“Oh, Safiye. You will not regret it.”
To my horror, Esmikhan was trying to get up to bow her gratitude. I managed to settle her back down. No matter what Safiye’s promise, I knew it could not be worth the trouble of sending for seconds to help my lady return to the divan should her constitution not prove up to the exertion.
I was greatly relieved that my lady contented herself with saying, “Allah will reward you in the next life if not in this.”
Safiye waved the possibility of God away with a flash of her long, elegantly hennaed and many-ringed fingers. “This must be the most formal of letters,” she then instructed her scribe. “Queen to queen.”
The scribe I recognized now as Belqis, a girl of beautiful Tatar features originally bought for Murad. Safiye’s greater charms, if not to say skills, had long ago supplanted her. Realizing her hopes in this direction must come to naught, Belqis had diverted her energies to the pen instead. That Safiye trusted her correspondence to this hand said something of Belqis. So did the fact that the scribe no longer bothered to conceal a premature grey creeping down the long, straight strands of her raven hair. The stains on her fingers were ink, not henna.
The conclusion of all of this was that Belqis and her art were a pleasure to watch, as fascinating as a dancer who takes equal care to hone her skills. Belqis began by taking a fresh sheet of paper out of her tooled red cowhide portfolio. The paper was thick and clearly of Eastern make, yellower than what they were making in Venice, and without watermark: Muslim paper-making firms were never so anxious to advertise their names as the profit-conscious West. The size of a large napkin, half as wide as it was long, the page’s thickness and color gave the impression of parchment, which Eastern paper-makers continued to yearn for even when that medium was too dear.
Belqis draped the paper like a tablecloth over the low, portable desk she wrote at, her knees drawn up under her on the floor. Finding by close inspection that she had the rough side up, she turned it over to the smooth, so that no fibers would clog her pen. Here again was Eastern manufacture evident, for the Turks had not the mechanical hammers, a recent German invention, and relied on hand burnishing which left uneven streaks on the smoothed side.
Belqis took an agate stone that exactly fit in the palm of her hand and finished up the poli.sh to her personal .specifications. Her actions released the hard, sharp, new-paper smell of animal-hide sizing like a knife into the harem’s usually cloying, heavy scent of too many women wearing too much perfume. In their sizing, too, the Muslims liked echoes of the ancient parchment.
Belqis studied her page with satisfaction, smeared now as it was with the midmorning light that dappled in from the courtyard through the lattices. The whole document, when it arrived in France, would .speak of things exotic, the integrity of an ancient tradition and its opulence, even before the first word was read.
This dappling did not seem to mar the paper’s perfection in her view; women are used to seeing things, half-light, half-dark, like that. Their eyes adjust from earliest infancy. “If the sun had not been female, even she would not have been allowed in the harem.” An Eastern pundit had once written those words, playing on the fact that in Arabic, sun is feminine. Unlike the male sun in Italian, a beneficence, the Arabic is a malevolent fury, a barren woman who seeks to scorch the entire world to her own fate. Under the harem’s lattices, even women condemned to childlessness like Belqis were protected from all but the most innocent of that celestial female’s wrath.
Belqis laid out her pens, her inks in five colors. Deciding after the morning’s labors she would have to grind more black, she did so, oak galls on a slate palette. Rose water turned the powder to liquid.
Now Belqis set a straight edge down the right-hand side of the paper, leaving a generous margin at least as wide as her own palm, and marked a crease at this point the full length of the page with the rounded tip of a stick of sandalwood. In France, they would smell that fragrance, and the distilled roses in the ink.
Then the scribe sat back on her heels and waited orders to begin.
Something did not seem quite right to me, not about Belqis but about Safiye. I could never have ease in the Fair One’s presence; I told myself there was probably no more to suspect than usual. Yet I couldn’t help but probe the deceptively still and murky waters a little.
“How did you become a correspondent of Catherine de’ Medici?” I asked. “She is the Queen Mother and effective ruler of France.”
“Quite simple.” Safiye displayed no hesitation to answer directly. “Catherine sent customary gifts with her new ambassador and Ghazanfer had only to suggest to the Divan that since these were gifts from a woman, it would not be appropriate for men to accept them. They were meant to be kept behind the curtain of modesty.”
“That makes perfect sense.” Esmikhan’s tone was warning me off. My distrust of her best friend always grieved her.
“Ghazanfer saw that they came to me,” Safiye continued. “They were nothing much, nothing the outer treasury would miss: some lace, a casket of onyx engraved with nude figures.”
Esmikhan said, “Such things are better suited to the harem in the first place—if not to be tossed out at once for obscenity.”
“What we thought exactly. Still, any gift requires a thank-you note.”
That was as far as I dared carry my questions. So I fell silent, as a eunuch ought, and determined to watch all the more carefully instead.
“The usual sort of formulaic opening.” Safiye turned to instruct her scribe.
And
