The Sultan's Daughter (22 page)

My own heart had begun to race the instant the idea came to me. I spoke quickly now to transfer that same palpitation to my audience.

“You face not only Piali Pasha in his eighty ships, but my master Sokolli Pasha as well. That was my business in your harbor, to bring my lady to her husband, who waits at Bozdag with half the Turkish army. He waits only to see Chios fall.”

The more I said, the more I came to believe it. This was how I would run a world conquest, anyway.

I elaborated: “Chios must fall before Sokolli Pasha can march north to join the Sultan in Hungary. And I don’t think the Sultan wants a full half of his army too far behind when he crosses the Danube. Piali Pasha won’t wait long. With this intelligence, have you any doubt as to what his purpose is? He is not come a-maying. Piali Pasha’s reinforcements are much, much closer than yours are, my friends. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sokolli Pasha was already at Izmir, perhaps even at Çeşme. My master and his hordes are just waiting for the first ships to vomit their loads of men and arms on your shores, then to come back and pick up more, ever more janissaries to swarm through your streets and your homes.

“And when the Turks enter your streets, as I promise you they must—tomorrow, dawn, at the latest—do you think they’ll spend much time worrying about my lady? I don’t. I know how Turks treat their women. Don’t you? They trust them so little they must put them in the care of creatures like me—and would sooner see them dead than have a whisper of dishonor about them. So—go ahead. Do what you will with my lady. But trust me. Tens of thousands of janissaries will do what
they
will with your mothers, wives, and daughters.”

And I couldn’t resist this last little turn: “Gentlemen, wouldn’t all of you welcome the protection of a eunuch for your women at times like these?”

Then I stood panting, backed against Esmikhan’s curtains, out of breath and out of words. I had painted a picture so grim that even I balked at it. But having exhausted my brain on this, I had no mind left to plan a remedy to the situation.

It was into this faltering that my lady stepped. Out of the curtains she came, only the very careful, strict draping of her veils let me—and me alone—know just how much such a move cost her. To step thus before a crowd of strange men and demand their attention on herself? I was silent a while longer just at the wonder of it.

And she did attract their attention, she certainly did. Of course she looked like little more than a bundle of fabric, but she had taken great care that it was her very richest fabrics that showed. Sparks of gold and silver threads caught the lamplight. A ruby glowed like blood upon one exposed finger.

But more than the impression of costly treasure, her appearance was striking in its indefiniteness. And in this indefiniteness, each man’s mind created its own particulars. My lady in all her distinct plainness of face might have appeared ridiculous, at best not worth fighting for. As she’d moaned herself as we stood on Ilium, “Allah, in His wisdom, made me no Helen.”

But as she now stood before us as no woman, she was Every Woman. Each man put aside that swath of silk and in his mind’s eye saw his mother’s face, his sister’s smile, his wife’s tender breast.

And draped over all, Esmikhan carried the Turkish star-and-crescent banner.

I could see signs of hasty completion. The stitches began as tiny and neat as any Esmikhan had used—too many times to bear the thought—to make garments for an infant prince. But towards the end, the lengths of thread extended until one hook of the moon and most of the star were merely tacked on. They would serve—through the first gusts of wind, anyway.

And they served very well now, in the lamplight, in the hand of a woman who was every man’s dearest.

“Sirs,” Esmikhan said.

My heart was in my throat. She spoke Italian—
Venetian
—my own mother tongue. They must understand her, although her thick accent and sometimes stilted or over-poetic choice of words lent a musical, exotic, almost otherworldly quality to what she said.

“Sirs, your flag is ready. Sail with it, and under it, as Allah is my witness, your families will receive no hurt at the hands of my grandfather’s slaves.” The men couldn’t guess, but I knew. My lady had just about reached the limit of her impromptu vocabulary as well as of her courage. So, with miraculously restored vigor of my own, I stepped into the breech. I took the flag from my lady’s shaking fingers and placed one reassuring, thanking hand at the small of her back, the place only I in all the world would know where to find beneath the bundle of wrappers.

“Go,” I said. “Fetch your families, your valuables. Enough to start a new life, but no more than you can carry. If Giustiniani won’t sail his
Epiphany
to safety, if he’s too proud, too Genoese to accept an Ottoman’s gift of protection, I’ll sail her myself. I’ll sail all of you and yours to safety through the very heart of Piali Pasha’s armada. This, by the word of Sokolli Pasha’s eunuch Abdullah, Giorgio Veniero.”

***

Sometime during the hectic night that followed, between hastily rowing men to shore, hastily rowing boat after boat of disoriented women, squalling infants, ill-sorted belongings back and stowing them, I found a moment alone with my lady. The moment I did, I fell to her feet in gratitude.

“Allah alone can recompense what I owe you, lady. What a brave and timely deed you did.”

“Nonsense,” she replied, her hand on my turban, then on my chin, trying to raise me. “Abdullah, what you said, when you said I was the only family left to you. Look, I weep now at the thought of it. How could I not do all in my power to aid—what was really an attempt to aid me. Abdullah, what you did, standing up to all those men who would have killed you and then—cut off my ear in a dungeon...”

She got my face so she could look at it, then pulled away her veil so she could laugh through the tears that lamplight embroidered with gold upon her cheek. “Abdullah, you really must stop all this groveling at my feet. You owe me no such obeisance. You never will. And you know it.”

When I still wouldn’t rise, she collapsed her form to kneel and bundle beside me. “I owe you,” she said, the instant before our lips met.

What a lovely, lingering moment was then, each touch untainted by sense of payment due, by looking towards some future goal. All was glorious in and of itself. Each fondle, each caress held perfect existence for itself alone, each touch an independent climax of its own. When lovers promise “for eternity,” they mean only ‘til the need is spent. Then they will roll over and sleep on it. Our ardor, appetite, and food all at once, knew no such conclusion...

...But then the world coughing for admittance outside our door intruded. With one last swirling taste of her chin, I rose to go, letting her know there was more freedom in serving her than in all of Christendom, letting her know in truth my service as well as my love was forever. There was nothing left about my person that could even stir for any other.

***

And so, as the Chian sky began to silver, we weighed anchor and unfurled the sails. The predawn breeze was brisker than the previous day had promised; the canvas overhead filled with the crack of whiplash. But still the movement was sluggish. We were terribly overloaded, daredevil toddlers and weeping old women to the gunwales.

Giustiniani had command. When he’d succumbed to our plan and brought his wife and daughters on board, I thought that was enough assault to his pride. I didn’t need to captain a ship. I had all I’d ever want in the safety of Esmikhan behind her curtains and her veils.

When my lady had invited the captain’s family to crowd under her awnings with her and her maids—well, that was fine. No time for dalliance in such a throng. Besides, I should keep a watch on deck and on the water before us. I’d have Esmikhan to myself plenty of time in the years to come—
inshallah
, for the rest of our lives, and even in the unphysicality beyond.

So I came to mate our desperate sail to safety that morning.

Exhaustion fairly nauseated me. More ship’s biscuit to prepare for the long Ramadhan day ahead didn’t help the stomach. But I would sooner cut my own throat than cut ties with Esmikhan by breaking the rules of her fast now. And in their scramble for possessions, few of the Chians had thought to bring any food. I’d eyed a number of chickens and a milch goat with interest—less interest now that I’d stepped in their droppings a time or two. Besides, I’d promised safety to these forlorn souls, and until I was certain Piali Pasha wouldn’t despoil them, I couldn’t very well do so myself.

Until then, I found distraction in the wind upon my face and a detached scrutiny of Giustiniani’s style and skill. I was glad the smooth hand of God in wind and sails prevented our means of locomotion from picking up their captain’s style, which at the moment was as rough as cullet with guilt and nerves.

“We’ve got a good start. We know the sandbars in the dark, we native Chians. And the Turks, the Turks are all asleep. We’ll be past them before they have an inkling.”

He kept muttering things like this over and over as he paced among bundles of belongings and sleeping Chians along the Turk-ward, starboard side of the rail. He said it to anyone who asked, anyone who’d listen, sometimes just to himself. He said it with the inflection of an
Ave Maria
. Well, those tones were easy enough to pick up. Anyone awake on deck was saying it, if they weren’t murmuring some Greek prayer in its place.

Had I been captain, I’d have soon put a stop to both of them. The same wind that blew us alongside the Turks would carry the cant ahead of us. But of course I was the irredeemable skeptic. I’d
Ave
’d myself ‘til bile rose in the dim little house in Pera—and saw that heaven did as it damn well pleased, for all our petitions. Still, how could I begrudge people their comfort where they could find it?

As long as they left me mine, I thought with a protective glance towards my lady’s curtains, drifting with the same breeze that propelled us.

All this “they sleep,” however. This “the Turks are still asleep” was delusion. Giustiniani deluded himself and anyone who believed his prayer. The Turks were awake, filling their bellies for whatever they had planned for the day, filling their hearts with Ramadhan fervor. The coating of biscuit and—did I taste it?—weevil on my teeth told me this was so. Indeed, before I could even tell sail from sky, I was certain I heard the Ramadhan drums across the straits, louder than both Christian prayers. The drums roused the faithful early, roused them so they could eat before sunrise. Made them alert.

I thought in good faith I should tell Giustiniani what my communion with the Turks—in my stomach at least—told me. After prayers, I thought, was soon enough. If I could find an inch of deck on which to spread my rug. Maybe without Esmikhan to share prostrations with, maybe I didn’t care about prayers.

But then I overheard another verse to our captain’s prayer: “We’ll pass them by. Yes, we’ll pass the flotilla by and then, with the princess as our cover ‘til we’re far beyond Greece, we’ll make it safe to Genoa. As God is my witness—Genoa.”

He wished us dead, that’s what he wished. Overloaded and underfed as the vessel was, I knew a trip to the mainland was about all we could hope for. My lady and I would be destitute if not enslaved in Genoa. Genoa was not a port for which I’d ever set the helm. Let the man pray “Genoa” if he liked—after our prayers were answered first. So I never told Giustiniani of what nerves, his own eyes, and his God failed to inform him.

Then what I knew would happen without bothering to pray for it did happen. The Ramadhan watch saw us. We were now close enough to see the men ordered from their breakfasts to scramble over the sides of Turkish galleys, into ships’ boats to row and drag the larger vessels at the circumference of the flotilla around so their guns could face us. This was unnerving.

“More coastward men,” I heard Giustiniani call. “Yes, cut the bars as close as you dare.”

I heard the sickening brush of wood on shallow shoal. Miraculously, the solid timbers held.
The
Epiphany
slipped on.

“Closer!”

Closer? By God, we were far too close already.
I was glad to see the man at the helm was in no hurry to fulfill that order. He knew, if the captain didn’t, just how low the load pressed.

For the love of Allah, couldn’t the Turks see Esmikhan’s banner? We weren’t out of firing range yet, not by a long shot.

“Closer. Trim the sails—”

I craned my neck up the mast behind me for reassurance—and then I couldn’t see the red banner, either.

I obliterated the captain’s orders with an outburst of my own. “Giustiniani, the banner. You’re a damned fool, man. To hope to sail without my lady’s banner.”

“I will not captain a ship under the infidel’s colors.”

“Then, by God, you’ll captain no ship. I will.” I yanked the shalvar silk out of an undecided Greek’s hands and ran it up myself.

Perhaps it was only the communion of predawn food, but once the wind caught the women’s stain of red, I was almost certain the Muslims at the fuses relaxed their hands a bit. At any rate, instead of the cannonballs I fully expected, the flotilla at last sent a little yawl towards us. A number of larger ships, too, had dropped their sails and began to move like the dawn out of the east towards us. I didn’t like that so well. The wind was with them, our cargo decidedly against us. So close to Chios as we were riding, our sails grew slack between gusts, panting like an overweight man near the top of a hill.

“Get off from land. Starboard, hard starboard,” I hollered to the helmsman. He was only too glad to comply as we brushed yet another rock, although his twist of the shaft brought us, for a moment, straight at Piali Pasha’s forces.

“They’re closing, you fools!” Giustiniani hollered. “Back port. And get these women and children out of the way.” Where they might go but packed tighter and tighter into each other’s arms, he didn’t say.

Then Giustiniani ordered: “Men, man your guns.”

“No,” I countered, knocking the first gun I came to out of its stand. “No. No, these are women, children, old folks we have. Giustiniani, we parley.”