Not only did the fact that she sat behind her screen serve to disembody my lady’s presence, but an allover dimness and light in irregular and deceptive blotches conspired to do so,-too. Her voice seemed to come not from behind the screen particularly but from everywhere at once, to bathe the hearer like the gloom, to be incorporeal and yet very present and very, very tangible all at once. Like the thick fog that sometimes rises off the Danube, it seemed to enter the lungs as if it were water and they a sponge; it entered the brain like wool stuffed a pillow.
And suddenly Ali Pasha knew it would be useless to try and fight this fog with his poor weapons—a sharp appearance and swaggering manners. It would be as useless to fight this as to throw one’s dagger and oneself against a Danubian fog for rising unbidden and misleading his troops. Esmikhan’s voice was the voice of conscience if not epiphany.
“A woman came to see me today,” the voice repeated, having once let us catch our bearings on no ground at all. “I did not remember her, though she had been a serving girl under my stepmother in her youth. Naturally I greeted her as such. She had come to me as the last friend she had in the world. She had no place else to go besides the brothel, being after all a former slave, kin- and defenseless. Of course I said at once that she must stay with me, she and her three children.
“‘But tell me,’ I could not refrain from asking, ‘how is it you come to be in such a pitiful state? My father, the Sultan of the Faithful, surely he did not leave you so. He would be nothing if not a man of honor and no man with a shred of honor would do such a thing.’
“Then she told me. She told me how her husband, the man to whom my father had trusted her honor and care, had been swollen by ambition to marry another and had cast her off without a backwards glance at the ten years she had served him in perfect faithfulness.
“You would have recognized this woman. Pasha, long before I did. She had to spell it out more clearly before I realized—before I could believe—that she was your wife. Pasha, and that I was the one for whom you so carelessly threw her fair face, supple body, and delicate manners away.”
AH Pasha made some movement to protest that the face and manners of a slave could not compete with those of one of the house of Othman. But he knew full well it was too late and did not get far with his protestations. Esmikhan refuted them all quickly anyway.
“No! How can you think to debase the royal blood of Othman with a nature so lacking in honor and devotion as that! I’m sure you will consider yourself fortunate if I do not call for your death—the usual punishment for treason against the throne—and simply refuse the suit of marriage that has been brought to me. Beyond that, I can hardly wish you peace and good day. Pasha. As Allah lives, I pray He may harrow your soul with guilt even a fraction of what it deserves. That should be enough to make you long for hellfire.”
You may be certain Ali Pasha left the palace with her voice licking his heels like flame.
Safiye was furious when she learned what her creature, or so she counted Esmikhan, had done. At first she tried everything from cajolery to cursing to sway the Sultan’s daughter, but my lady, still harboring the divorcee and her abandoned children, resisted with the spirit if not the physical force of a lion. Finally Safiye desisted, realizing that any more discussion on a point of view Esmikhan found so clearly immoral would only serve to lose her this important ally.
In the meantime, Nur Banu had sent her emissaries to Ali Pasha with some tempting offers concerning the Ottoman daughters of her slaves...
“Ali Pasha refused Nur Banu!” Safiye exclaimed, elated, when she learned the news. “He’s refused the old girl. But why? I can’t believe I overestimated him.”
“No,” Esmikhan said with a quiet smile. “I think you underestimated him.” And she took the hand of the divorcee who’d sought her protection and who sat dandling her youngest on the divan next to my lady.
There were three months of waiting. The sham marriage to another man, hired for the purpose. And then at last—-but not one day later than the minimum the law allowed—Ali Pasha and his wife were reunited and with hardly less joy and passion than I have seen between love matches and virgins. Within another three months, the new bride vas with child.
And Ali Pasha, though this business proved to be the end of his ambition, was not totally cut off from all routes to advancement. His wife now had powerful strings to pull in the heart of the imperial harem that she had not had before. The last time I saw the Pasha, I noticed with interest how the bladelike features of his former self had been buried, as it were, in dunes of sand-colored flesh. And though not particularly dashing any longer, one could not say he looked either unbecoming or unhappy.
“What a remarkable mistress you serve” was Ghazanfer’s comment on the matter, and I had to agree with him. But he went further. “In many another time and place—less civilized, we might say—a woman who had been so used for no other fault than coming in the way of her man’s ambition or his lust, she would have had no recourse. Even the
