The Sultan's Daughter (11 page)

And like a parrot who doesn’t please,
she thought,
I can just as easily be sold.

“I’ve never promised Mother anything—anything but that,” Murad bit back on the full voluptuousness of his lips, making them but a thin line between moustache and beard. “She is my mother. She must be content with that. And you, too, must learn to be content, my fairest one. You are with me all the time.”

“That only makes it harder, not to have the dignity of being your wife, being something people only snigger at.”

“Perhaps they snigger at you in Venice. Here, no one would dare. Please, love, be content that there is nothing I would rather do than make you my legal wife before all the world, as my honored grandfather made my grandmother—Allah’s blessings on her.”

“Do it then.”

“I gave my mother my word.”

“Break it.”

“I—I can’t.”

“You won’t.” Safiye turned from him sulkily. “And no woman would ever be good enough for her precious boy.”

Even without looking, Safiye knew he winced at the word ‘boy.’ “But she does have a point,” the ‘boy’ defended himself. “The reason the sons of Othman do not usually marry dates back over a hundred years...”

“I know. Tamerlane.”

“When we were but a small people, Tamerlane overcame us.”

“And you still haven’t redredged the harbor at Izmir.”

“Tamerlane carried off the beloved wife of my ancestor Bayazid the First in chains. Did unspeakable things to her. It took his sons years to overcome the shame of that and win the respect of their people again. Now that we are great, there are no princesses in either Europe or Asia worth polluting the royal bed for the political alliance...”

“Pollution! I like that!”

“I didn’t mean you, my love.” He touched her shoulder and she shook him off.

He tried a different tack. “Slaves don’t offer the threat to our honor that a wife does.”

“You are telling me you are so weak—now, under your grandfather whom the world calls magnificent—that you must fear a Tamerlane’s chains?”

“No, I swear I would die rather than let such a thing happen to you. But even in such a time, there are things...”

“What things?”

“You forget the brigands who took you from me? I was prostrate with grief all those ten days.”

“Brigands will not happen again.” The promise in her voice might have suggested that she herself had been responsible for their capture and could have prevented it.

“As Allah is my shield, they will not. But it was during that time of grief that my mother extracted this vow from me. I have only to remember how sharply my honor was cut at that time to recall the feelings—and renew my vow. Allah witness, my love, I cannot break it while she lives.”

“You want a child first,” Safiye accused.

“I’d like a son, yes. What man does not? But such is my love for you that I’d as soon have my brother ascend to the throne at my demise...”

“Allah forbid it!”

“...Than to abandon you, whom I love more than life. She is my mother, Safiye.”

“I see.” Safiye knew the ice in her voice would fire him.

“Perhaps—perhaps I may talk her into rescinding the vow she made me give her.”

“If I don’t go hunting with you, perhaps.” Safiye felt Murad squirm uncomfortably as she retreated from him.

“Perhaps, if you, Safiye, with your gift of words, may help me compose another letter.”

“You’re the poet, your majesty.” He hated it when she gave him that royal title. “She will not allow it for jealousy. Your father never married her. She could not bear to see us happy where she is not.”

“Perhaps.”

She could not bear to see me a queen in my own right rather than attendant on my sons
, Safiye thought but didn’t say.

Murad mused aloud, “Perhaps if Allah were to give us a child...She could not then contain her grandmotherly joy.”

“Yes, that’s what it would take.”

“Or maybe when she knows you better.”

“I fear we know each other all too well now.”

“She doesn’t know you as I do.”

“For that I’m glad.” Safiye planted a kiss on the point where Murad’s turban met his brow and began to wind him back from this distraction.

“So until then, love, please...” Murad fought to resist her touch but failed.

“Until then. Or until she dies.”

“Allah forbid it!” Murad turned the passion of this prayer back onto Safiye, eliciting another curse from the bearers.

And Baffo’s daughter knew she should drop the subject there. She worked her fingers up into the prince’s tightly bound turban, over the familiar bumps and planes of his meticulously shaved head.
Until then.
Until then there was no reason not to lie back and relax, enjoy the love of her prince, how her every touch made him gasp and sigh. They had a long ride to get to the Boz mountains where the army encampment and the hunting would be. It would take the better part of the day at bearers’ pace.

Safiye took a moment to fumble behind her among the sedan’s folds of velvet for her silver cases of farazikh, the compounds the midwife had taught her to make that would prevent conception. The trick would be to get one inside before Murad got there first, and without his knowledge. This had presented challenges before, but she’d always managed it. Murad was naive in such matters—and, in the heat of passion, oblivious to the point of distraction. Of course, night provided good cover, and she always took care to go prepared whenever she was called into the prince’s presence.

Daylight had its drawbacks, even in the gloom of the shuttered sedan. But she got the proper case open and one of the medicated sticks in her hand without detection. The sheep’s tail-fat, very soft in her fingers, released the familiar scent of powerful drugs—rue and myrrh predominated. Their odor must also stimulate Murad, for his passion stiffened against her thighs. She gave a groan of encouragement and thought she must only wait ‘til he loosened the tie of her shalvar. She doubted he’d bother with anything else this time.

Meanwhile, with her free hand, she returned to work on his head. Under his turban’s muslin she found first the fine linen undercap and then his topknot. She twisted the shock of hair between her fingers till the scent of the musk he used filled the cramped sedan to every seam of its paneling, covering her telltale drugs. Safiye reached up to meet Murad’s lips, swollen again and panting in his ardor. She drew those lips to hers with her tongue as though on a leash, but as the kiss began, the flex of her hands knocked the turban free.

Murad sat up with another jolt and yet more blasphemy from the bearers. He might have had cold water thrown on that naked scalp of his and that single, dangling hank of rusty, Russian-red hair he’d inherited from his grandmother. Safiye thought this, but could not imagine what the matter was.

“My love, what is it?”

With a lurch, then, she felt the chair sink to the ground beneath her.

“We’re here.” Murad panicked.

“Here? Where? The mountains are farsakhs away. My love, in truth you must find new bearers. These who can’t mind their own business and keep discreet about a little—”

“A plague upon this infidel turban,” Murad said, quite forgetting in his distress that nothing was, in fact, more of the Faith than a turban. “I will have to rewind it without valets while those fools of bearers hem and haw and smirk out there.”

“Let them smirk, then get rid of them.”

“I never meant for this to happen.”

“Oh, didn’t you?” Safiye asked him, taking a passing squeeze at the stake of the tent formed in the lap of his shalvar, betraying just how urgent was the desire from which the cursed turban distracted him.

The sedan was suddenly full of white muslin. What had fit so tightly and neatly on Murad’s head before now left room for little else. She tried to lend a hand, but a royal turban—each extra span a sign of higher nobility—demanded the length of an audience hall to achieve the proper tautness, the interweaving of layers in a smooth dovetail over the brow.

“Forget the turban for the moment.” Safiye lost an important tuck at this juncture. They would have to start again, either turban or love, and she’d rather do the second one first, so as to have the trouble with the turban but a single time. Love was better with efficiency. “Just yell at the fellows to move on. We’ll get to it later.”

“But I told them to stop here,” Murad said, finding one muslin end and determined to start the winding once again.

“We’re nowhere near the mountains. You can tell. It’s getting too beastly hot in here and the muslin is taking up all the air.”

“Not near the mountains, no. But they are waiting for us. I have to get out. And I can’t go like this!”

He’s about some governing business,
Safiye thought.
We haven’t even left town yet.
But nothing too important, she decided, or she would know about it already.

Murad said: “There’s something I wanted to show you first.”

“Here?”

“I assume it’s here. They wouldn’t have stopped before. They are good men, for all your complaints.”

Winding a turban is something like braiding,
Safiye thought. She picked up quickness in the task, once she’d tucked the farazikh—the heat of her hands had melted this particular dose too much in any case—secretly under a cushion and wiped most of the stickiness there as well.

When the pass of palm over smoothing palm freed one of his hands for a moment, Murad used it to open the wooden shutters a crack.

“Yes, we’re here,” he announced, breathlessly.

Safiye helped the prince tuck the end of the muslin in at the back of his head. Then she brought her fingers forward and let them dawdle, still hopeful they could change his mind, on his neck where the thick body hair turned into even thicker beard. Thwarted in this, she hurried to fasten the aigrette set with diamonds and its three rust brown pheasant feathers over an unsightly bulge of fabric in the turban’s center front. Finally, she shoved the prince out the door and settled back to wait, hoping he wouldn’t be too long as the sedan grew hotter by the minute.

“Hurry up, Safiye,” he hissed.

His turban seemed dangerously close to the verge of unraveling, grotesquely large and lumpy, for they’d come nowhere near the tight, compact ball of which such fine fabric was capable. The feathers wobbled. It was all she could do to keep from laughing.

“I thought I’d just wait here until you’re finished. Please your mother.”

“No,” Murad insisted. “I mean to please
you
. I mean for you to see this as well.”

So the two of them undertook yet another scramble with fabric, this time with the heavy outer wrapper, head veil, and none-too-fine gauze for the face necessary to make Safiye presentable.

And then Murad stepped aside to let Ghazanfer be her eyes. For even if she was veiled, it wasn’t seemly for the public to see a virtuous woman too close to any man, not even her husband—if she were legally married. How much more so when she was not?

Any other woman in a similar position must have shrunk conventionally back into her veils for shame at such thoughts. Safiye felt her determination harden instead, her ambition piqued rather than thwarted.

The midmorning summer air burned like clear, unwatered raki as it went down the throat. The sedan’s iron fittings throbbed audibly, expanding, creaking like live things. Even through a veil, her dark-accustomed eyes found the great expanse of sun on naked soil too brilliant to stare at directly. Safiye bowed her head—some would be pleased to read modesty there—and kept her attention close by, no further than the dust-trimmed hem of Ghazanfer’s skirt.

Just outside the sedan chair, she sensed rather than saw the bearers squatting at rest, passing a skin slick, almost obscene, with seeping water among them. Those six bearers from the poles on the other side had already taken the liberty of coming around to the door, for they had thoughtfully placed this facing west. All twelve of them now crowded together in the little bit of shade allowed by a sun rising rapidly over the sedan’s roof.

So tight was the press that Safiye felt her wrapper drag across one bony knee. She sensed that the man was fully aware of the difference between her body’s active heat—encapsulated as it was, concentrated—and the surrounding world’s passivity. The quick exchange of husband for eunuch couldn’t have fooled the bearers. They knew what sort of lurching rubbed their shoulders raw. No doubt they’d make some comment among themselves once she was out of earshot. She’d told Murad horses were better.

Still, after all, what was the discomfort of a few bearers to her? The lower sort of humanity existed to carry the upper, both physically and as the burden of their tongues.

We must be in a desert,
Safiye thought, considering the heat, the glare, the total lack of vegetation, and the puffs of yellow dust that pillowed every step she took. She did not know Magnesia—or any place in Turkey for that matter—more than descriptions of land rents in the Divan or the view between a sedan’s slats or from a lofty upper-floor lattice allowed her to imagine. That such sources might tend to an illiberal view of the world seemed impossible to her mind. But she knew of no desert in the provincial capital’s environs.

She might have known from the sounds that this was no desert, though: the ring of metal on metal, the thud of iron on dead earth, the call of many men to their fellows like the chorus of some unmusical lyric. And as her eyes adjusted to the assault of light and singing heat waves, she began to see things no desert would contain. Numerous crews of men populated the space, not just ordinary men, but well-fed, well-muscled janissaries. She could tell because, though they had mostly stripped to the waist for the work they were doing, they maintained their white headgear with the telltale drape down to their shoulders at the rear.

The work entailed digging, deep digging in at least two spots that she could see. Relays carried the fill away in baskets and dumped it off the hillside. Lines of little donkeys also tiptoed up under great weights which, when unloaded, proved to be blocks of fine white building ashlar. Other janissaries stacked the stone here and there, in readiness.