Just then came the flurried entrance of Ghazanfer Agha.
“Make haste!” he hissed in a whisper. “There is no time. You should be gone!”
Mitra collected herself as she collected the folds of the little scrap of paper. “I will not go without my sons.”
Ghazanfer’s face could not hide the truth when it was demanded of him like that. He was unable to save the boys. Only Mitra herself and that offspring she cradled under her heart.
“Pray it may be a girl,” he said fiercely, “then Safiye may forget your threat and not spend the rest of her days pursuing you.”
Mitra stood up firmly from the sedan. “I will not go without my sons,” she said one more time.
“Your sons are the next to greet the new Sultan,” Ghazanfer said. “Muhammed has decreed he wants them and all the young princes circumcised today.”
“But that is nonsense.” Mitra smiled, stretching the dimple out of her chin. “Princes are not circumcised without a party, a celebration...”
“Yes.” Ghazanfer said no more. There was no need for more.
It was not a religious man with a razor, but the deaf mutes with the silken cords that met the young princes in the circumcision pavilion. There were twenty in all who survived their father. The nineteen youngest were buried next to him in miniature little mounds by the mosque before the soil of his own grave had lost its clammy moistness.
As for Mitra, she did not have long either to mourn or regret. On the chance that their children might be male and threats to the throne, she and six other members of the harem in various stages of the same condition were rowed out to sea by night. Here they were stuffed in weighted sacks and sent to the bottom whence divers retrieved tales for years to come, tales of seven sacks waving like seaweed in the current: this one trailing an amber curl, this one a hand the late Sultan had kissed so fondly and decked with an emerald ring.
Her sisters went down cursing the she-devil whom they had trusted as their guardian and mistress and a thousand bargains broken. Mitra, I was told, recited poetry. Her final bubbles formed the shape of Allah’s all-encompassing hand. And sometimes, they said, the current moaned in the tones of a Persian poem.
That evening after he’d wept over his brothers’ corpses, laid out in size and age from Mitra’s eldest to the youngest infant but three months old, Muhammed took to his bed a pair of the girls from the Golden Way. They were the two who had been most coy and artfully hid their faces to catch his fancy. The next night it was...
But I forget them all after that. And it doesn’t really matter. To the outside world, a new reign had begun. But within, we still had Safiye.
LXVII
As his Grand Vizier, at the suggestion of his mother and his sister, Allah chose Ferhad Pasha. My lady Esmikhan made the supreme effort on one occasion to be carried and hauled up the narrow stairs to join Safiye in the Eye of the Sultan to see her beloved at work in the Divan. After that she protested that affairs of state had no interest for her and that she was uncomfortable to be so close to the world of men.
I suspect these were just catchphrases anyone would accept to hide the real cause of her refusals. And the real cause was that peering down on the man through the Sultan’s Eye was too reminiscent of the first day she’d seen him, wet and exhausted fi-om his three days’ ride. It was similar, and yet too different.
For she was no longer the young woman she had been to bloom like a rose at the first touch of the sun. And he was a man married to someone else. There was grey now beneath his beard, a dignified carriage and a caution brought on by weariness, perhaps. There was a definite and deep weariness in his eyes that had never been there before.
Safiye was his mother-in-law.
Then, too, the masculine form that had given Esmikhan the most exquisite of joys now wore the green robes of a grand vizier. It was the same costume she had seen so often on Sokolli Pasha. To look upon that costume was almost to look upon a second cuckolding. And now that she, too, wore streaks of grey, the all-justifying passion of youth seemed but an uncomfortable foolishness. She didn’t like to think of her love in such terms, so she never went again.
In spring, when word came that the snow had cleared from the mountain passes, Ferhad Pasha left at the head of the army to war in Hungary against a coalition of Austrians and Germans. Ibrahim Pasha was temporarily elevated to take his place in the Divan.
And then it was heard that, hardly at the borders of Bulgaria, the janissaries had revolted.
Among the measures Ferhad Pasha took in the field to put down the rebellion was to exile two of the army’s leaders whom he felt were responsible. This move infuriated Safiye, for those men were her protégés, sure to do her will even when Ferhad would not. One of them, in fact, she had been grooming for the post of Grand Vizier when Ferhad should become dispensable. I suspect the man had grown tired of waiting, as ambitious men will.
But other news grieved my own lady more. It was said that in his wrath, Ferhad cursed the unruly troops and swore by Allah that no janissary should ever have the virility to get a child again until the Judgment Day. Whether the report was true or not, Esmikhan took the words to heart and rode them up and down through all possible double meanings meant just for her.
Ferhad wished that he, too, as a young soldier had never gotten a child. Or he wished to berate Sokolli, dead and in his grave, forever allowing the men to marry. Esmikhan thought this unworthy
