The Aviary Gate (22 page)

‘Will they take Mihal, too?' Safiye asked, observing her brother dispassionately.

‘Mihal? What good would he be? A boy must have either brains or brawn to serve the Sultan.' Her father's voice was sour. ‘And besides, they would never take an only son.'

Standing at the front of the ragged little group of villagers who had gathered to see the caravan leave, Safiye observed the five boys, aged between seven and ten, who had been selected by the tribute-takers.

They wore garlands crudely woven from wild flowers and grasses on their heads. Their families seemed to be rejoicing rather than grieving at this sudden turn in their fortunes. As the caravan moved off some of the young men from the village ran alongside the horses, whooping and banging drums. Others scrambled on to the overhanging branches of the trees, and threw petals before the horses' feet. In a cloud of gunpowder, the tribute-takers let off their muskets in a farewell salute.

Throughout all this the boys stared back impassively at the knot of villagers. Already, it seemed to Safiye, they looked taller and somehow older, possessed of an instinctive knowledge that these first few jingling steps down along the valley pathway had in fact taken them across a far greater divide, wider and deeper than any mountain crevasse, which had already separated them for ever from their families, and was never again to be breached.

She pulled at her father's sleeve. ‘If they won't take Mihal, let them take me.'

‘You?' he laughed. ‘You are just a girl. Why would they take you?'

An old man who had been standing behind them wiped his cheek, but his eyes were bright. ‘They are
kul
– the slaves of the Sultan, now.'

‘But what slaves!' others put in. ‘Our sons will rule the Sultan's lands. They will become soldiers and janissaries …'

‘They will be pashas …!'

‘My grandson will be the next Grand Vizier!'

Talking amongst themselves the villagers made their way back into their houses. Only Safiye stayed staring after the caravan, the boys no more than dots now on the mountain path below them. The silver stirrups of the horsemen flashed in the sun.

‘Don't worry, my maid: when little girls become slaves of the Sultan, it is quite another thing,' her father laughed, pinching her cheek. ‘We'll find you a good husband soon enough – right here.'

A husband! At the very word something sharp and hard lodged in Safiye's breast like a stone.

‘So they've found you a husband, sister, have you heard?'

Mihal lay beside her on the mattress they shared, the greasy felt coverlet pulled up round his bony shoulders.

‘Who?'

‘Todor.'

‘Todor, our father's friend?'

‘He has offered twenty sheep for you.'

Safiye did not doubt Mihal. Although they had never been close, a certain uneasy alliance had always existed between them. Mihal, who with his withered leg would never be a huntsman or a
banditto
like the other clansmen of the Dukagjin mountains, none the less had an ability, which she admired very much: the ability to watch and listen, to move about almost unseen in the village and the surrounding pastures. He did not seem to resent his sister's pre-eminence in their father's affections; she, in turn, often found his information useful.

Through a crack in the wall Safiye could just make out the silhouettes of the village houses, bathed in silent moonlight. In the mountains a wolf bayed at the stars. After a while she said, ‘But Todor is old.' Her voice, in her own ears, sounded very small.

‘But he can still do it.' Mihal sniggered, thrusting his hips up against the back of her thighs. ‘He'll mount you like an old bull.'

Safiye dug her elbow as hard as she could into her brother's bony rib cage. ‘Get off me. You're disgusting.'

‘Not half as disgusting as Todor.' Mihal sniggered again, louder this time, and a piece of snot flew out of one of his nostrils. He wiped it away with a corner of the thin coverlet. ‘I've heard him boasting. A young wife always gets the old ones going again.' Safiye could smell Mihal's breath, rank against her neck. If a boy smelt this bad, how much worse would be the smell of an old man?

‘Get away from me!' She wriggled away from him, wrenching as much of the coverlet as she could with her. Then, trying not to sound hopeful. ‘Anyway, I know you're making it up.' But she knew he was not. There was one thing about Mihal that could be relied on: he never lied. He did not have to.

‘And you won't be able to go to the mountains any more, because he won't let you.'

At first Safiye did not reply. A feeling of such dread gripped her throat she could hardly breathe. ‘Our father would stop him ever doing that …'

‘You think so?' Mihal paused again, his last and most poisoned barb poised for the kill. ‘Why, you fool, can't you see? It's all his idea
in the first place. You can't go on being his little toy for ever, you know.'

At first her father did not believe that she would dare to disobey him. Later, he beat her, and when that did no good he locked her in the sheep corral. For six days they brought her no food, only water to drink, until she was so hungry she was reduced to scraping moss and lichen from the stones, sucking the flakes from beneath her blackened fingernails. The hut was too low for her to stand up in, and the smell of her own filth made her retch, but still she would not relent. At first, she was surprised at her own strength of mind. But after a few days she realised that if you wanted something badly enough, it was not all that hard.

‘I would rather die,' she shouted at them when they came to talk to her, ‘than be sold like a sheep to that old man.'

When the hunger visions came she thought she saw her mother's grandmother. Sometimes she was dressed like a Venetian lady with pearls at her throat; at other times she was in blue, like the painting of the Madonna in the church at Scutari, which her mother had once told her about. Almost always she was riding a horse, her silver stirrups flashing in the sun.

When they brought her out on the seventh day they had to carry her into the house. It was Mihal, of course, who told her what had been decided. ‘If you won't be married,' he shrugged, ‘you'll have to be sold.'

It was then that she knew she had won.

Two weeks later Safiye was sold to Esther Nasi, the Jewess of Scutari. Esther conducted her business from her own house, an elegant mansion built in the Ottoman style, which looked out on one side over the lake and on the other towards the ancient Venetian fortress. Rumoured to have once been a slave herself, the concubine of a rich provincial governor from the Balkans, Esther retained, despite her great size, the face and haughty demeanour of a Byzantine princess.

When Safiye was brought to her she showed no surprise. It was not unusual for families to sell a pretty daughter into slavery, hoping to secure for her a life of luxury in the protective confines of some rich man's harem. Sometimes, indeed, it was the girls themselves who
desired it, taking their fate into their own hands. But with this group it was hard to tell.

‘What have you brought her to me for? She's skin and bones.' The Jewess pinched Safiye's arm just below her shoulder and then the inside flesh of her upper thigh. ‘What have you been doing to the child? She looks half starved.'

‘She'll soon fatten.' The father, whose facial tattoos identified him immediately as a mountain dweller, spoke awkwardly, shuffling his feet. Esther Nasi saw the girl glance towards him, her face inscrutable, and then quickly back again.

‘To be frank, I'm not so sure …'

Sunlight caught the planes and sharp angles of the girl's half-starved face. She had something, Esther thought, there was no doubt of it. Unlike so many of the peasant girls who came to the Scutari establishment, she did not shrink or cringe away from Esther's gaze, but held her head up, examining with a level gaze the rich carpets, the milky green and blue tiles from Iznik, the marble floors and carved casements. All the same, Esther reminded herself, it was the flesh that counted. The girl's skin was already burnt – ruined, very probably – by exposure to the mountain sun. How tiresome it all was: Esther sighed, and rolled her kohl-darkened eyes so that the whites showed very white. Perhaps she was getting too old to be running a business.

‘All right, then. Let me look at her, but be quick, I haven't got all day.'

With her strong old woman's fingers she grasped Safiye's shoulder, turning her arm out, and running an expert thumb along the tender inside skin. Where the sun had not burnt her, it was quite white and fine-grained; so were the broad lids of her eyes. The space between her lids and brow bones, Esther noticed, was high and beautifully moulded. She slipped her finger quickly inside the girl's mouth, counting her teeth, inspecting their whiteness. Her fingers, Safiye would always remember, tasted sweet, like powdered sugar.

‘Does she snore? Have bad breath? Has she ever been with a man?' She might have been talking about a farm animal. ‘A brother, uncle? You, her father?'

‘No Signora.'

‘You'd be surprised how often it happens,' Esther sniffed. ‘Well, I
can check that soon enough. And be assured I always do. There is a market in second-hand goods, but not with me.'

She clapped her hands together and a king's ransom of golden bangles, thin as paper, cascaded down her wrists.

‘Walk!' she commanded.

Safiye walked slowly over to the window and back again.

‘Here, put these on.' Esther handed the girl a pair of pattens, four inches high, the wood inlaid with ivory flowers. ‘Let's see if you can walk in these.'

Safiye walked again, less certainly this time, and teetering with the unexpected height. The wooden heels clacked loudly on the floor.

‘No good.' Esther clicked her tongue against her teeth. ‘No good at all – thin
and
clumsy,' she added plaintively. ‘Why do you come here, wasting my time?'

The three men turned to go, but the girl did not follow them. Instead, she remained standing calmly in front of Esther Nasi.

‘I can sing and I can speak the Venetian language.' It was the first time that she had spoken in front of Esther. ‘My mother taught me.'

Esther's black eyebrows, painted together, Ottoman style, in a single black line, shot up quizzically. ‘Is that so?'

Safiye handed the little pattens back. ‘And I can soon learn to walk in these.'

For a moment Esther did not say anything. Then her eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘Sing something for me then.'

So Safiye sang one of the lullabies that her mother had taught her. Her voice was not strong, but it was low and pure: a voice which, once heard, was never to be forgotten, and which, although she could not then know it, was to change her life for ever.

In the early days of her business there were those who said that Esther Nasi's establishment was too far from the great slave trading centres of Constantinople and Alexandria to be feasible. But with her woman's instincts and her sharp business head, Esther had always known what she was about, and her establishment on the lakeside in Scutari quickly become famous as a halfway house. Traders not wishing to make the long and arduous sea journey all the way to Constantinople brought her the finest of their crop, for which she always paid generously, knowing that by the time she had finished
with them, these raw mountain girls, these ignorant fishermen's daughters, would fetch more than fifty times their price in
bedestens
throughout the Ottoman empire. Soon, some of the shrewder traders from the capital, those who specialised in supplying high-quality slaves and concubines to imperial harems, found it more than worth their while to make the journey to Scutari once or twice a year, where they could pick up Esther's exquisite handiwork for less than half the price they would pay in Constantinople.

Esther Nasi kept Safiye with her for a year. About a dozen other girls aged between six and thirteen – whom Esther both bought and sold, as she had done for several decades now, through a succession of dealers who plied their trade along the scented and pine-fringed shores of the Adriatic Sea – came and went during that time.

Many of the girls were Albanians, like Safiye herself, or from other parts of the Balkan interior, brought down from the mountains to be sold by their own parents in the hope of a better life for their daughters; others were captives, taken by Uskok and Ottoman corsairs in raids along the coast, or in attacks against unprotected ships sailing on the Adriatic Sea. There were two Greeks, a Serb, two little sisters from Venice, no more than eight years old, and one poor Circassian girl; no one seemed quite sure how she had come there, far, far from home.

As for Safiye, she watched and she waited. She did not mix with the other girls, who regarded her as aloof. Instead, she concentrated on what Esther Nasi could teach her. It was from Esther that she learnt not only how to refine her singing voice, but also to accompany herself on the lute. She learnt how to walk, how to eat, how to enter and leave a room, how to embroider and sew. She learnt something of the refined manners and etiquette of the Ottoman court: how to pour coffee and sherbet, how to stand for hours behind her mistress, hands clasped demurely at her back.

On the special milk diet that Esther devised for her, and deprived now of the physical exercise she had always been used to, her skinny twelve-year-old body soon filled out. Her breasts, which had been no bigger than unripened figs, swelled. For six months she was forbidden to go outside and, with the help of Esther's preparations, the skin of her face and hands became as white and smooth as a child's; her arms and cheeks plump and pink.

A few months after Safiye was taken into Esther Nasi's establishment, a commotion in the courtyard announced the arrival of a trader. Half an hour later, Esther herself came to the girls' quarters.