The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  “Where will the slave go?” he asked.

  “He will be manumitted, free. Her death frees him.”

  “But if he is her slave, she can bequeath him to you, can she not?”

  She looked at him uncomprehending.

  “Before the Valide dies,” he continued, “she can will him to you. You can ask her to do that.”

  “I couldn’t. We never talk of such things.”

  “That only means that you never have, not that you cannot. She is a clear-sighted woman and she loves you very much. Now that she knows the end is near, she may even ask you if there is anything of hers you want.”

  “And if she does not?”

  “Then you must ask her. For your own sake — for our sake. Remember this, we need Narcissus. Narcissus is the link between us.” Danilo paused to let this sink in, then continued: “You can ask. Remember, Audentes fortuna iuvat. Fortune favors the bold. Say it. Say it with me.”

  “Audentes fortuna iuvat,” she repeated. “Fortune favors the bold. I will do it. I will ask her to will me Narcissus.”

  23

  THE DEATH OF

  THE VALIDE

  The Valide Sultan spent the last days of her life at peace, drifting in and out of a painless sleep with the two people she loved most in constant attendance.

  When the doctors began to count the days, her granddaughter Princess Saida ordered a rolled-up pallet to be placed at the foot of the Valide’s bed so that, after spending the day holding the pale hand, mopping the feverish brow, offering spoonfuls of nourishment, and whispering words of comfort, the girl could retire to the pallet rather than leave her grandmother’s side.

  In this vigil she was frequently joined by her father, the Sultan, who put aside all but te most pressing imperial business to spend most of his time seated at the bedside between his mother and his daughter, some of it in prayer, some of it in conversation. In a sense, this unexpected intimacy turned out to be the most valuable gift that the Valide could have left her beloved granddaughter. Although the Sultan had always been punctilious in his harem visits, he owed attention to all of his children living in the harem with their mothers, not to mention his concubines and, of course, his mother. So although the princess had spent many hours in the company of her father, they were seldom alone together and rarely had the opportunity for close conversation.

  Now, in the enforced intimacy at the Valide’s bedside, he began to talk to his daughter, quite formally at first, but gradually taking up a familiar tone. She asked after his health. He complained about his gout. They explored their mutual passion for high-bred horses, and most importantly they prayed together, just the two of them, five times a day.

  One day, as he bent to kiss his mother’s cheek, Saida said, “You will miss her.” It was an intrusion into his inviolate privacy that she would never have thought to presume a week earlier.

  And she was greeted with a revealing dab at his eyes and a softly murmured, “More than anything in the world.”

  The doctors had prepared them for what to expect in the final moments — a shortness of breath, choking, possibly a seizure. But Saida was certain, and reassured her father as they sat side by side waiting, that Allah would be kinder than that, knowing that the end was near.

  Everything that could be done had been done. On the previous day the Lady Hafsa had dictated the terms of her will to a scribe. At her request Princess Saida and the Sultan were present, and as she dictated, she turned to him from time to time to ask, “Does this conform to your wishes, my lion?”

  To which he invariably replied, “Perfectly, honored mother,” and patted her hand to reassure her that all was well with the will.

  To her much loved granddaughter, the Valide bequeathed a sum of three thousand ducats, a sizeable fortune. That noted, she turned to Saida and asked, as Danilo had foretold she might, if there was anything else the girl particularly wanted. Were it not for the conversation with Danilo, Saida would likely have lowered her eyes modestly and denied any worldly wants. But now his words came back to her and she replied that yes, there was one thing. Even so, she hesitated to make the request specific, fearing to profane the solemnity of the moment, until her father intervened by whispering in her ear, “Speed it up, daughter. Every one of these seconds is precious.”

  So in the end she did ask for possession of the slave Narcissus, who, she told her grandmother, “has been so faithful to you and will stand as a reminder and a comfort to me.”

  “Only a slave? That is all? Not my pearl necklace that you so admire or my emerald coronet?”

  Saida could only shake her head in reply.

  The old woman reached over with some effort to pat the girl’s cheek. “I am touched by your modest request,” she said in a slightly faltering voice. “But then, you have never been grasping or avaricious, my child. And for that you will be rewarded. You will have my slave and my jewels as well. All of them.” At which the Sultan gasped. By custom, all the jewels he had given to his mother, as well as those bestowed upon her by his father as bridal gifts, would return to the royal treasury on her death. But he had never denied his mother anything in her lifetime and he did not intend to do so at her deathbed.

  “Everything will be done as you ask, honored mother.” He bent down to kiss her forehead. “Now you must rest.”

  “Yes, I must rest.” She smiled a faint smile. “It is time.” And with her mind cleared and her soul at peace, she closed her eyes, never to open them again.

  Moments later, her breathing stopped without so much as a shudder. She was gone.

  “Do you wish to sit with her while I get the priests?” asked the Sultan.

  “Yes, please,” Saida answered. Then, heedless of protocol, she threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Father, I will miss her so.”

  Whereupon her father, always so meticulous in keeping his distance, leapt that chasm in an instant and embraced her as tightly as she did him. And there they stood in the awesome presence of death, their two heads touching, their tears mingling.

  Hours later, after the priests had taken Hafsa’s body away, the princess was still sitting in the low chair beside her bed, becalmed in a sea without winds or currents. She had spent her life of fifteen years being nurtured and nursed, and guarded and guided, by this woman who was no more. Suddenly, her lodestar was gone. For the first time in her life she could pray or not, eat or not, sleep or not as she willed. Even for a girl of considerable courage, the prospect was daunting. So she sat silent and unmoving.

  Into this dead zone walked Narcissus and, without waiting for his orders, closed the shutters, lit the candles, and kindled the fire. Then he turned to her.

  “I hear that you have inherited me, along with some very valuable jewels.”

  This jab of sarcasm was not what she had expected from the normally deferential slave. Her immediate instinct was to give him the tongue-lashing he deserved, as her grandmother certainly would have. But he had more to say.

  “I am now your slave, madame.” He bent himself into an exaggerated bow. “I await your orders.”

  “How did you know?”

  “News travels faster than lightning in the harem,” he answered lightly but with an edge.

  “I owe you an explanation,” she offered.

  “Slaves are not owed explanations, Princess,” he retorted, still harsh.

  “You were expecting to be manumitted when she died, is that not so?”

  No answer.

  “So I have, however inadvertently, robbed you of your freedom today. Is that not so?” she persisted.

  He remained silent.

  “I want you to know that I asked for you because I need you now. But I do intend to give you your freedom in the future. And I will not forget that you stayed by me in my time of need.”

  “Am I to be resold when you’ve done with me?”

 
“Oh, no. I will do as my grandmother would have done. I will give you your freedom.”

  “By turning me out into the world when I am old, to be mocked and mistreated and underpaid?”

  “It is my intention to set you up properly in your new life when you leave my service,” she answered with quiet dignity. Then, because she was not quite grown up enough to hide her disappointment, she burst out, “I thought you would be . . . pleased.”

  “By your gift of my freedom?” he asked, still unappeased.

  “I spent some time recently with a slave who says she would give up all her worldly goods in exchange for her freedom,” she told him.

  “You are speaking of Lady Hürrem, no doubt,” he replied. “Are you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “That slave,” he informed her, “is Second Kadin to the Sultan. I am a black man and a eunuch.”

  “I was trying to make amends,” she sniffed. “I didn’t expect to get blamed for it.”

  She speaks like a child, he thought. And this time when he answered the belligerence was gone.

  “To be fair, I cannot blame you, Princess. If I were looking to cast blame for my fate, I would have to start with God, who made me black. Or with the traders who bought me from my parents as a boy. Or with my parents for selling me. Or with the African who cut off my manhood and buried me in the sand for three days waiting to see if I would bleed to death or survive to be sold. And sold I was to the Grand Vizier. A week after I arrived in his household they pulled my feet through wooden boards, tied them, and struck my bare soles with a cane again and again until I collapsed. For days I had to crawl to and from my bed because I could not walk. For weeks I wrapped gauze around my feet to sop up the bleeding. I tell you this because what you have done is neither cruel nor ruthless. You have offered to take responsibility for my life, a life that was shaped by others, not by you. I am not unhappy to be your slave.”

  She allowed herself a half smile of relief.

  “But,” he continued, “since you are now a rich woman, on the day when you no longer have need of me, I trust you to keep to your word and make adequate provision for me in my retirement.”

  Now she allowed herself a full smile. “We understand each other, do we not?”

  “Yes, Princess.” Narcissus, too, allowed himself a smile. “I think we do.”

  “Good. Then why don’t you hustle off and get me some food. Some pilaf and a ripe melon.” Exactly what the Valide would have ordered, he noted. “I will have need of you tonight.”

  “A caique with eight oarsmen?” he inquired with his old mischief.

  “Sadly, no,” she answered. “This is not a time for pleasure. I have a duty to my grandmother, and it is a duty that I will have to fight to perform. Since I have no sword, I must use my wits. First get me food. Then paper and my writing box.”

  He bowed. “Anything else?”

  “Later I will want you to carry what I write to the Sultan in his selamlik.”

  He frowned, puzzled.

  “I need his permission to carry out my task,” she explained.

  “Would I be too forward were I to ask what the task is?”

  “Yes, you would,” she answered primly. “Curiosity is a grievous defect in a slave.” Already she was beginning to sound like her grandmother. “But I will tell you my project.”

  Good, he thinks. She still needs someone to tell her secrets to.

  “I intend to write and deliver a eulogy at my grandmother’s burial.”

  “You? A girl?”

  “Who better than I? Who loved her most and knew her best?”

  “But a girl . . .Will the Ulema allow it?”

  “I do not plan to ask the priests. I will ask my father if I may speak for the family. I know how much he detests such tasks. And my brothers are all too lazy to do the writing. I will win the right to deliver my eulogy by default.”

  And, to be sure, the eulogy was written, copied, and delivered before the first prayer, along with a sweet note reminding the Sultan of certain historical precedents in the long history of eulogies. And the next day Princess Saida was carried off from the Old Palace in a litter, accompanied by her maid and her slave, Narcissus, and taken by water to the town of Bursa, where her beloved grandmother was to be honored by burial alongside the tomb of Selim the Grim, the father of her son, Suleiman the Magnificent.

  24

  THE BAILO REPORTS

  Against all odds, the day for the Valide Sultan’s funeral dawned clear and calm, most unusual for a late autumn day and most fortunate for the mourners making their way from the capital to the Ottoman family tomb at Bursa.

  With great reverence, Lady Hafsa’s coffin was borne aloft and carried through the streets of Istanbul, lined three deep by ordinary citizens come to pay their respects to a woman much admired, even loved. When the procession reached Bagce Kapi landing, the pallbearers, chosen from among the Sultan’s pages, draped the casket with white silk and placed it on a pure white barge to be carried over the waters to the dock at Bursa. It was followed by a cortege that stretched out along the shores of the Bosphorus in an endless mournful string of black caiques.

  Several hundred palace courtiers formed the nucleus of the cortege, to be joined at Bursa by hundreds more — the representatives of foreign powers, members of the Ulema and the divan, the entire Janissary corps, all of the pages from both the Sultan’s and the Grand Vizier’s schools, and several hundred ordinary citizens, all somber, many genuinely sad.

  The Valide had amassed considerable personal wealth in her lifetime and had donated the greater part of it to a number of madresses, soup kitchens, libraries, and hostels. It was a custom she continued to follow, and as a testament to her goodness she was given a final resting place beside the coffin of the Ottoman paterfamilias, a stone simply engraved Orhan, Son of Osman, Gazi, Sultan of Gazis, Lord of the Horizons, Burgrave of the Whole World.

  Watching her from his close vantage point beside the casket, Danilo marveled at his princess’s poised confidence when she took her place to deliver the eulogy. This self-possessed, dignified young woman was also, after all, the same girl who had once greeted him splayed out against her infinite pillows like a painted whore; at another time, as the wily horse trader in spiked boots; on still another occasion, as the ferocious rider who occasionally beat him in a pony race; and at yet another time as the little lost girl who clung to him like a frightened child, weeping on his shoulder at the prospect of being left alone and unprotected by the loss of the Valide. And now, standing tall before a crowd of thousands, a veritable female Demosthenes.

  “But, if I may,” she went on, “I should like to speak a few words on my own behalf. I am the daughter of a great man. They tell me that, in the wide world, my father is known as the Magnificent for the vastness of his power. In the eyes of his subjects, he is the father of all the poor and helpless of the world, an awesome obligation. Yet he has always found the time to be a father to me, a motherless child. When I was born, he gave me into the daily care of my beloved grandmother, the second blessing I have been granted by Allah, and of course she accepted the charge. That was her bounden duty. But in no way was it her duty to love me, to cherish me, to teach me, and to guide me. That came from the generosity of her heart. She also gave me the gift of faith. It was she who named me Saida, after the granddaughter of the Prophet. It was she who saw to it that by the time I was twelve years old, I had memorized the whole Koran. I received my first pony from my father, but she was the one who insisted that I be taught to ride it with my brothers. And she found a place for me in the Harem School and on the polo squad alongside them. ‘Strength of faith, strength of mind, strength of bone,’ she used to say.

  “On the night my grandmother died, because of the great love I bore her, I wailed and wept so much that I almost lost my senses. Not merely because we were kin but because for all the fift
een years of my life, she guided my every move.

  “In all the years, I never heard her speak bitterness or envy; only affection for me, a motherless child, and for all the unfortunates of this world. Henceforth, it behooves me to shower her with benedictions. God have mercy on her soul and God be pleased with her spirit.”

  The eulogy was so charmingly put that even the Venetian bailo, that cynical reprobate, was moved to tears. Quoting from his report to the Venetian Senate:

  The sweet simplicity of this girl, her candor, her humility when she spoke of her faith, made a great impression on all assembled and added a note of humanity to an otherwise grandiloquent and formal ceremony.

  Mind you, let it be said in their defense that these people prefer to do their grieving in private. I am informed that when the Sultan returned from his mother’s burial, he threw his turban on the ground, ripped off all his jewels, had the decorations stripped from the walls of the palace, and turned the carpets upside down. As of that moment, the court has been sequestered for a three-month period of mourning.

  Topkapi Palace is now closed to all visitors. The Imperial Gate is shrouded in white. There is no music; there are no feasts, no sporting games. No government business is conducted, no trials or petitions adjudicated, no wars fought; although I daresay taxes will continue to be collected if only to confirm that there is life beyond the grave.

  In these circumstances and with your permission, I too shall sequester myself in my estates on the island of Naxos, where I will feast my ears on the music of the Venetian tongue, my eyes on the unveiled beauty of Venetian women and my stomach on the comfort of Venetian cooking. Of course, I plan to return to Istanbul in good time to welcome the Padishah when he emerges from his living interment three months from the day of his mother’s death, and resume my long exile from my beloved Serenissima. With a heavy but dutiful heart.

  And, to be sure, on the ninety-first day of his mourning, the Sultan did emerge from his living interment to ride his horse through the streets of the capital to the mosque, thus confirming that life had begun again. Which it did in a manner totally unanticipated by anyone, even by the Venetian bailo and his well-paid spies. The bailo wrote to his masters, the powerful Committee of Ten: