“Hyacinth. You remember him, a khadim that belongs to Mihrimah Sultan. Ah, well. She is lax in her discipline, that daughter of our master.”
Yes, now Safiye remembered the man. She hadn’t recognized the topography of his stripped, well-muscled chest—its valleys and high, flat plains—nor the tangle of mousy brown hair on his head. These features had always been hung with furs and capped with white linen before.
And that mincing name! Hyacinth, for such a figure of a man! It was enough to confuse anyone.
“But what’s he accused of doing? Deflowering Mihrimah’s virgins?” Safiye nearly laughed at the notion.
“They found him with Selim’s current favorite.” The subject put bile in Nur Banu’s voice.
“When I said ‘virgins,’ I only half jested. I’d believe this particular khadim not only capable but anxious to do so.”
“Not with Selim’s girl,” Nur Banu fairly spat her disgust. “With his boy.”
Now, Safiye made it her practice not to let anything surprise her. Surprise was the first sign of an irredeemable weakness.
So she said: “I can’t imagine this sordid little affair can please our master the Sultan’s ears.” She looked at the older woman with a hard pity. To be unable to wean her man from his drink, let alone a boy! “His heir a bugger as well as a drunk. Or...? Yes, perhaps it is better to keep quiet about it.”
Nur Banu answered the barely concealed threat in Safiye’s words with a look such as a potter might give a vase that displeases and shames him just before he dashes it to the ground. The older woman restrained herself, however, and Safiye swallowed her own spittle into meekness.
There was no reason, Safiye realized, why she couldn’t be standing here waiting her turn in the stocks rather than just observing. Her relationship with the harem’s first woman had disintegrated to the point where it seemed only a matter of time before Nur Banu decided this pleasure was worth incurring Murad’s wrath. Of course Prince Murad was the only male his mother had any control over anymore—this sordid affair with the boy was proof of that. Nur Banu would attack Murad’s beloved—and risk his wrath—only with the greatest caution. Still, restraint was best, Safiye decided. It was no use frightening off the game by making it too jumpy too soon.
In spite of her prudent thoughts, Safiye couldn’t suppress her next comment: “I for one doubt he’s guilty.”
She meant her words to more than defy authority. She timed them carefully to the quiet between two blows. They’d carry.
“He says he’s not,” Nur Banu confirmed, settling her anger with dignity. “But they all say that.”
“I believe him.” Safiye punctuated off the pulse again.
“He says he only let the boy crawl into his bed for comfort after the rigors of my lord’s passion.”
For a moment, Safiye imagined herself crawling into that bed. Though she would never confess to the need of such comfort, she felt the pleasure of that warmth, the silent dark, those enfolding arms.
Nur Banu continued: “Hyacinth says he only let the lad cry on his shoulder. But again—they all would say that.”
“By Allah, I believe him.”
The eunuch in the stocks shifted his tawny mane, ever so slightly, to fix Safiye with a pair of icy, feral blue eyes flecked with green. And she, in return, ever so slightly dropped her veil. He’d recognize her when next they met. If the pain he then shut those eyes against were not too numbing. She hoped it was not.
“Come, Safiye,” Nur Banu said. “They won’t be at it too much longer. He’s bound for the Seven Towers as soon as they’ve finished here.”
“The Seven Towers” Safiye had a hard time telling whether she felt fear or thrill. She often did.
Safiye had never been to the Towers. She had never even seen them, though she knew the ancient fortress, dating to the Christian era, was within the vast palace compound, off where the land walls and the sea walls joined. There, far from—and yet always at the edge of—the mind of the world, prisoners moldered. And there was equipment for more serious tortures than this mild caning. There, only the torturers could hear the screams and extracted confessions over the sounds of the sea and the silencing distances.
The sea also provided a quick and discrete disposal site for those prisoners who did not survive their stay. Most of the rest walked—or were dragged, broken men—to the blocks before the Executioner’s Fountain where soon enough their bodiless heads would be displayed as an example to others.
“Yes, take him to the Seven Towers,” Safiye said, turning to comply with Nur Banu’s urging that she move on. “This bastinado is child’s play to such a man.”
But she was careful to say this away from the courtyard and under cover of the sound of the lash.
VII
With the help of a mirror, Baffo’s daughter could always shut a lattice in her mind against the noise and brilliance of the harem just as the harem shut its lattices against the world. The Quince’s green headdress with its gold-coin fringe flashed for a moment in the mirror, but Safiye adjusted the angle and then saw only her own face. The reflected oval fit the mirror’s gold enameled rim perfectly.
Tight oval echoes were also formed about her person by the hummingbirds’-egg emeralds in her ears, the matching wren’s-egg at her throat—new gifts from her prince. The reverberation of shape gave her pleasure.
Even dearer than pleasure was the image of concentric self, like rings round a pebble dropped in a pond but flowing inward instead of out. This image helped her to focus her being which otherwise, in the harem, was liable to dissipate. Dissipation happened to too many other women she met, women otherwise intelligent and firm of purpose. Such women lost concentration to the diversions of this place, became as silly and vacuous—as it was hoped they would become.
We are kept here for just this reason, Safiye
