“Perhaps so,” I heard Safiye reply aloud and offhandedly. Religion—anybody’s—had never been of overriding concern to her. “But if England had not thrown out Latin with the Church, I could have done more for Elizabeth. She and I could have communicated better.” It is my suspicion that Safiye never did take Elizabeth’s envoys more seriously than their persistence demanded. “In that northern climate,” she insisted, “people have no time for culture. They are too busy trying to keep warm.”
But Elizabeth had sent a carriage.
It had taken some doing to find Turkish horses who could pull the thing, not to mention the reassembly required after two months at sea. In the meantime the plain wood paneling and salt-spray-stiffened leather seats had been ripped out, replaced by silken brocade divans and mother-of-pearl in a dozen intricate patterns. Shutters and curtains went to the windows. The final result was more in harmony with eastern taste.
And now, wherever Safiye rode, something was always threatened with being crushed. If not idolatry, certainly local Muslim pedestrians. The question was raised whether the attention the carriage’s passing ignited were in keeping with eastern taste. Certainly the harem’s reserve and dignity must suffer. Others had a more basic complaint: the filth the horses left behind them in the streets.
“They’ll get used to it,” Safiye said to any and all objections.
And in friendship Esmikhan could not refuse the offer to take the carriage to Nur Banu’s.
The ride was a good deal rougher than that provided by well-trained sedan bearers over Constantinople’s streets. The streets had been paved within the last century but not with such contrivances in mind. Still, I had to admit a carriage was faster—it could quite take the breath away. It got us out to the Edirne Gate with a remarkable amount of time to spare between the two morning prayers.
And a eunuch could ride as well instead of trotting alongside. Safiye’s guardians—except Ghazanfer—rode up on top with the driver. But when there was only one woman passenger—and she congenial—there was room within the cab. I enjoyed that and told myself firmly we must not do this too often. Only by walking had I managed to escape that curse of many in my condition: a mind-numbing obesity.
The carriage was faster, but Esmikhan required the extra time before the prayer call to recover her equilibrium after such a ride. And where the horses were taken to recoup I cannot imagine: Few palaces were provided with such accommodations in those days. But the edge of town was not far off. No doubt the driver just took the patient beasts out the gate and hobbled them among the grazing sheep beyond the walls.
In time, we went in.
The smell of Nur Banu’s rooms, even halfway down the hall, was not that of poison but the vinegar, moldy lemon rind of a malignant cancer.
LXII
How long, I wondered, had this dreaded disease been coming on? And the Valide Sultan refused to call retreat?
The shutters of the room into which we were ushered were draped and drawn. The Valide Sultan could no longer bear light upon her face. The chamber was close and stifling hot, kept that way by half a dozen braziers whose constant stoking with pungent sandalwood was the full-time and single-minded task of one maid. The odors of hot healing herbs—southernwood, jasmine oil—added to the dense, murky atmosphere. But they could not camouflage the stale, sour smell of sweating attendants in health nor that of the patient, her opium, and her nausea.
Before we could fill our lungs enough to catch our breaths, the heat of this air had us in a sweat, as it did everyone else in the room save Nur Banu. Nur Banu’s torso, stripped to the shalvar, betrayed, even in the half light, the wasting of her flesh. She had shrunk down to the most basic harsh angles and jutting joints. These caught what light there was in sharp sheen and shadows, like naked bone, with no softening curve in between.
This wasting was not the work of but a week or two. The Valide Sultan must have hidden her condition from Safiye’s camp for months under heavier and heavier garments. And Safiye might have interpreted the change, if she considered it at all, as simply more and more greed for finery.
How ironic, that the final assault should come not from an outside enemy, but by betrayal of Nur Banu’s own body, that body whose very curves had been the route to power in the first place.
In the flurry of our arrival, a plump yellow cat jumped up among sample silks spread by a seamstress on one of the low tables covering a brazier. The fire-stoking maid shooed him off.
Nur Banu smiled wryly, patient with a beast’s liveliness when she had so little herself. “That is a sign it will snow.” She gave the usual superstitious interpretation of such an omen. The dull grey haze in her once-remarkable black eyes belied her hope. Personally, I doubted that she had such a thing as a future to divine.
As if new clothes were a guarantee against death until they could be worn at least once, Nur Banu was in the process of ordering yet more lengths of yet heavier silk worked with yet more gold and gemstones. All this when her doctoring required that she be naked to the waist much of the time.
The Fig was there, leeching. She shot me a tyrant’s glance, but went about her business wordlessly.
“I enjoyed a two-week respite.” Nur Banu smiled crookedly at my lady in an attempt at bravery, but hadn’t the vigor to talk of anything but her treatment. “She would not leech as long as the moon was waxing.”
Nur Banu looked weakly at the Fig for at least the strength of surgeon’s confirmation. The Fig must have given it, but I saw no such return glance.
“During the waxing of the moon,” Nur
