“So usually, it was just the wife and me in the little house, she with the keys to the door hung safely about her waist. She was trying to train me in a eunuch’s social graces: how to serve at table, how to run errands, how to shop in the bazaar with a woman’s eye, how to lard my Turkish with elegant phrases as opposed to sailor’s talk, how to hold the curtains as she got in and out of a carriage, all of that.
“And she tried to make a Muslim of me. ‘That you were uncircumcised when you came here is no longer an issue, is it?’ she told me. ‘That is the biggest fear most men face for conversion—unless they’re Jews to begin with. You know, there is honor for your kind among us. Only khuddam are allowed to be attendants in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Didn’t you know that? Female pilgrims need guides as well as male, of course. And khuddam stand guard at the boundaries between sacred and profane as well as be- tween men and women, that other boundary Allah in His All-Knowing wisdom ordained. Perhaps, if you embrace the Faith with your whole heart, inshallah, this could someday be your calling.’
Esmikhan asked with some concern: “She didn’t make a Muslim of you, Abdullah?”
“One who is neither male nor female can stand at the boundary between Christian, Jew, Muslim, and pagan, can he not?”
I suppose.
“She was a nice enough woman, I guess, in her own sloppy way, though my thirst for revenge found it difficult to see her as anything but vengeance’s object. She did favor capers in her cooking—even a eunuch’s food—entirely too much. A Turkish woman married to an Italian turncoat who gave her no children, not an enviable fate. She might have been more apologetic for the way in which her husband earned his living at my expense. I suppose she would have been, too, if the fact that he usually couldn’t afford to provide her with a eunuch—just a little Armenian girl in the kitchen—didn’t tempt her into taking full advantage of one when she had him.
“In any case, I did my best to learn as little as possible— of everything.”
“Oh, Abdullah, you are too modest.”
“Salah ad-Din came from time to time to have a home-cooked meal and see how we were coming along, how soon the profit could be turned on his investment. His wife had a vested interest in this. Her sash frayed right in two while I was dawdling along.”
“But the last time this man came home?”
“Dead. Throat cut. In the bazaar. The men who found him—other slavers—ferried him over and brought him up to the house, laying him out on a low wooden couch covered with a white sheet in the courtyard. It was summer, hot, and the flies had already found and followed him. He stank. The new widow was beside herself. It was, in fact, her screams, that made me leave my purpose with the sheet just tossed over the rafters. Oh, she could wail! Keening until the rest of us would fain lose our wits as well.”
“Poor woman.”
“Anyway, I was sent down to the local mosque for the imam at once and I had to help with the washing of the corpse.”
“Yes?”
I shrugged. “I was sent for sheeting and I pulled the stuff down from my rafter and used that to wash him with.”
“Yes?”
“It was then that I saw what the men who brought him had been careful to conceal from his wife. The man who’d cut his throat had also castrated him, leaving a gaping red-black hole alive with blue bottles. It was impossible to say whether he’d bled to death from the neck or the groin first.”
“So it must have been someone with revenge on his mind. Someone who knew—”
“Revenge. For me? Or others? I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. It was enough that he went to his grave without his manhood, without children and that hope of eternity—if he has the faith of your Chinese. Same as he condemned me to do.”
“Allah balances all, they say.”
“In any case, very shortly thereafter—within two days— the widow learned that her husband had vast outstanding debts, never mind her sash money. With him gone, so was his credit. She had to sell it all—including me—to save a pittance to take back home to her brother’s house. That was when I went to market, cheap. When Ali, unable to resist a bargain, even with a master the likes of Sokolli Pasha, bought me. Since then, there have been so many new things on my mind, I haven’t thought about Salah ad-Din’s end—except with brief feelings of warm justification—since then.”
“So you don’t know who did it?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t care. Some angel. So I was content to think until this morning.”
“What happened this morning? Your dream?”
“Yes, partly. I also remembered the mutterings of the men who brought the body home.”
“They had seen the murderer?”
“Someone had. ‘A dervish,’ they kept saying over and over again. ‘A dervish. A crazy dervish.’ That such a madman could never be found or put to death for his crime was clear to them.”
“Dervishes have that ability to vanish in thin air.”
“We saw that last night, didn’t we?”
“A coincidence.”
“More than a coincidence.”
“So they never did find him?”
“I suppose not. But I have.”
“You? How?”
“It was the same dervish that helped our escape last night. As I said, more than a coincidence.”
“How can you be so certain? There are hundreds of dervishes. Thousands. And this one wasn’t so crazy. More like a guardian angel.”
“Exactly.”
“You can’t know it wasn’t just the coincidence of two dervishes—two dervishes and a dream.”
“But I know.”
“How, Abdullah?”
“Because if
