Nevertheless, it touched her. No matter what he protested aloud, having an heir was as important for Murad as it was for any other man. Perhaps more so. Murad was willing to go to the fabulous expense of building a mosque—with Venetian glass, even—in order to attain it.
Safiye had to look at the absurdity of his ill-wrapped turban to temper her swelling emotion with reality. It also helped to remember a recent scene.
“Mother says you are doing something to keep from having a child,” Murad had accused her at this time. “I don’t know about such things, but is this possible? How on earth is this possible, my love?”
“Your mother has a bitter, jealous tongue,” Safiye had replied with a tight coolness.
She struggled to regain that coolness now as the sedan door closed on them. “How can she think I’d deny you anything, my lord and prince?”
“That’s what I told her.”
“And you believed her?”
“No. No, my love, I believe you.”
But if this mosque was being built to petition the One who could give the prince a son—well, Allah’s will had nothing to do with it. The great Muradiye mosque and its complex of pious and charitable buildings was, in fact, built to no one else’s honor but her own.
XIV
Far off to the west, white clouds marked the horizon where, although she couldn’t see it, Safiye knew the Mediterranean lay. The clouds swelled and clustered—like the ripening grapes on the vines they’d passed in the valleys below. But for the sky, this was just practice. It would be a month, probably, before such a sky actually ripened, full of white wine, before it marshaled its drunken troops to march inland with the season’s first rain. For the moment, most of the vault was un-veined lapis lazuli, too rich, too weighty, too parched for use, or for the use of anything under it.
The land in all directions panted under waves of heat, reflecting off that sky and yearning towards harvest, towards the olive press and the satisfied smell of fresh-filled granaries. Safiye looked over it all to the clouds, thought Mediterranean, thought beyond, to Constantinople, then had to force her thoughts back to the present. Magnesia wasn’t Constantinople, but it was a step in the right direction. She must perform this stint well, no matter how impatient she grew, in order to earn the next one.
Ghazanfer had set up a lovely little spot in the shade with cushions, rugs, and a repast of stuffed grape leaves; sliced cucumbers in salted, vinegared olive oil, flecked with sweet basil and pepper; napkin-wrapped flat bread, still warm and puffing at the black blisters; honeyed yogurt; fresh peaches to close. It was too hot to eat. Mostly Safiye concentrated on the pomegranate sherbet, tanged with lemon. No matter how much she drank, it still crunched with ice. How Ghazanfer managed that on such a hot day did not concern her.
That there was enough of everything for two was a little more disconcerting. The fluff of the lining velvet still itched on her sweating skin, but Safiye knew there would be no return to the stifling sedan after this rest. Thankfully, Magnesia, its prying eyes, its tattling tongues, was far enough behind them; it would be horses from now on. Murad had gone to see to the horses and then sent word back through Ghazanfer that the officers of the corps had detained him. He could not refuse their invitation to eat with them.
From time to time she could hear their coughs of rough male laughter carried around the intervening outcrops of limestone. She longed to overhear what sparked those flashes of merriment, the solid kindling and fuel beneath, almost as much as she wished to be back in Constantinople where the magnificent heart of the empire beat.
But the longer she sat where Ghazanfer had set her, the quiet, rustic pageant curling about her feet distracted her more and more. At first she thought the eunuch’s sole purpose in placing her here was the shade. She certainly had to crane her neck to see those clouds over the Mediterranean and she was maddeningly far from Murad and the officers.
But then Ghazanfer presented her with a handful of flowers he’d plucked from the wayside: asters, mostly, the lavender blossoms tiny, pale, dusty, brittle, weedy with drought. And then she realized that the spot gave her an excellent view of a shady grotto let into the steep side of the hill. A small stream trickled from the rock here, pale and thin as her heat-bleached flowers.
And within the grotto was a white stone the size and shape of a woman.
Safiye shifted from one end of the rugs that bounded her space to the other. No matter at what angle she sat, Safiye could not escape the impression that this was a real woman, her hair veiled, standing rigid with her arms pressing to her breast in a tight, hopeless grief. The fact that the source of the little stream was out of the rock near the woman’s head and that it pursued its ageless trickle across her hardened person—this exaggerated the impression of sorrow.
The hand and chisel of man had aided the natural form of the stone, roughed in a waist, the edge of an arm, a chin. This artifice was much older than the Greek and Roman sculptures she had seen, cruder—but this made it all the more compelling in a wild, barbaric sort of way. The individual moment of beauty captured by the classical style was superseded here by mere suggestion that encompassed every woman, indeed, the universe itself in a shapeless, basic anonymity.
“Niobe,” Ghazanfer said. “All tears.”
At first Safiye didn’t ask for any more explanation, no more than she asked her attendant how he happened
