“It is only the roll and thrust of the act itself played out on a much grander bed with a proportionately greater time incorporated in the rhythm.” So did Nur Banu brush the game aside. “Any girl has the instinct to move and curl beneath her lover.
And yet she never ceased to be amazed at the precision of this girl’s instinct and the throes of passion into which it threw her son. (Sometimes she heard his groans and animal-like yelps responding to the girl’s staccatic little purrs—they echoed into the harem from the mabein and she could not escape them.) If this was instinct, it was one she, Nur Banu, had been born without.
Nur Banu liked to flatter herself that she had known such passion and devotion in her life. But in the still, quiet times, she had to admit that it was only by chance that she was the first of Selim’s many early loves to bring forth a son and heir. He, the only man she would ever love—and he would never love her again—had only turned to her in the anonymity of a drunken bluster one night. Every time she remembered his putrid, bloated flesh and wine-soaked breath upon her, she was repulsed. Indeed, she had thought her morning sickness only an acute revulsion for many days. She had never known either her master’s passion nor her own. If Nur Banu enjoyed anyone’s passion at all, it was that of her All-Merciful God who had smiled with favorable stars upon her fate that night.
Yet how could she complain? The remarkable blond-haired girl had accomplished all she had been purchased for and more. Murad still enjoyed his drug from time to time, but who did not? There was not even the complaint that he had given up one addiction for another, because with Safiye’s encouragement, he began to take an interest in the other activities a young man should enjoy at court.
As an appreciative patron of both painting and music, her Murad soon made a name for himself throughout the district. He collected a small circle of favorites who loved him not only for his generosity but for his willingness to learn and for taste that was not merely the ability to buy it. He would bring miniatures for Safiye to see before he bought them and, often desiring her presence for a concert, would demand that the musicians be blindfolded so that she could sit by his side and receive his caresses that were the music made physical.
Murad also began to take an interest in the more mundane affairs of state and often attended when his father held court. Returning to the mabein afterward, pent up with frustrations at the insidiously formal and self-seeking ones who frequented the place, he would sink gratefully into his lover’s arms to let her loosen the tensions with her gentle caresses and finally press them from him completely between her long white thighs. It was, incidentally, with loving croons and caresses, that Safiye gained from him a working knowledge of the government of Kutahiya and of the greater Empire beyond.
And it happened more than once that a problem which had stumped Selim and all his counselors for weeks found solution in her quick mind. For, in the harem, a mind had the luxury to remain unfettered from the pressures of narrow and particular interests.
When Murad would carry the solution to his father the next day, the young prince would shrug off the praise and say, “Allah smiled on me—I had only to sleep upon it.”
PART III: ABDULLAH
XXXVIII
It was a night in autumn with a touch of winter already in the air when I was shown to my bed in the citadel of Kutahiya and then left on my own. A trip to wash the dust of my journey from my face and feet revealed that a long, wide hall marked the barrier between haremlik and selamlik in this prince’s house. On one side were the various rooms of the harem, on the other side opened the doors to the eunuchs’ quarters and the two chambers of the mabein where the governor and his son could enjoy their women. This hall was paved in rough stone and also opened in a long, high clerestory to the sky above.
I got the definite and purposeful feeling of having gone out of doors and passed from one building to another as I went from the world to the harem. There could be no mistaking the transition, even for the stranger.
That night, the windows had caught a brilliant moonlight in just such a way that it was channeled like sparkling water in a cascade down the walls and into a beautiful dappled pattern—like little waves—on the flagstones below. The beauty of the scene struck me as I’d been too numb to be struck by anything in a long, long time. I paused, all alone, to contemplate it and let my mind follow those waves back to days that were gone. To ships and sea I should never again enjoy.
As I did so, the door from one of the rooms of the mabein opened furtively and a figure joined me in the hall, walking upon the water.
She wore nothing more than a thin sheet caught haphazardly about her tall, slender body, leaving her neck and soft shoulders bare, over which her golden hair tumbled without constraint. Her light, naked feet scampered across the
