“Less watchful, but more full of heathen demons when they do get a glimpse.”
I nodded, and winked again. And Giustiniani took that as encouragement to speak of me and the spices off at Chios, after which he would take my lady to Izmir, then come back to reclaim me, in an Italian sailor’s hose and doublet once more.
And a codpiece? I wondered. I can never wear Italian clothes again without a codpiece.
He spoke of no greater remuneration than a handful of my lady’s jewels I might steal. When I looked a little seasick at the thought, he came down: “Just work for nothing but your board for three years, and you’ll be a free man. We must only take care that our voyages are all to the west for a while. Yes, a free man with a first mate’s job, standing to inherit this ship and all it contains, for I’ve only daughters waiting with my wife at home.”
And at home I have my lady ... I suppressed the longing that welled up in my own heart at that thought.
Night was quite fully upon us when I shook his hand to go. We shook on the deal as well as in friendship, the arrangement to carry my lady, her staff, her belongings, safely to Izmir in a timely and seamanly fashion.
About the other, I told him, “I’ll think about it.”
XX
“By the blessed Virgin, who is this lady of yours?” Giustiniani exclaimed as I took over his ship to Esmikhan’s needs.
Somehow he learned—or guessed—the truth. I know this because of what happened later. At the time, however, my only reply was the eunuch’s cultivated, tight-lipped smile. Such information was my secret. And, in this case—anticipating Esmikhan’s delight—my pleasure.
The most spontaneous purchase I made during the hectic week that followed turned out to be the most fortuitous. Amidst the dealings with carpenters and drapers, porters and victualers, I happened upon a Turkish seaman who’d set up such a stall as a square of old gray serge afforded him in a corner of the grain merchants’ port at the edge of the Golden Horn. Under orders to be ready to sail with the Kapudan Pasha at a moment’s notice, I suppose, he wanted to liquidate his holdings to more convenient cash. And he wanted it done without making the trek clear to the bazaar, for Ramadhan was now upon us and everyone on the Turkish side of the water at any rate moved as little as possible in their daily lethargy of hunger.
If, in my own stupefaction, I had been looking for what he had to sell, I certainly would have gone to the bazaar, where I might have found any number of his fellows with similar bargains to choose from. Or I’d find pawnshop owners who’d have saved both of us trouble.
Of course, I wasn’t looking for such wares at all. But on the stretch of serge between his often-patched knees, the Turk had a silver crucifix, a rosary of Murano beads, a wooden drinking cup, a tool kit with needles and an awl, and a leather-bound book. These were the effects of a Western sailor—my uncle might have had the same about him when he went down, though nobody had bothered to pluck him clean.
I couldn’t help myself. I stood and stared at the display while behind me the crowded sounds of the port shed from me like beads of water over a duck’s feathers. The hull after hull of grain it took to keep the Turk’s navy afloat, the Turk’s city alive, hissed like swords being drawn. The slap of sandals on the packed earth in between, the squawk of bargaining—all these might not have existed.
But I did hear, as always, the compelling creak of rigging and masts that bristled at my back, currying my spine as if I were a horse about to show. It was my name the combined rigging spoke: “Giorgio, Giorgio.”
Abdullah? Who was he?
Hardly stopping to bargain, I bought the book from the sailor. That seemed the least likely of all his wares to sell: the crucifix was worth melting down; the rosary’s millefiori glass, attractive without religious connotation. But the book, with its split, salted leather, was worthless on this side of the Golden Horn, worthless to one who couldn’t read the chopped Italic of its letters to find the treasure there.
I opened my purchase briefly, enough to see the imprint, Aldus Manutius, the famous Venetian house. It was a new translation of Homer. Then I left the place quickly before the pirating Turk should read by my face that he’d given me the bargain.
I bought the book for myself, of course, an act of reclaiming my native tongue, my patrimony, my former life in the midst of building a future for my lady. But then my life got confused with hers. While I was distracted with other details elsewhere, my lady came upon the book packed in a bundle of new purchases I’d made for her.
And, “Abdullah, what’s this?” she had to ask.
I couldn’t tell her what I was plotting—Giustiniani and I solidified the details more each time I saw him. And I had pestered her to learn Italian since I’d first known her; she had sometimes expressed curiosity. So that’s the tack I followed.
Quite to my surprise—and soon, delight—the book rekindled her interest. The little ditties and proverbs I was accustomed to say when occasion demanded, I found she could recite them back to me. Lullabies, folk songs I didn’t even know I’d sung in her presence, she knew them and their vocabularies. And she even remembered most of the alphabet I’d once hurriedly sketched for her: Italian’s sturdy building blocks so different from the winding vines of the Turkish, Arabic, and Persian with which she was already familiar.
Once we were under sail, I came
