A beauty pack followed to ease the sore skin. It was made of oil and rice flour mixed with honey and various sweet-smelling spices. In the heat of the steamy baths Safiye began to feel herself to be a living pastry, baking for the festive day.
Another bath followed with more lathering and scrubbing to remove the pack save for the scent and smoothness it gave Safiye’s skin. As they scrubbed her down, Esmikhan and Fatima Sultan repeated the word Mashallah! over and over as a crooning song. It was an invocation to their God to keep the evil spirits that might covet such a beauty from casting a spell on her while she was naked and helpless.
The sun was now past its zenith and came in, in long beams made tangible by the steam, at the high west-side windows. Safiye’s hair was washed with water in which roses and heliotrope had been allowed to steep. Then, stretched out naked on a bed of snow-white cushions and towels, she submitted herself to the hands of the harem masseuse from the time the sun was dappling the water in the pool until it was reflected off the smooth tile wall at shoulder-height.
Now is the pastry kneaded, she thought, made light and full of puffs of air for the young master’s festival.
Remembering the fancy Easter breads of her Italian childhood rather than the thin-crusted pastries that were actually baking at that moment in the citadel ovens, Safiye sometimes daydreamed, sometimes dozed, sometimes drifted fully asleep and dreamed true dreams of delight throughout the long, hot afternoon. It would leave her fresh and wide awake for the exertions of the night.
***
As the masseuse’s firm hands caressed the soft, pink skin, Safiye began to work her hips in an ardent response to that kneading, unconscious of what she was doing. A climax came in a smart slap across her buttocks.
“Save that for my brother!” Esmikhan teased.
Having just come from bathing herself, Selim’s daughter found that the wet end of her towel was more useful as a whip for bare backsides than as a cover.
“Why, you little—! Safiye cried and, throwing aside the masseuse’s hands, she dashed off in hot pursuit, armed also with a towel she paused to dip in the bath as she passed. Safiye made up for a slow start with her long legs and limberness compared to the other girl’s plumper docility. Neither would cry halt and the battle raged on all about the pool.
The two girls’ screams of laughter and of pain echoed off the marble walls and brought Nur Banu in from the latticed corridor where she’d been watching for the men. Her anger and concern were infectious and immediately brought the two dripping, panting, naked girls to bay.
Nur Banu wasted little time in either scolding or apologies, for the marks of Esmikhan’s towel on Safiye’s skin needed instant attention with oil and aloe lest they turn to welts that would last until the morrow. Nonetheless, a quiet smile crept to Nur Banu’s lips to see her young charge in such lively spirits. Safiye could tell that if the older woman was cautious, it was only to make sure that those spirits would not all be spent before nightfall.
“The men are returning from the mosque,” Nur Banu announced when the emergency had passed. “You can hear and see them from out there in the corridor. Make haste, make haste!”
XXXIII
“Auntie, may we bring Safiye out there in the corridor so we can see, too?” Esmikhan begged. “Her hair will dry so much faster there in the sun.” Nur Banu gave her permission and now the toilet began with an earnestness that all but stifled any carefree chatter.
“The sheep are being led into the courtyard,” Nur Banu reported, her voice crosshatched against the carved wood of the grille.
Safiye raised herself off Esmikhan’s knee, where she had been resting while the other girl brushed and combed her hair. By shifting her head from side to side, first to one diamond-shaped opening, then the next, she found it possible to see most of the courtyard below.
“Hold still!” Esmikhan begged. “I shall mess your hair.”
But Safiye couldn’t resist. The large company in the yard were all men, of course. They were differentiated, however, into dusty peasants on the perimeter, dumbly watching the motions of their betters under banners and poles dangling horsetails at the center. This might be a costume play at home, in the theater of the Foscaris. Safiye felt herself grow warm and was grateful no one else here remembered the occasion. Not just actors but all men dressed in such costumes in this land, these long robes that blinded with their richness when the sun hit them just right.
“Which is your brother?” she asked, surprised at her own breathlessness.
“There.” Esmikhan pointed with the end of the comb. “Standing next to my father. Murad is the one with the brown pheasant’s feathers in the ruby aigrette pinned to his blue-and-gold-striped turban.”
Safiye felt her heart race at the announcement, but the lanky young man had little to recommend him at this distance beyond a certain disinterest and lassitude in his stance. His father, Selim the Sultan’s heir, certainly upstaged him, as did a trio of shepherds who had their hands full trying to control the flock.
“Are the animals bleeding?” Safiye had quite forgotten where her attention ought to be.
“No.”
“Not yet,” Fatima added.
“They are marked for the holy sacrifice with splotches of red on their white wool,” Esmikhan explained.
I see.
There is nothing to fear out there, Safiye told herself as she leaned back to let Esmikhan anoint her hair with fragrant oil, then comb again. A few hot, impatient men and dirty sheep.
“Ah, your hair gleams as gold chains in a jeweler’s shop would under the same treatment,” the princess declared.
Meanwhile, other oils mixed with perfumes were applied to Safiye’s skin, along with a cream of henna to check perspiration.
“The
