Sofia (40 page)

Safiye didn’t speak, either. At the time I thought it was because her very true guilt had caught up with her, and shamed her, for once, into holding her tongue. I know now it was because she didn’t realize any defense was required of her.

Sokolli Pasha swallowed and shifted his firm, thin face under the firmer, more pinched mask of his duty. He raised a hand and the mutes rocked with anticipation on their heels.

And then a groan escaped from Murad’s lips. One pale, pasty hand crossed over his eyes and smeared tears down across his cheeks. They seemed to wash away the little layer of healthy tan he had only recently acquired.

“Ten days,” he moaned. “Ten days we searched these hills for you, my angel, my most fair one, and knew not where to find you. What I have been through,” he choked, then recovered, “in those ten days.”

Safiye spoke lowly and her voice seemed to build the privacy of a bed between them. “But I am back with you now, my prince, my charm and my strength. Let us thank Allah and rejoice.”

“Rejoice! I shall go to my grave,” the prince choked again, “without you, my love. My death shall follow so quickly upon yours, my beautiful, beautiful, faithless one. My faithfulness shall pursue your faithlessness across all the vaults of eternity.”

“My death...” Safiye began to realize.

“Yes, yes!” Murad said, and rose to flee the room. “Kill her!” he cried to the mutes. “Kill her first of all. I cannot endure her faithless presence in this world one moment longer.”

“I am condemned, then, on suspicion. Mere suspicion of. . .” She swallowed and picked up her defense as a reckless young soldier does his shield when he prepares to dive into battle. “Is not the vow of my eternal faithfulness enough for you, my love?”

Murad looked at her for the first time, seeing through the veils as a lover can see through any garment. He wavered on his fleeing feet. His head raised itself to nod in violent emotion. But then he tore his eyes away and shook his head instead.

“But all ten days,” Safiye said. “All ten days when I thought the world would end without you, Esmikhan and I were under the most careful protection of Veniero—Abdullah, the khadim here.”

I hadn’t the slightest desire to say anything in defense of Baffo’s daughter. But she had shifted the blame to me and I refused to take it, particularly not at the verge of death. I had to say something, with five pairs of mute eyes on me and only heaven to prove my innocence against the devilish enticement of her beauty, leaking even through veils.

“I have enjoyed the baths of Inonu,” I said, “and this puts me in memory of a way Allah may be called in to try the proof of guilt in this case. It is customarily reported that an innocent woman may walk through a bath full of men with no ill effect while the guilty—”

I looked at Sofia Baffo and she parted her veils ever so slightly to meet my stare. Her eyes over the film of silk were as hard as almond shells. I had to look away first.

“—The guilty have their shame exposed.”

Well, Baffo’s daughter’s galliard to the tune of “Come to the Budding Grove” just might bring a wind into a men’s bath strong enough to blow her skirts over her brazen head.

I felt rather than saw a shift of hope under Esmikhan’s veils beside me. She believed in the custom and would be willing to try it. A pain in my belly—above my scars—suddenly prayed she could. I cared not for my life, not for Baffo’s daughter. But all at once, I was fighting for my lady’s honor—and for her life. I urged: “My lords have heard of the custom, perhaps?”

I read my master’s face. He didn’t particularly believe in this superstition, but he was a man of violent justice. He did believe in allowing victims to prove their innocence when possible, and was willing to fight for that possibility when not readily granted. I also read a glance of gratitude in my direction. He appreciated that my quick thinking was helping him out of an unpleasant duty.

“That is an old wives’ tale!” Murad suddenly exploded. “Only foolish women and eunuchs would believe such prattle.”‘

I’d missed what had passed between Sofia Baffo and her prince. Perhaps Baffo’s daughter believed just a little too much in the wind of a man’s bath. I liked to think so, but liking didn’t help us around the fact that this proof of innocence was now rejected.

“I do not trust that eunuch,” Murad bit the words off fiercely. “I haven’t from the start. I should have killed him that first evening in the mabein at Kutahiya.”

I saw my master struggle to gain control from the brief flinch that lashing caused him. I was, after all, his responsibility. He touched the dagger that pointed at my heart.

Murad went on: “Besides. One eunuch against a dozen brigands. For ten full days. Brigands with no honor, with axes of their own revenge to grind. Even if he were a giant of a man, I cannot, I cannot believe this Abdullah could defend you.”

Yes, kill us all, I thought, bowing my head. I’ve wanted to die for six months and now—well, better late than never. Now is as good a time as any, than to face such continued insults from such as calls himself a man.

Beneath her borrowed veils, Safiye moistened her lips. It was an invisible gesture, but one that bound the magic of shared quilts even tighter between the two.

“My vows are of no use,” she said (and one could hear the delicious moistness of her pouting lips in those words). “Neither are the tokens of my body because, as Allah is my judge, you know I gave them all to you—gladly, joyfully—on the night of Idal-Adha.”

Murad turned from the memory with a moan as if it had struck him a physical blow.

“Save in that it yearns to return to yours as a pigeon to its roost, in my body there are no proofs,” Safiye reiterated. “And yet in Esmikhan’s there are.” She paused to let the meaning of her words sink in.

Then she continued: “My prince, your sister and I shared this trial together. And, by the mercy of Allah, we also share in the deliverance—unscathed, by my life. Prove my faithfulness by hers. Please. Marry her to the honorable Pasha as planned. Look for the tokens of virginity. I swear by my honor and hers, you will find them. Then you will know for certain that what I say is true.

“If the marriage bed is not stained, then, yes, you will have every right to kill us, all three of us, and with perfect conscience. If, however, you find the tokens present, you will know that our guardian, Abdullah, did not receive the wound on his arm in vain as he put his body between us and those who would have defiled us. You will know that by his diligence, and by the mercy of the All-Knowing One, we were spared the fate you imagine for us. You will know that you may reclaim us without shame or dishonor, but with twice the joy that was all our sorrow during that nightmare often days.”

Murad stood intoxicated by her words and by their promise. Color flushed his cheeks and even his beard seemed to grow ruddy with health and hope. I think he would have rushed across the room, and taken Safiye in his arms then and there. But he remembered, suddenly, that there were others present, and he turned to Sokolli Pasha instead.

My master had been looking steadily at me ever since the middle of Safiye’s speech had called attention to my feat—what it had been, if indeed it had been. My master’s eyes seemed to wonder if even the best of his janissaries could have fulfilled such a dangerous assignment with such success. And under his gaze, I began to feel a little remarkable, too. He made me almost proud to hold that post of such great trust, proud to have traded manhood for that trust.

But quickly I humbled myself and dropped my eyes from Sokolli’s gaze. Of course he looked at me because, in all decency, and even though she was veiled, he could not look at Esmikhan, not until ritual—and duty—demanded it.

As soon as my eyes were gone from him, Sokolli Pasha spoke. “Very well,” he said. “I am content with this test—as it also clearly pleases my master, Prince Murad.”

Then he dismissed the mutes with a wave of his hand.

I have since heard lavish descriptions of how Sultan Suleiman gave his granddaughter away out of the palace in Constantinople. I’ve heard of the festivities that accompanied the occasion, how the viziers vied with one another for the honor of walking—not riding as is their usual right—before the pavilion draped in blinding cloth-of-gold that covered her horse from mundane view. These marketplace historians confuse the occasion—in their nostalgia for the empire’s past glories, perhaps—with another princess’s bridal day.

I, who was in Inönü on the day, don’t bother to correct them. Their memories comfort me that our efforts to conceal the true irregularities of the case have worked completely.

The worthies of Inönü did their best, but even helped lavishly from Sokolli’s purse, their resources were but pitiful compared to those with which the Sultan would have feted his granddaughter and Pasha in the capital. Haifa day’s warning was insignificant against the months of planning for weeks of celebration Constantinople would have provided. The governor’s home in that small provincial town was like a closet when one thought of the Imperial palace, Sokolli’s palace, and the arena of the hippodrome between them in which the guests, spectators, and entertainments could spread.

Nonetheless, it was thought better this way. If things did not work out, the shame could be quickly buried in the provinces, and the capital never the wiser.

Of course, there was little here that conjured the idea of “wedding” to my mind. There were no silk- and flower-draped gondolas on the Grand Canal, no high mass in St. Mark’s with the formal procession of bride and maids. Nothing I had always imagined along with the words “happily ever after.”

Esmikhan didn’t even put in an appearance. If a woman is without male guardian, she may send a eunuch to the ceremony in her stead. But my lady had her brother and, while the legal documents were drawn up, Murad stood in his best brocades, brown and blue silk turban with the phea
sant-feather aigrette, facing the imam opposite Sokolli Pasha.

Even as a eunuch I had little notion what the women did all the while in the harem. I stood guard, arms crossed in defensive stance over a new ceremonial dagger, at the stairs to the forbidden area. Only once in a while was I sent: “Out for more henna!” “Khadim, more scarves to drape the bed!” “What? Have all the
taratir at-turkman
gone to the men? The Fair One will not have it. Fetch us a tray at once, ustadh.”

But like Venice there was music. The folk of Inönü managed to foot an orchestra, aided by musicians from Sokolli’s squadron of janissaries. The instrumentation relied heavily on the drums and played only haphazardly on any beat but the martial. This, however, they set to with a good will and vigor until the seams of the old stone house where the formalities were reaching their climax seemed ready to split with trying to contain them. Nowhere in the building—or in the neighboring ones, either, I dare say—could one go without the rhythm coming in pursuit, sending jolts up and down the skeleton. To this rhythm the local singers did their best to fit the traditional wedding songs, but the tunes had the thrust of war. Clearly the ease of bride, or more particularly, of groom, could hardly be hoped for against such odds.

Old dust and drying herbs thumped down on our heads, as the beat rocked from the heavy center of the drum skin to the rattling rim and back again. There was no help for it: my attention was continually drawn up through the rafters and the floor boards where fate rested on a marriage bed in Sokolli Pasha’s hands. In Allah’s hands, my lady might have corrected me.

Prince Murad’s mother, sisters, and retainers had continued on to Constantinople from the moment of the brigand’s raid so as to be out of harm’s way. Without their calming influence, the prince was anxious. Perhaps something I was missing made him contain his anxiety worse than I did, standing still at my post.

Murad paced back and forth like rude gusts of winter wind among the strangers he should have been entertaining. The drums openly rattled his heart like a dried gourd. He seemed close to bursting, and the local men, not fully comprehending the reasons, thinking their prince had only a sister’s honor at stake here, stood in awe of the sensitivity of royal blood.

One reverend gentleman with age to protect him ventured to suggest, “Patience, young prince. Who of us has not had a sister marry? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, all is well, thanks be to Allah. And Allah, who smiles with favor on the house of the Ottomans on the battlefields of Asia, Africa, and Europe, surely He will not frown now on so small a field as the marriage bed.”

“But why is he taking so damned long?” Murad exploded.

“Now, majesty, love does not come so fast after a certain age as it does in youth.”

“That Sokolli Pasha will drive me to my grave! My grandfather adores him, but I say it is because they are both so old and doddering...”

“Fie, son!” the old man said, and hastened to add words to protect the souls of his rulers from evil spirits. “The Pasha is an excellent man. He has not the haste of youth, perhaps, but certainly it has been replaced by firmness and good, solid sense, not senility. If he moves slowly, it is because he knows she is a virgin. No one spills Ottoman blood unadvisedly.”

The little old eyes glittered mischievously between age-weighted lids, but Murad passed them by with impatience. Two strides brought him to the foot of the stairs that led to the wedding chamber, ten strides and he had escaped that sight to hide at the other end of the hall, nine strides and he was back again. He cocked his head and listened, his brassy beard suggesting a wild beast that remembered the freedom of a jungle through which it had once roamed. Murad listened as if anyone could hear anything over the throb of those drums. As if he could hear not only the rain that was falling outside on the already-saturated road to Constantinople, but every breath taken in the room upstairs.

Suddenly something was heard over the janissaries’ drums: women’s trills of joy from the infinity of the harem above and behind us. Murad shoved others out of his way to see: an old, old woman, whose task it was to be judge of such things, was making her way down the stairs in full state. She was reciting from the Koran. Murad waited only to hear that they were verses from the Sura in which evil men sought to disparage the honor of the Prophet’s favorite wife. After a night spent lost in the desert in the company of a strange young man, Heaven vindicated her: “‘Did not the faithful of both sexes...say, “This is a manifest lie”...?’”