I understood and bowed. Later I heard the voice of Prince Muhammed wailing, “I want to see Gul Ruh. I have to see Gul Ruh again,” echoing into the heart of our harem like the disembodied voice of the jinn in the cypress on a windy night. It was the same wail he’d given as they’d driven his nurse away when he was a baby, only now there were words to it.
Only then did I finally feel the full impact of the day and realized that, for the two cousins, this was a very real sort of death. From now on, even when she went to call on the boy’s mother, Gul Ruh would have to veil closely if ever the young Prince came in the room. And I would have to speak for her while she quickly withdrew.
Muhammed was beyond the prohibited degrees of relationship: father, brother, and uncle. Sex was conceivable beyond that pale, hence, face-to-face contact was inconceivable. From this I understood that Arab Pasha was not the master’s son. If he had been, then their contact would not have startled Sokolli Pasha into seeing how close his daughter was to puberty, for brothers and sisters are always allowed to be intimate.
Gul Ruh had no brother. Until she married, her male companionship, beyond her father, was at an end. Her grief, unlike her cousin’s, was soundless.
And some weeks later Sokolli Pasha freed, then married one of our slave girls to Arab Pasha. It was the master’s rather awkward (awkward because so extravagant, especially on top of the appointment to Cyprus) way of showing his protégé his affection.
When we took the bride for her day in the bath, Gul Ruh had to run back to her rooms in tears. She barely survived the Henna Night, and the wedding night she couldn’t endure at all.
I’m not certain what particulars of the marriage bed Gul Ruh knew. Unlike in the West, women safe in their harems never curb their tongues in the presence of children when discussing such matters. Esmikhan was somewhat more inclined to modesty than most, probably because any mention of intimacy must call to her mind but a single event, and that stolen event was one she must not, under any circumstances, divulge.
Gul Ruh knew at least that marriage entailed great intimacy. She knew that this freed slave of a bride was allowed to go with honor and ritual to the presence of her adored Arab Pasha, whereas she, a princess of the blood, could only ever catch a glimpse of him through the lattice again. The hurt, grief, and jealousy was almost more than Gul Ruh could bear.
Something else about this marriage should be mentioned, not because I found it important then but because of what happened afterwards. The guests were eating wedding soup spun with threads of egg and plenty of lambs’ fat making rainbows on the surface, such a pottage said to give the couple the strength they need for their exertions. There were also great pyramids of party pancakes, dipped in orange blossom syrup, heaped with buffalo cream, and sprinkled with pistachios. My lady was an expert when it came to filling the house with the smell of warm butter and sugar.
In the midst of these festivities, Nur Banu put in an appearance, by which we were much surprised and professed great honor. The Queen Mother at the wedding of a slave! Esmikhan offered her stepmother a seat of honor next to the bride, and Nur Banu took it as if she would have demanded it had it not been immediately forthcoming.
Here she spent a great deal of time speaking to the bride in an undertone. That is, of course, a matronly guest’s prerogative and it is thus that a girl learns what she might expect from the married state. Many women take this opportunity to exercise their souls of griefs and disappointments in their own lives. So I suspected nothing. Even the words I did happen to overhear as I offered the Valide Sultan a narghile, though I found them odd, did not make me suspicious.
“Too bad he is black,” Nur Banu said. “The seed of a black man can curdle your inside. It is work, I tell you, to get healthy children by them.”
Here she stopped to screw the mouthpiece she had brought with her—it was the old, mellowed jade one—to the smoking apparatus. Then she continued, “It is the same with the governing posts they are sent to. They begin by serving as well or better than any white man. But soon, Allah alone knows why, their affairs turn muddy, black...”
It is unfortunate the girl was so young and fresh from the hills of Caucasia, too, where people are very isolated and superstitious. She believed, her eyes wide and frightened, what the Queen Mother told her.
XXXII
Christians in Constantinople will remember this time. Their solemn feast celebrating Our Lady’s Ascension was tragically interrupted that year. The janissaries were restive because Murad had declared no war at all that season—something that had never happened in the history of the Ottomans before—in consideration of the famine.
Having nothing better to do, a band of soldiers were spending their seventy-five akçe “tax” on wine. The wine sellers were wise to the debasement and only offered drink three-quarters water to match the three-quarters copper in the coin. Still the men had managed to imbibe enough to get rowdy and they began to take as their entertainment a mockery of the Christian solemnities. Some young acolytes, seeing what a small and disorganized band the soldiers were, decided to defend themselves. The brawl that ensued ended only with the death of a priest, the rape of several pious Christian matrons, and the church itself a pile of smoldering ashes.
Muslims will remember these days as well. Not for the brawl: that had little effect in their
