The Sultan's Daughter (12 page)

“This must be the site of his mosque.” Safiye adjusted her original judgment away from ‘naked desert.’ “Ghazanfer, ask him if it is.”

The eunuch hastened to comply and brought back an affirmative. Safiye had heard of the project, of course, although when Murad flushed with aesthetic details, she listened less. Like his evenings with poets and scholars, she let him indulge alone. The legal battles challenged her more.

“This buying up enough land to clear for the scheme is taking an inordinate amount of time,” she had commented to Murad on several occasions.

“I don’t want it so far out of town that no one will pray there,” had been the prince’s reply. “It must be close to water as well, for ablutions. That makes a suitable plot difficult to come by.”

“Who are these people holding up the business, then?”

“Just small landholders. Old families with too many children, not enough land.”

“I thought they must be great lords or something, by the trouble they raise. If such people will not sell at a decent price, surely they can be removed by force.”

The idea had clearly shocked Murad. “Many of them have lived here—their families, at any rate—since time out of mind. Who’s to say but that their ancestors were here to watch the Greeks sail in to avenge Helen at Troy? Long before we Turks arrived on the Gediz River, in any case.”

“They’re not even Muslims?”

“Many are Greek Christians, yes.”

“What is your compunction, then? At home, in Venice, it happened all the time, particularly on the mainland. Water projects, you understand. Any small holders would have to move if the Council determined it was necessary—for the good of all, of course.”

“That’s barbaric.”

“Sound business sense, my dear prince. A sense of progress.”

“Against not only the spirit but the letter of our most merciful law.” Murad had smoothed dignity into the feathers of his aigrette. “As you’ve just heard the mullah declare—if you were listening, as I’m sure you were, behind the Divan door—’Being an orphan himself, the Prophet—blessings on him—would never sanction the removal of property from the unwilling and underprivileged.’

You are the law in Magnesia, my prince. Can’t you act like it?
Safiye had said this, but not aloud.

The convulsions of circumventing this law took up Divan time second only to the most contentious thing: trying to stop the locals from turning their grapes into wine or from selling their raisins, grape syrup, and dried figs to any but the empire’s agents. Of course the farmers wanted the high prices red-nosed Englishmen and other foreigners would pay for these commodities that were luxuries in their distant homelands. But the Turkish laws were unstintingly clear—and annoying—about the evils of “tulip-colored wine.” Since Magnesia was close enough to Constantinople—one of its attractions, Safiye reminded herself—the law could not be circumvented; the capital demanded and consumed all the fresh produce at fresh, local prices. Domestic workshops required local cotton, too, if Ottoman subjects were to have work. So the sandjak bey had to see that selling abroad was severely punished.

Such cases made up, along with the usual petty thefts, tawdry adulteries, and inheritance squabbles, the majority of pleas that Murad—and Safiye curtained behind him—heard day in and day out. That, and the efforts, often maddeningly futile, to get a decent-sized plot on which to build a mosque.

Seeing this hard-won plot of dirt now in heat-seared substantiality was gratifying. There were some holdouts who still clung to the orphan Prophet’s mercy; Safiye saw their physicality now, too, their ramshackle houses making uneven tumors at the edges of her sight. But she was certain they’d soon be brought to bay—or at least Murad would be brought to see his legitimate rights as a ruler—and she could easily erase their existence from her mind’s construction of the projected edifice.

“The man to whom the prince my master speaks is called Mustafa Effendi,” Ghazanfer bent to inform Safiye. “He is the head architect.”

“But I thought Sinan, the Royal Architect himself, was to build my master’s mosque.”

Ghazanfer obediently queried Murad on this point as well and then passed the following dialogue back and forth.

“Sinan did draw the plans with his own hand. But the Royal Architect is old and so has sent his disciple Mustafa instead. Sinan is older, even, than my grandfather the Sultan—Allah grant that his reign may last to the end of time.”

Safiye knew the prayer was formulaic, but still she wished her prince would not ask quite so fervently for something that was so decidedly against his own interest—and hers.

“The only traveling Sinan thinks of doing,” Murad continued through Ghazanfer, “is the pilgrimage. Perhaps if he goes this year—if building projects in the City of Cities do not keep him yet again—perhaps he may stop in Magnesia and see the site. Allah willing, he has promised to try.”

“So what are these two holes the men are digging?”

“For the minarets, their bases. A group of craftsmen skilled in the special art of raising these fingers of stone that point towards heaven is directing the work. These men rove from town to town throughout the empire, wherever they are needed. Mustafa Effendi had news of this gang with a few months free so he thought he’d get them while he could and set them to work. We will have galley slaves to help as well, but only when the shipping lanes close for winter.”

“Two minarets, my love?”

“I know.” Murad blushed more than the sun would have caused. “Only a sultan’s foundation is allowed two. Perhaps I tempt heaven.”

“Your aunt Mihrimah’s foundation in Üsküdar has two.”

“That is because, in theory at least, her father built it for her. Still, it was her money. And certainly her taste.”

“You think perhaps you will be Sultan by the time the building is completed?”

“Allah knows best.”

So, whatever his pious and filial veneer, Murad would not really be content for the Angel Israfil’s horn to blow before he got to be Allah’s Shadow on earth. Safiye was pleased he harkened to her in this much, anyway.

At that moment, Baffo’s daughter stumbled over an unevenness in the ground. Another woman might have thought her pride caused the difficulty. Safiye only knew it was one or the other of her many obstacles preventing good sight. Ghazanfer quickly reached out a hand to stop her and prevented a spectacular tumble.

“This is quite a severe slope you’re forced to conform to,” she had the eunuch comment to the prince.

“All Magnesia is steep,” Murad replied. “Either coming up or going down.”

Safiye already knew this geological fact by the slipping first one way and then the other inside her sedan. Shifting her veil the tiniest bit, she now got a clearer idea of just how truly Murad spoke. Two mountains whose tops she could hardly see pinched the settlement at their feet as though in a vise. Behind each rocky peak, rank upon rank of other precipices followed, much like mosque domes themselves, only steeper. Each one shimmered hazier than the one before it, bluer, until the sky hit the final, purest degree. Magnesia was a divine setting for a memorial to defy the ages.

The town was blessed with another imperial mosque already, the one Suleiman had built for his own mother, Murad’s great-grandmother. Safiye caught a glimpse of it now across the edge of her view and knew the architect had been no Sinan. A heavy, primitive thing, the low dome seemed but a flattish blister such as days spent hiking up and down these hills might well raise on unaccustomed feet. She hoped silently that Sinan would have more success in dealing with—and matching—the terrain.

Murad had every confidence in his grandfather’s man. “...Sinan says that a severe rectangle cutting straight across the slope will be the best plan.” His parallel hands gestured the direction.

“A rectangle will not be too mundane?”

“The light angelic touch of Sinan with arches and domes will remedy that. Then, there will be room behind on a different level for a
medresse
—a religious college—a public kitchen to feed the poor—”

Safiye happened to catch the eye of an old woman watching them with dull interest from the closest of the hold-out houses. Silently, the prince’s favorite tried to send a message across the distance that separated them:
See? You’ll be perfectly well cared for if you give up that shack of yours. A public kitchen! Peasants in Venice never had such fortune.

Behind her, Murad was still cataloguing the wonders of this child of his inspiration. “... Costly tile from Iznik throughout the interior.”

“You’ll let me have a hand in their choosing?”

“Of course. And the facade will be pierced by a thousand thousand holes, more light and air than dead stone.”

“You will fill these holes with glass, I suppose.”

Murad looked a little crestfallen, an emotion Ghazanfer couldn’t translate. “The plan specifies only open air, spaces small enough to keep out birds, large enough to let in refreshing breezes.”

“It should be glass,” Safiye insisted.

“Well, bottle glass was mentioned as a possibility. But unfilled holes would be lighter.”

“Bottle glass! Why not real stained glass? From Venice, say. The best glass in the world.”

“That would be nice,” Murad sighed. “But then we’d have to put a second skin—bottle glass—on the outside to protect such treasures.”

“Common houses have glass where I come from,” Safiye said, on the verge of taunting.

“Terribly expensive. On a
sandjak bey’s
salary?”

“You are getting the local people to save their souls and contribute a little, I hope?”

“Yes. And my aunt Mihrimah, having already built a mosque of her own, is helping as well.”

“And you will not always be limited to a sandjak ‘s income.”

“Allah willing.”

“Nothing at all will ever happen if you wait on Allah.” Safiye was glad Ghazanfer censored out that part of her comment. But he did faithfully say the rest. “If you can have two minarets, I would not dismiss stained glass as out of the question, either. And you forget, my prince and my life, you were born in Magnesia. This monument is in honor of that. But Venice is my home. You should let me see what sources I can tap before you settle for a wall of empty holes.” It wouldn’t do to get any more specific about Venice than that.

“I take it the project pleases you, my Fair One?”

Murad spoke directly to her now, for, having seen what there was to see on a site but newly leveled, they had returned to the sedan. And it was high time to escape the punishment of the sun.

The bearers unfolded themselves and recovered their places as reluctantly as ratted hair. And Ghazanfer stepped aside with his usual silent tact to let the conversation turn immediate again. Until the sedan door closed behind them, their talk could not claim the intimacy of touch. Yet touch was the only way Safiye could think of to express her true delight at all she had seen and heard.

“It pleases me more than I can say,” she exclaimed and, feeling that her effluence sounded too insincere, she defied convention and reached out a hand to her prince to substantiate her words.

Murad stepped beyond the contact in order to serve modesty, but she could tell that the mere attempt impressed him.

It was Ghazanfer’s arm she felt instead as the eunuch helped her up into the blood-red velvet lining of the sedan, now as hot as oven bricks. Soon, soon veils and constrained hands could be discarded.

“That’s good.” Murad continued the dialogue behind Safiye and her servant. “And I must give the Venetian glass some thought.”

“Give it no thought. Simply do it.” Safiye was impatient with heat and veils as much as with the prince.

“Yes, because, in a way, I’m building this great mosque for you.”

“For me?” Safiye hoped her new purr tone carried through the veiling. She fumbled to remove the white silken gauze sweat-plastered to her face—in order to breathe, if for no other reason.

“In a way, yes. For Allah, of course, first of all. But I have made a vow and offer it to the Creator if He will but grant us a son...”

Murad’s voice foundered—not from heat, but from emotion.

And Safiye stopped what she was doing and kept her face covered, just a little while, until the door was shut upon them and the chair lurched up to the bearers’ shoulders. She did not want the emotion in her face betrayed, not even to Murad. A mosque for herself, she had been thinking. Nur Banu could claim no such honor. Only the greatest men had mosques of their own. And the women? You could count them on one hand: Suleiman’s mother; Haseki Khurrem, his beloved; Mihrimah Sultan, his daughter. That was privileged company indeed. Of course, this mosque would probably not wear her own name. They’d call it the Muradiye. But she would know, he would know—he’d just confessed. God would know. Perhaps most important of all, Nur Banu would know. Safiye would see to it that Murad wrote his mother this much—in his very next letter.

Now this talk of divine vows—that put a new spin on things, a spin Safiye couldn’t hear without a sting of tears in the corners of her eyes, threatening to betray her. She couldn’t afford to let such gestures flood her with emotion; she might lose sight of more important things.

Nevertheless, it touched her. No matter what he protested aloud, having an heir was as important for Murad as it was for any other man. Perhaps more so. Murad was willing to go to the fabulous expense of building a mosque—with Venetian glass, even—in order to attain it.

Safiye had to look at the absurdity of his ill-wrapped turban to temper her swelling emotion with reality. It also helped to remember a recent scene.

“Mother says you are doing something to keep from having a child,” Murad had accused her at this time. “I don’t know about such things, but is this possible? How on earth is this possible, my love?”

“Your mother has a bitter, jealous tongue,” Safiye had replied with a tight coolness.

She struggled to regain that coolness now as the sedan door closed on them. “How can she think I’d deny you anything, my lord and prince?”

“That’s what I told her.”

“And you believed her?”