***
Hosting pilgrims is a religious duty enjoined upon all Muslims and, in Konya, it is a profitable business as well. So, although my first day spent looking for him turned up nothing, I was confident the dervish must be safely stowed away among the boarding houses and monasteries of the holy city. In only a matter of time I would find him.
My mistress, for her part, had many connections in Konya; her rebellious uncle had been its governor for many years. Her father—as if to wipe the name Bayazid, which they held as almost divine, forever from the townsfolk’s memory—had ordered a grand new mosque built to house the saint’s remains. Though it was now complete enough to worship in, the tile work was still in process. Tiles stacked everywhere bore the name “Sultan Selim”; those already on the walls were glaring and fresh and had not faded into the delicate tendrils and flowerets as they would with time and dust.
Of course, the present governor of the sandjak insisted we live with him for the full year of our intended stay. His wives and daughters were honored to move from the best rooms of the harem for a princess of the Blood, and I was given the head eunuch’s room.
Our first day in Konya, being a Sunday, my lady spent getting used to her new surroundings and resting from the journey. I did my exploring. But we were up early on Monday and my lady spent all day in the shrine, kissing the sarcophagus, partaking of holy water, giving gifts, circumambulating, praying and listening to learned women read from the Koran, the traditions of the Prophet, and the writings of the blessed Rumi himself. I did not expect to catch a glimpse of our dervish, for Monday along with Wednesday were the two days of every week set aside in the holy places for women and their attendants alone so they could perform their devotions without infringement upon their modesty.
So it was that, though Esmikhan spent the day as if on the very precipice of ecstasy, hearing every word as if it were a present revelation to her alone, I suffered from a tedium greater than usual in a job often fraught with little more than patient waiting. Boredom I can usually bear, but not this that was mixed with anxiety about my dreams. The torment of uninterrupted thoughts there in the reverent murmur of the shrine must have quite benumbed me, else I never would have been so careless.
It was at the end of the day. As her last act before we left, Esmikhan wanted to sit upon the Stone. Set near the main portals and of plain white limestone, the Stone had a curved impression on the top where, it was said, the saint had been wont to sit while pursuing his meditations. The pilgrim, we were told, if she assumed Rumi’s exact attitude, and recited the first chapter of the Koran without a mistake, could expect her fondest prayer to be answered. Esmikhan had her maids go first, and there was such blushing and giggling that the Sura, if ever they knew it, was quite forgotten, and their wishes, plainly, were much too frivolous for a saint to pay heed to: an emerald necklace or khadin budu for supper, perhaps.
“Now you go, Abdullah.” Esmikhan touched my arm.
“I have nothing to wish for, lady,” I declared.
She looked up at me, her great brown eyes moist with understanding. The only wish she could imagine for me—my manhood back—would be a mockery of Allah and his will. So Esmikhan groped for my hand, and allowed me to help her onto the Stone.
“... Thee only do we worship, and to Thee do we cry for help...”
The Sura, recited with eyes clenched closed with effort, was probably never recited with more perfection, save only by the Prophet Muhammed himself. Esmikhan remained on the stone for some moments afterwards, her breath shallow with anticipation, as if she expected to be carried off into heaven by the miracle. Even her silly maids were sobered into silence as they joined their wills to hers. But soon it became clear that nothing out of the ordinary would happen. My lady groped for my hand again and we left the mosque.
“Abdullah. Ustadh! Peace be unto you!”
I recognized the voice, and it startled me so much that I dropped what I was holding. I was holding a corner of the large brocade curtain that allowed my lady to pass from the mosque compound to her sedan, a mere three paces across the public thoroughfare, without the public being able to see so much as her shadow. I quickly retrieved the screen, and held it much higher and tighter than usual, though I could not avoid dipping it again as I returned the greeter’s bow.
A man of ordinary good manners would have stood aside when he saw what I was doing, and waited until the curtain had been folded up and packed away inside the sedan after the lady. But this man had forgotten manners in his excitement to see me—or to see what I was trying to hide. And, once the greeting had been given and the curtain dropped, the most polite thing he could do was to continue on without a pause as if the whole operation, woman, curtain, sedan, and all, were quite invisible.
The man who greeted me with such effluence and abandon was none other than the young spahi-oghlan, Ferhad Bey.
“I thought I recognized you on the road the day before yesterday,” he said, “but we were on the march and I was unable to break rank and see. Well, how are you? How are you, my old friend?”
He proceeded to ask after my well-being, and that of everyone I knew,
