Nur Banu shrugged one hollowed, bony shoulder apologetically. The Fig pressed that shoulder back into the cushions to give herself an undisturbed plane of operations. Nur Banu waved the seamstress around to the front of her to continue her selections. Esmikhan followed, I think to escape the sight I continued to endure.
The Fig began applying the leeches, the best Anatolian leeches, starved to voracity. She scooped them quickly out of a Chinese porcelain jar and pressed their little heads down to give them the idea, precise spaces apart on the bony white back. In the half-light I imagined the creatures could be slithering slabs of the Fig’s own blue-black flesh. She was layering them upon her patient in an attempt to transfer strength and corpulence.
The Fig periodically sought out her patient’s pulse throughout the treatment until at last the fat worms began to drop off of their own accord, sated. Then the Fig hissed quietly through the gap in her teeth. The little trickles of blood that wormed down the pallid skin after their makers were likewise red-black. More bleeding would be necessary until the healthy blood flowed, with a healthy golden sheen as its basis instead of choking bitumen—like rubies mined during the moon’s waxing. The patient may at least weaken, I thought, until mercifully death takes her.
Nur Banu found Esmikhan insufficient as distraction, once the new costumes were ordered. My lady, I suspected, found the proximity of death took her tongue into its grasp. Nur Banu called for a storyteller instead. This large, waistless woman was ordered to “Tell the same again.”
“The same” was, incongruously I thought at first, an adventure of Alexander the Great. How, “in the time before, when the sieve was in the straw, the camel was a street crier, and I was rocking my father’s cradle,” the ancient king marched his army to the very center of the world. At the center of the world is the Mountain of Kaf, which holds up the sky and which “offers only space enough for a man to crawl beneath its pinnacle and the base of heaven.”
Alexander sent one of his bravest up to this mountaintop to see what he might see. The man came down quite shaken. All he could report was that at the top he had met, coming up from the other side, “one just like me in every way.” From among his uniform, disciplined ranks, Alexander chose another, then another to attempt the same mission. In the end the king decided he must go up himself.
And what he met on the summit was something he never expected: another Alexander. He who thought himself unique was confronted by his twin, identical in pride, inimicability, and peerlessness.
“So Alexander returned,” the tale concluded, “much humbled, having learned there are worlds upon worlds, generations upon generations, and only Allah is One. Three apples fell from the sky,” ran the traditional “happy ever after,” “one went to the one who told the story, the second to the one who wasted her breath, and the third to the one who listened to her tale. As each heart finds its own happiness, may Allah grant each of you find your true love in this narrow world.”
As soon as she could politely do so after this, my lady took her leave. She offered profuse wishes for her stepmother’s recovery and promises that she would soon return. But I could tell that in spite of her natural charity, Esmikhan longed for the carriage’s confines as the more comfortable surroundings. She would curse herself every day she left those promises unfulfilled. But sometimes charity requires more bravery than my lady had been given to go along with the rest of her nature.
As I climbed into the cushions beside her, Esmikhan took out a linen handkerchief and began to weep. “It is too bad, too bad, mashallah! Nur Banu Kadin admits defeat.” I think it was my lady herself who admitted defeat. The sudden lurch of the horses compounded her heartache.
That is another drawback of a carriage: It cut down on intimacy in voice quality if nothing else. Above the head-splitting noise of the ride, I begged Esmikhan not to grieve.
“To fight against the will of Allah—as the Valide Sultan’s death seems clearly to be—is to deny His mercy and to draw out our own pain. She should not try to fight heaven’s will, Nur Banu Kadin should not. It will only draw out her agony—and that of those who love her.” I took my lady’s trembling hand and she pressed mine in return and gratitude.
“At least I can report back to Topkapi that there is no poison, no witchcraft here.”
“Poison would be easier,” I murmured, hoping again that the Fig might at least hasten her patient’s demise.
And yet I found myself dreading the Valide Sultan’s death not so much for the sake of the woman herself but for the counterweight she had always been to keep Safiye’s ambition in check. Now—but I didn’t want to consider that now through the ear-numbing clatter of Safiye’s carriage. The noise totally engulfed us, offered no escape, and seemed ominous indeed. Who should counter that malignancy now, if only with malignancy of her own?
No one, drummed the horses’ shoes in answer. And virtue, like the little pat of cream of a hand I held, was no defense against such evil. Like the tallest minaret, perfect virtue probably only attracted the destructive glance of lightning.
Such thoughts brought tears of fear, of empathy to my own eyes. And though a weeping eunuch is not so extraordinary as a weeping man—our natures allow, nay, demand it—I fought desperately to change the subject. For my lady’s sake, I must change my emotion.
“I read an interesting series of poems the other day,” I told her, “written by a countrywoman
