Of course, what Ferhad Pasha felt like spurs to his flanks was not the eyes of Sokolli Pasha alone. There was also Sokolli Pasha’s harem, his wife, his daughter. Ferhad felt his neck and shoulders warm at the mere thought. He knew one man had no business thinking of another’s harem, especially not in such particular terms. But Ferhad couldn’t help himself. The wife was his wife, the daughter his as well.
Sometimes while at drill in the Hippodrome, he would catch a glimpse of the closed sedan as it left the rear harem door. It would never do to stare: How could he expect discipline from his men if he himself were as undisciplined as that? Yet he did not need to train his eyes. He could feel the progress of the sedan skirting the training ground. It moved like a branding iron across his back, turned his head like a spiked bit.
And as the unseen sight burned his back, the men before him would shift at their commander’s unusual distraction. He’d watch himself lose control within the tight confines of his mind and there was nothing he could do about it. All the wonderful night in the holy city of Konya would come flooding back to him. Only when he extracted himself from the fit could his fierce attention to duty return. Indeed, then he would triple its intensity.
The irony of the whole affair was that Ferhad Pasha had never, never sought to do anything that wasn’t duty. It was while he had been about the most secret of trusted duties that he had first found himself a guest in Sokolli Pasha’s home. A guest of enforced inactivity with nothing to do but wander in the Grand Vizier’s garden until, all inadvertently, he had found himself standing before a pavilion draped with autumn roses. Within had sat his host’s wife, playing the oud and singing songs of ancient and mythic love. She was those myths made corporal. A vision, he’d always thought, of paradise.
And no more than Allah’s offer of paradise—or martyrdom on the battlefield—could he escape the conclusion of that scene. All was, in the end, Allah’s will. Seeking refuge in duty only set him ever more firmly in Allah’s hands.
It had seemed a duty, a compulsion, to pick the flowers by whose secret code lovers communicate and leave them where the harem grille could read the meaning. Ferhad had read poets who had felt the same obligation to write or perish at the wrathful hands of their muse.
Through duty again he had found his unit back in Konya—at the very time the Grand Vizier’s lady had been there, begging in the most pious way for Allah to take her in His hand as well. When winter in the mountains had called his unit back to Konya, how could Ferhad, with a guest’s duty, have refused the governor there his duty of hospitality? Yes, even in the full knowledge that Sokolli Pasha’s woman was likewise a guest under the same roof.
And the eunuch Abdullah had come to Ferhad Pasha that night, un-customarily distracted, speaking disjointedly of the lady’s attempts to do violence to herself in her hopeless grief. How could he, Ferhad Pasha, a slave of the Sultan’s house, have resisted the duty to answer such a call to aid?
Images of that night came back to him at the most inopportune times. Blissful images. Esmikhan’s pink-tipped breasts splitting free of their confining silk with the same fragrance as roses. Her black curls had been like jasmine tendrils, the sticky taste of her like honey.
He’d known she was no virgin. She’d borne the Grand Vizier three sons, none of whom had lived through two prayer times. But he’d seen by the wide, surprised delight in her eyes, by their pupils’ dizzy blackness and the fresh bloom on her cheeks, that he’d been able to give her something she’d never known before. And that had fueled his own delight.
The memory of her shuddering beneath him could make him shiver on the warmest days. A seagull’s cry would sometimes sound so like her own that it took his breath away, even as her desperately panting mouth had stolen it from him on that night.
As for his own needs, well, he’d paid high-priced whores since then, coming with great recommendations from his comrades. And all their skill had come nowhere near granting him a similar satisfaction.
There was the child now, the daughter of that night. Gul Ruh. His daughter. She’d be ten years old by now. More. Only such calculations placed the night its proper distance from the present. Otherwise, it seemed no more removed than the last dawn.
The daughter he’d never seen. He liked to imagine she favored her mother: a rose, soft and pink. That was her name, Gul Ruh, the rose in the enclosed garden which the nightingale was forbidden to love.
There was, of course, no reason why she shouldn’t favor him. He realized that, particularly every time he felt Sokolli Pasha’s sharp scrutiny. Sometimes Ferhad Pasha felt the old man did more than guess. He knew.
Yes, the daughter would be ten, a young lady, well-guarded and in veils. Ferhad Pasha doubted he could tell mother from daughter or from any other woman if he saw them now so swaddled. And, of course, there was no opportunity to test that ability. Abdullah the eunuch had closed the harem doors behind him as dawn had leaked into the sky, putting an end to the night. And ever since then, Abdullah, who had once opened the doors of paradise, now stood a guardian as stern and
