The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi (26 page)

Desperate to find an alternative subject, she pounced on the Second
Kadin
. “The Lady Hürrem seemed unusually chimerical today.” It was a word she had heard her grandmother use when speaking of Hürrem.

“How so?”

“Well, this morning, having dined with my father last night, she told me she was the happiest woman in the world. But this afternoon at the
gerit
she seemed very sad. She even said she wished she could return here to the harem with me. To the comfort of home, was how she put it.”

“Did she say what was troubling her?” the Valide inquired with ill-disguised curiosity.

“Yes. In fact, I remember her exact words. They seemed so strange.”

“Strange? In what way?”

“She said, ‘I feel my shame today.’”

“What has she to be ashamed of?”

“It started when we first arrived at the Grand Vizier’s palace and were sitting on the balcony. There were a lot of women, perhaps half a dozen of the harem girls that my father has married off. Seeing them all married upset Lady Hürrem in some way. But she was the one who put him up to it, wasn’t she?” asked the girl.

“Yes, she told me that she loved him so much she couldn’t bear to share him with anyone,” the Valide replied. “I wondered at the wisdom of going so far against tradition, but it certainly took a grave responsibility off my old shoulders. Those girls were a handful, always angling to get into my son’s bed and keeping the others out. Do I speak too plainly, my dear?”

“Not at all.”

“But we must be generous to the Second
Kadin
.” The Valide resumed her all-wise, all-kindly manner. “Life has been difficult for her, batted back and forth like a shuttlecock between those girls and Rose of Spring. That rose is not without her thorns, you know.”

“But, Grandmother, my father ignores Rose of Spring completely and does everything Hürrem wishes. She was the one who wanted all the odalisques gone from the harem and who urged him to marry them off. And then she complains that the girls she got rid of are free women and she is a slave.”

“She suffers,” the Valide answered. “You are too young to understand suffering. And, Allah willing, you never will.”

“I never hear you complaining, Grandmama. And you too were a slave as long as my blessed grandfather Selim was alive. Did you suffer from it?”

It was an impertinent question, and once she had asked it Saida lowered her head awaiting a rebuke.

But no remonstrance was forthcoming. Instead, Lady Hafsa took her time in answering, rearranging the pillows to prop up her back and stretching her long neck to its height. Then, full of dignity, she answered, “I was the mother of the first prince of the realm, with every expectation of becoming the Valide Sultan when my son became Sultan. As long as Rose’s son Mustafa lives, Hürrem will only be the Second
Kadin
.” The way she spoke the words made them sound like a prophecy of doom. “Now then” — she waved her hands in the direction of the teapot — “it is time for my last cup of tea. I am tired.”

But Saida was unwilling to relinquish the brief span of intimacy. Such moments with her grandmother were rare. So, as she poured the tea into the chalcedony goblet, she reported, “She wants to move her household to Topkapi.”

“She does?” The Valide did not appear to be even slightly concerned.

“So what is to become of us?”

“Why, nothing.” She felt a reassuring touch on her arm. “We will live here in the Old Palace, in my son’s harem, as we always have,” her grandmother announced with all the authority of a royal edict. “Now, my tea.” Then she added, “You have a special way of brewing, child. I always sleep so well when you prepare my evening cup for me.”

22

INCOGNITO

It was close to a century since Mehmet the Conqueror outfitted Topkapi Palace as his residence and the center of his empire — plenty of time for generations of miscreants to devise ways of getting in and out of the palace grounds without being detected. Located at the confluence of the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Golden Horn, the high commanding site of Palace Point offered easy access to the three waterways by boat. Of all three, the taverns of Galata directly across the Bosphorus beckoned most enticingly to the pages of the Sultan’s school, living out their monitored lives behind guarded walls, dreaming of women and wine.

As devout Muslims — either born or converted — residents of the palace were forbidden to drink alcohol. But in the long history of Islam, that prohibition had always been more honored in the breach than in the observance. To the faithful of Istanbul the temptation of alcohol was exacerbated by the presence in their midst of both Christians and Jews, neither of whom were constrained by their religion from getting drunk every day of the year if they were so inclined. Always tolerant of the aberrant customs of foreigners, the Turks nevertheless did attempt to rein in the influence of these aliens by segregating them, together with their pork and their taverns, in restricted areas, much as the Venetians were attempting to do with their Jewish ghetto. But, unfortunately for the cause of sobriety, the Byzantine Greeks who comprised the majority of Christians in Istanbul were also the most passionate and dedicated imbibers and had long since settled themselves in the district of Galata, where their tower presented a constant, visible temptation to thirsty Muslims.

Besides, there were other imperatives driving the occupants of the palace to devise surreptitious paths of escape from the Sultan’s Abode of Felicity. Such as sex. Contrary to what foreigners seemed to think, the Sultan’s harem more closely resembled a convent than a bordello. The de-sexing of the eunuchs, who administered the Sultan’s regimen, was believed to have robbed them of their desire along with their genitals. So it had first been thought. But the genitalia, no matter how carefully cut out, had an inconvenient habit of growing back, giving the geldings good reason to haunt the fleshpots of Galata.

As for the young men in the Sultan’s School for Pages, they were strictly enjoined from intercourse with either sex. The monitors who watched over them through the night kept a sharp eye out for any form of sexual indulgence.

But not even three levels of enforcement could maintain constant vigilance over the vast army of cooks and gardeners and tanners and tailors and clerks and artisans — and pages — who lived within the palace grounds, not to mention the military personnel who patroled the walls and the gates. No surprise, then, that in defiance of both religion and discipline, there were literally hundreds of residents of the Abode of Felicity who wanted or needed to go over the walls at night. A sot who needed drink, a cook who needed his wife, a pasha who needed a boy, a boy who needed a girl, even a sultan who sought anonymity — all of them crawling around shoeless in the deep night, except for the Sultan. He retained his right to wear his boots, even when he blacked his face and donned the animal skin of a
sipahi
and sallied forth anonymously with his Grand Vizier to assess the mood of his people in the taverns of Galata, as he was doing that night.

Why did the Sultan go to such lengths simply to find out what his subjects thought of him? Because, even though he was a man who had everything, there was one thing the Sultan could never be sure of getting: an honest report. His subjects had seemed well content today at the hippodrome. But one never knew what seditious thoughts lurked in the hearts of men. At this moment, Suleiman felt the need of a true measure of how his people were reacting to his second defeat at Vienna (although it had been officially disguised as a victory at Guns), for which the general population had paid dearly both in casualties and coin.

Gazing into a looking glass as he went about blacking his face, Suleiman replayed the siege at Vienna one more time. What went wrong?

Bad weather, said his generals. The same thing they said two years ago when he was forced to abandon his first siege of Vienna after two harrowing months outside the walls of the Austrian capital. This year he was held up for three months at the insignificant border town of Guns. Of course, the town was finally taken. But by then winter was threatening, and once again Vienna was a lost cause.

How much humiliation could his subjects take without recognizing defeat? How much blather of victory could they swallow before they began to choke on the diet of mendacity his men were dishing out? No one — not even his trusted Vizier, Ibrahim — could give him an answer. He was surrounded by toadies, by men who did not meet his eyes and who (by his own fiat, mind you) did not open their mouths in his presence unless invited to do so.

It was time for the Sultan to go out among his people, not heroically on a milk-white stallion but secretly disguised in a
sipahi’s
skins, his towering turban replaced by a skullcap and his face black as coal.

“How do I look?” he asked his companion, garbed as a dervish.

“Like a proper
sipahi
, sire,” Ibrahim replied. “You’ll never be suspected unless you open your mouth.”

“My mouth?”

“It’s your teeth, sire. They are too white. And there are too many of them.” A shrewd fellow, this Greek. “What about me? Do I pass muster?” The Grand Vizier twirled delicately before his master in imitation of the dervish he had chosen to impersonate.

“You still look like a Greek to me,” Suleiman teased.

“As long as I am not mistaken for a Grand Vizier,” Ibrahim rejoined as he cloaked himself in a heavy woolen shawl. He then proceeded to wrap the Sultan in a similarly voluminous garment. “Shall we?” He held out his arm.

“Lead on, my dervish friend.”

Arm in arm they made their way through one of the
selamlik’
s conveniently unlocked doors and onto the steep path down to the Grand Vizier’s dock, swathed into invisibility in their black shawls.

If the old gods were still perched up on their pantheon, as many secretly believe, they must have been amused at what they saw when they looked down through the treetops into Topkapi’s gardens. The surface of the world within the walls was unruffled by so much as a ripple, each of the three courts a true abode of serenity, not a leaf out of place. But outside the walls, the banks that sloped down to the water were alive with adventurers of one sort or another, all of them furtive, all bent on concealing their movements.

If Zeus was entertaining himself by sneaking peeks at the mortals below, he must have been mightily amused by the clumsy disguises these two had chosen. Much easier — and far more elegant — to turn oneself into a bird or a donkey. But of course this Sultan, though he may crown himself emperor, king, Padishah, was still a mere mortal, not a god, poor fellow. Although he actually seemed to be enjoying his pathetic masquerade. Mortals!

On the other side of the summit, Danilo del Medigo was also heading down to the Grand Vizier’s dock. But he scurried along unhampered by either cloak or veil. He had little fear of being discovered. He had made this run successfully many times before. Oddly enough, the little wheeled kiosk that circumnavigated the grounds was not on patrol tonight. He came upon it, deserted, at the edge of the summit. Perhaps, he thought, the Sultan had given his guards the night off to enjoy the festival.

As, indeed, the Sultan had done. It would be too embarrassing for the great Padishah to be accosted by his own guards while in disguise. At Ibrahim’s suggestion, the sentries had been released from duty. The chance that anyone would be loitering around the palace walls was minimal, said the Grand Vizier, with free food and entertainment on offer in the town below.

So the Sultan and his Grand Vizier made their descent down the side of Palace Point opposite from the one chosen by the page, Danilo, each perfectly confident of encountering no obstruction. But because the pitch of the slope was so steep, the terrain demanded that each path to the waterway must zigzag. And, since the hillsides were a maze of paths, there was always a chance that adventurers approaching the shore from different directions might cross on the way down, a probability that increased as the paths converged toward the shore.

From Zeus’ vantage point high above it all, these three figures would have seemed to be on a collision course. Were they to collide, were the page to be identified as having witnessed Suleiman’s charade, there was little doubt he would be killed on the spot. People tended to blame the gods — and the Italians — for such imbroglios. The truth was that human beings had an infinite capacity for making their own mischief. And it was left to the gods to clean up the mess.

Fortune, so said the Greeks, favors the bold, often in the guise of misfortune. As Danilo vaulted down the hillside he tripped over a patch of nettles and had to stop to pick them out of his clothes. It was a time-consuming task that left his fingers bleeding and his temper frayed. But it was also just long enough to give the Sultan and his Vizier a head start, so that by the time Danilo reached the rock ledge above the dock, the black cloaks were already emerging from the heavy underbrush below the ledge onto the shore.

Still unconscious of their presence, Danilo glanced up at the palace walls to make sure he was not being observed from above. Then he stepped to the edge of the ledge and bent his knees in preparation for the jump down to the dock. But as he was about to lift off, he heard a sound below that froze him in place: the unmistakable huffing and puffing of someone out of breath. Animals did not become winded from running down hills. There was a human being down there.