Reign of the Favored Women (43 page)

“Is there some jewel,” the Sultan asked, groping, “of which you or your wife is particularly fond?”

“Me? No, sire.”

“Your wife?”

“May it please you, sire, I am unmarried.”

“Unmarried? Such a romantic soul in one so celibate? What will you be, by Allah, given a chance to taste the feasts of which the poets sing?”

“No less a man, I pray.”

The Sultan laughed with pleasure. “No less a man, indeed. Well, we shall not put off the essay any longer. I shall see you married before you ride to the front again. And not to just any of my girls, over twenty-six years old and cast off, by Allah. No, I shall see you have one of the royal Ottoman blood. I’m sure there are one or two appropriate women to choose from. I shall have to ask.”

“Gul Ruh” were the first words that came to Ferhad’s mind, not particularly because he knew that girl was an Ottoman but because those had become his words meaning “That’s impossible!” Of course he did not say this to the Shadow of Allah. He merely bowed and said, “Master, I am your slave.”

My master’s mausoleum was not as large as it had started out to be (how quickly the world forgets!) and it had a sort of amputated look. But the tile work was of the finest: blue and green forests espaliered against the walls and heavy with blossoms of that rich coral color that was recently born in Iznik and is such a closely guarded secret that it may well die there. Neglect had its benefits, however, for real vegetation promised soon to cover up the rough spots and take the edifice to itself as if it had always been there.

In small depressions in the marblework, rain water collected at which clouds of pigeons drank. Even in death, my master was proving generous. From the roof of plane trees above, herons had slung their nests like saucer lamps, and a recent molt had let a crest of feathers fall down upon the master’s cupola like nothing so much as the plume of the imperial turban itself.

A row of cypresses, those emblems of eternity, stood sentinel on either side, draped in ivy like shrouds. They kept back the rude press of staring, lesser monuments. Among these surrounding memorials, the men’s were topped with stone turbans in shapes that indicated what station the dead had held in life. Women’s stones were carved to end in flowers.

And, whereas in life all had bowed towards Mecca, in death they went every which way, depending on how the body beneath returned to the soil. Instead of the uniformity of death the preachers were always threatening us with—”The impious and heretic shall stand before their Maker and know the errors of their ways”—it seemed rather that life had enforced more compliance. And in death each relaxed into the individuality they had always cherished in their hearts but never dared while living.

Beyond these stones I could not see far: Heavy mist smeared the distance and then swallowed it whole. I shivered in the damp.

He appeared suddenly out of that mist and walked toward the mausoleum at a pace the heart takes when approaching a lovers’ tryst: quick, but of uneven rhythm. I remarked at once—he is as handsome and swift as ever. He was early, but I had been earlier, and from my post behind the cypress, I could watch his every move.

Waiting is not much practiced by Aghas of the Janissaries, but Ferhad Pasha had not forgotten the art learned so well by weeks under Sokolli Pasha’s roof with the fate of the Empire on his lips. Here he was under the Pasha’s roof again, and some of the same thrill was in this waiting, too: the youthful tantalization to be hopelessly, dangerously in love, near and yet so far.

He waited and I waited. I stood until my legs grew numb, cold slowly creeping up them from the mist-dampened grass. For one used to standing and watching most of every day, this was substantial evidence of the passage of time. But Ferhad Pasha still seemed insensible to it. That there was no sun to judge by was perhaps part of the reason, but here was a man with the responsibilities of all the army on his shoulders. Remembering this, I found his patience even more remarkable. It was hard to imagine: what devices he had used to slip from these responsibilities for the day, lingering now into long afternoon. But no call of duty seemed to disturb his waiting, no thought that he would miss something more important.

At last, the call of the muezzin came, seeping its way through the mist like blood through bandages, and Ferhad Pasha started from his heavy reverie. He had arrived just after the last call—a good four hours must have passed. He looked around in a sudden panic. Perhaps he felt himself confronted by Sokolli’s presence for the first time, surrounded by the ghosts of the others who slept all around. Perhaps he thought he must have missed something. It put a new focus on his eyes and he saw for the first time the basket set in the shadows just at the entrance to the tomb. He went to it, picked it up, saw it was not something left weeks ago by accident, but fresh, set just that morning.

He leapt down from the tomb in a moment, ran this way and that, calling, “My rose! My fountain! Esmikhan!” The mist swallowed his voice at the edge of sight.

I thought I might now be discovered but a step first to one side and then to the other prevented it. And Ferhad Pasha did not look very hard. His search was more a bodily reflex which all along his mind knew was vain.

The mind soon regained control and brought him slowly back to the steps of the tomb. Now he sat limply on the marble and looked long and hard at the basket’s contents. They were all fruit of the end of the present autumn season: a bunch of grapes gone to raisins with a long twig of vine attached, leaves dry and near to dust; an apple, red-cheeked like one sickly but having difficulty breathing; a pomegranate, packed with tears; a quince, the ascetic; almonds still in the husk, tight-lipped and reclusive; and a bouquet of marigold, basil, fenugreek, and forced jasmine. “Petals of the jasmine on fenugreek,” the poet says, “are like tears on a yellow face.”

Ferhad Pasha fingered the various fruits in turn. Their confused covey of meanings exuded but one tenor.

“Oh, Allah,” Ferhad Pasha said when at last he’d made himself understand what he saw. “No! Never, by the All Merciful!” he cried.

He took a handful of the raisins then and bit into them so hard I could hear the seeds crack fi-om where I was. Then he tore into the pomegranate, ate none but left it bleeding over all the rest. At last he made a mad dash for the tree where I hid, and ripping branches from it by the handfuls, he brought them to the basket. The cypress, I remembered, is the symbol for eternity.

But there was nothing more to do than this compounding of symbol on sterile symbol and at last he realized it. In a moment, he had disappeared into the mist from whence he had come.

I waited a breath or two to be sure he’d gone, although I was quite sure he wouldn’t give a backward glance. Then I crept forward and retrieved the basket. It still exuded a heavy smell of bruised basil and marigold steeped in pomegranate when I presented it wordlessly to my mistress. She was sitting not a hundred paces away in another part of the cemetery at the tomb of Rahine, daughter of a famous dervish who died, they said, on her wedding night.

Esmikhan acknowledged me and the altered contents of her basket with the twitch of a weary smile that broke through her tear-stained face.

“Thank Allah,” she said, “I cannot walk, because more than a dozen times I so wanted to...”

Just then a bevy of young girls, chattering maids and grumbling eunuchs arrived at the tomb. Though from all I knew of her history it was difficult to see why, Rahine had become something of a saint to whom girls resorted to pray for husbands. So one in the palace blinked when Esmikhan said she wanted to visit her husband’s grave and we had also thought no passerby would find it odd to see a veiled woman sitting—for hours as it turned out—at Rahine’s. Still, as the innumerable strips of cloth left by the devotees testified, we were lucky she had not been disturbed before now and Esmikhan instantly took my hand to help her up.

“Let’s go,” she said.

But as soon as she began to make her labored progress to where her sedan waited, one of the newly arrived girls ran up.

“Auntie! Aunt Esmikhan, is that you?”

She threw back her veil to let us see: it was Safiye’s daughter Aysha.

Aysha looked more like her mother than anyone else, but she was her mother watered down ten parts to one. Her hair tried to be blond but the sort of grey-brown of dried oak leaves was the best it could manage. Her eyes were neither a rich brown nor yet a blue but something dully, muddily in between. Bright clothes and jewels, bunches of flowers in the hair or on her brea.st were things she had to wear just to compete with the meane.st serving maid around her. On her they always looked tottering and presumptuous.

Aysha’s personality, too, was lackluster, usually mousy, and when it tried to be merry, it generally came out brash and clumsy instead. The girl made just such an attempt now.

“Why, Aunt Esmikhan! Whatever you are doing at Rahine’s tomb? You don’t need to worry about finding a man.”

This discharge, Aysha realized after .she’d said it, was tactless. She tried to cover. “Oh, I’m sorry. Of course you should come here. I ju.st keep thinking anyone over thirty-five must be...” She found all her struggles did nothing but make her sink deeper and deeper, like one floundering in quicksand.

Esmikhan smiled, wearily, hut with indulgence and reached out a hand to rescue the girl. She was, after all, only a child, though growing up seemed to be doing nothing to help the habit of tactlessness.

“So tell me, Aysha,” she asked, “what are you doing here? You don’t need to worry about finding a man, either.”

“Oh, yes I do.”

“But your father has offered you to Ferhad Pasha. What more could any girl want?”

“Oh, but the Agha of the Janissaries is perverse and drags his feet. Why he drags his feet, I don’t know. Allah knows, he’s almost fifty.”

“Perhaps he does it out of consideration of your youth,” Esmikhan said gently. “You aren’t yet ten years old, Allah shield you, after all.”

“But the other Aysha, the Prophet’s favorite, he married her while she was still playing with dolls. I am much more grown-up than that.”

“Indeed. But let me tell you, child, it’s not very jolly being married to an old, old man.”

“No, but Ferhad Pasha is not like your old Sokolli Pasha. Ferhad is still charming and handsome.”

“Yes, yes, he is.”

“Why, Auntie! Are you crying?”

“No, no child. Go on now. Make your visit to the Lady Rahine. And I don’t mean to try and second-guess Allah’s will, but I think it is very likely she may grant you what you wish today.”

“Yes, you are. You are crying! Why, Auntie? Tell me.”

“It’s nothing, child, really. Just...just the inscription over Rahine’s tomb. It made me sad.”

“What does it say?” Aysha squinted at the curved archway. She knew enough to tell there must be writing interwoven with the tendrils of poppies and morning glories there, but she was never very clever at her letters. I suspect her eyes, which appeared muddy from the outside, were muddy to look through, too.

Esmikhan smiled. She had had nearly all day to sit and examine the archway and she recited now without even looking at it the either of the young woman who’d died on her wedding night.

“What is fate?

Before half my desires were fulfilled

I was snatched from the world.

That is fate—But Allah will resurrect.”

The last line caught on the hoarseness in her voice and she tried it again. “Allah will resurrect.”

Safiye flung herself into the room and onto the divan with heavy snorts of impatience.

“Why, my dear, what’s the matter?” Esmikhan asked.

“It’s that Ferhad Pasha.”

“What’s wrong with him now?

“Here Murad offers him the honor of his own daughter and he hems and haws. By Allah, he’s only a slave after all. He should do as he’s told.”

Esmikhan lowered her head and blushed, but she said nothing.

Safiye took that as an excuse to continue. “Allah, what can I do? If I cannot get Aysha to him, someone in Nur Banu’s camp will go. That man is destined to be Grand Vizier, you mark my words. He’s young enough and clever enough to hold that post for a long, long time. And if she gains control over him...”

“He still won’t marry her?” Esmikhan sat up straight and asked with agitation.

Safiye didn’t bother to confirm or deny the question, but forged ahead with her complaints.

“But he needs a young, strong wife who can give him sons,” Esmikhan said in utter disbelief.

Safiye ignored the statement and continued to rant and rave as she always did when nothing else seemed to work. One subject led to another in her stream of frustrations and she was soon on another related problem.

“And what am I to do with that AH Pasha? He’s another powerful man who needs a well-placed wife so I can keep track of him.”

“Ah Pasha?”

“Yes, the new governor of Hungary. You know the dangers that go along with such newly conquered lands.”

“Yes. My late husband’s nephew in Buda. Allah save his soul.”

“Well, Ali Pasha has executed the government there quite remarkably. Outgrown that honor, we may say, and is busy looking around for more. He’s as dashing as could be. Why it should be so difficult to get him suitably married, I don’t know.”

“I...I would marry Ali Pasha,” Esmikhan said. “If you think...if you think it would help.”

“Help? Oh, my dear, it would be the most wonderful thing that’s happened around here in ages. He’s a man going somewhere, I tell you. And handsome—But would you really? You know, I’d often thought you must be lonely since Sokolli’s death—Allah favor him—but I never dared...”

“Yes, I’ll marry him,” Esmikhan said again.

One thing Safiye forgot to mention to my lady was that AH Pasha was already married with two sons and a daughter. But it went without saying that for the honor and advancement of marrying into the royal house, he’d divorce her in a minute.

* * *

Ghazanfer Agha was present at the divorce as one of the witnesses—the witness who would carry word of the transaction back to the harem, to let Safiye know that all was clear. Ali Pasha, he informed us, was a man of sharp features, slick and sure of his good looks. His brows, like two black daggers, met at the base of his hook of a nose and that nose thrust down to almost meet the black point of a beard that sheathed a dagger of a chin. He had just returned from the frontier and was lean and brown and hard and healthy from the rigors of a soldier’s life.