Sofia (28 page)

Safiye did at last and slowly, hampered by quivers that shook her whole body, she began to wrap the wound. As she took her hand from her shoulder Murad bent over and replaced it by his own. He took the end of her braid and weighed it in his hand. Then he let the plait fall and looked at the residue it left on his skin.

“Ah,” he nodded. “Just as I thought. Gold dust. My mother is a sorceress.”

But his skepticism did not keep him from handling the braid again, undoing it, and slowly working its kinks loose with his fingers. He gently removed the pearl-set cap and its veil as he asked again, “Now what am I to do with you?” and shook his head as if to dispel the thoughts that crossed her mind or his.

The other braids came down one by one and Murad filled his lap with the luxury. “Now what am I to do with you?” he murmured once again.

Safiye began, “You might—”

“Might love you?” he covered for her hesitation and, taking a great mass of golden curls in each hand, he gently brought her face to his, “Yes, I might. And if Allah grants me mercy, I shall. I shall indeed.”

It was almost three days later before the door to the mabein opened and Safiye returned triumphant to the harem. The key to the mabein door had become a toy for the lovers. They had played hide-and-seek with it, first the slave hiding it from the master, who pretended he wanted to escape, and then the roles were reversed. Murad had hidden it last— under the cushions he sat on—and when Safiye had tried to reach under him to get it, he had drawn her into yet another long and lazy bout of love.

Afterward he slept, a long, thin body sprawled among the cushions, careless of his helpless nakedness. She had gently withdrawn the key, gathered up what clothes she could carry on one arm, and slipped out, leaving the key behind on the table.

“By Allah, I am famished!” were her first words to the harem’s inmates who met her dumbfounded as if she were someone raised from the dead.

During the three days, the lovers had fed upon the festival dainties, being too jealous of the world they were creating between themselves to allow it to be peopled by even so much as a deaf mute with a water jug. They had scrapped like kittens over the last of the crumbs, then come to love again two or three times more, their hunger for food only adding to their hunger for one another. Though she could have claimed any dainty she wanted from the harem kitchen, after three days of nothing but dates, pastries, leftover lamb, and the heady sweetness of love, plain water and last night’s pilaf sounded better than anything.

While she washed her hands and helped herself, the inmates crowded around to wonder and to hear the tale. The death of a pride of lions or fifty men in battle are the only feats a selamlik could ever find to compare to this in the harem.

“But what gift did he give you for such a long time?” “Allah forbid, we thought he might have killed you.” “Yes! We were about to send the eunuchs to see.” “Three days, by the Merciful One! I tell you, it would have killed me.”

“He must have given you something fine.”

“Come on. Tell us. What did he give you?”

Finally Safiye managed to fit the word “Nothing” into this barrage.

“Nothing?”

“I don’t believe it. She must be hiding it.”

“But I would have thought it too big to hide.”

“Is it a slave, perhaps?”

“A fine fat eunuch of your very own?”

“A villa on the Black Sea? Surely he could give nothing less.”

“I tell you, by my life,” Safiye said with a careless wave of her pilaf-greased hand, “he gave me nothing.” She helped herself to another mouthful and then said, “Except, perhaps— Allah willing—a son.”

She shot a glance particularly at Nur Banu as she said this. The older woman had lost enough of her pride that she would not hear the news secondhand and crowded around with the others. Besides, she had healed most of her wounds with the thought that it was her plan after all, even if it had worked out in spite of her.

Still, a touch of bitterness caught in Nur Banu’s throat as she said, “He gave you nothing? Well, you cannot have been such a success as all that if for nearly three days’ toil you have earned nothing.”

“Toil, lady? You call it toil?” Safiye met the woman’s eyes with a self-assured, almost taunting smile. “Well, for those who call it toil, let them charge a fee. I myself am quite content. Quite content,” she repeated, giving it the cushioned sigh it had had, no doubt, when murmured in the mabein.

“Do not blame your son,” Safiye continued. “Perhaps he would have given me a little something, but he was asleep when I left.”

“He was—? You mean you left while he was asleep? Without his permission? You left the room before he did?”

“Yes. Yes, yes, and yes.”

“Well, it simply is not done. Safiye, I insist that you return to the mabein at once and do not leave until my son says you may, gift or no gift.”

“Esmikhan Sultan.” Safiye ignored this demand and turned to the girl instead. “Esmikhan, will you come to the bath with me? I cannot tell you how good the water will feel! My skin is crusted with dried-on sweat.”

The young girl took the hand Safiye offered her without a moment’s glance at Nur Banu. There was a new power to be reckoned with in the harem and everyone knew it. Safiye, of course, could never displace the mother of the heir. But now she had won a claim upon the outside for herself. The mother of the heir no longer held her reins directly and this greatly weakened their force.

“And, lady,” Safiye called over her shoulder as she and Esmikhan walked offhand in hand towards the bath. “Lady, if your son should send for me-—as I suppose he might— refuse him. Yes, tell him I am indisposed and to send again— oh, let us say next Friday. Certainly not before.”

Esmikhan could not smother a giggle at the wonderful brashness of the girl—woman, now—who held her hand. Safiye joined the giggle and the two scampered off as if there were years of virginity left in both of them.

***

Safiye and Esmikhan were still in the bath when, indeed, Murad did send.

“Tell him I am indisposed,” Safiye said and returned to her scrubbing.

The messenger was back just minutes later with a much more urgent appeal.

“I am indisposed,” she said again with fierce insistence and Esmikhan, giggling, joined her in splashing the messenger from the room for the safety of her silk robes.

Then the presents began to arrive.

Those who had clicked their tongues in pity were now put to dumb silence. At first they were only simple gifts: a basket of perfect peaches, a small inlaid box which, though very pretty, had seen some heavy use. Murad had not concerned himself with women before and had never bothered to lay in a store of appropriate trinkets as other men do, nor had he even thought what “appropriate” might be.

Soon, however, it was clear that he had sought out tutors, that his scouts were going farther and farther afield, with ever more money in their pouches. The silks that came, the jewels! Kutahiya had never seen the like before.

With these gifts, Safiye herself made gifts, binding carefully chosen women to her as only an unpaid debt can. Had Murad seen how little attachment his love fixed upon his lavish tokens, the despair would have devastated him.

Some few gifts only did Safiye keep and guard most jealously. These were the half dozen or so rather badly written poems that the prince had scribbled in his own hand. Safiye, of course, could not read them herself, but she was hard pressed to hide from Esmikhan—the only one she trusted to

act as her reader—the emotion they brought. Oh, yes, they were terribly bad. Even in just a few months, Safiye had been exposed to enough good Turkish love poetry at the frequent harem recitals to know bad copies when she heard them. She had always had a quick ear and discerning taste for her native Italian poets. But it was the very clumsy triteness of Murad’s attempts that made them so dear to her.

“Tell me what this word is,” she would ask of her friend who could read. And, “Where does it say that again?” trying, often succeeding, to find echoes of the way his hand had moved across her own flesh in the lines drawn out upon the paper.

“Thank you, Esmikhan.” She would excuse the girl when the latter, not Safiye herself, was obviously weary of the repetition.

Then Safiye would carefully fold the letter and push it into her bodice so as to keep it close to her heart and to prevent jealous hands from obtaining the wherewithal to work love-destroying spells. Still, neither bribes nor pleading turned Safiye from her resolve not to see him, no matter how flippant and impulsive her first enactment of it had seemed.

At the end of the week, Nur Banu could bear this unholy disruption of the peace and decorum of the harem no longer. She called the girl to her room with no one besides the Kislar Aga in attendance. The great white eunuch represented the physical hand of Nur Banu’s might. It was completely within her power to have him take any girl out and whip her—on the feet until she was lame forever or, less drastically, on her back or buttocks until she could neither sit, sleep, nor wear her fine silks for a month. Safiye imagined the temptation had more than once occurred to Nur Banu, but the older woman had so far resisted calling down such punishment. If her son, frustrated as he was, heard of it, she might lose all influence over him permanently. The eunuch, Safiye knew, was only there to lend silent force to the words her mistress would say.

Safiye was Nur Banu’s protégé, after all—her private property owned, body and soul, indeed, her creation from the very dust. Should the girl be surprised that Nur Banu could hardly control her rage when she was brought to her? But no matter how hard she tried to stand properly, her hands crossed on her breast, it was with a humility that was nothing but mockery.

“You thought you were so clever, my pretty little miss.” Nur Banu began with deepest sarcasm. “Toying with my son as if he were some scabby craftsman and you nothing but a cheap overnight whore. Well, you should know what I have just learned this morning. Murad has sent away his lovesick poets and his jewelers and called for his smoking companions once more. You played him one day too long, my girl, and within the week I shall sell you to the whoremonger who deserves such sluttishness.”

Safiye fell to her knees as if she’d been struck and ignored the look of delight that crossed Nur Banu’s face as she did so. Catching the gold-stitched hem of the older woman’s robe, she pleaded, “Please, believe me, lady, I thought only of his good. I meant only to help cure him. Please, please believe me. Let me go to him at once. I will satisfy him, if Allah may find favor with such a miserable creature as I am.”

Nur Banu smiled quietly, then told her eunuch to go tell the prince that, thanks to the persuasion of his ever-careful mother, the girl was coming.

Safiye was not deterred when she entered the mabein and saw that the danger had been grossly exaggerated. The prince had smoked a pipeful, that was all, to combat a gloomy depression, and he still found Safiye herself a much more welcome cure.

***

Nur Banu knew she was not the sole victor in this struggle. She knew her son loved the fair Italian in a way he could never love her. That would be a sin unthinkable. But it was more than just the laws of incest that were against it. Nur Banu had to admit, even if only to herself, that the girl understood her son better than she did. Safiye seemed to know with a sixth sense just what Murad needed and when. For, after her first withholding in the harem, the girl was not cured of that trick, but only learned to use it with more and more skill.

“It is only the roll and thrust of the act itself played out on a much grander bed with a proportionately greater time incorporated in the rhythm.” So did Nur Banu brush the game aside. “Any girl has the instinct to move and curl beneath her lover.

And yet she never ceased to be amazed at the precision of this girl’s instinct and the throes of passion into which it threw her son. (Sometimes she heard his groans and animal-like yelps responding to the girl’s staccatic little purrs—they echoed into the harem from the mabein and she could not escape them.) If this was instinct, it was one she, Nur Banu, had been born without.

Nur Banu liked to flatter herself that she had known such passion and devotion in her life. But in the still, quiet times, she had to admit that it was only by chance that she was the first of Selim’s many early loves to bring forth a son and heir. He, the only man she would ever love—and he would never love her again—had only turned to her in the anonymity of a drunken bluster one night. Every time she remembered his putrid, bloated flesh and wine-soaked breath upon her, she was repulsed. Indeed, she had thought her morning sickness only an acute revulsion for many days. She had never known either her master’s passion nor her own. If Nur Banu enjoyed anyone’s passion at all, it was that of her All-Merciful God who had smiled with favorable stars upon her fate that night.

Yet how could she complain? The remarkable blond-haired girl had accomplished all she had been purchased for and more. Murad still enjoyed his drug from time to time, but who did not? There was not even the complaint that he had given up one addiction for another, because with Safiye’s encouragement, he began to take an interest in the other activities a young man should enjoy at court.

As an appreciative patron of both painting and music, her Murad soon made a name for himself throughout the district. He collected a small circle of favorites who loved him not only for his generosity but for his willingness to learn and for taste that was not merely the ability to buy it. He would bring miniatures for Safiye to see before he bought them and, often desiring her presence for a concert, would demand that the musicians be blindfolded so that she could sit by his side and receive his caresses that were the music made physical.

Murad also began to take an interest in the more mundane affairs of state and often attended when his father held court. Returning to the mabein afterward, pent up with frustrations at the insidiously formal and self-seeking ones who frequented the place, he would sink gratefully into his lover’s arms to let her loosen the tensions with her gentle caresses and finally press them from him completely between her long white thighs. It was, incidentally, with loving croons and caresses, that Safiye gained from him a working knowledge of the government of Kutahiya and of the greater Empire beyond.