“By Allah,” he said, “these Christians are our wards. They are People of the Book, people who pay tribute into our coffers—practically all we have coming in now—-so that we will protect them. We must let them live their religion—inferior as it is—in peace. We are honor-bound before Allah to shield them. How shall it be when word of this comes to our borders? There are people—Christians and Jews—recently surrendered to our sway because we gave them our word they would receive protection and rights far and above what they had under the rapacious, petty Christian kings before. ‘Well,’ they will say, ‘even in the capital, Muslims do not keep their word.’ “
Sokolli Pasha was also unnerved by the unquiet mood he sensed in the troops. If such a mood were indulged at this moment, when there was nothing left with which to buy them off, rebellion was just around the corner. Sokolli Pasha conferred with the Agha of the Janissaries and got clear support from the Mufti, whom he never failed to impress with piety. The measure passed easily and in a matter of moments went from the Divan to the courtyard where it was read: “Any Muslim found drunk on wine against all command of Allah and His Prophet will suffer the pain of death.”
Heavy sobriety met the announcement and reigned, only slightly appeased by the return of the Sultan from a late summer hunt in the mountains near Edirne. Murad was not like his father, an incurable sot, to seek to overturn the law himself. He did indulge from time to time, but the way he did it—always eyeing the red crystal closely like a miniature painting, sniffing and sipping at it with an artist’s care—made drinking, to go along with the liturgy of his poems, something more like a sacrament. If left to himself, Murad might have let the whole thing pass, like the twenty other times such a law was on the books, as a useful piece of present discipline to be slowly relaxed, conveniently forgotten over time.
As his companion in the hunt, however, Murad had taken Uweis the Turk, and that man returned to the smoldering city with him.
Surely I have mentioned this man Uweis before. He was one of the faithful four who stood in the wind and the rain that night when Selim was dead, Murad not vet Sultan. When he’d stood there, he’d been a short, quiet man somewhat afraid of his first trip to the city. Like some exotic woodland beast, we all thought when we first learned of him. But years in Constantinople among the favorites had changed him.
Uweis had put on a lot of weight, which did not set well on his short legs, relatively long waist, and stubby neck. It gave him the proportions of a dwarf. A huge mustache he vainly curled and tended and the yards of gaudy-striped turbans he affected made this frame seem top-heavy and unstable. From one ear he dangled a foppish parade of jewels, and his trousers were shimmering satin, shot with gold, and so voluminous they would be useless for horseback. Someone must have told him that tying the layers of a sash around his midriff accentuated the fat. He’d taken to wearing it bound tightly around his hips instead (or maybe it simply wouldn’t stay up on the globe of his stomach), tourniqueting his legs. Such a sash forced the belly out into an even greater bulge, which sagged despondently over the bands like a merchant’s pouch. It was ironic that the costume designed by the original Turks who rode lean and fast off the steppes with scimitars flashing should suit this Uweis, the only man of pure Turkish descent I knew, so ill.
One who had never met the man before would have sensed something incongruous about him at first glance. Then one had only to wait ‘til he opened his mouth for the mystery to be made plain. His Turkish was rarified—the language of peasants and thieves. In the palace, even the simplest page keeping the back door peppers his speech with gracious allusions to the Persian poets or the Arabic religion. And Uweis had tried to pick up these affectations, too. But they came to his throat in hiccups of bad grammar and botcheries. If he’d had any sense, he’d have kept his mouth shut. But of course, such restraint was foreign to Uweis.
We often wondered what it was that made Murad keep the man about. Murad was, after all, one who strove for high culture. It seemed the Sultan might have done better to leave the Turk, like a favorite horse, at his hunting lodge where he could be kept and groomed and exercised to be in good shape when the master wanted him. That was always the excuse given for his perpetual presence—Uweis could track anything over any terrain for any distance. Those of us who’d never been hunting with the royal party wondered how that could be so, at least any more, when those dwarfish legs must send him crashing through the brush like a wounded bear, that awkward weight might well make even a workhorse stumble.
I suppose, like the poet who wrote of the fresh mountain breeze blowing through the heavy, scented garden, Murad liked the aesthetics of sharp contrast. Uweis was allowed to stay like a jester to give life at court perspective. Still, I cannot understand why Murad sought sense from mere shadows, no matter how dark and full of contrast they were.
After the fact, I learned of a particularly graceless remark Uweis made in the Divan which, because of that Turk’s favor, Sokolli Pasha had to let pass unchallenged.
“By Allah,” the little man had said between his teeth in language that made the hearers cringe, “what is a born Christian
