“Oh, Allah,” Ferhad Pasha said when at last he’d made himself understand what he saw. “No! Never, by the All Merciful!” he cried.
He took a handful of the raisins then and bit into them so hard I could hear the seeds crack fi-om where I was. Then he tore into the pomegranate, ate none but left it bleeding over all the rest. At last he made a mad dash for the tree where I hid, and ripping branches from it by the handfuls, he brought them to the basket. The cypress, I remembered, is the symbol for eternity.
But there was nothing more to do than this compounding of symbol on sterile symbol and at last he realized it. In a moment, he had disappeared into the mist from whence he had come.
I waited a breath or two to be sure he’d gone, although I was quite sure he wouldn’t give a backward glance. Then I crept forward and retrieved the basket. It still exuded a heavy smell of bruised basil and marigold steeped in pomegranate when I presented it wordlessly to my mistress. She was sitting not a hundred paces away in another part of the cemetery at the tomb of Rahine, daughter of a famous dervish who died, they said, on her wedding night.
Esmikhan acknowledged me and the altered contents of her basket with the twitch of a weary smile that broke through her tear-stained face.
“Thank Allah,” she said, “I cannot walk, because more than a dozen times I so wanted to...”
Just then a bevy of young girls, chattering maids and grumbling eunuchs arrived at the tomb. Though from all I knew of her history it was difficult to see why, Rahine had become something of a saint to whom girls resorted to pray for husbands. So one in the palace blinked when Esmikhan said she wanted to visit her husband’s grave and we had also thought no passerby would find it odd to see a veiled woman sitting—for hours as it turned out—at Rahine’s. Still, as the innumerable strips of cloth left by the devotees testified, we were lucky she had not been disturbed before now and Esmikhan instantly took my hand to help her up.
“Let’s go,” she said.
But as soon as she began to make her labored progress to where her sedan waited, one of the newly arrived girls ran up.
“Auntie! Aunt Esmikhan, is that you?”
She threw back her veil to let us see: it was Safiye’s daughter Aysha.
Aysha looked more like her mother than anyone else, but she was her mother watered down ten parts to one. Her hair tried to be blond but the sort of grey-brown of dried oak leaves was the best it could manage. Her eyes were neither a rich brown nor yet a blue but something dully, muddily in between. Bright clothes and jewels, bunches of flowers in the hair or on her brea.st were things she had to wear just to compete with the meane.st serving maid around her. On her they always looked tottering and presumptuous.
Aysha’s personality, too, was lackluster, usually mousy, and when it tried to be merry, it generally came out brash and clumsy instead. The girl made just such an attempt now.
“Why, Aunt Esmikhan! Whatever you are doing at Rahine’s tomb? You don’t need to worry about finding a man.”
This discharge, Aysha realized after .she’d said it, was tactless. She tried to cover. “Oh, I’m sorry. Of course you should come here. I ju.st keep thinking anyone over thirty-five must be...” She found all her struggles did nothing but make her sink deeper and deeper, like one floundering in quicksand.
Esmikhan smiled, wearily, hut with indulgence and reached out a hand to rescue the girl. She was, after all, only a child, though growing up seemed to be doing nothing to help the habit of tactlessness.
“So tell me, Aysha,” she asked, “what are you doing here? You don’t need to worry about finding a man, either.”
“Oh, yes I do.”
“But your father has offered you to Ferhad Pasha. What more could any girl want?”
“Oh, but the Agha of the Janissaries is perverse and drags his feet. Why he drags his feet, I don’t know. Allah knows, he’s almost fifty.”
“Perhaps he does it out of consideration of your youth,” Esmikhan said gently. “You aren’t yet ten years old, Allah shield you, after all.”
“But the other Aysha, the Prophet’s favorite, he married her while she was still playing with dolls. I am much more grown-up than that.”
“Indeed. But let me tell you, child, it’s not very jolly being married to an old, old man.”
“No, but Ferhad Pasha is not like your old Sokolli Pasha. Ferhad is still charming and handsome.”
“Yes, yes, he is.”
“Why, Auntie! Are you crying?”
“No, no child. Go on now. Make your visit to the Lady Rahine. And I don’t mean to try and second-guess Allah’s will, but I think it is very likely she may grant you what you wish today.”
“Yes, you are. You are crying! Why, Auntie? Tell me.”
“It’s nothing, child, really. Just...just the inscription over Rahine’s tomb. It made me sad.”
“What does it say?” Aysha squinted at the curved archway. She knew enough to tell there must be writing interwoven with the tendrils of poppies and morning glories there, but she was never very clever at her letters. I suspect her eyes, which appeared muddy from the outside, were muddy to look through, too.
Esmikhan smiled. She had had nearly all day to sit and examine the archway and she recited now without even looking at it the either of the young woman who’d died on her wedding night.
“What is fate?
Before half my desires were fulfilled
I was snatched from the world.
That is fate—But Allah will resurrect.”
The last line caught on the hoarseness in her voice and she tried it again. “Allah will resurrect.”
LIII
Safiye flung herself into the room and onto the divan with heavy snorts of impatience.
“Why, my dear, what’s the matter?” Esmikhan asked.
“It’s that Ferhad Pasha.”
“What’s wrong with him now?
“Here
