The Sultan's Daughter (19 page)

And there was the particular leisureliness of our voyage, at least compared to the merchantman’s pace I’d always known before. We took the luxury of setting in at any and every port, at the first sign of seasickness on my lady’s part or at the first inkling to sightsee. The anchor was always dropped to allow the servants to light proper cooking fires for each evening’s fast-breaking meal, as they would not have been had we been rolling and lurching under full sail.

So sometimes it seems we spent more time ashore on that journey than afloat, for all that getting there was a major undertaking. I had to insist the sailors move below decks or to the seaward side of the ship while I helped Esmikhan to negotiate the ladder down to the tender in all her veils. For better seclusion, I usually did the rowing myself, after the serious ship’s business had been taken care of, with at most one or two of my lady’s maids joining us. But it was easier—more pleasant—when just we two went alone.

In such company, the shore of Asia Minor was gentler, more feminine than I ever remembered from my past. Esmikhan never bathed in the sea as I had done as a lad, for—not to mention her modesty—my lady was convinced that bathing in salt water while she was still unclean from the birth would harm her fertility.

But, hungry, lightheaded together, Esmikhan and I read of “Troy’s proud glories” and the “white-armed Helen.” As Fate would have it, we were right there in the springtime fields of Ilium even as we held the book in our laps. We read of Penelope’s unstinting devotion, Poseidon’s unslakable wrath with the very heave of the god and his nereids below us, the drumbeat of Leto’s fair-haired son above.

Because it was Ramadhan, we lived much of our life at night, sleeping while under sail and fasting during the day. For fear of fire, we couldn’t light a lamp to read by. But even when the light failed, Esmikhan hadn’t had enough of my past—of me.

I didn’t know any Homer by heart, but I did have a dour childhood tutor to thank for my Dante. I did not recite to her verses from the very pit of hell, where the poet placed Muhammed the Prophet next to Judas Iscariot. But the tale of Francesca di Rimini and her Paolo, more pitiable than damnable, was particularly applicable to our state, what with its eternally unsatisfied swirling. Or at least, so it seemed in the moments of our deepest hunger-induced melancholia. Esmikhan had me recite it to her over and over until she could recite it to me:

“And this, I learned, was the never ending flight

of those who sinned in the flesh, the carnal and lusty

who betrayed reason to their appetite.

“As cranes go over sounding their harsh cry,

leaving the long streak of their fight in air,

so come these spirits, wailing as they fly.”

But in spite of her tortures, Francesca offered no regret, no apology, only this:

“Love, which permits no loved one not to love,

took me so strongly with delight in him

that we are one in Hell, as we were above.”

For happier times, or when my voice gave out, Esmikhan had her Persian poets:

“Awake! for morning in the bowl of night

Has flung the stone that puts the stars to fight:

And lo! the hunter of the East has caught

The Sultans turret in a noose of light.

“Come with me along some strip of herbage strown

That just divides the desert from the sown,

Where names of Slave and Sultan are forgot,

And pity Sultan Mahmud on his throne.

“A book of verses underneath the bough,

A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou

Beside me singing in the wilderness—

Oh, wilderness were paradise enow!”

Well, no loaves were allowed us when we did take early-morning or late-afternoon rambles to explore the shore. And certainly no wine jugs. But there was a blessed communion in our shared denial that is difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. More than once, the Christian crew of the ship tried to slip me something while my lady slept and the sun rode high.

“She would smell it on my breath.” I thanked them, but refused.

I would lose more than what she might sense. The poet, denying himself the freedom of rhymelessness and plain, straightforward speech, is pushed into the sublime almost without trying. Such was the drive of hunger—and more—between Esmikhan and me.

We were two halves suddenly one, the failed single sexes suddenly whole. Or if we were whole the way we were, which her presence often made even me feel, together we had double the space in which to stretch our humanity.

One evening we returned to the ship hand in hand after a taste of Khayyam’s paradise more real than bread so fresh it can burn the hands. The soil between more sober rocks puddled with hyacinths or anemones, difficult to distinguish, save by scent, in the growing dark. The world was so green and quickened by the seeming death of winter, I couldn’t help but think of Easter, resurrection. And what I thought, I spoke, and spoke until tears came and I was glad for the dust of twilight between us.

“What would your grandfather think?” I said by way of apology, an excuse to escape thoughts of hope or joy when reason told me I must expect none, ever. “What do you mean, what my grandfather thinks?” Esmikhan laughed, teasing me with a tickle to the ribs.

“Here I am reciting
II Paradiso
to you, speaking in glowing terms of Christian feasts and beliefs.”

“Well, what is the harem if not to keep such things?” She bent to the ground and then I saw she had plucked yet another hyacinth to stuff into a turban-free curl on my head.

“What are you saying, lady?”

“Exactly that. The harem is to keep such things close to the heart. Where the Shadow of Allah cannot touch them.” And with a palm she pressed the part on my anatomy where such safety might reside.

There was another, different safety in a scholarly detachment. I took it. “Allah’s Shadow. I suppose the term comes from the Arabs in their deserts for whom a shadow is always a blessing. But for us, who have just suffered such a bleak winter, ‘shadow’ is a mixed image. My lady”—and I groped for her hand again—”I fear you speak heresy.”

“And if I do? Who is to know?” She leaned towards my ear to whisper it, close enough to touch my loosened curls with nose and lips. “Only my eunuch, my servant of Allah. Not a soul more.”

And then it was time to replace my turban, replace her veils, rejoin the world before the tumbling night. I let my fingers linger on her face as I helped to drape it from profane view. I hungered for the curves of her cheeks and her eyes’ flashes of delight, even as darkness was clearing the sight from my table.

I couldn’t help myself. Just before I dropped the gauze, I had to dip and kiss the dimple in her pudgy chin, or I felt I should burst with emotion, gelded from all other outlet.

I fully expected her chastisement. It was deserved. I was a fool. But no chastisement came. Instead, I felt the briefest pressure of her hand on mine. And then she moved with me, to re- turn those gems of hers we brought out for play within the confines of their purse, secured.

And I had to return—to do double duty as the
Epiphany
’s mate. For I was forgetting my approaching freedom, an approach I was more and more apt to let slip my mind.

The northern spur of Chios floated lightly off starboard, belying its heavy, rocky appearance. We’d hit a becalming lull in the wind; we drifted more than sailed towards the harbor. But the scent of the island was perceptible, even a quarter of a league offshore. I’d have known Chios anyhow, even if it’d been my eyes Turkey had taken from me instead.

Clear from the Campos to the south came the fragrance of citrus bloom, resinous mastic, bemusing dust, triggered to life by the passing night’s dewfall. Above the creak of the timbers, the shiver of rigging, the hush of water slipping away from the prow, the sky panted like punctured bellows and glowed the flame-blue color found at the center of a low fire.

And was that cicadas I heard over the deep breath of other sounds? It seemed too early for those creatures to be singing to one another, but maybe Chios always had cicadas. The sound rolled off the island like the opening of prison doors, the rattling of rusty keys. It was the promise of freedom. For all the pleasures of sight and sound that sent trills of expectation down my spine, the island’s capital looped about the bay like a grubby, well-worn linen collar. The red tile roofs bleached out to drab. Few of the whitewashed walls had been renewed in some time. They offered little contrast to the fading patterns of beige or brown, the repeating friezes of triangles and circles, triangles made of circles and vice versa, with which Chian walls were traditionally decorated.

As a whole, the city exuded the depressing corruptibility of a grasping merchant who’d made compromise after compromise, giving up all he held most dear in the process, until he could no longer tell the difference.

And with this city I must throw my lot in order to gain freedom?

I looked away, off the port side, where mainland Anatolia dozed like a gypsy’s shaggy bear spring had not yet wakened. But only a fool would think the beast dead so that nothing could rouse him.

A sudden pealing of bells from the island made me start.
What are they thinking?
pulsed the panic through my brain.
They will awaken the brute. He will discover what we are about.

But Giustiniani walked up beside me on the forward bulwarks then, as calm as the wind that slackened our sails.

“It’s Easter Sunday. The heretic Greeks will have theirs in a week or so, but this is ours. Did you forget? Too much Ramadhan?” he asked with a twinkle in both eyes and earring. “If we did not ring, the Turks would suspect. Good day for rebirth as a Christian, eh?”

I nodded vaguely. Certainly during these past glorious days with Esmikhan my mind had been yearning towards the meaning of Easter in a primal urge no renegade’s knife could cut from me. The very countryside clamored for it, but in ways that made bell towers quite redundant. I had been feeling “Easter” in no way so precisely defined as the ultimatum that rang out from Chios that morning.

Had the ability to feel Christianity been cut from me along with the rest? Or were there things about Christianity’s compulsion that I had forgotten until this reminder?

“This will do.” The captain shoved himself from the rail with the carelessness of command, more immediate things on his mind. “Why don’t you, my mate, give the boys the order to drop anchor. Then go gather your things and—and you’re a free...you re tree.

I couldn’t fail to notice how he avoided saying “A free man.” I could never be that. And since I couldn’t be that, was there any use in freedom at all?

I suppressed this doubt and others like it, however, and went to do as Giustiniani bade me. Orders are easier to follow than to think about.

The anchor carried its cable to the bottom with a plunge that seemed to take my heart with it. Now I had to go get my few belongings from the cubicle where my lady lay. But I lingered on deck as long as I could, contemplating how not even a bubble arose to show where my heart had gone down.

I thought-—I hoped—Esmikhan was still asleep. It was her fast-day custom, after taking a sustaining meal before dawn, to sleep again as much as she could into the long, hungry day. But perhaps hearing bells in place of the muezzin startled her as much as it did me. As I quietly pulled back the damask curtains to slip inside, she roused and sat up on her cushions, stretching with lazy luxury.

“Morning, Abdullah,” got swallowed in a yawn.

“My lady.”

Say as little as possible,
I told myself. But every word I did say seemed awash with gall. Look jour last, I advised again. But I couldn’t. To have her read betrayal in my eyes?

“Ah, Abdullah,” Esmikhan said in another yawn. “Up so early? You sailors are a hardy bunch.”

“Yes, lady.” I had my things now. I could go.

“Today is the day we rest at Chios, isn’t it? Yes, I remember. Does it look like it will be a good day?”

She tried to hold me with her idle chatter, but it was the sweet smell she stirred when disturbing sleep that held me more. With an explosion of breath that came close to a groan, I snapped free of the spell.

I even choked on the word “
Inshallah
” as I fled.

***

Outside, the morning air, though breezeless, cleared my head. The ship’s boat lowered smoothly. But Giustiniani seemed somewhat agitated. I fell alongside his stride of nervous pacing at the rail.

“Something’s amiss,” he said, twiddling his earring.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

Giustiniani shook his own hand from his ear as if it were an invasion. Then he pointed out a flock of little local boats drawn up on the Chian strand. The natives were among them, almost frantically decking out the crafts with rugs and garlands and bunting.

“An Easter custom?” I offered, though I realized as soon as I said it that one didn’t suggest an ancient custom to a native. But the islanders’ actions did seem quaint and harmless enough.

“No,” Giustiniani said. “The only time we get up a little flotilla like that is to greet incoming Turks.”

“Turks?”

I was certain the captain must hear the thud of my heart. Or perhaps he was deafened by the thud of his own. I raked the horizon all around but saw nothing.

“They come once a year to claim some men and ships for their navy,” Giustiniani explained. “It counts as part of the tribute. We put up a little pomp for them when they do. Seems to make them satisfied with less of a material nature. But it’s fall when they usually come, on their way to shutting down for the winter, as it were.”

“And they already came last fall?”

“They did.”

“So what can the actions of your countrymen mean?”

“I don’t know.” With disgust, the captain once more found the cross in his earring gave him no comfort. “But I think you’d better stay put for a while ‘til I find out.”

I nodded my compliance. I might have tried to logic him into the position that the sooner I got onto the Chian shore, the better my chances of freedom were. But haste didn’t seem to be his first instinct. I trusted to his instinct and to my own, which at the first sign of danger was “My lady.” But was it her safety that concerned me, or my own which I sensed would be greater if I stayed with her?