The Sultan's Daughter Read online

  The Sultan’s Daughter

  Ann Chamberlin

  OTTOMAN EMPIRE TRILOGY: BOOK 2

  Copyright © 1997 by Ann Chamberlin

  All rights reserved

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Distributed by St. Martin’s Press

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Jacket art, Flaming June, by Frederick, Lord Leighton, Museo de Arte, Puerto Rico; courtesy of Bridgeman/Art Resource, NY Map by Ellisa Mitchell

  Lines from Harem: The World Behind the Veil by Alev Lytle Croutier, published by Abbeville Press, 1989.

  Lines from “The Inferno” from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, translated by John Ciardi. Translation copyright © 1954, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1965, 1967, 1970 by the Ciari Family Publishing Trust. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  Lines from “Paradise on Earth: The Terrestrial Garden in Persian Literature” by William L. Hanaway, Jr., in The Islamic Garden, published by Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC, 1976. Reprinted by permission.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN-10: 0312862032

  ISBN-13: 978-0312862039

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE EMPIRE OF VENICE IN 1562

  PART I: ABDULLAH I

  II

  III

  IV

  PART II: SAFIYE V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  PART III: ABDULLAH XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  XXXVII

  XXXVIII

  XXXIX

  XL

  XLI

  XLII

  This book is dedicated to my cousins

  Kourkan Daglian and Ruth Mentley.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Much of the list is the same as for the first volume of this trilogy, but repetition should not indicate a lack of appreciation, rather the opposite.

  My cousins Kourkan Daglian and Ruth Mentley, to whom this volume is dedicated, Harriet Klausner, Alexis Bar-Lev, and Dr. James Kelly all unstintingly shared their expertise with me. Again I’d like to thank the Wasatch Mountain Fiction Writers Friday Morning Group for their support, patience, and friendship. Teddi Kachi, Leonard Chiarelli and, in the Middle East Section, Hermione Bavas at the Marriott Library, as well as all the Whitmore and Holladay librarians, never stinted in their assistance. Gerry Pearce is new to the list, but cannot be surpassed as a sounding board.

  I owe a great deal to the friendly people in Turkey, especially the guides at the Topkapi palace who hardly raised a brow as I went through the harem again and again. I’d like to thank my in-laws for their support and my husband and sons for their patience while my mind was elsewhere.

  There is another woman to whom I owe much but she didn’t want her name mentioned. She knows who she is. She doesn’t approve—except of good spelling and grammar.

  None of these people is to be blamed for the errors I’ve committed, only thanked for saving me from making more.

  And finally, of course, there are Natalia Aponte, my editor, Steve, Erin, and all the other folks at Tor/Forge, and Virginia Kidd, my agent. Without them The Reign would have existed, but never in the light of day.

  ***

  THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE EMPIRE OF VENICE IN 1562

  ***

  PART I: ABDULLAH

  I

  “I am a harem woman, an Ottoman slave.

  I was conceived in an act of contemptuous rape

  And born in a sumptuous palace.

  Hot sand is my father;

  The Bosphorus, my mother;

  Wisdom, my destiny;

  Ignorance, my doom.

  I am richly dressed and poorly regarded;

  I am a slave-owner and a slave.

  I am anonymous, I am infamous;

  One thousand and one tales have been written about me.

  My home is this place where gods are buried

  And devils breed,

  The land of holiness,

  The backyard of hell.

  I am—”

  Esmikhan Sultan stopped her song, a song she might have learned at her nurse’s knee or from any of her childhood companions, it was that popular among Constantinople’s women. She sang it for the sweet, plaintive melody, I hoped, and not because it was true.

  Well, some of it was true. She was a slave-owner. She owned me.

  She owns me. I had heard rapturous stage lovers sing such declarations—but in a previous life.

  And sometimes the word “love” flitted through my mind when I looked at Esmikhan Sultan and thought of our relationship. An unnatural thump of the heart accompanied the word: here was something I feared to lose. Perhaps more than life itself. She is not just my mistress, I thought in unguarded moments. Or she is my mistress indeed, my mistress in the other, beautiful sense of the word. We have been through much together. Yes, I have faced death for her sake. She is my best and only friend in this foreign place...

  But no. I rejected “love,” the breathy whisper of “amore,” all the lushness my Italian childhood had taught me to expect. One cruel cut had put all hope of love forever beyond my grasp.

  Esmikhan Sultan owns my body, I reminded myself. But not my heart, not my soul. My still-raw pain told me I would die before I gave those to anyone.

  Esmikhan Sultan turned to look at me. Her face flushed to match the scarlet tulips she had been readjusting for the twentieth time that morning in their Chinese porcelain vase on a low silk-draped table in the center of the room.

  “I hear their sedans in the yard!” she exclaimed. “Oh, Abdullah! What will they think when you are not at the door to greet them?”

  Esmikhan made the much-older Vizier a better wife than he made her a husband, I thought, not for the first time. And they were both better at their allotments than I claimed to be at mine: my lady’s chief and only eunuch.

  None of us had had any choice in our fates; we learned to make our choices elsewhere.

  Every harem in Constantinople knew Esmikhan Sultan was with child from Sokolli Pasha’s brief nights of duty with her. Viewing the decor of her new winter rooms was the ostensive reason for this long-awaited visit. But quite plainly, the women of her father’s harem came for no other reason than to see how she fared in her condition.

  As only a female, albeit the granddaughter of Sultan Suleiman the Lawgiver and the Magnificent—”richly dressed and poorly regarded” as the song said—any son she bore would not be in direct line to the throne. Nonetheless, given the right circumstances, the right personality, the right play of fate, the will of Allah, this combination of royal Othman blood and a Vizier’s cunning could make things very interesting twenty or thirty years hence.

  Women, I was beginning to see, start calculating such things before their first missed blood time. On the other hand, a promising youth appears full grown at the
edge of the world of men and the men treat him like a bothersome gadfly—often until it is too late to properly account for him in their calculations.

  I looked down into that round little face, rounder still with the pregnancy, those round, dark eyes, that round little chin, the dimples when she smiled, the mole by her nose—all the supreme pleasantness of her that I’d come to take for granted. She was like a pearl in this velvet-lined case, the walls inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory in the olive wood wainscoting. A pearl with the pink tint of tulips.

  I laughed gently at her fluster. These sessions of display with your family are not all that important, I wanted to speak along with my silent brush at a black curl that strayed into her face. When they have gawked their fill and gone home, I will still be here. No matter what their sharp tongues invent, I am your slave.

  “Abdullah,” she protested, shoving my hand away with her own little dimpled one. “At once!”

  So at my lady’s bidding, I strode down to the courtyard and helped the visiting eunuchs hold up the silken canopy. This canopy allowed their charges to slip into our harem without the gardeners catching a glimpse of so much as veils and outer wrappers.

  I was getting good at distinguishing women and their individuality through such covers. I’d originally come to the Land of the Turk as first mate on my murdered uncle’s trading ship. Women had seemed altogether invisible to me then. I was learning to use other senses more now, as a blind man does and sometimes fares better than the sighted.

  Today, I went by the scent they wore, and Prince Selim’s harem presented a whole airy palette to the nostrils.

  This first one, smoky with the musk of ambergris, was Nur Banu Kadin, my lady’s stepmother as well as mother to the son of the heir to Suleiman’s throne. My lady’s unwed sisters were cloying in attar of roses, sandalwood, cloves. Their maidservants were the usual giggling bouquet of violet, mimosa, and orange blossom.

  Ah, but here—through the silken corridor I held up to one edge of the sedan and the eunuch next to me held to the harem door—here passed an odd one. I couldn’t recognize her, nor her clumsy way of moving in her veils, as if threatening to shed them all off at any minute. Some new slave, I thought, for I’d never known any native-born Turkish woman to be so clumsy with the burden of her sex. Some new slave, perhaps, whom Nur Banu would soon train to her usual rigorous elegance. The surprise was that Nur Banu would let a recruit of such raw manners come with her on any outing.

  Still, violet- and mimosa-scented bundles held back and let this package go in first. And there was an odd smell to this one, the smell of quinces set to ripen in the midst of winter bedding. This odor proclaimed no artifice but straightforward practicality: every drug known to man and some known only to women, medicinal bitterness disguised with the flavor of quince.

  Suppose this was some interloper, some threat to the peace of my lady’s harem?

  I told myself that this was a petty sort of concern—for a man bred to the wild adventures of the sea, indeed! But the manhood left to me was not considered the equal of pirates or shipwreck anymore. I was meant to have no purpose other than the protection of this sanctuary behind the grilles. So I couldn’t help that my mind entertained such possibilities, fretful though they sometimes seemed.

  That thing I lacked—manhood in vague generality—was the very threat against which I wore a jeweled, ceremonial dagger. Could this be a man in women’s veils? Or could some other invasion I had vet to imagine take feminine form?

  Again I dismissed the ideas. Anything Nur Banu Kadin allowed into her sedan must be allowed into Esmikhan’s harem.

  The mystery would unwind itself soon enough, and the scent that brought up the rear of the cavalcade, too proud to jostle for position among the rest, gave me more important things to worry about. Jasmine. Heady, overpowering, sweeping away all before it, jasmine assaulted the nose with a fragrance to which the senses could never grow numb. That jasmine could only be Safiye—Sofia Baffo she had been once, before she learned eastern fashions in perfume. Safiye was my lady’s brother’s odalisque. Instinctively, I stiffened, hating always when she had the advantage of veils over me: I could not read her eves to warn me which way to jump.

  Safiye swept on into the narrow doorway and ascended the steep staircase without a sideways glance. At the top of the stairs, however, as she kicked off her outdoor shoes, she gave me a momentary—purposeful, I thought—glimpse of white ankles under ballooning red shalvar.

  I turned to make the visiting eunuchs comfortable in my lower sitting room. I helped them fold the silken curtains neatly back into the sedans. With a pang, I remembered helping sailors with the sails; these new mates of mine would never scramble up masts. And the way their thick and heavily jeweled fingers set upon the fried pastries dripping with orange water and honey, they were bent upon keeping such activity an impossibility.

  A pair of Nur Banu’s eunuchs unabashedly loosened the wide silk banded about their middles as they settled into my cushions for the afternoon. They struggled with the sweat-soaked furs of their long, heavy, blue robes and the high cones of their white turbans, releasing very feminine perfumes to the room, though they were perfumes pickled by greasy perspiration. Then they launched into the sherbets I offered.

  Well, extra flesh distracted from the other deformities eunuchs were prone to—the barrel chest, the long, dangling, apelike arms and clawed hands. As eating and drinking distracted from invisible distortions within.

  So far I had avoided the outward mutations, but I feared it was only a matter of time. Slackening into cushions on a warm afternoon seemed one sure way to hasten the inevitable, so as soon as I saw my colleagues settled, I left them. Their reedy voices pursued me, like the fragile notes of a ship’s flautist on the night air, up through the stairwell. Here, over the neat rows of discarded feminine footwear on the threshold, the scent of jasmine still lingered, trapped.

  “Alas, the day is too warm to show off the braziers,” was the first thing I heard my lady say over the preliminary oohs and ahs of her guests. Esmikhan had been fretting over that all morning. “But you were right, Nur Banu Kadin. I was just telling Abdullah.”

  “About what, my dear?” The ambergris’s question was still muffled by the white gauze that rode over the bridge of her nose and scrunched into the black sharpness of her eyes.

  “I should have started with the summer rooms. Here it is, too hot for braziers, and we must spend the summer in this velvet-lined chest without a single cooling fountain.”

  Absently, Esmikhan smoothed the buttons down the front of her yelek; she was already leaving three undone as her belly grew. “Summer” had become synonymous with “baby” for her. “It is hard to think of summer when you’re cold.”

  “Allah willing, all will be well, my little mountain spring,” said Nur Banu.

  “Inshallah,” Esmikhan echoed.

  “It is warm, lady,” I agreed as I nudged our still ill-trained maidservants forward to remove the guests’ wraps. We could ease their heat that much in any case.

  My lady caught my eye. I read gratitude there—for covering for the stupefaction of the maids. I’m not certain how much of my concern was towards Esmikhan and how much that Safiye should not find too much amiss in our house.

  But Esmikhan’s look also carried her empathy to me.

  Earlier that morning, during the last hectic rush of preparation, Esmikhan had caught me staring out the window at this sudden warmth of spring. Touching my arm folded across my chest in a eunuch’s habitual attitude, she’d murmured, “It’s been about a year, hasn’t it?”

  I didn’t need to say. My lady sensed how the spring air with its bath of light, warmth, and birdsong, reminded me of my first days among the Turks. How the exquisite opposition of such beauty and new life with remembered pain and death of all hope in a dark house in Pera sometimes came close to tearing my soul apart. How a year ago, through the machinations of Sofia Baffo—or my own stupidity and youth—I had lost family,
homeland, manhood, more than most men could lose without considering their lives at an end.

  My lady was aware of my pain now, even with the pressure of friends and family upon her, and I was grateful. Then I caught Safiye’s scrutiny upon our silent communication. Our little maid had pulled back Safiye’s veils as if they were curtains on a theatre act in which some heinous murder lay revealed.

  That face had not changed from the first time I saw it—and settled my own fate in the same instant. If anything, Baffo’s daughter had grown more beautiful. The convent garden where we’d first become acquainted had provided an ill medium for the cultivation of women’s appearance when compared to the imperial harem. Still, she stood out, even among women scoured from an empire for their loveliness.

  Her glorious golden hair and almond eyes had intensified during the year of our acquaintance like a quarter moon coming to its full. The cold demonic nature of that moonlight could turn a man’s reason. Time was when it had turned mine. Knowing of what she was capable, using that breathtaking beauty as her weapon, I looked away in horror. And Safiye’s exquisite alabaster features quickly covered any signs of disapproval at what she had seen pass between my lady and me.

  Still, I vowed to keep an eye on her. And hoped, for once, that the castrator had done his job well enough to make me immune to her infection.

  Now the admiration of the rooms, which had hardly even started, was interrupted by Nur Banu. “Do you remember our Quince, Esmikhan Sultan, my dear?”

  The Kadin gave over her veils and wrappers to our slaves with a flash of her commanding eyes. She was a handsome woman still, her formerly raven-black hair now wearing the bronze cast of gray-covering henna, but those eyes, demanding obedience, were as bright as ever.

  “The harem’s midwife?” my lady asked. This woman I’d never met before with the medicinal smell of stored linen bent to kiss my lady’s hem. “But of course. Madam, you are welcome.” And Esmikhan returned the kiss of honor with a nod of deference. “You delivered my mother of me, I believe.”