My chest was, in fact, the very core of their complaint. Both mutinies were against “interference in our affairs by the harem,” as well they might be. Sometimes I rue that I ever stood sentinel with my back pressed to the gates’ silver studs. Perhaps I should have taken the first man in the press, spitting venom beneath his wild mustache. I should have taken him quietly by the arm and led him straight to Safiye’s rooms. I could have let him cut one throat to spare tens of thousands in the years to come.
But Esmikhan was also cowering behind those silver studs. I could never be certain the man and his fellows, leaping with impotent rage as they were, would leave just so quietly afterwards. I could risk no guarantee they would not stop in every other room of the palace to do all the other things soldiers do. For Esmikhan’s sake, I stood and crossed my arms in the troops’ hot breath and did not flinch.
Safiye, the euphemistic harem, survived by our flimsy protection and by judiciously cutting her losses, making certain “necessary sacrifices.” For instance, she let the janissaries have her Kira. Esperanza Malchi, who’d become a plump and very well-to-do widow, was not protected by harem walls. She was dragged from her house along with one of her helpless grown sons and torn to pieces by the soldiers’ bare hands. Another son barely managed to escape and fled into exile.
The thousandth year of the Muslim era occurred during this time and was preceded by much end-of-the-world fanaticism. Christian and Jewish minorities suffered greatly and the government did little to stop the more radical elements. Here again Safiye cut her losses, gave the rebellious a vent for their emotions. The vent in fact came nowhere near touching the true cause. And the true cause, though couched in pious Suras, was of course that, as they waited for judgment day, pious Muslims must suffer a Christian—and worse, a woman—to rule over them. But the fanatic, once he has larded his purpose with loftiness, can rarely see his satisfaction clearly, either.
Safiye allowed a number of churches within the capital to be converted into mosques, churches the Conqueror himself had promised might remain Christian. This, though the Greek Patriarch hovered about outside the harem door for days on end. She was born and raised a Christian. She must show mercy. Like a bedraggled raven he was, fasting until he had to be carried away for weakness. To no avail. It was his church that first had the icons smashed and the minaret foundation dug.
So did Safiye deal with those who had been most faithful to her. But I had always known that was her style.
Safe within the harem, Esmikhan and I ignored all this in the world. Safiye wanted nothing more from us, my two ladies and me, so she left us in peace. And Allah—all praise to Him—sent us a great distraction from her.
Not too many months after her grandmother Nur Banu died, Gul Ruh gave birth to her first child, a son. Two years did not pass afterwards that she did not birth another, strong, healthy child: two girls and three boys in the end. It was always Esmikhan’s wonder that Gul Ruh suffered very little to gain her progeny. Indeed, each new blossom seemed to make her bloom all the more herself.
Esmikhan and I spent a great deal of time at the old Mufti’s house on the Golden Horn. It was always a delightful bit of instruction to me to arrive there and see all the things a harem was not, things most in the West insist that it is. The raven Patriarch himself seemed to have imagined his enemy to be like these wild rumors. And maybe he was closer to being right, in Safiye’s case, where the world of men intruded. But not in Gul Ruh’s.
The silent, somber, somnolent world stifled with boredom and frustration is a better description of Abd ar-Rahman and his brothers’ selamlik than the harem. In the selamlik in dusty, crinkly tones, the scholars and legists pursued their endless discussions. Their topics might have something distantly to do with the wars and mutinies of more active men. But to assure judicial detachment, they always carefully reduced the cases to flat pages of black and white, to some theoretical man named a generic Amr or Zeyd, to a woman named Hind or Zeyneb. All was strained to the clearest broth without the least pother lump into which to sink an emotional tooth. And in this state they dissected un-passionately, weighing all against the immutable Word of Allah, and filed appropriately for future reference.
How unlike the world that burst upon us when we finally reached the harem doors! The selamlik was like the somber black veils of a woman, to slip quietly by, a phantom. But when she removed them, she was revealed to be in her holiday best, blinding with silks and gems and fragrance and lark-like trills of laughter. The selamlik was the rough, dirty grey-green rind of a melon, thwarting the hungry. Opening revealed the sole purpose such things were grown in the first place: the brilliant burst of orange, sun-warmed flesh, swathing the nose with sweetness and juice.
Entering Gul Ruh’s harem was like opening a melon, hungry, thirsty, on a hot day. Every day was crammed with events which, while none was earth-shattering enough ever to gain a place in the historians’ annals, were certainly always thrill and worry and
