“Any whores I find will be stoned at once.”
“That’s what ought to be done to you.” Nur Banu threatened with a gesture.
“I see no hand lifted against me—only your empty one. And if I am fated to lose my son to another—which Allah forbid—then better to circumcise him now, before such a calamity can happen.”
Through all of this, Esmikhan had offered little reconciliatory chirps which even I did not hear. But now I could no longer ignore her agitation, and moving to her side, I bent and asked if she were not ready to go home.
“I cannot yet,” she murmured under the row. “I must see if the Quince has something for my pain.”
I had never been able to understand why my lady persisted in trusting her health and that of her children to the palace midwife. Esmikhan could have chosen another. I wished she’d chosen another after the death of her first little son. After two more dead sons, still she had persisted. Now she could scold my skepticism, “Abdullah, the Quince gave me Gul Ruh.”
At what a cost of health! I might have replied. But Esmikhan was nothing if not trusting as well as bound and determined to do things “the way they ought to be done.”
“Everyone has always used the palace midwife,” she always said. And “you can’t blame the Quince for things that are due to the hand of Allah.”
So I comforted myself that if there was witchcraft, one might as well go to the witch to undo it. And the ashen pallor of Esmikhan’s face urged me there wasn’t time—yet once again—to hunt up someone new. Her sickly look should have reminded me earlier that we had this errand today.
The discord she was obliged to witness probably triggered this bout of pains in her lower belly in the first place, I thought as I offered her my arm. “Let me take you to the infirmary, then.”
“I don’t think I could make it there. Besides, you remember the last time I saw the Quince?”
I did, the haunted look that had come over the midwife’s eyes, the harshness in her tone. I might almost say fear, though what the tough old Quince had to fear from my lady was impossible to guess. “Then I’ll go for you.”
“Would you please, Abdullah?”
“You won’t mind staying here?” I looked anxiously over at the other two women, the noise between them having risen another notch. I marveled how little Aysha could be sleeping through it all and thought poppy-head water again. “I could take you to the sedan first.”
“I’ll stay,” Esmikhan said. She made another ineffectual attempt to speak between the antagonists, then filled her mouth with a sweet laden with buffalo cream. She always ate when she was distressed and helpless to do anything about it.
In the doorway I met Ghazanfer, red in the face and puffing for breath. He had obviously heard the row corridors away and come on the run. His errand, then, had been within the palace. But I didn’t care to scrutinize it more than that. I just gave him a look as to say. So this is the peace of your harem, khadim? I’m taking a risk leaving my lady here with you.
And then I saw Gul Ruh standing in the big man’s shadow. Her little hands, working anxiously, clung to the door frame from the courtyard. Her brown, doe eyes widened and swam with tears as she tried to call, “Auntie? Grandmother? Auntie? Grandmother?” over and over again to no effect.
“My lady,” I called past my shoulder to Esmikhan, “I’m taking the little one with me to the Quince.”
Esmikhan replied, “Very well.”
But the eunuch tried to stop me. “I’m not certain you should, brother. The little one to the Quince? It is not wise.”
“Well, I’m not about to leave more than one of my ladies here in the midst of this catfight you call harem peace.”
And with that, I scooped Gul Ruh up into my arms and hurried off as fast as I could go.
XIV
The moment the sounds of squabbling died, Gul Ruh wriggled to get down and I let her gently, taking the sweet, soft petals of her hand instead. Esmikhan would always have clothes made too big for her daughter, certain, with an uncharacteristic disregard for the will of heaven, that “she’ll grow.” The heels of Gul Ruh’s too-big slippers clattered merrily beside me, echoing off the long, marble halls as if to frighten off evil spirits.
The harem corridors wound this way and that, upstairs and down again, like the tendrils of a luxurious jasmine vine—or, as I’d once heard Safiye say—the intestines in the belly of a stone-hearted beast. There were always at least two ways to get from one place to another, depending on what one wanted to see or to avoid. Or, alternatively, there was no way at all. I took the roundabout route to the infirmary, knowing how every woman from mistress of the wardrobe to the lowest laundress would be hovering where she could hear the brawl between the two leading women, laying her bets as to the outcome and what it might mean for her own life. I’d let Gul Ruh avoid that gawking if I could.
Door after door arched, mitred, squared, tunneled down to the size of a mouse hole in the gloom at the end of perspective. Now that the women’s voices had been swallowed in a gulp, off to our right we could hear a tumult of young boys’ voices, full of fear-propelled enthusiasm, all reciting Koranic verses at once, at different speeds, perhaps even different verses. That was the princes’ school, where the brightest of the young levy boys also studied with their future masters.
“My cousin Muhammed is in there.” Gul Ruh stated rather than asked it, pulling lightly on my hand until I stopped in the corridor
