Shortly there were other things flying. Nur Banu caught up pots of beauty cream and launched them through the air after her words. Murano glass shattered, loosing the scent of a spice market within the narrow confines of the harem. Other pots thudded dully into the cushions close—too close—to Safiye’s love-disheveled head.
“Get out!”
So in defiant, tight control and slow, deliberate dignity, Safiye fulfilled the order. And even the Quince, who had come, hoping for a chance to comb out Safiye’s golden hair that morning, did not dare to follow.
Nonetheless, though Safiye did not hear it, she knew she was not alone. Confidently she sensed the shadow of Ghazanfer’s feet behind her. She saw no more than his hands as they opened the intervening doors, but she felt their surety as they closed those doors behind her against the harem’s chaos. She wondered as she walked, about the strength of such hands. Such hands, so solicitous, could overcome a man stumbling home drunk, even empty of any weapon. Such hands had forced more on the man’s unconsciousness with a Quince-provided potion. Then those hands had hoisted that Effendi up to broad shoulders and carried him through the fresh palace night to a place where the body couldn’t be missed.
“I dowsed him with more drink afterwards,” the great eunuch had reported in the laconic, hissing way the lack of teeth and outward masculinity forced him to. “A whole bottle of raki.”
She saw gratitude in his eyes then as he spoke, perfect gratitude. She knew if she cared to look back she would see it now, flooding the hard green with their only softness. She had given him revenge—as he had helped her to take her own ambition by the horns.
“Get out!”
Nur Banu screamed, out of all control. But the eunuch’s torture-scarred hands gently closed one final door and the sound dropped to nothing.
Then Safiye could set words the older woman didn’t say—that she would never say—into the calm of the oval of her own mind.
So you have won, you bitch, you demon from hell. You have won the heir’s sandjak for your lover. My son, whom in your presence I can no longer control. You’ve won it for him, for yourself Along with the sandjak you gain your own harem to add to your new eunuch. A harem free of my scrutiny. It puts my Murad—and your own accursed self—even further from my reach. We remain in Kutahiya, you go alone to Magnesia. Murad grows even closer to his grandfather, to his grandfather’s throne when the old man should vacate it.
And I? I am condemned not only to that fiendish overland journey and the desolation of yet another summer in Kutahiya, the end of the earth. But all my future is condemned to dependence on this man, this Selim, who forgets-—in his drunken stupors and love of boys—that I ever existed.
This is what Safiye heard, all she cared to hear. Still, the ears of her mind could not help but hear one further echo off the face of the naked tile, the echo of accusations Nur Banu had once actually flung at her.
“This you have won, this battle, you they call the Fair One, you whom I bought on the slave block. I might as well have purchased an afreet from the depths of hell. But the war is not over. Not by far. Do you know why?
“You have no son, you selfish slut. Murad may always tire of you, as Selim did of me. But unlike my good fortune, you have no son.
“And we have yet to see if you can conceive. May not the Quince’s potions destroy you as readily as they destroy others? May they not rot out your insides? If not in the original formula, in one she may be bribed to concoct?
“And if you can conceive, you know girls are born into this world as frequently as boys. More frequently, it seems to be Allah’s will, when their presence is least desired.”
Safiye denied all this, then as she did now. Heaven would never so betray the beauty it had given her. Would God betray holy writ? Still, her mind couldn’t shake the words.
“As long as you have no son, Fair One, you must know. You are vulnerable. You are more vulnerable, even, than I.”
XI
The sea journey to Magnesia was everything harem envy promised. The time did not dawdle away in the same spirit of languid indolence that most of the inmates imagined, however. She wouldn’t have liked it, Safiye supposed, if it had.
For example, she delighted in the sight of the Turk’s naval might from the vantage of the Sea of Marmara, the all-important shipyards, the arsenal on the soft, southern underbelly of the city’s peninsula. She counted five new war galleys under construction, like the skeletal ribs of beached sea monsters. On the water itself, she tallied every hull crested with Saint Mark’s banner. She nursed no interest to escape to them, but debated if she might know a captain or an owner and what he might be sailing for. She weighed their presence against the arsenal’s production.
Lacking more direct information of the Venetian vessels, she made Murad tell her the names and capacities of all the crescent-flagged ships in the harbor instead, their tonnage, their armament. She made him find out their captains if he didn’t know them, then entertain the cream of these corsairs—in a place where she could hear everything from behind a screen of sailing shroud—while they yet rode at anchor.
Then, at the Dardenelles, Murad took her ashore and together they inspected the two solid fortresses, built by the prince’s ancestors, that guarded the waterway from either side of the narrow strait. “So you need never fear, my Safiye,” the prince said, “or worry your pretty little head about an attack on the heart of our empire, Constantinople. You see the approach is impregnable.”
Safiye picked her way around the forts for a while with no reply. She knew her veils gave
