The Sultan's Daughter

The Sultan’s Daughter

Ann Chamberlin

OTTOMAN EMPIRE TRILOGY: BOOK 2

Copyright © 1997 by Ann Chamberlin

All rights reserved

A Forge Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

Distributed by St. Martin’s Press

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

Jacket art, Flaming June, by Frederick, Lord Leighton, Museo de Arte, Puerto Rico; courtesy of Bridgeman/Art Resource, NY Map by Ellisa Mitchell

Lines from Harem: The World Behind the Veil by Alev Lytle Croutier, published by Abbeville Press, 1989.

Lines from “The Inferno” from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated by John Ciardi. Translation copyright © 1954, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1965, 1967, 1970 by the Ciari Family Publishing Trust. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Lines from “Paradise on Earth: The Terrestrial Garden in Persian Literature” by William L. Hanaway, Jr., in The Islamic Garden, published by Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC, 1976. Reprinted by permission.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN-10: 0312862032

ISBN-13: 978-0312862039

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE EMPIRE OF VENICE IN 1562

PART I: ABDULLAH

I

II

III

IV

PART II: SAFIYE

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

PART III: ABDULLAH

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

XLI

XLII

This book is dedicated to my cousins

Kourkan Daglian and Ruth Mentley.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Much of the list is the same as for the first volume of this trilogy, but repetition should not indicate a lack of appreciation, rather the opposite.

My cousins Kourkan Daglian and Ruth Mentley, to whom this volume is dedicated, Harriet Klausner, Alexis Bar-Lev, and Dr. James Kelly all unstintingly shared their expertise with me. Again I’d like to thank the Wasatch Mountain Fiction Writers Friday Morning Group for their support, patience, and friendship. Teddi Kachi, Leonard Chiarelli and, in the Middle East Section, Hermione Bavas at the Marriott Library, as well as all the Whitmore and Holladay librarians, never stinted in their assistance. Gerry Pearce is new to the list, but cannot be surpassed as a sounding board.

I owe a great deal to the friendly people in Turkey, especially the guides at the Topkapi palace who hardly raised a brow as I went through the harem again and again. I’d like to thank my in-laws for their support and my husband and sons for their patience while my mind was elsewhere.

There is another woman to whom I owe much but she didn’t want her name mentioned. She knows who she is. She doesn’t approve—except of good spelling and grammar.

None of these people is to be blamed for the errors I’ve committed, only thanked for saving me from making more.

And finally, of course, there are Natalia Aponte, my editor, Steve, Erin, and all the other folks at Tor/Forge, and Virginia Kidd, my agent. Without them The Reign would have existed, but never in the light of day.

***

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE EMPIRE OF VENICE IN 1562

***

PART I: ABDULLAH

I

“I am a harem woman, an Ottoman slave.

I was conceived in an act of contemptuous rape

And born in a sumptuous palace.

Hot sand is my father;

The Bosphorus, my mother;

Wisdom, my destiny;

Ignorance, my doom.

I am richly dressed and poorly regarded;

I am a slave-owner and a slave.

I am anonymous, I am infamous;

One thousand and one tales have been written about me.

My home is this place where gods are buried

And devils breed,

The land of holiness,

The backyard of hell.

I am—”

Esmikhan Sultan stopped her song, a song she might have learned at her nurse’s knee or from any of her childhood companions, it was that popular among Constantinople’s women. She sang it for the sweet, plaintive melody, I hoped, and not because it was true.

Well, some of it was true. She was a slave-owner. She owned me.

She owns me. I had heard rapturous stage lovers sing such declarations—but in a previous life.

And sometimes the word “love” flitted through my mind when I looked at Esmikhan Sultan and thought of our relationship. An unnatural thump of the heart accompanied the word: here was something I feared to lose. Perhaps more than life itself. She is not just my mistress, I thought in unguarded moments. Or she is my mistress indeed, my mistress in the other, beautiful sense of the word. We have been through much together. Yes, I have faced death for her sake. She is my best and only friend in this foreign place...

But no. I rejected “love,” the breathy whisper of “amore,” all the lushness my Italian childhood had taught me to expect. One cruel cut had put all hope of love forever beyond my grasp.

Esmikhan Sultan owns my body, I reminded myself. But not my heart, not my soul. My still-raw pain told me I would die before I gave those to anyone.

Esmikhan Sultan turned to look at me. Her face flushed to match the scarlet tulips she had been readjusting for the twentieth time that morning in their Chinese porcelain vase on a low silk-draped table in the center of the room.

“I hear their sedans in the yard!” she exclaimed. “Oh, Abdullah! What will they think when you are not at the door to greet them?”

Esmikhan made the much-older Vizier a better wife than he made her a husband, I thought, not for the first time. And they were both better at their allotments than I claimed to be at mine: my lady’s chief and only eunuch.

None of us had had any choice in our fates; we learned to make our choices elsewhere.

Every harem in Constantinople knew Esmikhan Sultan was with child from Sokolli Pasha’s brief nights of duty with her. Viewing the decor of her new winter rooms was the ostensive reason for this long-awaited visit. But quite plainly, the women of her father’s harem came for no other reason than to see how she fared in her condition.

As only a female, albeit the granddaughter of Sultan Suleiman the Lawgiver and the Magnificent—”richly dressed and poorly regarded” as the song said—any son she bore would not be in direct line to the throne.