There, on top of the chest, was the blue and white Chinese vase filled with another singular bouquet. The rather large branch of an apple tree arced against the wall. Its leaves had turned and the three apples that still clung to it blushed pink as if the roses, now all withered in the gardens, had bequeathed their color to the apples on their deathbeds. The branch recalled at once the famous lines by Qatran:
Red begins to show on the golden apple
like a blush on a lover’s cheek...
It looks as if camphor dust had been sprinkled on the mountaintops,
and as if a steel sword had attacked the stream.
The evenings become as long as the day
when you part from a beautiful woman,
And the days become as short as a night of lovers’ union...
If tears rain down my cheeks longing for you, let them fall,
for rains make the garden beautiful in time to come.
It took me but a minute to decipher the message, but a moment longer to realize that young Ferhad, as I’d feared, must have been among the soldiers our master had sent to protect the house; I had seen the faces of only two or three of them, and Esmikhan had said nothing. So Ferhad had proven his worth so well during the month that Suleiman’s death had had to be kept a secret that he had been trusted not to side with the rebels.
And yet here, beneath the master’s very eyes, was treachery of a much deeper and more devastating variety. His choices might save the Empire. But from the point of view of the harem, they were devastating.
My master looked directly at the apple branch for a long time, but he did not see anything amiss in it. Sokolli Pasha had never been one to read poetry on the written page, much less in the symbolism of flowers. I don’t think he even stopped his thoughts long enough to think what an odd bouquet a branch of withering apple made, or to wonder where it might have come from. There were no apple trees in our garden, but he never thought that it must have come from the orchards north of the city through which the army had marched. He had marched through those same orchards with them, worrying about rebellion and not love.
Fortunately, we were interrupted again at this point by another messenger with papers to be read and signed. By the time he had gone, I thought I could speak without betraying what I held in my mind.
“My uncle,” I began with a slave’s euphemism for ‘my master.’ “My uncle, excuse my bringing this up tonight, this first night that you’ve been returned to us, but I have been quite concerned lately that we should have more guardians to properly keep your harem.”
“How many are you now?” Sokolli Pasha asked me in the same tone he would use for tallying men on the battlefield.
“Nearly thirty women serve your wife, my lord,” I said, “including the musicians, seamstresses, maids, and cooks.”
“No, I mean khuddam,” he said. “How many are there of you?”
“Just me, sir,” I replied, surprised that he should ask. “There has always been just myself.”
A brief chuckle was wrenched from my master’s throat as he said, “Just you?”
“Yes, my uncle,” I assured him.
Other chuckles came in the same fierce, rough way, until my master was laughing heartily, but in a clumsy, guarded manner that told me his throat was unused to such entertainment, and laughter to him was like stones dragged over tender flesh.
“Oh, forgive me, Abdullah,” he said at last, gasping for breath. “I wasn’t laughing at you. I was laughing at myself more than anything. And at the confounded absurdity of it all.”
“My uncle?”
“I mean, here I’ve been the past month and a half, guarding a dead corpse with an army of half a million, while at home I’ve let my wife—a woman no doubt very much alive and very bored and restless, the poor soul—go guarded with but a single khadim, and he hardly more than a boy. All these years I’ve been married—how many is it now? Three?”
“Over four, my lord.”
“Four, by Allah! Well, it really is too ridiculous. If I had failed to carry out the succession, Allah forbid, history would have forgiven me. It is humanly impossible to keep such a vast empire as ours quiet and content on all fronts. Any man who’s ever ruled could tell you that. But even the most common gutter sweep manages to keep his common wife in line. If one loses honor at home, it’s pretty useless to hope to gain it in the Divan, but I...”
We were interrupted here by yet another messenger, but Sokolli Pasha waved him away. When he turned to me again, he said, “I remember the day you first came here. You seemed so young and innocent, and I saw a deep, fresh hurt in your eyes. ‘By the Merciful One,’ I remember thinking. ‘I hope old Ali finds a good head eunuch to train this one or there will be one spoiled and skittish khadim on our hands.’ I meant to speak to him about it later, when you were out of the room, but I see now that either he didn’t hear me or I forgot to speak to him. Actually, it was probably the latter. I am so used to having to keep my own counsel that I could easily forget to give an order like that. I often find things so blatant, I assume others do, too. Then there was the business with the brigands and it turned out so well that I just assumed...
“I am a self-made man, you see,” he interrupted himself. “Certainly Suleiman, may he rest in peace, raised me from place to place, but it was I myself who saw and did what
