The Sultan's Daughter (39 page)

“When—if Allah wills—my son grows to be a man, he will be the Sultan. He will have to know about the Divan and janissaries and war—all such things. Allah willing, he will not be a monarch who sits home idling with the harem favorites when the army marches.”

“You might wish him to idle with his mother, however,” Esmikhan suggested.

“But how can I teach him if I don’t know about these things myself?”

Esmikhan was silent, for she knew no answer to this except, perhaps, one she carried like her unborn child, close to her heart, and whose time had not yet come.

As we turned to rejoin the rest of the women, Safiye happened to catch my eye with her sharp brown ones. She paused, then spoke in Italian. “You know, don’t you, Veniero? You were there when they held that meeting, and you did not have babies on the brain.”

I smiled quietly.

“Tell me,” she pleaded. “Tell me where they have gone and why.”

“I think my lady is right,” I said in Turkish. “You would do better to spend more time with your child.”

Not half an hour after I’d sent the messenger on his way to Astrakhan with a notice for the Grand Vizier that his wife had come to her time, another man arrived with news from the front. They must have passed one another in the streets by the quay, and perhaps even salaamed and wished each other “A joyful arrival.”

Yet the news from the front was as different from the good tidings of home as night is from day. The invasion of Astrakhan had woefully miscarried. Although it was at first successful, a force of a mere fifteen thousand Russians had come upon the Turks as they worked, unarmed at the canal, and put them to a dreadful, confused flight. The hand of Allah seemed to be against the expedition, too, for even of those who had managed to reach the safety of the boats without being ambushed and hacked to pieces, a mere seven thousand were returning. An early, sudden winter storm had surprised the ships at sea and sunk half the fleet.

Sokolli Pasha, the messenger said, knew that the disastrous news would precede him into Constantinople, and he wanted his wife not to fear unduly. She should know that he, at least, thanks be to Allah, was safe and would be home as soon as he could.

I waited as long as I dared after the messenger had gone to his barracks before going up to the birthing room. I had decided I would not break the news until after the child was born, but my lady read my face, and then it was better that she knew all than that she be kept guessing with nothing.

She gave a little cry when I had finished, whether from the labor or my words, I knew not.

“Please, do not fear, lady,” I said. “Your husband sends word that he, by the mercy of Allah, was spared.”

“But what about...?”

Pain, or again, perhaps dread, cut her words short, but I knew she could not help but think of the child’s father.

“I’m sorry, lady. I do not know. I will try and find out and let you know as soon as I can.”

Tears pressed silently from her eyes, but she nodded gratefully as I left.

I returned to the house at nightfall, having heard nothing. Even the disaster was as yet unknown in the streets.

“She’s having a hard time of it,” the Quince greeted me.

The midwife had poured gunpowder in a thin line across the threshold, and I knew if I crossed it, I could not come out of the birthing room again, for it was believed I would take the strength of pangs with me. They would only torment and bring forth nothing, so I stayed without and only peered in from time to time. The room was dark, and made darker still by the thick clouds of burning sandalwood and frankincense that were to make the labor sweet. I wondered, rather, how Esmikhan could even breathe, and I shrank when I imagined the incense drying in a still, suffocating mask on sweat and tears. I could barely make out the glimmer of the gilded cover of the great Koran the Quince had hung as a talisman above the point where the baby should be born. I couldn’t distinguish the figure of my lady huddling on the birthing stool beneath it from those of the other women—her maids and some from the Serai—who were in attendance to give her encouragement.

The women had set up a rhythmic chant of “
Allah akhbar
, God is great!” Esmikhan was encouraged to join in as she could, and all of them let their words blur into one long, sustained wail when the contractions came.

“The baby is buttocks first,” the midwife elaborated, “and I have so far been unable to get it turned around.”

Although my notion of a woman’s insides was very vague, I knew a slave girl in the palace had died from just such a difficulty within the last six months. The thought made me viscerally sick. But as there was nothing I could do, I went to my room and tried to spend an evening as usual.

Echoes of the women’s chant pursued me to my room and I found I could neither eat nor sleep nor read. My assistants and the khuddam who had come with the women from the palace were finding distraction in the general room by singing, telling tales, and playing chess. Careless clouds of laughter timed to the wails of the chant helped them forget that they were half women; that if the demon of childbirth brought death, they would find themselves on the slave block again.

Still, let them escape as they can, I thought, though I could not join them.

I let the women’s wails chase me out of the house, through the garden, and into the dark streets. Their echoes even seemed to come to me in the refuge I took in the hollow mosque at the end of the street. There I alternately prayed, paced, and wept, returning always to the weeping again (unmanly, but that did not bother me) whenever realization of my true helplessness struck me again.

I was not alone in the mosque. I joined a man, a tinsmith by trade, who with his two young sons, bundled in blankets and trying to sleep, was also waiting for a woman to deliver—his wife of their sixth. He came and spoke to me quite merrily of children, begetting and bearing. There was nothing to it, he assured me.

Had his wife never had any difficulties at all? I asked.

“The first was not so easy,” he admitted, tousling the head of the eldest son. “Before it was over, I was called into the room and she relinquished all claims she had on me if only my seed would stop hurting her and come forth. After that bit of magic, the child came readily enough, Allah be praised. Since then, I could divorce her at my heart’s desire without having to return the bride price to her father or anything. But why should I bother? She is a good wife, Allah bless her, and now produces with the ease and fecundity of a rabbit.”

I grew angry at the man for such careless talk, and for latching onto me when I would have rather been alone. But he did know how to make time pass. And when his daughter came to announce the successful birth of vet another son and he left me with wishes for equal joy, I was pleased to discover it was already after midnight.

But nobody came with glad tidings for me.

I considered taking a description of the little ritual that had delivered the tinsmith’s wife of her first child to Esmikhan’s midwife. But this, I decided, was madness. First of all, the Quince was the best money could buy. If there was any good in this practice, no doubt she would have already tried it. Secondly, what man should be called in to acquit her? Even if Sokolli Pasha were in town, I knew, Esmikhan knew, perhaps even the midwife knew, that it was not his seed. Whether Ferhad was among the thousands dead in Astrakhan was not yet known. Assuming that he was, my mind played with the scenario that he was in Paradise, still had control over his seed, and was attempting to bring his true love to the other world to join him. Martyrs for the faith on the battlefield go straight to Paradise, they say, whatever their sins. So do women who die bringing forth Muslim children.

This thought caused me such sorrow that I startled the silent mosque with a sob. What about myself? I thought. On no account was I guaranteed to be in Paradise with her. In this confusion of paternity, where did I fit? Neither legally nor physically had I any claim upon this child struggling to be born. Both were so impossible as to be laughable.

But the memory came to me as I sat in that great empty mosque, of a night some few weeks ago as Esmikhan and I had sat by the fire playing chess. I reminded her of just such a night three years previous when she had first laid eyes on Ferhad. I mentioned it laconically, for there were others in the room, and at first her silence made me suppose she, too, had missed my meaning. But at length she smiled slightly and said, with equal cryptics, “You know, Abdullah, my first thought when I saw him was how much he looked like you.”

“If I were a man.”

“Yes.”

Esmikhan made a move then, a very astute play which I had totally overlooked. But before I could condemn my stupidity or she could gloat, she cried out, “Oh, Abdullah! it moved! The baby moved! Come and feel. There it goes again! It’s always lively in the evening. Come on, Abdullah, don’t be shy.”

And I went around the table and let her place my hand on that great mound—like bread set to rise. By kneeling, my face had been brought very close to hers. I remember staring at the round, pink curve of her cheek and being more amazed at the life I saw there than at that I felt beneath my hand. She was so pleased to feel life within her that she was blushing. But even as I stooped there, waiting for the next infant kick, there passed through my mind the image of the hollow bones beneath that cheek as if I were being given a vision of what the future held and how my same, blushing lady would someday rot in the grave.

I had since, perhaps in self-defense, extracted a different meaning from this moment of vision than that of a morbid prophecy it seemed at first to warrant. Life at its most intense is often found in contrast to death, for it’s by opposition that opposites take on meaning. And when the light and angle between two poles is so perfectly set, as they seemed to be on that evening, then, like two mirrors, they reflect one another and whatever is caught between them is thrown likewise into the depths of eternity.

The real, enduring Esmikhan, I decided, was neither the physical, living body who had bloomed and caught Ferhad’s young eyes, nor the thing that hung like a dead weight from Sokolli Pasha’s marriage contract. Her essence was something else again, no easier to describe than the nature of a reflection. I remembered the first evening I’d met her, dressed as a bride, and that secret, invisible thing that had passed between us on the road from Kutahiya which has made me say on occasion that we were married, she and I. Being neither male nor female, but having in me the attributes of both, it was I who was most qualified to love the eternal reflection of my lady that was neither living nor dead. Indeed, I believe, when there is true love between mortals of any sex or between man and God, that is the part that is loved. If so, then I was, in a certain way, the child’s father more than either of those two men who were away, fighting their wars, and neither of whom bothered to sit quietly on a winter’s evening, feeling the child’s first movements, and being reflected in eternity’s mirrors.

And, too, I was responsible in a very acute way for the terrible pain that was tearing my lady apart at just that moment. It was not sheer blind vengeance that made husbands kill the eunuchs as well as the adulterous wife when the crime was discovered. If it were that this strange God Allah, whose will I had, perhaps, misunderstood, were taking it upon Himself to punish the sin even when it was still a secret to mortal eyes, He would have revenge on me as well. I was certain I could not live if Esmikhan were dead and that reflected, eternal part of her beyond my reach. If Sokolli Pasha did not have me killed, I would, I decided alone in the mosque, be obliged to kill myself.

When the morning call to prayer brought ranks of men to interrupt my sanctuary, I participated, but without much faith, as if this Allah were a capricious master I could not trust. Then I went back to the house.

During the night, the child had begun its descent down the birth canal.

“Thanks be to Allah,” I blurted.

The Quince shook her head soberly but wearily. She had had no time to enjoy her own drugs, and reality, more than the long hours, was telling on her.

“Now your lady is so exhausted she cannot push. The pains come like swift waves and merely wear her away like the crumbling of a shoreline. I do not know if she can do it. Allah alone knows.”

I escaped this news into the streets of Constantinople once more. Making some attempt to learn word of the army was diversion, although very little and seemingly very useless. By evening the rumors had begun to have a common tint, which spoke of some truth, behind them. There had been disaster. Some ships of the fleet had been sighted off Pera, but they were loathe to enter the harbor before nightfall.

“Sokolli Pasha dares not show his face by daylight in this city,” one man said. “You mark my words, the Sultan will replace him for this.”

There was no word of joy I could take home with me, nor did I meet one at the birthing room door.

“It is useless,” the Quince said. “We can do no more. She cannot even hold herself up on the birthing stool. She will die in any case. As Allah is my witness, I have no choice but to cut the child out.”

To cut the child out, to murder the mother. “I will take that same knife and use it, still warm, on myself when you have done that!” I cried.

So saying, I pushed the old woman out of the way, sending the numerous charms on her headdress and bosom a-jangle. I stepped over the gunpowder in one great stride: in a moment or two we could all come and go as we pleased, for my lady would be dead and the gunpowder of no earthly purpose but to fill cannon and cause more death. I passed the bundles of dead-weary women, whose
“Allah akhbars”
were no more than sighs, and whose hands fanned themselves instead of the woman in labor. I picked Esmikhan up off the floor. She lay there like some discarded rag with all life drained from her, but when I moved her, the increased pain brought some stiffness of life in her limbs.

“Abdul...,” she murmured.

Her lips were white, cracked, and dried as if they were made of mosaic. Her face had begun to take on in reality the aspects of the death mask I had envisioned several weeks before, but I ignored it, searching for the life that still glimmered in the other mirror. I grasped my own elbows around her distended waist and squatted to the floor, holding her tightly between my thighs. I felt a spasm of pain go through her, and I took it on myself.