everything! Just let me forget, for pity's sake!'

'Abbas, I never had the chance to thank you … you saved my life.'

'I did because I loved you. You do not need to thank me. How will you return my love? With your kisses? Will you take me to your bed? Shall we become lovers at last?'

Julia took a step towards him to try and comfort him but he held out a hand to stop her. 'Don't,' he said.

'Abbas …'

'Can you even imagine what it is like for me? There is no release for me, ever. I want to love and be loved, but that can never happen. I am a slave and even less than a slave. There is no hell after death, Julia, it is here, it is now and it is where I reside every day and every night.' His rage spent he slumped against the wall. 'Please, just go.'

'All right. But first there is something I have to tell you. I did not come here to torment you.'

'Tell me then and go in peace.'

'It is about my father.'

'Gonzaga?'

'He is coming here to Stamboul.'

'Coming here? How do you know this?'

'Ludovici was informed yesterday by the
bailo
. La Serenissima is dispatching a peace legation to the Porte and my father will be the ambassador.'

Abbas slipped further down the wall until he sat on his haunches on the carpet. 'So the devil approaches Paradise,' he said.

There was nothing else to say. Julia desperately wanted to comfort him. She knelt down beside him and he did not protest as she leaned forward and gently kissed his cheek. 'I am sorry,' she whispered. 'I do love you, Abbas.'

'I love you, too,' he said.

She started to weep. He patted her head, gently. 'It's all right. Don't.'

She got up, replaced the
yashmak
and the
cazeta
. She was still crying. Now that she had started, she could not stop.

After she had gone Abbas stayed crouched against the wall, his kaftan skewed around his knees. He heard the clatter of the carriage wheels on the cobblestones as she left. After a while the shadows slanted across the room, and he watched dust motes drift through the chevrons of light that angled through the slats in the window.

He drew his knees up to his chest and curled on the floor. Just before evening his pages came, helped him to his feet and half-carried him downstairs to the carriage. Then they took him home, to Hürrem.

Pera

Antonio Gonzaga watched the Kubbealti Tower at the Topkapi Palace rise like a miniature campanile from the skyline as they sailed past the battlement walls on Seraglio Point.

'So that is the home of Il Signore Turco?' he said.

'We must treat warily with him,' the
bailo
said.

Gonzaga snorted with contempt. The
bailo
was more Turke than Venetian now himself, he thought. The man has gone native.

He despised the
Comunità
. All these merchants lived in Turkish palaces and lived in Turkish gowns. What was more disturbing they spoke of the Sultan and the Divan as if they were more important than the Doge and the
Consiglio
.

'We should take care not to provoke him,' the bail went on. 'The Mediterranean is now, after all, just a Turkish lake.'

'Do not disturb yourself,
Bailo
. One day the Lion of Venice will consume all its enemies. Until then, I shall do as you suggest and play the lamb. But I shall not grovel to him. Our setbacks are only temporary. Do not forget that. '

The Ambassador of the Illustrious Signory of Venice made the short trip across the Golden Horn in the royal
caïque
. When he reached Seraglio Point, two pashas and forty heralds escorted him and his delegation the rest of the way to the Ba'ab i-Humayün, the gate of the Majestic One.

Gonzaga tried to appear indifferent to the great arch of white marble and the contents of its mitred niches. The decapitated heads had ripened in the sun and there were more heads piled like cannonballs at the main gate. A group of urchins were playing with them.

Gonzaga put a scented handkerchief to his nose.

The arch was a full fifteen paces long and when they emerged from it they entered the first court of the Topkapi Palace, the courtyard of the
Yeniçeris
. The court was full of people; servants carrying trays of hot rolls,; a page being carried on a litter to the Infirmary; a troop of blue coated
Yeniçeris
on the march, their Bird of Paradise plumes of the veterans cascading almost to their knees. Yet he was struck by the hush, after the tumult of the street outside. In here no one spoke above a whisper.

The Ortakapi, the gateway to the second court, was flanked by two octagonal towers with conical tops, like candle snuffers. There was a huge iron door and Suleiman's
tugra
- his personal seal - hung above it on a brass shield. There were yet more heads blackening on spikes on the wall above.

Gonzaga was ordered to dismount.

'We must go on foot the rest of the way,' his interpreter told him.

Gonzaga reluctantly complied.

There was a waiting room leading off from the gatehouse. While Gonzaga cooled his heels in a sparsely furnished cell the interpreter passed the time by pointing out a cistern used for drowning and the beheading block. The Chief High Executioner, he said with some pride, could process up to fifty heads a day.

Gonzaga thanked him for this information and settled down to wait.

Three hours later he was escorted through the gate to the Second Court.

***

How dare they can make him wait like this! He was so furious at the insult to his person and to La Serenissima that he did not spare a glance for the fountains or the box hedges or even at the gazelles that grazed on the lawns. He stamped between the honour guard of
Yeniçeris
lining the pathway to the Divan, head down, his retinue hurrying behind him.

He was aware of the silence though. The only thing to be heard was the sigh of the wind in the trees.

He was escorted into the Divan.

This, however, was impressive. He had never witnessed such a riot of colour. Despite himself he stared in awe at the brilliance and variety of the costumes before him; the Grand Vizier in bright green; the muftis of religion in dark blue; the grand
ulemas
in violet; the court chamberlain in scarlet. Ostrich plumes waved like a forest, jewels flashed in turbans and from scimitars. There were silks and velvets and satins.

And the aromas! Hundreds of dishes of foods were set out on the silver tables; guinea fowl, pigeon, goose, lamb, chicken. The Ambassador of the Illustrious Signory of Venice looked around for the chairs. Instead he was made to squat on the carpets with the rest of the company to eat his lunch.

'When may I see the Sultan?' he hissed at his interpreter, an unhappy looking man who was sweating profusely.

'Very soon!' the man whispered back. 'But we must be silent for the meal!'

As the interpreter had suggested the meal was eaten in total silence. Pages leaned over their shoulders and squirted rosewater into their goblets with unswerving accuracy from goatskins slung over their backs. Attendants in red silk robes moved silently to and from the kitchen. Just a raised finger was enough to have a servant hurry over to fulfil any request. Pastries, figs, dates, watermelon and
rahat lokum
were served as dessert.

Still, not a word spoken.

In fact the solemnity of the occasion was not broken until the meal was completed and the assembled dignitaries rose to their feet. At that point the slaves descended on the plates and scrambled for the remains of the food like a pack of dogs. It only confirmed what Gonzaga had suspected all along.

Big show. Nice clothes. But just heathen beneath it all.

***

The Ba'ab-i-Sa'adet, the Gate of Felicity, guarded the selamlik, the Sultan's inner sanctum The double gate was surmounted by an ornamented canopy flanked by sixteen columns of porphyry and guarded, by Gonzaga's calculation, by at least thirty eunuchs. They wore vests of gold brocade and each had his curved
yataghan
drawn, each razor sharp edge flashing in the sun.

Gonzaga was given a gold cloth to put over his clothes so that he would be fit to present to the Sultan. The Chief of Standard then came to receive his gifts.

Four Parmesan cheeses.

The interpreter did not comment on this bounty. He was made to wait while this treasure was presented to the Lord of Life.

Suddenly two chamberlains grabbed him by the neck and arms, pinioning him. They forced him to his knees to kiss the portal and then dragged him across a gloomy courtyard, between another double line of guards, and into the Audience Hall, the
Arzodarsi
. They ignored his protests. They could not understand his Italian anyway.

His impression of the Lord of Life was fleeting; a white turban adorned with a huge egret feather, three diamond tiaras and a ruby the size of a hazelnut, a gown of white satin ablaze with even more rubies. He had a beard and a proud nose.

A throne, fashioned form beaten gold, stood in one corner of the hall like a four poster bed surrounded by a carpet of green satin. It was so vast that the Sultan's feet did not touch the ground. Pearls and rubies hung from silk tassels on the canopy.

Gonzaga was even afforded a glimpse of his own august person, on his knees, held down by two black slaves, in the reflection of a gilt Vicenzan mirror. He was by now almost inarticulate with rage. While he fought for words, the Vizier, standing at Suleiman's right shoulder, turned to his interpreter. 'Has the dog been fed?'

'The infidel is fed and now craves to lick the dust beneath His Majesty's throne.'

'Bring him here, then.'

Gonzaga was compelled into the act of
sala'am
by the chamberlains. He was then dragged into the middle of the chamber where they again forced his head onto the floor. Approaching the throne they pressed his forehead to the carpets a third time.

'The dog has brought tribute?' the Vizier asked.

'Four cheeses, Great lord.'

'Store them in the Treasury with the other gifts.'

The Ambassador of the Illustrious Signory of Venice was then dragged backwards to the door. Yet again his face was introduced to the carpet, and he was then propelled from the
Arzodarsi
into the forecourt, where the chamberlains released him.

Gonzaga was incandescent with rage. 'What … what is the meaning … you humiliate me this way … I have not addressed the Sultan!'

'You may not address the Lord of Life directly,' the interpreter said. 'Now we go to the Divan. You may put your entreaties to the Vizier and the Council.'

'What?'

'It is not possible to speak directly with the Sultan.'

'Then why did you bring me here?'

His interpreter looked absolutely terrified. 'Please, this way, My Lord,' he said. 'You will speak to the Vizier now and he will take your message personally to the Lord of Life. Please don't shout. You'll get me into trouble.'

Gonzaga could not believe his ears. He turned on his heel and stalked away, his interpreter scurrying after him.