Around him were the familiar sounds of the Turkish bazaar muffled by walls. The sharp smell of gold mingled with the strong soap the Jewess used throughout the shop in a religious frenzy of cleanliness, yeasted by the little fresh-baked poppyseed buns she offered to every guest. All these things folded into the pleasant ambiance he had longed for throughout the past two months until the thought stung his eyes with tears. But these same things now all seemed bleached and faded of life.
Andrea struggled against passive acceptance of his own statement as a man struggles beneath a smothering pillow. He felt, in fact, more violently angry, more betrayed, more frightened than he’d ever been in his life.
“Sofia will not see me?” he repeated, more of his emotion wriggling free this time and gasping for air. “That lecherous prince must be in town.”
“Prince Murad—may Allah favor him—remains in Magnesia,” Ghazanfer stoically advised.
“Then—God forbid it—Sofia must be ill.” Andrea knew his feet were pacing under him, though there was no more than two steps they could go in any direction without running into walls—or into the eunuch’s great rigid green-draped knees.
“The lady is well, by the favor of Allah.”
“But she will not see me? No. I refuse to accept it. She cannot turn me away, not after what I’ve done for her.”
“She knows what you’ve done,” Ghazanfer said. God, the creature was a statue!
Only death would have kept Andrea away. Surely it must be the same with Sofia. “She doesn’t know. She can’t know.”
“About the Venetian Arsenal, yes, she knows. You, sir, must have been delayed by other matters, for word of the—calamity—reached us a week ago and my lady read your hand there at once.”
“She can’t know. She can’t know how we stood on the Foscaris’ altena and watched—”
Andrea stopped the rehearsal surging through his brain. The memory had a demonic life of its own. So many times during the intervening weeks he’d attempted the same amputation of his thoughts. By promising himself, Sofia’s ears will hear it, he’d always managed what seemed a superhuman feat. I will tell her and only her. And her kiss will make it go away.
“More people would have died in an invasion, wouldn’t they? Even if Venice won.”
Why had he said that to this pathetic, ravaged, expressionless substitute for his beloved? To prevent more confessions, Andrea paced like a madman, his hands twenty places at once. He was aware of his actions, but couldn’t help himself.
“Inshallah.” The eunuch committed nothing.
“She must know I did it for her.”
“She does. And is grateful.”
Andrea knew he’d said more than enough. The eunuch remained a godlike judge, though Andrea had always imagined God with more wrath in His eyes—like Agostino Barbarigo. Still he couldn’t stop himself.
“I haven’t regretted it. I haven’t regretted a single action, not for a moment—none of it. Not until now. Now when you tell me—God in heaven!—she will not see me.”
“Rest assured, young sir, you have my lady’s gratitude.”
“But nothing else. Nothing else? Not even the sight of her?”
For two months Andrea had thought of nothing but returning to this room, of renewal of the supreme pleasures he had enjoyed here. Now that it was not to be, this return to the place only evoked the memory of love, aching in its absence. And the warning of that other eunuch, that eunuch who’d said his name was Veniero, who’d said...
Now all he could see was that it wasn’t enough.
A bit of unmeshed logic wagged its loose ends at him, more noticeable now than it had ever seemed before.
If Sofia wanted Chios to remain with the Turk, she could not possibly have ever planned to leave with me. Few mastic profits could be hers in Venice, even if Venice owned the island. Only if she stayed, slave to the dark lusts of that heathen prince—
Unthinkable. Something was missing, that was all. One tiny bit of the web that made his rationale a neat and tidy package—a package presented by God in his favor—that was all. He simply couldn’t see it right now, but he was certain it was there.
No, the only possible conclusion was that Sofia was being kept from him against her will. Someone suspected their attachment, so she was no longer as free as once she’d been.
Perhaps not as safe?
“But it was enough, more than enough,” Andrea heard himself shout. “If she had seen what I saw, heard what I heard. All they ever found of Giustiniani was—the wink of the cross in his unattached ear. The wails haunt me still in my nightmares. Screams and cries I am powerless to help—in my childhood language and hers—”
Andrea managed to stop his mouth and his frantic pacing. His insides wobbled like a child’s top losing its spin and equilibrium. He took a seat to keep himself from falling over.
The seat Andrea took was the edge of the cot which he and Sofia had had no trouble turning into a bower of bliss. In order to make himself sit now on this compacted mattress laid over sagging strings, it was necessary for him to brush a score of webbed associations from his mind. He had to realize that others, many others, had used this room for many purposes. The stench of such purposes seemed to creep out of the plaster and splitting boards to assault his nostrils. He joined himself to the rest of unbenedicted humankind with this thought, and to be no better than the redundancy of the copulating, groveling, self-interested race did not do much for his own esteem.
To even settle himself down to the level of this stone-like creature before him—not male, not female, nor yet quite beast—that was too much to be endured. But having endured news that he would not see the revelation of Sofia, anything else was easy enough to take.
“I suppose there is something she
