* * *
The dancer, sweating profusely, kicked off her shoes the better to free herself of the world and enter into the seduction of the music. Her shoulders rolled like sea waves. Over them, with a pair of wooden spoons in each hand, she clattered out a rhythm. The rhythm inter-coursed with thrilling shivers amongst the three tantalizing touches on the tenor side of the drum to each heavy grunt on the bass. The shawm squealed, the audience did, too, squealed and blushed and sweated at the suggestion in the merest roll of the dancer’s hips. The hips seemed to have a life of their own, a life far removed from that in the stifle of the harem, a life where all desires were satisfied...
Nur Banu, watching this, her newest slave, with obvious pride, cracked a pistachio between her strong white teeth.
“You know she killed your father, don’t you?”
Nur Banu spat the hull onto the carpet. The dancer was oblivious and danced on it and a spray of others as if on clouds.
“Who did?” Gul Ruh’s heart leapt to her throat with fear on the off -beat.
“Why, Safiye, of course.” Nur Banu picked another nut with care and dealt similarly with it.
Gul Ruh had been ignoring the dancing to vent her grief and anger over the latest happening in Safiye’s section to Nur Banu’s understanding ears. But this revelation caught my young lady totally unprepared and she could say nothing.
“Oh, she didn’t dress up like a dervish and actually do the deed herself. But he was in her pay. Which is the same thing, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Gul Ruh admitted. Then she stammered, “But why?”
“To keep you from marrying Abd ar-Rahman. To keep you for herself—and, incidentally, for Muhammed. Do you think it’s just coincidence that Sokolli Pasha—Allah favor him—died the same day the sons of the old Mufti were to come and make the marriage plans? No. She had to move fast—and she did.”
Gul Ruh was silent, trying to fit the complexity, the duplicity of what she had just heard into the straightforwardness of her mind. Safiye was her mother’s closest friend. Yet Safiye had killed her best friend’s husband?
Before the tortuous task was half complete, Nur Banu spoke again. “And Arab Pasha, too.”
“Brabi?”
“She had him killed on Cyprus. Oh, I know they say they were brigands, but they were brigands as much as that dervish was a holy man—they had the same source for their pay.”
Gul Ruh was shaking her head in a dither of disbelief.
“But it’s true. And for the same reason. Your aunt Safiye knew only too well what an impediment he was in your heart.”
The ancient commandment of blood for blood clamped like manacles about Gul Ruh’s hands. She stuttered, “Then...then I must take revenge. I must...” She could not say it actively and threw it to the safety of the passive: “She must be killed.”
“It would be nice, yes. But frankly, my dear, I don’t know how it is to be done. Allah knows, I’ve tried. No, she is too closely guarded, she is too strong and clever, even for one like you who may come and go in her presence.”
“Allah is merciful to widows and orphans. He cannot let such crimes go unpunished.”
“Allah is indeed merciful. Safiye herself may be impregnable, but there are others of her blood who will suit the demands of vengeance just as well—blood for blood—and in fact may cause her more grief than just a moment’s twist of the knife.”
“Others of her blood?”
“Prince Muhammed, for example. She cannot be with him every minute of every day. It would not be such a difficult thing for you, his dear, trusted cousin, to win his confidence...”
“Must I kill Muhammed, then?” Gul Ruh’s voice was as weak as milk skimmed of the cream.
“Oh, my goodness, no, my dear! Such a thing for a lady to say! But you might open opportunity...”
“Allah! Allah! Allah!” The audience was shouting in an all-consuming rhythm now, clapping their hands with a particularly sharp resonance. A second woman, as if possessed, could not stay on her cushion any longer. She leapt up, tore the scarf off her head and threw it around the first dancer’s hips. They danced in a vertigo of waists.
“Praise Allah for our new sister who has freed our souls!” was heard from deep in a hoarse throat.
And from another: “Allah, I will give my right hand to be the one to take her to the baths and wash this sweat from her when at last she drops.”
“And ah, to see—to touch!—those hips when the weight of that belt of bells is gone!”
LVIII
Summer, the second month of Rabia and a time the astrologers and fortunetellers labeled laconically “the ascendancy of the household,” began on a single day. The Marmara had ironed out its springtime turbulence and lay now like a carpet of honor before the palace enthroned on the Point.
In certain lights, particularly early morning or at sunset, it caught the colors and patterns of Angora wool besides. But then, honor was still in the making, for the caïques and skiffs with their bright holiday banners trailing sped one way and the other like shuttles. On such a day a seven-charge salute sounded from the Tower of the Cannon and the festivities that would make an adult Muslim of Muhammed, the firstborn Prince, began.
For much of this two-week period, I stood in my place at the end of the ranks of eunuchs which in turn were behind the scarlet-robed pages, the blue tutors, the violet lawyers and the green viziers spun out like satin ribbons on the court. The sea of turbans was like a field of mushrooms sprung up in the muggiest of weather. It was easy to leave my insignificant place without causing scandal when I grew weary. I had, indeed,
