I turned a protective glance in my lady’s direction. Safiye had now shuttered herself against Esmikhan’s friendliness, but that was the usual way of things. I detected no new threat there, though I did notice a new string of Murano glass beads around Safiye’s alabaster neck. Such a necklace could cost as much as the real gems my countrymen so successfully mimicked; still, the obvious provenance was odd. Well, perhaps Murad had given them to her, a reminder of her home.
And my lady seemed in no need of consolation as she usually did upon Safiye’s neglect. The young prince offered ample diversion. Little Muhammed had more personality than the creature, amorphous save for his sex, that we’d last encountered. He seemed an awfully sullen child, rewarding Esmikhan’s antics with never a smile, only long, big, brown-eyed stares. But he could sit on his own now, eat more halva than was good for him with four pearls of teeth and, propped up with pillows, held a miniature divan as if already come to his inheritance.
Safiye watched the proceedings with a detached air, with less mind than she gave to an adult divan, easily—and perhaps that was where her mind wandered, after all. I heard her say very few things—and these seemed to have nothing to do with anything else happening in the room at all.
“The army is two days’ march away,” she said, “with Selim and the Grand Vizier. There are some that would have us set aside our grief over the loss of Suleiman our Shadow and Lawgiver. We should immediately prepare to greet Suleiman’s successor with the pomp and triumph that, they say, he deserves. A large, triumphal parade of all the armed forces is planned to enter through the Golden Gate. I, for one, am not so rapidly over my sense of loss.”
I detected formula and not a little sarcasm in this speech, but no one else seemed to notice. Esmikhan gave her friend a comforting squeeze. The speech had the effect, in any case, of turning the discussion to just how much of this upcoming pomp the ladies could or ought to share.
A cousin of my lady, daughter to the ill-fated Bayazid, had a house near the mosque of Yedi Kule. “That’s not far from the Golden Gate on the Triumphal Way,” this lady said. “From my harem’s shuttered windows, we would all be able to see all the procession. Aunt Mihrimah, madam, Diadem of the Veiled Heads, we could move all of this solemnity over there and not miss a thing.”
The great Mirhimah Sultan had black looks for this idea. She did not like to be moved and preferred that the world came to her instead. Nor did she care to have her hospitality overshadowed.
But other women, including my lady—though I did see the throes of guilt to be relinquishing her mourning so soon cross her face—decided the opportunity could not be missed.
“It is for one day only, after all,” justified one.
We eunuchs were consulted as to how and when our charges could be brought to the neighborhood of Yedi Kule in two days’ time.
“The word of Allah,” justified someone else, “is so powerful, it does not need us to go on.”
“Well, I will hire reciters at my house, too,” said the cousin. “There cannot be too much recitation of the Holy Word.”
“Safiye, you will come, of course,” my lady urged.
Safiye shrugged with what I felt to be feigned nonchalance; it was not feigned very carefully. I found it very hard to believe, particularly from one who wouldn’t miss a Divan if she could help it, that she was not bursting to see which captains had won honors for themselves in the campaign, who got precedence over whom, how the various viziers fared. Yet she said, “It is up to my son’s grandmother, my gracious hostess. I am at her disposal.”
When consulted, Nur Banu hesitated as well, taken aback, I think by Safiye’s uncustomary deference. She, too, prorogued. She will wait to find out more precisely what Safiye wants, I thought. So she can act in exactly the opposite fashion.
Then I noticed Ghazanfer’s absence from the eunuch’s ranks. His presence always discomforted; in the ease without him it was difficult to go looking for trouble. But when I got the chance, I asked Safiye about him, being as indifferent as possible in my phrasing.
I was pleased that she did not suspect my suspicion. She treated the matter as if I were a child asking why another child had not come to play. “He doesn’t come to Mirhimah Sultan’s. He doesn’t like it here—for some reason. You, perhaps, may understand the caprice of a eunuch. I confess it’s beyond me. At any rate, whenever I want to come to pay my respects to the great daughter of Suleiman—on whom be peace—I must depend on Nur Banu’s khuddam.”
Then, with another outward show of insouciance, I made my way around to the other side of the room and asked Nur Banu the same thing.
“I don’t know,” was her reply. “Something about visiting friends from his homeland. And she let him go! Safiye has no control over her eunuch, none. A slave needs to visit friends when it suits him? And he’s done nothing but visit since they got here.”
“What is his homeland?” I attempted one more question.
“Hungary, I believe. Some place westward, in any case.”
I couldn’t think of anything to ask after that.
Along towards sunset finally came the chapter contradictorily entitled “Daybreak,” which rails against the mischief of weird women working magic. And then the final verse “against djinn and men,” “the stealthily withdrawing whisperer who whispers in man’s breast,” and the day’s labor was done.
The aged mother and her
