My burst of blasphemy silenced her babble for a while and pressed her lips together, thin and white. In exhaustion, I slumped to the ground beside her, arms over my head and my head between my knees.
“No, Abdullah,” she said eventually, very quietly so perhaps she only thought it and, in the stillness, I was able to read her thoughts. “No, even now, try as I might, I cannot wish this thing undone against Allah’s will. You may think this very selfish of me, or cruel, but I can’t help it. For if Allah had never willed it done, I never would have known you and that—even after so brief a time, I can tell—that would be the greatest loss of my life.”
Over the high, distant midmorning call of birds, I heard her front teeth working vigorously on bits of thyme. No mouthful was ever enough to send back to the molars; her incisors just made quick little rhythmic, nervous chops. Sleep thrummed up from the earth like the night’s evaporating storm, like the hum of bees on a last-minute raid to the mulberries.
After a long, drowsy while, Esmikhan murmured as if in her sleep. “And Safiye has something to do with this, doesn’t she?”
I felt myself floating on the warmth of the sun and could reply with no more than a grunt.
“I’ve seen you watching her, heard how you speak her name. Did Safiye bring you to this pass, Abdullah?”
This time my grunt attained no more than a deep sigh.
“Never mind. Perhaps, inshallah, you will tell me that story another time.” Her voice drowsed into unburdened breath.
L
The recurring dream of dervish and death brought me suddenly wide awake. Perhaps I groaned or even screamed. My lady, sleeping nearby with her veils all awry, and pillowed on the tuffet of thyme, stirred, too.
“Abdullah? What is it?” she murmured.
“It makes sense. Finally, it makes sense.”
“What makes sense?”
I doubted she could make much sense of anything, still half-asleep as she was. “Just a mystery that’s been preying on my mind for a while.”
“What mystery?”
“Nothing. Go back to sleep, lady. I’m sorry I disturbed you.
“I’m awake now. Besides, it seems late.”
“The sun is past its zenith. We should be on our way soon. Rest until then, to build your strength. It was only something I dreamed.”
“Now you must tell me. A dream untold brings misfortune. It must be told and analyzed.”
“Is that a Turkish custom?”
“Custom? It is only common sense.”
“Oh, I see.”
“It will help me lose the drowsiness. Of what mystery did you dream?”
“Just something having to do with Salah ad-Din’s death.”
She sat straight up now without a hint of sluggishness. “Salah ad-Din is dead?”
“Yes.”
“The man who made you a slave and mutilated you is dead?”
“Yes.”
“Mashallah! You never said that.”
“I didn’t?”
“Mashallah! How?”
“Murder.”
“Abdullah—? Not you—?”
I gave a brief laugh at the horror in her face. “No, lady. Calm yourself.”
“Well, I have seen what you did to the brigands. I know you’re fully capable.”
“Certainly I wished his death, wished it at my hands, every waking moment.”
“Mashallah. Allah turn the evil of that thought from you.”
“At first, of course, I was too weak to consider it. Later, as I mended in spite of myself, I began to look for opportunities. But he was wily, that Salah ad-Din, very wily. Mostly he had his wife see to me and kept his distance.”
I continued: “Coward! Damnable coward, hiding behind his woman. I was allowed no knife. My food was heavy on the sweets and dairy foods they say make tractable eunuchs. Once in awhile a little veal, but not often, because of the cost and then always prepared in bite-sized pieces.” “It’s a wonder you healed so well without flesh to eat,” Esmikhan commented.
“And the other knife with which I would have taken my revenge on the wife, they’d done away with that as well.”
“You never tried to escape?”
I had to smile at my lady’s explicit faith in the proportions of my heroism. “I thought of it, yes. But you know Pera. I was kept in the center of Pera.”
“It is the home of your countrymen.”
“Exactly.”
“But you could have escaped to them.”
“Could I? And what sort of life was there for me back in Venice? Now?” I couldn’t keep the cry of anguish from my voice.
“Your women have no khuddam?” Her voice was full of sympathy—for Venetian women more than for me.
“Of course not,” I snapped. We are not barbarians, I almost continued. Then I thought better of it and sought to ease any hurt my curtness might have caused with: “Unless they can sing.”
“With you they make khuddam just to sing?”
“Now, that is odd, isn’t it? Well, I can’t sing. I’ve never had a voice. In any case, I couldn’t bear the shame. I’ve already told you about those two countrymen of mine I overheard in the bazaar, how mortified I was for them to see me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized what an effective fence Salah ad-Din had created in his location. What other life had he left for me to return to?”
“I see. But the murder, Abdullah. Get to the murder.”
“I’m coming to it. As I was saying, I had about decided just to kill myself and at least deprive the bastard of the profit of his deed. I had even fashioned a rope from old sheeting that
I hoped could bear my weight. I had it hidden under my pallet for the hour I should get my courage up. I was about to do it, too.”
“Speak not of that, Abdullah, only to thank Allah your hand did not succeed against yourself. But the murder —”
“I actually had the rope swung over a dubiously rotten rafter when they brought the body home.”
“From where?”
“Salah ad-Din had gone across to the City that day to see to his shop in the bazaar. Most days, actually, this was his custom. He often slept across in Constantinople, to save himself
