UWEIS*—A rowdy native Turk, companion to Murad.
PART I: ABDULLAH
I
After the very difficult birth of her daughter, my dear lady, Esmikhan Sultan, eventually learned to walk again with the aid of a cane. But she moved more like a duck than a woman and therefore preferred to be carried, either in her sedan or in a chair one of my assistant eunuchs and I would contrive by crossing our hands. She could sit for short periods without discomfort, but mostly she preferred to lie about in the harem, propped up with innumerable pillows.
Plump before, now inactivity and contentment made her fat.
To me Esmikhan was as dear as ever, but then, I had been forcibly removed from the realm where physicality was important. Huge breasts dominated her entire body. She nursed the child herself for four full years, and then it was Gul Ruh, teased by other youngsters for being a baby, who shook her head and said, “No, thank you, Mama,” of her own accord.
This saucy weaning was as yet far in the future, however, one day of her daughter’s first spring. The women of the imperial palace had invited a jeweler to display her wares, and my lady came, too. More than the jewels, she had wanted to show Baby Gul Ruh the gazelle fawns that always enlivened the Sultan’s gardens at that time of year. Esmikhan caught my gaze over the child’s delight, and the gentle love I read in my lady’s round, gazelle-brown eyes was delight enough for me.
The day was so warm and bright however that we soon retreated inside with the rest of the harem as if the heat of summer were already upon us. Here, behind the bastion of the walls and playing fountains, we sank into the exquisite artifice that was harem reality.
Turkish women called their procurers Kira. Usually Jewish, always female, these were the wives or daughters of merchants who entered the harems to peddle their families’ goods where men would not be allowed. This particular jeweler’s wife was Esperanza Malchi. Her fathers had been expelled from Spain almost eighty years before, in 1492 as Christians tell the years, and had spent some years in Venice before finally ending their wanderings in Constantinople’s jewelry suq.
And that particular day, as the culmination of her show, Esperanza Malchi produced a ruby necklace so magnificent it quite made the head reel.
“Come, ladies,” she replied to the “oohs and ahs” with a purr that matched her black-cat features. “To truly appreciate the unique qualities of the major gem, you must view it in the light. Come to the window, if you please.”
As if she were Moses and they the liberated Israelites, the Kira led all the women to the advantage of a high window on the other side of the room. Only my lady, her daughter, and I remained behind because Esmikhan had decided—wisely, I thought—that the pleasure of seeing a ruby in sunlight was not worth the trouble of getting up and moving to the window.
Because my lady was a married woman, not a slave, and a daughter of the Sultan besides, with an income of her own, the Kira had placed the display case right at her elbow, the better to tempt her. Most of the others could only look and sigh. Now, while they were all busy at the window, Esmikhan idly ran her fingers through the box’s contents: the ransom of any European prince. But I think my lady fingered the gems from boredom.
If Esmikhan did look with interest, it was to consider trinkets for her daughter, who, at almost seven months old, lay nestled against her expansive breast. Esmikhan plucked out a pair of pendant earrings and held them up to the baby’s ears: Was it too early to pierce that petal-like flesh?
I was more struck by the look of the father in the child. Remarkable, I mused, how the sunburnt features of a cavalry officer remolded themselves in plump pink baby skin. Surely my lady thought of her lover every time she looked at her daughter. Grief, loss, and guilt tainted each such thought, for Gul Ruh was not the Pasha’s legitimate child. But only my lady and I must ever know that secret.
I sometimes wished I’d stopped the clandestine exchange of letters and gifts between the two lovers sooner—or more effectively. Those wordless missives of flowers and leaves that only the love-blind could read, how dangerous if discovered. And sometimes I knew the stab of my own jealousy, that the dashing Ferhad Pasha offered my lady something I could not. This wasn’t the case with Sokolli Pasha, the old grey Grand Vizier to whom she was legitimately married.
I was never sorry I’d broken the master’s trust to allow the single night’s indiscretion. It had saved my lady from self-destructive heartbreak. It had produced this lovely dear rose to fill her childless arms. And yet, I couldn’t be easy with the memory, nor with people’s comments, given innocently enough, that “There’s nothing of the Vizier in her, is there?” The very hint of adultery could not go well for a great man’s wife in this land: even a Sultan’s daughter could not hope to escape the death sentence if the charge were ever proven. Never mind how it would go for the eunuch entrusted with guarding her virtue. I tried, therefore, to shut the thought out of my mind.
Gul Ruh grabbed at the earrings, so my lady put them back, cooing all the while, and slipped a plain gold bangle on the fat little wrist instead. The child instantly took the bangle off and began to teethe on it. With the little hands and mouth safely occupied, Esmikhan introduced her daughter’s eyes to the intricacies of a locket she fished out of the velvet-lined box. I noticed only briefly that the mosaic work above the clasp was Venetian. Then I closed my mind to all but the sense of contentment in the baby prattle that followed.
“I
