“I feel myself sick of languor.
Come, o Death, come lie this night next to me.”
Death, so unexpected, came in the midst of these very verses, they say, as Murad lay contemplating the flight of clouds through the windows of his kiosk. A loud salute of cannon in his honor from two Egyptian ships shattered the glass in a skylight and sent it in a rain down to his feet. Now, many a salute had sounded before without ill effect and many a time he had listened to those verses. But this coincidence of events he took as an omen, an answer at last from the mystics’ Beloved, and that night he closed his eyes for the last time and dutifully responded to the call.
We, of course, were kept ignorant of the death until Safiye and her lackey, the Grand Vizier, should have time to bring the heir Muhammed from Magnesia, I was not one of them, but still there were those whose sixth sense told them what was afoot. They began to try and consolidate their positions.
* * *
I remember one day in particular on which, had I been able to read such things, the very air should have told me something. Ghazanfer and I were walking through the inner harem when, for no reason we could name, we paused in one of the smaller courts. No wider than two men laid foot to foot, and yet three stories high, the court was very like a well, and this was added to by the fact that there had been rain in the morning that left the walls and flags in the floor grey and slick with moisture.
A clematis not yet brought to bloom in that shadowy place clung to the wall like moss. Pigeons fluttered through the blue so far overhead, and somewhere on the third story a girl—scrubbing floors, perhaps—let her youthful exuberance out in a song. It seemed disembodied and far away as if it came from the next field, the next hillside, and was the product of wind on stone.
More real to us at the bottom of that pit came a heavy sound, like a drone, the sound of someone weeping. We set out to find the source of that sound and it took us longer than one might imagine. It was coming from the last place either of us thought to look—the little room where only months before one of the girls had died in childbirth. Until that episode could be forgotten, the place would be avoided as too rife with evil spirits.
“Mitra!” Ghazanfer cried when our eyes adjusted to the gloom and the sight. “Allah spare you, but you should not be here in your condition.” Mitra was just beginning to show her third pregnancy, brought on by her great skill at reciting Persian mystic poems, “Allah forbid, but might not the brokenhearted soul of our dead sister, Allah have mercy on her, seek to infect you here?”
Mitra looked up, her face swollen and grey as death from the weeping. “And what if she should? We are dead anyway, all of us: me and my sons and this little one I carry. To go at her phantom hand would be more merciful than at. . .” Here her voice dropped to a whisper and she turned her head to the wall again so I had to guess that she finished the sentence with the name “Safiye.”
It was then that I got the first inkling of what might be afoot in the rooms of the Sultan.
Ghazanfer tried to allay her fears, but she protested, “No, he is dead. I know he is dead. Three days now, four, I have not been called to his side to recite.”
“You know he is disturbed to see women with child,” I soothed her. There was only one person anyone meant by “he” in the harem.
“But that’s never stopped us before. I can recite from behind a screen.”
“He is sick,” I suggested, “and Allah may grant him a rapid recovery.”
“No, no, it is always in sickness that he loves my voice best. Nay, he is very sick, beyond hearing. He is dead. And so...so am I.”
I tried to think of more comfort and turned to Ghazanfer for aid. But Ghazanfer was one of those who already knew or guessed. He could offer no comfort. And that was more comforting to Mitra, somehow, than all my vain words. She turned to him now, full of hope.
“You know,” she said to him desperately. “You know, don’t you? You know that once her Muhammed is on the throne, my sons and I are useless to her. Worse than useless. Dangerous, for who knows what sort of rebellion might form around my little boys? I swear by Allah we have no such interest in power, but such vows are of no use here. By Allah, all we want is to live in peace. All I ever wanted, from the time I was a child, was to live in peace. And she made a bargain with us. You know, Agha, the bargain she made with us. ‘When Murad is dead...’ she said. She said she would free me and I could return to Persia, to my home, with my babies. And my brother, he fulfilled our part of the bargain. He killed the man. But they killed him and now I have no one to speak for me. I fooled myself all along into thinking—But now I know I was a fool. She’ll never keep her half of the bargain.”
Mitra’s words would not stop, a torrent. “She has the right—nay, the obligation according to the ancient law of the Ottomans—to kill all brothers to the heir, whether living or yet unborn, in order for peace to reign in the Empire. What is the peace of
