Sofia
of this alive.”I remarked to myself that in spite of the haul of riches her menfolk had brought home with them, the labor of that single peasant woman had provided us with the things that were most important: this good goat cheese, the bread, the rough woven blankets, and kilims brightly dyed with red madder.
“At least it does not appear that they mean to let us starve to death.”
I meant my tone to deliver a comment on Safiye’s nonchalance. The brigand’s wife wasn’t even out of the room before Baffo’s daughter sat down on the floor and began to eat with great appetite.
“Of course not,” Safiye said between thick bites of bread. “What good are dead hostages?”
“We’re to be held as hostages then? For what?”
“Ransom. And revenge.” Safiye’s appetite for those words was obviously no less than for the soup and cheese.
The quick ride out of Murad’s earshot was all that Safiye needed, so it seemed, to take stock of the new situation and to plot her future accordingly. Not too much further on, she had gotten the brigand leader to ungag her, then untie her, and then her probing into the situation began in earnest.
“Surely you noticed Crazy Orhan” (by this familiarity she meant our captor) “is missing his right eye.”
As a matter of fact, I had not noticed this detail during the heat of our capture. Later examination showed me that his face served to strike terror rather than compassion in the observer. The black, burned-out socket was camouflaged to the casual glance by a sagging lid and the shadow of simian brows. Black, too, were his boar-bristle beard, mustachios that could be knotted thrice behind his neck, and a rudely shaved forehead from which the hair appeared to have been torn out in clumps. A saggy felt cap and a rag of red turban too small for a bestial breadth of face completed the picture.
“You know how he lost it?” Safiye asked.
I did not.
“Your Sokolli Pasha did it. With a red-hot iron.”
I gave an expression of disbelief.
“Yes, it’s true. Oh, years ago, of course. You wouldn’t expect a pasha to dirty his hands with such business. But years ago, when he was a janissary in his first service. The man who was Grand Vizier then, Ibrahim Pasha, under the shadow of the Sultan Suleiman’s good graces, began to confiscate the holdings of honest, faithful Turks such as Orhan for his own purposes. A certain dervish came preaching to the men to stand up for their age-old rights, which they finally had no choice but to do.”
I shivered a little at the thought of that dervish in the next room with double meaning in his eyes.
“Well, they were no match for Ibrahim and his Christian-boy janissaries. Those who were not slaughtered on the battlefield were blinded or incapacitated in other brutal ways so they would not rise again.”
“I’m sure Sokolli Pasha was only fulfilling his duty,” I said in defense.
“Yes. The duty of a lackey to fulfill the wishes of a greedy master.”
“Still Orhan is missing only one eye, not both.”
“It seems the mercy of Allah called Sokolli away for a moment in the midst of his deed. When he returned, Orhan, in all his unspeakable pain, had managed to escape by hiding among the dead, by crawling over thorns and stones with the fluid of his eye running down his face all the while. But of course he never got his land back, so one eye is little consolation.”
“I am sure Sokolli Pasha did only what was necessary,” I found myself coming to my master’s defense again. “He is a good man. His pious foundations exist from one end of the empire to the other.”
“Yes. And who lines up for bread at those places? Men his hand blinded or lamed so they cannot dig for their own bread. Women his hand made widows. Children—not heathen children, but the children of Turks—children his hand left fatherless and without inheritance.”
I looked uneasily over at Esmikhan and was glad to find her still asleep. I did not want her hearing this.
“Do not worry for Esmikhan,” Safiye said, watching my eyes. “She has been saved from a much worse fate. Now she will never have to marry that pasha.”
“Surely you can’t believe Orhan will succeed in his plans for us.”
“Why should he not?”
“He is one man. One half-blind man with a handful of followers against an empire. You cannot believe, Ibrahim Pasha or no Ibrahim Pasha, that Sultan Suleiman—he the West calls Magnificent—will let this happen to his own granddaughter in his own backyard. And what about your precious Murad, eh?”
Safiye shrugged the name off as if it were only water. “Orhan has the hand of Allah behind him in the secrets of these mountain passes.”
“And in the inspiration of mad dervishes. The time for such fanatic leadership is passed, here in Islam as in our native Italy where Savonarola met his heretic’s doom in our father’s time.”
“Veniero, it is not like you to be such a cold realist. You were always full of such dreamy idealism before. You were going to save me from the Turkish pirates. You were going to climb walls to save me.” She fluttered her eyelids at me and dropped into a sultry Italian.
I refused to let such gestures have their desired effect. I spat in anger. “Thanks to you, I have since had done to me something that cured me of such idealism.”
“Now, now, are we bitter?”
“By God, I have a right to be. And you, Baffo’s daughter. Just look at you. One moment you want to traipse halfway across Anatolia for a silly necklace to entice one man, the next you are willing to throw your lot with a total stranger. By God, you are like a pat of butter; you pick up the taste and smell of whatever garlicky, oniony man handles you.”
Safiye tossed her hair—in the half-light it did have the rich color butter gets in spring—as if I’d given her a