“By Allah, they will kill her,” I exclaimed to the first unoccupied khadim I met. The screams were all-permeating and our conversation was marked by severe distraction on both sides.
“By Allah’s will, not,” the man replied. “At least, not yet. Their orders are to give off as soon as she is unconscious. Then they must wait ‘til she rouses, then try again.”
Though all khuddam are called upon to administer discipline from time to time, it is rarely more than a few heavy blows to the soles of the feet. If the girl suffers the embarrassment of an ungraceful walk afterwards, that soon passes. But blows to the back mean her career is ruined. The Sultan will never put his arms about scars, no matter how pretty the face.
“What can be wrong,” I asked, “that calls for Nur Banu’s destruction of her own property?”
“It’s not Nur Banu’s slave,” I was told, “but Safiye’s.”
“Ah. But would she destroy every girl Safiye buys so that none may come to the Sultan again? What a waste!”
“The charge is more serious than mere jealousy.”
“What’s that?”
“Witchcraft.”
The girl stopped screaming at that moment and my overtaut nerves leapt into the silence and onto that word like biting onto a cherry pit when one expects a smooth, well-cooked sauce.
Witchcraft. No more heinous crime can infest the soul of a harem than that.
“Murder and treason are less insidious.” I found my voice shawled in a whisper.
“Yes,” the man replied, “for in those cases the culprit is swiftly dispatched and that is the end of the business.”
“With this darkest of crimes, however, the witch herself may be unaware of what she has done.”
“What other explanation can there be for the Quince’s sad end?”
“Indeed.” I hadn’t considered that.
“If a woman of such intelligence can be turned mad, almost rabid—”
“This is true.”
And I couldn’t help but think of the assistant Fig, her reputed familiarity with the world of spirits. But what reason would the Fig have to harm her mentor?
“Confessions drawn under torture,” I suggested, “may only ever uncover a fraction of plots devised in the company of demons and jinn.”
“And who could say what are lies? All has to be taken as real.”
“But, my friend,” I suggested, “even death is no answer, no safeguard against the power to lurk from beyond the grave.”
“Indeed. And insubstantial spirit may haunt in silent talismans, in any dark corner, and under every flagstone.”
I felt suspicions rise from the very paving stones as I left the khadim to go about my business. There was the Fig, of course, but I seemed to be the only one who considered her.
Mitra’s blue eyes had made her suspect from the first day of her arrival. Safiye herself had taken to pinning a little mirror to her bodice so that the evil inherent in such eyes, even if inadvertent, might be reflected back again. It must be unnerving even—or especially—if a woman has no malice, to find her face reflected back off every soul she meets. But because she was still carrying royal blood, Mitra was immune from all but the most irrefutable of implications, and this Nur Banu never was able to extract, though she tried.
Safiye, as mother of Murad’s only children to date, shared this immunity. And in the end, it was only a few poor serving girls—some from Safiye’s suite, three who had waited on the Hungarian or the Quince, two Persians, and a Genoese, who, because of their origins, were suspected of setting their sympathies where they ought not to—only they ever felt the rod.
The Genoese and one of Safiye’s own girls were all who paid the supreme penalty: Tied in weighted sacks, they were rowed out into the Golden Horn one night and then pushed overboard. One could not pity them too greatly. By then the black eunuchs’ rod had wrecked such havoc on their limbs that they could never hope for more than a life of meanest drudgery.
After that, Murad, who had never seen full pregnancy before except as a child too young to remember, grew uneasy around Mitra and the swelling fruit of his own loins. He sometimes had her recite from behind a screen but without the magic of her eyes, the spell was somehow broken. He began to choose others for his bed, others his mother held out to him. By the time Mitra was delivered of a fine, healthy boy she called Mustafa—for some dear brother, perhaps, or her father, long dead—the Sultan had a new infatuation.
And witchcraft was allowed to sink for the time being into the dark and bottomless pit from which it had arisen.
I lose track of Murad’s infatuations now. One seemed much the same as the next, and as Safiye and Nur Banu were pretty well matched in determination and skill at choosing, the crown went first to one camp, then to the other. The only effect was to make the Sultan all the more defenseless before the onslaught.
What experience I have had with love—or, rather, I should keep to the word infatuation, for to use that other here is blasphemy—convinces me that there is indeed something of the dark powers in it. And time and again throughout the coming years the word witchcraft was heard, first from one side of the harem, then the other.
Some strange signs scratched on the post in the hall to the baths. A pile of decomposing bones and skin found in a corner. No more, and no real indication that accident rather than malice might have caused these things. No matter. The great black eunuch would bring out his rod again, like a shadow from the dead himself.
I never liked that khadim. The cutters would have done better had they left him a man and sent him to the front lines somewhere to defend the faith and put down heresy. He enjoyed his job too much.
Even if you profess no superstition yourself, an awful shiver must come to you when you hear the word witchcraft, once you’ve seen what
