The Sultan's Daughter (31 page)

Red begins to show on the golden apple

like a blush on a lover’s cheek...

It looks as if camphor dust had been sprinkled on the mountaintops,

and as if a steel sword had attacked the stream.

The evenings become as long as the day

when you part from a beautiful woman,

And the days become as short as a night of lovers’ union...

If tears rain down my cheeks longing for you, let them fall,

for rains make the garden beautiful in time to come.

It took me but a minute to decipher the message, but a moment longer to realize that young Ferhad, as I’d feared, must have been among the soldiers our master had sent to protect the house; I had seen the faces of only two or three of them, and Esmikhan had said nothing. So Ferhad had proven his worth so well during the month that Suleiman’s death had had to be kept a secret that he had been trusted not to side with the rebels.

And yet here, beneath the master’s very eyes, was treachery of a much deeper and more devastating variety. His choices might save the Empire. But from the point of view of the harem, they were devastating.

My master looked directly at the apple branch for a long time, but he did not see anything amiss in it. Sokolli Pasha had never been one to read poetry on the written page, much less in the symbolism of flowers. I don’t think he even stopped his thoughts long enough to think what an odd bouquet a branch of withering apple made, or to wonder where it might have come from. There were no apple trees in our garden, but he never thought that it must have come from the orchards north of the city through which the army had marched. He had marched through those same orchards with them, worrying about rebellion and not love.

Fortunately, we were interrupted again at this point by another messenger with papers to be read and signed. By the time he had gone, I thought I could speak without betraying what I held in my mind.

“My uncle,” I began with a slave’s euphemism for ‘my master.’ “My uncle, excuse my bringing this up tonight, this first night that you’ve been returned to us, but I have been quite concerned lately that we should have more guardians to properly keep your harem.”

“How many are you now?” Sokolli Pasha asked me in the same tone he would use for tallying men on the battlefield.

“Nearly thirty women serve your wife, my lord,” I said, “including the musicians, seamstresses, maids, and cooks.”

“No, I mean
khuddam
,” he said. “How many are there of you?”

“Just me, sir,” I replied, surprised that he should ask. “There has always been just myself.”

A brief chuckle was wrenched from my master’s throat as he said, “Just you?”

“Yes, my uncle,” I assured him.

Other chuckles came in the same fierce, rough way, until my master was laughing heartily, but in a clumsy, guarded manner that told me his throat was unused to such entertainment, and laughter to him was like stones dragged over tender flesh.

“Oh, forgive me, Abdullah,” he said at last, gasping for breath. “I wasn’t laughing at you. I was laughing at myself more than anything. And at the confounded absurdity of it all.”

“My uncle?”

“I mean, here I’ve been the past month and a half, guarding a dead corpse with an army of half a million, while at home I’ve let my wife—a woman no doubt very much alive and very bored and restless, the poor soul—go guarded with but a single
khadim
, and he hardly more than a boy. All these years I’ve been married—how many is it now? Three?”

“Over four, my lord.”

“Four, by Allah! Well, it really is too ridiculous. If I had failed to carry out the succession, Allah forbid, history would have forgiven me. It is humanly impossible to keep such a vast empire as ours quiet and content on all fronts. Any man who’s ever ruled could tell you that. But even the most common gutter sweep manages to keep his common wife in line. If one loses honor at home, it’s pretty useless to hope to gain it in the Divan, but I...”

We were interrupted here by yet another messenger, but Sokolli Pasha waved him away. When he turned to me again, he said, “I remember the day you first came here. You seemed so young and innocent, and I saw a deep, fresh hurt in your eyes. ‘By the Merciful One,’ I remember thinking. ‘I hope old Ali finds a good head eunuch to train this one or there will be one spoiled and skittish khadim on our hands.’ I meant to speak to him about it later, when you were out of the room, but I see now that either he didn’t hear me or I forgot to speak to him. Actually, it was probably the latter. I am so used to having to keep my own counsel that I could easily forget to give an order like that. I often find things so blatant, I assume others do, too. Then there was the business with the brigands and it turned out so well that I just assumed...

“I am a self-made man, you see,” he interrupted himself. “Certainly Suleiman, may he rest in peace, raised me from place to place, but it was I myself who saw and did what needed to be done in order to win his favor. You are a man of the same mold, I see, and have gone ahead and made yourself indispensable, even when instruction was not given. I wonder at this, and I wonder, too, what has happened in my absence to make you think that only now, after four years alone, now you need assistance.”

The hawk-like stare with which he fixed me had disarmed many a more deadly schemer, but I was prepared and met it with an ease which did not betray my lady.

“When one is young,” I said, carefully balancing pith with calm, “one thinks oneself capable of everything. If there is one thing I have learned in your absence, my lord, it is to dispel this youthful exuberance or at least to temper it with more caution.”

Sokolli Pasha gave another ragged burst of laughter and said, “You know at twenty what I am only just beginning to learn at sixty. While on campaign this year, I decided I really must get someone to help me keep my accounts, and you will soon have to go through such a fellow with requests like this. Until then, I myself will say, certainly, buy all the khuddam you need. Make this the best-guarded harem in the Empire if you please. My only stipulation is, buy only fellows you can control, for I would hate to lose you as head eunuch, and I don’t care what anybody says about your youth.”

“Thank you, my uncle.”

“And why don’t you buy a likely-looking boy or two—just cut. I know the market will be glutted with them soon, just arriving with the army from our last campaign. Allah knows I don’t allow it among my soldiers, but He also knows I can’t be everywhere at once. You’ll be able to get some very good bargains and then train them exactly as you wish. Having had no training yourself, I’m sure you’ll make the best of instructors. Somewhere the tradition of a decent Ottoman household must be carried on. The Almighty knows we must stop looking to the Grand Serai for an example.”

My master sighed and shook his head once again at the new Sultan duty compelled him to sustain against his better judgment. “You mentioned this mother of Murad’s son might have had something to do with this rebellion?”

“My uncle, I am sure of it.”

“I suppose that is something I will never know, the archivists will never know. Only you, khadim, can say. And the mysteries of the harem are never spoken of in public.”

“No, master.”

Then a new thought came to him which I noticed had a profound effect. The normally severe lines in his face grew softer and more round—from fear? was my first impression.

“I say, Abdullah,” he mused. “How fares the princess, my wife?”

“Her health is well, praise Allah.”

“The child...? There was a child?”

“Died just after birth, sir, early this spring you will recall.”

“Yes, I assumed as much when I didn’t hear. Or did I hear?”

“I think, sir, you did.”

“They would have told me if I’d had a son. How many is that now? Two we’ve buried?”

“Three, sir.”

“Well, it is Allah’s will, as they say.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Do you suppose, Abdullah,” he hesitated. “Do you suppose she would see me this evening?”

I saw little creases of white at the corners of my master’s mouth, and I suddenly got an inkling of how helpless he felt. Being surrounded and sorely outnumbered by the enemy could never have reduced him as much as this. Three days spent as hostage to his own rebellious men was nothing compared to having to face a woman, to have to think of endearments, consolations on the death of the child—things foreign to his tongue. He would be clumsy, he knew it, and that foreknowledge would make it worse.

“Sir,” I said gently, “she has been waiting for you these four days, throughout the rebellion, with naught in her heart but a prayer for your safe and speedy return to her.”

I hoped my tone would recall some ancient romance he might once have heard to help him slide into the mood, but, alas, I doubt there was anything there to recall.

Sokolli Pasha smiled a smile that was timid and clumsy in the strange, new, softer lines of his face. “Tell your mistress,” he cleared his throat of dryness. “Tell your mistress, my master Selim’s daughter, I beg she may see me tonight.”

“I shall indeed, lord Pasha,” I said. “She will be most grateful.” Then I bowed farewell as quickly as possible, for I hated to see such discomfort.

Esmikhan nodded when I relayed the message to her in the harem. She had been listening to all our conversation through the grille—before which she still stood in deep thought.

“My husband has begun to dye the gray in his beard,” she commented.

“Has he?” I asked. “I didn’t notice.”

“Yes. It’s dyed with henna and has a reddish cast to it that it didn’t have before.”

“I suppose that is to make the soldiers think he is still strong and in his vigor,” I said, for it had certainly made the right impression during the rebellion. I remembered the figure he had cut while urging his horse through the ranks turning into the chaos of a riot before the hay cart and I thought I must certainly tell Esmikhan all I had seen of her husband’s magnificence someday when there was more time.

“I suppose it is for the soldiers.” She nodded. That it was therefore no flattery to her went unstated.

Esmikhan stood yet another moment at the grille, and I knew without following them where her eyes still lingered. Above the head of her husband, bent purposely now over some new firman, my lady’s eyes and heart were trained on the branch of apple tree stuck in the old Chinese vase.

When all was calm in the capital, the new Sultan’s harem was sent for, and Nur Banu soon installed herself permanently in the haremlik and private gardens of the Grand Serai. But her son, Murad, now heir apparent, was sent back to the sandjak in Magnesia after appearing suddenly and by surprise in the capital just after the rebellion. What might have been construed as insubordination was quickly changed into a formal swearing of loyalty to his sire and no more was said on the matter.

At first Murad declared he would not return unless his Safiye came, too, but his lover stood firm in her refusal to move. So then Murad made another public vow, this one being not to touch another woman until Safiye returned to him. He went with thirty witnesses to the mosque to solemnize the oath before the Mufti. After that he resigned himself with a stiff upper lip to both celibacy and political duty.

“For the sake of the woman and child I love above all else, save Allah only,” he said, and departed.

He contented himself by spending half his sandjak earnings on messengers who ran in a steady stream across Anatolia to bring the latest word on the health of his mistress, and to carry love poems and tokens to her in return.

At the end of the mourning period for her grandfather, her womb still empty, my lady determined to make a pilgrimage to visit the saint Rumi, founder of the Mevlevi order of dervishes, in Konya. His shrine was known throughout the world (the Muslim world, I should say), for the miracles worked healing the sick, the blind, and causing the barren to bring forth fruit.

My master, too, had mentioned such a plan to me on more than one occasion. He was never a man of superstition, but perhaps he felt the need of a vacation—for my lady or for himself from my lady, I wasn’t sure.

And yet there was that curious stiffness between this married couple of five full years that would not allow them to bring the subject up between them to their immediate and mutual satisfaction. Sokolli Pasha was constantly distracted by the herculean task of keeping the Empire together in spite of his master the Sultan. Even when he had attention enough to stammeringly ask his wife if there was anything her heart desired that he could give her—anything beneath the will of Allah—Esmikhan never dared mention this wish to him. To ask to cross all of Turkey without him would seem too forward and demanding of a well-brought-up Muslim girl, even one who ought, by her station as a princess of the Blood, to have been able to tell one of her father’s slaves anything and everything she wanted.

“And won’t people talk?” she fussed at the matter to me. “In all reason, staying here with my husband is more likely to get a child than crossing all the realm of the Turks.”

“Allah’s will has little to do with reason,” I eased her mind.

For his part, the Grand Vizier did not wish to give offense to this daughter of the sultans. He was afraid she might go just to please him if he mentioned it, and that could open the way to gossip and silent miseries of the worst sort.

I, though skeptical of anybody’s saints, had long ago determined to do what I could to help my lady towards a child she could keep. Having collected a staff of five under me, I decided that such a journey could be made with ease, without risk of my mistress’ virtue, and without so much strain on me that I could not enjoy it, too. It could be a change of scenery, a little excitement, like Chios, but without the danger, without the conflict in my soul. So once I made this decision, it only remained to go between
selamlik
and
haremlik
in such a way that Sokolli Pasha thought he was doing his wife a favor and Esmikhan thought she was being obedient to her husband. Thus the trip was arranged.