Safiye was on her feet. I grabbed her eyes with mine as one grabs a naughty child to give it a firm scolding—not for standing, but for putting on what was obviously an act. It could be to no good purpose.
She was prepared for my glare, however. She met it not with firmness, but with an all-consuming softness like some animal gone limp and playing dead as the hunter approaches. I dropped my eyes at once in self-defense, but it was too late.
Sweet Jesus, but she is beautiful! I thought. The reversion to Venetian language and faith were but emblems of the surge of youthful passion I felt. I managed to offer this prayer before rationality left me altogether: Lord, don’t let her ask me anything. I won’t be able to refuse her if she asks me...
I saw her eyes roll into a fog of unconsciousness like almonds rolling into a vat of honey. Whatever there was of a man left in me rose, then stumbled, awkward on unused feet. My arms took her weight in them as she fell. The satin of her robe was slick with body heat and with straining to meet across her growing belly. I could feel the coursing of her blood beneath it.
I let that golden head sink back into the pillows on the divan and my hand reached for a taste of that pomegranate cheek.
“Ghazanfer,” Safiye murmured.
My hand fell back, confused and hurt that it was not my name her lips formed.
“Where’s Ghazanfer?”
“I’ll see if I can find him, lady,” I said coldly, finding I was indeed able to rise to my feet.
With surprising speed and strength for any woman, but especially for one about to miscarry, she sat upright and caught my hand. “Veniero,” she hissed at me. “There is a doctor in the selamlik. A Venetian. A guest of Sokolli Pasha. Bring him to me.”
The lapse into Italian and her laconic style made me believe she was on the very edge of delirium. But her brown eyes caught mine totally washed of their honey sweetness, sharp as arrow points.
I appeased her with a baby word my nurse used to use, full of endearment, yet promising nothing.
I left the room and stood a moment or two in the next, trying to shake her influence from me as a dog shakes water. In the end I still could not sort out what she wanted me to do from what I really ought to do and so I sent my fastest assistant to find Ghazanfer. I saw Esmikhan, her ladies, and the rest of my seconds in to sit with Safiye and—maybe—to keep her from rashness or dishonor in the meantime. Then I myself went down to the selamlik to see about this doctor.
Many of Murad’s scholars and poets had, like Safiye, taken to sulking on Sokolli Pasha’s hospitality when they were out of favor. Six men were in the midst of a lively discussion when I entered the room. Their language was Persian, for the physician, though he had traveled widely in lands further east, learning the lore of his profession, had but passed through Turkey before, an omission he was swearing to remedy.
My master, among his six or seven other languages, had a smattering of Venetian on which he would sometimes fall back for politeness, but which he was too unsure of to use readily. He found it more useful to pretend ignorance and overhear.
Three of the other men—the Egyptian astronomer and two of the best-loved poets alive—knew not a word. It can be unnerving to learn that the tongue you grew up thinking all the world spoke has not been worth the while of such great minds to learn. Only the sixth man present, the sea captain and dragoman, once Andrea Barbarigo, now called simply Muslim, would have been more comfortable in Italian. But this meeting was not to honor him, so he could be content to sit quietly to one side and try to pick up a phrase here and there of the Persian.
Barbarigo looked at me as he always did, with eyes one could not help but pity. He had tried, I knew, many times to reestablish contact with Safiye now that, as a renegade, he had made a name for himself in the Turkish navy. But now that he was all Turk, she no longer had any use for him. He was all Turk, he had to have the morals of one. I could not take any more time to feel sorry for him then.
My personal interest in poetry and the mystics had increased my knowledge of Persian so I had no difficulty in catching the drift of the conversation—the medical works of Galen as they are translated and commented upon by the Arabs—nor in finding a pause when I could present my problem to my master.
“Abdullah,” he said, falling into Turkish and touching my arm as if he feared I had the fever. “Abdullah, whatever can you be thinking? A woman of the Sultan? To expose her to the scrutiny of a man, and a stranger at that?”
Barbarigo overheard and raised an eyebrow as he must any time the word woman was pronounced in his hearing, however rarely that must be. I shifted so my back was more fully to him and tried to speak lower. I pleaded that she was a Venetian and more used to male doctors than a Turkish lady would be.
But my master replied, “She will not have the usual midwife? Then send for another and wait for her to come.” He continued then with something I had not considered. “If we set this precedent, all of our women with skill in medicine will soon be overshadowed by the men who have more interest in high fees than in health. The women will have no place to practice and never receive the honor due to them. My guest has just been telling me how in Venice many women
