The Sultan's Daughter (32 page)

I should mention that, quite by chance, I met Signor Andrea Barbarigo yet again during my flurry of preparations.

There is one thing foreign diplomats learn quickly among the Turks: If you want to know something about the government, don’t ask the governors. They are either too tight-lipped, or too expensive. Ask Moshe. Between them, Moshe and his wife Esperanza had access to the best homes,
selamlik
and
haremlik
alike. They went everywhere, saw everything, and had no compunctions about telling anyone anything—for the right price—inventing tales when they had no truth to go on.

What Barbarigo had come to learn from the Jews, I do not know. I did not really care either, for within the week my lady and I were on our way south. I merely nodded at him and went about my business as he did his. I did not expect to ever see the Venetian again, and I would soon have forgotten all about the incident but for one detail.

Moshe Malchi was also known to have a private back room that could be rented—well, for whatever you had in mind. And as I turned out of the shop, I caught, in the corner of my eye, a glimpse of a familiar sedan attended by a familiar monstrous Hungarian eunuch just pulling up in the narrow alley, redolent with rats and garbage, that ran between Malchi’s shop and the next.

I always knew you for a whore,
Sofia Baffo,
I sent the message silently in her direction,
going to the highest bidder in any game. But my lady and I are off, far out of your reach for months now. Good riddance.
And quietly congratulating myself that I would never have to slip and slide on such garbage after my lady’s sedan, I went on my way.

Two days later we were on the road to Konya.

The ritual of praying five times a day, first enforced upon me and escaped whenever possible, had become a soothing time of rest and meditation that I now rarely missed. By no stretch of the imagination, however, did I feel converted. Rumi was considered a saint by great numbers of Eastern Christians as well as by Muslims, but I was no more anxious to take the pilgrimage as a follower of Christ than of Muhammed.

Yet even I could not escape the excitement and sense of well-being that arose as we made our way. The farther south we went, the higher we climbed, the more time turned backwards into the most delightful days of spring, fresh with plum and apricot bloom, and carpets of red anemones and wild hyacinths. And time turned backward, too, into a carefree sort of childhood for both my lady and me.

Pilgrims from three continents could be met upon the road, increasing in numbers and anticipation as we drew ever closer. They made interesting company, and their devotion was in part infectious.

One man in particular caught my attention. Any dervish, since our escape from the brigands, did, of course, but this one even more so.
Yet how can this he Husayn, my old family friend?
I thought.
Is it possible that this emaciated pile of bones was the man whose note had warned me of the hay-cart rebellion?
At least the man who delivered us from the brigands had had a body that seemed as though it ought to belong to a merchant or a well-fed civil servant.

This man wore the patchwork cloak of his order—the begging or wandering dervishes—-with the crude stitches on the outside. The clothes of the previous fellow had been more like a costume thrown together to merely suggest “dervish” than anything of precise commitment. The brigand’s dervish had worn a beard only a week or so old, and of a youthful black. This man’s gray beard was long and dusty, and his mouth missed numerous teeth. Husayn had worn gold teeth in the place of those he lacked, for vanity. Taking on the humility of a dervish would require the gold’s removal as a very first step and I remembered having seen the gaps in the brigand dervish’s teeth—when, after the fact, I’d identified him as my friend. Was this the same man?

My master had once told me, “They all look alike, dervishes.” Yes, but sometimes they were subtly, annoyingly different, too. If this was Husayn, he had grown into the part during the past five years in ways that hardly seemed humanly possible. No, without a sign from the dervish—or from God—first, I could not claim him.

The dervish came to beg from our company just outside the town of Aksehir. “For the love of Allah. For the love of Allah,” he muttered quietly as he stumbled slowly among us.

I tossed half a loaf into his wooden bowl, for which he blessed me. He looked at me as he did so; the look, the mystical, demanding look, was the same as before. I gave him a bit of radish and onion from my shish kebab. His eyes pierced my heart like the skewer. But as he said nothing, I said nothing, and looked away.

After that, he turned up regularly among us like a stray dog one has thrown scraps to, and, though he would never take up our invitations to sit down among us. we came to think of him as “our” dervish. No doubt he was under some stern vow that prohibited any more socializing than necessary to win his bread. The more superstitious of us took his presence to be a good omen.

Pilgrims like to spend their last night before reaching Konya in an old, tumbledown caravanserai called Baba Ahlam, which, it is said, gives dreams by which the pious can tell whether or not Rumi will be willing to answer their petitions. One poor, old woman of our acquaintance actually turned and went back home after that night, some dream having told her it was useless to continue on.

My lady, on the other hand, woke that morning blushing with delight. She had dreamed, she said, of a great field lull of beautiful children like so many spring flowers.

“Allah be praised,” she said. “It was so beautiful. I wished I could have slept forever, were it not that I must rise with haste to make it become reality.”

And I welcomed the flurry of activity to pack up and be on our way, driving my subordinates to greater haste than usual because I, too, had dreamed a dream in Baba Ahlam.

In the corner of the caravanserai by the gate where I had seen his shadow, curled up like a faithful dog, last thing the night before, and all along our route that day, I kept a sharp lookout for our dervish. The old man, you see, was the object of my dreams.

In this dream, I had seen time run backwards, faster, even, than it had seemed on our journey. The old man had lost his gray and wrinkles, put weight on over his monkish austerity, and gained vain golden teeth to replace those he had lost. The dervish was the same. Not only that, but as time went further back, I saw him again as my old friend, Husayn. At least, that seemed clear in my dream, though by daylight I told myself the eerie ruin of a caravanserai must have been playing tricks on me. Only actually seeing the man again could tell me for certain.

And if Husayn was making his presence known to me, it must be to impart some life-saving information.

But now, more eerily still, he seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth.

“Did you see...?” My lady drew the curtain of her sedan back ever so slightly and whispered to me.

“No, no sign of the old man,” I replied.

“Who? The dervish? No, I didn’t mean him. I meant...”

“Whom did you mean?” I asked, trying, but not succeeding very well to hide my distraction.

“Nothing.” She sighed and sank back into silence and invisibility.

It was only with this hint that I happened to notice that our party had been overtaken by a regiment of young spahis. I thought nothing of it, however. The old dervish’s words kept echoing in my head with strange new import, and with tones I found now familiar, for all the whistling around the gaps in his teeth. “Allah bless you, my friend.”

***

Hosting pilgrims is a religious duty enjoined upon all Muslims and, in Konya, it is a profitable business as well. So, although my first day spent looking for him turned up nothing, I was confident the dervish must be safely stowed away among the boarding houses and monasteries of the holy city. In only a matter of time I would find him.

My mistress, for her part, had many connections in Konya; her rebellious uncle had been its governor for many years. Her father—as if to wipe the name Bayazid, which they held as almost divine, forever from the townsfolk’s memory—had ordered a grand new mosque built to house the saint’s remains. Though it was now complete enough to worship in, the tile work was still in process. Tiles stacked everywhere bore the name “Sultan Selim”; those already on the walls were glaring and fresh and had not faded into the delicate tendrils and flowerets as they would with time and dust.

Of course, the present governor of the sandjak insisted we live with him for the full year of our intended stay. His wives and daughters were honored to move from the best rooms of the harem for a princess of the Blood, and I was given the head eunuch’s room.

Our first day in Konya, being a Sunday, my lady spent getting used to her new surroundings and resting from the journey. I did my exploring. But we were up early on Monday and my lady spent all day in the shrine, kissing the sarcophagus, partaking of holy water, giving gifts, circumambulating, praying and listening to learned women read from the Koran, the traditions of the Prophet, and the writings of the blessed Rumi himself. I did not expect to catch a glimpse of our dervish, for Monday along with Wednesday were the two days of every week set aside in the holy places for women and their attendants alone so they could perform their devotions without infringement upon their modesty.

So it was that, though Esmikhan spent the day as if on the very precipice of ecstasy, hearing every word as if it were a present revelation to her alone, I suffered from a tedium greater than usual in a job often fraught with little more than patient waiting. Boredom I can usually bear, but not this that was mixed with anxiety about my dreams. The torment of uninterrupted thoughts there in the reverent murmur of the shrine must have quite benumbed me, else I never would have been so careless.

It was at the end of the day. As her last act before we left, Esmikhan wanted to sit upon the Stone. Set near the main portals and of plain white limestone, the Stone had a curved impression on the top where, it was said, the saint had been wont to sit while pursuing his meditations. The pilgrim, we were told, if she assumed Rumi’s exact attitude, and recited the first chapter of the Koran without a mistake, could expect her fondest prayer to be answered. Esmikhan had her maids go first, and there was such blushing and giggling that the Sura, if ever they knew it, was quite forgotten, and their wishes, plainly, were much too frivolous for a saint to pay heed to: an emerald necklace or
khadin budu
for supper, perhaps.

“Now you go, Abdullah.” Esmikhan touched my arm.

“I have nothing to wish for, lady,” I declared.

She looked up at me, her great brown eyes moist with understanding. The only wish she could imagine for me—my manhood back—would be a mockery of Allah and his will. So Esmikhan groped for my hand, and allowed me to help her onto the Stone.

“... Thee only do we worship, and to Thee do we cry for help...”

The Sura, recited with eyes clenched closed with effort, was probably never recited with more perfection, save only by the Prophet Muhammed himself. Esmikhan remained on the stone for some moments afterwards, her breath shallow with anticipation, as if she expected to be carried off into heaven by the miracle. Even her silly maids were sobered into silence as they joined their wills to hers. But soon it became clear that nothing out of the ordinary would happen. My lady groped for my hand again and we left the mosque.

“Abdullah.
Ustadh
! Peace be unto you!”

I recognized the voice, and it startled me so much that I dropped what I was holding. I was holding a corner of the large brocade curtain that allowed my lady to pass from the mosque compound to her sedan, a mere three paces across the public thoroughfare, without the public being able to see so much as her shadow. I quickly retrieved the screen, and held it much higher and tighter than usual, though I could not avoid dipping it again as I returned the greeter’s bow.

A man of ordinary good manners would have stood aside when he saw what I was doing, and waited until the curtain had been folded up and packed away inside the sedan after the lady. But this man had forgotten manners in his excitement to see me—or to see what I was trying to hide. And, once the greeting had been given and the curtain dropped, the most polite thing he could do was to continue on without a pause as if the whole operation, woman, curtain, sedan, and all, were quite invisible.

The man who greeted me with such effluence and abandon was none other than the young
spahi-oghlan
, Ferhad Bey.

“I thought I recognized you on the road the day before yesterday,” he said, “but we were on the march and I was unable to break rank and see. Well, how are you? How are you, my old friend?”

He proceeded to ask after my well-being, and that of everyone I knew, as if we had all day to dally in a tea shop, and as if he hadn’t left the capital on his rapid march more recently than I. The only thing he did not ask me was, “How fares your lovely mistress?” but this was not so much because he was polite as because he had already seen for himself.

Ferhad spoke in detail of the duty that brought him to Konya: “...Disturbances on the Persian border since the Shah has learned of the death of Suleiman—Allah give his mighty soul rest. Troops are being mobilized to answer them. We have a long trek ahead over the sterile, mountainous regions of Upper Armenia and Azerbijian. We will be leaving to face this fate in another week,
inshallah
.”

Some might have thought him a fool. Others would have found him indiscreet, treacherous, even, and worthy of court-martial for these confidences. But from events at the death of the great Sultan, I knew full well how Ferhad could hold his tongue when it was required of him.

No, I recognized the symptoms. He was drawn to what stood behind my curtain as a man is drawn to answer the call of the Angel of Death. He would have been content to stand there silent and to bask in what he could feel and the rest of the world was sadly numb to. But as that was impossible, guilt pricked his tongue on to such animated talk that he was hardly recognizable or sensible.