“All right, young lady,” I said, turning some of my anger against her. “I’d like you to give an accounting of yourself.”
“Me, Abdullah?” She played innocent. “Whatever have I done? I’ve been quietly playing chess with my khadim Carnation all this while. Isn’t that right. Carnation?”
And Carnation, my assistant who was just coming to see normally again since his last pipeful, assured me she spoke the truth.
That liar I motioned from the room, telling him I’d deal with him later.
Then I turned to her and began to lecture, “Young ladies should never—”
She interrupted me. “ ‘Young ladies should never!’ But how are we supposed to learn to behave ourselves when men are allowed into our sanctuary?”
“He wasn’t in the harem. He was only in the mabein,” I protested, but I knew she had a point.
“That’s still the harem.”
“The door was safely locked, and well you know it.”
“I suppose you’ll be wanting the key back,” she said, and, pulling it from her bodice, dangled it enticingly in front of me. When I reached for it, she pulled back and said, “But first you must tell me who he is.”
I shook my head.
“I saved his life. Surely I have a right to know who he is.”
My heart was working up a sweat. I thought I saw the glimmer of romance in her eyes and the scene I imagined to have happened in that room before the soldiers burst in grew more and more torrid in my mind.
“You have no business. You have no right,” I declared in panic.
But as we bantered back and forth, I soon came to discover I was the only one who saw romance there. She had had time to stare a second or two at the equally startled Bey-—no more.
“I didn’t dare to use the key until you’d gone into the selamlik, Abdullah,” she said, “and suddenly, there was the pounding of the soldiers on the door.
“How funny he looked”—not handsome—” a man in women’s clothes. He didn’t look at all comfortable and was only too glad to see me, especially when he could toss that veil to me and run out into the yard in an instant.”
Gul Ruh had boosted herself into a window sill to stand her ground against my scolding. Here she could swing her legs back and forth defiantly. Now a blush came to her cheeks and a tear to her eye and I feared once more that there might be some awful confession. “You know, Abdullah, that’s the only time my father has touched me since he sent me in here.” That was what would remain as the most important aspect of that evening to her.
I decided to conclude my lecture, picking up on her sentiment for her father. “Now you must promise me you will never go opening doors you shouldn’t or climbing on rooftops again. It is your father’s honor we have at stake here. If you do not come pure to the husband he may someday, Allah willing, choose for you in his great love and concern, you will break his heart.”
She nodded her head, the tears too thick now for speech. She kicked her heels against the wall instead, and the repentant, sweet yet impish picture so touched me that I embraced her. We each took in that embrace more than reality could ever give; she, the love of a cold and clumsy father and I, the love of the child my loins would never bear.
* * *
Sokolli Pasha realized now he could not hope to keep his faithful Feridun Bey in the harem until the Sultan’s rage over the trumped-up charge should pass. And so, before the next Friday, I had escorted the secretary, still in sedan chair and apricot veil, as far as the master’s farm outside the city, where he gratefully changed into male attire at last, took a horse, and rode into exile.
Feridun Bey carried letters with him to Mustafa Pasha, the master’s nephew who was beglerbeg, governor, over the difficult border territory around Buda. If Mustafa could not find a place for the secretary in some out-of-the-way Hungarian village, then he would certainly be able to help him across the border into Christian territory until such time as Allah should change Murad’s heart.
I cannot tell you what a relief the apricot veil’s disappearance brought to my lady. “I knew it. Such a silly thing. I knew he’d soon grow tired of her.” And because Esmikhan was relieved, the harem in general was relieved.
And Sokolli Pasha went to his room and wrote another very long letter to Arab Pasha in Cyprus.
PART IV: FERHAD
XXXVII
The Master of the Imperial Horse strode across the hoof-churned dust of the Hippodrome to where the group of horsemen were practicing. Their efforts focused on an exhibition exercise to be performed at night in which rags dipped in saltpeter were lashed on shield, sword, and helmet, then set afire. It always made a grand spectacle, but as for practical application, little was accomplished more than training the horses not to balk at flame.
Ferhad Pasha had just come from the other side of the field where practice with the more useful but not so showy skills of lance and target was an utter shambles. The incompetence bothered him much worse than usual, he knew, because they were in the Hippodrome, the very shadows of the Grand Vizier’s palace just shortening off man and beast. Anything to do with Sokolli Pasha must always have that effect on him.
What chance that the Grand Vizier had nothing better to do than to look out his palace gate and decide which units were hopelessly incompetent, by implication which commanders? Ferhad Pasha had no real need to drive the men
