“My lord, I don’t think she could go so far as to...” But I stopped to keep from contradicting myself. She is capable. Of this—and more. And perhaps, I swallowed. I am partly to blame. If Selim was as my master described him, perhaps it would take an extraordinary amount of muscle to keep him balanced on his throne. But Sokolli Pasha had, for better or worse, thrown his lot with him. Selim was my lady’s father. And Safiye opposed him. My course was determined as well.
“So, master,” I prompted. There had been silence in the tent for some time. “You will cancel the triumphal procession?”
“It’s too late,” was his final conclusion. “To back out of the procession now would seem like one more gesture of cowardice, a bad omen at the start of a reign. And we’ve had too many of them already.
“But you just watch the men as you pass their campfires on your return. You will see the time for praising Allah is not yet. We must still be pleading for His tender mercy.”
There was indeed a sort of tension in the silence of the soldiers as if my passing were a handful of dirt to dowse their smoldering embers. But the dramatic retelling of old battle tales could just as easily cause so slight an edginess. I don’t think I would have noticed had my master not told me to look for it. My ever-increasing ability to read human nature held good for affairs of the harem only. My master was the authority when it came to men.
Over and over again I recalled his final words to me: “We must allow Allah to give mankind what He wills tomorrow.”
Things are different, however, for womankind.
XXXII
“Had he no message for me?” my lady asked.
Beyond the news that he couldn’t see her until the morrow, there was none. And my head had been so full of his male view of things until that moment that I’d failed to manufacture something to suit her concerns. I lied now. I told her he had asked her specifically to stay away from the procession tomorrow, to spend the day enclosed safely with her Aunt Mihrimah in the swaddle of the Koran’s drone. That, I hoped, would cover for him. In reality he hadn’t given her that much thought at all.
But while covering for the greater neglect, I couldn’t shield her from the lesser. Esmikhan’s face ashed with disappointment. She sucked the breath into her mouth with little clicks of the tongue in an attempt to keep back the tears. I cannot say what grieved her the most, missing the procession and the sociability at her cousin’s, or realizing that after a seven-month reprieve, she was still in fact married to a man who gave orders like he followed them—without explanation, without a word of endearment.
I flushed with guilt for my own part in this. But I didn’t dare divulge the first part of what I knew to her so I suggested, “He cannot mean it.”
“Oh, he means it, all right,” Esmikhan said. “You know very well my husband always means what he says. He hasn’t a joking bone in his body.”
“Lady, surely if he realizes that this is your own father we are greeting...”
“You think he doesn’t realize that? Abdullah, why else in the name of the Almighty did he marry me if it wasn’t because my father is who he is? It’s quite clear love had nothing to do with it.” Her tears had broken free now and were flowing bitterly.
“Lady, Lady,” I crooned, taking her plump little hands in one of mine and stroking her fine dark curls until she slept.
And in the morning, after prayers, I was relieved to find her in much better spirits. Beyond no concern to miss the procession, she even expressed a desire not to go even so far as Lady Mihrimah’s that day. As little more than an afterthought she said, “But you are free to go, Abdullah, to either place, and be my eyes if you wish.” I felt she was doing me a favor, not giving me an order. Her mind was elsewhere.
Perhaps her cheer had something to do with the squadron of soldiers that had appeared at our front door during the night. I met one of them in the yard. They were under Sokolli’s orders, he told me, the Grand Vizier’s most trusted elite, sent there, “Just in case.” If Esmikhan took their presence as a decent substitute for a letter or other sign of her husband’s care, who was I to contradict her?
There was so little fuss about my going that I had more than enough time to find a good seat at the cousin’s near Yedi Kule. And since I didn’t have my lady to accompany, I could avoid the harem and take my chances with the rest of mankind in the street below.
A high stone wall just at the first bend after the Golden Gate served me well. I watched an hour’s worth of hurried preparations as carpets, flower petals, and palm branches were strewn across the roadway for the conquering heroes and their new Sultan to tread upon.
“They come! They come!” The news ran, and then, I, too, could hear the cheers and the music—the pound of drums, the squeal of horns, and the jarring rattle of the bell standards and the cymbals—keeping time to the march of a million soldiers’ feet, and the reined tripping of the cavalry. A great shout went up and we knew the first rank had reached the Golden Gate.
All eyes were straining up the road with such intensity that not a soul noticed until the crash, and then none could escape it. It looked so innocent and accidental, something that one might see any day of the week in the streets of Constantinople. But this was not any day, and it was no accident. There it was, not twenty paces in front of me, a cart spilling its
