Sofia (24 page)

“If you did, lady, it was before I could understand what you were saying. I knew you had one, of course, because you are the master’s first lady and the head of the harem. But more you haven’t said. If he is at all like you, lady, I am sure he must be a very bright little boy, and fair to look upon, may Allah shield him.”

“‘A little boy!’” Nur Banu repeated with a laugh. “Oh, that he were, that I might still have the pleasure of his company day in and day out! No, my son is now a man, full-grown and more like himself than he is like any other. Allah give him many more years: he is eighteen.”

“Eighteen!” Safiye exclaimed. “Lady, I assure you I never guessed!”

“Yes, it was eighteen years ago that Murad gave me all that pain and grief. Ah, but it was worth it. I’ll tell you, my dear, no one is more surprised than I am that time has gone so rapidly.”

“Lady, Allah shield you, but I never would have guessed you had a son so old. You are still young yourself—no evil eye upon you, if Allah please.”

Nur Banu smiled at these flatteries and at the superstitious cautions that accompanied them. Perhaps she remembered when she had first learned to squelch her own religion and call on Islam’s god. Then she began to speak again. “My Murad is as fine a son as any mother could wish. I have concern for him, however, and it is very great. He has for this past year or two—almost since we first came to Kutahiya, in fact—become heavily addicted to his water pipes.

“Opium is not such an awful vice. I myself put a little in the narghile or indulge in a
beng
confection from time to time. But in one so young and to such excess—! He takes pleasure, I am told, in no other pastimes. He refused to accompany our master to the Persian border, and his place as counselor and friend in time of war was taken by a captive janissary.

“He neither hunts nor attends his father’s government sessions nor practices with arms nor improves his mind with reading and scholarly discourse with the ulema. Even poetry and music he enjoys only as an accompaniment to his trances. Should the music become too lively or the epic too enthralling, he will send the performer away so as not to interrupt his dreams. For companions too, he will have none but those weak, pale-faced youths who will join him in his habit.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t worry quite so much. He is young still. But I am his mother. And, though far be it from me to presume to second-guess Allah, it is very likely that upon the death of first his grandfather and then his father—Allah forbid them both—he will become Sultan of all the Faithful. What sort of occupation is the pipe for one who must lead armies with the sword? Worse than keeping him from his duties, it may well open him up to manipulation by ministers and counselors who would like nothing better than to see his overthrow. Even now, some slippery fellow has but to say that the opium he has in his pouch from such and such an exotic field is more pleasurable than any in this world and my son will give the rings off his fingers and sacks of ghrush besides to have it. If he is like this now, before he is twenty—Allah stay me!—what will he be like when he is forty?”

Here Nur Banu sighed and shook her head. Then she continued, “As Allah is my witness, I have done all a mother can do to divert him. I nag and cajole, but too much of that, I know, and he will never come to see me again—no, not even on holidays. I make his fine clothes. With my own hands I bake him special dainties which I know he loves. But what is the use? He can always escape into the world beyond my reach. At first, of course, I thought he was simply a young man, bored here in this small town and, when his father would not get him a girl (Selim likes them all for himself), I did. You know Aziza?”

“Yes,” Safiye replied. She knew the girl.

“Well, she lasted less than a week. Then I got him Belqis. Her, too, you know.”

“Yes,” Safiye said again.

“Do you know what he said to me after Belqis? ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘No more of your silly girls. They are such a bother! They waste my time.’ My own son! Now a man who will not even bother to get children, what sort of man is that? He should not be a Sultan, for who would reign after him? He owes it to his people, at least, to preserve them from civil wars of succession and give them an honest heir. No, he should not be a Sultan. He should not even be a eunuch!

“Now, my dear,” Nur Banu suddenly turned from her passion to address Safiye directly. “Now do you know why I bought you and brought you here?”

“Indeed, lady, I do not,” Safiye confessed. Then she added that she was startled and puzzled by the question in such a context.

“Because,” Nur Banu announced, “because you are the one, my dear, who must draw my son away from his drug.”

Safiye stopped in her tracks and the little black girl, carrying the sunshade behind her and hastening to keep up so she would not miss a word, ran into her. When apologies and blessings had been given all around, Nur Banu began again. “It might well be a girl my Murad needs,’ I thought to myself. ‘But Murad is no ordinary young man. He needs a girl above the ordinary.’“

“Belqis and Aziza are not ugly girls,” Safiye protested.

“Oh, no, but girls like that can always be found in the market. Slavic girls from the Sultan’s campaigns—I can get two of them for what I paid for you—maybe three, if I bargain well. ‘No, no.’ I said to myself. ‘My son needs something extraordinary.’

“So I was content to bide my time, to pretend to heed his warning, ‘No more of your girls, Mother.’ But all the while, I had the Kislar Aga, my head eunuch, watching the slave markets carefully. Many girls, many, he found and brought to me. But none of them was quite right. Then, early last spring, just before we were scheduled to leave Constantinople for Kutahiya once again—he brought me you. ‘This,’ I said to myself, ‘this is the girl for my son.’

Nur Banu’s arm squeezed Safiye’s waist in both affection and ambitious possession. Safiye murmured something in reply about how unworthy she was of such an honor.

“But my dear, you are most worthy! Do you never look in the mirror? Your hair, that is the most remarkable thing.”

You will win him with your hair. And your face— Yet it is something besides your outward features. I sensed it from the moment I saw you. ‘Such a girl,’ I said to myself, ‘should never belong to Suleiman.’ For you might as well know that had I not seen you first and bid higher, that is exactly where you would be now, in Suleiman’s harem in Constantinople. You were so much more important to me than to him, you see, that I bid so much higher.

“You think you would like that, eh? Being Suleiman’s odalisque? Think again, my little mountain spring. He is an old man, beyond the getting of children. If he has girls, it is only to keep his bed warm, like King David of old. If you ever got to sleep with him—I say if, for the chances are, in that mob of odalisques, that even you would not—you would never get a child. And then, in three or four years, however long it may be (Allah grant it may be a hundred), when Suleiman dies—that would be it. The end, no more. Because you had once belonged to him, by a glance of his eyes if nothing else, you could never belong to anyone else. You would be shipped off to the cold, dark harem in Edirne to rot away until Allah was merciful and granted you death. No children, no diversions, no fine clothes, no jewels, nothing. That is not a life for you. I knew it the moment I saw you. ‘If anyone can make a Sultan of my son,’ I said, ‘it’s this one here.’

“Now, my dear. You see? In three days we will celebrate Id ad-Adha, a festival in honor of the pilgrims in the Holy City of Mecca. My son has agreed to share the sacrifice with me, a mundane duty for him, but for me—I mean to give you to him on this holy day. Tell me. What do you think? Do you think you can do it?”

“Yes,” Safiye replied with such confidence that she almost forgot to add, as she had been taught one must always add when speaking of things yet to happen, “if Allah wills it.”

She set her mouth in a firm line as she said the words. So might a young recruit do when he is given orders full of danger and responsibility. She knew if she succeeded there would be glory indeed. But if she failed, only death could save her from the ignominy. She thought of Aziza and Belqis, girls who never received the call to go and wait on the master Selim either, though they were fair and pleasant tempered. Once rejected by Murad, their lives now offered no glimmer of a future at all.

The two women continued to walk in the gardens arm in arm, talking and planning, until the shadows grew long and tangled among the swelling rose hips.

Just before they turned to re-enter and join the other harem inmates, Safiye spoke, “Lady, there is one thing I must request before I go to your son.”

“Yes, my dear. What is it? You know you may have anything I can give you, clothes, jewels...”

“You have the means, have you not, by which one can keep from getting a child?”

“Yes. Yes, there are some potions I know of. But—”

“Please, provide me with some before I go to your son.”

“What? What talk is this?” Nur Banu exclaimed, dropping her arm from about Safiye’s waist in her horror. “Are you as perverse as he is, that you do not care for children? What kind of woman are you, who cares so little for her own future that she will throw away any chance to get a son?”

“Lady, forgive me,” Safiye said. “I would heartily love to have a son—and give you a grandson. If Allah is merciful I may yet be granted this blessing. But the first thing to be done is to get Murad away from his water pipe. Who can say how long that may take? Surely I can trust neither Allah nor what poor charms He may have given me to assure victory in the month or two that may pass before I become pregnant. Then, if I become sick or bloated and ugly, I will be beyond any hope of diverting your son, and we may lose him for good. By your leave, lady, give me your remedies that I may use them until victory is assured.”

Nur Banu nodded, slowly at first, for she was a woman who was always loath to credit any mind other than her own with good ideas. But Safiye knew she could not help but see the wisdom in this plan. Safiye would get what she wanted.

***

As they parted within the haremlik, the older woman stood behind and watched the younger go, that tall, graceful frame that seemed to dance as she moved.

Yes
, she congratulated herself.
I have chosen well. Very well.

But a little gnawing voice came right afterwards.
Perhaps too well?

Safiye opened her eyes at midmorning. The harem had spent a late night and she would have enjoyed the luxury of sleeping past noon, but she remembered what day it was. That evening would mark the Great Feast, Id al-Adha.

“For me, it shall be a sort of birth as well,” she murmured to herself. She stirred and found herself covered with rose petals. She remembered how delightfully cool they had felt on her naked skin when they’d first been showered on her, but the warmth of her sleep had wilted them and now her every move bruised their narcotic fragrance into her skin.

Safiye lifted her hands to her eyes to rub the sleep away, but she found her lower arms swathed in white and yellow silk. Now she remembered that she must not use her hands for anything.

The previous evening flooded back to her in vivid detail. Physically helpless, her mind grew active, fed by the night’s dreams. Once again she saw how the lamps of perforated brass swung star-shaped blotches of golden light down on the entire harem. The assembly of women sat packed knee to knee on the divans and on rugs on the floor; the lamps raised a slick of sweat on every curve of skin.

Into their midst, Nur Banu brought a silk square full of old, dried leaves to which she gave the name henna. Safiye had heard this identical word before in Venice, usually hissed behind critical hands when some woman beginning to go gray suddenly appeared with her hair the lurid color of flame. Here among the Turks, she had seen women dip their fingers in a henna pot after their baths to stain the nails and tips the hue of overripe apricots.

Now Nur Banu worked these leaves into a fresh paste moistened with rose water. When it was done, the paste was an unpleasant dark greenish-gray and smelled like a horse stall as well.

Unpleasant though it was, the pot was placed at her knee and Safiye gave her right hand over to Esmikhan Sultan. With the thinnest of sticks, this girl began to paint the paste onto the hand in an intricate design. Excited chatter and the comments and encouragement of the rest of the room barely concealed the fact that over an hour had passed before the artist had completed one hand.

When it was finished, Nur Banu held the hand over a dish of glowing coals. Then the older woman placed a gold coin in the palm and wrapped it with linen strips, finally covering the whole with a silken bag. Then the process began all over again with the left hand.

Safiye liked being the center of all this attention, of course, but her body throbbed with the effort of holding still. Her throat ached with thirst, her stomach with hunger, her bladder with its burden she wasn’t allowed to release. Her head reeled.

Ribald jokes passed among the older women about how men had to assert their dominance and women had to pretend to go along.
Is this active forcing of passivity to teach me this?
Safiye wondered.
No. Alluring as is this safe, enclosing feeling of all these women about me, I will not succumb to it. I have strength enough to go through passivity to even greater power.

“I am not as skilled at this as our Lady Nur Banu is,” Esmikhan apologized. Her hand was soft with plumpness, white, warm, and pressing Safiye’s with the strain of her concentration.

“Nonsense.” Nur Banu watched the work with close scrutiny in spite of her words. “Besides, a girl about to lose her virginity—Allah willing—must count it auspicious to have those who’ve never known a man among her attendants.”

Esmikhan and Fatima Sultan, her younger sister who sat nearby, blushed deeply at their stepmother’s words. They were both close to Safiye’s own age and also both Selim’s daughters, princesses of the royal Ottoman blood. This fact was betrayed by the “khan” suffix on the name of the eldest. Safiye spent much time studying both girls’ plump, happy faces and full red lips that always wore smiles under the yellow light. Since they were Murad’s half-sisters, she might discover some resemblance.