The Sultan's Daughter, стр. 2
Women, I was beginning to see, start calculating such things before their first missed blood time. On the other hand, a promising youth appears full grown at the edge of the world of men and the men treat him like a bothersome gadfly—often until it is too late to properly account for him in their calculations.
I looked down into that round little face, rounder still with the pregnancy, those round, dark eyes, that round little chin, the dimples when she smiled, the mole by her nose—all the supreme pleasantness of her that I’d come to take for granted. She was like a pearl in this velvet-lined case, the walls inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory in the olive wood wainscoting. A pearl with the pink tint of tulips.
I laughed gently at her fluster. These sessions of display with your family are not all that important, I wanted to speak along with my silent brush at a black curl that strayed into her face. When they have gawked their fill and gone home, I will still be here. No matter what their sharp tongues invent, I am your slave.
“Abdullah,” she protested, shoving my hand away with her own little dimpled one. “At once!”
So at my lady’s bidding, I strode down to the courtyard and helped the visiting eunuchs hold up the silken canopy. This canopy allowed their charges to slip into our harem without the gardeners catching a glimpse of so much as veils and outer wrappers.
I was getting good at distinguishing women and their individuality through such covers. I’d originally come to the Land of the Turk as first mate on my murdered uncle’s trading ship. Women had seemed altogether invisible to me then. I was learning to use other senses more now, as a blind man does and sometimes fares better than the sighted.
Today, I went by the scent they wore, and Prince Selim’s harem presented a whole airy palette to the nostrils.
This first one, smoky with the musk of ambergris, was Nur Banu Kadin, my lady’s stepmother as well as mother to the son of the heir to Suleiman’s throne. My lady’s unwed sisters were cloying in attar of roses, sandalwood, cloves. Their maidservants were the usual giggling bouquet of violet, mimosa, and orange blossom.
Ah, but here—through the silken corridor I held up to one edge of the sedan and the eunuch next to me held to the harem door—here passed an odd one. I couldn’t recognize her, nor her clumsy way of moving in her veils, as if threatening to shed them all off at any minute. Some new slave, I thought, for I’d never known any native-born Turkish woman to be so clumsy with the burden of her sex. Some new slave, perhaps, whom Nur Banu would soon train to her usual rigorous elegance. The surprise was that Nur Banu would let a recruit of such raw manners come with her on any outing.
Still, violet- and mimosa-scented bundles held back and let this package go in first. And there was an odd smell to this one, the smell of quinces set to ripen in the midst of winter bedding. This odor proclaimed no artifice but straightforward practicality: every drug known to man and some known only to women, medicinal bitterness disguised with the flavor of quince.
Suppose this was some interloper, some threat to the peace of my lady’s harem?
I told myself that this was a petty sort of concern—for a man bred to the wild adventures of the sea, indeed! But the manhood left to me was not considered the equal of pirates or shipwreck anymore. I was meant to have no purpose other than the protection of this sanctuary behind the grilles. So I couldn’t help that my mind entertained such possibilities, fretful though they sometimes seemed.
That thing I lacked—manhood in vague generality—was the very threat against which I wore a jeweled, ceremonial dagger. Could this be a man in women’s veils? Or could some other invasion I had vet to imagine take feminine form?
Again I dismissed the ideas. Anything Nur Banu Kadin allowed into her sedan must be allowed into Esmikhan’s harem.
The mystery would unwind itself soon enough, and the scent that brought up the rear of the cavalcade, too proud to jostle for position among the rest, gave me more important things to worry about. Jasmine. Heady, overpowering, sweeping away all before it, jasmine assaulted the nose with a fragrance to which the senses could never grow numb. That jasmine could only be Safiye—Sofia Baffo she had been once, before she learned eastern fashions in perfume. Safiye was my lady’s brother’s odalisque. Instinctively, I stiffened, hating always when she had the advantage of veils over me: I could not read her eves to warn me which way to jump.
Safiye swept on into the narrow doorway and ascended the steep staircase without a sideways glance. At the top of the stairs, however, as she kicked off her outdoor shoes, she gave me a momentary—purposeful, I thought—glimpse of white ankles under ballooning red shalvar.
I turned to make the visiting eunuchs comfortable in my lower sitting room. I helped them fold the silken curtains neatly back into the sedans. With a pang, I remembered helping sailors with the sails; these new mates of mine would never scramble up masts. And the way their thick and heavily jeweled fingers set upon the fried pastries dripping with orange water and honey, they were bent upon keeping such activity an impossibility.
A pair of Nur Banu’s eunuchs unabashedly loosened the wide silk banded about their middles as they settled into my cushions for the afternoon. They struggled with the sweat-soaked furs of their long, heavy, blue robes and the high cones of their white turbans, releasing very feminine perfumes to the room, though they were