Or was what we stood before only, as I had once heard Muslim clerics argue, an empty tomb? The body was stolen. Or the worms worked exceedingly fast. Or the man hadn’t died in the first place, as was reported, but recovered and walked away from his ordeal on the cross. In any case, Isa ibn Maryam, Jesus the son of Mary, was not the Son of God. God—when he was called Allah, at any rate—didn’t work that way. Saints He allowed, and prophets. But life went on as before, unpeopled by divinity. And resurrection was for another plane which never touched this one at all.
Esmikhan sensed my desire to avoid her, although she didn’t (I hoped) appreciate the reasons for it. But I couldn’t avoid telling her in terms as terse as possible—which was easy enough since I knew so little—what was about.
“Turks?” she repeated innocently.
“It’s only a rumor.” I did my best to calm her.
Esmikhan was quite calm already. “You mean Ottomans? We have nothing to fear from Ottomans. I am a princess of the Ottoman blood.”
“Exactly.” In my mind, I was thrashing myself for the lack of care that could have lured me into this position. Had the desire for freedom blinded me so to the dangers? “You are an Ottoman princess on a Christian ship in a Christian harbor.”
Her calm was quite unnerving. “We need only tell my grandfather’s men who we are. We need not fear them.”
“A stray cannonball may not stop to ask for introductions. And it may come from the fortress there”—I indicated the three gray stone turrets marching out to the sea on the right-hand side of our vista in easy firing range—”as easily as from any Muslim ship.”
“Muslims won’t fight without discussion first. My grandfather’s servants will hear the other side with reason.”
I’m afraid my scoffing at that idea was loud enough to offend her. “The time for discussion is past, lady, when there are forty thousand ducats to answer for as well as a small army of runaway slaves.”
“But what has any of this to do with us?” Esmikhan may have been less naive than I had hoped to keep her about the Chians’ latter infringement, for she looked at me hard.
I looked away and ended the conversation with: “Well, it is probably nothing. I see no Turkish ship.”
Not long afterwards, however, we saw a ship leave the island under sail. Only single-masted, it depended heavily on oars in the calm, but the bunting and banners decking it purported some official mission. At first I thought we might be its destination, but the vessel quickly passed by, touching us only with a gentle surge of wake.
“Isn’t that our captain on board?” Esmikhan asked.
I had to agree the man did have the same air, but then every Chian shared the blood. The man who caught our interest along with all his fellows on board this launch was dressed in brilliant red robes of an ancient cut and didn’t spare a single glance in our direction.
Eventually we lost them in the blur over against the mainland coast, which was only visible if you knew what you were looking at. Then the tomb was empty again.
No Christian bell rang at midday, which I found disconcerting, particularly on Easter. Esmikhan was more distressed that we had missed her hour of prayer, but we said them late. I kept hoping to hear bells, and she didn’t want to cheat lest her anxiety to make the hungry day pass quickly leave her a greater burden of leaden hours at the end.
Rising from the prayers gave us the view of the launch returning under the same press for haste, under the same labored power. It dropped anchor near shore, then shoved off again in less than an hour. It followed its wake back to Asia again with a different, even more noble-looking group than the first time.
“Look,” my lady said, our first exchange of words since the brief discussion of prayer time. “Aren’t there quite a number of ships across the straits there?”
Indeed, the lowering sun did seem to pick out more detail on the far shore. And the sleeping bear did suddenly seem to have all claws unsheathed in a bristling of masts.
“I’ll climb into the crow’s-nest to see,” I offered, blinking up the long height against the sun.
“Up there? Oh, don’t. Abdullah, you’ll fall and kill yourself.”
Her concern sparked a determination that caught at the pit of my empty innards. I determined to refuse the image of the eunuch, the wounded boy in need of mothering she tried to press on me with a squeeze of her hand.
“But I’ll have to get out of these first.”
I shed her hand along with my robes down to only the loincloth. In order not to have to think about the pain and shame beneath that for long, I was on the ratlines in a moment.
Less than a quarter the way up, I knew I’d been foolhardy. My feet were as tender as an infant’s, my balance skewed by the lack of practice, my head light from fasting and, with the perverse way it has of doing so, the wind seemed to pick up just to welcome me aloft. But I wouldn’t back down at this point, not for anything, not with Esmikhan’s eyes on me, tearing with sympathetic effort over the hands she clasped across her veil to hold back a scream.
“Ustadh.” Esmikhan let out her breath when I returned to the deck. She used the most reverential form of address she could for a eunuch, the one that means ‘master.’ “Ustadh, that was very brave.”
I wish I’d something else to tell her, for all that bravery.
