I think I had truly been ashamed for the sea to find me in my maimed state. But I knew the moment I saw the sun, just past its pale spring zenith, silvering the wavelets like streaks of age in a mother’s hair, that she would have me any way at all.
The wharves and docked ships tamed the sea’s hair like a lace cap. The red Turkish flags—and no one dared fly either cross or saint’s emblem under Piali Pasha’s nose—pulsed in the wind like a mother’s heartbeat. They were the throb at her temples, the blush of pleasure on her cheeks. The creek of planking, the whisper of empty rigging, and the cry of gulls between them—these were a mother’s songs, her lullabies. They were her call of encouragement to her toddling child to take the narrow leap over the vacillating slash of dark water between wharf and deck. To escape from the weight of earth. To take the canvas wings of flight.
Whenever I reminded myself that we were going to attend the motherhood of Safiye Baffo, the image lost some of its poetry. What I should be doing was reclaiming what Safiye had stolen from me. What she has stolen from Esmikhan. That was a bitter, unfounded thought. It only rose because it rankled: Why should she become a mother and my lady not? That was like asking why Murad should become a father and I not. Simply because there was no justice in the world—never had been, never would be any.
Getting my lady to Magnesia, however, grew perceptibly more difficult by the moment. Piali Pasha’s admiralty drew every available bark to it by sheer mass. Provisioning skiffs and flat-bottomed ferries as well as the more substantial craft for which I sought were all detailed to outfitting the master of Allah’s seas.
The last of the seaworthy ships owned by the harem of my lady’s grandfather had just departed, bearing the midwife to attend on the birth of Murad’s heir. I supposed this was an errand equal to the supplying of Piali Pasha. We could wait until that one returned, but I knew Esmikhan—and her empty womb—would give me no peace until it did. Otherwise, the demands of war had requisitioned every chunk of wood that could float within two days’ sailing.
My lady owned a neat little caïque, like all women of her station, for pleasure outings on the Bosphorus. She didn’t use it much—seasickness came quickly when she was with child. Instead of finding the ship I wanted, I got incredibly inflated offers to use the caïque for the provisioning instead. I could almost hear my lady accepting every one that came along with an irrational flush of partisan enthusiasm. There are reasons women stay in the harem.
I resisted these offers, not requiring much imagination to picture what one trip out and back with a load of gun grease or leaky flour sacks would do to the velvet curtaining and the mother-of-pearl inlay. But this didn’t help me to find the transportation I needed either, for which the caïque was equally un-suited.
There were foreign ships, of course, skirting the arsenal’s menace warily, trying to stay invisible lest they be suspected of spying out what Piali Pasha might have in mind for those at home. I rejected these out of hand. It would never do to entrust a princess of the blood to an infidel hull. Nonetheless, desperation finally brought me to the foreigners’ wharves at Pera. My legs were beginning to ache, unaccustomed as they were to hours of fruitless wandering about the wharves.
Wherever boats gave an arm’s length of space between hull and prow, fishermen grounded because their boats were with the navy dangled their lines. The black of their doublets clanged with the metal of their trade: hooks, scalers, knives. The offal of last week’s catch sloshing in the gray-green water below their feet offered the predominant smell to the place and attracted mangy cats who slunk about for their own share.
But such smells might have been a mother’s perfume to me. And the great baskets of fingerling hamsi fish—anchovies, we called them at home—appeared to me in their silver sheen like a princess’s dowry.
A man could take his pick from the top of the heap, still wriggling, their eyes popping, mouths agape at death’s surprise. The fishermen would thread your choice on a skewer—with yet more wriggling—and shove them over the coals of his brazier. In a moment, the fish were smoky, blackened, fragrant, and delicious. That might have been mother’s milk to me.
I was downing my second shish of the day, aided by sea-whipped appetite, chased by tall glasses of minted yogurt drink. The yogurt vendor was wiping out the glass from the last customer with the corner of his sash to pour me another when that last customer introduced himself to me.
“You won’t be drinking and eating like that in a day or two, will you?” he asked, winking.
“Ramadhan.” I nodded, not knowing what to make of the wink in connection with the soon-to-begin holy month. Perhaps the man only had a tic.
“Yes,” he said carefully, as if to say “Make of it what you will.” And he repeated, “Yes, Ramadhan.”
Watching the shipping, but mostly the hypnotic roll of the sea, we fell to talking, and the cryptic messages fell away.
The language we used was the traders’ patois. My companion expressed no surprise that I, a khadim, should be conversant in the jargon, mixed like the bastard blood in any Mediterranean port of Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and Italian. Perhaps this fellow’s experience of the Ottoman realm, circumscribed by water and wharf as it must be, made him believe the patois was indeed court Turkish.
His habit of falling back on
