The face was familiar—round, soft, and effeminate. It didn’t take long to realize where I’d seen it before: the young man passing out notices about the ransom her father was offering for Safiye’s return. The face behind a black mask at a long-ago carnival, as like my own as a mirror. So he had come up in the world the last four years. He was no longer running errands in the marketplace, but was among the first rank of diplomats to pay their respects. Of course, he was from such a prominent Venetian family that his career was assured.
What was his name? Oh, yes, Barbarigo. Young Barbarigo must have received some clue by now that he had spoken out of turn. This was not the Kremlin or some other court of barbarians after all, but a land with the strictest and most ancient etiquette in the world; still he would not keep quiet.
“No insult meant,” he hastened to apologize, “but Suleiman has always received us himself before, and the people of Venice, hearing rumors of the Grand Turk’s health, are very interested to learn of him personally.”
I could only see the top of his fine white turban, but I could imagine the sort of half-smile with which my master would meet such insolence.
“But you are in his presence,” Sokolli Pasha said, and pointed with one long finger behind his head to where Safiye and I sat. “Behold,” he said, “the Eye of the Sultan.”
Barbarigo had to be content with that.
In Constantinople, the Eye of the Sultan was an institution Suleiman had set in mortar and stone. Khurrem Sultan, Suleiman’s beloved, legal wife sat often there, close to her lord—or so the romantics had it.
My master must have known full well, as did everyone else, that Suleiman was nowhere near that place, that the Favored of Allah, no matter how long the shadow he cast, was halfway to Hungary by now. The convention was mere symbolism, used to suggest that wherever the Sultan’s servants were, there Allah’s Umbrella was as well.
But did Sokolli Pasha know who sat here instead? Probably not: he took little interest in the harem. My master, I suppose, considered this seam at his back as empty of all but symbolism. And he would have fumigated the place if he’d suspected what larvae wriggled there.
Now Safiye’s reaction interested me more once again. She drew herself up firm and regal, as if she were indeed the magnificent Suleiman himself instead of just the slave mother-to-be of his heir.
I looked at that curious anomaly in lavish, feminine silks, far-gone with child, round, soft, beautiful, but inside was something with which one’s eyes dallied painfully as if with a razor hidden in a vat of new butter. And Safiye looked at the young Venetian with a smile that was at once self-satisfied and lustful with her usual lust for nothing but what would lend her power.
“You just watch,” she murmured then, neither to me nor to the Venetian ambassador in particular, but rather to the world in general, or, in defiance, to God Himself. “I will do as she did,” she proclaimed. Before I could wonder who “she” was, I was answered, “No, I shall even outdo Khurrem Sultan, the beloved of Suleiman.”
And then I realized that thoughts of Venice never touched Safiye as they did any other mortal born along its canals and touched by its sea breezes. To her, Venice was the city that had thought her only a silly, headstrong girl and determined to marry her to a peasant on the isle of Corfu. It was a place that would slap her hand from any work save stitchery and letter writing. But here in Turkey, behind the harem curtain, no one need know what a woman set her hand to.
What is Venice to Constantinople? Safiye said with her eyes words that must have been percolating in her heart for months, years. That little island republic where everyone knows everyone else, clinging to their miserable swamps so as not to fall or be pushed into the sea—what is it to this vast Empire encompassing three continents, from the Atlantic to India, larger than Rome ever was, whose million subjects speak a hundred tongues? What is St. Mark’s Cathedral to Aya Sophia, or the Doge’s dried sunbaked hovel to the gold-lined rooms of the Topkapi palace where I sometimes live, set like a rich stone in those cool gardens—sparkling with fountains and flowers of all descriptions? I can accomplish more here by raising a finger than the Doge can by raising all his navies. His “Empire of the Sea” his trade with the East, his very bread and butter—it is all impossible, a child’s dream, without our will.
The young Venetian ambassador didn’t know it, but he had just been more diplomatic making a fool of himself in front of the Eye of the Sultan than had he gone with all pomp and ceremony to the Hungarian front.
Now crimson-and-gilt-turbaned pages ceremonially washed the guests’ hands and dried them with smoking incense. Then they brought mountains of food—broiled whole lamb, turkey birds, and tiny squabs nestled among heaps of well-buttered rice, either plain, yellow with saffron, or pink with pomegranate juice—on gold plate as thick as drachmas.
Little of interest would transpire during a state dinner, Safiye must have known from experience. The Christians would try to find the strange dishes appetizing, try to eat rice with their fingers, try to keep the unclean left hand carefully, clumsily hidden—this without spilling the greasy grains down their white robes of honor.
All the while, the Turks would stand by, their hands folded gracefully in front of them, maintaining a demeanor
