“Then, at length, this final duty done, the faithful khuddam retire to their platform once again where they sleep in turns, some always watchful, always on guard. There—twixt heaven and earth.”
The tale ended with sleep, as many a child’s tale does, happily ever after. And I murmured from a deep drowse of my own the traditional tale’s beginning: “Once there was a man—and once, there was not.”
Perhaps I slept a healing sleep, perhaps not quite yet. I was aware of some commotion as one of my seconds came to the room, bowed deeply before the kapu aghasi and informed him that he was wanted “by many great lords in the selamlik.”
I heard Ghazanfer sigh as he heaved himself up to his feet. “Duty calls, my friend,” he said. “I told no one where I was going, but the world has found me out anyway. Allah grant you—” He seemed to want to wish me much more but in the end limited his prayer to “—Allah grant you health.”
And he was gone. Sleep came almost instantly to me now. There was room, however, for two more thoughts. And most curious ones they were, too.
The first was a feeling I couldn’t shake. Everyone who knew the details of the kapu aghasi\ appointment, including my master, assumed the great eunuch had taken the post at Safiye’s behest, to work her will as a counterpoise to that of the Grand Vizier. But then, with the eunuch’s presence still lingering in the room, it seemed quite otherwise. Perhaps even Safiye assumed she had nothing but the firmest of allies. And yet Ghazanfer himself gave off another purpose—-if you looked hard and close enough. Was it possible that the khadim had taken sanctuary in the office so heavily charged with religion, with baraka? Was this his way to escape in some measure from the demands of his mistress instead, Safiye’s spell being, as I knew only too well myself, difficult—dangerous—to break?
My second thought was to wonder about the tale I’d overheard Ghazanfer Agha tell Andrea Barbarigo concerning the death of the page boy at Selim’s hand. Throughout the three and more years since, I’d thought it hardly a thing one told to an unbelieving stranger. Ghazanfer would speak so? Ghazanfer, usually so taciturn even to those who knew him?
I remembered, in the moment before sleep, the flit of green eyes towards the chink in the Jews’ wall where, I’d thought, I was so cleverly hidden. And it occurred to me: Maybe he meant the tale not for Barbarigo, who had been, after all, a lovesick fool, dragged helplessly towards his fate by the codpiece.
Perhaps, like all that afternoon’s effusion, Ghazanfer Agha had meant the tale for me.
XXVIII
I have often been disquieted by the thought, then as I am now: Isn’t a manufactured virgin very like a eunuch, likewise manufactured? It is clear that Safiye’s new Persian girl Mitra always suffered pain in being a woman. This—coupled, perhaps, with the pains of her earlier life, more than any sort of training—made her the remarkable reciter she was.
It could be seen in her eyes. Plain eyes as God made them, they became heavenly blue through experience and seemed always filled to the brim with a sort of petulant vulnerability. They not only made her more attractive—one wanted to swim in those eyes like in shivering cool pools on a hot summer’s day—but they lent to her poetry a beautiful, wounded longing that I have never heard matched before, even by those who claim more art.
Now Safiye, with her two new weapons, gave a party to celebrate her return to the palace and, as she said, “To repay Nur Banu’s kind hospitality,” sorry only that it had taken her several months to do so.
It was the excitement. The heat. The shock the sight of Mitra gave her. The pressure Nur Banu poured out upon her afterwards. Nur Banu’s sudden increase in the magical regime she had the girl on to insure a male child. All of these were put forward as causes for the very serious trauma the little Hungarian went through that night in which she almost lost her child.
I have my own suspicions about the matter.
I know for a fact that Safiye had gotten a vial from the Venetian doctor that very morning. She said it was part of her own treatment, but I also happened to see her wave one particular dish to the little Hungarian that evening and saw, when she turned from the slave, that she had hidden something about the size of a vial in her bosom.
I said nothing of my suspicions at first because I could not believe in anything so horrendous. Then, too, I had no proof and no one else to share in my conjecture—unless it were Ghazanfer and he was busy with his new office.
The Quince, however, must have suspected something immediately. She roused herself from her haze and managed to halt the untimely contractions, bringing the pregnancy back to normal. But she was very jittery—and sober—after that. Or so I heard. She wouldn’t let Safiye near the Hungarian girl when she came to offer her condolences and congratulations on her recovery. And the midwife, aided by the Fig, did her best by calumny and gossip to try and undermine the power of that man, the doctor, in “their” harem.
On the whole this made for an ironic Ramadhan, that month when Islamic unity asserts itself stronger than at any other time save perhaps during the pilgrimage. We managed to maintain something of the usual air under Sokolli’s roof by inviting the imperial ladies by turn, Safiye one night, Nur Banu the
