“Yes,” I said, and the weight of this knowledge pried me up from the food and led me to Esmikhan’s side. Something fearful in my lady’s dreams made her call out and thrash away her veils as if at invisible demons.
XLV
“The boy has gone where? You let him go all the way to Constantinople on his own—with this kidnapping on his head, by Allah!”
“He is not a boy any longer, woman. He is a man.” Crazy Orhan tried to appease his wife’s wrath, and he quoted to her a familiar proverb, “‘If you do not give a man a man’s business, he will take it for himself.’ He asked to be the one to take our demands to Sokolli—may Allah take both of his eyes—and to the Sultan.”
“They will kill him as soon as they look at him!” The woman wrung her hands.
“I gave him some of the trappings off the litter, and if that’s not enough I should hope he has sense to steal until he gets all he needs to buy himself an envoy into the Porte. If he hasn’t the sense to take such simple precautions, well, he’s no son of mine, and I blame his manhood—if you can call it that—all on your womanish upbringing.”
“Oh, and I looked to this horrible risk of yours to at least bring the boy a bride. Until now, your blood’s been too hot with revenge to see to that simple father’s duty toward his son. ‘No girl but one worthy of the noble blood in his veins,’ you said. Very well. And I prayed it would slake your awful thirst for Sokolli’s blood at last, after all these years, that we might have some peace and live like normal mortals for a change. Snatch Sokolli’s bride from under his nose. Defile that Christian fiend’s honor and the girl at once and, incidentally, give your son the granddaughter of the Sultan to wife. After all, that is no less than he deserves. But now I see, I see. You are determined to go to your grave without progeny and I must resign myself to Allah’s will.”
In such shrewish words, Safiye first learned the brigand’s designs for Esmikhan. But she never bothered to tell us, who clung in the back as to the safety of our native harem, fighting off goats, fleas, and bedbugs alike. Safiye could not remain confined like that. She had to be out and about and our captors gave her quite free rein for they had no fear that she could possibly escape the fastness of their hideout. Indeed, escape was, at present, the last thing on her mind. This was not because she feared the wilds about us, but because she relished too much the wilds in the midst of which we found ourselves.
The head brigand saw Safiye’s almond eyes watching this exchange between him and his wife, and it threw him into a rage. Only the three of them were in the room. There was no threat to the wife’s pride in a young captive girl, but there was to the brigand’s.
“I, Crazy Orhan, bring the rulers of this world to their knees!” he cried, punctuating his words by hurling the closest thing to hand—a wooden truncheon—in his wife’s direction. It fell harmlessly but with a greatly satisfying crash among her pots and milking pails. “Can I not have some respect in my own home?”
The wife set about to clean up the mess as if after the tantrum of a young child. Her silence was hardly one of deep impression.
Safiye, however, ventured into that silence with as much awe and respect as any words could bring forth. “Oh, my master. Is it true that Allah has favored you with but a single son in which you place all your hopes for the future? By my life, such a great man as yourself should not rest so content.
“If one wife cannot give his heart’s desire to him, what prevents him from taking another?”
The wife laughed scornfully, partly at Safiye’s accent, which sounded silly and pretentious on her ears, and partly at the notion that any other woman in the world would be such a fool as to let herself fall into the drudgery that was the life of brigand’s wife.
Orhan was rendered more thoughtful. The word “master” from those carefully pouting lips soothed his rage in a way no other sound ever had, and her courtly tones put in his mind a higher, more worthy life than that to which fate had condemned him. He tried to revive his anger and stormed out of the hut, feigning the emotion. But the way he rubbed his burned-out eyelid—a tender spot on his soul, if no longer on his body—destroyed the camouflage.
“Yes, get outside and cool off,” the wife snorted in contempt.
Crazy Orhan turned back to the room now in a high state of agitation that, had he not been given his nickname for other reasons, would have given it to him then. Yet another day had gone by with no word from his son, yet another day with the nervous sensation of the Sultan’s women beneath his roof, and his wife would treat these things like child’s play.
“Another word from you,” he said dangerously, “and I will have your shrewish gizzard.” The woman opened her mouth and he stopped her. “No. I don’t even want to hear your whining apologies.”
His wife smiled knowingly and pretended to be afraid until her man’s back was gone from the room. Then she turned her violence onto Safiye instead. “Look at those eyes,” she sneered. “A slut’s eyes, squandering what the labor of honest women has bought for her. Whore! I see those eyes, like dice, risking all on a single roll.
