“I see.” Murad smiled in wonder and some little relief.
“Surely you don’t expect me to live like Sokolli Pasha wants us to.”
“Away with your fine clothes?” Murad teased, plucking at the diamonds that buttoned her yelek. “And my slave girls?”
“You could not do without your girls, my love,” Safiye agreed.
“I just wanted to know. That’s all.” He said it into the pillow of her neck.
And Safiye pulled herself up on the Sultan’s knees and kissed him tenderly on one cheek. Murad repaid the kiss, then their lips met lightly.
Ghazanfer did not move a muscle. He willed even his eyes not to blink.
“Tell me, how is your Mitra these days?” Murad murmured into the golden hair. His nuzzle released the smell of heliotrope and lemon.
“Just fine. Lonely, though. She misses you.”
“And I miss her. She has such a way with the poets.”
“Yes, she does. Oh, but you’ve been so busy with that new girl of your mother’s.”
“Yes. Well, she’s a silly little thing.”
“Aren’t they always?”
Murad grunted into a smile that committed nothing. He took another deep breath of that hair, then sighed. “Send her to me tonight, will you?”
“Mitra?”
“Yes.”
“Of course. Your wish is my command, my master.” She kissed him again and was gone. The big Hungarian eunuch slipped after her dance in silence.
XXXI
“King Joseph” the sign read beneath the shield of red lines and silver crosses. “Barry ten azure and argent,” the description of Christian heralders might have read, “lion rampant gules.” Yet the words were not as foreign to Constantinople as one might imagine. Azure comes from the Arabic for dark blue and gul is the red rose in Persian, as in the name of my young lady.
The lions had faded pink, the stripes to a pastel blue. Five years of wet cold and blistering heat had passed since Joseph Nassey’s dream of a kingdom of Cyprus had reached fruition in the Sultan’s heart. Yet the Jew had never enjoyed the fruits of his labors. At first there had been famine on the conquered island. Selim had fumed, not so much because his new subjects were going hungry but because part of their hunger was that nearly every vine on the island had been cut down during the war. It would be years before there would be another decent vintage and Allah only knew if the cuttings imported from the mainland could ever make wine so sweet.
His friend and inspiration Nassey, the Sultan had declared, would only be given the island when it was worthy of him. Until time had healed the ravages of war it would be best to put the place in the hands of one used to desolation, a soldier, Muzzaffer Pasha.
Muzzaffer Pasha had done a remarkable job. The Cypriots were now hailing the Muslims as deliverers. I can understand this, from my present perspective. We Venetians had insisted that every priest on the island be in communion with Rome. Muzzaffer allowed the beards and Cossacks of eastern orthodoxy back. If the man in charge of the island’s secular law was a mufti, the people cared little as long as Greek could be the tongue that sent them to heaven and incense and icons greeted them in their churches every Sunday.
Muzzaffer Pasha also allowed the people, who had lived on their lands as serfs according to Byzantine custom, to buy those lands for a nominal sum and to work them as free men. That was Turkish custom. It seemed to produce better results.
Within three years a pressing from new Cypriot grapes arrived in Constantinople as per the tax schedule. But no one was able to tell whether the vintage was as good as that in former times. Selim was dead and could not say whether the price he had paid in Turkish lives, subject suffering, and drain on the treasury was worth it.
Selim was dead and with him, one thought, Nassey’s claim to Cyprus’s throne. Nassey had no friend in the new Sultan. No one was surprised, when the time came to reward Muzzaffer Pasha with a fourth horsetail to his banner and a transfer to a sandjak closer to home, that the Divan totally overlooked promises made by a predecessor. Nassey would fade, we all suspected, like the sign in front of his house.
So I was somewhat startled to see, as I happened to pass it one day, a eunuch from Nur Banu’s suite entering under the shadow of Cyprus’s wooden coat of arms. But Nassey, when he was in favor, was favored by Safiye. I could find no explanation for the khadim’s presence there, and I had business of my own to attend to, so I soon forgot the event.
I remembered it again in a hurry as things progressed.
At the time, that afternoon was more memorable to me for another reason. I was the last soul to leave the street in front of our house. The heat had closed all shops and driven all other errand-runners indoors some time before. I was grateful for the cool that greeted me in the cavern of cypress trees and jasmine of the master’s garden. It was cooler still within the house and there I was welcomed by Gul Ruh’s joyful shouts. Their echoes were to my ears like sherbet to a dry tongue. I decided to put off entering the haremlik for a moment to follow the sounds and refresh my eyes on her as well.
A fountain splashed in the middle of a courtyard in the selamlik where, when he chose to pray at home, the master could perform his ablutions. About this, like sparkling water herself, the young mistress was scampering, skipping, playing tag. Whenever I saw her like this, I was always glad for the sin that caused her to be, even when the master looked at me and commented that she seemed to have nothing of him in her at all.
She was a beautiful child—young lady now, almost nine years old. She had her father’s (her real father’s) height as well as his
