Sofia
the prayer rugs, Nur Banu called Safiye to her. Surveying her handiwork at arm’s length, she nodded with satisfaction.“If my son will not have you,” she said, “may he never become Sultan at all—as Allah wills.”
Then she kissed Safiye fondly on both cheeks and, as she did, she pressed a pair of small silver cases into her hand. Safiye opened and examined one after the other. Each contained perhaps two dozen objects the shape and size of fingers—black in one case, yellow in the other—that released a medicinal smell.
“What are they?”
Nur Banu replied with the word farazikh, which Safiye had never heard and wouldn’t have known in Italian either, had someone been around to give it to her. “Pessary” was not in the vocabulary of a convent girl.
“No, do not touch them,” Nur Banu warned, and Safiye obediently withdrew her curious fingers. “Body heat will make them melt. You are to place them inside yourself, the yellow one before the act, the black ones after.”
“What are they made of?”
Nur Banu raised the perfect crescents of her brows so her eyes could pierce deeper. Did this girl plan to make farazikh on her own? The idea was so startling—so unthinkable—that the older woman told her anyway.
“The yellow is the pulp taken from between the pips of a pomegranate mixed with alum, rue, myrrh, hellebore, and ox-gall, kneaded with the tail-fat of a sheep so it will melt. The black is colocynth pulp, bryony, sulfur, and cabbage seed in a base of tar.”
“Are these formulas of which the Quince approves?”
Nur Banu’s brows went higher still. “Yes,” she snapped.
Safiye laughed lightly, realizing she had, for the moment, pressed for too much control of her own enslaved body. “Then I know they’ll work.”
The lightness, the girlishness in her voice served as an apology, and the older woman’s brows settled down to their usual arcs.
“May you remain childless many blissful nights.”
XXXIV
The air was different in the mabein, that strange half-world between the world of men and that of women. It seemed darker, heavier. The dust of disuse a day of airing had been unable to remove lingered in this room of the young Murad, for he rarely cared to make contact with the world of shadows that stood always at his back while he went about in the male, sunshiny world of everyday. Here in this space between, opposites met. Things as unlike as oil and vinegar mingled either, like that dressing, quickly and bitterly to separate or, like the opposites of flame and powder, to mix and explode into one.
Nur Banu had time to enter and arrange things to her liking before her son came. This she did with the precision and display of a man of the theater. Lamps were lit and set in all the niches. Bowls and trays of nuts and sweets were loaded on a low table until it groaned. The cushions on the divan were plumped up in four places, one for Nur Banu, two, close together, for Esmikhan and Fatima, the sisters, who would also join in this party, and the fourth for the young prince himself.
A row of beautiful slaves, Aziza and Belqis still nursing hopes among them, was lined up against one wall, arms crossed upon their breasts, heads bowed, to await their mistress’ further orders. But as for the actual performance, for which the Prince’s arrival in the room would be the cue, Safiye could not be a witness to that. As soon as the excited whisper ran, “He comes! He comes!” the door to the harem was quietly but hurriedly shut, and Safiye had to remain on the women’s side of it.
Of the initiatory salaams and embraces, Safiye heard nothing at all. The first thing she did hear was a voice rather thin and weak for a man’s (but that might only be from tedium, she thought) saying, “Dear Mother, send your silly girls away.”
Now the harem door opened and the row of girls filed in. Upon their faces Safiye read all she could of what had transpired. Upon those who had cherished hopes, in spite of every previous reason to abandon them, the disappointment was as clear as if seen through glass, and threatened to spill immediately into tears. The others could greet Safiye with smiles and murmurs of “Allah bless you” —for, so far, all was going according to Nur Banu’s script.
Now they must be seated, now Nur Banu must offer him the dainties on the table. The meat of the sacrifice must be brought in. Murad must eat of that, of the accompanying rice, pulse, and yogurt with cucumber. He must finish with a nibble on a favorite pastry out of politeness. A sherbet. Then rose water and incense must be offered for cleansing. And then, finally, his mother must suggest the water pipes...
Safiye counted the entrances of the serving eunuchs and ran the scenario over and over in her mind so many times that her heart began to race with the idea that something must have gone amiss. But to actually play a scene takes much more time than to rehearse it in one’s mind and Murad really had found but brief diversion in anything up to the mention of pipe.
The three sharp claps came soon enough. Safiye took the pipe from Aziza who stood behind her—the stem and mouthpiece lightly in her right hand, the small silver tray in her left as she had been carefully taught. Then Aziza opened the door for her and she stepped into the close and dusty air of the mabein alone.
Slow, measured steps had been rehearsed and came naturally as she felt, not only the burden of the pipe, but that of four pairs of eyes upon her.
“Four,” she told herself. “I know it is four and he is not just looking at the pipe,” though she did not dare to raise her eyes to confirm this feeling.
She brought the pipe down to the smoker’s level and carefully worked the mouthpiece through her