I got the feeling Safiye found this ritual laughable. How easily she’d forgotten that she had once gone through the same discomfort.
In any case, with slightly more haste—could I say anxiety?—than I was used to seeing in her, Baffo’s daughter reached for my hand and I helped her to her feet. Ghazanfer heard the stir. He held the heavy rugs back for us and I passed the woman from my hands into his, where she seemed to find deeper ease. With incongruous tenderness, the huge eunuch adjusted her veils; for this Safiye always took too little care.
The prince’s favorite stretched her back against its normal curve, exaggerating her fecundity as she did so. A deep sigh filled her cramped lungs with new air, unfiltered by rugs, enlivened by the ordure of camp. The sigh caught in mid-breath with a slight twinge of discomfort. She leaned into Ghazanfer for its duration, caught his eye with some meaning I couldn’t fathom, and then spoke.
“The young one. Not the bailo himself, but his assistant.” Women and their eunuchs speak notoriously in a sort of code. Between them there is no need for more; the rest of the world is intruders. “He might be the one to go through,” she continued laconically. “I noticed his eyes, full of idealism and energy—“
Her thought caught, like her sigh, at the midpoint. She leaned more heavily into Ghazanfer now.
“The midwife, lady?” Ghazanfer murmured, as a man murmurs prayers.
“The midwife, my lion,” was her reply.
XXVI
“The midwife?” I repeated in a stammer, rooted to the spot as Ghazanfer scooped his lady up and carried her to a nearby sedan. Then, past her pain—for the moment—Safiye turned to me over the monster’s shoulder with sudden impatience. “You are the densest of all khuddam!” she declared. But was the impatience with me or with her own condition? “The Sultan, our master, is about to become a great-grandfather.” She said it as if it were no more than “the Sultan will dine on pilaf today.”
“And the Quince ought to be in attendance, don’t you think?”
“Of course,” I stammered. “Allah bless the Ottoman blood.”
“No, wait...” And she clung to the khadim’s broad shoulders a moment before she found breath to continue. “Run for her, will you, Veniero? I don’t want Ghazanfer to leave me until she comes.”
“Of course, my lady.”
“And Veniero...”
Just before Ghazanfer snapped the door shut over his charge, his great head bent in to receive a few more words and the clutch of a white-knuckled hand. In a moment, these translated to me as:
“And the bailo’s assistant. Veniero, will you?”
“I?” But what I really wanted to ask was: Not the prince? Not the great viziers and lords of the land?
“Yes, you. You speak the language, don’t you?”
“I see. What am I to tell young Barbarigo?”
“Tell him to come and find Ghazanfer when he may. Isn’t that enough?”
“Very well.”
“What should be amiss if I seek a Roman priest to sprinkle my child when it is born?”
Nothing, I supposed. At least I didn’t say. This was Safiye Baffo and things were allowed to her that brought the death penalty to other inmates of the harem.
I did not hesitate to run at least the first of these errands for her. The second, I put off. What business was it of the young Venetian that there was a Baffo in the imperial harem? Or that she had been delivered of a fine, healthy boy?
I told my master instead, along with the greetings of my lady. I did not tell him what was all the talk of the harem—that Safiye had labored hardly three hours with wonderfully little pain. She was up and about the very next day, longing to be at the Sultan’s Eye again, though the Quince strictly forbade it.
The moment he knew the news, Sokolli Pasha bade farewell to the young father, struck camp, and departed into Europe. He did not pause in Magnesia to take leave of his wife, which was a private grief. Soon, however, we heard that the entire army of the Faithful was united at Pazardjik. The Grand Vizier congratulated the Sultan on a great-grandson—”who favors you, my lord” and the Sultan took his privilege to name the lad the most Muslim of all Muslim names—Muhammed.
And, as soon as the midwife thought it safe, she, too, packed the mother, the infant, and three or four attendant nursemaids—but only back to Magnesia. The older woman’s constant mastic-ladened mutterings ran: “Birthing a princeling in an army camp. By Allah, like some tart of a camp follower.”
Here, Esmikhan got the first glimpses of her little nephew and, though tears salted her hungry eyes, she couldn’t get enough of him. For days on end, she held him more than any of the nurses, certainly more than Safiye, who paced at her grille like the caged lionness she was. The main concern for her son’s care, I heard the Fair One express, was a complaint that the gem-studded cradle usually used for princes of the blood was left behind in Constantinople.
“Five rams have been sacrificed for him”—Esmikhan tried to comfort her friend—”both here and in every department in the capital. The cannon will fire seven rounds from Constantinople’s walls. That’s instead of the three they fired when I was born.”
“And I am not there to hear it!” Safiye turned with sudden ferocity on the midwife. “How can you have been such a fool to forget the cradle?” she snapped. “People will mistake him for any whore’s son.”
And the Quince, in silence, groped for another round, yellow comfit.
“He looks quite plain to me.” Safiye appraised her son from a good safe distance.
“Mashallah,” Esmikhan murmured at the new mother’s words, though not with disapproval. She agreed with the Turkish superstition
