The Sultan's Daughter (15 page)

Safiye prodded yet more carefully, rising on an elbow and reaching a hand to narrow the space between them again. “I...I suppose she has a fawn in a thicket nearby. She will return to it...”

This seemed precisely the wrong thing to say. Murad sank into a crouch on the littered forest floor as if her words were arrows. The prince hugged himself into a ball, nursing the wound she couldn’t see. In his gold and rusty colors, he seemed a premature autumn there.

On hands and knees Safiye crawled across the verdant summer floor towards him. The fallen fruits and twigs concealed by grass and infant trees were harsher on her knees than they had been on her buttocks, and she was shaking with the pain of it by the time she reached him. Pain, and a good deal of distress. Still, she pressed through the tightness, like the moment of lost virginity, in order to lay a questioning hand upon the brown and yellow summer silk of her lover’s shoulder.

The prince shuddered, as from a hurt rather than a comfort. He was weeping.

Safiye was taken aback. Murad had railed, whined, even struck her before. But he had never, never cried. She hadn’t known he could cry. She herself had cried but once since the Turks had captured her, and then only in secret. A man in tears turned her stomach with disgust. And this man...

Safiye fought down her nausea. Much as she wanted to slap him, shrew him into finding his lost manhood, shame him forever for such tears, she could not. Perhaps it was the dead horse, the living doe. Perhaps it went back even so far as Niobe, solid rock, weeping for eternity. Safiye could only crouch and stare with awe, and when that grew awkward she had no other choice but to crawl around to a different angle and take the shuddering ball of silk, brocade, and tender, tender flesh into her arms.

The violence with which Murad returned the embrace frightened her, but she couldn’t flinch. Nor would she confess, even to herself, that she was daunted. Soon the fabric on her shoulder had turned hot and wet, like a poultice.

“So easy to take life “Murad said eventually, when he thought his voice would hold. But again control failed him as he continued, “So easy. And yet, so hard to give it.”

A cuckoo called, its mate responded, and in the silence between, the other birds they cuckolded. Safiye could feel her lover’s heartbeat like an inflammation in her own breast.

She said nothing, but waited until, in a few minutes, Murad began again. “Forgive me. Say you forgive me, my love.”

“Forgive you? Whatever for?”

“Forgive me that you are fated to a man who can never give you children.”

“No children?” Safiye exclaimed gently. “But that is Allah’s will, not yours, my own sweet love.”

“It is my fault. I know it. He punishes me because I fretted away time with the opium, and created worlds for myself that He did not create. That is blasphemy. I took opium and let it steal Allah-created desire from me. Most men blame their women for their childlessness, but most men are fools. And most men are not blessed with such a faultless creature as yourself. I have grieved much over this. Others may blame you, but I do not.”

“Your mother...” She didn’t know how to finish the phrase herself.

“Yes, I know my mother made your days in the harem a hell because she would have a grandson in her old age. But rest assured that I do not love you one whit less. I know it is not your fault. I saw this clearly today. Today, when I thought I’d struck you—Allah forbid! When I pulled up the wrapper, thinking to find your death-shriveled form. When I pulled my arrow out of the mare’s warm, dark insides, I brought forth only blood and death. What else do I do to you but that? What else have I only just done? In my anger against Heaven and myself? Served you no better than the poor, poor horse.”

“My love,” Safiye said with a thrill in her breast that was only contained by pressing Murad’s head to it. “Be at ease, my cool summer rain. For surely, if there is guilt here, we share it, as we share everything.”

They loved again, slower, deliberately this time, sharing guilt as much as they shared delight.

Near sunset, Safiye relinquished her lover’s arms for her eunuch’s. Ghazanfer had recovered her veils and stood with them placidly draped over his arm. The khadim had kept his faithful watch, even there in the woods, preserving the lovers’ privacy inviolate.

And it wasn’t until that moment, until she met his green eyes as he laid the ridge of silk to ride chafing over her nose, that she remembered. She remembered what she had forgotten in the midst of the horse’s death. She remembered she ought to have pressed her advantage and gained the legality of marriage.

And she remembered what lay melted in ornate silver cases, back in the overheated red velvet of her sedan.

“Good morning, madam.”

The Quince sailed into Esmikhan Sultan’s harem, trailing Bosphorus damp and cold after her. Winter lingered in earnest in the capital.

I prodded again: “This is a pleasant surprise.”

I really didn’t look for an answer. I had only ever had one good conversation with the midwife—the day she assured me no power on earth could restore my lost manhood. Otherwise, she had always been one of those women—the majority—for whom khuddam were just one more item of harem furniture. Like cushions and divans we were, there to make life comfortable, but never expected to intrude upon her business with conversation.

The Quince had presided closely over my lady’s health for over two years. I was familiar with the midwife’s quirks, as she must have been with ours, that my lady and I did not hold to the usual formalities between eunuch and mistress.

My lady’s little slave girl took the midwife’s veils and wraps as I’d taught her and hung them on pegs to dry. But even before her pinched, sour face was revealed, I could tell our guest’s manner was even more brusque and agitated than usual.

So I spoke to set her at ease. “We didn’t hope to have you back with us in Constantinople for many months more.” Though, if I’d thought about it, I would have done better to serve with the impassivity of a pillow—something she was used to—if I truly sought her comfort and not my own.

Frankly, curiosity put decorum the furthest thing from my mind at the moment. The last time we’d had the bustle of this woman in our house had been just before the sea lanes closed for the winter. At that time, Esmikhan had been daily hoping for Safiye’s return for the season. Such hopes had been dashed, then quickly dispelled by even happier news. Safiye’s condition forbade her removal on any long journey; my lady’s child was no longer the most royal expectation in the empire.

“Of course you must go to her,” my lady had told her midwife.

“Safiye isn’t due until three, four months after you, lady,” I’d interjected. “The midwife could see you,
inshallah
, safe and have plenty of time to travel on to see to your brother’s child.”

Esmikhan had chosen to ignore me and spoke exclusively to our guest. “Safiye will need you. And I—I have done this so many times I can manage with another midwife.”

The Quince hadn’t needed more convincing. She’d packed her things in an hour and caught the final ship out of the Golden Horn—to see to Safiye and the royal child she was expecting.

“My brother’s child,
inshallah
, will be heir to the throne,” my lady had said wistfully when at last we’d been alone. “It needs the best midwife, not I.”

Now, here was the Quince, back after only three months, no more. My lady was yet undelivered. The sea lanes had hardly opened again. Perhaps the midwife had even come by land. Or perhaps she’d not made it to Magnesia at all.

What could it mean? Curiosity prodded me to attempt one more speech. “Are we to expect you for an extended stay, madam?”

If she did plan to move back in with us, as had been her custom as long as Esmikhan carried her ill-fated children, I would need to know so I could make arrangements. The Quince could hardly deny me an answer to this.

The eye she turned on me simmered with impatience that I, the cushion, had forced any pronouncement from her at all. “I just come for a little visit,” she said in clipped tones.

And then we were in my lady’s presence, so I retreated to my post by the door of the room and trusted Esmikhan to draw out the details.

My lady sat on the floor before the low table on which lay one of the seven or eight dainty meals she ate a day at this stage of her pregnancies, when the huge mass of child pressed awkwardly on her stomach. Earlier that morning, I had placed a metal brazier packed with fresh coals under that table and a heavy rug over the top of it. My lady had gone directly from her nighttime quilts to this rug. Though other pregnancies in the ninth month had prostrated her with the heat, so grim and cold was this day that she kept all of the lower half of her body tucked under the insulating rug, her knees and feet almost touching the room’s only source of heat.

The light was bad through the window. I’d lit a lamp or two but considered lighting more. Unpainted olive-wood lattice was difficult to distinguish from the gray of the sky beyond. Many other details in the room were obscured as well, but in the darkest corners the sweet smell of the sandalwood I’d put along with other fuel in the brazier snuggled the nose. The weather outside, vacillating between a drizzle and an even damper fog, hissed in the ear. The entire mood, close to sightless though it was, remained safe from the world’s cold blasts. As usual, I liked to see my lady as a gem—perhaps dull onyx today—in a setting of my own design.

But the effect was lost on the Quince.

Esmikhan’s reaction upon seeing her guest was much as mine had been. Even our words were identical,-though the Quince eked this rehearsal out with greetings in return and a salaam as negligent as her usual attentions to such forms.

When my lady reached the part about the length of her stay with us, the Quince repeated, “Just a little visit “but added, “Just long enough to see my prize patient and the new child,
mashallah
.”

“I am fine, thanks to Allah,” my lady replied. She shifted her attitude and the rug so the midwife could give her hem a cursory kiss, as royal blood demanded. “The child—well, that is in the hands of heaven. I am doing my best for him. And yourself, madam?”

There was no reply. As she raised herself from the obeisance and got her first good look at my lady in the half-light, the Quince started. She could not have been more shocked and surprised if Esmikhan had pulled a pistol and shot her. The midwife’s usual color grew yet more pallid and green, and that pronounced the fuzz on her face more as well.

“Madam, what is the matter?” My lady attempted to raise her awkward bulk to assist, for her guest suddenly seemed to demand it.

“Nothing,” said the older woman in a tone that betrayed a bold-faced lie.

“What can I get you? Some watered yogurt? Sherbet?”

When the Quince managed no reply to this but a weak gesture, Esmikhan sent for both, and a warming broth besides.

“Madam, please, have a seat.” My lady was on her own feet now and caught her guest by the elbow. She signaled everyone else still in the room—including me—for cushions and rugs.

I was just behind the quince-shaped hips, plumping pillows, when the midwife found the strength to put up a little protest. “Your child has not been born yet, majesty?” she choked. And I saw that, in nervous hands, she was fingering a large gold coin—such as one might offer an infant as a birth gift—too distracted at the moment to find a place to hide it.

“
Mashallah
, no,” Esmikhan replied. “But let’s not worry about me right now.”

“But we figured...”

“Yes, I figured it would be here by now, too.” Esmikhan shrugged, other concerns on her mind. “This one is tenacious, that’s all. Allah willing he may be of life as well.”

“But—but they told me you’d delivered.”

“Who told you that? Madam, you must relax.”

“Some...someone.”

“Allah’s will, I wish they were right. I’d have no complaint if I’d finished with this business a fortnight ago, as we’d thought.”

“But she said, clear as day, ‘Yes, the princess delivered.’

“She—whoever she is—must have confused it with another time. It is easy to do, I suppose.
Mashallah
, there’ve been so many...” Esmikhan’s voice faded as her concern for the Quince reached another peak. “Madam, what ails you? Can I send Abdullah for a physician?”

“No physician, no,” the Quince said with a sudden vehemence that gave her the aspect of returning health. “Those charlatans. I’ll be fine, a good deal better than if you send for a physician. Just a momentary ... a momentary weakness, I assure you. I’ll be fine.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then seemed to resign herself—to death? Something just as momentous passed before the bitterness of her face. But when she opened her eyes and breathed again, the midwife seemed almost herself.

“Madam?” my lady asked.

“I’ll be fine,” the Quince repeated. “Maybe a little pilaf.”

Esmikhan quickly set the rest of her meal and a napkin before the other woman. The napkin afforded, I felt, no use for its station, encrusted with gold thread on every crossing of warp over weft as it was.

“
Khadim
?” the Quince said then through one mouthful, her fingers reaching after another.

“Madam?” I had almost regained my post after the flurry with the pillows but stepped from it once more with a little nod.

“Down in the sedan chair is a green and gold kerchief of comfits. Fetch it for me, will you? I think—I think they may help. My heart...”

“Of course, madam.”

“Oh, and khadim?”

I turned back at the door. “Madam?”

“I will be prevailing on your hospitality. Until the child is born. You can send the men back to the palace for my things.”

“Madam?” I stopped and asked only because I couldn’t believe my ears had heard such a complete about-face.

“Abdullah, at once,” my lady ordered impatiently, still very much concerned that any vexation of her guest might exacerbate the frightful condition once more.

So I went, found the kerchief, and gave the orders. I had no doubt I’d found the right bundle. It was the only thing in the sedan, no medicines, no spells as a midwife on anything more than a social call must surely carry. I wondered at this, but not overlong. The bundle I found exuded the heavy smell of an evergreen forest—mastic gum—and seemed innocent enough.