“As for his remaining two sons,” Nur Banu continued, “—my master and his brother—the Sultan thought it wise to get them out of Constantinople, where they might fall victim to similar plots. He gave them each a sandjak —Selim in Magnesia and Bayazid in Konya.”
“What is a sandjak?” Sofia asked.
“A fief, a province they must govern and tax, sending the revenues to the capital and keeping for themselves only enough to live on. You must know that Magnesia is the traditional sandjak of the heir to the throne and, though she tried, even Khurrem Sultan could not move my master Selim from this place. Oh, how I loved Magnesia! Perhaps I loved it so because that is where my son was born and we were very happy together when he was small and could still play at my feet in the harem. From Magnesia, we could often take jaunts to the sea coast and that was pleasant—Ah, but one must not weep over what it is not Allah’s will to have endure forever.
“Four years ago, Khurrem Sultan took mortally ill. Suleiman was mad with grief and decided to fulfill her last request. She had not asked that her favorite Bayazid be moved to Magnesia, only that Selim be moved elsewhere. The rest, she supposed would follow, for she had great faith, not unwarranted, in Bayazid’s ambition.
“But even grief could not blur Suleiman’s eyes to the needs of the Empire altogether. Under the wise counsel of the vizier Rustem Pasha, he decided to move my master here to Kutahiya, which does have the advantage of being much closer to Constantinople. In case of emergency, my master can reach the Sublime Porte in five days of hard riding. Bayazid, on the other hand, was not moved to Magnesia as Khurrem Sultan had desired, but to Amasia in the Pontic Mountains. Because of bad roads and the greater distance, he could not hope to reach Constantinople in anything less than two weeks. In case something, Allah forbid, should happen to the Sultan, Selim would have that much advantage to carry the day. This fact was not lost on Bayazid.
“We were not overjoyed to move to Kutahiya. It was not our beloved Magnesia, after all, and the climate is abominable. But we always made haste to fulfill our sovereign lord’s desire, and when we were told to leave Magnesia, we did. Not so Bayazid. He refused to go to Amasia. Have I told you? No. I guess not. Amasia had been poor Mustafa’s sandjak.
“‘I will not go,’ Bayazid said, ‘for it puts me in mind of my poor dead brother, and how can I rule with such grief on my shoulders?’
“In fact he was thinking, ‘If Magnesia is the place where princes go to grow into sultans, Amasia is where they go to die.’
“Well, still muttering such things, Bayazid finally did go. And he discovered that in that eastern land of Kurds and wild Turks one need only say the name ‘Mustafa’ to conjure up an army, for they all loved Suleiman’s eldest son dearly. In their ignorance they began to say that Bayazid was a resurrection of the strangled Mustafa.
“Soon, entrenching himself with arms and men, Bayazid stood in Amasia in open rebellion against his father. Perhaps it was his mother Khurrem Sultan who encouraged this in him before she died, hinting that his father was old and weak and that a show of force would finish him. Still, Allah was with the right and did not support such blasphemies against the man girded with Othman’s sword. My master joined his armies to those of his father and, loathe as he was to fight against his own brother, defeated him on the fields of Konya.
“Bayazid fled first to Amasia and thence to the court of the Persian Shah, where he remains today. That is where our master Selim is, where he has been since the snows cleared this spring, menacing on the borders of Persia and warning the Shah that Suleiman means business. The Shah for his part has made a solemn vow that he will not give up Bayazid nor his four little sons to Turkish heretics while he yet has breath.
So the matter stands. Allah alone knows how it may all turn out, but I pray daily that He may favor our master and bring this to a speedy, victorious end.”
Sofia nodded her amen to this prayer and her appreciation for the confidences. She thought of them often in the days that followed. More memorable than the words, which she still could understand but imperfectly, was the action she had witnessed. Cool, sedate Nur Banu had risen to her feet and “strangled” the air with a flick of her white, bangled wrists and a twist of her painted red fingertips. There was power indeed, and more than in all those bungling princes and their armies.
XXIX
Spring gave way to summer there at the edge of the Phrygian highlands. The fields of thistle whitened and dust, once raised, took all afternoon to settle.
Sofia learned Turkish. She also learned the ways of the harem. She learned to groom herself with the help of the lesser slaves and she learned what fabrics and colors were most becoming according to Turkish tastes. She learned to dance. She learned the communal dances when lines of women holding one another’s belts followed the small, bouncing steps of a leader. And she learned the more strenuous individual dances, where one accompanied a lot of movement from hip to navel with the clicking of wooden spoons. At this latter pastime, with her long, graceful limbs, Sofia soon excelled.
She learned to sing, to adjust some of her Venetian songs to Nur Banu’s aesthetics while at the same time giving them an exotic flavor all her own that delighted her audiences. She also learned to play a little on the oud and to accompany others when they performed, but at this she had less patience and so made
