It was the same hour, the hour of stars, the setting of the moon and the sharp coolness before dawn. I had taken some food and was now coaxing down water in a pious, desireless fashion to steel myself against the rigors of the coming day. My old friend and I found ourselves face to face and alone in the courtyard. I lowered my eyes to my bowl and sipped again, waiting on him.
“Peace on you,” he said at just the right moment to meet the void of my desire, after a tantalizing pause. But not too late to lose the dither of expectancy.
“And on you, peace,” I replied. That was enough. I would have been satisfied then if our speech had never gone any further.
“What do you seek, pilgrim?”
“It.” I replied the dervishes’ divine “Hu,” beyond which there is no other.
“You shall find It in yourself.”
All that followed was afterplay, removed—if not in time or space, then in true reality—from that which went before. As distant from true discovery as are the two stars closest to the horizon north and south, the full arc of the sky from each other. How that vast gap in the fabric of reality is bridged, in the twinkling of an eye and yet so utterly, is one of the mysteries a dervish can feel to the very marrow of his bones. Yet he is unable to describe the mystery but with that one word that is goal and satisfaction, yearning and striving, all at once: “Hu.”
Bridge that gap we did, with the sweet nonsense of lovers, lovers of God. And when that was complete, Hajji spoke no more than a score of words from the world. They did not catch up with me until morning. “Purpose came not only from desire, but from within, from the harem. Look well, my friend.”
At that moment under the fading stars, we heard the muezzin together as if we had never heard him before. It brought tears to our eyes as if we’d spent all our lives imagining what the glory of that sound might be—the trumpet of the Day of Judgment—and heard it now at last, all our griefs and martyrdoms rewarded in the end. Then we bade goodbye—in silence and without touching. For how long? Another fifteen years? Who could say but the Most Merciful One?
We drifted back into the building to say die prayer at dawn. As I raised my hands to the side of my face, the edge of my sleeve wiped my friend from the mirror of my vision.
XLIX
“From within, from the harem. Look well, my friend.”
Upon the death of her husband, my lady fell under the protection of her brother. With no man to sit in its selamlik, the great house and gardens our master had built were deserted. There was talk of turning the area into a mosque with a pleasure park for the public.
But we moved back into the harem of the main palace. Safiye would hear of no place else, and in apartments right beside her, by Allah! My lady had always been loath to make a choice between Nur Banu and Safiye. When a firm decision such as this was made for her, however, and larded with protestations of friendship, she was helpless to refuse it. What I saw was that Safiye would find it that much easier now to see that her son, the heir, and his cousin Gul Ruh were brought together.
The move did cut my duties down to almost nothing. I was in favor of dismissing all my seconds, what with the army of eunuchs already employed in the palace. Although the last years of fevered purchase of new girls for the Sultan’s delight had filled the harem to overflowing, under such dense conditions, mere guarding took far fewer khuddam. But of course one can never look for reason or restraint when the palace is concerned, and somehow my assistants stayed on.
At first I was pleased to be relieved of responsibilities. I was spending all my time trying to track down my master’s murderer. But soon I discovered what such ‘freedom’ did to my power to act for myself. Hours and stations of guard were set in the palace by long tradition. And I was trying to fill old bottles with new wine.
“Hello, khadim. What are you doing here?”
“I just thought this corridor seemed unwatched.”
“No, no. I’m here. Don’t you worry. We’ve got it all taken care of. Why don’t you go run an errand for your mistress into town? Surely there is some new jewelry she needs to get, a new case of sweetmeats...”
And the day after the Night of Power my refocused attention made me discover yet another thing the move had taken from me. I had unwittingly, though quite of my own free will, given up the only responsibility I had left—and it was the only one that was of any real meaning. I had neglected my role as confident and comfort to my lady.
Her marriage to Sokolli Pasha had been empty form for years. We all knew that. I had supposed her grief would be but form as well. I don’t think she’d even seen her man for over five years. Though they lived in the very same house, their paths never crossed. But I’d forgotten to consider that with this emptiness could come a horrible guilt. And that never seeing him could help create an image of the man in her mind that was worth ten times the mourning the real flesh and blood had been.
She was never a complainer, but on that day just after the end of Ramadhan, Esmikhan herself reproached me. “What have you to do with those men’s affairs?” she asked me after I’d stumblingly tried to explain that my negligence had really been in her interest and the interest of Sokolli Pasha’s memory. I was seeking revenge, after all.
“Revenge,” she said with a wave of her hand, “that
