The Reign of the Favored Women Read online

  Safiye smoothed the pearl-button closure of her yelek across her flat abdomen: the unconscious gesture I knew from my lady when she was with child. Was it possible Safiye had an additional reason to be smug about her trip to Magnesia?

  She’d come through the birth of little Muhammed with beauty and power unscathed, the latter enhanced here in the East in ways she had not quite appreciated before. If one prince was a good thing, two must be twice as good. So such a condition was possible, even though my lady had no rumor of it yet and the tight, willowy figure didn’t show.

  I reminded myself I was a eunuch, with but abbreviated knowledge of such things. I returned my attention to the matter at hand.

  Nur Banu was firing these words at her opponent: “I wonder my son doesn’t sell you and spare himself considerable expense.”

  “He cannot sell the mother of his son.” Did only my ears hear the echo in Safiye’s voice that indicated, perhaps, two sons?

  “Any more than he will marry her.”

  “But forgive me, gracious lady.” Safiye’s contrition was obviously a mockery. “Had I known you admired this necklace so much, I never would have presumed to speak for it first. Though Allah knows why it interests you. Against your dark and blotchy skin it would be lost. But—very well—each one is allowed her own taste.” She reached behind her lovely neck for the clasp. “Please, Kira, send the bill to the Sultan himself and say, ‘For his favorite.’ “

  This was followed by an awkward silence, for everyone, including the Kira, knew that whoever Selim’s present favorite was—and it was as likely to be a boy he bought rubies for as a girl—it was not Nur Banu. The mother of his eldest son, she had her food and household expenses paid for, but any extravagance was out of the question.

  Dramatically, in the silence, Safiye slipped her hands forward and to her lap. The silence persisted. Safiye smiled. The insults were glossed like cheap plating on tinware. The rubies stayed on Safiye’s neck.

  Later, after we’d made our farewells, my lady pulled me close and whispered, “There was something written on that paper in the locket.”

  “Something?”

  “I’ve been able to think of nothing else since I saw it.”

  “A Koranic verse, perhaps, to ward off the evil eye?”

  “No, Abdullah. I have heard my fellow believers call Christian letters flowers because they cannot recognize them as writing. But you have opened my eyes to much, perhaps too much, since you taught me to read Dante.”

  “The note was in Italian?”

  “Venetian, ustadh,” she teased with pretended formality.

  I didn’t need to ask whose hand. “What did she say?”

  “Only two words. Tomorrow. And afternoon.”

  “That was all it said?”

  My lady nodded. “I fear I have much to learn in your language. I cannot fathom sense from just two words.”

  “No better than I,” I said.

  That was all the attention my lady chose to give to the matter, turning now to the ever-new delight of her daughter once she had placed the information in my hands.

  So I was left alone to mull the message over. My mind raced. Close in the Kira’s bosom, then, these two words were making their way out of the harem and to—where? I couldn’t unravel that end of it, so I retreated to the other end again.

  Only one hand could have written those words. I might have seen the feathery hand myself and recognized it as the same that had scribbled “Si” in the stateroom aboard my dearly departed uncle’s galley so long ago. Or from a love note I’d intercepted even before that on a fateful winter’s night in Venice. Yes, only one writer, but there were thousands of possible recipients in Constantinople alone. And what, exactly, did those words mean?

  Assuming no clandestine meeting could take place in the harem, the next afternoon I wandered on the off chance into the suq where the Kira and her husband had their shop.

  II

  The corbeled roof of Constantinople’s Great Bazaar palled the shops with gloom. Every merchant gave his most dazzling wares place of pride beneath his open grille. Here the goods astonished the alley’s steep inchne between one bulging corner and the murk of the next. But in that light and in such quantities, gold and brass were revealed as yellow, cheap, and tarnished things compared to natural air and illumination.

  And when I spied Safiye’s eunuch Ghazanfer walking down the same street at the same time with my same pretended nonchalance, I knew it could not be coincidence. I dove into the shop next door to the Jews’ and waited for him to pass.

  “Yes, please?” The shopkeeper came forward to greet me with a bow.

  “Uh—” I stammered clumsily, unsure of how to respond.

  In that moment, I happened to look up on the man’s wall and see a highly polished brass vase. It was set at such an angle that, reflected in it, I could see a good fifty paces up the street in the other direction. And whom should I see, slowly, coincidentally, making his way down the street, around the belly of the vase, but Andrea Barbarigo, the young Venetian attaché.

  “This I simply must hear!” I exclaimed aloud and then turned instantly to the shopkeeper. “Has your shop a loft upstairs?”

  “Yes,” the man replied, but almost with a question. I didn’t want to see any of his brass lavers or fine, encrusted goblets?

  “Does it communicate with the shop next door?”

  A slight smile came to his thin lips. I was not the first who had ever asked him that, but I had no time to demand particulars. “Yes,” he said, smiling. “There used to be a door, actually, but—”

  “Five ghrush to use that room for the next hour.”

  “My usual price is twenty-five.”

  “Twenty-five!” I exclaimed. “That’s robbery!”

  “It is a very good room,” he insisted quietly, and laid a finger across his lips to indicate that discretion went into the bargain.

  “I’ll give you fifteen.”

  “This way, ustadh/’he said, and led me instantly upstairs.

  The room was tiny, windowless, and cramped with dusty stock. There was hardly space for a man to sit. The arched doorway of which the shopkeeper had spoken was, like many such openings in the maze of old Constantinople, no more than chest high. It had been remodeled over centuries and finally boarded up, but more solidly at first than now. A difference in color told me that some boards had been recently removed. This led me to discover a cleverly camouflaged chink through which I had a perfect view of Ghazanfer and the Kira, who had just brought him a narghile to smoke.

  I looked back at my host in amazement. His smile told me—if anything, for it was very tight-lipped—to recall that Italians were not the only ones who knew what a source of information Moshe and his wife were.

  I handed the merchant his money, thinking I’d gotten the better of the deal. The man smiled, bowed, and left the room. Presently he returned with two glasses of sherbet and a cushion for me to sit on. He was so attentive that the scene that followed might have been played in public in the Divan, and I might have been legally, comfortably in attendance throughout.

  Ghazanfer’s name means bold lion, as odd a name for a eunuch as my Abdullah was. Our mistresses usually favor such atrocities as Hyacinth or—as my lady had wanted ‘til I talked her out of it that first day of our acquaintance—Lulu.

  Ghazanfer’s size was due to fat rather than muscle. Still, he was as strong as an ox, a monster of a man grotesquely scarred by some history I did not know. His hands looked as if every finger had been tortured and crushed, though he could still crack walnuts between them. His broken nose (and maybe the cheekbones had gone in the same disaster), straggly hair, and sallow skin gave him a decidedly Mongolian appearance and recalled to mind some cruel aberration of the lithe, swift riders of the steppes. Because of the operation, Ghazanfer was as beardless as a girl, which not only added to his appearance as one from the Asian steppe, but was startling whenever one came upon him in a group of men.

 
Yet I knew he was not Mongolian. His hair under that tall white turban was lion-tawny, his eyes blue with hard chips of green. I heard he’d been born in Hungary. I suspected him of, among other things, fostering rebellion among the Hungarian troops on behalf of his lady’s ambition.

  The whitewash on the walls behind Ghazanfer was in need of reap-plication. His eyes, however, were all too familiar with the space and allowed him to ignore the fact. His bulk filled the narrow room, furnished though it was with no more than the chair he occupied, his narghile, and a narrow rope-strung cot. There did not seem to be room for anybody else. Anything more than a quiet smoke, certainly an important meeting, seemed out of the question.

  But Andrea Barbarigo entered the room almost immediately and the eunuch made space for him. Though I’d met both men before, it was only now that I was struck by the total contrast between them. Barbarigo was short and wiry. Whereas the eunuch was so obdurate as to make one imagine a swarm of mosquitoes could not force him to scratch, the attaché seemed to suffer eternally the torments of lo. Constantly the Venetian smoothed his beard, his hair, his hose, the end of his nose, cracked his knuckles, turned his rings around on his fingers, sniffed, coughed, and when he remembered himself after each act, he grinned sheepishly.

  The eunuch was clean-faced as if every woman were a razor, and constant contact with them kept him smooth. The attaché, to continue the same image, had not seen the edge of female metal since I’d seen him last, just after Safiye’s son was born and she’d sent me—Well, I thought she’d sent me for a priest. Not for the first time, I thought Venice should have seen their man married before they sent him here.

  I’d first met Barbarigo long ago, in my Foscari uncle’s reception hall in Venice. That was so far away I smiled to think how I’d imagined us mirror images of one another: same age, same height, same class, same future, if the Fates were kind. Then, he, as I, had been Venetian to the teeth. What had become of me was a tale not worth rehearsing, but now I noticed that he, although not completely Turkified, combined the styles.

  Barbarigo wore a Turkish turban with a feather at an angle only an Italian would affect, hose and shoes, but his robe was of Eastern stuff, cut a bit short and sashed around the waist. It was the most foppish of both styles, the dignity of neither. And around his neck the young attaché was wearing the locket I recognized from the Kira’s display box. He fingered it voraciously as he made his salaams to the eunuch.

  “So tell me, tell me, how fares your lady?” Barbarigo asked, out of breath. “How fares Sofia Baffo?”

  I had not known such words existed in Turkish. It was a question only an Italian would think or dare to ask of a eunuch and, as the conversation continued, I remarked to myself that, though he took on Turkish syllables, Barbarigo’s inflections and ideas remained pure Italian. He hadn’t a Turkish thought or value in his brain.

  Ghazanfer forgave the man his lack of manners. It seemed he had done so before and Safiye must have assured him that if he would please her, he must continue to do so in the future. The eunuch’s reply, though prefaced with a half-smile, refused to be moved by Barbarigo’s passion. But then Ghazanfer rose and, with his monstrous hands, began to palm the young attaché.

  “By Jesu and Maria!”

  The Italian came out of Barbarigo in such a groan of anticipation at Ghazanfer’s first touch that I had to echo the sentiment in my own mind. By Jesu and Maria! What sordid thing am I going to witness here?

  “You know I only do this to satisfy myself,” the eunuch said in his flutelike, feminine tones.

  “I know you do, khadim.” My countryman groaned another reply.

  Panting with the heartbeat of his desire, Barbarigo began to help the eunuch peel through layers of costume. The attaché’s turban tumbled off and collapsed to its natural, formless self on the floor. His bare head revealed a very un-Turkish tumble of curls—so like a eunuch’s in this Eastern world.

  So like mine.

  I couldn’t say that there hadn’t been rumors circulating about the strange tastes of Safiye’s head khadim, but I’d learned never to believe a tenth of the things a harem whispers. Now?

  Off came the shoes, the sash—I was about to turn away in disgust when suddenly the eunuch reached his satisfaction. Ghazanfer stepped away from Barbarigo, as calm as ever, and nodded. I saw now that, while the great Hungarian didn’t balk at allowing strange men into his lady’s presence, he did consider searching such men for concealed weapons a part of his duties. This was the satisfaction he had sought—and gained. No more. No weapons were concealed on this man, or none that Ghazanfer could remove without a castrator’s skill. The eunuch bowed and exited.

  But the attaché’s frenzy continued to climb. He was down to mere hose when the door to the Kira’s back room opened once again to admit the silent bundle of veils and wrappers that is a Turkish woman in public.

  But then she wasn’t in public any longer.

  If I hadn’t guessed before, I knew at the first whiff of jasmine through broken slats who this woman was. I never saw her face, for though veils flew like waves parting before a ship’s prow, Barbarigo devoured her features in his hunger. I saw clearly the frantic collapse onto the room’s narrow cot. The ropes creaked dangerously under their double burden.

  Then I heard the all-too-familiar woman’s crescendo of her lover’s name, her “Caro mios,” her “Amorosos”. Her yellow kidskin slippers were just a rotted board’s distance from me as they kicked for purchase in her climax.

  Desires I thought had been cut from me rose staggering from the dead. With no place to go, they festered within. I thought I was going to be sick.

  III

  An hour later, I was waiting for him in the niche between two shops when he left the Jews’ with his latest orders from the hell-born witch. My dagger was drawn, bejeweled and ceremonial though it was. Hadn’t Ghazanfer done me the khadimly favor of showing me my quarry was unarmed?

  “Barbarigo.” I stated his name.

  My adversary wheeled, still drunk with love. I have known I must fight him since we first came face-to-face, I thought, face-to-face again. Duel him, duel him. The demands of seven years drummed in my head. Mask to mask at Carnival in Foscari’s hall I had confronted him. Sofia Baffo had hardly been able to choose between us. Fate had chosen then; today it would again.

  Barbarigo dropped his hands from their post-coital fussing with sash and codpiece. By God, I would have him dead. He stared at the come-on wink of my dagger as if with long-lost recognition.

  “What?” he said, then stopped. He knew; every man recognizes death’s angel.

  He bolted suddenly. I’d fully expected him to. Though weighted down by my eunuch’s skirts, I was upon him in a moment. I caught him by the sash and flung him hard against the wall of a coppersmith’s shop. The burnished wares clanged together like a kitchen in full smoke and his new-wound turban tumbled to the ground, releasing his eunuch-like Western curls once more. I rammed my dagger through the foppish brocade under his left arm. His liquid brown eyes—I could see my beardless self in them—winced as the point of my blade stopped somewhere between skin and rib.

  Shopmen retreated into their back rooms. No one in Constantinople would lift a finger to stop a eunuch with his dagger bared. When the deed was done, they would reemerge and quietly set things in order again, merely muttering “honor” among themselves with awe rather than anger. To pry more into the matter would be decided bad taste—or decidedly dangerous.

  I slipped my blade, wicking blood to the hilt, through Barbarigo’s flesh, off the rib and down, until the next thing it found would be his heart. And yet I couldn’t drive it home. We stood eye to eye, panting in each other’s exhausted breath.

  “You—” Barbarigo swallowed and tried again, almost smiling with the pleasure to find each word was not his last. “You are the khadim who first brought me to her.”

  I drew my arm back for the lunge at such a lie.

  “You are,” he insisted. “Didn’t
you come, telling me she’d borne a son and wanted a priest for him?”

  I couldn’t deny it. And if I acted now upon my impulse, would my part in all of this be exposed?

  Barbarigo had been speaking Turkish to this point. I switched to Venetian, for he could not recognize me as I did him and would have no reason to switch on his ovm. The croon of our mothers’ tongue took him as much by surprise as the point of my blade, warmed by his own blood. But suddenly, irrationally, I wanted him to know.

  “That was not the beginning, Barbarigo. Not the beginning at all. Do you remember me now? My voice, at least, from behind a carnival mask. My voice which, against all nature, hasn’t changed in the intervening years. It was I, Barbarigo, who thwarted your attempt to elope with the lady that January evening so long ago. It was I, in the Foscari’s hall. I, Giorgio Veniero. And you—” I laughed in spite of myself at the mercy it would have been. “You threatened to turn me in to your father.”

  My adversary’s face paled as if I’d hit an artery, though, by my life, I’d as yet given him no more than a scratch.

  “Yes, I—I remember,” he stammered. “I—I haven’t forgotten—nor forgiven—in all these years.”

  “Nor I, Barbarigo. Nor I. Though, by my life, I wish I’d let her go with you. I pray to heaven you had taken her out of my life, to give me my life again.”

  Barbarigo shifted. I refocused the attention of my blade, so he would not think emotion had weakened my resolve.

  But then I realized I did not truly want him dead. Neither his life nor his death presented any threat to me or my two ladies at all. If I’d turned and walked away from the chink in the tradesman’s wall, refusing to get involved in Safiye’s machinations, we would have remained safe, too. But now she had drawn me into her maelstrom once again. Who knew where it would end? And who knew what effect this could have on my lady and her tiny, precious daughter? Evil was the only word that came to mind.

  I could not escape the thought that this was how Baffo’s daughter had planned it all along. Once again I was playing her dupe. I had hoped, even prayed, that what I had suffered in that castrator’s dim little house in Pera had freed me of the spell the sight of her cast on every being in the world. Now rationality glimmered in the back of my mind: The haze of jealousy I’d been laboring through for the past hour was not the way to peace in my life.