The Sultan's Daughter (3 page)

The happy bevy of women brushed the last of the salt out of Esmikhan’s hair and replaced her cap, its veils and its ruby-rose ornaments. While they were so distracted, the Quince slipped behind them to my lady’s vacated cushion on the divan. I followed the healer closely, saw her secret the two cutting implements behind the cushion, and got a firmer grip on my dagger. I had faced a pack of brigands in defense of my lady’s honor; I would not hesitate to face a midwife.

“She sits to the left, she sits to the left.” Safiye’s declaration after having observed Esmikhan’s attempt to settle back down on her cushions brought me up short.

Wondering, delighted with surprise, Esmikhan withdrew the hardness she felt through the figured velvet and wool stuffing of the left side of her cushion. It was the knife.

With another shrug, the Quince announced, “A boy. She sat on the knife. That means a boy.”

Only another harmless divining device. I really did get too jumpy when Safiye was in the room.

“
Mashallah
, a boy for certain.” Over all the renewed exclamations of joy, Safiye’s was the only one that seemed to contain a hint, not so much of sorrow, but almost of doom.

“
Mashallah
” my lady echoed her guests. “Oh, but I grieve to have you here, Quince.”

“Esmikhan, lady, why say you so?” Nur Banu asked.

“Because her presence is a clear indication that no baby more royal than my own is expected in the coming months.” Esmikhan reached for Baffo’s daughter’s hand. “Dear Safiye, can’t you give me word that my child will have a little cousin to play with?”

Safiye, it seemed, had so little hope of becoming pregnant that she couldn’t even hunch her shoulders and say, “If Allah is so pleased.”

One of Nur Banu’s slaves, Aziza, began to accompany the conversation and the feasting with the same haunting tune my lady had sung earlier:

“One thousand and one tales have been written about me.

My home is this place where gods are buried.

And devils breed.

The land of holiness.

The backyard of hell.”

Aziza had a lovely voice. She was a pretty thing, too, but now consigned to the rank of menial since Prince Murad had rejected her in favor of Safiye. I suppose she sought to ingratiate herself to the company in the best way she knew how. She would show she was not unpleasantly aloof.

After Safiye had achieved her purpose—the entrusting of Esmikhan and her unborn child to the astringent mercies of the Quince—Baffo’s daughter had completely turned from the society of the room. She gazed absently now through the latticework of polished olive wood. Even a guest who’d been to two weddings and a circumcision before she entered our rooms would have shown more interest in the dainties that Esmikhan presented. It was nothing short of ill-mannered to ignore platter after platter, crowded rim over rim beneath the tulips on the room’s three low tables.

My lady personally supervised the kitchen and was not averse to getting her velvets dusted with flour as she turned out the various Turkish sweets as delightful and voluptuous as their names: “Woman’s Navel,” “Ladies’ Thighs,” “Lips of the Beauty.” There was lokhoum, that fruit paste that called for the stirring of two pots over the flame simultaneously, in white grape, mulberry, apricot, and quince jelly flavors. And of course, my lady had turned out hundreds of deep-fried “Little Bonnets of the Turks,” one entire extra tray for no other reason than that they were Safiye’s favorites. But these, too, Baffo’s daughter seemed to ignore that day.

I surprised myself by taking Safiye’s negligence personally. It wasn’t presumptuous to include myself in the credits for the stacks of treats with which we dazzled, honored, and rather overwhelmed our guests. I had done what was asked of me to make these trays for the palate what the intricate inlay of mother-of-pearl and ivory of the new rooms were to the eye. No, I realized as my offense grew. I took pride in my part, though a year ago I would have scoffed at it as being something “any housewife can do.” Of course, any Turkish housewife was confined to that house. She needed her eunuch to make things run smoothly, and I had done it. Why else was I hovering around up here with the women instead of downstairs with my cronies if not to see how it all went?

If I say so myself, my lady and I were learning to work well together. Economy meant nothing to her, as a princess first and now a Vizier’s wife. She was used to having any desire appear at the first thought, and it became my challenge to work that magic for her. Spurred by her taste and delight in the best the world had to offer, and the world’s best marketplace, Constantinople, out our front door, I had shopped. When desire to disparage the skill had crept up on me, sometimes just to keep my self-respect, I had remembered my training under my dear dead uncle. To haggle, bargain, and trade was done by the richest of merchants as well as the lowliest housewife.

So I gave credit to myself, even if the ladies gave it to their hostess. All my trips to the bazaar for fabric swatches before she finally settled on that figured magenta velvet for the divans that ran around three walls. All the purchasing of skilled seamstress-slaves for the gold work on drapes and coverlets. All the hauling of Persian carpets back and forth as they failed to please in the salon’s afternoon light. Not to mention the simple logistics of letting workmen into the inner sanctum while at the same time giving the ladies some sort of privacy. All the trips to the latrine—which were frequent at this stage of my lady’s pregnancy—had to be negotiated, for the only route lay through this salon. And there was the master’s mother, a gnarled, deaf blank most of the time, but apt to disorientation and immodest wanderings when her environment was disturbed.

I begrudged Esmikhan none of her guests’ delighted praises for the accomplishments of either interior decorating or the kitchen. In the service of the kitchen, too, I had risen to the challenge, aiding the success in ways that a secluded woman cannot imagine. Who saw to the quality of the olives, the honey, shrewed the merchant for his rancid oil? When this sudden warm snap made the icemen’s usual cartloads melt, who arranged for the horseback riders? The riders had raced the nearly twenty
farsakh
from the mountain the Turks called Olympus, vying with the ancient Greek place of the same name, where the snowcap is stored over summer in caves. The riders had raced back with their panniers of ice wrapped in flannel and cooling vines showing only the first hint of dampness. I had paid them what such a chase was worth so our guests had to give no thought to the delicious coldness of their sherbets. They had only to make a choice of flavors from the assortment with which my lady dazzled them—rosewater, aloe, linden, ambergris, or gardenia.

Esmikhan had worked on the blending of syrups like an Alto Adige vintner with his wines. These oversweetened things with ingredients I was used to calling perfumes and medicines were hard for a Venetian to take in the place of his daily libation. Sometimes I wanted a glass of the basic old Bardolino in the worst way. And I often thought that, given the present state of my life, I would quickly and easily drown in my cups—if cups were available. That was one more void for which to damn Islam.

But at Esmikhan’s hand I had learned to appreciate the tang of lemon-almond with a little linden—innocent of intoxication. And to appreciate that sherbet could sicken if it wasn’t cold. I saw to it that every glass she served was very, very cold.

I did not mind that our guests gave Esmikhan the credit, nor even that she took it to herself with blushes of pleasure. That was the form of Turkish manners; watching the quiet satisfaction of others was a new sort of triumph for me.

When I was a man, I had disparaged such things, and would have turned away to look at the view as if I were above food and drink, even as Safiye was doing. Her disregard shamed me and, when I saw through the shame, I was infuriated. Baffo’s daughter was a woman; she should know better.

Her negligence was almost as if she had written off Esmikhan. The world of power and politics might write off my dear, sweet lady, might not even know that she existed. Because Esmikhan had no wish in her heart but to please—and particularly to please Safiye, whose beauty, liveliness, and daring held my lady entranced—men would take my lady for granted. Would Baffo’s daughter do the same?

Or would Baffo’s daughter reject another woman just for having a baby? In Safiye’s almond eyes this condition seemed almost to remove my lady from the cycle of living instead of entrenching her all the more deeply in it.

“Ah, she dreams of her prince.”

The Quince spoke, watching Safiye’s detachment with a long, warm, bubbly drag on her pipe. The midwife had brought her own wad for the bowl and I couldn’t distinguish its smell over all the other odors compressed in that hot room.

The lattice work at the window mimicked the room’s new inlay, with the gleam of blue-gray sky in place of mother-of-pearl. Over a fringe of pine and cypress, the height of the house’s situation revealed a prospect of the sea, its islands and the blue-hazed Asian mountains.

No chance existed that Safiye would see Murad through that window. At her feet bloomed no more than a quiet spot in the harem garden where the tulips, in profusion, remained oblivious or even defiantly careless of the power ploys of men. I suspected her mind was not on Murad, but that was because mine was not.

Lawn was being cut somewhere by men with scythes, hard, but sweet-smelling work. These spring sights and sounds reminded me once again that a year almost to the day we had first come to this city, Safiye and I. She had told me once how she had passed regiments of tulips to enter “the belly of this beast”—as she’d called the imperial harem—for the first time.

But I should have known better than to think that Safiye’s thoughts had time for any such sentimentality. Still less were they, as Esmikhan’s compassion made her weep to think, centered on prayers for a child of her own.

Safiye did not speak to defend herself, however. Curiously, it was Nur Banu who did, leaping into the silence after the Quince’s statement rather more hastily than necessary.

“Allah preserve him, my friend, but do you remember the night my son was born?”

“I do indeed.” The midwife smiled, nodding at Esmikhan to listen now and gain a young woman’s education for her own birthing.

“We had a time getting him to suck, didn’t we? Four wet nurses we went through, and all the time it was his own perversity.”

“Yes. The little lion refused to suck for three...”

“Four days. It was four.”

“Yes, it was almost four days.”

“I was sure he would starve.”

“All he needed was to get hungry enough. Then he sucked like a leech.”

“Praise Allah, he did all right then.”

The midwife continued thoughtfully, “I always take omens from the birth of a child and his first few days.”

“Are such omens trustworthy?” Esmikhan asked.

“Of course,” the Quince replied. “Your brother—he has been the same with affairs of state as he first was with sucking. For years we wondered if he would ever latch on. But this past year, we have seen a marvel. He is everywhere—in the Divan, inviting himself to the counsels of the viziers, speaking his mind when the most reverend of religious judges hold court.”

“
She
puts him up to it.” Aziza had stopped singing and stepped out of place now to express her resentment.

Safiye took, or seemed to take, no notice of the accusation and Nur Banu did her best to silence the other girl, even if she could not nullify her.

“He does it to prove himself a great man,” Nur Banu said, “worthy of the sword of his ancestors.”

“Worthy of the Fair One’s love,” the Quince purred cattily through her smoke.

Aziza seemed more comforted to find her suspicions confirmed by the wise old woman than she had been when they were simply brushed aside. At least she did not think it out of place to give one more comment. “He even takes liberties with Suleiman, the Sultan—may Allah preserve him—all at her instigation.”

“Suleiman is a far greater man than his grandson has yet become,” the midwife said. “He takes little notice of Murad’s pretensions.”

“He does indeed take notice,” Nur Banu defended herself through her son. “He is proud to have such a grandson.”

“Well, he may be forced to take notice at this latest request,” the midwife admitted, “as one must take notice of a mosquito when it bites.” The Quince was perhaps the only woman in Islam who could speak her mind freely to Nur Banu and get away with it. “Murad has bitten the teat, we may say, and the wet nurse must turn from her pleasure at the candy tray to slap him, be he prince or no.”

“He asked for a ship to take him—and Safiye—back to Kutahiya for the summer,” Nur Banu continued her defense. “You are staying here with Esmikhan this year, else you would remember, my dear Quince, how wretched that journey overland is.”

“How dangerous and full of brigands,” Aziza added with a look at Safiye.

“And how one cannot be blamed for making every attempt to avoid it,” Nur Banu concluded.

“But to ask for a galley when the Faithful are now in open war against the infidel of Europe and every vessel is needed for the defense of our shores?” the Quince said. “Add to that the fact that as the mainstay of his harem Murad has a Christian girl, the daughter of a very powerful governor of the Venetian Republic for whom great ransom has been offered. No, the wet nurse Suleiman must be doting in his old age if, besides letting Murad suck at his power all winter, he lets the boy now take a bite.”

Safiye turned from the window to the company with a smile that startled us all with its indication that her mind had not really been absent, but had carefully and with deep scrutiny overheard every word of the recent interval’s conversation.

“Then the Sultan is doting, may Allah preserve him,” she said, weighing her words for just the right measure of disrespect and surprise, and watching like an alchemist for the various reactions they caused in every face present. “For my lord, the prince, sent me word just after morning prayers today. I am to meet him quayside on Thursday in the afternoon. He has been promised the galley, and we shall have such a luxurious cruise down the coast at this time of year!”