The women stopped to pray, to break their last on ship’s biscuit, the dregs of an olive barrel, and tepid, stored water. The pleasanter things promised by Giustiniani and even the citric air of this port itself had come to naught. But Esmikhan allowed no complaint among her women and they went back to their work the moment they were halfway satisfied.
No matter how the four Chians divided the night among them, I determined to keep a watch myself. I certainly hoped the quiet and loneliness of the wait wouldn’t let me forget what ominous portents hung in the air. Fasting urged me towards sleep already. But the menace was clear enough that it spared me that shame, at least, by coming early.
The night’s first watch cannot have seen two hours before I picked what was more than the moon’s reflection out of the gloom. This yellow lantern light approached rapidly with the creak and slip of oars.
An “Ahoy” brought up Giustiniani’s familiar vowels and limited consonants. The Chians threw him a line and soon his shadow and those of six or seven others—enough to raise the anchor, I determined—joined ours on board.
“What’s the news?”
“Is it truly Piali Pasha off the mainland there?”
“Saints help us, have negotiations availed anything?”
“Our wives and children—are they safe?”
But the men’s pleas for tidings went unheeded. Giustiniani’s first no-nonsense words were, “Where’s the capon?”
He had never called me that before—not within my hearing. But I stepped forward to claim that abuse and whatever else he had to give me.
Discovering me made him change the address but not the tone. “Veniero, get your lady and bring her to the boat.”
Certainly his voice meant business, but to save my soul I couldn’t fathom what that business might be. “Beg pardon?”
“You heard me. I’m taking your lady ashore. We’ll keep her in the fortress. Piali Pasha turns away all our suits. He says we Chians have nothing left to bargain with; we must surrender. He underestimates our willingness to fight. Let’s see if he says we have no bargain left tomorrow morning when we send him the delicate gem-studded ear of the Sultan’s granddaughter as a present.”
XXIII
“What are you squawking for, Veniero?” The Epiphany’s captain snapped at me. “Your fate remains the same. The slave-freeing network still operates. At least it does as long as Piali Pasha stays out of our harbor.” Even against the dark I could see how his look grew keener. His earring itself seemed to sneer. “Or do you want the Turks on Chios? You want this escape route for captives to dry up? You want to remain a slave?”
Each “want” was a scourge upon my soul. It had been so long since anyone had consulted my desires in anything, perhaps that part of me had totally atrophied. Did I even know how to want anymore? The heavy disgust in Giustiniani’s voice loaded me with self-doubt. Even if I could distinguish what I really wanted from all that had been foisted upon me, would Giustiniani let me realize it any more than slavery did? His stance—patience contained with difficulty by the arms crossing his chest and backed as he was by a dozen sea-toughened men—this hardly lent me hope.
And the violence so thinly veiled in his word “capon.” My head still rang with it.
Somehow I knew I must speak, and speak I did, repeating my first words, but managing a lower register this time. “I cannot let you do this to Esmikhan Sultan.”
My fingers danced on the hilt of the dagger stuck in my sash, the symbol of my office. But I knew from experience that, like most symbols, it was of little practical use in the real world. “We will do this with you or without you, eunuch. You may stay with her or go. Go to your freedom.”
Giustiniani took a solid step towards me and I countered, backwards, brushing up against the curtains that, besides my emasculated person and showy but useless dagger were the only things that stood between my lady and Chios’ fortress.
“Our families are on that island—” Giustiniani explained the obvious and echoes of agreement rose from the men behind him—and we will do whatever we must to protect them.”
“By God—and, yes, by Allah, too—Esmikhan Sultan is the only family this world has left to me.” I said this with more firmness than I felt.
And when this raised snickers from my opponents, I added with desperation, “At least she never thinks me inferior for a loss that is not my fault. She thinks I have gifts to offer, even as I am. Exactly as I am.” I realized I sounded like a child facing bullies in the alleyway, and my voice rose until it squeaked again at the thought.
Giustiniani’s voice dripped with exaggerated pity. “Yes, well, any man who’d rather live life as a ball-less slave doesn’t deserve to be called a man—whether he is or not.”
“Freedom.” I breathed the word and closed my eyes as if life itself were fading from me into heaven behind layers of cloud.
Times like this before, a dervish had whirled in to save me—a dervish who was really my friend Husayn. A friend of the family since before I could remember, the Syrian merchant had stepped in to godfather me when others had failed. He had taken the ultimate vengeance on my castrator and so was forced to live as an outlaw in a holy man’s disguise. In such disguise, the teeming land of the Turk had disgorged him when I had need before, in the face of both pirates and brigands.
But I couldn’t hope for such a deliverance now, far off in Christian waters. I was on my own.
Isn’t that, after all, what freedom meant?
My eyes remained closed. Without having to strain in the dark to catch sight of the threatening moves of my opponents, my mind opened to other things. Beneath my feet was the comforting rock of the timbers,
