Sofia
us to have his blood upon our hands. The girl is unharmed, and that is most important. If we spill blood or demand vengeance according to the law, the affair may come to the notice of the Sublime Porte. Fearing their merchandise damaged, they may refuse to go through with the deal.”The young man submitted to his father with an angry grunt. The tension in his arms had to thrust the sword somewhere, so he threw it with violence against the wall.
Without ceremony I was immediately dragged from the room. The last thing I saw of Baffo’s daughter, she was sitting calmly on her divan, straightening her bodice as if nothing had happened at all. I spent the rest of that night locked up in one of the merchant’s spare cells, fearing the worst.
In the morning, however, I got the impression that my captors’ lust for personal vengeance had faded somewhat. They turned me over to the custody of a man who owned one of the other shops in the colonnade.
Salah ad-Din, in spite of his heavy flowing robes, was one of the thinnest men I had ever seen. At the same time he was quite tall, and the combined effect was bizarre. It seemed clear that poverty was not the cause of his want of weight and still I could not credit nature to condone such freakishness.
This man held his hands constantly before himself, studying the long, bony fingers with the same narcissistic delight as he also constantly fondled his heavy growth of black moustache. It seemed that both were attributes which he cultivated and which gave his great pride. Perhaps a streak of miserliness made him feel that money spent on food was money wasted when it could be better invested in merchandise. I had the strange feeling, however, that he cultivated these things—thinness and a moustache—because persons of his acquaintance, for some defect in their persons, could not do so. I knew of no slave trader, however, who could not grow as heavy a beard as he wished, and there was more glory in flaunting the rich foods one could afford than in keeping trim.
“Call me Francesco,” Salah ad-Din said in Italian as he extended his hand.
I learned, then, to my surprise, that this man was a native-born Genoese. Giving up his Christianity had allowed him to start a very lucrative business here in Constantinople as a slave trader. I wondered not so much at this as at the fact that he should choose for his Muslim name that of the great defeater of Christians and the scourge of the Crusade.
“Ah, I still miss Italy,” Salah ad-Din divulged to me. “And I always enjoy talking to a fellow countryman.”
I returned this compliment by confessing something of my own origins, too—that I was orphaned and how my guardian uncle had died at sea.
“By the roasting flesh of San Lorenzo, that is a pity,” he said with a piety both rough and, at the same time, a little studied.
“A great pity,” he repeated. “You must allow me to offer you breakfast.”
A silent slave brought breakfast—yogurt, olives, dried prunes, and flat bread—to the back room of Salah ad-Din’s shop. In spite of all I had been through—or perhaps because of it—I ate with good appetite. Salah ad-Din did not join me but watched as a customer may watch with fascination the jeweler at his work. I got the impression that he restrained himself because he felt himself above the animal lusts to which I was a slave.
In the middle of my meal, a colleague of Salah ad-Din called him to the door for consultation and, though they spoke in Turkish and though I missed most of what they said, I got the impression it was some piece of slave flesh they were considering.
“He is too old,” the colleague said.
“There is no beard.”
“After twelve or thirteen success is but limited. Death is more than likely.”
“Yet such skin, such a figure, and that hair,” Salah ad-Din argued. “How dare we pass it by?”
My breakfast finished, I now rose to take my leave. “I think I must return to my friend Husayn,” I told the Genoese. “He has betrayed me and Venice—and you may gloat at that as much as I mourn. But I have no other friend in this town. And I know he must be very anxious for my well-being.”
To my surprise I was detained.
They had not known I could understand a little Turkish, else they would have left the room.
I was the piece of slave’s flesh they were discussing.
My struggles and protests availed nothing. If anything, they made Salah ad-Din determined to hasten the process.
Before noon, I was ferried across the Golden Horn and beyond the walls of Pera to a small house in the countryside.
What was done there is against Islamic law. It had to be done beyond city limits and by those whose Islam was a will-o’-the-wisp thing.
***
The very same day that I went beyond Pera, Abu Isa got four hundred ghrush —more than his wildest dreams—for the blond-haired slave girl from the corsair’s ship. Toward evening, the closed sedan chair again made its way from the shop to the palace.
But this time it returned empty.
PART II: SAFIYE
XXIII
Within the belly, as she called it, of the marble beast, Sofia did not find herself back in the glittering presence of the woman with the dark, piercing eyes. The eunuch showed her, instead, to a narrow string bed at the far end of a dark, dank dormitory two flights up. A thin mattress covered the bedstrings and, when she sat upon it to get her bearings, it jolted her hard, for it was crushed by much use.
Nine forlorn, dusty-looking girls stared back at her from their own hard pallets. A few chirps of greeting revealed a multitude of foreign tongues among which she could not exchange a single word.
Only the eunuch had something to say. On his way out he stopped to verbally lash one of the girls, for