“Yes, we’re here,” he announced, breathlessly.
Safiye helped the prince tuck the end of the muslin in at the back of his head. Then she brought her fingers forward and let them dawdle, still hopeful they could change his mind, on his neck where the thick body hair turned into even thicker beard. Thwarted in this, she hurried to fasten the aigrette set with diamonds and its three rust brown pheasant feathers over an unsightly bulge of fabric in the turban’s center front. Finally, she shoved the prince out the door and settled back to wait, hoping he wouldn’t be too long as the sedan grew hotter by the minute.
“Hurry up, Safiye,” he hissed.
His turban seemed dangerously close to the verge of unraveling, grotesquely large and lumpy, for they’d come nowhere near the tight, compact ball of which such fine fabric was capable. The feathers wobbled. It was all she could do to keep from laughing.
“I thought I’d just wait here until you’re finished. Please your mother.”
“No,” Murad insisted. “I mean to please you. I mean for you to see this as well.”
So the two of them undertook yet another scramble with fabric, this time with the heavy outer wrapper, head veil, and none-too-fine gauze for the face necessary to make Safiye presentable.
And then Murad stepped aside to let Ghazanfer be her eyes. For even if she was veiled, it wasn’t seemly for the public to see a virtuous woman too close to any man, not even her husband—if she were legally married. How much more so when she was not?
Any other woman in a similar position must have shrunk conventionally back into her veils for shame at such thoughts. Safiye felt her determination harden instead, her ambition piqued rather than thwarted.
XIII
The midmorning summer air burned like clear, unwatered raki as it went down the throat. The sedan’s iron fittings throbbed audibly, expanding, creaking like live things. Even through a veil, her dark-accustomed eyes found the great expanse of sun on naked soil too brilliant to stare at directly. Safiye bowed her head—some would be pleased to read modesty there—and kept her attention close by, no further than the dust-trimmed hem of Ghazanfer’s skirt.
Just outside the sedan chair, she sensed rather than saw the bearers squatting at rest, passing a skin slick, almost obscene, with seeping water among them. Those six bearers from the poles on the other side had already taken the liberty of coming around to the door, for they had thoughtfully placed this facing west. All twelve of them now crowded together in the little bit of shade allowed by a sun rising rapidly over the sedan’s roof.
So tight was the press that Safiye felt her wrapper drag across one bony knee. She sensed that the man was fully aware of the difference between her body’s active heat—encapsulated as it was, concentrated—and the surrounding world’s passivity. The quick exchange of husband for eunuch couldn’t have fooled the bearers. They knew what sort of lurching rubbed their shoulders raw. No doubt they’d make some comment among themselves once she was out of earshot. She’d told Murad horses were better.
Still, after all, what was the discomfort of a few bearers to her? The lower sort of humanity existed to carry the upper, both physically and as the burden of their tongues.
We must be in a desert, Safiye thought, considering the heat, the glare, the total lack of vegetation, and the puffs of yellow dust that pillowed every step she took. She did not know Magnesia—or any place in Turkey for that matter—more than descriptions of land rents in the Divan or the view between a sedan’s slats or from a lofty upper-floor lattice allowed her to imagine. That such sources might tend to an illiberal view of the world seemed impossible to her mind. But she knew of no desert in the provincial capital’s environs.
She might have known from the sounds that this was no desert, though: the ring of metal on metal, the thud of iron on dead earth, the call of many men to their fellows like the chorus of some unmusical lyric. And as her eyes adjusted to the assault of light and singing heat waves, she began to see things no desert would contain. Numerous crews of men populated the space, not just ordinary men, but well-fed, well-muscled janissaries. She could tell because, though they had mostly stripped to the waist for the work they were doing, they maintained their white headgear with the telltale drape down to their shoulders at the rear.
The work entailed digging, deep digging in at least two spots that she could see. Relays carried the fill away in baskets and dumped it off the hillside. Lines of little donkeys also tiptoed up under great weights which, when unloaded, proved to be blocks of fine white building ashlar. Other janissaries stacked the stone here and there, in readiness.
“This must be the site of his mosque.” Safiye adjusted her original judgment away from ‘naked desert.’ “Ghazanfer, ask him if it is.”
The eunuch hastened to comply and brought back an affirmative. Safiye had heard of the project, of course, although when Murad flushed with aesthetic details, she listened less. Like his evenings with poets and scholars, she let him indulge alone. The legal battles challenged her more.
“This buying up enough land to clear for the scheme is taking an inordinate amount of time,” she had commented to Murad on several occasions.
“I don’t want it so far out of town that no one will pray there,” had been the prince’s reply. “It must be close to water as well, for ablutions. That makes a suitable plot difficult to come by.”
“Who are these people holding up the business, then?”
“Just small landholders. Old families with too many children, not enough land.”
“I thought they must be great lords or something, by the trouble they raise. If such people will not sell
