He did. “Niobe was a woman. A mortal woman.” She couldn’t expect Ghazanfer to warm to his tale like the best of wayside storytellers. “Niobe was blessed above the usual course of mortals.”
“Blessed with riches? She was a princess?” It wasn’t too self-effacing to urge the story on like this, else they might be at it all day.
Ghazanfer nodded but added: “The gods had given her many children, seven boys and seven girls.”
“Mashallah!” Safiye exclaimed in spite of herself, not at all certain that this was indeed a blessing.
“But she forgot.”
“What did she forget?” The eunuch had to be pulled out of his usual infuriatingly laconic style again.
“That it was the gods that had blessed her in the first place. She had the temerity to boast that she was greater than the goddess Leto, whose only two children were Apollo and Artemis.”
“So what happened?” Safiye tore nervously at the eunuch’s gift of asters and their brittle foliage.
“Leto’s children avenged their mother’s honor by showering their divine arrows down on Niobe’s offspring so they died, all fourteen of them, all in an instant.”
“Mashallah!”
“Niobe, in her grief, could not cease weeping until the great Creator took pity on her and turned her to stone. She weeps still, but at least she no longer suffers.”
“And this is the stone?”
“So they say.”
Having been chided once in an afternoon for superstition, Ghazanfer was not going to commit himself so readily. It was all Safiye could do to resist ordering him to do so at once. Such was the compulsion of the place, a power she desired, like all power. Unlike other power, however, she didn’t know how to claim it. Thus unnerved, she wanted to leave the place, but couldn’t begin to imagine where she might go to escape such a spell or even, she realized, how to get to her feet to begin to try.
Murad’s appearance with the horses was a great relief. The officers must have helped him to rewind his turban. He looked as neat and attractive as the entire meal she had failed to eat.
“My love, what’s the matter?” the prince asked as he helped her to her feet, helped her to rediscover what those appendages were for.
“Nothing. Nothing at all, my heart’s desire. Only missing you.”
For once, her lover’s patter was true and heartfelt. And her clinging to him somewhat embarrassed Murad in such a public place.
Fortunately, at the prince’s approach, the black flocks of pilgrims had taken flight like crows before a sling stone. Safiye suspected they and the spell would return as soon as Murad was gone, and she wanted to leave, with him and as quickly as possible.
Leaving Ghazanfer and a menial or two to pack up the re- mains of the meal, she let Murad lead her to the horses. She greeted her dappled mare with a hand to the muzzle and filled her head with the smell of horse, the smell of freedom—escape from the harem, the sedan. The smell, finally, of power.
Murad held the stirrup for her, promising all of this, but just before she lifted her foot to claim it, Ghazanfer interrupted.
“Lady?”
“What is it, khadim?”
Oddly, he approached no nearer, carefully keeping the horse’s flank between him and the prince as if he had something to hide. Safiye had no choice but to join the eunuch on the other side, leaving Murad with a little reassuring pressure on the arm—but was the reassurance for her lover or for herself?
“Yes, Ghazanfer, what is it?” She began with an exaggerated show of patience, indicating that patience was about to run out.
Ghazanfer closed the green of his eyes as he looked down. Following that look, she saw what the matter was. In each hand the eunuch held one of the silver cases in which she kept her pessaries, the farazikh that prevented conception.
“I found them in the sedan while I was packing up,” Ghazanfer elaborated.
“Of course. That’s where they ought to be. In case—” Did she have to spell it out for this sexless creature?
But now she saw more. The eunuch held the cases, protecting his flattened hands from the metal with the ends of his sash. Both cases lay open. The sheep’s tail-fat in one, the black tar in the other, had melted in the sedan’s heat leaving no body-ready fingers, but large, shapeless, useless puddles of swirling simples instead.
“Is everything all right, Safiye?” Murad called over the horse’s flank.
“Just fine,” she assured him. Then to the eunuch she said, “Never mind, Ghazanfer. Keep them safe. With the sherbet ice, perhaps. I’ll reform the mixture later.”
“Inshallah,” she heard her attendant say as she swung up onto the horse.
The saddle leather, smooth and sun-warmed, embraced her legs and soothed her cares. Finding the bunch of asters still burdening her hand, she tossed the flowers from her, grasped the reins, and gave the dappled flanks a good nudge with her yellow kidskin slippers.
XV
Across her reaching shoulder blades, Safiye felt the rousing whip of the ends of her six braids. She’d dropped the stiff golden brown outer wrap off her back perhaps half a farsakh ago, hardly out of Niobe’s tear-bleared sight, and brought it around to rest in front of her over the horse’s neck. The golden crepe extending her braids allowed her hips to feel the stimulating lash as well. The wind made by her ride on an otherwise still day penetrated the thin shirt over her forearms and breast until gooseflesh rose and her nipples bunched as if wrung of sweat.
She felt her breath competing with the sun for enough moisture to find any scent in that late summer countryside. All she did smell held the dryness of tinder and, as it filled her head, she felt herself ready to burst into spontaneous flame. She
