Reign of the Favored Women (29 page)

Like other similar laws before it, that law has never been rescinded. It remains on the books for future rulers to ignore or to apply as the whim suits them.

Sokolli Pasha alone seemed to feel the weight of what this might do to the discipline of the troops and to public morale throughout the courtyards and back lanes of the empire. It was there the tale had flown as fast as pigeons gone home to roost. Of course it was upon Sokolli’s shoulders that the scandal and dishonor fell most squarely—and for no reason, it seemed, but a mad whim of Allah. My master wore the face of a man in the prime of life who awakens one morning to find his whole left side paralyzed.

That night I stood at my post to see if he would send to the harem for a girl for comfort—simply to beat her, perhaps, as others do. But my master was never like that. I stood longer to see if he would like to talk, but he was never like that, either. My master never trusted but a very few with even a half of his thoughts. This hard time might have been eased if he had been a different man.

But had he been a different man, such a time would never have come to him.

My master went alone that night into his room and shut the door behind him. I could consider myself dismissed, but I sat up much later, seeing the light under the door and knowing Sokolli could not sleep either.

That night Sokolli Pasha wrote a very long letter in his own hand. It went to the one person he trusted most of all—Arab, now governor of Cyprus. Arab Pasha, who’d come as close to flesh and blood as my master ever knew.

“Abdullah, come here.”

It was Gul Ruh’s voice stifled into a whisper that drew my attention up into the big plane tree by the wall.

That girl! A year since she’d first been sent to the harem and still she was fighting it. I’d put one of my assistants on her full time. A jolly, fat eunuch, I’d chosen him because he could tell tales and jokes and sing songs that kept her satisfied at his knees for hours on end. But he did like his narghile with a few grains of opium in it, and when he’d start that bubbling, you could bet Gul Ruh would not sit quietly beside him doing needlework. Then I had to go off and find her myself.

“No, come right up here,” she insisted, pointing to the limb beside her. Simply standing at the trunk to break her fall was not enough.

A plane tree by a garden wall on a cool day in early spring. It reminded me of another day and another place when another girl—just slightly older than this one as the sun tells time, but much, much older in reality—had piped me to my fate with a bawdy song.

Turkish women’s
shalvar
, I noticed, made climbing tress much easier than full Venetian skirts and farthingales. Once up there, they were basically more modest, too. Still, they could be pulled suggestively tight. The gauzy bodice (and Gul Ruh’s vest was perpetually missing a little pearl button or two) revealed more than a hard bone corset just how close to being a woman she was. Her satin slippers were scuffed from the climb and hung from her feet by only the toes. The bare ankles, white but firm, crossed and uncrossed with excitement at just my nose’s level.

Had I been the man who’d climbed the convent’s garden wall, I would have refused to join her. Pride and a little petulance would have hidden the flush in my face, the racing of my heart and the tightness in my codpiece. The victory of forcing my will over hers, of getting her down from the tree when she wanted me up—by physical means if necessary—would be practice for the more intimate forcing I would have had next in mind.

But I loved my little mistress in a way that was foreign tongue to the passion of my youth and yet, I believe, having known them both, was more true and enduring. I tried the branch carefully to see if it would hold us both, then joined her there. It had been a lifetime, I realized sadly, since I’d climbed a ship’s rigging like a little monkey. The long, heavy robes of my office did not help matters, either. Gul Ruh had to cover her giggles with her hand as she watched my struggle up.

“The Jew, Joseph Nassey,” I replied, panting from the struggle, to her first question, “Who is that?”

But to her second, “What is he doing there in front of our gate?” I could not answer at all.

“I’ll go ask,” I offered, but she did not send me and I didn’t go at once. We both just sat and watched with wonder the spectacle that appeared between the naked branches of the plane tree.

Had we not been the only ones about, I would have dragged the girl down from the tree in an instant. In spite of the meager and unknown audience we made, Joseph Nassey walked to and fro in front of the master’s gate with a mincing stiffness in his hips that said he expected more eyes. His head was thrown back, singing or shouting, I couldn’t tell which in the distance. And, hung around his neck by its heavy iron chain, he wore the wooden coat of arms that had swung so long and so vainly in front of his own house.

We watched this spectacle together for some time. Gul Ruh reached through the branches of the tree to hold my hand for protection against the strangeness of it. But finally a question without an answer bored her and she scrambled down of her own accord and went back into the house to provoke her personal guardian into entertainment.

As I had more means to unscramble the puzzle at my disposal, I pursued it much longer and was finally able to discover the man’s purpose. He had taken heart by the recent and public displays of Sokolli Pasha’s weakness and thought the time ripe to bid for his long-denied kingship once more. Since Selim’s death, free access to the Divan had been refused to the Jew and so he determined on this plot to call attention to himself.

Years of heavy disappointment weighed on him: Few who saw his protest did not consider it at least halfway mad. But the intelligence I received from the palace led me to believe Nassey would, indeed, have earned his Cyprus by this ploy if for no other reason than that it would give a slap to Sokolli and to his favorite Arab Pasha.

Fortunately, the hand of God moved in. Whether it was a damp, cold night in the street he couldn’t stand at his age, whether his madness, or whether foul play was involved (there were no sure signs of it, so my master escaped suspicion), the man was found dead in the gutter in the morning. His coat of arms hung rudely away about his iron-cold neck, as if it had choked him.

It fell my master’s lot to see that the deceased’s property returned to the royal coffers. The house and furniture were sold, the gold, silver, jewels, and slaves were confiscated and brought in bulk to the rooms beyond the sacred protection of the Prophet’s Cloak in the palace. This was the usual practice when a Jew or a Christian whose wealth was so largely due to the favors of the Sultan died; they cannot secure their goods’ separate perpetuation by the founding of charities attached to the mosques.

* * *

One week after Joseph Nassey’s death, my master had me collect some women’s clothes “of substantial size,” and a full apricot-colored veil. He instructed me to bring them to a house near the Small Khan, then pick them up again—on the person of the new addition to our harem.

“Bring her to me!” Esmikhan cried when she heard. “I will scratch her eyes out!”

The thought of such a confrontation I did not relish. Although I had only seen the new girl in her veils, even then I could tell she was no mean figure. At least one advantage she had over my lady: She was mobile on her feet, if somewhat heavy. And that heaviness might be due to her awkwardness with a veil if she were new to the land of the Faithful.

Still, somehow I doubted her novitiate. Though I’d been unable to provoke a word from her, not even the statement of her name, she seemed to understand quickly enough when directions were given. She climbed into the sedan chair and turned right or left down the hallway with none of the usual hand signals and gentle shoves a eunuch had to use with new slaves.

Irrational as it was, one could hardly blame my lady’s reaction. Never had she had cause to be jealous before, never had the master given her one. She was one Sultan’s daughter and the sister of another. No woman bought on the block could ever supplant her in that harem, should she bear a thousand sons. And it was perfectly legitimate that Sokolli Pasha should find someone younger, stronger, more beautiful to be his companion in idle hours. Indeed, gossips only wondered why he had not done so years ago. Still, it was not a comfortable position for my mistress to find herself in so suddenly and so without precedent.

Her discomfort tended to out-and-out panic, mostly because the new addition remained a complete unknown. There was no chance to observe her strengths, plot to combat them, or to wheedle out weaknesses and find them great enough for eternal damnation. The new slave remained in the mabein—that room of connubial bliss which had been unused for years—and was allowed no visitor but the master and myself. This was not Sokolli’s mere suggestion; it was a holy commandment to which he made me swear my life.

Normally, Sokolli Pasha made few requests concerning the harem. Like weather and seasons, we came and went and carried out our business as if by the will of Allah alone. He gave little thought to the processes which were my whole occupation. Therefore, when he did choose to take a stand against the elements, I would certainly do my best to see that he was obeyed, almost as if he were a wonder-working saint.

And so my lady alternately tried on new jewels and gowns to improve her attractions, swore violence, and conferred with a whole string of midwives and holy women about spells, amulets, and potions. The house reeked of wild rue and Job’s tears, the prime ingredients of such concoctions. I nearly lost my heart out of my throat one time when I came upon the dried skin of a snake and viper’s fangs set carefully in a niche—witchcraft. But desperate measures were called for, anything that might serve to improve Esmikhan’s position, with the help of Allah. Her own powers, it was clear, must fail miserably.

I alone visited the mabein twice a day with food on a tray. From curiosity as much as politeness I would offer the newcomer a bath or try to draw her into conversation, or even only try to get her to take off her veil so she might have more air. Although every scrap of any quantity of food had vanished when I returned, I always locked the door to the mabein behind me unsatisfied.

“I do not know,” I had to reply to my lady’s distraught enquiries after anything and everything.

“But my husband,” she said, biting her lip, “still spends time with her?”

“Several hours at least every night.”

“Night only?”

“As far as I know.”

“Oh, Allah, night is night! What do they do?”

“That, my lady, is their business and Allah’s alone. But I have heard talking. Low talk at least. That’s more than she’s ever given me.”

Here my lady would burst into tears and exclaim wildly, “She must bathe soon or the neighbors will complain of the smell. She must have her menses sometime this month and he will not approach her then. Unless, oh, Allah forbid, she is with child already and then...”Things of that nature babbled over her lips until the stress overcame her with silence.

One day I met Gul Ruh dawdling about the mabein door when I brought the new girl the evening meal. My young lady was there when I came out again so I knew it was not just by chance.

“Abdullah, let me in to see her, please. I won’t scratch her eyes out like Mother would.”

“Off with you, silly girl,” I said, giving her backside a playful swat.

Gul Ruh’s eyes watched me narrowly as I replaced the mabein key carefully into my belt for safekeeping.

“Abdullah,” she stopped me to ask a day later. “Do ladies in your country relieve themselves standing up?”

“We are not like the wild Arabs of the desert,” I told her decidedly. “Our women squat the same as you. Why do you ask such a question, little monkey?”

“No reason. Just wondered.”

As she turned to run off, I noticed a smear of dirty red brick color on one sleeve and across the neighboring hip. I called her attention to it, warning how angry the laundress would be when she saw that on new yellow silk.

“Oh, she’ll get over it,” Gul Ruh said carelessly, dusting vigorously as she disappeared down the hallway.

Thinking, she’s always running somewhere, I turned myself in the opposite direction and proceeded about my own business. As I did, I felt an unusual draft and then saw that the latch on one of the lattices on the windows of that hallway was open. When I went to close it, I paused a moment before the vision of sky, iron-grey with a relapse into winter. Then I saw a clean patch on the red tile just below the window. It was the very same dirty brick red as Gul Ruh had worn on her jacket sleeve.

And then I saw something that made my heart stop. Not far from the smear of red was a missing tile. My young mistress had come within a hand’s breadth of falling to the courtyard, two stories below. By Allah, and she hadn’t even been out of breath!

Looking to either side to see I was not watched (even as she must have done), I climbed onto the ledge myself and then onto the tiles, my legs shaking as they felt for other loose spots. I looked down and grew dizzy, not fearing for myself, for I usually have no such fear, but fearing for her. On the pebbles of the courtyard below I saw a glint of gold—a woman’s broken bangle in a place it could never have gotten except from the air, for that yard was in the public selamlik.

Very well, it was quite clear Gul Ruh had been out on that roof and saved from a horrible accident only by the Merciful One. But what had she been doing there? To the left, the housetops of the city lay in a fascinating jumble: the back alleyways and open markets, the parks, mosques, and caravanserais. To the right, over the rather ill-defined mass of the palace, ships on the Bosphorus with the hills of Asia, gauzed that day like women’s breasts, lay in the distance. There was much for a child to see there, indeed, a child grown oh-so weary of being cooped up like a rabbit in a hutch.

The view towards Asia was blocked somewhat by the cupola that domed over the mabein. I could just press between it and the wall of the harem—it would be easier for a ten-year-old—and when I had done that, I saw what she must have seen. There, on the other side of the cupola, was a tiny courtyard with a dried-up fountain, weedy beds and trees sadly in need of the pruner’s hook. It was a courtyard that could only be reached from the mabein, where the architect had imagined the lord and his favorite could spend many delightful hours together. Although in demand throughout the Believing world, Sinan the architect had woefully misread the needs of this particular client—until now. Now I saw how commodious the yard was. There was even a tiny outhouse in one corner, open with large windows to let in fresh air—and the spying glance of a girl on the harem roof.