I studied his face, which seemed as little altered by years as it did by moment-to-moment changes in emotion. Nor did his costume deviate, summer, winter, or spring, as the season now was. I supposed that whenever the brown sable of his trim began to grow a little thin, he scoured the furriers for just the same shade. The drapers had to produce the identical bottle green in such widths as his great figure required for the ample fall of his robes. Such lot-to-lot dye variations as the normal harem uniform suppliers produced never glanced off him.
I replied with an attempt at equal impassivity. He owed me his life, from that dark alley by my master’s northern wall. But I cannot say this made me trust him anymore. Ghazanfer had not heard, for example, what I had heard while his lady and young Barbarigo spoke together in Italian in that same alley, that same night. Safiye wanted my master, Sokolli Pasha, the Grand Vizier and main prop of the empire, dead. Allah only knew what that would do to my two ladies, Esmikhan Sultan and her little daughter.
Or what else Baffo’s daughter might have in mind for my two charges. I glanced protectively after them, where they paused now, Esmikhan loath to walk too far without me on the opposite side of her cane for stability. In the one spot in that dark alley where there was enough sunlight, a rosebush struggled in a raised stone bed. I remembered my lady claiming the pink blooms to liven her daughter’s soft, dark hair last summer. “A rose for a Rose,” she’d said, playing with the Persian meaning of the name Gul Ruh.
Now they studied the first splitting of greenery to judge how soon they might repeat the ritual. Gul Ruh, over three years old, was calling me in her most saucy, commanding tone to come and lift her up. “ ‘Cause you know Mama cannot.”
Ghazanfer was not the sort of man to argue with, about harem peace or anything else. Nor was he one to talk with much, either. So I agreed with him. “Thanks be to Allah.” But I could not resist adding, “May He not allow the peace to be on the surface only.”
“You look, my friend, for a Battle of Lepanto here within chastity’s walls?”
This hint of joviality was unusual encouragement from Safiye’s monster. I said, “No battleships in the pleasure fountains, no. But what in its own way may equal the Battle of Lepanto on the scale used in the women’s world. With no less ultimate effect.”
“You refer perhaps to the—” He chose the word carefully, “—tension between Nur Banu Kadin and my lady?”
“That creature Nur Banu herself introduced into the sanctum, but who has now grown to have very definite power of her own. And the will to use that power. Safiye the Fair, once called Sofia Baffo.”
Slowly, quietly Ghazanfer spoke. “The harem chooses sides.” Was there threat in his voice, that I had chosen the wrong side?
“At first it was only periods of silence,” I continued to challenge him, “and long icy stares between the factions as they sat together. Then it came that they sat in opposite ends of the room, whispering, and have separate hours set aside for them in the bath. Nothing overt.”
“Nothing,” Ghazanfer told me, “to lose sleep over.”
But I could not agree with him that it wasn’t dangerous. It was much more dangerous, I sensed, than a battery of cannon; and the long, slow wait for the fuse to burn down was often more nerve-wracking than had I been in the front lines on a battlefield.
And was his uncustomary verbosity a warning that my lady, too, must choose sides or be crushed in the middle? Esmikhan, I knew, would die rather than make such a choice, her dearest friend on the one hand, the stepmother who had all but raised her from infancy on the other. And though her mission on this occasion was with Safiye, my lady would scrupulously keep even hours with Nur Banu at another time.
I hurried to answer Gul Ruh’s demands. I caught her up, the bundle of silk that she was, warmed by the life of her tight little body. I took the whip of her stubby little braids in my face. Then the sight of life springing from the rosebush’s severely pruned and manifestly dead twigs made me cling to the preciousness of her being with such ferocity that she cried out I was hurting her and I must let her down.
“Are you certain we must visit Safiye today?” I asked my lady in a low voice and with a glance behind to Ghazanfer as I took her arm.
We made our laborious way after Gul Ruh’s happy skipping to a song she made up about “Beautiful Aunt Safiye’s beautiful curtain of modesty,” by which I felt the child might have inherited some of her uncle Murad’s penchant for poetry. Not to mention that of her natural father, with his bunches of flowers and quotes from the Persian. But I did not allow myself to think too long in that direction. For all I knew, Ghazanfer might read such thoughts in my walk and he’d already given me cause to believe he held too much of this ammunition against my lady in his arsenal.
“You know I must,” Esmikhan panted. “A mother’s grief is at stake.” She did not say more, the labor of walking strained her breath already. And I did not argue further lest it tax her beyond endurance.
And what could I say? The two women were as close to each other as legal sisters-in-law might be in Venice. And Esmikhan always considered Safiye her best friend, though what Safiye’s feelings might be were more equivocal.
And I must confess to some gratitude when Ghazanfer, having seen to the comfort of our bearers and the rest of my lady’s attendants, caught up with us and offered—sincerely enough—to help. When Esmikhan smiled her thanks, he lifted
