Sofia
you want to go. A fine pasha’s wife you’ll make if you can’t bid eunuchs.”Now I was caught in a vise between those two looks, the devastating seduction of Baffo’s daughter’s eyes, and the doe-like pleading of Esmikhan’s. Was my lady really going to ask me to do such a thing? Yes, she was. She could not resist. But at a deeper level, I read her plea, “Take care of me, Abdullah. Think for me. I am in over my head and must depend on your strength.”
It was not my place to speak until spoken to, but I decided something had to be said before Esmikhan did bring the request forth from the confusion of her mind and then anything I said could only be interpreted as insubordination.
“It is curious,” I murmured, as if to myself, like no more than Esmikhan’s conscience. “For all these days, your overtures to your friend have been soundly ignored. And now, suddenly, Safiye makes such demands of your friendship that she expects you to put it above the charity of Allah.”
The almond glance Baffo’s daughter sent me was coated with poison. She sank back into the roominess of her sedan, a cabin which, at Murad’s insistence, would carry two in a snug embrace. It was borne between two horses who would not blush or blink if their burden rocked vigorously on route. I took her withdrawal as a retreat, but I should have known better. Before I knew quite what was happening, Safiye had enticed Esmikhan in after her and given orders to her eunuchs.
“See?” I heard from the muffled interior as the door snapped shut. “I will go back toInönüwith you, Esmikhan.”
My hand went instinctively to the great curved dagger that is as much a eunuch’s uniform as his fur-lined robe. But was I to use it against another woman and her eunuchs? That seemed ridiculous. Foolhardy, in fact, in the face of those particular eunuchs. Murad had hand-picked a trio of monstrous hulks, thinking, no doubt, that a brute physical siege would be the greatest threat to his favorite. They hadn’t the brains among them to ward off the simplest stratagem. They were as obedient as lapdogs to their mistress; their remarkable musculature must have kept them men enough to be affected by her eyes and her pouts.
So I could do little more than run alongside the sedan saying, “But what about His Royal Highness Prince Murad and the rest of the party?”
I waved my hand in the direction of the next hillock where the people in question had halted. The thirty janissaries in their road-dusty red stood out against the throbbing blue of a clear autumn sky, their division banners limp in the breathless air. Everyone had the rump of his horse and the white featureless wedge of the back of his headdress to us with the discipline of the Sultan’s Friday parade to prayers. If the prince allowed his mistress to indulge in her present fancy and go back to the rear to speak with his sister, why would they gainsay him? The greater discipline they demonstrated now, the more likely they were in time to earn a harem of their own to indulge.
“What will they think? What will they do?” I panted.
To this I received the careless reply, “We’ll be back with them before noon. They will hardly miss us.”
The echo of the hills around, the pleating of my desperate footfalls into the folds of the dried, brown grassland were of more response than our guard.
“The march will be halted no more than a few hours,” Safiye continued to chant cheerily while I had lost my breath to running. “Tonight, when Murad has rested a little, stirred by concern—unnecessary but delightful...Tonight, with me in that silver necklace...I swear by Allah, all shall be forgiven—tonight.”
I stumbled along after the sedan, its drivers and its eunuchs, over the steps we had just covered that morning—up a fair-sized hillock and down into the dry stream bed beyond it. The bed could not always be dry, for its banks threw up a thick growth of oaks and shrubbery. Though a good number of leaves had already been lost and crunched to pinkish powder beneath our feet, the dry, gray branches had the screening effect of harem lattices. The rest of the party could not fathom what was afoot within this sanctuary until it was all but over.
The copse also hid the horses and dusty turbans of a band of brigands.
XLIII
The brigands were a ragged lot, as bristling with irregular knives and pikes and bows as their homespun woolen shalvars must have felt on their legs. I would learn later that they had, in fact, been following us for days, but the heady threat of the thirty-janissary escort had kept them invisible. A lone sedan guarded by four eunuchs, however, they could swallow as easily as one does a gulp of water on a hot summer’s day.
Two of Safiye’s eunuchs were dispatched at once, and the third incapacitated by an arrow to his right shoulder. I suppose their fearsome size and demeanor made them necessary targets.
Personally, I skidded for cover under the belly of the sedan, pressing up against one khadim as the death whistle left him.
The horses bearing the sedan were gentle beasts; they’d had no training at all for the battlefield, and the smell of blood sent them rearing at once. The sedan rocked dangerously, and the occupants, who were still ignorant of the precise nature of their predicament, knocked against the sides like a pair of beans in a rattle, and shrieked in fear.
My first reaction, like that of the other eunuchs, had been to go for my dagger, in spite of its futility against ten men armed to the teeth. But soon I realized the best thing for Esmikhan’s immediate safety was to calm the horses, which I proceeded to do. The brigands appreciated the gesture; at least they relaxed the tension on their bows. And probably I presented such