The Sultan's Daughter (6 page)

Mentally, she washed the blush from herself and returned to the question: How best to make use of this favor for Murad’s benefit? And for her own, of course. A young man could grow bored, indolent—self-destructive like his father—if his prowess wasn’t continually challenged.

So might a young woman, for that matter. This particular young woman, anyway, Safiye thought, hugging herself again.

“Why won’t you let me buy you a eunuch, my love?” the young prince would always ask her whenever she hinted at these concerns to him. “I’ll give you the money. Get yourself a eunuch, the best money can buy. Then you won’t have to be so beholden to my mother and her
khuddam
. Anything you wanted, anyplace you wanted to go, wouldn’t have to be screened by those watchdogs first. It would be very liberating for you.”

“Liberating” seemed an odd word when it was not less she wanted, not
out
of the harem, but more, deeper, into the controlling heart. Still, she’d agree, “It would be nice. If I could find the right eunuch.”

Murad would say something like, “I’m sure you could if you’d only look.” He’d nuzzle her neck so she couldn’t tell exactly what he said, other things on his mind. “You’re the cleverest woman I know.” Some such nonsense, stating the obvious.

She would return the nuzzle, just enough. Then she would hint, “Your sister Esmikhan Sultan has a eunuch. That Venetian Veniero.”

“Who? Abdullah?” Maybe he’d say it. Or maybe he’d start on her buttons with his teeth.

“He has some intelligence.”
He could even he dangerous, with what he knows
. She’d keep that part to herself.
What he could tell you about me—
“—My love.” That part aloud, with the proper groan of desire as Murad found her breast.

Everyone considered Veniero a mistake of the cutter’s knife and of the marketplace. They pitied Esmikhan his youth, his unsettled nature, his lack of experience. But compared to everything else Safiye had seen—
and, my dear princeling, I have looked
—Veniero-Abdullah had promise.

She’d have to be careful: Murad would be in her now and each thrust would bring a new descriptive word to her mind:
whiny, shrill, gossipy, silly half-men like so many geese. They were worse than the lay sisters in the convent.
Of course she meant the eunuchs.

He’d hitch up her thighs awkwardly, so it hurt, with no thought beyond the best and swiftest striking of his immediate goal.

And then the prince would collapse across her, and she’d toy with the cinnamon topknot on the crown of his head and say, “They must cut away part of their brains with the rest of it, my wonderful, glorious master and lord.”

But she’d think,
That’s where all you men keep your brains. One cut takes it all.

Esmikhan also had the best of luck with her husband. The Vizier, unlike Prince Murad, was already at the peak of his powers. Sokolli Pasha often held meetings of highest state right there under Esmikhan’s innocent little nose. That’s another reason why it was good to visit the princess as often as possible.

It was just as well that Esmikhan was no more sensitive to her blessings than to call them “the will of Allah.” If she were, poor girl, she would really be a force to reckon with. More than courtesy visits and a midwife would be needed to deal with her.

Safiye had offered Murad’s sister a great sum for that eunuch. She’d had her prince offer even more. Esmikhan had merely laughed a silly little laugh and refused to sell him “for anything in the world.” Safiye wouldn’t be at all surprised if the eunuch himself had something to do with that refusal. Esmikhan, left alone, would do anything to please. Anything.

On the other hand, Veniero, though smart, might not prove biddable enough. Indeed, he showed only signs of rebellion. Towards anyone but Esmikhan.

No, Safiye decided, she had better keep looking. She would find some khadim, intelligent but perfectly beholden to her as well. Courage, too, would not go amiss; he should be willing to die for her. Such criteria were easier expressed than met. Her beauty, the key to most of her power over men as well as women—women usually made quick treaty with her open threat—seemed to have but uneven effect on the sexless.

With such thoughts—and a sigh—Safiye made herself move from one velvet-lined box to another, the harem roomier but no less confining than the sedan.

From the sedan through this long passage, a woman had to remain veiled. She took them blind, these uneven stone floors and surprisingly stepped thresholds, plunging from the light of the yard into the narrow, windowless corridor. Safiye negotiated it only by the knowledge of frequent use and by passing from hand to flaccid hand of the ever-present colonnade of eunuchs.

And by the sounds. The brassy, open, official,
tantalizing
sounds of the Second Court milling for the session of the Sultan’s Divan grew fainter and more unreal as if being gargled by this throat of marble and tile. And then swallowed completely by the rhythmic lash—heard almost as frequently—of punishment dispensed in the eunuch’s courtyard.

Then Safiye realized what sound was missing today. The whistle and beat of the scourge was unaccompanied by any lament from the tortured. Brushing aside the next pair of guiding hands, she took an unguided turn to the left. Stopping to adjust her eyes to a return to light as she stepped to the edge of the eunuch’s courtyard, she watched. The shadow of a plan condensed in her brain.

Six free-standing columns opened onto the eunuch’s yard. Their gray stone capitals, sharply, newly carved with lotuses in relief, declared them to be the exquisite work of Sinan, the imperial architect. Incongruously, a rough wooden canopy hazarded against them, protecting the tilework and the dormitory rooms on the southern wall from extremes of weather. And under this canopy, Safiye saw a pair of great black eunuchs, bulls more than men, rhythmically executing the grim punishment.

The other eunuchs, whites, who were supposed to be guiding Safiye forward to her own rooms, had a keen interest in their black brothers’ proceedings. With their tall, sugarcone hats, fur-lined robes in cinnamon red and candied-violet blue, their too-sweet smells, they seemed to be confections, left in the sun and melted to the spot. They ceased paying any attention whether their other veil-wrapped charges tripped and fell while scurrying through the dark passage to the inner chambers. And they made no grunt of protest when Safiye stopped to watch along with them.

One of their own, lying on his back at such an angle that Safiye couldn’t see his face, had his legs hoisted up and caught in the wooden bastinado stocks. The black eunuchs laid onto his naked soles with thin, whip-like canes.

This was a preferred form of punishment for odalisques: they might not be able to walk for a month afterwards, but their beauty remained intact. Ten blows was a good number for women; the most recalcitrant rarely required more than fifteen to learn proper obedience.

But Safiye counted twenty lashes as she stood and watched before she gave up counting. The victim was not a black man. White, or rather, earth-colored, tawny, like a lion. His publishers’ reeds caught bits of bruised and swollen pink flesh. Tiny droplets of blood arced up and behind the bullmen’s dark, felty heads with each swing of their great black arms. But still there was no sound from the victim. The shudders that ran through his prone body seemed due more to the vigor of the blows than to his own quailing.

“Come away, my Fair One.” Nur Banu was at Safiye’s elbow, speaking gently. “This is not a scene you need to watch. It may linger with you and spoil you for my son’s bed tonight.”

This concern for the sensibilities of Murad’s favorite was something Nur Banu hadn’t shown in a long while. Jealousy and competition had welled up too divisively between the two women; Safiye knew Murad’s mother could see her only as a supplanter. Safiye, in one part of her mind, knew she should accept the overture with open arms. She had been waiting for just such a move, looking for the chance to make one of her own. It was not helpful to have the harem’s head woman so constantly at odds with her, suspecting every move she made.

But the spectacle before her wiped all good intentions from Safiye’s mind. “Who is he?” she asked, and budged no more than the beating’s victim in response to Nur Banu’s pressure on her arm.

“Hyacinth. You remember him, a khadim that belongs to Mihrimah Sultan. Ah, well. She is lax in her discipline, that daughter of our master.”

Yes, now Safiye remembered the man. She hadn’t recognized the topography of his stripped, well-muscled chest—its valleys and high, flat plains—nor the tangle of mousy brown hair on his head. These features had always been hung with furs and capped with white linen before.

And that mincing name! Hyacinth, for such a figure of a man! It was enough to confuse anyone.

“But what’s he accused of doing? Deflowering Mihrimah’s virgins?” Safiye nearly laughed at the notion.

“They found him with Selim’s current favorite.” The subject put bile in Nur Banu’s voice.

“When I said ‘virgins,’ I only half jested. I’d believe this particular khadim not only capable but anxious to do so.”

“Not with Selim’s
girl
,” Nur Banu fairly spat her disgust. “With his
boy.
”

Now, Safiye made it her practice not to let anything surprise her. Surprise was the first sign of an irredeemable weakness.

So she said: “I can’t imagine this sordid little affair can please our master the Sultan’s ears.” She looked at the older woman with a hard pity. To be unable to wean her man from his drink, let alone a
boy
! “His heir a bugger as well as a drunk. Or...? Yes, perhaps it is better to keep quiet about it.”

Nur Banu answered the barely concealed threat in Safiye’s words with a look such as a potter might give a vase that displeases and shames him just before he dashes it to the ground. The older woman restrained herself, however, and Safiye swallowed her own spittle into meekness.

There was no reason, Safiye realized, why she couldn’t be standing here waiting her turn in the stocks rather than just observing. Her relationship with the harem’s first woman had disintegrated to the point where it seemed only a matter of time before Nur Banu decided this pleasure was worth incurring Murad’s wrath. Of course Prince Murad was the only male his mother had any control over anymore—this sordid affair with the boy was proof of that. Nur Banu would attack Murad’s beloved—and risk his wrath—only with the greatest caution. Still, restraint was best, Safiye decided. It was no use frightening off the game by making it too jumpy too soon.

In spite of her prudent thoughts, Safiye couldn’t suppress her next comment: “I for one doubt he’s guilty.”

She meant her words to more than defy authority. She timed them carefully to the quiet between two blows. They’d carry.

“He says he’s not,” Nur Banu confirmed, settling her anger with dignity. “But they all say that.”

“I believe him.” Safiye punctuated off the pulse again.

“He says he only let the boy crawl into his bed for comfort after the rigors of my lord’s passion.”

For a moment, Safiye imagined herself crawling into that bed. Though she would never confess to the need of such comfort, she felt the pleasure of that warmth, the silent dark, those enfolding arms.

Nur Banu continued: “Hyacinth says he only let the lad cry on his shoulder. But again—they all would say that.”

“By Allah, I believe him.”

The eunuch in the stocks shifted his tawny mane, ever so slightly, to fix Safiye with a pair of icy, feral blue eyes flecked with green. And she, in return, ever so slightly dropped her veil. He’d recognize her when next they met. If the pain he then shut those eyes against were not too numbing. She hoped it was not.

“Come, Safiye,” Nur Banu said. “They won’t be at it too much longer. He’s bound for the Seven Towers as soon as they’ve finished here.”

“The Seven Towers” Safiye had a hard time telling whether she felt fear or thrill. She often did.

Safiye had never been to the Towers. She had never even seen them, though she knew the ancient fortress, dating to the Christian era, was within the vast palace compound, off where the land walls and the sea walls joined. There, far from—and yet always at the edge of—the mind of the world, prisoners moldered. And there was equipment for more serious tortures than this mild caning. There, only the torturers could hear the screams and extracted confessions over the sounds of the sea and the silencing distances.

The sea also provided a quick and discrete disposal site for those prisoners who did not survive their stay. Most of the rest walked—or were dragged, broken men—to the blocks before the Executioner’s Fountain where soon enough their bodiless heads would be displayed as an example to others.

“Yes, take him to the Seven Towers,” Safiye said, turning to comply with Nur Banu’s urging that she move on. “This bastinado is child’s play to such a man.”

But she was careful to say this away from the courtyard and under cover of the sound of the lash.

With the help of a mirror, Baffo’s daughter could always shut a lattice in her mind against the noise and brilliance of the harem just as the harem shut its lattices against the world. The Quince’s green headdress with its gold-coin fringe flashed for a moment in the mirror, but Safiye adjusted the angle and then saw only her own face. The reflected oval fit the mirror’s gold enameled rim perfectly.

Tight oval echoes were also formed about her person by the hummingbirds’-egg emeralds in her ears, the matching wren’s-egg at her throat—new gifts from her prince. The reverberation of shape gave her pleasure.

Even dearer than pleasure was the image of concentric self, like rings round a pebble dropped in a pond but flowing inward instead of out. This image helped her to focus her being which otherwise, in the harem, was liable to dissipate. Dissipation happened to too many other women she met, women otherwise intelligent and firm of purpose. Such women lost concentration to the diversions of this place, became as silly and vacuous—as it was hoped they would become.