I meant to be noncommittal while I searched under other leaves with my free hand. The truth was I could see better with the turban up where it belonged. I guess she could, too.
“Is this the case with all khuddam?”
“Not all are as... as radically served as I was. If one is younger...”
She pressed my hand again when I couldn’t go on. “Abdullah, we will find it.”
Desperate to change the subject, I asked: “Do you know the wooden Tower of Leander?” When I spoke slowly and deliberately, my hands searched that way, too.
Esmikhan shook her head. She had looped the ends of her veil up and under her cap to keep them out of her face. Her cheeks were flushed with the open air. Her black eyes sparkled with the wind like the last of the rain clinging to the grasses.
“It is in Constantinople. It sits on a lone rock right in the center of the bay where the waters of the Golden Horn, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosphorus all meet together, over against the Asian side. I am certain you can see it from your grandfather’s palace and have passed it in your caïque many times. Your grandfather the Sultan likes to draw a chain from this tower across the entire bay and keep either untaxed trade or entire navies out. But there is a story to the tower, above and beyond its practical uses. My uncle told it to me.”
“Tell me the story.”
“It is said that the fair Hero of ancient times lived in that tower and every night her lover Leander, of whom her family disapproved, would swim out across the water to be with her. Just before dawn, he would swim back again.”
“How could he see his way?”
“Hero would light a lamp for him and set it in her window.”
“That’s a sweet story.”
“Not so sweet. One night, a storm blew out the lamp. As the brave Leander floundered without guide, the high waves overcame him and he was drowned.”
“Oh, no.”
“When Hero looked out of her lonely tower with the morning light, she saw her lover’s body washed up on her rock. For grief, she flung herself down from the tower and died.”
“How awful! I liked the story better when it ended earlier.” “But this way is more like real life—it never ends soon enough.”
“Ah, say not so, Abdullah. Not the day after you have rescued me from a fate worse than death.”
“Look for the tower when you cross back into Constantinople. You cannot miss it. I could see it even from Pera, from the high little window, through its bars and over the red-tiled roofs while I suffered my end. And there was nobody to save me from a fate worse than death.”
I meant to stop right there. That was already more than enough to say, in fact. But I found myself speaking with an urgency suddenly more desperate than my physical need.
XLVIII
I told Esmikhan Sultan all about that dark little house beyond Pera, how it was set in the midst of gnarled old olive trees.
“That must have been nice,” my lady exclaimed.
“So no one could hear my screams,” I quickly disabused her. “So no one would come to my rescue.”
I continued. I couldn’t stop myself. “The trees were in bloom and the pollen swelled my eyes shut while I slept. Sometimes sheep wandered through the orchard, shifting boulders in the springtime mist.”
“It was in spring?”
“Yes.”
“A hard time for such a fate.”
“Ramadhan came.”
“Yes, I remember. Most of my life, the holy fast has been in the summer and we haven’t been allowed a sip of water in the heat until after sundown.”
“You know, the first time I heard the cannon from the walls—”
“The cannon that announces the end of the fast every night at sundown?”
“Yes. The first couple times I heard that, I thought, ‘It’s my countrymen. They’ve turned their big guns on Serai Point. They’ve come to rescue me.’
“But they hadn’t. They wouldn’t. And once I thought about it, I decided I didn’t want them to. Not like this. There can be no recue from this fallen state.”
I took a breath and continued: “Then there was the Night of Power, just when I was starting to feel—well, not myself again. I shall never be myself. But—better. A little better. The Night of Power, what irony! When Muhammed was translated to the moon on his fabulous steed—”
“Blessings on Allah’s Prophet.”
“And all the minarets are lit with lamps.”
“Like Hero’s tower. I will always think of that from now on.
“There was such a minaret just over the tops of the olive trees, a low one, a little neighborhood mosque with moss on its tiled roof. Five times a day, the call came, measuring out the time of my torture. I found it a most melancholic sound.”
“Did you?”
“Void of all hope.”
“It must just have been that muezzin.”
“Perhaps. But the birds in the orchard—to torment me, there were lots of birds about their spring rites. And a nightingale, even. I heard a nightingale, just returned from the south. He sang every evening.
“And when the mist cleared, I could see all the way to the water, to Leander’s Tower, from the tiny barred window of my second-story cell. The view was like a painting. The festival, and all that came after it. A painting. Captured. Artificial. Cropped. A painting your religion believes it is presumptuous of mere mortals to make in tortured imitation of Allah’s creation. That painted world, that world of happy, bustling people had nothing to do with me. No more. I would never enter it again.”
Yes, slowly and deliberated was easier.
“They gave me nothing but plain water for a day after my arrival—like a pullet is starved, or a sacrificial goat. To make the cleaning easier. And on the morning of the second day, they brought me a warm posset and I was so
