The Sultan's Daughter (4 page)

Nur Banu rejoiced in the sharp-stroke victory of her protégée as if it had been her own, and those who lost the foray sank quietly into their cushions.

Only the Quince ventured a “Well, we shall see” afterwards, and the talk moved hastily on to other, lighter things.

As a matter of fact, the Quince was said to take omens from her smoke, and she was no less prophetic this time than at others.

“Does my grandson think he invented love?”

Suleiman’s magnificent fuming found its way to the depths of our harem. The Sultan’s own love for Khurrem, of blessed memory, was the subject of popular poetry throughout the empire. He could not be outdone by a mere boy.

“Allah willing,” Suleiman concluded his tirade, “Murad will learn some sense before he ever comes to the throne of Ottoman, our ancestor.”

What Murad found at the quayside that Thursday morning, there in the presence of Safiye, ready in her traveling clothes, with all her bags and servants, was an old, leaky ketch that barely stayed afloat to carry them across the Bosphorus. They had to make their way back to Kutahiya the same plodding way everyone else did.

When this tale made its way through our lattices, I had to laugh out loud. I had, after all, been on board a ship with Sofia Baffo and would regret it the rest of my days. My laughter, however, grieved my lady endlessly, and three full days afterwards, she was still scolding me for one word of torment I’d side-cast at Safiye during the party.

“I merely suggested to Sofia Baffo that her childlessness may not be only in the hands of the Almighty,” I defended myself.

“But I asked you specifically to be nice to Safiye when she came.”

I stiffened and she felt it. “I am always nice to Safiye,” I said.

“No, you’re not.”

“As nice as she deserves. And infinitely nicer than she is to me.”

“Just try to ignore all that.”

“As Safiye ignores me?”

“When she’s in a good mood.”

“Like a rug beneath her feet.” As if to emphasize the phrase, I began to pace our new, deep-piled rugs. The subject of Safiye always made me nervous.

My lady watched me from the divan where, dappled with lattice-strained light, she was teasing a kitten with a peacock feather. “I’m afraid it’s a
khadim’s
lot in life to be ignored much of the time.”

“And what about when she is restless and irritable?”

“You two do have some spectacular exchanges.”

“She starts them all.”

“She only has to look at you wrong and you’re off.”

“It’s those eyes of hers.”

“‘Almonds dredged in poison,’ didn’t you once say?”

“And that hair.”

“Butter.”

“That picks up the odor of whatever onion of a man handles her.”

“Abdullah, you know she’s perfectly faithful to my brother Murad.”

I snorted without comment and flung myself to the divan next to her. I know it is not proper form for eunuchs to sit in their ladies’ presence, but ours was not the usual mistress-slave relationship. Since my refusal to go by the ridiculous name she’d always wanted to give her first eunuch—”Lulu”—Esmikhan had never tried to mold or even order me. She was too used to being molded herself; there was no older woman, as a harem usually has, to take me in hand. And I had come too late, too recently to my slavery and sexlessness to accept the pinch of their molds about me. So rather than being her gossipy khadim and a talemonger, I knew it was no use—and no kindness—disabusing Esmikhan’s innocence with the truth.

My lady laughed, let the kitten rip the feather away, and took my face gently between her hands so I’d look at her. I closed my eyes against the shame that not all the smoothness I felt was her plump little palms. In the past year it had become clear that I would never grow more beard than I had. I would always smart under this charcoal smudge which had so mortified me when I first met Safiye—Sofia Baffo then—so long ago and far away.

“Ah, sweet lady,” I said with my eyes still closed. “You refuse to see malice in anyone.”

I caught one hand just before she pulled it away and held it there, to my spayed, stripling cheek.

She declared: “I think your squabbles give you great pleasure.”

“You laugh out loud and clap for joy at our antics as if we were baby kittens play-fighting for your amusement.”

“Aren’t you?” She tugged at her hand and I let it go. “At least, if you must squabble, I wish you’d stop slipping into Venetian all the time, you two. I always feel I’m missing something.”

“So you should let me teach you my native language as I’ve been longing to.”

“Perhaps, yes. After the baby...” She let one more button out of her yelek. “I’ll bet even if I knew Italian, I’d be missing something.”

I looked away. “I assure you, lady, you are not.”

“I get jealous.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t ever be jealous of Sofia Baffo.”

“Does Safiye ever get the best of you in Venetian?”

“Never.”

“Even when she prepares her comments in advance?”

“Does she do that?”

“I think so.”

“Never,” I said doughtily. “She never gets the better of me.”

“That’s good.”

“Still, I wish...”

“You wish what?” Esmikhan urged, resting her little round chin on my shoulder. “That I wouldn’t invite her at all? Safiye, who is my dearest friend in the world?”

“No, I don’t wish that.”

“I can’t not invite her.” My lady removed her chin and looked away. “Even for your sake, dearest Abdullah.”

“I will never say her presence is unstimulating. I always take care not to drowse, no matter how late the hour, when she is here. I’m certain to find myself the brunt of cruel jokes while my eyes are closed.”

“But she has lost the ability to consume your every waking thought?”

“Sofia Baffo never consumed my every waking...”

I stopped because Esmikhan’s glance, gone sideways with perception, made me sound ridiculous.

“She does not make you miserable anymore?” my lady asked.

“That, I thank Allah, is no small victory.”

“I hate to think of you miserable, for any reason.”

“For that, my lady, I thank you.”

“So please, please, treat Safiye with the utmost tenderness.”

“For your sake, I will try.”

“For
her
sake, Abdullah. It grieves me so much to have this child, this wonderful child, growing within me while she, who has been with my brother months longer than I’ve been with the Pasha, should have none.”

“Ah, so that’s what this is all about.” I laughed.

“And why shouldn’t it be?”

“My dear, tender-hearted little lady.” I slipped a hand under the head scarf at her neck and rubbed the tension there.

As I turned her face to me with the pressure of my hand, I could see Safiye’s condition pained my lady to speechlessness. How could I let Esmikhan’s features—and especially her soul—grow mundane to me?

I changed the subject and turned away as if admiring the room for the first time. Actually I’d been consulted and reconsulted on every chip of mother-of-pearl and ivory inlaid in the olive wood wainscoting.

“Even without the braziers, you were right to be proud to show it to your sisters and friends,” I said. “You can be proud of what you’ve done.”

“What we’ve done, Abdullah. I am sensible that I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“In any case, it’s a vast improvement over what we found here on our arrival,” I agreed.

“Oh, yes. Do you remember that first night, Abdullah? ‘A palace built by the great architect Sinan,’ you promised me.”

“Well, it is, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but the plaster wasn’t even dry. And no furnishings at all. That first night we slept on rolled up rugs in the smell of damp and empty echoes.”

“It was an adventure.”

“I’ve been having adventures ever since I met you.”

I turned from her look as from a brazier that had grown too warm. “Progress has been made.”

“And now that Safiye’s gone for the summer...” My lady’s thought lost itself in a sigh.

“You will miss your family and friends, won’t you?”

Esmikhan let out yet another button on her yelek—then fastened it back up again. “But I will have the Quince. The baby,
inshallah
. And you.”

“
Inshallah,
” I repeated, more because she always said it than because I believed, “If Allah wills.” And I smiled at, but didn’t provoke, her naive faith. I thought, but didn’t say, how my protecting her ability to say “
Inshallah
” ‘til death overtook me had very little to do with any will but my own.

And the Quince, too, put little faith in anything outside herself. I knew this because several days previous, I’d helped her to set up a whole pharmacopoeia in some of the cupboards concealed within the wainscoting in the new winter rooms.

“No, no, the drugs used in poultices must be kept separate from those taken internally,” she had instructed. “I always store them on a separate shelf, else an assistant I send in the night might fetch the wrong item. If nothing worse, precious time may be lost.”

No mention of Allah in that, though I wanted to say “God forbid” against the mere idea of such an accident. The Quince went about her business with the perfect assurance that if she put her jars in their proper places, nothing could possibly go wrong.

I gave up trying to help and only watched, fascinated by the confidence she displayed towards these powerful simples. She greeted each with tender strokes and embraces as she unpacked it, sniffed their aromas as a mother breathes in the fragrance of her newborn’s hair. She understood where each wanted to sit and how it might best serve and show its peculiar attributes. Few people know their most intimate acquaintance better.

When I exclaimed over the quantity of drugs we were to host, the Quince waved her hand in dismissal. “These are only things I may need here. When I agreed to come and stay with your household, khadim, I did not mean to give up my practice with the main harem at the serai, those who are not packing to go with Nur Banu to Kutahiya, or with Mihrimah Sultan, our master’s daughter, to Edirne, or just to the Princes’ Islands to escape summer’s heat. I have my herbs to tend in the garden, see that they get plenty of water through the hot months and are picked when their virtues are at the peak. I must engraft the new girls against the smallpox, help the faithful old servants with the aches and pains of their years of service, the khuddam with the ills their particular station is subject to.”

“You cannot—you cannot restore one who’s been cut such as I—

By God, I hated myself when I sounded so pathetic.

I was almost glad when she brushed this question aside as well and scoffed, “No, I can’t. And don’t you,
khadim
, ever fall prey to those who, when your position makes you rich and powerful, will tell you they can help you. I’ve treated too many
khuddam
who’ve believed charlatans. I’ve treated them for burns—trying to burn back what was lost, can you imagine? I’ve treated poisonings—Aconite, just think! Aconite is called ‘love poison.’ People hear the ‘love’ part and go deaf for the rest. All I’ve ever seen aconite do is kill the gullible, the desperate, with horrible delirium on the way.

“There’s maid’s ruin, savory, pepper internal and external, dragon bones...” She gestured her list on and on. “Not to mention that five-leafed plant the Chinese like to kill each other over, which they say glows in the night and rises above the ground—I’ve cuttings in my garden and I’ve never seen such a thing.

“Charlatans will tell you any or all of these are beneficial, and I can tell you, you’ll be lucky if you only waste your wealth and not your health. If you’re not belly-cut, yes, there can sometimes—rarely—be a remedy. If the cutters left you something to work with, I could prescribe. But what usually happens is the desperate urge without the ability. No, don’t waste your life looking for the cure. There is none.”

By heaven, I was almost relieved to hear it, her sentence of lifeless life. A sort of desperate panic that had been eating at my heart—most would have called it hope—took love’s poison and died.

She continued: “The same as there is no escape from death. I make those Allah has marked comfortable with pain-numbing draughts, but I never give false promises. I cannot raise the dead. I cannot grow your parts again. No one can. And if the pain of that terminal knowledge is too great for you, I can recommend opium. You won’t be the first
khadim
I’ve ordered it for. All I can say is, it’s too bad to ruin a life so young as yours with a poppy haze. I’ve seen it happen, but it’s a shame when the only lack in your life is a bit of flesh between your legs. I might as well take to the pipe myself, for being female. There are those who do, but it’s a great waste.

“Oh, by the bye “the Quince continued, having come across our scissors and our knife during her straightening and handing them to me. “I think these are yours.”

“Yes,” I replied. “Thank you.” I swung away on my heel to return the implements to their places, but then came back to her, holding the knife foremost. “So it’s a boy?”

“How should I know?” The midwife now found her herb pots better company than myself.

“But you said, if my lady sat on the knife side of her cushion, it was a boy. And she did.”

“Old wives’ tales. Hocus-pocus.”

“But you do it.”

“I do it because it’s expected. Safiye in particular wanted to know.” I tried to read more out of her face on this theme, but she wouldn’t give it. Heedless, she continued: “Knives and scissors behind a cushion, salt in the hair—these things, these charlatans’ ploys, they’re harmless. Not like what the quacks might do to you.”

They’d already done their worst to me, I thought, then said: “Such hocus-pocus might make a woman hope for what is not to be.”

For the first time, the Quince looked studiously away from me, almost as if she couldn’t meet my eye. “Well, usually the readings of such idle tricks are ambiguous. Or one trick contradicts the other. I guess you could say I always try to read ‘eunuch.’ “

She laughed at her joke at my expense and went on. “Your lady’s readings are, in fact, the first time I’ve ever had two unequivocal readings both say ‘boy.’ And part of that was Safiye, pushing me for a definite answer. Usually I try on purpose to leave some doubt or push the answer towards a girl child in one or both cases. That way the mother can always be pleasantly surprised.