And I could not help but think that, even though her new Fatima was only a girl, Safiye was missing out on a great claim to power by allowing a nurse’s arms to hold the babe at that time instead of her own.
XXIX
I was not present, being safe in Sokolli Pasha’s palace with my ladies at the time. But the events were discussed so often over the next weeks that I might have been and can reconstruct the story well.
The Quince had fallen asleep over her water pipe. Most remembered the old midwife as one who understood and controlled the workings of things too well to have to resort to hysterics. Fussiness or a sharp bite of sarcasm were her old methods of dealing with life’s difficulties. So when she woke up screaming, it curdled the blood. Such a sound could only be imagined coming from unearthly realms of ghosts and jinn. Or from the flaming pits of the damned.
“Babies!” was the first coherent word the Fig, who came running with rose water and valerian, could make out.
Then, “Their insides all bled out.” As she had done on that day in the presence of my little lady and me.
When the Quince had recovered herself somewhat, the Fig adjured her to tell what horrors she had dreamed. But the old midwife pursed her lips tighter than ever, turned green, and would not. She would not tell even when the nightmare came again. Again, and then when she dared not go to sleep days on end because it came every time she closed her eyes.
Thinking the drug was the cause, Nur Banu and the Fig tried to keep the pipe from the old woman. But they could not keep her from her pharmacopoeia because her skills were needed, now more than ever as the Hungarian came near to her time. If anything, the prohibition served to intensify the Quince’s intoxication.
And the Hungarian came to her time, but without the Quince. At first the old woman said to her assistant, “Well, see how she does for a while and call me if you need me.”
At the end of the first day the Quince sent potions to help, but no one was ever quite sure they were administered correctly. At the end of the third day, Nur Banu had her eunuchs drag the midwife to the birthing room by force.
The Quince, it was clear from her staggering and stammering, had fortified herself—not the laboring woman—heavily with drugs. But to no avail. As soon as the midwife stepped over the line of gunpowder into the smell and warmth of the birthing room, the dream came to her awake. Her screams evidenced more torture than those of the Hungarian.
In sore straits now Nur Banu sent for Safiye’s midwife. The closest assistance turned out to be the Venetian doctor. She let him come, but it was too late. Or it was too early, and he was the final cause. What happened depended on whom one asked. The Hungarian died and her child as well, that is all we know for sure. The girl, like her country, could no longer bear the battles of empires being fought over her small body and what it contained.
Some shook their heads and said, “Four days of labor and then death. But think if she had lived, she and her son. What ravage then…? Allah favored her with mercy.”
Nur Banu lost her Hungarian, but Safiye lost her doctor; he was not trusted in the harem again on anybody’s word.
As for the Quince, her mind slowly stewed to the viscous consistency one gets if one cooks the seeds of that fruit with a bit of pulp for a long time. I don’t think she spoke another coherent word, although her babble was perpetual. I never saw her again, for as I had already noted, she had developed a particular aversion to my mistress. The mere report that Esmikhan was visiting sent the older woman in a frenzy to the highest parapet or darkest cellar of the harem. Sometimes we would hear her, the sharp, inhuman barks of a tortured soul, and they sent shivers down our backs.
The Quince lived on in this state for years. Indeed, I don’t remember her death at all. She simply faded away, mind first, into the world that tormented her so, the voice lingering on last of all, finally coming only at haunting times. One came to think of it as no more than the sound of rain on the harem’s copper roof.
* * *
Nur Banu bought two or three promising new girls in an attempt to replace the Hungarian and to break the spell cast on her son by Safiye and Mitra. In a market inflated by demand of her own making, they must have cost her a small fortune. I know even a scullery maid I went to buy for my mistress cost over three hundred ghrush at the time. But so far, Nur Banu’s money had only been wasted, and with more girls than she could reasonably keep busy, their idleness got them into mischief. They were not maintaining a good name for themselves as is absolutely necessary if one would see the Sultan.
One day I happened to be passing through the newly reconstructed Black Eunuchs’ Quarters where I heard a most dreadful sound. It was someone crying out in pain, yet one gone so far beyond humanity that it took effort for me to consider it human and to go and see if I could be of some assistance. I shouldn’t have gone. Two burly blacks had a girl laid out cruciform while a third turned her bare white back into deep red furrows with
