Sofia (34 page)

The second occupant disquieted me more. He wore the plain brimless woolen cap of a mendicant holy man and rags that left his hairy arms bare. He did seem a little too-well fleshed for the role, but what disconcerted me most was the way he looked at me—as if he recognized me, and I should recognize him in return. Mystics always unnerved me. They seemed the same among Muslims as among Christians: their every look and stance threatened my soul with similar entrapment.

I had enough to worry about at that moment with the entrapment of my body. I was almost glad when the brigands commanded me and my burden out of their cramped common room. I trudged through the low doorway where they pointed me and into one of the back rooms. Even though it was away from the fire and populated already by half a dozen goats, it was as close to escape as I could hope for under the circumstances.

Safiye was likewise ordered into the room with us, but she was not so ready to make it her home. Her first priority toward comfort was to stretch all the kinks of the ride out of her long limbs. She did so with the grace and movements of a dancer at a feast, but restlessly.

Esmikhan could not have stood if she had to. One particularly inquisitive nanny made my charge whimper with fear by coming up for a trial nibble of lady’s veils. Esmikhan had only seen goats roasted whole and docile on beds of saffron rice before, and the sharp odor of their life was enough to send her into shivers.

I shooed the creature off and then did my best to make my lady comfortable on a heap of dried grass—which is what I suppose the goats thought she was in my arms. Fortunately, my lady was exhausted enough that once she’d gotten used to the burn of goat in her nostrils, she fell sound asleep within moments. I gently opened her wrapper and veils somewhat and was pleased to find that they had kept her other garments from getting too damp to sleep in.

Sounds of someone entering the room made me hastily draw the veils again, but it was only the brigand’s wife bearing soup—green and fragrant with mint—flat bread, and cheese. She returned moments later with a pair of musty but warm blankets, and only sniffed skeptically when I thanked her as if she wanted to say, “Yes, well, you can thank me if we come out of this alive.”

I remarked to myself that in spite of the haul of riches her menfolk had brought home with them, the labor of that single peasant woman had provided us with the things that were most important: this good goat cheese, the bread, the rough woven blankets, and kilims brightly dyed with red madder.

“At least it does not appear that they mean to let us starve to death.”

I meant my tone to deliver a comment on Safiye’s nonchalance. The brigand’s wife wasn’t even out of the room before Baffo’s daughter sat down on the floor and began to eat with great appetite.

“Of course not,” Safiye said between thick bites of bread. “What good are dead hostages?”

“We’re to be held as hostages then? For what?”

“Ransom. And revenge.” Safiye’s appetite for those words was obviously no less than for the soup and cheese.

The quick ride out of Murad’s earshot was all that Safiye needed, so it seemed, to take stock of the new situation and to plot her future accordingly. Not too much further on, she had gotten the brigand leader to ungag her, then untie her, and then her probing into the situation began in earnest.

“Surely you noticed Crazy Orhan” (by this familiarity she meant our captor) “is missing his right eye.”

As a matter of fact, I had not noticed this detail during the heat of our capture. Later examination showed me that his face served to strike terror rather than compassion in the observer. The black, burned-out socket was camouflaged to the casual glance by a sagging lid and the shadow of simian brows. Black, too, were his boar-bristle beard, mustachios that could be knotted thrice behind his neck, and a rudely shaved forehead from which the hair appeared to have been torn out in clumps. A saggy felt cap and a rag of red turban too small for a bestial breadth of face completed the picture.

“You know how he lost it?” Safiye asked.

I did not.

“Your Sokolli Pasha did it. With a red-hot iron.”

I gave an expression of disbelief.

“Yes, it’s true. Oh, years ago, of course. You wouldn’t expect a pasha to dirty his hands with such business. But years ago, when he was a janissary in his first service. The man who was Grand Vizier then, Ibrahim Pasha, under the shadow of the Sultan Suleiman’s good graces, began to confiscate the holdings of honest, faithful Turks such as Orhan for his own purposes. A certain dervish came preaching to the men to stand up for their age-old rights, which they finally had no choice but to do.”

I shivered a little at the thought of that dervish in the next room with double meaning in his eyes.

“Well, they were no match for Ibrahim and his Christian-boy janissaries. Those who were not slaughtered on the battlefield were blinded or incapacitated in other brutal ways so they would not rise again.”

“I’m sure Sokolli Pasha was only fulfilling his duty,” I said in defense.

“Yes. The duty of a lackey to fulfill the wishes of a greedy master.”

“Still Orhan is missing only one eye, not both.”

“It seems the mercy of Allah called Sokolli away for a moment in the midst of his deed. When he returned, Orhan, in all his unspeakable pain, had managed to escape by hiding among the dead, by crawling over thorns and stones with the fluid of his eye running down his face all the while. But of course he never got his land back, so one eye is little consolation.”

“I am sure Sokolli Pasha did only what was necessary,” I found myself coming to my master’s defense again. “He is a good man. His pious foundations exist from one end of the empire to the other.”

“Yes. And who lines up for bread at those places? Men his hand blinded or lamed so they cannot dig for their own bread. Women his hand made widows. Children—not heathen children, but the children of Turks—children his hand left fatherless and without inheritance.”

I looked uneasily over at Esmikhan and was glad to find her still asleep. I did not want her hearing this.

“Do not worry for Esmikhan,” Safiye said, watching my eyes. “She has been saved from a much worse fate. Now she will never have to marry that pasha.”

“Surely you can’t believe Orhan will succeed in his plans for us.”

“Why should he not?”

“He is one man. One half-blind man with a handful of followers against an empire. You cannot believe, Ibrahim Pasha or no Ibrahim Pasha, that Sultan Suleiman—he the West calls Magnificent—will let this happen to his own granddaughter in his own backyard. And what about your precious Murad, eh?”

Safiye shrugged the name off as if it were only water. “Orhan has the hand of Allah behind him in the secrets of these mountain passes.”

“And in the inspiration of mad dervishes. The time for such fanatic leadership is passed, here in Islam as in our native Italy where Savonarola met his heretic’s doom in our father’s time.”

“Veniero, it is not like you to be such a cold realist. You were always full of such dreamy idealism before. You were going to save me from the Turkish pirates. You were going to climb walls to save me.” She fluttered her eyelids at me and dropped into a sultry Italian.

I refused to let such gestures have their desired effect. I spat in anger. “Thanks to you, I have since had done to me something that cured me of such idealism.”

“Now, now, are we bitter?”

“By God, I have a right to be. And you, Baffo’s daughter. Just look at you. One moment you want to traipse halfway across Anatolia for a silly necklace to entice one man, the next you are willing to throw your lot with a total stranger. By God, you are like a pat of butter; you pick up the taste and smell of whatever garlicky, oniony man handles you.”

Safiye tossed her hair—in the half-light it did have the rich color butter gets in spring—as if I’d given her a compliment. “It will not do to underestimate the power of Crazy Orhan,” she said simply. “He is a man seethed in a lust for vengeance these twenty years. And we are his captives. Murad is
farsakh
upon
farsakh’s
ride from here.”

“Yes,” I said, and the weight of this knowledge pried me up from the food and led me to Esmikhan’s side. Something fearful in my lady’s dreams made her call out and thrash away her veils as if at invisible demons.

“The boy has gone where? You let him go all the way to Constantinople on his own—with this kidnapping on his head, by Allah!”

“He is not a boy any longer, woman. He is a man.” Crazy Orhan tried to appease his wife’s wrath, and he quoted to her a familiar proverb, “‘If you do not give a man a man’s business, he will take it for himself.’ He asked to be the one to take our demands to Sokolli—may Allah take both of his eyes—and to the Sultan.”

“They will kill him as soon as they look at him!” The woman wrung her hands.

“I gave him some of the trappings off the litter, and if that’s not enough I should hope he has sense to steal until he gets all he needs to buy himself an envoy into the Porte. If he hasn’t the sense to take such simple precautions, well, he’s no son of mine, and I blame his manhood—if you can call it that—all on your womanish upbringing.”

“Oh, and I looked to this horrible risk of yours to at least bring the boy a bride. Until now, your blood’s been too hot with revenge to see to that simple father’s duty toward his son. ‘No girl but one worthy of the noble blood in his veins,’ you said. Very well. And I prayed it would slake your awful thirst for Sokolli’s blood at last, after all these years, that we might have some peace and live like normal mortals for a change. Snatch Sokolli’s bride from under his nose. Defile that Christian fiend’s honor and the girl at once and, incidentally, give your son the granddaughter of the Sultan to wife. After all, that is no less than he deserves. But now I see, I see. You are determined to go to your grave without progeny and I must resign myself to Allah’s will.”

In such shrewish words, Safiye first learned the brigand’s designs for Esmikhan. But she never bothered to tell us, who clung in the back as to the safety of our native harem, fighting off goats, fleas, and bedbugs alike. Safiye could not remain confined like that. She had to be out and about and our captors gave her quite free rein for they had no fear that she could possibly escape the fastness of their hideout. Indeed, escape was, at present, the last thing on her mind. This was not because she feared the wilds about us, but because she relished too much the wilds in the midst of which we found ourselves.

The head brigand saw Safiye’s almond eyes watching this exchange between him and his wife, and it threw him into a rage. Only the three of them were in the room. There was no threat to the wife’s pride in a young captive girl, but there was to the brigand’s.

“I, Crazy Orhan, bring the rulers of this world to their knees!” he cried, punctuating his words by hurling the closest thing to hand—a wooden truncheon—in his wife’s direction. It fell harmlessly but with a greatly satisfying crash among her pots and milking pails. “Can I not have some respect in my own home?”

The wife set about to clean up the mess as if after the tantrum of a young child. Her silence was hardly one of deep impression.

Safiye, however, ventured into that silence with as much awe and respect as any words could bring forth. “Oh, my master. Is it true that Allah has favored you with but a single son in which you place all your hopes for the future? By my life, such a great man as yourself should not rest so content.

“If one wife cannot give his heart’s desire to him, what prevents him from taking another?”

The wife laughed scornfully, partly at Safiye’s accent, which sounded silly and pretentious on her ears, and partly at the notion that any other woman in the world would be such a fool as to let herself fall into the drudgery that was the life of brigand’s wife.

Orhan was rendered more thoughtful. The word “master” from those carefully pouting lips soothed his rage in a way no other sound ever had, and her courtly tones put in his mind a higher, more worthy life than that to which fate had condemned him. He tried to revive his anger and stormed out of the hut, feigning the emotion. But the way he rubbed his burned-out eyelid—a tender spot on his soul, if no longer on his body—destroyed the camouflage.

“Yes, get outside and cool off,” the wife snorted in contempt.

Crazy Orhan turned back to the room now in a high state of agitation that, had he not been given his nickname for other reasons, would have given it to him then. Yet another day had gone by with no word from his son, yet another day with the nervous sensation of the Sultan’s women beneath his roof, and his wife would treat these things like child’s play.

“Another word from you,” he said dangerously, “and I will have your shrewish gizzard.” The woman opened her mouth and he stopped her. “No. I don’t even want to hear your whining apologies.”

His wife smiled knowingly and pretended to be afraid until her man’s back was gone from the room. Then she turned her violence onto Safiye instead. “Look at those eyes,” she sneered. “A slut’s eyes, squandering what the labor of honest women has bought for her. Whore! I see those eyes, like dice, risking all on a single roll. Whore, I see.”

Safiye could have escaped to the back room, but she did not. She sat taking the abuse calmly, almost with delight, for its vicarious effect on the brigand, just outside the door, was not lost on her. She had asked for and received, however grudgingly, the loan of the woman’s broken wood comb to substitute for her jewel-studded one that had gone with the brigand’s son to Constantinople. She made certain the brigand was in the hut when she cleaned its teeth of the black and gray strands as if of years of accumulated dust. Then she sat, for hours it seemed, combing out her yards of gold. She combed with the thoughtlessness that in reality bespeaks a deep self-absorption. Such an absorption only workers of spells lapse into over their amulets and piles of golden, fruitful grain in the back recesses of the marketplace.

“Here,” the wife said, reaching the end of all patience. “Here, girl. You grow pink-cheeked and fair on the toil and sweat of my hands. Why don’t you make yourself useful for a change instead of cluttering my kitchen with your demon-colored hair?” And she thrust a spindle at her.