The Sultan's Daughter (37 page)

“If you could only stand in a few hours until reinforcements can be brought from the old palace...”

“Of course, Abdullah, you should go,” my lady said. “Our talk cannot be very interesting for you.”

I was quickly outfitted with the white hat and green fur-trimmed cloak particular to the palace harem, and given a post, in the heart of the mabein. At either end of the hall, I could see one of my colleagues—leaning against the wall as the chills of the fever came over them. Usually they were set no further than ten paces apart, and did not dare to even slouch as they stood at careful attention throughout four-hour shifts. I could have called to these men in an emergency, but I’m sure I was the only one who could hear what was going on behind the door just to my right.

It was the interview between Murad and Safiye. His voice was hot with anger.

“What, I would like to know, is the infidel attraction here in Constantinople? Why do you put me off? Why must you stay here? What do you do all day that you couldn’t do in Magnesia?

“I know you are as disappointed as I am that the hay-cart rebellion was not successful. But, my prince, you must trust that I am working towards the same end in more and different ways...”

“Forget rebellion. It is too dangerous, for you, for our son. Besides, what do I care to be Sultan—if I can’t have you there beside me.”

“You could marry...”

Murad snapped off her last word like a pinnacle of glass. “I have promised my mother.”

“And even a son makes no difference to you.”

“He seems to make no damned bit of difference to you.”

“Why, I care for our child...”

I heard a child whimper, and I knew little Muhammed must be in there as well, his first experience with his father—like being set in a pen with a charging bull.

“Go on, sweetheart. Go to your Mama.”

It was another woman’s voice and I knew that little Muhammed’s nurse was also present. A gentle, plump woman with a husband and family of her own in Magnesia, she had been given the little prince to suckle from birth. This had given Safiye plenty of time for the pursuits she hadn’t divulged to Murad—following events in the Divan, and sending her eunuch out to bring in the latest word from the quayside, the barracks, the Mufti’s palace. But it also meant that the child clung to this woman rather than to his mother, especially now, with that raging bull in the room. Muhammed whimpered again as Safiye tried, clumsily, to show off her mothering skills.

“Yes, I can tell how devoted you are to him,” Murad spat sarcastically. “He goes to you like a bee to honey.”

The argument grew fiercer.

“There is nothing wrong with Magnesia,” Murad declared. “I’ll have you recall that I was born and raised there.”

“Ah, yes. How often I have listened to your mother speak of those delightful days with her little Murad. Why don’t you take her down there with you this time so she can mother you to her heart’s content.”

“Magnesia is a nice town for a boy to grow up in. No dirt, no crowds, not like Constantinople.”

“I should die of boredom.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, I should die of boredom. It’s so quiet there that you’ve forgotten how to hear.”

“Boredom? You would be bored with me there?”

“You said it. I didn’t.”

“What’s the matter? I’m not good enough for you? I am the heir to the throne of Othman! I bore you?”

“I didn’t say anything.” Her tone was not as innocent as her words.

“By Allah, have you been unfaithful?”

“That would be a nice trick. Here, behind these walls, crawling with dour eunuchs and your mother everywhere I turn.”

“I heard tales when I was a child in the harem. I know it is sometimes done, sneaking lovers in in laundry baskets.”

“If I had a lover, he would have more dignity than to go creeping around in laundry baskets. No, my lord, I have not had a lover, though I must say several nice plates of cool green cucumbers have caught my eye. I’ve thought of helping myself to a better ...”

“Why, you whore! You bought-and-paid-for whore!”

There was a shocked little gasp from the nurse. She called the baby to her and must have tried to cover his ears.

Safiye laughed. “Well, what are you going to do about it? Eh? What are you going to do? I am the mother of your firstborn son. You are stuck with me. What are you going to do, kill the precious little bastard?”

Another moan from the nurse, “Allah forbid!”

“No, no. But I can have another woman. I can have any damned woman in this harem. In this country. In this world.”

“Hell if I care. Have as many as you like.”

“You wouldn’t care?”

“I am still the mother of your firstborn son. I am still the one who taught you how to use that little old cock of yours.”

“I’ll show you, you bitch! Anyone in the whole damned world. I could have this woman here, right now.”

“What? Our old nurse?”

“Damn it, yes! I can! I will!”

“Master! Master!” The nurse cried out in shock, then in true pain.

I shifted my feet and looked anxiously down the hall to my colleagues. One was sitting on the floor, exhausted by his sickness, and the other was rubbing his temples. The one on the floor suddenly got up and ran out of the hall to empty his stomach someplace else. They heard nothing and, caught up in their own suffering, cared less. Besides, it was none of our business what went on in the mabein, once we had screened those who went in.

I stood and listened. I heard the nurse’s sobs and moaning pleas, “Master. No, master, please...”

I listened to the child whimpering for the comfort of her bosom. I heard Safiye trying to hush him in vain, then her mocking laugh, “Just look at your father, my lion. He’s like a pi-dog in the streets.”

“Bitch!” Murad shouted.

The door to the room burst open and the nurse, looking like a dead thing, a rat half-cat-eaten and rotted a week, threw herself out of the room and down the hall into the safety of the harem without a glance at me. Her jacket was misbuttoned and her shalvar twisted on awkwardly, but she didn’t care.

“You’re not the only one,” Murad repeated. “I can have anyone, anytime.”

“Yes, well, you’ll have to learn not to let them get away before you go making claims like that.”

The child howled.

“Take your damned brat away before I...”

There was a sudden, awful slap across soft baby flesh. There was a moment of horrified silence, and then the howl of pained innocence, perhaps the most dreadful sound in the world. It carried. The khadim at the other end of the hall stood up straight and looked at me. But before I could make any gesture of explanation, the door opened again. Safiye stuck her head out. She was flushed, panting with rage—and perhaps a little with fear, although you would never hear her admit it.

“Hello?” she said. “Oh, Veniero. Run and get someone to take this child, will you?”

She was holding the baby clumsily, not just because she was unused to the procedure, nor because the child was writhing so, but also in a vain attempt to keep the blood from a vicious cut across his face from staining her clothes.

I wanted to take the child myself. Even I, who had never held a baby before, would have done a better job of it than that.

“Not you,” Safiye told me sharply. “Go get someone who knows what she’s doing.”

The child’s scream had gone soundless with pain, but her sharp voice made him take breath in again and it came out, rending the air like doomsday. I could bear it no longer. I couldn’t leave him there with his parents. I feared for his life. I snatched him away and ran, Murad’s abuse and Safiye’s Italian curses pursuing me all the way down the hall.

A young black nursemaid’s assistant was there in the nursery trying to revive some sort of life in her superior. The rag of a woman had thrown herself in a corner, was tearing her hair, quite senseless to the pain, and moaning over and over, “O Allah, Allah, if You are Merciful, take me now. Take me before my poor Mansur finds out how he has been betrayed, O Allah!”

The minute she saw little Muhammed, however, she instantly forgot her own grief. By that time the poor child looked as if he must have lost the skin off half his face and his howls were mortifying. My arm, too, looked as if it must have sustained a grievous wound, it was so soaked with his blood.

Little Muhammed went to her and took some comfort—either that, or finally stilled his sobs to a low hum from sheer exhaustion. The nurse cooed to him through hysterical tears of her own, and tried to mop the wound first with her sleeve, then with a kerchief the maid handed her.

“Allah, it won’t stop bleeding!” she cried. “Allah, how it gapes across your poor cheek, my angel.” Then, “Run for the Quince,” she told her assistant. “Run, this instant!”

I stayed until the midwife came. The blood was still oozing out and the grim noises and greenish color that came from the old woman told me that her skills would be tried with this case. This made me so furious, fury above my fear, that I determined to march down to the mabein at once and tell the daughter of Baffo—and, the Prince, too—just what their violence had done.

I was stopped at their door. I heard sounds of their violence grown into a violence of love. My anger rotted in my stomach and made me ill.

“Ah, cursed veal!” a novice eunuch who was still staggering, exclaimed sympathetically when he saw me. He assumed by my looks that I had eaten from the tainted pot last night, too.

***

It was a week or two later when we visited the Serai again. Safiye was bright and lively, making no plans to go to Magnesia and saying no word about her son. So when I happened to see the little black nurse’s assistant, I could not help but ask for news. I never stopped to think how curious it was to find her in the hot, humid, stone, and metallic world of the laundry off the nine-pillared court of the menial slaves instead of in the nursery.

She blinked at me over the great copper kettle, and I thought her tears were from the steam. I soon realized, however, that the irritation was in her heart.

“They tell me his little cheek got infected,” she said. “He will always have a scar, that perfect, pure little face! They did not dress it properly, I’m sure. Maybe they even let the flies get to it. By Allah, if I were still in the nursery, I would see it cleared up. I wouldn’t stop to do anything else, to gossip, to try on new clothes like those others must be doing. I would stay up all night to see that he got better.”

“But surely his nurse is as dedicated to the little Prince as you are,” I suggested.

“You cannot have heard.”

“No, I’ve heard nothing.”

“The nurse is no longer in the palace.”

“But where has she gone?”

“Home.”

“And left little Muhammed?”

“
She
made her go.”

“She?”

“The Fair One, Safiye. She says it was because of the nurse’s carelessness that he got that horrible wound on his cheek. By Allah, it isn’t true!”

“No,” I said. “I know it isn’t true.”

“I say it’s because she’s jealous. The nurse told me in dark whispers in the corner—she told me what happened, how Murad tried to...Well, Safiye realizes now that her position in the harem is not as secure as she thought. Murad could easily take another. Easily, easily. Why not? If only this realization would make her more careful of the little Prince. No, I refuse to call him her son. She doesn’t deserve to be called a mother. If anyone does, it’s my dear mistress, his nurse.

“But Safiye got jealous of her. She made her life miserable, hoping she would ask to be released. My mistress was miserable, but she would not leave the baby for anything. Safiye finally forced her to leave.

“I shall never forget the sorrow of that day. My mistress sat trying to give the lad suck ‘til the very last moment. He was hungry.
They’
d been plying him with sweets all day ‘til I’m sure he had a bellyache. But my mistress let him play a little game they had where he’d nip at her with those little gapped baby teeth, shed tweak his ear, then hug him close, and then they’d do it all over again. Oh, they’d laugh and laugh and laugh at that. My mistress was sobbing instead of laughing this time, but she sat, probing his little mouth with the breast until they actually dragged him from her.

“‘Go home,’ the kinder folk said. ‘You have children of your own and a husband at home. You haven’t seen them in two years. Go to them.’

“But they still had to drag her away, so limp was she from crying, knowing she would never see her little suckling again. They took her out by the funeral door, which seems just somehow. To us in here, it is as if she had died and gone to be buried outside the walls.

“The little Prince, he set up a wail, too, to see his sobbing nurse carried away. They could not hush him. None of them had her soft, quiet ways, you know. They couldn’t hold him for his struggles, and when they set him down, he tried to toddle after her, reaching out his little hands—I shall never forget it. Ever. His first steps alone were to her. And then these ... He clung to the handle, crying, pounding, until—oh, it was hours later—he fell into a whimpering sleep. In his fit, he broke the wound open again. That’s when it got infected, I’ll wager. But that’s when they brought me to this place, so I don’t know.”

Just then the head laundress came in. “You still on about it, girl?” she asked. “Still fretting about the young Prince’s weaning, Allah shield him. Fie, everyone has to be weaned sooner or later. Normal women celebrate and give a little party when it finally happens for them.”

“Weaning is one thing,” the girl spoke up. “I swear by Allah, this will starve the Prince to death.”

The laundress was a formidable woman, tall, large, with arms like a butcher’s, and what gentleness might once have been in her face, the pox had ravaged. Still, she was not a cruel person, and she tried to speak with sympathy. “It is a matter we do not understand,” she said.

“Because I was taken from my mother at an early age means I understand more, not less,” the girl insisted.

“The gossips tell me Safiye stopped using her aloe and rue while Murad was here. I’m sure she realizes just how important her son’s well-being is to her position and perhaps, if Allah wills, she may get another.”