The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi (30 page)

“He is inviting me to go with him? In his own retinue?” The expression of disbelief mixed with wild joy that suffused the young face confirmed Judah’s worst fears. His son was about to be taken from him.

“I cannot allow you to go.” The words came out of him unbidden. “I cannot allow you to become one of the Janissaries that boast about being the Sultan’s slaves. To think that a son of mine would fall into such —”

“With all respect, sir,” the boy broke in, “I must remind you that I am also the son of my mother. I was suckled on Homer. I knew of Dionysus before I knew of David. I played at being Alexander the Great. My mother read to me a book of his exploits to tempt me into studying Latin. Alexander is as much a part of my heritage as Abraham, Sarah, or Jacob. And this is an opportunity to walk in his footsteps.”

“Point well taken,” Judah said. “I spoke hastily, but I fear for your soul embedded in the toils of this Muslim
jihad.”

Now it was the boy’s turn to take a deep breath before he responded. “I admit, sir, that I find a certain affinity for the Muslim pages that I study with in the Sultan’s school. I was surprised to learn how much we have in common, that we all claim our heritage from Abraham, that we all kill our animals by the same ritual, that we all refuse to eat the flesh of a pig, that all of us are circumcised.”

For some reason Judah became almost apoplectic at the mention of circumcision.

“Forgive me, sir; that was only a tease,” the boy said in an attempt to placate his father. “But truly the idea of taking up a new religion has never entered my mind. And in his letter the Sultan agrees that he will oversee my religious practice as if I were his own son, does he not?”

If the boy had spoken resentfully or even cursed, Judah might have summoned up the will to persist. But Judah was not only a man of science, he was also a man of feeling, and he could not summon up a defense against the combination of modesty and sweet reason with which his son made his case.

A silence followed, then finally, “If you want to accept the Sultan’s offer” — each word caught in the doctor’s throat as he uttered it — “I will raise no objection.”

That night, Judah del Medigo dispatched his son Danilo across the courtyard to the
selamlik,
to deliver to the Sultan his blessing on the venture. And the boy, taking advantage of the opportunity to walk out freely as a messenger bearing a communiqué for the Padishah, carried along with him a communiqué of his own, addressed to Princess Saida at the Old Palace. Throughout the years of hidden communication between them, all contact had been initiated by her. It was much easier to smuggle things out of the harem than into it, especially since she had the assistance of Narcissus to act as her postman.

But this time Danilo could not wait for his princess to fix a convenient time for their next meeting. The date of the Sultan’s departure for the east was set for only a few days hence. So, for the first time, Danilo was faced with a task that had flummoxed generations of illicit harem suitors before him: how to slip a message past the vigilant harem doorkeepers at the iron gates of the Old Palace, who guarded the Sultan’s women like a pride of fierce lions.

While he waited for Judah to compose his missive for the Sultan, Danilo turned over in his mind the disguises, subterfuges, and spurious errands that he might concoct. There was not time enough to corrupt one of the harem eunuchs. Such arrangements took months to establish. What he needed was to get a message through this very night — a hidden message. There came to his mind a piece of advice Judah had once given him: the best way to hide a thing is to hide it in plain sight. He would hide his message in an innocent letter from an old chum in the Harem School, a letter from a lowly page to a princess, a letter of condolence on the death of her grandmother!

Mind you, it was close to four months since the Valide’s death. But what if he had held off out of reluctance to intrude on her great grief? Another of Judah’s worldly maxims came to mind: when inventing a lie, try to include as much truth as you can. What if he was only writing now because he was about to leave on campaign? (True.) And in the Sultan’s entourage. (Also true.)

At first, the harem sentry was completely intransigent. He had his orders: letters could not be delivered into the harem. In desperation, Danilo offered to break the seal and let the guard read the letter for himself.

“Read it and you will see.” He held the letter out with the same hand and the same careless ease that he offered sweet carrots to his horse. Who could turn away from such a tempting morsel? The guard read and found a nicely composed note of condolence from an old schoolmate to the princess, expressing deep sympathy and the hope that, now that her mourning period had come to an end, the princess would go on to live a life of duty and grace in emulation of her revered grandmother.

I know that you will never cease to grieve for her,
the message read.
But I also know that she would have wanted you to enjoy a life full of love for all Allah’s creatures as she did.
The note closed, as was proper, with a formal declaration of the page’s readiness to serve the princess, should she so desire.
If there is ever any service or duty, small or large, that I can offer, you need only call upon me at my residence at the Sultan’s School for Pages, from which I will shortly embark for Mesopotamia as a member of the Sultan’s honor guard. To serve the Padishah in the field is an honor beyond my dreams. I can only hope that I am able to live up to the faith he has placed in me by inviting me to serve as his Assistant Foreign Language
Interpreter
.

It was a message that the eunuch had no hesitation in delivering — formal, respectful, no ambiguous phrases or hidden meanings. As for subterfuge and deceit, that possibility was obviated by the information that the writer was about to set off as a member of the Padishah’s elite guard to fight a
jihad
against the Shiite heresy in Persia.

26

MAGIC INK

The next morning came and went without a perfumed note or cinnamon stick on Danilo’s pillow in the dormitory. As the afternoon hours passed he began to wonder if perhaps the harem sentinel had been less gullible than he appeared and had confiscated his condolences to the princess. By late afternoon he found himself on the watch for a pair of husky harem eunuchs come to take him away to the dungeons for having attempted to stain the honor of a royal princess. At the end of the school day, when an acknowledgment of his letter had still not appeared, he made his way to the
gerit
field with a heavy heart, prepared for the worst. What a relief it was to find Narcissus there waiting for him.

With no time to gather rose petals or commandeer a caique, the eunuch simply muttered a curt order: “Be in your stall with your horse after the third prayer,” and melted off into the sunset. Not until Narcissus was out of sight did Danilo realize that the eunuch had not even taken the time to don his silk caftan, which he took as a sign that he too had better be prompt.

Just after the
muezzin
began his third call, Danilo excused himself from hurling drill and headed for the familiar Eunuch’s Path. There was a shorter route to the Sultan’s stables through the heavily manned gate that separated the Third and Second Courts. But he chose a circuitous route that took him in and out of the palace grounds by a narrow path and that made it impossible for anyone to follow him without being seen. Still, he did not feel completely safe until he was cozily tucked up with Bucephalus in the horse’s stall. Bucephalus could be depended on never to give him away. After a few moments of snuggling with the silent horse, he was joined by a cloaked figure in a very badly wound turban and sporting a bushy black mustache. What she thought she was supposed to be, Danilo could not imagine. But apparently her disguise was effective since none of the stable hands paid any heed to the strangely gotten-up visitor. Nor did they take notice when the blond page and the ill-turbaned pasha retired to the back of the horse stall and barricaded themselves behind two tall hay bales.

From the first word, she was all business. “So when do you go?” she asked as soon they were well concealed.

“I report at Üsküdar in three days,” he answered, equally terse.

“That soon?” And before he had a chance to answer: “But you are already gone from me.”

“Am I not here?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.

“Only in body,” she replied. “Your spirit is already off to war. Do not deny it. You are filled with longing for some far-away battle.”

“How do you know that?”

“There may not be much to learn in the harem,” she answered, “but on the subject of men and wars, harem-bred women are very well versed. As a little girl, I already knew that although a woman can sometimes pry a man loose from another woman, all her wiles are useless against the call to arms. Men are made for war as women are made for love. Tell me the truth. Are you not happy to be going off to war and leaving me?”

“No!”

“So be it.” She placed two fingers gently against his lips. “There is no time for quarrels. I was able to come today on the pretext of bidding my father farewell and wishing him great success in his Asian
jihad
. His carriage is waiting to take me back to the Old Palace as we speak. But I wanted to tell you one more time that no matter how long we are apart, you will always be the love of my life.”

“You don’t seem to be very sad to see me go,” he observed, not without some pique.

“I am not sad. I am heartsick,” she corrected him in the same pedantic way she had years before when she was his eleven-year-old tutor. “Heartsick,” she repeated. “But I am consoled when I remind myself that, although there may be long stretches of time ahead with no contact between us, we’ve endured months apart between the
Bayrams
and have always come together afterwards. Believe me, this is not a final goodbye.”

This was not the distraught maiden in tears he had expected to find. “What makes you so certain?” he asked.

“Because I tell myself that, for all the time you are gone, my father will also be gone. And for me to be married in his absence is unthinkable. Don’t you see?”

He was beginning to.

“It breaks my heart that we will not see each other for a year or even more. But when you return from the Baghdad campaign we will have at least one last chance to meet unobserved during the festival for my father’s victorious homecoming. After that . . .” She rubbed her eyes as if to banish the vision of what the future held. Then she straightened her shoulders and turned to look directly into his eyes. “But I have devised a way for us to stay close while we are far apart.” Even in the semi-darkness of the stall, he could make out a trace of the old devilment in her eyes. “Through letters!”

“Letters?”

“The letters in my father’s pouch. He sends and receives them every day when he is on campaign.”

“But letters can fall into the wrong hands and be read by the wrong people,” he reminded her.

“Not if they’re written in invisible ink.”

This plan was beginning to sound like something she had picked up from
The
Thousand and One Nights
.

“Written in what?”

“Written in invisible ink at the bottom of other people’s letters. The harem girls use invisible ink to arrange meetings with their lovers outside the walls. Love letters are a major preoccupation with them. And I have bathed with them in the
hamam
for years.” She paused. Then, with a twinkle, she added, “I even know how to make the magic ink.”

It did not take magic to read the incredulity on Danilo’s face.

“They make up batches of it every week,” she explained.

“In the harem?”

“The girls have plenty of time and it’s not difficult,” she continued. “First you soak a handkerchief in a mixture of nitrate, soda, and starch. Then you dry the fabric. The chemicals come out when the cloth is placed in water, and that liquid becomes invisible ink for your quill pen.”

It did seem as if she knew what she was talking about. “But how do I read these messages if they are invisible?”

“Simple. The flame from a lighted taper will reveal the invisible writing. But you must be quick. Once the ink is melted it fades quickly and is gone forever.”

All very well, but for Danilo that did not solve the problem of how to get their messages, visible or invisible, into the right hands and keep them out of the wrong hands.

“I’ve thought about the letters,” she went on, as if she had read his mind. “Hürrem always writes to my father when he is on campaign. And now that my grandmother is gone, he will write to Hürrem as he did to his mother. He has promised. And my father always does what he says he will do.”

“But —”

“Listen to me,” she cut him off. “You forget that Hürrem cannot read or write. I am still having difficulty teaching her after all these years. So . . .”

“So all her letters to him are written by you.” This was not the first time he had underestimated her. It was the pouts and pranks that misled him.