Sofia
And Allah, who smiles with favor on the house of the Ottomans on the battlefields of Asia, Africa, and Europe, surely He will not frown now on so small a field as the marriage bed.”“But why is he taking so damned long?” Murad exploded.
“Now, majesty, love does not come so fast after a certain age as it does in youth.”
“That Sokolli Pasha will drive me to my grave! My grandfather adores him, but I say it is because they are both so old and doddering...”
“Fie, son!” the old man said, and hastened to add words to protect the souls of his rulers from evil spirits. “The Pasha is an excellent man. He has not the haste of youth, perhaps, but certainly it has been replaced by firmness and good, solid sense, not senility. If he moves slowly, it is because he knows she is a virgin. No one spills Ottoman blood unadvisedly.”
The little old eyes glittered mischievously between age-weighted lids, but Murad passed them by with impatience. Two strides brought him to the foot of the stairs that led to the wedding chamber, ten strides and he had escaped that sight to hide at the other end of the hall, nine strides and he was back again. He cocked his head and listened, his brassy beard suggesting a wild beast that remembered the freedom of a jungle through which it had once roamed. Murad listened as if anyone could hear anything over the throb of those drums. As if he could hear not only the rain that was falling outside on the already-saturated road to Constantinople, but every breath taken in the room upstairs.
Suddenly something was heard over the janissaries’ drums: women’s trills of joy from the infinity of the harem above and behind us. Murad shoved others out of his way to see: an old, old woman, whose task it was to be judge of such things, was making her way down the stairs in full state. She was reciting from the Koran. Murad waited only to hear that they were verses from the Sura in which evil men sought to disparage the honor of the Prophet’s favorite wife. After a night spent lost in the desert in the company of a strange young man, Heaven vindicated her: “‘Did not the faithful of both sexes...say, “This is a manifest lie”...?’”
Murad stayed long enough for only half a glance at what the old woman held stretched out between her fingers like a tent between its gnarled stakes: the fabric of his sister’s shalvar, stained with blood. Murad nearly ran into me in his haste, and stopped long enough to meet my eyes. He said nothing, but dropped his lids for one brief second—as close as a son of Othman may ever come to a bow acknowledging indebtedness to anyone. Then he was gone, up the stairs three at a time and into the mabein where he’d told Safiye to wait.
The drums struck up a triumphal march and the old woman and her burden were paraded around and around as if it were the personal victory of every man there. I got out of their way by taking the stairs. I stood and watched the festivities from the balcony for a while, a window open for the cool night air at my back. Then I turned to retire. Imagine how startled I was to find, in the shadows at my elbow, my master, watching likewise.
I bowed, clumsy in my surprise. “Felicitations, master,” I managed to say.
“Thank you, Abdullah.” Something struggled under his rich bridegroom’s robes. “Excuse me a moment,” he said.
I looked away, embarrassed, as he turned to the window. The dark night air possessed just the quality it had had on the Grand Canal from the Foscari’s chamber so many lives and deaths ago. A dark cloud of jealous grief swept over me for what he had that I didn’t.
But then the most absurd squawk made me turn back to him with a start. I was just in time to see a paroxysm of black feathers disappear into the night. In a moment, the capon my master had loosed crowed prematurely and ineptly to set his ruffled dignity to rights under cover of darkness.
“My master,” I couldn’t help but laugh. “What on earth that?”
Over the hawk’s beak of his nose, his right eve almost winked. “I took him to your lady’s chamber with me. In case things hadn’t—worked out.”
“You would have killed him?”
“Cut his throat and used his blood instead of hers.”
“You would have done that? To cover for me?”
“I never doubted you, Abdullah. Nor your lady. Only Murad’s fair one. But what can one do with the favorites of princes? They make life difficult for the rest of us, don’t they?” He took a deep sigh. If I needed to cover for—in case—There is no reason either of you should suffer tor my deficiencies.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant but didn’t feel it was my place to pry. “So the bird flies tree, master. Congratulations I say again.”
“But more congratulations are due to you, I believe. A group of my men went up into the gorge, according to the directions you gave them, and found the brigands’ hut today. They’ve just returned with nothing but an old woman, half-mad, whom I suppose we shall have to release onto charity. More pious donations are due, I suppose, out of my purse to commemorate the event.”
“Allah’s will,” I murmured. He sounded nothing like a groom on his wedding night.
“Yes, but it is more than that. My men reported the scene in the hut; seven burly, hard-bitten criminals dead these three or four days and unburied. Abdullah...”
I blushed under his gaze. “Believe me, sir, I’m not responsible for a half of those deaths. There was another, a dervish...”
“A dervish?”
“Yes. He killed most of them. While I merely acted as diversion.”
“What sort of dervish? What did he look like?”
“To tell you the truth, sir, he resembled an old friend...but maybe I only dreamed.