The Sultan's Daughter (24 page)

I was distracted from such thoughts by a ripple in the smooth flow of decorum before us. “I protest, my lord vizier,” a young representative of Venice said, oblivious to the scowls of his superior, the actual
bailo
. “I understood we were to be in the presence of the Grand Turk himself, yet here are only viziers.”

The face was familiar—round, soft, and effeminate. It didn’t take long to realize where I’d seen it before: the young man passing out notices about the ransom her father was offering for Safiye’s return. The face behind a black mask at a long-ago carnival, as like my own as a mirror. So he had come up in the world the last four years. He was no longer running errands in the marketplace, but was among the first rank of diplomats to pay their respects. Of course, he was from such a prominent Venetian family that his career was assured.

What was his name? Oh, yes, Barbarigo. Young Barbarigo must have received some clue by now that he had spoken out of turn. This was not the Kremlin or some other court of barbarians after all, but a land with the strictest and most ancient etiquette in the world; still he would not keep quiet.

“No insult meant,” he hastened to apologize, “but Suleiman has always received us himself before, and the people of Venice, hearing rumors of the Grand Turk’s health, are very interested to learn of him personally.”

I could only see the top of his fine white turban, but I could imagine the sort of half-smile with which my master would meet such insolence.

“But you are in his presence,” Sokolli Pasha said, and pointed with one long finger behind his head to where Safiye and I sat. “Behold,” he said, “the Eye of the Sultan.”

Barbarigo had to be content with that.

In Constantinople, the Eye of the Sultan was an institution Suleiman had set in mortar and stone. Khurrem Sultan, Suleiman’s beloved, legal wife sat often there, close to her lord—or so the romantics had it.

My master must have known full well, as did everyone else, that Suleiman was nowhere near that place, that the Favored of Allah, no matter how long the shadow he cast, was halfway to Hungary by now. The convention was mere symbolism, used to suggest that wherever the Sultan’s servants were, there Allah’s Umbrella was as well.

But did Sokolli Pasha know who sat here instead? Probably not: he took little interest in the harem. My master, I suppose, considered this seam at his back as empty of all but symbolism. And he would have fumigated the place if he’d suspected what larvae wriggled there.

Now Safiye’s reaction interested me more once again. She drew herself up firm and regal, as if she were indeed the magnificent Suleiman himself instead of just the slave mother-to-be of his heir.

I looked at that curious anomaly in lavish, feminine silks, far-gone with child, round, soft, beautiful, but inside was something with which one’s eyes dallied painfully as if with a razor hidden in a vat of new butter. And Safiye looked at the young Venetian with a smile that was at once self-satisfied and lustful with her usual lust for nothing but what would lend her power.

“You just watch,” she murmured then, neither to me nor to the Venetian ambassador in particular, but rather to the world in general, or, in defiance, to God Himself. “I will do as she did,” she proclaimed. Before I could wonder who “she” was, I was answered, “No, I shall even outdo Khurrem Sultan, the beloved of Suleiman.”

And then I realized that thoughts of Venice never touched Safiye as they did any other mortal born along its canals and touched by its sea breezes. To her, Venice was the city that had thought her only a silly, headstrong girl and determined to marry her to a peasant on the isle of Corfu. It was a place that would slap her hand from any work save stitchery and letter writing. But here in Turkey, behind the harem curtain, no one need know what a woman set her hand to.

What is Venice to Constantinople?
Safiye said with her eyes words that must have been percolating in her heart for months, years.
That little island republic where everyone knows everyone else, clinging to their miserable swamps so as not to fall or be pushed into the sea—what is it to this vast Empire encompassing three continents, from the Atlantic to India, larger than Rome ever was, whose million subjects speak a hundred tongues? What is St. Mark’s Cathedral to Aya Sophia, or the Doge’s dried sunbaked hovel to the gold-lined rooms of the Topkapi palace where I sometimes live, set like a rich stone in those cool gardens—sparkling with fountains and flowers of all descriptions? I can accomplish more here by raising a finger than the Doge can by raising all his navies. His “Empire of the Sea” his trade with the East, his very bread and butter—it is all impossible, a child’s dream, without our will.

The young Venetian ambassador didn’t know it, but he had just been more diplomatic making a fool of himself in front of the Eye of the Sultan than had he gone with all pomp and ceremony to the Hungarian front.

Now crimson-and-gilt-turbaned pages ceremonially washed the guests’ hands and dried them with smoking incense. Then they brought mountains of food—broiled whole lamb, turkey birds, and tiny squabs nestled among heaps of well-buttered rice, either plain, yellow with saffron, or pink with pomegranate juice—on gold plate as thick as drachmas.

Little of interest would transpire during a state dinner, Safiye must have known from experience. The Christians would try to find the strange dishes appetizing, try to eat rice with their fingers, try to keep the unclean left hand carefully, clumsily hidden—this without spilling the greasy grains down their white robes of honor.

All the while, the Turks would stand by, their hands folded gracefully in front of them, maintaining a demeanor that said, “We will be good hosts, even if you are miserable excuses for guests.” Their laws forbade them to eat with nonbelievers, so, gracious as they tried to be, they never failed to seem like farmers who have just slopped the pigs they fatten for slaughter.

I got the feeling Safiye found this ritual laughable. How easily she’d forgotten that she had once gone through the same discomfort.

In any case, with slightly more haste—could I say anxiety?—than I was used to seeing in her, Baffo’s daughter reached for my hand and I helped her to her feet. Ghazanfer heard the stir. He held the heavy rugs back for us and I passed the woman from my hands into his, where she seemed to find deeper ease. With incongruous tenderness, the huge eunuch adjusted her veils; for this Safiye always took too little care.

The prince’s favorite stretched her back against its normal curve, exaggerating her fecundity as she did so. A deep sigh filled her cramped lungs with new air, unfiltered by rugs, enlivened by the ordure of camp. The sigh caught in mid-breath with a slight twinge of discomfort. She leaned into Ghazanfer for its duration, caught his eye with some meaning I couldn’t fathom, and then spoke.

“The young one. Not the
bailo
himself, but his assistant.” Women and their eunuchs speak notoriously in a sort of code. Between them there is no need for more; the rest of the world is intruders. “He might be the one to go through,” she continued laconically. “I noticed his eyes, full of idealism and energy—“

Her thought caught, like her sigh, at the midpoint. She leaned more heavily into Ghazanfer now.

“The midwife, lady?” Ghazanfer murmured, as a man murmurs prayers.

“The midwife, my lion,” was her reply.

“The midwife?” I repeated in a stammer, rooted to the spot as Ghazanfer scooped his lady up and carried her to a nearby sedan. Then, past her pain—for the moment—Safiye turned to me over the monster’s shoulder with sudden impatience. “You are the densest of all khuddam!” she declared. But was the impatience with me or with her own condition? “The Sultan, our master, is about to become a great-grandfather.” She said it as if it were no more than “the Sultan will dine on pilaf today.”

“And the Quince ought to be in attendance, don’t you think?”

“Of course,” I stammered. “Allah bless the Ottoman blood.”

“No, wait...” And she clung to the khadim’s broad shoulders a moment before she found breath to continue. “Run for her, will you, Veniero? I don’t want Ghazanfer to leave me until she comes.”

“Of course, my lady.”

“And Veniero...”

Just before Ghazanfer snapped the door shut over his charge, his great head bent in to receive a few more words and the clutch of a white-knuckled hand. In a moment, these translated to me as:

“And the bailo’s assistant. Veniero, will you?”

“I?” But what I really wanted to ask was:
Not the prince? Not the great viziers and lords of the land?

“Yes, you. You speak the language, don’t you?”

“I see. What am I to tell young Barbarigo?”

“Tell him to come and find Ghazanfer when he may. Isn’t that enough?”

“Very well.”

“What should be amiss if I seek a Roman priest to sprinkle my child when it is born?”

Nothing, I supposed. At least I didn’t say. This was Safiye Baffo and things were allowed to her that brought the death penalty to other inmates of the harem.

I did not hesitate to run at least the first of these errands for her. The second, I put off. What business was it of the young Venetian that there was a Baffo in the imperial harem? Or that she had been delivered of a fine, healthy boy?

I told my master instead, along with the greetings of my lady. I did not tell him what was all the talk of the harem—that Safiye had labored hardly three hours with wonderfully little pain. She was up and about the very next day, longing to be at the Sultan’s Eye again, though the Quince strictly forbade it.

The moment he knew the news, Sokolli Pasha bade farewell to the young father, struck camp, and departed into Europe. He did not pause in Magnesia to take leave of his wife, which was a private grief. Soon, however, we heard that the entire army of the Faithful was united at Pazardjik. The Grand Vizier congratulated the Sultan on a great-grandson—”who favors you, my lord” and the Sultan took his privilege to name the lad the most Muslim of all Muslim names—Muhammed.

And, as soon as the midwife thought it safe, she, too, packed the mother, the infant, and three or four attendant nursemaids—but only back to Magnesia. The older woman’s constant mastic-ladened mutterings ran: “Birthing a princeling in an army camp. By Allah, like some tart of a camp follower.”

Here, Esmikhan got the first glimpses of her little nephew and, though tears salted her hungry eyes, she couldn’t get enough of him. For days on end, she held him more than any of the nurses, certainly more than Safiye, who paced at her grille like the caged lionness she was. The main concern for her son’s care, I heard the Fair One express, was a complaint that the gem-studded cradle usually used for princes of the blood was left behind in Constantinople.

“Five rams have been sacrificed for him”—Esmikhan tried to comfort her friend—”both here and in every department in the capital. The cannon will fire seven rounds from Constantinople’s walls. That’s instead of the three they fired when I was born.”

“And I am not there to hear it!” Safiye turned with sudden ferocity on the midwife. “How can you have been such a fool to forget the cradle?” she snapped. “People will mistake him for any whore’s son.”

And the Quince, in silence, groped for another round, yellow comfit.

“He looks quite plain to me.” Safiye appraised her son from a good safe distance.

“
Mashallah
,” Esmikhan murmured at the new mother’s words, though not with disapproval. She agreed with the Turkish superstition that any praise of a child tempted the evil eye. Though she couldn’t bring herself to pronounce what she found such blatant lies herself, she diligently turned any that were uttered with a constant lullaby of “Garlic, garlic.
Mashallah
.”

And she hung the infant, his cradle, the entire room, with scraps of the Koran, chunks of blue glass, quantities and quantities of garlic. Always for her own infants, she had been too weak to see to such things before the babes faded from her life. She would not fail here.

I doubted—in the richness of his swaddling, the red silk patterned with gold tulips of his tiny shalvar, the tasseled crimson cap that wouldn’t stay put for all my lady’s efforts, as well as the day-and-night vigil we kept—I seriously doubted there was the slightest danger of confusing tiny Prince Muhammed with any other infant in the empire—in the world. So, though the cradle’s arches over his son’s head were only intricately carved olive wood, Murad had no difficulty claiming him.

And I, too, watched with a certain reverent fascination when my lady would replace the prince in that little bed, so different from cradles at home. Not that I’d ever paid much attention to infants’ affairs once I’d outgrown them myself, but I did find the long crack in the floor of the Turkish cot quite remarkable. I would have joined Safiye in complaining for a new one in a moment, thinking the wood split with age and use. The nurses didn’t even seek to pad the crack much.

But I had seen how Esmikhan fit a little ceramic spout over the child’s boyhood before she set him down to sleep. And I saw how, from time to time, urine was funneled through the crack and into a dish below. Later, when the first weeks of danger were passed and the cradle was set outside for air, even the dish was dispensed with, the urine allowed to trickle straight into the ground. Only feces required the laundress.

Esmikhan treated every voiding of the little boy as some regal firman, gold-infused water, no less. And I, too, watched the process with—well, let’s call it the fear of God. A bitter sort of awe at the bundle of flesh between his legs—whole, uncircumcised, proportionately large, as it is in infants—of which the little prince was entirely and blissfully ignorant.

I felt my own loss keenly. Not just the loss of that bundle, which was only flesh, after all, but that I should never have a miniature self. I should never find—as Murad found in the little hands that fit in the hollows of his, the little life that pulsed so fiercely in the scalp’s soft spot—that only sure form of immortality.

“Veniero. The bailors assistant.” From time to time in her pacing, Safiye would hiss at me in Italian.