And she hung the infant, his cradle, the entire room, with scraps of the Koran, chunks of blue glass, quantities and quantities of garlic. Always for her own infants, she had been too weak to see to such things before the babes faded from her life. She would not fail here.
I doubted—in the richness of his swaddling, the red silk patterned with gold tulips of his tiny shalvar, the tasseled crimson cap that wouldn’t stay put for all my lady’s efforts, as well as the day-and-night vigil we kept—I seriously doubted there was the slightest danger of confusing tiny Prince Muhammed with any other infant in the empire—in the world. So, though the cradle’s arches over his son’s head were only intricately carved olive wood, Murad had no difficulty claiming him.
And I, too, watched with a certain reverent fascination when my lady would replace the prince in that little bed, so different from cradles at home. Not that I’d ever paid much attention to infants’ affairs once I’d outgrown them myself, but I did find the long crack in the floor of the Turkish cot quite remarkable. I would have joined Safiye in complaining for a new one in a moment, thinking the wood split with age and use. The nurses didn’t even seek to pad the crack much.
But I had seen how Esmikhan fit a little ceramic spout over the child’s boyhood before she set him down to sleep. And I saw how, from time to time, urine was funneled through the crack and into a dish below. Later, when the first weeks of danger were passed and the cradle was set outside for air, even the dish was dispensed with, the urine allowed to trickle straight into the ground. Only feces required the laundress.
Esmikhan treated every voiding of the little boy as some regal firman, gold-infused water, no less. And I, too, watched the process with—well, let’s call it the fear of God. A bitter sort of awe at the bundle of flesh between his legs—whole, uncircumcised, proportionately large, as it is in infants—of which the little prince was entirely and blissfully ignorant.
I felt my own loss keenly. Not just the loss of that bundle, which was only flesh, after all, but that I should never have a miniature self. I should never find—as Murad found in the little hands that fit in the hollows of his, the little life that pulsed so fiercely in the scalp’s soft spot—that only sure form of immortality.
“Veniero. The bailors assistant.” From time to time in her pacing, Safiye would hiss at me in Italian.
“The bailo’s assistant? What does she mean?” Esmikhan, unfortunately, was not so consumed with an inspection of the small princeling’s drying cord that she could ignore the new mother’s words as I had being trying to do. And she had not, in the flurry of surrogate motherhood, lost any of her Italian, either.
So, when we were alone and Esmikhan, I hoped, exhausted with child care into a pleasant sort of languidness, I had to explain it to her. I explained the second errand Safiye had sent me on when labor was upon her. To my surprise—and dismay—my lady suddenly roused herself and demanded more details.
“And you have not sought out this Barbarigo?” Esmikhan sounded hurt, as hurt as if I’d neglected a request of her own.
“She wants the baby christened—at least that’s what she says.
“So what’s the harm in that? Inshallah, he’ll be circumcised when the time is right, made a true believer in all earnestness. What’s a little water now? The holy blade will take care of that.”
As it did with me? I thought, but didn’t say.
My lady persisted. “Can’t you see Safiye is distracted?”
“I can see that.”
“Can’t you do what you can to make her a happier mother?”
“Only Allah can do that.”
And though my lady didn’t argue with me, she didn’t let me forget the request, either. “The harem,” she said, “was created to cover just such contradictions arising from a woman’s deepest need, to cover things that the light of day would scorch from being if it touched.”
So in the end, I went.
For all the cannon fire and ram sacrifices, my word was the first the Venetian delegation, still in Magnesia, had of this birth. As I’ve said, affairs of the harem were no outsider’s business.
Even before I opened my mouth, emotions—too many emotions—flooded my brain as I faced young Barbarigo. In that instant I remembered facing him when we both were masked, just before I thwarted his attempted elopement with Baffo’s daughter that would have brought shame on my entire family. I remembered his threat of lion’s mouthing me, the palpable threat of his father’s power. I remembered his hatred, my jealousy that he was what I ought to be: the vigorous young Venetian nobleman into whose lap everything fell by the grace of God. And from which none dared take a thing. The same prompting came back to me as it had over and over then: “Someday you will have to fight this man for what is yours.”
Lest I blow my cover and face greater shame, I suppressed all of this before I made my announcement. I sought to veil my face as with a mask once more and told him in my stiffest Turkish:
“Pray, take the message to your Governor Baffo that he is now a grandfather and may rest assured that his daughter and grandson are secure and happy.”
“By St. Mark, think of it! “the young diplomat exclaimed, no inkling of conflicted emotion in him once the news sank home. “Turkey ruled by a Christian! The son of a Venetian convent girl, no less. This may well do more for the powers of Christendom than centuries of treaties.”
The young man took my arm
