The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  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.

  Heart pounding, the boy laid himself down flat on the rock where he would be invisible from the shore. Then, carefully lowering himself over the ledge, he looked down.

  What he saw was not one figure but two, impossible to identify without the aid of moonlight. Who were these wraiths wrapped in black? What brought them to this unlikely spot? And what could he do to prevent them from seeing the caique that his princess was sending to collect him?

  Cheerful, lighthearted, even amused by the absurd sight they presented but — as far as they knew — visible to no one but themselves, the two men advancing toward the pier, their billowing garments flapping around their ankles, taunted each other playfully for their clumsiness.

  Just then the curved prow of a caique slipped around the bend of the cove. Danilo waited for his signal: two long flashes followed by two short. But no signal came. Had Narcissus forgotten to instruct the captain? Was the signaling lantern disabled? Nothing like this had ever happened before.

  “There it is!” He heard a Greek-accented voice from below. “I instructed them to douse the lights. One cannot be too careful.”

  The voice resembled that of the Grand Vizier, but Danilo could not be certain. Speak again, he implored the voice.

  Instead, what he heard was a thump accompanied by a cry of pain. Then a second voice, cursing. Then the first voice — the Greek voice — again: “Are you all right, sire?” It was the voice of the Grand Vizier for sure.

  Then came the reply. “Nothing serious. Just a scratch.” This was the voice that had questioned him that very afternoon about the Gonzaga stud. Unquestionably he was hearing the voice of the Sultan himself.

  Suleiman was not an especially cruel or vengeful man. It was simply in the nature of things Oriental that when a forbidden line is crossed, punishment is swift, silent, and inexorable. Had the Sultan gotten there a moment later and discovered his page on his private dock; worse, had the princess’s caique given its signal and a plot to dishonor the Sultan’s daughter been unearthed . . . Danilo could envision his own head on a pike outside the Gate of Felicity. But he could not will himself to imagine Saida’s body sinking into the inky depths of the Bosphorus, weighted down by a sack of stones. And he vowed there and then that if they escaped discovery this time, this must be their last rendezvous. He made this vow in all sincerity, fully believing that the next time Narcissus brought him a summons, he would be able to resist the siren call.

  But for now, there was still this night to get through. At any moment, Saida’s caique would round the point and begin to signal with its lantern. And there was nothing he could do to stop it. Peering over the ledge, he could make out the two black-swathed men preparing to board their craft, each tossing his cloak onto the dock as he stepped down and disappeared behind the curtained cabin in the center of the craft. Then, smooth and silent, the caique slid away from the dock.

  No voices now. No light. It was impossible, from Danilo’s perch, to follow the course of the Sultan’s caique. But he could hear the faint sound of droplets falling onto the surface each time the eight paddles were lifted out of the water in unison. Not until that sound faded into the darkness was he assured that with each passing minute the odds were rising in his favor. But he cautioned himself to stay still and silent until he could be absolutely certain that the Sultan’s caique was well on its way across open water to wherever it was headed.

  He decided to count to one hundred — slowly — before showing his head above the ledge. When he reached that number, he added another hundred just to be safe. They might have forgotten something and decided to come back for it. Or changed their minds about discarding the cloaks they had left behind on the pier. He pressed his cheek against the cold stone and waited. One hundred and eighty-six, one hundred and eight-seven . . .

  At one hundred and ninety-two, he saw a blob of light in the distance and rose to his feet. Two long. Two short. He stretched, bowed his head, and thanked all the gods for his narrow escape. By the time Saida’s caique slid up to the dock, he was there to take his accustomed seat at the stern. But instead, the captain motioned him toward the curtained compartment in the center of the craft.

  As he stepped forward to pull back the drape, it began slowly to part of its own accord and a veiled head appeared. Had he been tricked? Were these the Sultan’s men playing games with him? A gloved hand reached around and slowly drew up the veil, revealing a pair of rosy lips. This was no man.

  Next, a slightly tilted nose. Then those eyes he knew so well, velvet brown with hazel lights that twinkled in the soft light of the lantern.

  “As you see,” she whispered, “I have managed to escape from my tower.” She cocked her head to one side and patted the cushion beside her invitingly. “Care to join me for a midnight sail?”

  But her bravado dissolved as soon as she felt his arms around her. Pulling the curtains tight around them, she buried her head in his neck and clung to him like a frightened child. What had happened to his fearless princess? Had she encountered her father on the Bosphorus? Perhaps narrowly escaped an encounter?

  “I feel so wretched,” she sobbed. “I am so . . . afraid.”

  His first instinct was to hug her and kiss her and jolly her out of her despair. But some inchoate impulse led him to stay quiet and let her talk.

  “Tell me,” he heard himself saying. “Tell me.”

  And, after some nose blowing and sniffing, it all came out: Hürrem’s plan to move from the harem to Topkapi and her grandmother’s refusal to heed the consequences. “I keep thinking that she will soon be dead and I will be alone. There will be no one to take care of me.”

  “What about me, Princess?” he asked lightly.

  “You? How can you help me?”

  “I’m strong. I do care for you. I am your knight.”

  At this, she smiled for the first time. “Of course you are. But we both know . . .” She looked away. “I was proud of you today at the gerit. You were very brave, my knight.”

  “You were there, at the hippodrome?”

  “On the Grand Vizier’s balcony. I saw everything.”

  “Did you see me fall?”

  She nodded.

  “And get up?”

  She nodded again.

  “Did you wonder why I was not stabbed through the heart when the gerit hit
me?”

  No, she had not wondered. “I thanked Allah.”

  “What if I told you that Allah had nothing to do with it.”

  She drew away from him. “That would be disrespectful.”

  “Even if I told you that it was you who saved my life?”

  “Me?”

  “The amulet you gave me to wear against the evil eye, I was wearing it over my breast. And the point of his gerit shattered the jewel to bits, instead of shattering my heart.”

  “A miracle,” she murmured softly.

  “It is more than that. Don’t you see? It is a sign.”

  She shook her head.

  “Saida . . .” He laid his hands lightly on her shoulders to emphasize what he was about to tell her. “When I came here tonight, I meant to end everything between us. For your sake. Because it was too risky for you. I almost collided with the Sultan at the Grand Vizier’s dock tonight; I only missed him by seconds. But I did miss him. And this afternoon, the gerit did miss my heart. That has to mean something.”

  “I don’t understand any of this . . .”

  “It means that we are meant to be together forever. In my religion we call it besheert, foreordained. The pagans would have said that you and I are favored by fortune.”

  “No.” She held up her hand to stop him. “We agreed not to talk about the future.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time we did talk about it.”

  “There is nothing to talk about. I cannot live on false hopes. My religion tells me to trust in Allah’s will and accept what cannot be changed. Don’t you see that everything between us depends on my grandmother? Narcissus is her slave. He issues my orders in her name. He is my lifeline. Once she is gone, he will be manumitted, no longer a slave. There will be no safe contact for us.”

  She was on the verge of tears; still, he could not let go. His religion had not taught him acceptance. And his upbringing had taught him to use his brains. There had to be a way.