But “Impregnable?” she asked her prince instead. “Perhaps, yes. When your ancestors built them and hoped their crossbow bolts might reach the decks of invaders’ ships.”
“Now we have cannon in each fort and so that much less to fear.”
“But the enemy has cannon as well. Not as in the days when Muhammed the Conqueror, your great forefather, turned firepower against the Byzantine Greeks who were as yet unarmed with guns.”
“But, you see, my sweet—” Murad took the tone with which one explains things to a child.
Safiye didn’t mind. She flattered him where she could. The prince still even thought he was responsible for his own advancement to sandjak hey.
“A cannonball has much less difficulty falling down”—the prince’s tutorial continued—”as, say, from those battlements, than flying up.”
“Precisely my point.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“In their effort to reach the invaders’ decks, your ancestors failed to claim the highest points on either side for their fortifications. See the precipice here—and across, there. Naked and unprotected as newborn babes—and peering right down into the fortress’s yards. An enemy would only have to get his guns up there—no light task, certainly, but perfectly possible in a single dark night—and he would control both forts and the strait.”
Murad ran from vantage point to vantage point in a paroxysm of denial until he could deny it no longer. Then Safiye helped him compose a letter to his grandfather the Sultan delineating the problem—as if the prince himself had discovered it, of course—and urging immediate action to remedy the situation.
At Izmir, Safiye saw the harbor, still silted up from the rapacity of Tamerlane.
“After over a hundred and fifty years, they might have re-dredged it,” she suggested.
“But we don’t want too many foreign ships coming to Izmir,” Murad said, the blush of a sea breeze riding above his beard.
“Why ever not? Foreign trade will make the region bloom.”
“The region feeds Constantinople and, most importantly, the armies of the faithful. If unbelievers help themselves, Muslims will go hungry.”
Safiye remarked that there were plenty of foreign merchants scrambling for bargains of silks and cottons, figs and malmsey, in Izmir’s bazaars anyway. She liked to stop the sedan and overhear the talk of Venetians with Genoese incognito. And she noted the species she had never seen before but learned to recognize as Englishmen. Those Englishmen who had not adopted Turkish dress sweltered irrationally in heavy woolens. Their faces were sunburnt and burnt again peeling, pink as fresh fig flesh.
And everywhere, everywhere along the coast were the classical ruins. Colonnades of teeth-white pillars leered down on the sea from deserted promontories. Great bowls of theatres echoed emptily against their drab hillsides, still able to seat tens of thousands in comfort. Agoras and villas and streets and temples were empty save for the occasional shepherd with his flock. Yet, the permanence of their stones, glaring an impervious white under the best efforts of a malevolent sun, seemed to need only the quick addition of a few softening touches: awnings, strings of laundry, cushions, a few potted plants, perhaps, to make them thriving metropolises once more.
Ruins such as these defied the word “ruin.” They would stand for as many generations again as they already had, generations, Safiye hoped, which would not be slaves of such prudery as the present one. Sometimes Murad found the stuff of their sightseeing objectionable. There were so many shamelessly naked figures with marble skin and unveiled beauty that no conqueror since their making had had time to chisel out all the eyes and privates to suit his higher standards of modesty and iconoclasm. Safiye pleaded with her prince not to complete the task for which his predecessors hadn’t had time.
“Not this one,” she counseled. “But consider—if the polytheistic Greeks and Romans could sustain such wonders on this land, there is no reason why the Turks cannot as well.”
And she felt the force of his concurrence in that night’s love.
XII
Time passed. For lovers, it was but moments. And regular mortals knew it as seventeen or eighteen months, sometimes long, sometimes short in perspective. It was late summer 1565, according to how Christians tell the years, and now in Magnesia, rides in sedan chairs had lost the odium for Safiye that they had for the harem in Constantinople. For one thing, Murad nearly always traveled with her, in the roomy, double chair he’d ordered.
He traveled with her now, on the hunt, urging open the sedan’s shutter to get as much of the early morning sun as possible on the day’s dispatches.
“You will not take Safiye on a hunt with you, my son,” he read from the top missive. “To expose yourself to such censure!” The mischievous sparkle that filled his eyes and the mimic in his voice told Safiye this letter could only be from his mother, Nur Banu.
Murad continued, or rather, Nur Banu did: “Safe in her harem, nothing a woman can do brings shame on her man. But in the public eye, one ill-timed giggle, and people will think not just her, but you, silly and frivolous. One slip of a sedan bearer, one twisted ankle as she passes from sedan to tent on uneven ground and in her veils, as she must. My dear, a twisted ankle, and folk will never let the prince of my heart live down the name as one who has no care for his women. Have we yet lived down the shame of the brigands, even though all of them were killed, and your indiscretion was neatly covered by saying your grandfather—may his realm last until eternity—made the roads safe for travelers?
“If you insist on taking her, the hunters will say you are one who is addicted to women, even if—Allah willing—no ill befalls her. ‘He is
