I went in prepared to make my deepest salaam, and to keep my eyes averted as was proper in the Sultan’s presence. But the room seemed to be deserted.
The Cypriot led me down three tiled steps to the cooling room in the center of whose octagonal piers an octagonal fountain bubbled. At the bottom of the steps of the far pier lay a body.
It was hard to believe that the Sultan of all Islam could be found in such indignity. A slave, perhaps, or a beggar at the end. He was spread-eagle, stark naked, and where it was not pale and flabby as a fatted, plucked hen, too much liquor blotched his flesh the color of dried liver.
“Is he dead?” the girl whispered.
I forced myself to overcome not awe but revulsion and to bend and find out. When I put my hand at the back of his head, it felt mushy and came back bloody. But the movement made him open his eyes and catch the girl’s face. She drew back, startled and afraid.
A tongue thick with wine moved in the Sultan’s mouth and I bent to hear what it said, “Cyprus...shall...”
“Cyprus shall what, majesty?” I asked, but never heard. A pulse continued, very faintly, but there was no consciousness to accompany it.
“He slipped,” the girl explained. She had given up the towel as a cover altogether now and was wringing it anxiously in both hands.
I stood up and looked at her. Yes, that seemed reasonable. Stumbling drunk, he’d been pursuing her around the fountain. The floor was wet. He slipped, fell, and cracked his skull.
There was, of course, another possibility. Even as I stood there, I thought I heard a voice echoing from the dark recesses of the bath where, the superstitious say, are the haunts of jinn. It seemed to be the voice of the Sultan saying, “Come, my splendid Cyprus. Give me a hand.”
And she gave him a hand: to his tipsy feet a firm, well-placed shove.
I looked in her eyes and saw that vision was a very definite possibility. Those sad brown eyes had seen her whole family and all her friends starved or butchered, the indignity of the slave block, the continued embraces of the rotting man whose fault her entire sorrow was. Unlike other favorites, she never thought the getting of a son might improve her lot. A hardness in her features hid other ambitions. That was why she could never be very pretty and why, perhaps, Selim still called for her when he wanted to tempt his vulnerability.
“You may pray,” I told her quietly, “he doesn’t live to speak again.”
Then I looked away from that hardness, for even I could not stand in its presence.
I found a towel to cover the man’s nakedness so that the next to find him should not be exposed to the same shock I’d suffered to learn just what frailty we’d all been subject to for eight years. Then I told her she had better learn to weep for her master quickly before I returned with help to carry him to a bed.
What was done was done, I thought. Even boiling the girl in oil for treachery would not improve matters, only give ideas to others who might not have considered it on their own. To this day she and I alone know that what was everywhere pronounced an accident, “Allah’s will,” was really the revenge of Cyprus from a cask of its best wine and the hand of a hard-faced slave girl.
XXI
It took three full days for the ghost to pass from him, but even before we got the dying Sultan to his bed, the messenger was on his mad dash to Magnesia with the word for Murad: “If you would inherit your father’s throne, come at once before the news gets out and other claimants have a chance to mass.”
Again I had to wonder at the cool way in which my master, the Grand Vizier, carried off the change of power. Of course, had he done otherwise, he might well have been out of a job—nay, out of his life. But cucumber flesh could not have been slower to color and betray itself. Me he trusted, the girl he ignored, and only the two I’d called to help me when the Sultan fell had their tongues removed as a precaution. Otherwise, even Esmikhan was not told, Nur Banu did not guess, and the other viziers and officers of the Divan did not have an inkling until Murad himself arrived at Moudania.
Sokolli had the imperial galley on alert, ready to ferry the new emperor across when he should come. But Murad was not expected for another day, and had not been told of these arrangements, so he hired his own passage on a little fishing boat. Thus he arrived on the deserted shore of the Topkapi peninsula.
Now, Murad had been camping out on the fourth day of a hunt when he was alerted. He did not bother to change clothes before riding and sailing like a madman for ten days. For speed he had limited his suite to no more than four trusted companions. Ghazanfer was among them—Safiye’s eyes and ears, her fist of power—and there was also Uweis, an illiterate and rather wild Turkoman of original stock whom Murad favored because he knew the mountains and steppes and could hunt them like a fox. It would take more than just a change of robe to give that man a
