She caught my hands in the desperation I had expected all along, considering the tragedy she’d just been through. “If I can have—oh, just a week with him in Magnesia, I shall know I have done my best—and the rest is Allah’s will, whether I conceive or not.”
“Lady, he will be much occupied with the affairs of the army in Bozdag.”
“Of course. But he will not refuse me. He cannot, when I have gone all that way, just to be with him. When you tell him...”
“It is a long journey. You may not feel well enough to see him at the end.”
“The journey’s by sea, as Safiye always likes to gloat. Not nearly so strenuous as by land.” Esmikhan withdrew her hands now, sulking—which she knew had its effect on me—rounding her face, pouting her lips. Had she been clamoring for my bed, there would have been no more discussion. “Besides, any discomfort is worth the hope of getting a child that might, inshallah, live.”
“The Quince has already departed. We will not have the comfort of her company on our way.” Remembering the buzz of opium on my tongue, I wasn’t at all certain that this was such a bad thing. It didn’t deter my lady either.
“We may catch up with her in any case—if you aren’t too slow. If not, she at least will be there when we arrive to provide—inshallah—some fertility drug that may enhance the prospect of those few days I will have with my husband.”
“But lady, you are still in your time of uncleanliness.” I feared more for her health, her soft little body put through yet more all-consuming pain and exhaustion without a moment’s rest. But I couldn’t deny that the very idea of this stress—to which I could compare only one thing in my life—seemed to enliven rather than intimidate her. She had learned all her life to take her greatest meaning from the fruits of such torture, I guess. Whereas my torture had been the means of removing that meaning from me altogether.
“I won’t be unclean by the time we get there. Certainly not if you persist in dawdling so.”
With that, I ran out of excuses. And when a scouting trip down to the wharves restored my arsenal, my lady’s exuberance soon dispelled that as well.
“The Golden Horn is quite ominously full of ships,” I told her. “The Kapudan Pasha, Piali, is amassing a great flotilla to sail against some benighted enemy of the Faith. I counted eighty galleys while I stood there. Come to the window. You can see some of them, at least, for yourself.”
Esmikhan looked disinterestedly through the lacework of lattice in the direction I pointed and shrugged.
“As Allah is my witness,” I persisted, “I wouldn’t be anywhere on the seas with such an armada about.”
“But these are my grandfather’s ships, Abdullah. I need have no fear of them. Besides, we are only sailing to Izmir, never losing sight of Turkish coast the whole way. Piali Pasha sails to some distant land, of that you may be certain.”
“Perhaps my lady is right. I did hear a rumor that they mean to lay siege to Malta, the lair of the Knights of St. John, to punish those pirates’ depredations of Turkish shipping.” I did not mention how this intelligence made me feel: almost a Turk myself, for it was in large part due to a Maltese knight—under the influence of Sofia Baffo, of course—that I found myself in my present shadow life.
“The bastion of Malta defied them last year,” I elaborated. “Yes, I wouldn’t be surprised if Piali Pasha meant to renew the assault with reinforcements and better weather.”
“There. You see? Piali Pasha’s galleys mean nothing to us. I’ve thought it all out while you were gone.”
“Lady?”
“My brother and Safiye are in Magnesia, as well as my husband. I will rely upon their hospitality of course so I won’t have to consider camping out primitively with the army. And after my husband leaves about his duties, I can stay until Safiye has her child, inshallah, and help her with that.”
Yes, I saw that the reasons my lady could produce to go had multiplied in my absence while mine to stay had only increased by the vague unease caused by Piali Pasha’s ships. And that discomfort might only be the last reflexes of my former life I couldn’t quite shake, the sudden leap of the heart in the throat, the charge of desperate energy to every limb. The Turkish crescent would probably always cause that, no matter where they cut.
If anything, the planning offered Esmikhan distraction, filled her with hope and life in place of loss and despair. I couldn’t line her empty womb for her, but I could do this. I was a fool to oppose her.
“Abdullah, you waste time. Find us a boat to sail on—at once. I will go to Magnesia.”
So down I went to the docks to try again.
XIX
I suppose the lodestone of nostalgia drew me on. Like an addict with his drug, I had avoided the sights and sounds of the sea with sober success for four long years. But now, one breath of the spray-thick air and I was hopelessly intoxicated again.
How many times had I made this very promenade at my Uncle Jacopo’s side? Is it any wonder that the call of the sea is legendized in sailors’ minds as the mermaid or siren, the most beautiful image men removed from their doxies for months on end can imagine? And I had tried to deny this pull which was, after all, my birthright and my very weaning. For four long years I had denied this lost world, knowing that the first sip would make me feel the pain of the cutters’ knives all over again.
Indeed, it did. But having now, at my lady’s insistence,
