The Sultan's Daughter (2 page)

That thing I lacked—manhood in vague generality—was the very threat against which I wore a jeweled, ceremonial dagger. Could this be a man in women’s veils? Or could some other invasion I had vet to imagine take feminine form?

Again I dismissed the ideas. Anything Nur Banu Kadin allowed into her sedan must be allowed into Esmikhan’s harem.

The mystery would unwind itself soon enough, and the scent that brought up the rear of the cavalcade, too proud to jostle for position among the rest, gave me more important things to worry about. Jasmine. Heady, overpowering, sweeping away all before it, jasmine assaulted the nose with a fragrance to which the senses could never grow numb. That jasmine could only be Safiye—Sofia Baffo she had been once, before she learned eastern fashions in perfume. Safiye was my lady’s brother’s odalisque. Instinctively, I stiffened, hating always when she had the advantage of veils over me: I could not read her eves to warn me which way to jump.

Safiye swept on into the narrow doorway and ascended the steep staircase without a sideways glance. At the top of the stairs, however, as she kicked off her outdoor shoes, she gave me a momentary—purposeful, I thought—glimpse of white ankles under ballooning red
shalvar
.

I turned to make the visiting eunuchs comfortable in my lower sitting room. I helped them fold the silken curtains neatly back into the sedans. With a pang, I remembered helping sailors with the sails; these new mates of mine would never scramble up masts. And the way their thick and heavily jeweled fingers set upon the fried pastries dripping with orange water and honey, they were bent upon keeping such activity an impossibility.

A pair of Nur Banu’s eunuchs unabashedly loosened the wide silk banded about their middles as they settled into my cushions for the afternoon. They struggled with the sweat-soaked furs of their long, heavy, blue robes and the high cones of their white turbans, releasing very feminine perfumes to the room, though they were perfumes pickled by greasy perspiration. Then they launched into the sherbets I offered.

Well, extra flesh distracted from the other deformities eunuchs were prone to—the barrel chest, the long, dangling, apelike arms and clawed hands. As eating and drinking distracted from invisible distortions within.

So far I had avoided the outward mutations, but I feared it was only a matter of time. Slackening into cushions on a warm afternoon seemed one sure way to hasten the inevitable, so as soon as I saw my colleagues settled, I left them. Their reedy voices pursued me, like the fragile notes of a ship’s flautist on the night air, up through the stairwell. Here, over the neat rows of discarded feminine footwear on the threshold, the scent of jasmine still lingered, trapped.

“Alas, the day is too warm to show off the braziers,” was the first thing I heard my lady say over the preliminary oohs and ahs of her guests. Esmikhan had been fretting over that all morning. “But you were right, Nur Banu Kadin. I was just telling Abdullah.”

“About what, my dear?” The ambergris’s question was still muffled by the white gauze that rode over the bridge of her nose and scrunched into the black sharpness of her eyes.

“I should have started with the summer rooms. Here it is, too hot for braziers, and we must spend the summer in this velvet-lined chest without a single cooling fountain.”

Absently, Esmikhan smoothed the buttons down the front of her
yelek
; she was already leaving three undone as her belly grew. “Summer” had become synonymous with “baby” for her. “It is hard to think of summer when you’re cold.”

“Allah willing, all will be well, my little mountain spring,” said Nur Banu.

“
Inshallah
,” Esmikhan echoed.

“It is warm, lady,” I agreed as I nudged our still ill-trained maidservants forward to remove the guests’ wraps. We could ease their heat that much in any case.

My lady caught my eye. I read gratitude there—for covering for the stupefaction of the maids. I’m not certain how much of my concern was towards Esmikhan and how much that Safiye should not find too much amiss in our house.

But Esmikhan’s look also carried her empathy to me.

Earlier that morning, during the last hectic rush of preparation, Esmikhan had caught me staring out the window at this sudden warmth of spring. Touching my arm folded across my chest in a eunuch’s habitual attitude, she’d murmured, “It’s been about a year, hasn’t it?”

I didn’t need to say. My lady sensed how the spring air with its bath of light, warmth, and birdsong, reminded me of my first days among the Turks. How the exquisite opposition of such beauty and new life with remembered pain and death of all hope in a dark house in Pera sometimes came close to tearing my soul apart. How a year ago, through the machinations of Sofia Baffo—or my own stupidity and youth—I had lost family, homeland, manhood, more than most men could lose without considering their lives at an end.

My lady was aware of my pain now, even with the pressure of friends and family upon her, and I was grateful. Then I caught Safiye’s scrutiny upon our silent communication. Our little maid had pulled back Safiye’s veils as if they were curtains on a theatre act in which some heinous murder lay revealed.

That face had not changed from the first time I saw it—and settled my own fate in the same instant. If anything, Baffo’s daughter had grown more beautiful. The convent garden where we’d first become acquainted had provided an ill medium for the cultivation of women’s appearance when compared to the imperial harem. Still, she stood out, even among women scoured from an empire for their loveliness.

Her glorious golden hair and almond eyes had intensified during the year of our acquaintance like a quarter moon coming to its full. The cold demonic nature of that moonlight could turn a man’s reason. Time was when it had turned mine. Knowing of what she was capable, using that breathtaking beauty as her weapon, I looked away in horror. And Safiye’s exquisite alabaster features quickly covered any signs of disapproval at what she had seen pass between my lady and me.

Still, I vowed to keep an eye on her. And hoped, for once, that the castrator had done his job well enough to make me immune to her infection.

Now the admiration of the rooms, which had hardly even started, was interrupted by Nur Banu. “Do you remember our Quince, Esmikhan Sultan, my dear?”

The Kadin gave over her veils and wrappers to our slaves with a flash of her commanding eyes. She was a handsome woman still, her formerly raven-black hair now wearing the bronze cast of gray-covering henna, but those eyes, demanding obedience, were as bright as ever.

“The harem’s midwife?” my lady asked. This woman I’d never met before with the medicinal smell of stored linen bent to kiss my lady’s hem. “But of course. Madam, you are welcome.” And Esmikhan returned the kiss of honor with a nod of deference. “You delivered my mother of me, I believe.”

“Indeed, lady, I had that honor.”

Few women own as much power as the midwife in a harem. Of course, this explained the woman’s awkwardness. A midwife alone is included in a harem not because of her beauty and grace but because of her intelligence and skill. I was ashamed of the threat I’d felt from this woman at first and was glad I hadn’t acted on it.

And how apt her nickname! Never had the exigencies of womanhood swollen out a more bulbous shape. Her skin had a yellow, quince-like cast to it, exaggerated by the olive green of her coin-trimmed head scarf and a great deal of facial hair she had not the self-absorption to remove. Not to mention her stored-fruit smell.

“Nur Banu Kadin has decided the Quince ought to stay with you, my dear Esmikhan, until your baby is born.”

This was Safiye speaking, diverting attention from the cloud that had imperceptibly passed over the conversation, for few had forgotten that my lady’s mother had died with her birthing. Did I owe Baffo’s daughter a debt of gratitude for this consideration? I doubted it. How could Safiye know of something that had happened in Turkey fifteen years ago? Or care?

“For me, Auntie?” Esmikhan turned to Nur Banu.

“It was Safiye’s idea.”

“No one can deny the Quince’s skill,” Safiye said.

“Bordering on magic,” Nur Banu concurred.

The room was warm. Why did I shiver?

Nur Banu continued: “The Quince well deserves her place as attendant to the births of princes and princesses.”

My lady said: “To have the Quince sent to my lying-in, even just for an hour or two, even if she did no more than hold my hand...Why, this is an honor.”

“Honor for a woman,” Safiye said, “equal to the honor for a man if your husband the Vizier puts in an appearance at the circumcision of his son.”

“Well, you shall have her,” Nur Banu said. “In your house as a permanent guest, working her magics day and night against miscarriage and injury from these very early months.”

“Auntie, this is an honor indeed.”

“For the Sultan’s first great-grandchild, you should have expected no less.”

Was there a subtle jab here by the older woman at Safiye’s continued childless state? Safiye turned with dignity to an open window, above such pettiness, and my lady moved quickly lest any offense be attributed to her failure as a hostess.

“Thank you,” my lady said. “And thank you, Quince. We can make room for her, Abdullah, can we not?”

Before I had time to reply to my lady’s deference, Safiye ingressed, “Oh, my dear Esmikhan. You don’t ask a khadim if the arrangements are to his liking. You tell him how things are going to be.”

Where I had seen no difficulty with this extended visit before, with Safiye’s snipe I suddenly had a most desperate one. But how to express my unease? The rummage through my brain left me speechless for a moment.

“You will see, Abdullah, that the Quince is made comfortable in the room next to mine.” Flawlessly, my lady took her cue from Baffo’s daughter.

“As you will.” I bowed with stiffness as if I’d never made such a movement in my life before. Desperate for excuse, I continued, “But I must remind you, lady, the workmen for the summer rooms have stored their tiles and plaster there. It would take all day to clear it.”

Safiye’s glance read,
Well, then, you’d better get started right away, hadn’t you, eunuch?

She said nothing, however, as if yielding graciously herself to the Sultan’s granddaughter, who said, “Of course, Abdullah, you’re right. But then the Quince must sleep with me in my room. You won’t mind, madam, will you?”

“Not at all. This way I can better judge the instant, Allah forbid, anything should go amiss.”

“It is most gracious of you.”

As she spoke these words, my lady failed to see a glance that passed between the Quince and—of all people—Sofia Baffo. I was more determined than ever to stop this new arrangement in our home, but I could think of no way to do it. By this time, too, Esmikhan had already slipped her arm into Safiye’s and was leading the way toward the divans and the lattices thrown wide against the heat.

Safiye said: “If you’d like, Esmikhan, the Quince can tell you right today if it’s a boy or a girl you’re carrying.”

“Can she?” Esmikhan turned with such excitement to the midwife that the gauze of her head scarf stuck to the pink flush on her windward cheek. “Can you really do that, madam?”

“You doubt my skill, lady?”

“No, no. Of course not.”

“Because such predictions are the easiest part of a midwife’s work.”

Esmikhan caught a reproving glance from me, swept her hand in a studied gesture of welcome and said: “But first, you must all sit down. Make yourselves at home. Please. Welcome. Guests belong to Allah as well as to the hostess.”

So the women draped their skirts around their feet as they tucked up on the various divans according to their status. My lady, however, who’d been pressing her hands together in order to contain her excitement, could no longer. She blurted out: “I should love to have you read the signs for me with your art, madam, if it is the will of Allah.”

Having seen that thrill in my lady’s face, how could I begrudge her her midwife?

From a saffron-colored square of silk the midwife had given her, Safiye sprinkled a good cook’s measure of salt into the pale part of my lady’s dark hair. The well-ground crystals—none larger than the head of a pin, not a cook’s coarse lumps—glinted with anticipation, like sequins in her curls.

Meanwhile, Esmikhan sat and blushed and squirmed to have every eye on her with her head uncovered, as she usually only bared it in the bath. Her locks were still sweat-damp and -dented into the shape of the cap she twiddled now between her fingers. She hadn’t been on such display even as a bride.

“She squirms,” the Quince diagnosed.

“She is only nervous,” Safiye protested, putting an arm about her friend’s brocaded shoulders. “Aren’t you, my dear?”

Esmikhan made the effort not to be, and only blushed the more.

“She doesn’t itch,” Safiye declared.

“She does, but she restrains herself with a princess’s restraint “the Quince countered. “The salt doesn’t itch your scalp, does it, Esmikhan?”

“No, no, not yet,” my lady replied, as though determined to create an itch if that would please.

“You see? It should itch like lice, didn’t you say, Quince?”

“No, it doesn’t itch. Is that bad?” Nervousness washed from my lady’s face to give place to a pallid fear.

“It’s been long enough now,” Safiye urged the midwife. “She doesn’t itch.”

“She doesn’t itch,” the Quince conceded with a shrug. “She carries a boy.”

The company let out its bated hope in an audible sigh. “A boy!
Mashallah
! A boy!” They exclaimed all round and took turns congratulating their hostess.

Over this pleasant confusion, I saw Safiye shoot slivers of almond eyes at the midwife, some sort of stern call to duty. The Quince shrugged without commitment, but asked me to fetch her a pair of scissors and a knife.

These are sharp blades
, I thought as I handed them to her with a complaisant little bow.
Imagine them sinking into my flesh
—
or worse, my lady’s.
My hand found the hilt of my own dagger and shifted it somewhat out of my sash, just in case.