“Perhaps.”
She could not bear to see me a queen in my own right rather than attendant on my sons, Safiye thought but didn’t say.
Murad mused aloud, “Perhaps if Allah were to give us a child...She could not then contain her grandmotherly joy.”
“Yes, that’s what it would take.”
“Or maybe when she knows you better.”
“I fear we know each other all too well now.”
“She doesn’t know you as I do.”
“For that I’m glad.” Safiye planted a kiss on the point where Murad’s turban met his brow and began to wind him back from this distraction.
“So until then, love, please...” Murad fought to resist her touch but failed.
“Until then. Or until she dies.”
“Allah forbid it!” Murad turned the passion of this prayer back onto Safiye, eliciting another curse from the bearers.
And Baffo’s daughter knew she should drop the subject there. She worked her fingers up into the prince’s tightly bound turban, over the familiar bumps and planes of his meticulously shaved head. Until then. Until then there was no reason not to lie back and relax, enjoy the love of her prince, how her every touch made him gasp and sigh. They had a long ride to get to the Boz mountains where the army encampment and the hunting would be. It would take the better part of the day at bearers’ pace.
Safiye took a moment to fumble behind her among the sedan’s folds of velvet for her silver cases of farazikh, the compounds the midwife had taught her to make that would prevent conception. The trick would be to get one inside before Murad got there first, and without his knowledge. This had presented challenges before, but she’d always managed it. Murad was naive in such matters—and, in the heat of passion, oblivious to the point of distraction. Of course, night provided good cover, and she always took care to go prepared whenever she was called into the prince’s presence.
Daylight had its drawbacks, even in the gloom of the shuttered sedan. But she got the proper case open and one of the medicated sticks in her hand without detection. The sheep’s tail-fat, very soft in her fingers, released the familiar scent of powerful drugs—rue and myrrh predominated. Their odor must also stimulate Murad, for his passion stiffened against her thighs. She gave a groan of encouragement and thought she must only wait ‘til he loosened the tie of her shalvar. She doubted he’d bother with anything else this time.
Meanwhile, with her free hand, she returned to work on his head. Under his turban’s muslin she found first the fine linen undercap and then his topknot. She twisted the shock of hair between her fingers till the scent of the musk he used filled the cramped sedan to every seam of its paneling, covering her telltale drugs. Safiye reached up to meet Murad’s lips, swollen again and panting in his ardor. She drew those lips to hers with her tongue as though on a leash, but as the kiss began, the flex of her hands knocked the turban free.
Murad sat up with another jolt and yet more blasphemy from the bearers. He might have had cold water thrown on that naked scalp of his and that single, dangling hank of rusty, Russian-red hair he’d inherited from his grandmother. Safiye thought this, but could not imagine what the matter was.
“My love, what is it?”
With a lurch, then, she felt the chair sink to the ground beneath her.
“We’re here.” Murad panicked.
“Here? Where? The mountains are farsakhs away. My love, in truth you must find new bearers. These who can’t mind their own business and keep discreet about a little—”
“A plague upon this infidel turban,” Murad said, quite forgetting in his distress that nothing was, in fact, more of the Faith than a turban. “I will have to rewind it without valets while those fools of bearers hem and haw and smirk out there.”
“Let them smirk, then get rid of them.”
“I never meant for this to happen.”
“Oh, didn’t you?” Safiye asked him, taking a passing squeeze at the stake of the tent formed in the lap of his shalvar, betraying just how urgent was the desire from which the cursed turban distracted him.
The sedan was suddenly full of white muslin. What had fit so tightly and neatly on Murad’s head before now left room for little else. She tried to lend a hand, but a royal turban—each extra span a sign of higher nobility—demanded the length of an audience hall to achieve the proper tautness, the interweaving of layers in a smooth dovetail over the brow.
“Forget the turban for the moment.” Safiye lost an important tuck at this juncture. They would have to start again, either turban or love, and she’d rather do the second one first, so as to have the trouble with the turban but a single time. Love was better with efficiency. “Just yell at the fellows to move on. We’ll get to it later.”
“But I told them to stop here,” Murad said, finding one muslin end and determined to start the winding once again.
“We’re nowhere near the mountains. You can tell. It’s getting too beastly hot in here and the muslin is taking up all the air.”
“Not near the mountains, no. But they are waiting for us. I have to get out. And I can’t go like this!”
He’s about some governing business, Safiye thought. We haven’t even left town yet. But nothing too important, she decided, or she would know about it already.
Murad said: “There’s something I wanted to show you first.”
“Here?”
“I assume it’s here. They wouldn’t have stopped before. They are good men, for all your complaints.”
Winding a turban is something like braiding, Safiye thought. She picked up quickness in the task, once she’d tucked the farazikh—the heat of her hands had melted this particular dose too much in any case—secretly under a cushion and wiped most of the stickiness there as well.
When the pass of palm over smoothing palm
