The Sultan's Daughter (7 page)

We are kept here for just this reason,
Safiye mused.
Shortly Murad will send for me—if the Sultan does not keep him too long tonight. My entire day’s purpose is for this end. At least they mean it for this end.
But she concluded this thought with a brief consideration of what she had in fact accomplished that day—and of her new eunuch, Ghazanfer, who proved useful in that accomplishment.

Having thus established her sense of purpose—if not to say superiority—Safiye allowed herself to reach out. She took an oval fingertip full of almond and jasmine cream and rubbed it into her face, releasing the cloying scent into the air about her like curls of blood in a warm bath. The alabaster of her face firmed and whitened under the cool smoothness in further layers of perfection.

When one girl’s complexion is praised as being like feta cheese,
Safiye thought,
another’s like Turkish delight, I still rejoice in the alabaster of my own. Cheese is too spongy, Turkish delight too tinted and transparent—both too easily dissolved, digested.

Confirmed in the solidity of her being as well as in its centeredness, Safiye reached out again, letting her attention go further, to the delicate blue glass phial that held her beauty cream. Glass made in Murano, she noticed with no twinge either of homesickness or self-banishment, but rather with an affirmation of the state of trade and policy between her old homeland and her new one.

She looked beyond to the hands that held the vessel towards her, the Quince’s greenish knots of knuckle. Then she allowed those hands to take up their own daub of cream and conform it to the oval. Safiye knew that while she herself was alabaster in response to that touch, the midwife’s hands, otherwise so confident and calm, would quiver.

They did, like stone-scraped flesh.

Prince Murad’s reaction was the same when he caressed her.

The linger of the Quince’s fingers grew so long as to annoy. But Safiye took care to keep her annoyance shut behind her mind’s grille.

Nor did she bother to break the boundaries of her own oval perfection to wonder about the older woman’s fascination. Safiye only knew that the midwife—otherwise so incorruptible-—remained vigilant at Esmikhan’s. And returned again and again to sit on the cushion next to Safiye with new Venetian glass filled with this new potion and that.

Baffo’s daughter wasn’t convinced of the efficacy of beauty rituals. She never had been. In this as in everything else she felt self-sufficient, above a groveling slavery to fashion. She was certain she had won Murad and continued to hold him not because of any human concoction but by a touch of God.

Safiye had the feeling that her face had, in fact, been made in much the same manner as divine fire honed the prophets of old. She had an innate right to be beautiful, and heaven would allow no hindrance to the authority beauty gave her, that same heaven’s open gift. This was perhaps the extent of her theology in either her native religion or her adopted one. If pushed to a corner, however, or even on the rack, she might confess nothing more: Safiye Baffo recognized no divinity beyond the rim of her own face.

Still, if cloves and ginger were no fail-proof way to attain irresistibility for those God had not blessed, Safiye saw no harm in the spices. She saw no harm in any ritual—whether prayer or fasting or feasting—she discovered here among the Turks.

The tingle in the Quince’s fingers: Well, it might be the burn of cloves, of ginger, nothing more. But Safiye needed very little convincing to see that these rituals did serve beyond the surface. Their rare ingredients did have efficacy greater than merely translating her God-given gift to the Turkish vernacular.

And then the Quince let the quiver affecting her olive-green fingers move to her tongue. “Pepper is cheap in the spice market,” the midwife said, following the curve of Safiye’s cheek down to oval chin as if touching holy relics and uttering prayer instead of venalities. “It’s so cheap, I’d almost scrub my pots with it in place of sand. A pity there’s little beauty benefit in pepper, my sweetest mountain flower. But I’ve stocked up on enough sacks of the stuff to poultice a hundred winters’ coughs.”

“That’ll be the twenty thousand
quintals
of pepper Sultan Suleiman’s ships have confiscated from the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean.” Safiye spoke, and watched in the mirror how entranced the Quince’s fingers were by the slightest movement of her lips.

“You care a lot about the source of your spices,” the midwife commented. “More than about the spices themselves, I think.”

Safiye smiled and condescended to speak some more. “This cargo has been brought to Alexandria. Thence some comes to us in Constantinople, much to the Venetian traders for an excellent price.”

“You favor the traders of your homeland, fairest of the fair?” The Quince asked it as if she would willingly capture the moon for Safiye if that would please as well as a coup for Venice.

“In this case, what helps the Venetian Republic helps the realm of Islam, too. I do not pick sides except against the Portuguese who, ever since their ships rounded Africa, have had unfair—uncustomary—advantage of the Indian seas.”

“No wonder the cooks have been over-peppering the sauces lately.”

“Your ambition, my Quince, extends no further than your belly?”

“While yours, my fair one, encompasses the entire earth.” Was that a note of exasperation in the midwife’s tone?

‘Where the pepper goes, there goes the gold,’ was a saying when I was a child.” Safiye unfurled her eyelids and drawled, letting the midwife think she was half a-swoon with caresses. “I remember the smell when, as a child, we’d pole through the canals where the richest merchants warehoused. Sometimes cloves, sometimes cinnamon, but always, always pepper. The smell of wealth. The smell of power.”

“Come to my surgery, heart of my heart.” The Quince quieted to a whisper in her intensity. “Leave this silly, garish communal hall. You shall smell that smell again.”

Safiye pushed a smile up into the cream on her cheeks as if the offer were a great temptation. She was, in fact, delighting in another brief reverie of her new eunuch. Finally, she had found a khadim of her own, and such a one as might be an extension of herself. It seemed to be the Quince’s touch that thrilled her. But it was in fact a more mystical thrill, a sharing with Ghazanfer of what she knew he must be accomplishing at that moment.

Safiye didn’t reply to the midwife’s invitation. Instead, when the tantalization of clairvoyant union with her eunuch had past, she spoke in another vein. She retained in her voice, however, the note of husky desire which, she knew, drew the midwife to her like a lodestone.

“How the war with Portugal goes will affect how willing you are to slather my face with any of your concoctions, my dearest Quince.”

“Fair one, I would not hesitate to do so if almonds were as dear as gold.”

Safiye sighed as if the entire world conspired against their mutual attraction. “I wish—” She let the Quince’s imagination fill in the wish voluptuously, then continued, glancing at the crowded room about them as if that alone thwarted the mutual granting of that wish.

“—I do wish our lord the Sultan would free enough men from other arenas to complete construction of that canal joining our Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea at Suez. That would defeat the upstart, renegade Portuguese once and for all, have them on their knees before us to spice their sausages.”

“What can a ditch through some desert possibly have to do with you here, my heart?”

“Sometimes you do surprise me in the narrowness of your thinking. You are an intelligent woman, my Quince. The most intelligent in this harem.”

“Do I take that as a compliment?” The Quince struggled a bit with her veil, the first effort in that direction she had evidently made all day.

“Of course.”

“I’m not certain. Sometimes I’d rather hear you call me beautiful.”

“Well, my Quince, you’re clearly not...”

Safiye bit her tongue and was much relieved to hear the midwife laugh, as if this were no matter.

“Sometimes I think you equate beauty with wisdom,” the Quince said, “as if anybody with any sense would choose to be beautiful if she could.”

“Well, certainly, any woman...”

“And so this makes you not only the fairest in our harem, but the most intelligent as well?”

Safiye was glad to hear the other woman laugh again, although it was a fuzzy, bitter laugh, like her nickname, the Quince. Safiye did not trust herself to make a reply, however. How could she, without offense? Or without striking the phial from the midwife’s hand.

The Quince spoke first. “I’m not so certain as you are. Oh, not that you aren’t fair and intelligent, my Safiye, but that the two keep good company most of the time. Or that beauty is to be preferred above intelligence. And both outweigh a certain sweetness, kindness, concern for one’s fellows. Love.”

“Oh, my Quince! Who are you to speak of loving kindness and tender mercy? You have a heart, we all know, as hard and tart as your namesake fruit.”

The midwife shifted on her cushion, clearly made uncomfortable by the barest hint of accusation, of blackmail.

“But do the narrow walls of this harem cramp your mind as well?” Safiye continued.

“My Safiye, does the lure of a distant mirage blind you to what is here, this that is more real than realms and principalities?”

“What can be more important than the spread and security of our master Suleiman’s empire? That empire that will be Murad’s. And our son’s.”

“And yours?”

“Yes, and mine.”

“Allah willing.”

“Allah willing, of course.”

After a pause spent conforming the movement of her heavily used hands to the ellipse of Safiye’s skin, the Quince’s cause, whatever it was, subsided. The midwife regained her contentedness to give Safiye anything, even her topic of conversation.

“In spite of the distance,” she said, “I understand our lord receives ambassadors from Calicut, Malabar—as far away as Sumatra—pleading with him in the name of that Islam we share to come to their defense against these heathen Portuguese.”

The Quince took up no more almond cream on her fingers, for Safiye’s alabaster was already slick with it. But she kept working on that face. From temple to lips, from bridge of nose to point of chin she slipped, as loathe to part contact as a lover at dawn.

Safiye closed her eyes and sighed, trying to set the tone between the satisfaction the Quince was hoping to evoke and the disappointment and frustration the conversation made her truly feel.

Safiye said: “And to each supplicant our lord gives a cloth of gold coat of honor, a sack of silver aspers—but not the artillery and master gunners they want. They deserve.”

“I suppose a man, even a sultan, cannot be everywhere at once, and must pick and choose his battles.”

“And the harem, a woman’s country, denies a woman the right to be anywhere.”

“But that same denial allows her to be much more omnipresent than a man’s world allows him.”

This again. What was the midwife driving at? Let her keep to her potions and magics, things she can understand.
But for an instant, Safiye felt herself drawn in by the sweep of the hand across her face and she kept her thoughts to herself.

The Quince continued, lulling: “A woman is invisible, yet the touch of her finger is everywhere.”

“Like Allah?” Safiye purred.

“Like Allah,” the Quince replied.

Safiye smiled at the notion of an invisible woman as God. She saw her smile shoot through the midwife’s body, the Quince’s eyes half close with the rigor of emotion.

“But I—no less than the Sultan—must pick and choose my battles,” Safiye said. “I think—if it’s Allah’s will—I shall know better than the old man how to choose, when I am there.

“In the meantime, the site of the old man’s war with the Portuguese is so distant, the hostilities so scattered, it takes forever to hear word of what has happened and even longer to decipher what it may mean afterwards.”

“What it means for the Sultan. For his grandson.”

“For
me
. Your price quotes from the spice markets are as good—and as rapid—an indicator as any other I’ve discovered.”

The Quince seemed to take more compliment than Safiye had meant. But it was a sign that, secure in this ally, Baffo’s daughter could expand her attention to the rest of the room.

Here, harem walls contained the brilliant splinters of life created by close to two dozen young women yet uncontained within themselves. The young women’s native integrity imploded under the pressures of grille and veil. Although beautiful, indeed chosen first for this beauty, they were not naturally favored quite enough to be free of beauty’s thralldom—and all the other slaveries fashion brought in its wake.

The Quince sighed. “Your prince will call for you soon.”

Safiye hummed a half-attentive response.

“Too soon.”

After another circle of Safiye’s face, the midwife said: “Will he love the smell of jasmine on you as much as I do, my doe?”

Safiye could tell her lack of attention galled the Quince. Speaking would help, even if it were mindless repetition of thoughts she’d shared before.

“On my first visit to the harem,” Safiye said therefore, “before I’d even been bought and guaranteed a place here, I felt the pulse of power in these inner rooms. It was as if, in a body apparently dead, there had been this forceful sign of life. Can you appreciate that, my Quince? Have you ever come upon a body like that?”

“No. Mostly what I find dead is genuinely dead.”

“It was not just life, but a vigorous, splendid life, the most glorious life I could imagine.”
And I claimed it for my own
, she told herself with a fierce glance in the mirror.

“There is something in the harem I have tried to explain to you, my Fair One, but words have failed me. Something—between women. Was that what you sensed?”

Safiye shook her head, not so much at what the midwife said, which she hardly heard, but at her own discovery. “I realize now that the power I sensed came from Nur Banu.”

“Well, a woman and her mother-in-law are always at odds.”