“‘You do not understand the boat, either. There are wicked men in that city who would have stolen that only means of livelihood from those two good sailors. They will not bother to steal a boat with a hole in it, and by the time our friends have made their repairs, the wicked men will be converted to Allah and will molest them no more.’
“‘And the child?’ Moses asked. ‘Surely there can be no excuse to kill a child in the Mind of Allah.’
‘But there is,’ Elias replied. ‘Had that child become an adult, he would have been a very wicked man. His fair features would have remained and he would have deceived many with them. Not only would innocent people have had to suffer the loss of their goods, but hundreds would have died most miserably had that small hand grown large.’
“Sometimes,” Husayn concluded, “the man of Allah can best fulfill the will of the Merciful One not by obeying His laws, but by breaking them.”
My friend and I let the story sit in silence, and then we went without another word to eat some breakfast, for it would soon be dawn and the fast would be upon us again.
The story stayed with me throughout the coming weeks as the fast ended and we began to prepare to return to Constantinople. It seemed especially clear when I accompanied my lady to the tomb of the saint on the last Wednesday of our stay. It was as if Rumi himself, who, the dervishes say, had Elias for his instructor, were reciting the story to me in hollow echoes from the grave:”... Not by obeying His laws, but by breaking them.”
When we had completed our devotions, Esmikhan indicated that she wanted to sit in Rumi’s seat one final time. I knew that repetition was believed to erase the efficacy of a wish. At first I thought she was so desperate that she didn’t care, but when I helped her step down, I knew that over our stay her wish had changed. At first she had prayed for a child and the answer, so it seemed, had come in the vision of our young spahi. Her new wish I could guess at, and the way her eyes met mine made me feel that whatever power she had derived from that chair convinced her that its fulfillment lay in my good will alone.
“Not I!” I declared when she indicated again that I, too, should make a wish. My tone spoke in answer to the hope in those eyes, not to the suggestion of her tongue.
“Perhaps you have no desires, Abdallah. But can’t you even pray for the happiness of your poor Esmikhan? It cannot be pleasant to serve a woman whose heart is breaking,” she murmured.
Again I refused, but her words struck me with disquiet as if they had indeed come from an otherworldly source. So much so that, once I had packed her and her maids into their sedans, and sent them off with the porters and the other eunuchs, I took the first opportunity to escape even when that excuse was the appearance of none other than Ferhad himself.
I knew he would be there. He had been there in the public place outside the mosque compound every women’s day since the end of Ramadhan and many before. “He mingles among the men we must govern, and discovers their feelings and their desires,” our host excused him. “He is more useful to me there than he would be here while I hold court.”
I was not so easily beguiled. I knew his only true desire was to catch another glimpse of my lady as she entered and exited the mosque.
My lady, too, sensed this and always sat straight and arranged her hair with care and blushed so prettily even though I made certain there always remained four or five opaque barriers between his eyes and her. If I had had any doubts before, I had none that day, for a dark afternoon drizzle had driven all the more sensible townsmen to their homes, leaving only the Master of the Imperial Horse sitting there as if he were some village halfwit. There was no one for him to spy on but the ladies. That he kept his back discreetly to us did not fool me for a moment. It only allowed me to creep up on him without his knowledge.
The face that turned to me had tears distorting its handsome angles. I pretended I thought they were only raindrops, but I could not hide my surprise to see the other out-of-character thing about him: in his right hand was an unsheathed dagger.
Now the spahis are men of war and they undergo a little ceremony when they are issued their first dagger during which they vow “to use this blade against none but the enemies of Allah and of His Shadow, the Sultan of Islam.”
The enemy of Turkish society against which he now turned his knife was himself.
He had been holding it with such real intent that when my greeting startled him, he actually cut the flesh of his left wrist. It was not such a deep cut as to be dangerous but both he and I watched with startled fascination as beads of blood began to make a dainty woman’s bracelet on his arm. Only the reflex of ritual greetings and pleasantries kept a morbid silence from stifling us. The pleasantries allowed him, too, to gain some degree of composure with which to chuckle as if the scratch were nothing.
“Abdullah, my friend,” he said, “I have faced wild Austrians and Kurds as well as trained Persians
