The ferocity with which she yielded was sometimes frightening, hollowed of infants as it was. But what at first I couldn’t begrudge I rapidly came to crave. And how could I be jealous of the ill-fated mites that had distracted her before?
There was, besides, the separate, sacred time created as much by the novelty of sea travel as by the holy month of fasting, Ramadhan. There was never any question that Esmikhan would keep the fast, for, although believers on journeys are exempt, pregnant women are also exempt and she had been pregnant the past three years. Fasting days missed would have to be made up later—when, it was hoped, she would be expecting again. So it was best to do it now.
The past three years I had kept the fast with the rest of the household—to please my lady, who was required to deny the blessings herself. I began the fast with her this year as well, the complete and strenuous refusal of food and water from sunrise to sunset. And then I didn’t stop, for all Giustiniani’s winking. The holy month has a sort of compulsion with it, an addiction, especially when shared. With loved ones.
And there was the particular leisureliness of our voyage, at least compared to the merchantman’s pace I’d always known before. We took the luxury of setting in at any and every port, at the first sign of seasickness on my lady’s part or at the first inkling to sightsee. The anchor was always dropped to allow the servants to light proper cooking fires for each evening’s fast-breaking meal, as they would not have been had we been rolling and lurching under full sail.
So sometimes it seems we spent more time ashore on that journey than afloat, for all that getting there was a major undertaking. I had to insist the sailors move below decks or to the seaward side of the ship while I helped Esmikhan to negotiate the ladder down to the tender in all her veils. For better seclusion, I usually did the rowing myself, after the serious ship’s business had been taken care of, with at most one or two of my lady’s maids joining us. But it was easier—more pleasant—when just we two went alone.
In such company, the shore of Asia Minor was gentler, more feminine than I ever remembered from my past. Esmikhan never bathed in the sea as I had done as a lad, for—not to mention her modesty—my lady was convinced that bathing in salt water while she was still unclean from the birth would harm her fertility.
But, hungry, lightheaded together, Esmikhan and I read of “Troy’s proud glories” and the “white-armed Helen.” As Fate would have it, we were right there in the springtime fields of Ilium even as we held the book in our laps. We read of Penelope’s unstinting devotion, Poseidon’s unslakable wrath with the very heave of the god and his nereids below us, the drumbeat of Leto’s fair-haired son above.
Because it was Ramadhan, we lived much of our life at night, sleeping while under sail and fasting during the day. For fear of fire, we couldn’t light a lamp to read by. But even when the light failed, Esmikhan hadn’t had enough of my past—of me.
I didn’t know any Homer by heart, but I did have a dour childhood tutor to thank for my Dante. I did not recite to her verses from the very pit of hell, where the poet placed Muhammed the Prophet next to Judas Iscariot. But the tale of Francesca di Rimini and her Paolo, more pitiable than damnable, was particularly applicable to our state, what with its eternally unsatisfied swirling. Or at least, so it seemed in the moments of our deepest hunger-induced melancholia. Esmikhan had me recite it to her over and over until she could recite it to me:
“And this, I learned, was the never ending flight
of those who sinned in the flesh, the carnal and lusty
who betrayed reason to their appetite.
“As cranes go over sounding their harsh cry,
leaving the long streak of their fight in air,
so come these spirits, wailing as they fly.”
But in spite of her tortures, Francesca offered no regret, no apology, only this:
“Love, which permits no loved one not to love,
took me so strongly with delight in him
that we are one in Hell, as we were above.”
For happier times, or when my voice gave out, Esmikhan had her Persian poets:
“Awake! for morning in the bowl of night
Has flung the stone that puts the stars to fight:
And lo! the hunter of the East has caught
The Sultans turret in a noose of light.
“Come with me along some strip of herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown,
Where names of Slave and Sultan are forgot,
And pity Sultan Mahmud on his throne.
“A book of verses underneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness—
Oh, wilderness were paradise enow!”
Well, no loaves were allowed us when we did take early-morning or late-afternoon rambles to explore the shore. And certainly no wine jugs. But there was a blessed communion in our shared denial that is difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. More than once, the Christian crew of the ship tried to slip me something while my lady slept and the sun rode high.
“She would smell it on my breath.” I thanked them, but refused.
I would lose more than what she might sense. The poet,
