Yes, one could see in the face of Baffo’s daughter that she would rather have scattered the Golden Way with a few old laundresses and two or three girls with heavily poxed faces that day. But Muhammed was Sultan now. If she would wield power through him, it would not do to try and curtail his power in any way. It would not do to try and keep him content with a little Greek girl when his hand—and through it, his mother’s—reached from the Danube to the Indian Ocean.
But Safiye had had many years in the harem on her own to prepare for this day. She trusted that every one of the maidens that lined his triumphal way into the inner sanctum was not only the most beautiful the Empire had to offer, but also totally dependent upon her will. The will of the new Valide Sultan.
There were two hundred of Safiye’s girls, a material recreation of the dream Prince Muhammed had once dreamed of Paradise. There were blondes and brunettes, blue eyes, brown eyes, and green, the svelte and agile, the cushiony and comfortable, all blushing in the perfect bloom of youth. The presence of a man brought them to their peak, like roses with dew. For some of them this was the first man they’d seen since their seclusion and careful training began as toddlers. For all of them, this was their man, the only man they would ever know, if Allah were favorable.
And Muhammed strode between them with an equal glow. In his cream-peach robes he walked and scattered a handful of coins from the tray borne by the coffee-colored eunuch behind him. The coins were a mere pretense of generosity, as the earlier ritual of placing their hennaed hands under his mother’s foot had been pretense of sudden submission. The girls hardly bothered to scramble for the money, except as a scramble might better show a cleavage or an ankle. Those who thought modesty or long lashes were their best features did not move at all but blushed and giggled.
Studded with rubies, the Sultan was twenty-four years old and come at last to his own.
I saw no more of this ritual than that. For Ghazanfer had contrived to get Mitra there among those scrambling—or not scrambling—in the Golden Way.
She was heavily disguised and veiled, of course. Had Muhammed actually laid eyes on her, his father’s concubine, it would have been rank incest. The even greater threat was that Safiye might see. Or guess.
Still, it had to be risked, under the celebratory confusion. The Golden Way was but a few steps from the antechamber where Ghaz-2infer had a sedan chair waiting. To what safety he meant to carry her, I never learned. My job was only to see that she got out the back door and into that sedan before Muhammed passed, before Safiye noticed she was gone. It was safer that I knew no more.
I was, in fact, grateful that the monstrous Hungarian seemed intent on protecting me as well as the girl. I did my job without a hitch. We slipped out of the stale, overused air of the harem’s bowels and into the fresh winter chill.
But only my part of the plot was ever fulfilled.
“Where...where are my sons?” Mitra turned to me from the caver nously empty sedan.
“Ghazanfer Agha has them safe somewhere,” I said quickly, perhaps too quickly. In fact I had no idea what he had in mind for the boys. “Get in now, lady.”
“No. I will not go without my sons.”
“They are safe, I am sure. Come now. Let me give you a hand.”
Still she hesitated. I did not know how much longer the giggles and shrieks in the Golden Way would cover us.
“Will you swear by the Most Merciful they are all right?”
“Allah is merciful,” I said. “They are in His hands.”
“It’s curious.” She sat down on the edge of the chair but would not yet swing her feet up into the box so we could close the door and be on our way. “That is just the line Mustafa, my eldest, wrote in a little poem last night. You know he’s quite a poet. Already! At his age, Allah shield him.”
“Well, with such artistic parents...” I said, trying anxiously to humor her.
She smiled gently. It seemed all the long afternoons she had sat in the cool of a kiosk reciting to our dead master passed across her face like a breeze from the Bosphorus on one of those afternoons...
She took a scrap of paper out of her bosom and unfolded it. Then she read the poem aloud. But I could tell, with her gift of memory, she had already committed it to heart, and needed the paper only as the physical evidence of one whose round, youthful hand had so lately touched it.
The hand was childish, but the words seemed those of a stoic old man who has looked Death in the face and smiled in recognition and welcome. “We are in His hands.” She finished the verse and there was a silence neither of us could break for a long time, a dangerously long time.
Then she said, “I am sorry, Abdullah. Forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” I said. “Or, rather, you should forgive me that I can’t do more for you.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. It was I. Well, my brother and I. In my desire to be free and to live, I killed him. Your master, Sokolli Pasha. I killed him.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “I was there. It was a dervish.”
“A dervish who was my brother,” she said. “You see, she promised...”
Her chin quivered. And I saw that it was the same round chin I’d seen on the executioner’s stand, pierced by the same round
