“Perhaps I shouldn’t worry quite so much. He is young still. But I am his mother. And, though far be it from me to presume to second-guess Allah, it is very likely that upon the death of first his grandfather and then his father—Allah forbid them both—he will become Sultan of all the Faithful. What sort of occupation is the pipe for one who must lead armies with the sword? Worse than keeping him from his duties, it may well open him up to manipulation by ministers and counselors who would like nothing better than to see his overthrow. Even now, some slippery fellow has but to say that the opium he has in his pouch from such and such an exotic field is more pleasurable than any in this world and my son will give the rings off his fingers and sacks of ghrush besides to have it. If he is like this now, before he is twenty—Allah stay me!—what will he be like when he is forty?”
Here Nur Banu sighed and shook her head. Then she continued, “As Allah is my witness, I have done all a mother can do to divert him. I nag and cajole, but too much of that, I know, and he will never come to see me again—no, not even on holidays. I make his fine clothes. With my own hands I bake him special dainties which I know he loves. But what is the use? He can always escape into the world beyond my reach. At first, of course, I thought he was simply a young man, bored here in this small town and, when his father would not get him a girl (Selim likes them all for himself), I did. You know Aziza?”
“Yes,” Safiye replied. She knew the girl.
“Well, she lasted less than a week. Then I got him Belqis. Her, too, you know.”
“Yes,” Safiye said again.
“Do you know what he said to me after Belqis? ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘No more of your silly girls. They are such a bother! They waste my time.’ My own son! Now a man who will not even bother to get children, what sort of man is that? He should not be a Sultan, for who would reign after him? He owes it to his people, at least, to preserve them from civil wars of succession and give them an honest heir. No, he should not be a Sultan. He should not even be a eunuch!
“Now, my dear,” Nur Banu suddenly turned from her passion to address Safiye directly. “Now do you know why I bought you and brought you here?”
“Indeed, lady, I do not,” Safiye confessed. Then she added that she was startled and puzzled by the question in such a context.
“Because,” Nur Banu announced, “because you are the one, my dear, who must draw my son away from his drug.”
XXX
Safiye stopped in her tracks and the little black girl, carrying the sunshade behind her and hastening to keep up so she would not miss a word, ran into her. When apologies and blessings had been given all around, Nur Banu began again. “It might well be a girl my Murad needs,’ I thought to myself. ‘But Murad is no ordinary young man. He needs a girl above the ordinary.’“
“Belqis and Aziza are not ugly girls,” Safiye protested.
“Oh, no, but girls like that can always be found in the market. Slavic girls from the Sultan’s campaigns—I can get two of them for what I paid for you—maybe three, if I bargain well. ‘No, no.’ I said to myself. ‘My son needs something extraordinary.’
“So I was content to bide my time, to pretend to heed his warning, ‘No more of your girls, Mother.’ But all the while, I had the Kislar Aga, my head eunuch, watching the slave markets carefully. Many girls, many, he found and brought to me. But none of them was quite right. Then, early last spring, just before we were scheduled to leave Constantinople for Kutahiya once again—he brought me you. ‘This,’ I said to myself, ‘this is the girl for my son.’
Nur Banu’s arm squeezed Safiye’s waist in both affection and ambitious possession. Safiye murmured something in reply about how unworthy she was of such an honor.
“But my dear, you are most worthy! Do you never look in the mirror? Your hair, that is the most remarkable thing.”
You will win him with your hair. And your face— Yet it is something besides your outward features. I sensed it from the moment I saw you. ‘Such a girl,’ I said to myself, ‘should never belong to Suleiman.’ For you might as well know that had I not seen you first and bid higher, that is exactly where you would be now, in Suleiman’s harem in Constantinople. You were so much more important to me than to him, you see, that I bid so much higher.
“You think you would like that, eh? Being Suleiman’s odalisque? Think again, my little mountain spring. He is an old man, beyond the getting of children. If he has girls, it is only to keep his bed warm, like King David of old. If you ever got to sleep with him—I say if, for the chances are, in that mob of odalisques, that even you would not—you would never get a child. And then, in three or four years, however long it may be (Allah grant it may be a hundred), when Suleiman dies—that would be it. The end, no more. Because you had once belonged to him, by a glance of his eyes if nothing else, you could never belong to anyone else. You would be shipped off
