Sofia
to approach him.Safiye had half a mind to refuse so weak and slovenly a gesture. But ambition got the better of her spite and she approached until she stood directly before him, just to one side of the table covered with untouched festive dainties. The young man continued to scrutinize her with his half-closed eyes until finally these squinted into a dry, soundless laugh which contorted his face and shook his flimsy body.
At last he spoke, not to her, but to himself aloud. “Well, guess you fooled her this time, Murad, my old friend. She thought she could take your vision with her when she went, the old sorceress, your mother. But see, we have just proved her wrong. Here the vision is, and she is gone. But it would not obey your commands and mental summons while she was here as other visions do. It is a very curious vision, this one, which probably explains why it is so lifelike. I think, Murad, you may look upon this day as a day you reached a new level of experience with the Milk of Paradise.”
Safiye knelt now beside the divan in an attempt to prove to the young prince that he did not control her actions. That did not work, however, and so she decided she must speak.
“I am not a vision,” she declared. “I am not a figment in your mind. I am as real as you are.”
Murad laughed and shook his head, “All my visions say that. They do that to teach me that my life is nothing, not that they are something. No, I will not let you fool me, you least of all.”
His laughter made him shut his eyes now, but they immediately reopened.
“Curious,” he said. “Though all my dreams tell me they are real, you are the first that has vanished when I shut my eyes.”
“That is because I am real,” Safiye declared. “Your mother put no opium in your pipe—only mastic and cinnamon. See, I will show you.”
And, against the protests that it disturbed his smoke, she sifted through the ashes in the bowl and insisted that he look and see that there was little left but charred bran and gummy mastic.
“I knew that,” the prince sulked. “You think I didn’t know that? I knew that from the first. Yet, you came with the pipe. I knew there must be something extraordinary in it. Tell me what it was so I can get some for myself next time.”
“You cannot control me like that,” Safiye cried. “Yes, I am a slave and you are my master, but I am Sofia Baffo, daughter of the Governor of Corfu. You did not will me from the harem and, just to prove it, I shall now return there. You can’t stop me.”
Safiye returned her hands to their place upon her breasts, but it was with a sort of contemptuous dare. With the same attitude, she gave a little nod of farewell and began to get to her feet.
Murad watched this whole performance without other response than to smile as if the antics of his unpredictable vision were highly diverting. Unseen by Safiye, however, he was fumbling in his sash for his dagger and while her head was bowed, he used it to make a lunge at her.
XXXVI
It was not a deep wound, for Murad had not bothered to remove the sheath and besides, since it was never used, its sharpness had never been of any concern to him. He had fully expected, however, to stab at the nothingness of vision through which his hand should pass unhindered to the table behind her. Such was not the case, as he discovered, and the rough edges of the sheath’s encrustation caught upon her very real flesh in such a way that he was jolted awake.
For her part, Safiye gasped aloud at the pain and, fully chastised for the presumption of her last speech, remained humbly bowed, her hands where they belonged across her breast, though the right one where the knife had hit shook with pain. Tears began to curl from her eyes and blood from her hand.
With these proofs, Murad was forced to admit, “Well! May I never be my father’s first-born son! It is real!”
“May I return to the harem, then, good master,” Safiye murmured, “and never bother you anymore?”
She was, for all her ambition, a child of but fourteen after all, and the pressure of all this very real playacting suddenly crushed her.
Before he could give her a reply, however, the harem came to them. Nur Banu flung open the door and stood there with a barrage of abuse for her willful slave girl on the tip of her tongue. The scene that met her eyes—her son bent over the kneeling girl with more concern than he had shown for anything short of Indian poppies in over a year—took her aback for just a moment and, in that moment, Murad spoke instead.
“Mother, if you please.”
Just that much, and Nur Banu closed first her mouth and then the door. Murad got to his feet and locked the door behind her. As he turned to the room again, he chuckled with ill ease.
“Now what am I to do with you?” he asked, himself more than her. “If I send you back tonight, Mother will eat you alive. So you must stay here, I suppose. Here’s the key. Leave only when you’re sure it’s safe. As for me—no, I shall demand no more blood of you. There are plenty of other rooms in this citadel where I can sleep, indeed, with much more comfort than in here—
“Oh, for the sake of the All-Merciful, do something with your hand before it drips all over your dress.”
He sat down on the divan next to her again and offered a napkin from among the platters on the table. “Here, here,” he waved it at her. “Take it.”
Safiye did at last and slowly, hampered by quivers that shook her whole body, she began to