Sofia (26 page)

“Which is your brother?” she asked, surprised at her own breathlessness.

“There.” Esmikhan pointed with the end of the comb. “Standing next to my father. Murad is the one with the brown pheasant’s feathers in the ruby aigrette pinned to his blue-and-gold-striped turban.”

Safiye felt her heart race at the announcement, but the lanky young man had little to recommend him at this distance beyond a certain disinterest and lassitude in his stance. His father, Selim the Sultan’s heir, certainly upstaged him, as did a trio of shepherds who had their hands full trying to control the flock.

“Are the animals bleeding?” Safiye had quite forgotten where her attention ought to be.

“No.”

“Not yet,” Fatima added.

“They are marked for the holy sacrifice with splotches of red on their white wool,” Esmikhan explained.

I see.

There is nothing to fear out there,
Safiye told herself as she leaned back to let Esmikhan anoint her hair with fragrant oil, then comb again.
A few hot, impatient men and dirty sheep.

“Ah, your hair gleams as gold chains in a jeweler’s shop would under the same treatment,” the princess declared.

Meanwhile, other oils mixed with perfumes were applied to Safiye’s skin, along with a cream of henna to check perspiration.

“The pit for the sacrifice is now dug,” Nur Banu announced.

Safiye leaned forward and looked again. She saw Selim, assisted by a shepherd, struggling with the first of the sheep.

“One sheep for each member of the household,” Esmikhan explained. “Male sheep of a certain age.”

“Male sheep? Even for the females here?”

“Yes. Without blemish.”

Safiye forced herself to look at the pheasant’s feathers. It was difficult to imagine that through this unremarkable figure lay the path to everything of which she’d ever dreamed. Well, the unremarkable doors were always the easiest to turn. She remembered Andrea Barbarigo and young Veniero, but neither with regret. They were behind her; in time, so would this Murad be.

Actually Safiye found herself more interested in which sheep might be hers. Or did slaves not warrant one?
Next year at this time I shall certainly have one of the finest, she was convinced.

Now Nur Banu’s personal slaves brought out the garments that she had chosen for her daughter-in-law-to-be. First, of course, came the great shalvar of finest crimson silk and the diaphanous undershirt that had a trimming of lace from faraway Flanders, as delicate as spiders’ webs. The
yelek
, or floor-length jacket, was the color of lilac blossom and worked all over the bodice with threads of a deeper purple and of gold into a pattern of full-blown roses, each with a cluster of three tiny pearls as stamens in the center.

The jacket buttoned to below the hip so the curve in from the bosom and out again could be followed without distraction. Then a girdle of crimson velvet was tied about Safiye’s hips in such a way that the golden fringe of its ends would bounce against her left knee when she walked. The girdle was set with five amethysts the size of almonds. Amethysts, too, were the stones in the earrings Nur Banu fastened in Safiye’s ears and let cascade down to her shoulders. But there was no such coordination in the other jewelry she put on, all of which was lent for the occasion by all the members of the harem, all deeply concerned in the evening’s outcome.

Because it was not hers to keep, Safiye soon lost interest in examining each piece. She leaned over the weight at her neck to look into the yard once more.

“Our master Selim strokes the sheep’s throat, oh, so gently,” she said. “He is speaking, too. What does he say to it?”

“He offers a prayer,” Esmikhan’s voice came from where she was struggling with a clasp behind her. “As it says in the Koran: ‘Mention Allah’s Name over them.’

Bracelets of every description were forced up to the elbow so there was hardly room for them to jangle against one another on either forearm. Necklaces, rings, and anklets, too, were added until Safiye exclaimed, “Please! I can hardly move.”

Nur Banu conceded after a moment’s thought and, while the older woman gave her next orders, Safiye escaped to the grille once more. This time she gasped in horror. Five sheep lay twitching in death and the sixth was jerking its life’s blood into the pit over the white of entrails.

“Why—why he is killing them!”

“Of course,” Esmikhan replied. “You have never eaten meat before?”

“How quickly he draws the knife!” Nur Banu leaned over Safiye’s shoulder to catch a glimpse. “The beasts hardly struggle.”

Safiye’s hair was sprinkled with gold dust.
Like the baker dredges his pastries with sugar.
But it was a desperate thought. The first thing that had come to her mind was the roast and its salt.

“The gold is redundant,” Esmikhan chatted happily.

Nur Banu kept the phial of gold dust carefully in her own possession and spoke with earnest precaution. “Nonetheless—”

The hair was formed into four thick plaits, but given enough freedom at the ends to show the willfulness of its curl.

“My son, Allah shield him, never looked more handsome.” Nur Banu said with pride looking out the window yet again.

Safiye looked and saw only how a shepherd thrust a tube up a dead sheep’s leg.

“A few good puffs of air and the retainer can remove the fleece all at once,” Nur Banu said.

Safiye saw nothing but white light and clung to the grille to keep her feet.

A small red cap studded with pearls served as an anchor for the great lengths of fine, transparent veil. Red embroidered calfskin slippers went upon her feet. Then finally her face was painted: her eyes into almonds, her brows into “Frankish bows,” her cheeks into peonies, and her mouth into a full-blown rose which, with its natural pearly teeth, rivaled the glory of those worked into the yelek.

“The meat is divided, as the holy Koran says: ‘when their flanks collapse...feed the beggar and the suppliant.’ How the poor praise the generosity of our master!

“But come,” Nur Banu said, breaking her own report. “Come, girls. The cook is taking his portion into the kitchen right now. There’s not a moment to lose!”

Now the harem scurried out of the bath and into the main part of the house, for there was hardly time for a proper evening prayer before the door to Murad’s apartment would be opened.

Away from the grille, and shown her own reflection, Safiye’s courage returned. The beauty that stared back at her from the mirror could not be crushed by any slavery, to fashion or otherwise. And it was clearly destined for only the greatest of things.

That evening at prayers, Safiye looked upon these foreign prostrations in much the same light as she looked upon the Turkish dances and songs she had learned. Though there was haste in the movements that evening and Safiye was weighted down with many ornaments, still she managed to include between the lines of Arabic a little prayer to Saint Catherine that her aunt had taught her. Just such a prayer would have been uttered on her wedding day, if she had married that lowly Corfiot.
Rather too much favor with heaven, she thought, than too little.

In the confusion that followed as the menial slaves hurriedly rolled up the prayer rugs, Nur Banu called Safiye to her. Surveying her handiwork at arm’s length, she nodded with satisfaction.

“If my son will not have you,” she said, “may he never become Sultan at all—as Allah wills.”

Then she kissed Safiye fondly on both cheeks and, as she did, she pressed a pair of small silver cases into her hand. Safiye opened and examined one after the other. Each contained perhaps two dozen objects the shape and size of fingers—black in one case, yellow in the other—that released a medicinal smell.

“What are they?”

Nur Banu replied with the word
farazikh
, which Safiye had never heard and wouldn’t have known in Italian either, had someone been around to give it to her. “Pessary” was not in the vocabulary of a convent girl.

“No, do not touch them,” Nur Banu warned, and Safiye obediently withdrew her curious fingers. “Body heat will make them melt. You are to place them inside yourself, the yellow one before the act, the black ones after.”

“What are they made of?”

Nur Banu raised the perfect crescents of her brows so her eyes could pierce deeper. Did this girl plan to make farazikh on her own? The idea was so startling—so unthinkable—that the older woman told her anyway.

“The yellow is the pulp taken from between the pips of a pomegranate mixed with alum, rue, myrrh, hellebore, and ox-gall, kneaded with the tail-fat of a sheep so it will melt. The black is colocynth pulp, bryony, sulfur, and cabbage seed in a base of tar.”

“Are these formulas of which the Quince approves?”

Nur Banu’s brows went higher still. “Yes,” she snapped.

Safiye laughed lightly, realizing she had, for the moment, pressed for too much control of her own enslaved body. “Then I know they’ll work.”

The lightness, the girlishness in her voice served as an apology, and the older woman’s brows settled down to their usual arcs.

“May you remain childless many blissful nights.”

The air was different in the
mabein
, that strange half-world between the world of men and that of women. It seemed darker, heavier. The dust of disuse a day of airing had been unable to remove lingered in this room of the young Murad, for he rarely cared to make contact with the world of shadows that stood always at his back while he went about in the male, sunshiny world of everyday. Here in this space between, opposites met. Things as unlike as oil and vinegar mingled either, like that dressing, quickly and bitterly to separate or, like the opposites of flame and powder, to mix and explode into one.

Nur Banu had time to enter and arrange things to her liking before her son came. This she did with the precision and display of a man of the theater. Lamps were lit and set in all the niches. Bowls and trays of nuts and sweets were loaded on a low table until it groaned. The cushions on the divan were plumped up in four places, one for Nur Banu, two, close together, for Esmikhan and Fatima, the sisters, who would also join in this party, and the fourth for the young prince himself.

A row of beautiful slaves, Aziza and Belqis still nursing hopes among them, was lined up against one wall, arms crossed upon their breasts, heads bowed, to await their mistress’ further orders. But as for the actual performance, for which the Prince’s arrival in the room would be the cue, Safiye could not be a witness to that. As soon as the excited whisper ran, “He comes! He comes!” the door to the harem was quietly but hurriedly shut, and Safiye had to remain on the women’s side of it.

Of the initiatory salaams and embraces, Safiye heard nothing at all. The first thing she did hear was a voice rather thin and weak for a man’s (but that might only be from tedium, she thought) saying, “Dear Mother, send your silly girls away.”

Now the harem door opened and the row of girls filed in. Upon their faces Safiye read all she could of what had transpired. Upon those who had cherished hopes, in spite of every previous reason to abandon them, the disappointment was as clear as if seen through glass, and threatened to spill immediately into tears. The others could greet Safiye with smiles and murmurs of “Allah bless
you
” —for, so far, all was going according to Nur Banu’s script.

Now they must be seated, now Nur Banu must offer him the dainties on the table. The meat of the sacrifice must be brought in. Murad must eat of that, of the accompanying rice, pulse, and yogurt with cucumber. He must finish with a nibble on a favorite pastry out of politeness. A sherbet. Then rose water and incense must be offered for cleansing. And then, finally, his mother must suggest the water pipes...

Safiye counted the entrances of the serving eunuchs and ran the scenario over and over in her mind so many times that her heart began to race with the idea that something must have gone amiss. But to actually play a scene takes much more time than to rehearse it in one’s mind and Murad really had found but brief diversion in anything up to the mention of pipe.

The three sharp claps came soon enough. Safiye took the pipe from Aziza who stood behind her—the stem and mouthpiece lightly in her right hand, the small silver tray in her left as she had been carefully taught. Then Aziza opened the door for her and she stepped into the close and dusty air of the mabein alone.

Slow, measured steps had been rehearsed and came naturally as she felt, not only the burden of the pipe, but that of four pairs of eyes upon her.

“Four,” she told herself. “I know it is four and he is not just looking at the pipe,” though she did not dare to raise her eyes to confirm this feeling.

She brought the pipe down to the smoker’s level and carefully worked the mouthpiece through her fingers toward him, all without so much as a glance to affirm that it was indeed the man in the room that she approached. A hand of white, skeletal fingers relieved her of that lightest part of her burden and assured her that so far she had done well. But as she set the main body of the pipe down upon its little tray, Nur Banu spoke to her.

“O my fair one, I shall have a pipe, too.” That was a cue that things were not progressing as rapidly as hoped; it was necessary to draw the meeting out.

Now Safiye found her performance interminable. She returned for the second pipe and, offering it to her mistress, felt Nur Banu killed the time all too obviously before she took the mouthpiece in her hand and Safiye could set it down on the table. Then she had to return to the harem—slowly, slowly—get the brass brazier from Aziza, return, and, kneeling before each smoker, place a glowing coal in each one’s bowl with a little pair of tongs. She paused there on her knees until assured that each pipe bubbled well. The smokers drew and the sweet aroma filled the room. Then, and only then, could Safiye retreat to the corner where, the brazier nursed beside her feet, she stood with each hand upon its opposite shoulder, head slightly bowed, waiting for a further order.

The nervous energy created by being the center of attention now slowly drained from her. It had made her want to skip in with the pipes and say aloud, “Here you are, you drugged excuse for a man. But wouldn’t you really rather have me instead?” just to get it over with. Glad she had not succumbed to this temptation, Safiye could now afford to be aware of other things besides her every knotted muscle, and she began to follow the conversation taking place there in the room with her. It was no more than pleasantries and it was immediately clear that Nur Banu was in a rising panic—or, at least as close to panic as such a controlled woman would ever allow herself to come.