Murad stood intoxicated by her words and by their promise. Color flushed his cheeks and even his beard seemed to grow ruddy with health and hope. I think he would have rushed across the room, and taken Safiye in his arms then and there. But he remembered, suddenly, that there were others present, and he turned to Sokolli Pasha instead.
My master had been looking steadily at me ever since the middle of Safiye’s speech had called attention to my feat—what it had been, if indeed it had been. My master’s eyes seemed to wonder if even the best of his janissaries could have fulfilled such a dangerous assignment with such success. And under his gaze, I began to feel a little remarkable, too. He made me almost proud to hold that post of such great trust, proud to have traded manhood for that trust.
But quickly I humbled myself and dropped my eyes from Sokolli’s gaze. Of course he looked at me because, in all decency, and even though she was veiled, he could not look at Esmikhan, not until ritual—and duty—demanded it.
As soon as my eyes were gone from him, Sokolli Pasha spoke. “Very well,” he said. “I am content with this test—as it also clearly pleases my master, Prince Murad.”
Then he dismissed the mutes with a wave of his hand.
LII
I have since heard lavish descriptions of how Sultan Suleiman gave his granddaughter away out of the palace in Constantinople. I’ve heard of the festivities that accompanied the occasion, how the viziers vied with one another for the honor of walking—not riding as is their usual right—before the pavilion draped in blinding cloth-of-gold that covered her horse from mundane view. These marketplace historians confuse the occasion—in their nostalgia for the empire’s past glories, perhaps—with another princess’s bridal day.
I, who was in Inönü on the day, don’t bother to correct them. Their memories comfort me that our efforts to conceal the true irregularities of the case have worked completely.
The worthies of Inönü did their best, but even helped lavishly from Sokolli’s purse, their resources were but pitiful compared to those with which the Sultan would have feted his granddaughter and Pasha in the capital. Haifa day’s warning was insignificant against the months of planning for weeks of celebration Constantinople would have provided. The governor’s home in that small provincial town was like a closet when one thought of the Imperial palace, Sokolli’s palace, and the arena of the hippodrome between them in which the guests, spectators, and entertainments could spread.
Nonetheless, it was thought better this way. If things did not work out, the shame could be quickly buried in the provinces, and the capital never the wiser.
Of course, there was little here that conjured the idea of “wedding” to my mind. There were no silk- and flower-draped gondolas on the Grand Canal, no high mass in St. Mark’s with the formal procession of bride and maids. Nothing I had always imagined along with the words “happily ever after.”
Esmikhan didn’t even put in an appearance. If a woman is without male guardian, she may send a eunuch to the ceremony in her stead. But my lady had her brother and, while the legal documents were drawn up, Murad stood in his best brocades, brown and blue silk turban with the pheasant-feather aigrette, facing the imam opposite Sokolli Pasha.
Even as a eunuch I had little notion what the women did all the while in the harem. I stood guard, arms crossed in defensive stance over a new ceremonial dagger, at the stairs to the forbidden area. Only once in a while was I sent: “Out for more henna!” “Khadim, more scarves to drape the bed!” “What? Have all the taratir at-turkman gone to the men? The Fair One will not have it. Fetch us a tray at once, ustadh.”
But like Venice there was music. The folk of Inönü managed to foot an orchestra, aided by musicians from Sokolli’s squadron of janissaries. The instrumentation relied heavily on the drums and played only haphazardly on any beat but the martial. This, however, they set to with a good will and vigor until the seams of the old stone house where the formalities were reaching their climax seemed ready to split with trying to contain them. Nowhere in the building—or in the neighboring ones, either, I dare say—could one go without the rhythm coming in pursuit, sending jolts up and down the skeleton. To this rhythm the local singers did their best to fit the traditional wedding songs, but the tunes had the thrust of war. Clearly the ease of bride, or more particularly, of groom, could hardly be hoped for against such odds.
Old dust and drying herbs thumped down on our heads, as the beat rocked from the heavy center of the drum skin to the rattling rim and back again. There was no help for it: my attention was continually drawn up through the rafters and the floor boards where fate rested on a marriage bed in Sokolli Pasha’s hands. In Allah’s hands, my lady might have corrected me.
Prince Murad’s mother, sisters, and retainers had continued on to Constantinople from the moment of the brigand’s raid so as to be out of harm’s way. Without their calming influence, the prince was anxious. Perhaps something I was missing made him contain his anxiety worse than I did, standing still at my post.
Murad paced back and forth like rude gusts of winter wind among the strangers he should have been entertaining. The drums openly rattled his heart like a dried gourd. He seemed close to bursting, and the local men, not fully comprehending the reasons, thinking their prince had only a sister’s honor at stake here, stood in awe of the sensitivity of royal blood.
One reverend gentleman with age to protect him ventured to suggest, “Patience, young prince. Who of us has not had a sister marry? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, all is well, thanks be to Allah.
