“There was the doe...,”he said.
When he seemed reluctant to continue, Safiye said, “I saw her.”
“Yes. She was very beautiful.”
“My heart stopped to see her, even from a distance,” Safiye agreed.
“You should have seen her up close. Those eyes!”
“The eyes of a paradise houri,” she coaxed into his hair.
For one brief instant, she assumed he would kiss her on the eyelids, bridging the metaphor without words. She even closed her eyes for the moment. But then Murad leapt to his feet as if her touch burned him. He began to dress in a fever. The sight of her might almost have disgusted him.
Safiye prodded yet more carefully, rising on an elbow and reaching a hand to narrow the space between them again. “I...I suppose she has a fawn in a thicket nearby. She will return to it...”
This seemed precisely the wrong thing to say. Murad sank into a crouch on the littered forest floor as if her words were arrows. The prince hugged himself into a ball, nursing the wound she couldn’t see. In his gold and rusty colors, he seemed a premature autumn there.
On hands and knees Safiye crawled across the verdant summer floor towards him. The fallen fruits and twigs concealed by grass and infant trees were harsher on her knees than they had been on her buttocks, and she was shaking with the pain of it by the time she reached him. Pain, and a good deal of distress. Still, she pressed through the tightness, like the moment of lost virginity, in order to lay a questioning hand upon the brown and yellow summer silk of her lover’s shoulder.
The prince shuddered, as from a hurt rather than a comfort. He was weeping.
Safiye was taken aback. Murad had railed, whined, even struck her before. But he had never, never cried. She hadn’t known he could cry. She herself had cried but once since the Turks had captured her, and then only in secret. A man in tears turned her stomach with disgust. And this man...
Safiye fought down her nausea. Much as she wanted to slap him, shrew him into finding his lost manhood, shame him forever for such tears, she could not. Perhaps it was the dead horse, the living doe. Perhaps it went back even so far as Niobe, solid rock, weeping for eternity. Safiye could only crouch and stare with awe, and when that grew awkward she had no other choice but to crawl around to a different angle and take the shuddering ball of silk, brocade, and tender, tender flesh into her arms.
The violence with which Murad returned the embrace frightened her, but she couldn’t flinch. Nor would she confess, even to herself, that she was daunted. Soon the fabric on her shoulder had turned hot and wet, like a poultice.
“So easy to take life “Murad said eventually, when he thought his voice would hold. But again control failed him as he continued, “So easy. And yet, so hard to give it.”
A cuckoo called, its mate responded, and in the silence between, the other birds they cuckolded. Safiye could feel her lover’s heartbeat like an inflammation in her own breast.
She said nothing, but waited until, in a few minutes, Murad began again. “Forgive me. Say you forgive me, my love.”
“Forgive you? Whatever for?”
“Forgive me that you are fated to a man who can never give you children.”
“No children?” Safiye exclaimed gently. “But that is Allah’s will, not yours, my own sweet love.”
“It is my fault. I know it. He punishes me because I fretted away time with the opium, and created worlds for myself that He did not create. That is blasphemy. I took opium and let it steal Allah-created desire from me. Most men blame their women for their childlessness, but most men are fools. And most men are not blessed with such a faultless creature as yourself. I have grieved much over this. Others may blame you, but I do not.”
“Your mother...” She didn’t know how to finish the phrase herself.
“Yes, I know my mother made your days in the harem a hell because she would have a grandson in her old age. But rest assured that I do not love you one whit less. I know it is not your fault. I saw this clearly today. Today, when I thought I’d struck you—Allah forbid! When I pulled up the wrapper, thinking to find your death-shriveled form. When I pulled my arrow out of the mare’s warm, dark insides, I brought forth only blood and death. What else do I do to you but that? What else have I only just done? In my anger against Heaven and myself? Served you no better than the poor, poor horse.”
“My love,” Safiye said with a thrill in her breast that was only contained by pressing Murad’s head to it. “Be at ease, my cool summer rain. For surely, if there is guilt here, we share it, as we share everything.”
They loved again, slower, deliberately this time, sharing guilt as much as they shared delight.
Near sunset, Safiye relinquished her lover’s arms for her eunuch’s. Ghazanfer had recovered her veils and stood with them placidly draped over his arm. The khadim had kept his faithful watch, even there in the woods, preserving the lovers’ privacy inviolate.
And it wasn’t until that moment, until she met his green eyes as he laid the ridge of silk to ride chafing over her nose, that she remembered. She remembered what she had forgotten in the midst of the horse’s death. She remembered she ought to have pressed her advantage and gained the legality of marriage.
And she remembered what lay melted in ornate silver cases, back in the overheated red velvet of her sedan.
PART III: ABDULLAH
XVII
“Good morning, madam.”
The Quince sailed into Esmikhan Sultan’s harem, trailing Bosphorus damp and cold after her. Winter lingered in earnest in the capital.
I prodded again: “This is a
