The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi (19 page)

But whatever black marks Danilo had picked up in the Aga’s grading book, nowhere had anyone marked him as faint-hearted. Stubborn, yes. Stiff-necked, yes. But all agreed that Danilo del Medigo was one who, as the Albanian riding master put it, always got back on the horse. He had one dim hope left: forget the velvet rope and simply be at the door of his father’s house to greet the doctor when he arrived home.

As the faint music of the procession got louder, the boy’s backbone began to stiffen. By the time he was on his feet he had begun to concoct a scenario to account for missing the procession. A sudden earache . . . toothache . . . headache. But by the time he had brushed himself off and called for Abdul, he had discarded these ideas as feeble. No matter. Something better would occur to him. Meanwhile, his immediate task was to beat the doctor home to his own door.

“Here is what I want you to do, Abdul. I want you to stay with Bucephalus. I am going to my father’s house to make my peace with him. Don’t leave the horse for any reason. And don’t feed him. Or water him.” These were tips he had picked up from frequenting stables. “If the horse doctor comes . . .”

No time for ifs. He was off at a run. The fastest route would be to take the Eunuch’s Path to the Third Court. As he was running, he reviewed in his mind what he would say to pacify his father. He knew himself to be an atrocious liar, sure to give himself away by stammering or blushing. Better to tell the truth. That he stayed up all night waiting for the Master of the Horse and then fell asleep.
A lame excuse
, he thought.
A lame horse made for a lame excuse.
Bad joke. But having thought it cheered him up nevertheless.

Now, he was back in his dormitory where this miserable day began. From here on, everything depended on Fortuna. There was a back door past the classrooms, which was often kept slightly ajar by a small, triangular piece of wood. If he was in luck, one of the pages would have put it in place today for the holiday outing, and Danilo could make the dash around the entire circumference of the palace without being questioned or held up — if his luck held. Thank God for the Eunuch’s Path. Thank God for the old fruit ladder. Pray God that the last user had the decency to replace it against the dead tree trunk outside the wall. He spat on his forefingers and rubbed them on his forehead, muttering some fragment of a prayer in Hebrew and, for extra protection, adding a plea to the goddess Fortuna. A born and bred Italian, Danilo continued to turn to the old pagan dame for help when he was in serious trouble, on the off chance that she was still doling out her whimsical favors.

15

THE SULTAN ARRIVES

It had been a long, hot wait for the ladies at the top of the Diwan Tower. Noon had come and gone. After the climb up the tight little staircase of the tower came hours of pomp and spectacle. But still no sign of the Sultan on his white horse. And sherbets and cakes and melons and soft pillows and cooling poultices for the eyes could only assuage so much discomfort.

By now, Princess Saida was beginning to wilt in the unseasonable heat. The hours in the tower had reduced her perception of the event to a whirling blur of banners and animals and uniforms and weaponry. She had been exhorted by the Lady Hürrem to applaud the Sultan’s cavalry, to revere his cadre of Islamic judges, to cheer his hundreds of camels and thousands of caparisoned horses, and to wonder at a weird gaggle of muffled Bedouins atop the battle wagons that hauled the celebrated Ottoman cannons along the parade route.

No doubt about it, the procession provided a prodigious feast for the eyes, which was not to say that the other senses had been neglected. Between courses, the spectators were served up a series of auditory delights, such as was provided this afternoon by the Anatolian Seljuks, each of these mini-parades accompanied by its own band. And all of this accompanied by a constant unrelieved cacophony of cheering, shouting, and blaring horns.

Attuned to the serenity of the harem, where the loudest sound to be heard was the twittering of birds, Princess Saida was overwhelmed by the bombardment of sights and sounds. In the two years since her brothers had left the Harem School, her life had slowed down to the daily pace of the harem, where a visit to the
hamam
baths could take an entire afternoon and a complete depilation (undertaken at the first sign of a hair anywhere on the body or in its crevices) easily occupied the better part of several hours. It was not surprising the headache that had begun early in the day now held her temples in a vise-like grip. Even the shining prospect of witnessing tomorrow’s
gerit
match at the hippodrome dimmed under the barrage of heat and noise. Barely fifteen years old, the princess was no match for the Second
Kadin
,
whose early years as a peasant girl in Russia had given her the staying power of an ox. At heart, Lady Hürrem was still a farm girl, as awed by the trappings of royalty as any other peasant, and so captivated by the pageantry unfolding below them that she barely noticed the discomfort, much less the exhaustion of the girl beside her.

“Is it not thrilling?” she asked for what seemed to Saida the tenth time. “And soon . . .”

Soon it will be over
, the girl thought wishfully.

She longed for the serenity of the
hamam
, where any inclination toward rapid movement was inhibited by the high, stilted wooden clogs that the harem beauties wore to preserve their tender feet from hot marble tiles and to prevent them from slipping on the wet floors. These pattens also served to slow the women down and to train them, as ponies are trained in the show ring, to move through life in an even, mincing gait. It also helped to habituate the harem girls to a way of life in which the most strenuous sport was a game of “Istanbul Gentleman,” where one of the girls — dressed as a man, her eyebrows thickened with
kohl
and with a pumpkin on her head — sat backward on a donkey clutching the animal’s tail, while the other girls tried to knock her off. The game was, at the very least, a highly domesticated version of the
gerit
match and certainly a far cry from Saida’s early years in the Harem School, when she romped in the meadows playing kick-ball with her brothers and male cousins.

But now, two years of the soft life of the harem had taken their toll on her. Halfway through the day she was already done in, whereas Lady Hürrem couldn’t wait for more.

“And soon you will see your father again after . . . how many months? It seems to me like an eternity.” Hürrem reached for a sweet cake to ease her anguish but stopped, holding the pastry in mid-air. “Do you hear it?”

“Hear what, lady?”

“The tune. It’s ‘The Sultan’s March.’”

And to be sure, the sound of fifes and drums, the clash of cymbals and the jangle of tambourines were discernible at a distance.

“Be still my heart.” Hürrem clutched her bosom. “Listen!”

Happy to have something to contribute to what had been a long-running monologue, Saida responded, “The philosopher Plato says that music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, and life to everything.”

“Where did you learn that?” Suddenly, Hürrem’s sentiment was replaced by suspicion. “Surely they did not teach you such heresies in the Harem School.”

It was Saida’s moment and she savored it briefly before she replied, “I believe I heard it from my honorable father, the Sultan,” which brought the conversation to a full stop and enabled the princess to retreat to a sofa to enjoy a moment of quiet. But not for long. Soon, a loud blast announced the arrival of a fresh novelty below.

“Come here,” the lady beckoned the princess. “Come to the balustrade. Look down. Don’t be afraid. You must see the Janissaries.”

Wearily, Saida made her way back to join the lady at the parapet and leaned her throbbing forehead against the cool bricks.
When will it be over?
she thought.

“Any minute now he will appear,” Hürrem advised her, “just as soon as the Grand Vizier condescends to move himself from his master’s path.”

Indeed, it did appear that Ibrahim Pasha was prolonging his moment of adulation far longer than need be, stopping constantly to lower his jeweled turban to the crowd.

“You would think to watch him that
he
had won the war,” Hürrem sniffed. It was no secret in the harem that she loathed the Sultan’s chief councillor and constant companion.

But (“At last,” Hürrem sighed) the Grand Vizier and his train disappeared through the Gate of Felicity, and their place was filled by the Sultan’s hand-picked Janissary corps, unmistakable in their handkerchief-shaped white turbans and purple silks.

“The Padishah’s most trusted men,” Hürrem explained. “They are prepared to die rather than face defeat.”

These elite of the elite presented quite a different aspect than any of the troops that had gone before. Most striking, they were not in battle order but marched out of line in a dense pack, swaying like sailors and carrying almost no defensive armaments, each one bearing only a single harquebus or scimitar and every one with a little hatchet or spade hanging from his waist.

To make up for their lack of firepower, each of their turbans was festooned by a prodigious plume of bird of paradise feathers that fell in a curve down each back almost to the knees.

This odd contingent did indeed quicken Saida’s jaded senses. “So these are the famous Janissaries who put the fear of Allah into the armies of two continents. They look more like diggers than soldiers to me,” she commented.

“Do not be fooled by appearances, my girl,” Hürrem admonished her. “It was with just such weapons that the Ottoman army took from the Europeans the strongholds of Rhodes, Belgrade, and Budapest. When there are a hundred thousand men all working together with shovels and spades under the walls of a fortress, no amount of defenders can hold up a wall.”

“How do you know these things?” Saida asked, curious in spite of herself.

“Because I set myself to learn them as I want you to do. Believe me, a woman’s charm can go only so far with a man. Sooner or later, your husband will want a companion, somebody to talk to. And to joke with as well.”

A subtler woman might have noticed that, at the mention of the subject of marriage, she seemed to have lost her listener’s close attention. But Hürrem was a woman who considered it worth her while to observe nuances only in her dealings with men. With slaves, children, and other women, she found it less troublesome simply to pursue her own ends directly. So she went on chattering about marriage — a subject close to her heart — as Saida sank slowly back into lethargy.

“Saida, you are not listening.”

Reluctantly the princess managed to summon a somewhat half-hearted enthusiasm for the marvelous Janissaries even though she could not quite believe in their invincibility. They looked so . . . sloppy.

Once emptied of the rowdy Janissaries, the great square of the Second Court went silent. The first one to notice the black banner unfurled behind the two octagonal towers of the Middle Gate was Saida, and she did not need to be told what this portended. She stood up and lowered her head as a single member of the Ulema, honored above all the priests of Islam this day, walked solemnly into the Second Court, his eyes focused on the book in his hands. He began to read from the forty-eighth chapter of the Koran, the sura
of Victory. He was followed by three other clerics who together slowly raised the tattered black flag to its full height. This was the Prophet’s Banner, one of the holy relics of Islam, which, along with the Prophet’s Mantle and his sword and a hair of his beard, the Ottomans considered their greatest treasure.

The first time Suleiman had set out to settle the fate of Vienna, this misshapen piece of black wool was taken from its pure gold cask, wrapped in forty silk coverings, and carried reverently all the way to Austria and back. During the terrible weeks of the siege of Vienna, it waved over the Ottoman encampment under the walls of the city, wordlessly exhorting the followers of Mohammed to fight for the faith, promising them that he who gave his life under its aegis would go straight to Paradise. This season it waved over the defeated ruins of Guns. Next season it would lead the way to Baghdad,
Inshallah
.

Directly below the tower, officials lined the path decorated like human icons in their jeweled turbans and gold-embroidered caftans. As the banner passed, they threw themselves face-down, careless of their finery, sobbing and calling the name of Allah. And there they remained, prostrate in the dust, until the banner was placed upright just outside the Gate of Felicity in a deep depression in the stone, carved out for the purpose in the days of Mehmet the Conqueror.

Up on the loggia, Saida joined those in the crowd able to repeat the Koranic reading from memory and, along with the rest, fell to her knees when the banner was raised, reiterating, “God is Great.” Beside her, Hürrem, in no hurry to soil her finery, simply bowed and smiled approvingly at her stepdaughter. The girl had all the instincts of a true princess and was also quick to learn. She would make a valuable addition to Hürrem’s entourage if and when the Second
Kadin
had need of her.