Sofia
caught one as a gasp escaped his lips, and his nails clawed against the stone in a tarantella of gratification.The dervish, his meditation among the trees disturbed, moved silently away, thoughtfully smoothing his scraggly moustache into his scraggly beard. But I myself, who could not escape, heard through cracks in the cavern walls, many other times over the next few days when Orhan reveled in the spoils of Murad.
XLVI
Esmikhan, bless her heart, was of such a nature that she found it impossible to believe that any woman, Safiye in particular, would ever stay long of her own free will in a place where her honor was even threatened, let alone compromised. Safiye stayed away from us for hours at a time. Well, she was braver than Esmikhan herself, but she wasn’t wanton. I thought it best not to disillusion my mistress; to protect her even from defilement of the mind seemed to be my duty. But, although we were as yet unaware of what it meant for our personal futures, the day did soon come when the young brigand, Orhan’s son, returned from Constantinople.
“But where’s my father?” he asked, growing impatient with the tears and thanksgiving of his mother’s welcome.
His words threw the woman back into the dark gray mood she’d been laboring under for days now. “Villainy!” she spat into the back of the hut. “Your son is here.”
“Coming, coming.” Orhan muttered, impatient, sheepish, and came out of a small side room still struggling with the wide bands of his sash.
The young man looked quizzically at his father, but did not comment as he dove headlong into an account of the success of his mission. He had received no firm confirmation of the Porte’s willingness to negotiate. Indeed, Sokolli Pasha, at the head of a small army, had left the city in the same hour with the intention of taking the brigands as one takes a castle or a town.
“But we know that is impossible,” Orhan said, smiling as he imagined the fastness of his fortress.
“It is indeed,” the son replied. “I left them in Inönü. Beyond that town, they have no clue as to where to go, no more than the prince does who has been sitting there a week.”
“Good. Yes, they will soon be ready to talk. I give them till midwinter—at the latest.”
His deadline grew so much closer that very night; it began to snow.
***
The brigands were up late that night. The young man had brought wine from the forbidden Christian vats of Constantinople, and success tasted sweeter, closer than it ever had before. Safiye sat up, too, wishing she could be in front there with our captors, watching the warm glow flared from time to time by raucous laughter in consolation. Esmikhan herself fell into a fitful sleep, scratching, even in her dreams, at the rawness raised by the bedbugs that had snuggled closer for warmth.
I think I must have dozed as well, at least the grasp on my shoulder in the dark came as a surprise. The empty hand I put up to defend myself suddenly found itself fumbling around the hilt of a dagger.
It was a strange voice, yet a voice strange in its almost-familiarity, that assured me in the darkness, “It’s not your own dagger. I’m sorry. They guard that too well, because of the jewels in the hilt. But I think you will find this more serviceable than that eunuch’s weapon time and form have atrophied to little more than show.”
I realized by this time it was the dervish. He cautioned against unnecessary speech and then spoke on hastily in his hoarse yet mystical whisper. “They mean to give your young lady to Orhan’s son. This very night. You must fight out of it. There is no other way. For the sake of her virtue and your life, I pray Allah may side with you in this.”
I weighed the weapon in my hand and found it heavy and good. It sparked in me feelings of strength and sudden wholeness which I see now were returns to the foolhardiness of youth. But at the time they were gratifying.
I turned to thank my benefactor, but he had disappeared. Surely I would have seen him against the light if he’d gone out the door and back into the main room. But it was too dark to see in the other direction, and even after a few low calls, “Ya shahim, ya shahim!” I failed to hear him as distinguished from the stirring of the goats behind me. So I shrugged and went to the brightly lit doorway to observe the situation for myself.
A silence had fallen over the drinking men, and at first I hoped they might have retired for the night or sunken into a stupor over their cups. But it was a silence of heavy anticipation which Crazy Orhan broke with the loud announcement, “Bring in the girl!”
Thus did I learn that the triumphal dishonoring of Sokolli Pasha was to be public, not private. And I realized as two brigands shoved their way past me armed with torches that, dagger or no, against such odds I might not even exist. I could only kill one or at the most two before they finished me off and Esmikhan was left not only honorless, but friendless as well.
“Up, Princess, up!” The men leered with demon faces in the torchlight over her pile of hay. “It’s your wedding night.”
Esmikhan did not yet comprehend their cruel jest as she stumbled past me. Her feet were still heavy with sleep, yet she was conscious enough to weep over the fact that they had discovered her unveiled. That she had clumsily managed to replace her coverings by the time she was hauled by the elbows into the center of the main room’s blinding light was little consolation. Nor could I meet her eyes through those veils to offer comfort, though they pleaded with me to do so. I was as helpless as she.
Directly across the room from me