So I agreed. “What else is a eunuch for if not to take his lady’s most urgent messages to the outside world?”
And, come the morning, I felt much better about the prospect. I saw my lady safely installed with her Aunt Mihrimah and the Eternal Words. Then I rode out beyond the city walls, invigorated by the clear, cold winter air. After having picked my way through the awkward looks an army gives a eunuch and the curdled mud they make of winter-fallow countryside, I found him as I had before. Through concentric lines of tents after identical small yellow tents splashed to the eaves with campground, I found Sokolli Pasha in the lavish pavilion beneath the flutter of seven horsetails. The Sultan was in the small farmhouse nearby. I had no idea where the farm family was.
“My eunuch!” I heard him say as I was shown in. “By Allah, that’s the last thing I need right now!”
Still, he invited me to sit down, and tried to be polite in response to my deep, supplicating bow. “How are you?” His voice grew in sharpness through the speech. “How is your lady?”
“My lady rejoices at your safe return, my lord Pasha, and wishes me to ask ...” I still stood, feeling three layers of rugs beneath my muddy boots and wooden planking beneath them.
“No. I know what you want to ask, and the answer is no. I admire your devotion, Abdullah, but the answer is still no. Now, you’ve ridden a long way today and you must be tired. Why don’t you let my orderly find you a place where you can rest for a few hours? But I want you on that road long before the army’s up and on the move tomorrow.”
“Sir, may I ask why?”
“By Allah, I’d forgotten what civilian life is like. Everybody has to have a reason for everything. And you Venetians are the worst of all. Yes, how well I remember! If you must know, it’s because our new Sultan, Allah help me, is a tenth of the man at forty-five that his father Suleiman—may he rest in peace—was at seventy when his bad heart confined him to a carriage.”
“What do you mean, sir?” I asked. My amazement to hear these words from a man of duty would not let me remain silent.
“I mean that Selim, the son of Suleiman—yes, my dear wife’s own dear father—is a roaring drunkard.”
“Surely not. Alcohol is against the laws of Muhammed the Prophet.”
“Yes, isn’t it, though? And for good reason. But that doesn’t stop Selim. Selim, the Sot, the army calls him—his own army, by Allah. Drunkenness and a strong taste for women and for boys (yes, there’s that as well)—well, the army could live with that. They might even praise him for it, and ‘the Sot’ become something like the epithet they called his great ancestor Muhammed, ‘the Conqueror.’ The Turkish army is not full of scrupulous sissies, no. But worse than all of this—Selim is a coward. Do you know that in Belgrade—when we had to break Suleiman’s death to the men—he refused to pass beneath their swords? Now, perhaps to a Venetian such as yourself, this custom has little meaning, just some quaint relic from the past. These Turks, you know—it’s not so very long since they came riding wild off the steppes. Allah, the smell is still on them! Don’t I know, I, who as Grand Vizier must be followed everywhere I go by a standard bearing the tails lopped off seven horses, never minding the flies it attracts.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” I admitted, “but I don’t know what it means to pass under their swords.”
As I would not sit, Sokolli Pasha did, amidst a rainbow arc of pillows which, save for a low table draped in correspondence and a cloak hung on a peg from the center pole, were the tent’s only furnishings.
“Every new Sultan,” he said, “must, upon his ascension, pass under a tunnel made of the crossed, naked swords of all the army. If any soldier does not approve of the new commander, this is his chance to let his displeasure be known. He has only to let his sword grow heavy in his hand, and drop when the pretender is beneath the blade. It’s the perfect solution for a small nomadic tribe in the steppe which must move and fight as one man. Suleiman submitted to that ordeal and had the supreme devotion of all his men ever since. And he knew he could trust them, too. There were no daggers poised in the dark for him—he’d already given them their chance. Of course, that was fifty years ago, and no one in the army today was there. Still, they remember. The Muslim army never forgets its privileges, even if it forgets the difference between a left-face and a right.
“Selim refused to pass. He had already consolidated his power in Constantinople, he said. He had received the kiss of submission from the Serai staff and from the eunuchs of the harem. Well, there is the harem, and then there is the army. Selim knows very well that the janissaries have no love for him. He is Sultan only because of the death of his two brothers. The men loved Mustafa—perhaps more, even, than they loved Suleiman. And loved Bayazid because he was like Mustafa. It is for Khurrem’s sake that these two favorites were killed, and her son, Selim, is a poor replacement. Well indeed might he fear the naked swords of his troops, many of whom have brothers or dear friends who died fighting on Bayazid’s side at Amasia. But if he’d shown courage and respect for them, they probably would have forgiven him. To simply say, ‘It does not suit the dignity of my majesty...!’
“If one is to rule these people, one cannot go calling such customs outdated, barbaric, or undignified, or ever—ever—put the harem before the soldiers. That is one
