We were two halves suddenly one, the failed single sexes suddenly whole. Or if we were whole the way we were, which her presence often made even me feel, together we had double the space in which to stretch our humanity.
One evening we returned to the ship hand in hand after a taste of Khayyam’s paradise more real than bread so fresh it can burn the hands. The soil between more sober rocks puddled with hyacinths or anemones, difficult to distinguish, save by scent, in the growing dark. The world was so green and quickened by the seeming death of winter, I couldn’t help but think of Easter, resurrection. And what I thought, I spoke, and spoke until tears came and I was glad for the dust of twilight between us.
“What would your grandfather think?” I said by way of apology, an excuse to escape thoughts of hope or joy when reason told me I must expect none, ever. “What do you mean, what my grandfather thinks?” Esmikhan laughed, teasing me with a tickle to the ribs.
“Here I am reciting II Paradiso to you, speaking in glowing terms of Christian feasts and beliefs.”
“Well, what is the harem if not to keep such things?” She bent to the ground and then I saw she had plucked yet another hyacinth to stuff into a turban-free curl on my head.
“What are you saying, lady?”
“Exactly that. The harem is to keep such things close to the heart. Where the Shadow of Allah cannot touch them.” And with a palm she pressed the part on my anatomy where such safety might reside.
There was another, different safety in a scholarly detachment. I took it. “Allah’s Shadow. I suppose the term comes from the Arabs in their deserts for whom a shadow is always a blessing. But for us, who have just suffered such a bleak winter, ‘shadow’ is a mixed image. My lady”—and I groped for her hand again—”I fear you speak heresy.”
“And if I do? Who is to know?” She leaned towards my ear to whisper it, close enough to touch my loosened curls with nose and lips. “Only my eunuch, my servant of Allah. Not a soul more.”
And then it was time to replace my turban, replace her veils, rejoin the world before the tumbling night. I let my fingers linger on her face as I helped to drape it from profane view. I hungered for the curves of her cheeks and her eyes’ flashes of delight, even as darkness was clearing the sight from my table.
I couldn’t help myself. Just before I dropped the gauze, I had to dip and kiss the dimple in her pudgy chin, or I felt I should burst with emotion, gelded from all other outlet.
I fully expected her chastisement. It was deserved. I was a fool. But no chastisement came. Instead, I felt the briefest pressure of her hand on mine. And then she moved with me, to re- turn those gems of hers we brought out for play within the confines of their purse, secured.
And I had to return—to do double duty as the Epiphany’s mate. For I was forgetting my approaching freedom, an approach I was more and more apt to let slip my mind.
XXI
The northern spur of Chios floated lightly off starboard, belying its heavy, rocky appearance. We’d hit a becalming lull in the wind; we drifted more than sailed towards the harbor. But the scent of the island was perceptible, even a quarter of a league offshore. I’d have known Chios anyhow, even if it’d been my eyes Turkey had taken from me instead.
Clear from the Campos to the south came the fragrance of citrus bloom, resinous mastic, bemusing dust, triggered to life by the passing night’s dewfall. Above the creak of the timbers, the shiver of rigging, the hush of water slipping away from the prow, the sky panted like punctured bellows and glowed the flame-blue color found at the center of a low fire.
And was that cicadas I heard over the deep breath of other sounds? It seemed too early for those creatures to be singing to one another, but maybe Chios always had cicadas. The sound rolled off the island like the opening of prison doors, the rattling of rusty keys. It was the promise of freedom. For all the pleasures of sight and sound that sent trills of expectation down my spine, the island’s capital looped about the bay like a grubby, well-worn linen collar. The red tile roofs bleached out to drab. Few of the whitewashed walls had been renewed in some time. They offered little contrast to the fading patterns of beige or brown, the repeating friezes of triangles and circles, triangles made of circles and vice versa, with which Chian walls were traditionally decorated.
As a whole, the city exuded the depressing corruptibility of a grasping merchant who’d made compromise after compromise, giving up all he held most dear in the process, until he could no longer tell the difference.
And with this city I must throw my lot in order to gain freedom?
I looked away, off the port side, where mainland Anatolia dozed like a gypsy’s shaggy bear spring had not yet wakened. But only a fool would think the beast dead so that nothing could rouse him.
A sudden pealing of bells from the island made me start. What are they thinking? pulsed the panic through my brain. They will awaken the brute. He will discover what we are about.
But Giustiniani walked up beside me on the forward bulwarks then, as calm as the wind that slackened our sails.
“It’s Easter Sunday. The heretic Greeks will have theirs in a week or so, but this is ours. Did you forget? Too much Ramadhan?” he asked with a twinkle in both eyes and earring. “If we did not ring, the Turks would suspect.
