“Iskandar should be done now,” Ferhad said to himself, put the rosette in his sash, and turned back wearily to his lodgings.
* * *
“They’ve made Iskandar Master of the Horse, Abdullah ustadh,” Ferhad told the eunuch as he handed him the rosette made by a jeweler into a pleasant little necklace for Gul Ruh to wear.
“Yes,” Abdullah said. “And I hear you’ve been promoted to Agha of all the Janissaries.”
“Yes,” Ferhad shrugged as if it were nothing.
“Congratulations.”
Ferhad shrugged again. “I can run no more messages for Sokolli Pasha.”
“Well, he has other means.”
“Yes.”
“This. For your lady.”
Ferhad handed the eunuch a bunch of fresh blue rue. A similar flower seemed to branch and bloom in his heart as he recalled all the messages that had passed thus between him and Sokolli’s harem. Secret messages in flowers and fruits, innocent messages—-to all but the love-trained eye. And to such eyes they expressed a world lush with passion. A plane leaf for the lover’s hand. A clove to represent how slender, how sweet he found her figure. A lock of her soft, curly hair, in his bosom yet, that said he was the crown of her head.
And now the rue. It meant the same thing in the East as it did in the West: “Remember me.”
Abdullah accepted the bouquet with a nod and turned to go.
“Oh, ustadh?”
“Yes?”
“Tell your master I am sorry about the death of the beglerbeg in Hungary. I know—I know they were close.”
“Allah’s wall,” the khadim said with disinterest. He had not known the man.
“And—”
“And?”
Ferhad struggled to conceal any meaning in his eye. His red leather boots of office scuffled on the flagstones and he looked at them as he said, “And please warn your master to be on his guard.”
“Against what?” The eunuch was suddenly all ears. “Against a similar plot?”
“I cannot say. He must only beware. And I—I would not see—see orphans and widows made.”
Ferhad turned and hurried away.
PART V: ABDULLAH
XXXIX
“Yes, my friend Abdullah. I swear by Allah, you are wise to keep your eyes on that one when he gets anywhere near your women.”
The voice, like muddy water flowing over gravel, and the monstrous hand of Ghazanfer on my shoulder startled me out of what had been the gaze of an idle daydream, not watchful care as he imagined. And “my women” for whom he so feared, were nowhere in sight. They were in Safiye’s rooms comparing costumes and jewels for the upcoming holiday, the Prophet’s Birthday. The pilgrim caravan had only just returned from Mecca and Medina, well-ladened from contacts made with the Faithful from India, China, and beyond. By such trade many a man had funded that holy journey of a lifetime. There was plenty to keep the ladies busy.
What had attracted my attention—and thereby Ghazanfer’s—was the woman walking with the eunuch. Of course there was nothing odd in this—it is our duty to walk with them, either behind, hearing their orders, their complaints, their gossip, or ahead to throw up curtains, close doors, and otherwise clear the way of men. In fact, I had found nothing really strange in what I saw. It was like a panel of painted tiles one passes every day until in a moment of idleness one notices it for the first time and it sends one’s mind soaring.
The woman was Mitra, Safiye’s Persian, whose poetry had won her such a place in the Sultan’s heart that she was pregnant again. The eunuch was likewise Persian, the startlingly handsome one new to Nur Banu’s suite. Between them was neither a veil in preparation for going out nor a list of errands she wanted to send him on. It was a folio of poetry and—though for all my study of both the romantic and the mystical poets, I still could understand but a word here and there when natives spoke Persian—I knew their subject was not the compassion of Allah.
Very well, now that I thought of it, it was a remarkable sight. Things had become so polarized in the harem that for one of Safiye’s camp to be seen with one of Nur Banu’s was immediate cause for suspicion of spying, poison, or witchcraft.
Ghazanfer left me and crossed the atrium to the couple. A few stern words on his part sent the girl fleeing to her room and the eunuch, with nothing left to do in that place, dawdled off with the folio under his arm.
“Well!” I was over my start enough to joke a little when the huge man returned to my side. When I did speak to Ghazanfer, it was usually half-serious. Such a man one doesn’t care to become earnest with.
“What was it?” I asked. “Was he spying or poisoning?”
“Allah shield us from both,” Ghazanfer replied. Then, “I shall never trust that man.”
I made a sign and a sound to pacify him—he was so huge even a little anger in him was frightening—but he continued as if in explanation, “I knew his castrator.”
“So?” I said as lightly as one can who has felt the knife himself. “A butcher is a butcher.”
“Mu’awiya the Red always called himself an artist, not a butcher. But butchers a man can usually trust, except when there’s a meat shortage. Artists, never.”
I still dared not take him seriously, but his words made me able to name something else that had been curious about that couple. Between them had seemed to be the attraction of lodestones. I had not seen such attraction since the heavily chaperoned but haremless dances of my youth. The Turks generally worked on a system that either defied this natural law or gave it full rein. That uneasy hanging in abeyance is foreign to them.
I made some careless comment in the direction of this new observation, asking Ghazanfer how there was any room for jealousy between eunuchs. “Our fate is everywhere and eternally the same.”
Ghazanfer fixed me with a look
