Safiye didn’t reply to the midwife’s invitation. Instead, when the tantalization of clairvoyant union with her eunuch had past, she spoke in another vein. She retained in her voice, however, the note of husky desire which, she knew, drew the midwife to her like a lodestone.
“How the war with Portugal goes will affect how willing you are to slather my face with any of your concoctions, my dearest Quince.”
“Fair one, I would not hesitate to do so if almonds were as dear as gold.”
Safiye sighed as if the entire world conspired against their mutual attraction. “I wish—” She let the Quince’s imagination fill in the wish voluptuously, then continued, glancing at the crowded room about them as if that alone thwarted the mutual granting of that wish.
“—I do wish our lord the Sultan would free enough men from other arenas to complete construction of that canal joining our Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea at Suez. That would defeat the upstart, renegade Portuguese once and for all, have them on their knees before us to spice their sausages.”
“What can a ditch through some desert possibly have to do with you here, my heart?”
“Sometimes you do surprise me in the narrowness of your thinking. You are an intelligent woman, my Quince. The most intelligent in this harem.”
“Do I take that as a compliment?” The Quince struggled a bit with her veil, the first effort in that direction she had evidently made all day.
“Of course.”
“I’m not certain. Sometimes I’d rather hear you call me beautiful.”
“Well, my Quince, you’re clearly not...”
Safiye bit her tongue and was much relieved to hear the midwife laugh, as if this were no matter.
“Sometimes I think you equate beauty with wisdom,” the Quince said, “as if anybody with any sense would choose to be beautiful if she could.”
“Well, certainly, any woman...”
“And so this makes you not only the fairest in our harem, but the most intelligent as well?”
Safiye was glad to hear the other woman laugh again, although it was a fuzzy, bitter laugh, like her nickname, the Quince. Safiye did not trust herself to make a reply, however. How could she, without offense? Or without striking the phial from the midwife’s hand.
The Quince spoke first. “I’m not so certain as you are. Oh, not that you aren’t fair and intelligent, my Safiye, but that the two keep good company most of the time. Or that beauty is to be preferred above intelligence. And both outweigh a certain sweetness, kindness, concern for one’s fellows. Love.”
“Oh, my Quince! Who are you to speak of loving kindness and tender mercy? You have a heart, we all know, as hard and tart as your namesake fruit.”
The midwife shifted on her cushion, clearly made uncomfortable by the barest hint of accusation, of blackmail.
“But do the narrow walls of this harem cramp your mind as well?” Safiye continued.
“My Safiye, does the lure of a distant mirage blind you to what is here, this that is more real than realms and principalities?”
“What can be more important than the spread and security of our master Suleiman’s empire? That empire that will be Murad’s. And our son’s.”
“And yours?”
“Yes, and mine.”
“Allah willing.”
“Allah willing, of course.”
After a pause spent conforming the movement of her heavily used hands to the ellipse of Safiye’s skin, the Quince’s cause, whatever it was, subsided. The midwife regained her contentedness to give Safiye anything, even her topic of conversation.
“In spite of the distance,” she said, “I understand our lord receives ambassadors from Calicut, Malabar—as far away as Sumatra—pleading with him in the name of that Islam we share to come to their defense against these heathen Portuguese.”
The Quince took up no more almond cream on her fingers, for Safiye’s alabaster was already slick with it. But she kept working on that face. From temple to lips, from bridge of nose to point of chin she slipped, as loathe to part contact as a lover at dawn.
Safiye closed her eyes and sighed, trying to set the tone between the satisfaction the Quince was hoping to evoke and the disappointment and frustration the conversation made her truly feel.
Safiye said: “And to each supplicant our lord gives a cloth of gold coat of honor, a sack of silver aspers—but not the artillery and master gunners they want. They deserve.”
“I suppose a man, even a sultan, cannot be everywhere at once, and must pick and choose his battles.”
“And the harem, a woman’s country, denies a woman the right to be anywhere.”
“But that same denial allows her to be much more omnipresent than a man’s world allows him.”
This again. What was the midwife driving at? Let her keep to her potions and magics, things she can understand. But for an instant, Safiye felt herself drawn in by the sweep of the hand across her face and she kept her thoughts to herself.
The Quince continued, lulling: “A woman is invisible, yet the touch of her finger is everywhere.”
“Like Allah?” Safiye purred.
“Like Allah,” the Quince replied.
VIII
Safiye smiled at the notion of an invisible woman as God. She saw her smile shoot through the midwife’s body, the Quince’s eyes half close with the rigor of emotion.
“But I—no less than the Sultan—must pick and choose my battles,” Safiye said. “I think—if it’s Allah’s will—I shall know better than the old man how to choose, when I am there.
“In the meantime, the site of the old man’s war with the Portuguese is so distant, the hostilities so scattered, it takes forever to hear word of what has happened and even longer to decipher what
