The Aviary Gate (21 page)

These rooms are simply – empty, she thought. And then, half-laughing at herself: well, what did you expect?

Elizabeth was about to leave the Valide's apartments altogether when, in the tiny entrance vestibule, she caught sight of a closed door. She put her hand to it, expecting it to be locked as the others had been, but to her surprise it opened easily and she found herself standing on the threshold of a disused apartment.

It was quite a large room; by far the largest in the harem, apart from the Valide's own suite, to which it was connected, but not, as far as Elizabeth could make out, a part of it. For a moment or two, she hesitated on the threshold. Then quickly she took two paces into the room.

More fustiness. Winter light filtering through small holes in an overhead cupola. Carpets, their edges frayed and rotting, lined the floor. Beyond, another door and a courtyard she had not seen before. A room filled with the breath of the past, like the distant roar of the sea.

For a moment or two Elizabeth stood quite still.
Careful. Careful now
. Not breathing this time, but listening.
You're listening. What are you listening for
? But in the now deserted harem there was not a sound, not a footfall.

Cautiously, Elizabeth took a few more steps into the room; stood there, feeling like a trespasser this time, her heart hammering in her chest. Still silence. With the toe of her boot she lifted up the corner of one of the carpets. Pieces of decomposing raffia matting lay beneath. A raised platform took up most of the centre of the room. When she looked more carefully she saw that it was still covered in old coverlets and cushions. They seemed to her to be lying exactly as the last occupant must have left them. Was it her imagination, or could she actually make out the imprint of a woman's body?

Don't be a fool! Elizabeth shook herself, found she was shivering suddenly. She recalled an old black and white photograph she had once seen, taken after slavery had been officially abolished and the last Sultan's harem disbanded in 1924. It showed six of his exconcubines, unfortunates who had remained unclaimed by their relatives, on their way ‘to exhibit themselves', so the caption had read, in Vienna. Their faces, stripped naked, stared palely out from beneath black shrouds. Incurious, a little grumpy even, they returned the camera's gaze, looking more like novice nuns, Elizabeth thought, than the well-fleshed odalisques of Western imagination.

She looked around her. The walls here too were lined with green and blue tiles. In places there were cupboards, their doors hanging off the hinges; in others small alcoves for storing things. Just then there was a movement in the corner of her eye. Startled, she turned, but it was just a pair of pigeons whirling into flight in the courtyard beyond. Their wings made a tearing sound in the cold air.

Elizabeth turned back into the room. She sat down gingerly on the edge of the platform and opened her notebook, but somehow she could not concentrate. Perhaps it was the atmosphere of the place, the sense that she was violating some private space, that made her nervous. Despite the cold the palms of her hands were clammy and the pen kept slipping in her fingers. In one of the little alcoves she saw a glint of blue. Elizabeth leant over and picked it up carefully. It lay in her palm, a tiny chip of blue and white glass.

It was then that she heard it.

Not pigeons' wings this time but the sound of laughter, and a woman running past the door on little slippered feet.

‘You sent for me, Safiye Sultan.'

‘Is it done?'

‘It is done, Majesty, just as you said.'

The Valide's
kira
, the Jewess Esperanza Malchi, stood in the shadows. Her eyesight was no longer good; through long practice, she felt, rather than saw, the shadowy outline of the Queen where she lay in the darkness. There were no windows at all in the innermost sanctum, the most private chamber in the Queen's withdrawing chambers. Even in the oppressive heat of summer the room was always fresh, made so by the thickness of the walls, the coolness of their tiles, with their soaring arabesques of blue and milky green, like so many fronds of seaweed in an underwater cavern. In the middle of the floor, lumps of some sweet-smelling resin burned on a small brazier.

‘And so, Malchi?' The figure stirred in the darkness. ‘The Haseki's parcel has been delivered?'

‘Cariye Lala was there as you said; I handed it to her myself.' The Jewess addressed herself to the shadows. She hesitated, then added, ‘I don't like it, Majesty. Cariye Lala is—' she checked herself, aware of the need to choose the word with care, ‘forgetful these days. How do we know she'll hide it safely?'

There was a pause.

‘Cariye Lala can be trusted, that's all you need to know. She will hide the parcel in the Haseki's room until we need it.' There was a faint smile in the beautiful voice. ‘When it's found, Gulay Haseki will
be implicated completely. Not even the Sultan himself will be able to save her then.'

‘The physician didn't like it.' Esperanza shifted uneasily. ‘I'm not sure he'll be persuaded to do it again.'

There was another short silence while Safiye digested this information.

‘Well, I can't say I'm altogether surprised,' she sighed. ‘Although it's not as if he hasn't done it before.'

‘But that was years ago,' Esperanza said. ‘I told him we may not need it. There are signs that the other plan may be working.'

‘True.' Safiye Sultan considered this. ‘The Haseki must be … put aside, that's all. I don't really care how. She has too great a hold on the Sultan; he doesn't even look at any of the other
cariyes
. This is not a good state of affairs. He must be helped to do so, that's all. For the good of us all.'

A smouldering lump of resin flared briefly into a small red flame. It illuminated the clusters of diamonds on Safiye Sultan's girdle, at her ears and buttoned down her bodice, a king's ransom of jewels, making them glitter briefly. On her finger, Nurbanu's emerald winked like a green eye.

‘And the other business?' Esperanza ventured.

The velvety figure stirred slightly, and then was still again. ‘They found him, as I'm sure you've heard. Wandering about just inside the palace walls.'

‘Impossible!' The Valide's
kira
wrung her hands. ‘He was as good as dead.'

‘Oh?' Once again there was a faint smile in the beautiful voice. ‘If you think that, then you don't know Hassan Aga as I do. Little Nightingale may not be a man, but he has the strength of ten of them.'

‘But how did he escape? He was right here, in the cell, right beneath our very feet. There was no way out except through this room …'

‘There is a way. The harem is full of ways. But that's not for you to know, Malchi.'

Esperanza bowed her head in acquiescence. ‘They're saying that it's the English ship.'

‘Who says that it's the English ship?'

‘But I thought that Hassan Aga himself said …'

‘Hassan Aga said no such thing.' Safiye gave a short laugh. ‘It was the eunuch Hyacinth who said it, because I told him to.'

‘But – why?' Esperanza was bemused.

‘Why?' Safiye regarded her
kira
thoughtfully. ‘I always forget with you, Malchi. You know so much about us, but you have never lived as one of us.' She shrugged. ‘Call it a hunting trick, if you like.' She saw Esperanza's look of bewilderment. ‘If your prey feels safe, it gets careless,' she explained slowly, as if to a child. ‘Don't you see: if whoever really poisoned Little Nightingale thinks we've all been fooled by that sugar toy, they'll show their hand eventually. This way we'll flush them out into the open.'

‘And the English?'

‘I had one of their cooks arrested, the man who made the sweetmeat. Someone who is entirely expendable,' Safiye said carelessly. ‘If they have any sense – which I think they do – they won't squeal too much. They want their Capitulations too badly for that. Then later we'll just quietly let him go.'

‘And when Little Nightingale recovers?'

‘He won't betray us because those were the rules. The Nightingales. We were all agreed.'

At the Valide's signal, Esperanza made as if to leave. Then at the door, she hesitated. ‘There is one other thing, Majesty.'

‘Speak then.'

‘Your girl. The new one. The one they used to call Annetta.'

‘Ayshe?'

‘Yes.'

‘She was in the room with the Sultan's new concubine.'

Safiye Sultan considered this for a moment. ‘Did they see you?'

‘Yes. But they believe that I did not see them.'

‘They hid from you?'

‘Yes.' A thoughtful silence. ‘Is it possible that she knows something?'

‘Ayshe?' Slowly Safiye Sultan pulled one of the fur wraps around her shoulders. ‘No, I don't think so.' Another small lump of resin was dislodged in the brazier. A small flame hissed, illuminating the room briefly. ‘It's the other girl, the one they call Kaya. Celia. She's the one, Malchi. She's the one we have to watch.'

When Esperanza had gone, Safiye lay back amongst her cushions again, drawing her solitude luxuriously around her like a cloak. It was not often she indulged herself in such moments.

Most of the women Safiye had known retained only shadowy memories of where they came from, of whom they had been before they entered the harem's domain. But Safiye Sultan, the Mother of God's Shadow Upon Earth, remembered her former life very well: the sharp spines of the Albanian mountains; the colour of the sky, as blue as gentians; the cruel sharpness of stones against her bare feet.

Her father, Petko, like almost all the men in those parts, lived in their village only in the winter months. In the summer, he and the other men made their way up into the fastness of the mountains, where they camped in caves, or in the open air, living by their wits, with only their dogs and their lutes for company. Safiye remembered the strange sight of them, barbarous figures they had seemed to her even then, with tattoos inked across their broad cheekbones and along their forearms, their shaggy sheep pelt coats reaching down to their ankles.

The women stayed down below, and seemed lighter-hearted somehow, without their men-folk. Safiye's mother, a pale-skinned beauty from the Dalmatian sea-coast near Scutari, had been bought by her father-in-law for a bride price of ten sheep. She was just twelve when she was married to Safiye's father, and had never been into the mountains before. Although it was often said that the Albanian mountain men did not have much use for their females, preferring the company of their male clansmen, she gave birth to eight children in as many years, all of whom died except for Safiye and her brother, Mihal. The harsh mountain sun soon weathered Safiye's mother's beautiful cheeks; her belly and breasts sagged like an old woman's. By the age of thirty she was worn out. Her husband often beat her, smashing her face so badly one time that he broke both her front teeth, and dislocated her jaw. She rarely spoke after that, except to whisper to her daughter the stories and lullabies that she had learnt as a child from her Venetian grandmother, snatches of songs in the dialect of the Veneto, the tongue of their ancient overlords, which she had thought long forgotten, but which now, since that blow, ran round and around, word perfect, inside her head.

Safiye grew up to be as pale skinned as her mother had been, but with the strength and agility of a boy. Headstrong and unafraid, she was always her father's favourite. Her brother, a snivelling sickly child who had been born with a limp, cringed whenever his father came near him, and so it was Safiye, his small daughter, he took with him to the mountains.

Safiye went everywhere with her father, like a mascot. In the summer when he took her up to live in the high pastures with the other clansmen, she wore leather chaps and a piece of sheepskin slung over one shoulder like a boy. From her father she learnt how to trap the wild mountain hares and skin them, how to lay fires, and even how to whittle arrows for her own small bow. She learnt how to leap between the crags of rock, surefooted as a goat, and how to keep cover when they hunted, lying next to her father silently for hours, crouched behind rocks or hidden beneath piles of leaves. She was so proud to be with him, and with the other men, that she would have cut out her own tongue rather than complain. No matter if thorns tore at her bare feet, or if her mouth was so dry with thirst that it stuck to the roof of her mouth, or if the stone floor of the cave bit into her shoulders at night.

Hunting tricks, my little maid, her father would say. And her first lesson, she would realise many years later, in survival.

She was twelve when the slave collectors came to their village: strange men sent by their Ottoman overlords, they rode on horses with jingling harnesses, their saddlebags and turbans and silk robes a blaze of such textures and jewelled colours that it made Safiye and her brother gasp and stare. Their village, Rezi, was small, and so collecting the boy tribute – one boy to be given up by each Christian family living within the Ottoman Sultan's dominions – did not take long.