Reign of the Favored Women (20 page)

The little window through which Gul Ruh could pass her written exercises for examination now served to pass Safiye’s wrist. I do not know how much the man could learn from that pulse alone. It was hardly the natural pulse it might have been had a woman taken it. Safiye’s breath must have come with more difficulty through the veils in which we’d robed her in lest the screen fail. Then, too, the touch of a man’s hand was not something to leave her unaffected. My master’s anxieties were plain now: How could a mixed doctor-patient relationship ever produce the objective diagnosis necessary for proper treatment?

Whatever the man found in that wrist, it was both interesting and informative. The two remained huddled on either side of that screen for a very long time.

“What did they say?” I asked the assistant I’d put to oversee the meeting.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “It was in no language I can understand.”

I cursed myself soundly. Of course! They would speak in Italian, and I was the only one who could understand that. Why had I thought my first responsibility was to Esmikhan, who was taking the whole business very hard? Because, I realized, Safiye had suggested it with a weak roll of those wonderful eyes.

I spent a long time afterwards going over the physician’s features in my mind. He was an old, withered man interested in little beyond his art. Even his next meal was of little concern when there was scientific study or doctoring to be done. He had a small, pointed white beard and the grey eyes of a grandfather. Although Safiye could not have seen these things except from a distance through the harem grille, surely his hands would show her that in the rest of the man there could be of little interest for a lover. These were hands thin and bulging with veins and knuckles until they seemed more mechanical than flesh and blood, hands that had handled drugs and diseased limbs from Spain to Cathay.

Others might have been reassured by such thoughts, thinking romance was the worst confidence those two could have exchanged. But something Esmikhan said made me guess otherwise and gave me more ill ease.

“Is the doctor still seeing her?” Esmikhan demanded of me when I came to comfort her. “Is he seeing her?”

“Yes, lady,” I replied, giving her my hand. “Allah willing, she may be made well now.”

“Allah willing, it may be so. But I would not trust my body and my unborn child to that Christian.”

“Do not fear, lady. Medicine, the knowledge of Allah, may cure whether the practitioner be Muslim or not.”

“Still, I cannot think what Safiye can be imagining. She must be delirious, poor child.”

“The doctor may help delirium,” I said, though “poor child” had never been an epithet I’d give to Safiye, even when she was much younger.

“But after the things we overheard him say to my husband and the other gentlemen yesterday...”

“What did he say?”

“Why, he said—actually bragged—that many of the great authorities had known much of the ways of the child in the womb, but that he had learned more than any of them. In some distant land he had learned to give abortions without danger to the mother. He can make it look like a miscarriage. And he can bring on a case of child-bed fever looking as natural as the real thing. He also knows, he said, more of poisons than anyone who has ever lived, both antidote and administration. Surely that is black magic and ought to be avoided, don’t you think?”

I left Esmikhan as soon as I could after this without causing her alarm and ran to the mabein. But by then another midwife had arrived and my assistants were diligently ushering the doctor out as they had been ordered.

When Safiye threw off her veil to let the old woman examine her—the old woman clucking against any witchcraft the unbeliever might have applied—I had never seen Baffo’s daughter look healthier.

And Ghazanfer had arrived. Where he’d been all this while was a mystery, even to Safiye it seemed. I remembered how fearfully she’d asked after him in the midst of the crisis. Now, as I entered, the great eunuch’s back was to me as he paced at the foot of his lady’s makeshift bed on the divan with unaccustomed agitation. Perhaps our recent enforced closeness had also helped to make him more transparent. In any case, this was the first time I realized that the khadim, usually so cautious of what his face revealed, could sometimes be gauged in his unguarded back.

There I now read, Why have you done this to yourself, lady? To yourself and your unborn child? It is my job to protect you and I do so—with my life. But how can I protect you if it’s your own hand you turn against yourself?

I also saw a slouch in the wide space between his shoulders, a slouch that spoke of a case of the sulks approaching childishness.

What I heard aloud, in the eunuch’s rising
voce di testa
, was this:

“Against Selim, yes. I hated Selim. You know I had cause and he was the ruination of the land. But Murad—Allah keep him—is not his father and I can’t continue to serve you against him and against innocents, to bring chaos to the lands of Islam!”

Safiye saw me in the doorway. Her eves shifted and Ghazanfer caught the message. He managed to suppress the storm inside to his usual glassy calm exterior. With the intake of a single breath, even his back fell silent.

“How fares the cradle of princes?” I covered the intermittent awkwardness with my most formal language.

“She and the child are out of danger,” the midwife declared with self-satisfaction.

“Allah be praised.”

Safiye smiled an addictive smile at me, which I resisted. Then she allowed her attention to be consumed with midwifery.

Ghazanfer took another breath and took the burden of my presence from his lady. “I am conscious, khadim/’he: said, “of the disruption all of this causes the peace of your harem.”

“Do not mention what is Allah’s will,” I replied with equal stiffness.

A glimmer moved through Ghazanfer’s eves, as if to say. It’s never Allah’s will in reference to her.

Before I could raise my own brows in surprise, he spoke aloud in a different vein. “I fear we must impose upon your hospitality yet further.”

“The guest is a gift from Allah.”

“His Highness the Sultan, hearing of the danger that has threatened his peace and majesty in this room, is very desirous to see the well-guarded one with his own eves.”

“His Highness’s wish is my command.”

“But as it is not thought wise to move the object of his concern in her present state—”

“We will not hear of it.”

“His majesty will come here.”

“We will be honored.”

“Now. This very afternoon.”

What could I say? “We will be honored.”

“I know it’s a great inconvenience.” Ghazanfer dropped his formal tone in an approximation of apology. “But what else can we do?”

For one moment I thought, Nur Banu must be beside herself with fury. Surely her new girl was condemned to failure from the start, if Safiye the Fair One remained so vital in Murad’s heart. For the only other being a sultan had ever gone to see—and did not send for to await his own pleasure— was Allah Himself in His mosque at Friday prayers.

What else could we do? the great eunuch had asked. I couldn’t spare thought for alternatives the rest of the day. I wasn’t the only one who noted parallels: Some of the same ceremonial could be applied here as at Friday prayers. But though this parallel lent the self-propulsion of centuries-old tradition, I could not trust to that. I personally had to see to every detail.

I ended up claiming part of the Hippodrome’s summer dust as I tried to find places for all the attendants that had to come along on this lovers’ tryst and the mounts of those who claimed the honor of riding the short distance. The viziers made a field of green, the muftis in white, the chamberlains scarlet, the sheikhs a block of blue. All these had to be made comfortable with refreshments and small guest gifts according to rank.

My master himself had to unpack his most formal robes of heavy green silk from among scented aloes, his conical turban ringed with gold. He saw to the highest dignitaries in the
selamlik
. The harem, of course, was mostly left in peace: Even a sultan could claim no access to any household’s inner sanctum. But my lady had to rise to the occasion and little Gul Ruh, too, had to wear her best to greet her royal uncle.

I take it all as heaven’s mercy that I had no time the rest of that day to consider the ramifications of this visit, either for Nur Banu or for anyone else in the empire. But I do recall thinking, on one hasty passage through the
mabein
, that this man from whom I so scrupulously averted my eyes as the Shadow of Allah had once tried to best me in a hand-to-hand fight. It had been when I’d first come to the harem and I’d stood my own again.st him until Safiye’s declaration that I was a eunuch had finally removed me from the young prince’s threat. I wondered if Murad remembered.

On that same quick passage on silent, watchful eunuch’s feet, I saw little out of the ordinary in the familiar faces: Gul Ruh’s straining to whiteness in her attempt to be a grown up lady, Esmikhan’s blooming to renewed health in her brother’s presence, Safiye’s calmly triumphant—this much was expected. That Ghazanfer’s flattened cheeks wore a brush of high color—of pleasure? or shame?—was more surprising. But I took no time to consider the curiosity then.

So it came as something quite unforeseen when at last I closed the harem doors and thought we had done with the world for a while that my master should call me back out to him in the selamlik.

Sokolli Pasha’s private rooms had less of the feminine about them than a soldier’s barracks, than a monk’s cell. A spartan divan of rumpled cushions, a worn rug rutched at the corners, stacks of dispatches, pens and ink, maps on a low writing desk. That was all the furnishings save the overwhelming smell of masculinity barely tempered by the requisite aloe shaken out of his ceremonial robes. I could count on one hand the times even so feminine a creature as myself had entered these rooms. They were, from my perspective, a more closed sanctuary than the harem.

The Grand Vizier looked at me keenly over his falcon’s beak of a nose. “It went well, Abdullah.”

“Thank Allah.”

“And thanks to you as well, Allah’s servant.”

“And your servant, my master.” I bowed, arms across my chest, straight from the waist.

Sokolli Pasha shrugged out of his ceremonial robe. I moved to lend a hand, a gesture I could tell he was unaccustomed to, still in many ways the raw Bosnian recruit. I found myself averting my eyes from the sight of his shoulder blades. Though still covered by under robes of lighter silk, they seemed old and tight—achingly tired. Any other man would have called for a massage. I felt tempted to undertake the task myself, but did not dare, unbidden.

The Grand Vizier was now closer to seventy than to sixty, the small vanity of henna becoming an ever deeper red on his beard as he sought to cover the encroaching grey. And his eyes—tonight—seemed rheumy with exhaustion. No one but Allah would ever know—or truly appreciate—the weight of the world that rested on the lids of those eyes.

“Tell me,
khadim
.”

“Master?”

I was not prepared for what he wanted to ask, “Tell me what you know of Ghazanfer Agha.” I was even less prepared for the title he attached to the end of my counterpart’s name. It took me a moment to imagine whom he might mean.
Agha
,
lord
, though euphemistically applied to all eunuchs, was a rank above
ustadh
in honor.

“Ghazanfer...Ghazanfer is a
khadim
.” Yes, that much was self-evident. I had to say more. “Ghazanfer is a khadim who knows his duty and does it.” Surely no one could argue with that statement, no matter whose side he was prompted to take.

My master nodded. He had guessed as much. No, more. But I had given him the impression that this was a man after his own heart, someone he could trust. I hadn’t meant to do that.

“Why, sir, do you ask?”

“It seems he is to be
kapu aghasi
.”

“
Kapu aghasi
?”

“Senior officer of the palace, yes. Not ‘is to be.’ Already is. Our master the Sultan declared him to that high post this afternoon. On his visit to our—to his harem.”

“But
kapu aghasi
is a post—a post almost equal to that of Grand Vizier—to your own, master.”

“Indeed. And it was greatly enhanced when our sadly mourned master Suleiman—may Allah give him the paradise he deserves—transferred the
awkaf
of the holy cities Mecca and Medina as well as that of over seventy of the largest mosques to his superintendence.”

“Safiye!” I couldn’t help but hiss between my teeth.

“Yes.” My master took off the heavy gold-banded turban and rubbed the infant nakedness of his carefully shaven scalp. “I know my master the Sultan’s harem is none of my business. But I had to suspect that a woman who could call the Shadow of Allah—heaven grant his reign last ‘til Judgment Day—to her bedside could also get him to appoint whomever she wants to a vacant post. I know his mother the Valide Sultan was putting forth candidates of her own. I even got a note or two shuffled through the sacred curtains. But—it seems the old woman has lost this round.”

Sokolli Pasha remembered himself and went to kindle more lamps in the growing darkness. Where are the servants to do this? I wondered. I bent myself to straighten the rug. At least I could do that for him, even if I couldn’t find a way to tell him of the scene I had witnessed between Safiye and her eunuch—now the whole empire’s eunuch—that afternoon.

In truth, I didn’t know what to make of the exchange myself, not in light of this latest appointment. I would have liked some help in the task. But, though I admired my master’s wisdom—the entire empire must be grateful to it for getting us through the years of Selim’s negligent rule—I was quite certain he was not the man to help me unravel the faces of women and the most taciturn of eunuchs. In the ordinary way, Sokolli Pasha behaved as if such creatures did not exist.