In a moment, blue blood filled the Persian’s face and Ghazanfer Agha tossed him to the floor, lifeless as a bundle of rags. The Hungarian was in a quandary then, whether to come to my aid—and masses of blood from my head made my wounds seem worse than they actually were—or to do his duty first and go to the sobbing young woman. But by then the noise had brought most of the rest of the harem running up to see and there were plenty of arms for both of us. Ghazanfer Agha made his choice and he chose me, grunting between his teeth as he carried me to one of the pallets, “I knew we couldn’t trust the product of Mu’awiya the Red’s knife.”
Quickly my head was stanched and wrapped and a few other cuts I’d received from falling on the shattered crockery were seen to as well with uncommon gentleness.
“I’ll be all right now,” I said, attempting to get up.
“No, you’d better just lie still,” said the giant Hungarian.
I protested again. “I can at least make it to my own room and let these girls straighten up here.”
I indicated the hovering slaves who were actually doing more staring and whispering than straightening. They found a loved-on bed a wonderful anomaly—as if it were a meteorite landed in their midst and guaranteed to give beauty and fertility. Others were examining the ewer, fingering its new dents as if by so doing they could inject some passion into their own dull lives. Ghazanfer looked at them and then nodded and helped me to my feet, taking most of the weight upon himself.
At the door among the crowd still standing and staring, I saw Gul Ruh. I smiled to reassure her all would be well, then managed to raise my free hand up and lay it on her head.
“What are you doing here, little one?” I asked, trying to laugh. It was, after all, looking for her that I had found myself in this mess. “This is no sight for your young eyes.”
She took my hand gratefully in hers and proceeded to walk downstairs beside me. In spite of the fact that if it hadn’t been for Ghazanfer Agha, I probably would have gotten myself killed, I was the hero of the hour and she was delighted to be seen with me. But a squeeze of her hand brought other values to my mind. Dear Abdullah, it seemed to say. I know you would do the same or more for me, to save me from a union I do not desire.
L
Before my pain-racked body reached my room, the Persian’s was in the sea. The rites of Islam were not disgraced by application to him.
Mitra had been helped to her room, too, and was cleaned up a bit. But then she was deserted to wonder about her fate in solitude. She called to see her two little boys, but their nurses would not even allow them to enter the room of one whom the head eunuch might condemn to death at any moment.
Kislar Agha, “the head of the girls,” was Nur Banu’s creature and should not have hesitated a moment before fetching Mitra out and sending her to join her lover at the bottom of the sea. Indeed, there were few of us who ever doubted that the false eunuch had been acting under the Queen Mother’s orders every luring step of his way.
Nur Banu must have told him, “Come, today is the day. I order it. She is over her impurity from the birth of her last son and is attracting the Sultan again. You must disgrace her today or live forever disgraced in my eye.”
And perhaps she had even given him a pepper infusion to quicken his blood and rubbed his privates with honey and nettle to coddle and enflame them before he left her that morning. He may not have known how greatly his life was at risk. But Nur Banu knew.
A refined, white Persian eunuch from the knife of Mu’awiya the Red did not come cheaply. Nonetheless, that was a sacrifice the Queen Mother made willingly to rid herself of the greatest threat to her power—that Persian girl of Safiye’s. That girl’s poetry had won her two sons from the loins of the master and she had been invited back yet again over the most beautiful Circassian the Valide Sultan could muster. So Nur Banu had paid the price of such a eunuch and surely she would do all in her power to see she got what she’d paid for—even after the man was dead.
But Safiye, too, had her means. She must have worked quickly the moment she sensed what was afoot up in the slave’s dormitory. Overstepping the head black eunuch, she burst in on the Sultan and several of his companions, her veilless state indicating a grief on the edge of insanity that could not be ignored. But she had the sense to keep the news to herself until the strangers had been excused so the word would get no further than those ears that commanded life and death in all the Empire.
“Our fair Mitra whom you love so dearly, the mother of two of your sons, has been foully attacked in your own harem. She has been attacked by one your own mother dared to introduce to thwart your honor and dignity in the guise of a eunuch. By the merciful will of Allah, one of my most diligent khuddam was able to stop and kill the man before the deed was actually done. Come to the room and see for yourself his accursed seed spilled on the floor. There is none, by the mercy of Allah, on her.
“The man has paid with his life as is only well and just, but there are those
