Sofia
brain. The pustules on her face had the telltale indentation in their centers. Her face reflected that of the ugly little charwoman. Her face, her life, it was all over, worthless. “No, no.” Sofia heard the Quince’s calming voice and its little Faridah echo. “The wounds—where I engrafted the venom—they remain open, weeping. See? It will be necessary to keep them clean, but that is the way the poison leaves the body, so it never becomes acute. I haven’t lost a patient yet. Believe me.”“Inshallah,” Faridah added.
Sofia became aware of time again two days later, which finally convinced her of the Quince’s power. Victims of real smallpox, even if they were destined to live, could not hope to be over the fever and delirium in less than a week. Nonetheless, she was left feeling like the burned-out hull of a ship, as empty as a marble hall with the rugs packed away, tile and mirrors reflecting only emptiness, tired and listless.
“It is something else that ails her,” the Quince said firmly, “not my medicine. See? The scabs have sloughed off as clean as you can wish. Only the entry cuts remain and they will heal. Because she is full-grown, not an eight-year-old, they will not expand as she grows, but remain as they are, no bigger than a fingernail. No, it’s something else—”
After Sofia’s second week in the harem, the Quince pronounced her fit to travel and vowed she wouldn’t come to visit any more.
“And no, I will not believe it’s witchcraft until I have much more proof than this, you superstitious chit,” were her parting words to Faridah. “Depression. All too common a condition in here, and I won’t prescribe drugs for a case as minor as hers. Travel is the best therapy. The new girl is fit to travel, and travel I order her to do.”
Faridah wept as if losing her only friend in the world.
Fit to travel didn’t mean willing to travel. Sofia’s listless-ness lingered on to the next morning when eunuchs with whom she couldn’t communicate, and wasn’t expected to, once again swathed her in veils. Where they led her she was too hollow to care, but it turned out to be through the gardens by another route until she reached the water’s edge. As passive as a doll, she was put in a boat and ferried across the Bosphorus until she arrived at the dock at Scutari on the Asian side.
Once more she was loaded in a sedan chair, but this time the journey did not end until nightfall. And, come morning, it began again. And all the next day and the next. Sofia soon realized that the wonderful city of Constantinople, harem or otherwise, was not to be her home after all.
Sometimes her chair halted for an hour or two in a bit of afternoon shade. Sofia would find herself in the middle of a muddy field with muddy peasants tending muddy crops and she would despair. She might have married the Corfiot after all. At least she understood what that play for power was all about. Here was no one to tell her where she was going or why. Even had the porters been able to understand her questions they dared not respond under the careful eye of the great white eunuch.
The journey lasted a full week.
***
Fortunately, on the third day, Sofia’s single sedan overcame a much larger company and joined it. She had closed her curtain tightly against the dreariness of the countryside, and when she first heard the noise of these new com-pardons, she thought it was only another crowd of peasants on their way to market. She imagined them with scabby donkeys loaded to breaking with wives, children, hens, and cabbages, and she closed the shutters even tighter against their noise and dust. When they halted at noon and the noise persisted, she refused to come out, even to stretch her legs or relieve herself, though she needed to do both quite badly.
Presently, however, the shutters were thrown open from the outside, and a heavily veiled face, startlingly spectral, peered in at her. A hand to her mouth betrayed Sofia’s uneasiness to which the other face replied by removing a corner of its veil.
Sofia recognized the revealed eyes at once and gave a squeal of delight. All lingering exhaustion left her. She and the wonderful woman were traveling companions after all!
“We stopped to visit friends along the way. To give you time to recover from the pox.”
So much she understood of Nur Banu’s greetings, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter, either, where Sofia was carried, even to the end of the earth, as long as that woman came along. That the woman’s wagon had room for one more added to the new slave’s delight. Needless to say, at the end of two weeks, Sofia’s command of Turkish had grown by leaps and bounds.
Kutahiya was the name of their final destination, not that it mattered much to Sofia. It was Nur Banu’s destination, that was enough for her to know.
It was a small town: if every soul there had been taxed half a ghrush, they would not yet have the price to pay for a Sofia Baffo. Nearly as large as the area covered by the tile-roofed houses of the natives was a sprawling citadel that crowned the hill. An ancient building, its foundations and cellars predated Islam; only repairs had been made in current memory. Here the governor of the neighborhood lived with his family.
Sofia was installed in the harem of this citadel.
XXVIII
“Kutahiya is a terribly tedious place to have to spend one’s days,” Nur Banu Kadin said.
Nur Banu, Sofia soon learned, meant “woman of splendor,” and she continued to think that no woman had been more aptly named.
“The winters are undoubtedly the worst, damp and cold. Can you blame me if I use every ruse to be able to spend them in the Grand Serai? Unfortunately, the complaints that work for winter do not serve for summer, for