Work Text:
In France and in the Low Countries, at the courts of Navarre or Lisbon, one arrived as a peddler at the gates of paradise, by appointment, accompanied by attendants and journeymen. Marthe possessed a wardrobe of good woollen dresses for the occasion. The wool was English, suitably refined and dutifully dull. She wore a wimple, white, of Irish linen, so that the gold of her hair was never a distraction from the gold of her goods.
Marthe herself, she had established early and with force, was beyond price.
In Stamboul, things became much simpler once the dress was removed from the equation. In her slim silk trousers and embroidered kaftan and with her gold hair caught under the turban with its single discreet jewel, Marthe was as free to move about the city as any other trader who paid their taxes. Warfare was the life-blood of the empire, but in the absence of plunder faith and commerce sustained the coffers of the Ottomans. Her uncle George Gaultier paid, grumbling, the harbour dues; the import taxes; the jizyah, the religious poll tax. This meant he and Marthe could attend should they wish the threadbare Christian services of the city, some the last fragments of the Orthodox faith that had once sustained the Byzantine Empire. Gaultier did so. Marthe did not. There were freedoms religious and other for the traveller in Stamboul, in the street of storytellers, at the stalls of booksellers, or at the feet of wandering imans and Sufi mystics. The reach of the Ottoman Empire was long. It was not unusual, to find among the Janissaries, the Sultan's bodyguards, or the white eunuchs who guarded the palace, not just the children of the Balkans and the Caspian Sea but sons of Ukraine, or Poland, or of the Rus who had served the city for centuries as warriors and slaves. Among the black eunuchs of the harem and the teachers and doctors of the city were the Amhara, and those who claimed ancestry in Nubia and Abyssinia. In the courtyards, the philosophers and mystics included Malian astronomers and Berber mathematicians. The pale Marthe, forbidden the universities of her native land, was in Stamboul equal to any other far-travelled pilgrim and reveled in freedom of body and mind.
“A business does not sustain itself on poetry and argument!” Gaultier hissed.
“Have I not brought you scribes and scholars?” enquired Marthe. “One to copy the words, one to buy them... was I supposed not to notice we have sold the Erasmus many times over?”
“No scholar is wealthy,” said Gaultier. “Your dervishes will not buy my clockwork. I did not bring an astralobe intact across the middle sea to sell it to shopkeepers. And what of the lace? The ribbons? The enamels? Should we return to Dieppe beggars?”
The Sultan, in his magnificence, gave himself an allowance of a hundred aspers a day. His mother, three hundred. It was the women of the harem, unseen, who purchased Siberian furs and Chinese silks, Spanish steel and Korean porcelain, carpets from Khiva and nutmeg from Zanzibar...The high-born women of the Ottoman Empire, the sisters and daughters of Pashas and Viziers, kept seclusion. The Sultan’s favourites, the mothers of his sons, never left the harem. The slavegirls and concubines, adorned, moved only between households on the whims of men, in curtained carts. How, then, should trader encounter market?
“The harem is forbidden,” said Marthe.
“For me,” said Gaultier.
“And having once entered,” said Marthe, “How do you suggest I exit, with or without the profits of commerce, no matter how righteous and honest?”
“There is a way,” said Gaultier. “There is always a way.”
Immediately, there was not. For the doctors who tended the women of the harem, scholarly women known as their mothers before them to the black eunuchs who guarded the three gates to the inner palace, passage was possible. For the women of the harem who had been married to the officials of the Empire, bringing their skills of languages and diplomacy to the vast network of bureaucratic alliances, networking continued. A foreign trader, of doubtful allegiance and contested faith, was neither.
“All things are possible for those who believe,” said the Iman Beyabit, a practical and well connected gentleman.
“Inshallah,” said Marthe.
“My daughter,” said the Iman, who had never pretended that his European student was anything other, “A little more conviction would not go amiss.”
“I struggle with faith,” said Marthe.
“Who does not?” said the Iman. “Yet with every hardship, ease is promised. You may not yet be able to enter the inner courtyard. But the outer is accessible to all.”
“The palace? On a Friday?” said Marthe. “When the Sultan rides to the Mosque? I am not his subject: I have no right to petition and no wish to do so. The law is just.”
“On any day,” said the Iman gently. “All are welcome.”
It was true. The gates to the new palace stood open, and in the courtyard beyond there were workshops and traders as well as Janissaries and eunuchs and court officials. There were temporary kiosks selling sherbet and honey sweets, ices and yoghurt, a knife sharpener, a maker of hats, a maker of toys: a troupe of acrobats... In addition, the royal mint and the armoury, lending the air an edge of steel and embers. Marthe, having endured the precautionary search of the guards and paid the necessary bribes, found a shaded corner and laid out on fine silvered brocade the second-best ribbons and a few enamelled brooches, which skill the Ottomans esteemed. There, she embraced patience, cross-legged and half-veiled against the dust, for the square was busy. She sold a length of silvered lace to a provincial administrator, and a lapis earring to a Janissary as fair as herself, but the gate to the inner courtyard remained closed. Only the robed eunuchs, armed to the teeth, with scarlet slippers and crested turbans, swept through these, the Gates of Salutation. Some of these she knew were purveyors, sent out from the harem to source and bargain for sweets and silks and other things, too. Once, a leather-curtained cart escorted by Janissaries paused, so that, a glimpse of a different life, Marthe saw the barest shadow of henna’d fingertips parting the curtain before the cart passed on to the inner courtyard.
On Fridays the Sultan rode the same route, and his attendants collected the petitions of his subjects, so that the Sultan could dispense justice and alms in the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, the protector of widows, orphans, and bastard children with doubtful sponsors and a distaste for astrology.
“Is this the best you have?”
“In ribbons? No. In jewellery? Depending on your purse.”
Her customer was tall and clean shaven, with well tended hands and a considering eye. His skin had the magnificent black sheen of a warrior Nubian, seasoned and scarred, but he had, too, the pagentry of the polished and tasselled swords of the black eunuchs, the guardians of the harem and the personal bodyguards of the Sultan's favourites.
“I have not seen such enamelling before.”
“It is Frankish,” said Marthe. “With this technique, patterns are made with gold wire, see, here, and here. The image is of a flower, which is traditional. This is a small piece. Would you like to see more? I have a couple of pieces here. More, elsewhere.”
“Yes,” he said. He inspected the enamels in silence, tilting each piece to the light, using the tips of his fingers as much as his eyes. Then, he returned them all. “Be at the cart gate at dawn,” he said. “Bring your best work.”
He was, discretely, extremely well dressed. Those were rubies on his sword hilts, and there was a diamond in his ear. His was the confidence of a man who knew how to be obeyed.
“Yes,” said Marthe.
“Take the buckles,” said Gaultier. “Take the sketches for the book cover – not the covers, the sketches. The belt clasps! And the goblets – take one, Marthe. No more. Take one of the automata. The miller.”
“The swan,” said Marthe.
“I cannot lose the swan! Take the miller.”
“And the rose,” Marthe said.
The eunuchs blindfolded her at the gate, so that the fustian smell of old broadcloth was her first impression of the harem. That, and the darkness beyond it, as the gates opened and the eunuchs led her through into the passageway beyond. Under her feet there were cobbles, for the horses. Above her, the wind ripple of canvas awnings, pitched against the sun. The whisper of the slippered footsteps of the eunuchs, and the soft rustle of their robes. A trace scent, of spiced rice, and rose petals.
“They will take you to the audience hall,” said a voice she knew, which she had last heard at her grandmother’s side, in the stifling dark of the town house in Dieppe. There, the woman Kiaya Khátún had spoken in soft and idiomatic French. Here, in precise and clipped Arabic, the language of law and trade in the Levant. “There, you will lay out your goods, and wait. Do not bargain. This is the harem, not the marketplace.”
She did not let her breath betray her, although she could feel the catch of it in her throat, as if a trapped bird fluttered in the cage of her bones. It is one thing to hope. It is another to have that hope answered. “I understand,” Marthe said.
“What a beautiful child,” Kiaya Khátún had said, years ago, in Dieppe, which is what the Scottish woman had said, too, and the foul old man with his brown-spotted hands. “Is she for sale?”
Marthe had bared her teeth, and her grandmother had laughed. But afterwards - Kiaya Khátún was a woman of burnished beauty and honed mind. To the young Marthe, she was as thrilling as Aspasia, as learned as Hypatia, as alluring as an unopened book...
In Stamboul, Marthe did not bare her teeth. She was a woman grown, and she had opened the book and reading, learned all endings are bitter, unless she wrote her own. They had taken her knife at the gate, the little blunt one she kept at her belt and used, here in the Levant where bringing a knife to the table was threat and insult, for trimming candle wicks and slicing cloth. They had not taken the miniature blade she kept in her turban, nor the pick locks in her shoes, nor the aspers sewn into her sash. Her mind was her own. The gates had closed behind her, but Marthe had always been her own weapon.
She held her head high under the blindfold, and sat where she was told to sit, and laid out on the silks the enamelled goblet and the broaches and earrings, the necklaces and buckles and bangles and trinket boxes she and Gaultier had brought from Trier and Limoges, and then beside the little figure of the clockwork miller with his stone which Gaultier had made, exquisitely tooled. She knew every piece. As she laid them out, with every sense but sight heightened she was aware of the rustle of silk and muslin, the whisper of women’s voices and the threads of heady perfume. A child laughed, and was hushed. A heavier step, swift, of one of the eunuchs, carrying messages. Somewhere, there was the hum of voices rising and falling, as if reciting verse.
The harem, she knew, was as much university as it was creche. Women learned languages, music, dance, administration, theology. For the ambitious, the route to power led through the corridors of the harem. For those suited to marriage, it was the jeweller’s workshop, and the setting in which they shone: for the scholarly, it was library and lecture hall: for the talented, an industry in which only the most ruthless and efficient succeeded. For the beautiful and wise, if they were also fortunate, the path to power led, perfumed, through the Sultan’s bed, and to the birth of a son. No better fate could be had, here in the cradle of the Ottoman dynasty. The most powerful woman in the empire was the Sultan’s mother, the Valide Sultan.
Marthe, who did not contemplate parenthood, crossed her ankles, and waited. Soon, the women came, to browse and question, to exclaim over the clockwork miller and admire the jewel-bright colours of the enamel. One or two of the eunuch paused too, and then the children, so that she must wind up the miller again and again. “See how industrious he is!” Marthe said. “How perfect in his work, as the prophet enjoins.”
“You are not Christian?” said one of the escorting eunuchs, sharply.
“A scholar,” said Marthe. “As god wills.”
For a time, then, they left her alone. And then came the rustle and slide of footsteps, many footsteps, a woman with attendants, and the familiar ambergris of perfume, with a rarer note to it, sweet and heady as a rose. “Be still,” said Kiaya Khátún, in Arabic. And then, deferential, in the Persian of the palace, “This is the trader I mentioned to you, my Sultan. The enamel is good, with one or two exceptional pieces. This, the model, is unique.”
“The jewellery is fair enough, but the toy? It is a thing for children, surely,” said another woman. Her voice was low and soft, with a note of amusement to it, as if the speaker was only a breath away from laughter.
“This one, perhaps,” said Kiaya Khátún. “But there is a rose also, which the trader will demonstrate to us.”
To Marthe’s knowledge, for three months Gaultier’s crafted rose had not left its slim case, in the casket of their most precious goods; the automata, and the clock. She carried it now, as the eunuchs must know, but she had not set it out for all the women of the harem to see.
“Show us,” said Kiaya Khátún. It was, in the most musical of voices, command.
Marthe, blind, exquisitely aware that she, as much as her wares, was on display, unrolled the silk wrapping, and opened the cedar box. Within she knew Gaultier’s rose would glimmer, every petal enamelled in white and outlined in silver. The mechanism was in the base. She wound it, making of every movement a ritual, her long, pale fingers, the fall of her embroidered sleeves, the rose cupped in her hands, displayed to the unseen watchers. A flourished final touch to the key, so that the thing shivered and trembled into motion, the petals uncurling and opening. In the heart of the flower, there was a tiny casket, and in the casket, when the lid rose, a miniature rose bush which itself grew and flourished. The mechanism was smooth, but not quite soundless: the base trembled as the flower rose to shed its petals, its stem telescoping: the bush caught briefly on the edge of the casket, the base trembled...
“Again.”
She wound it again, and let the clockwork run its course.
“Now, stop. Leave it unwound.”
Someone lent over her. “See, here,” Kiaya Khátún said, quiet and merciless, “Here is the chamber. The catch, here. There is a reservoir beneath this thorn, and another here. A message may be conveyed. Or, medicine. Be careful. The thorn is sharp.”
“I understand,” said the second woman.
“There is space, too, in the heart of the rose, for a further gift. A ring, perhaps, or a poem. A flask of scent.”
“They are all so made?”
“Only this one. The maker could construct more, but would need the tools and materials to do so.”
“It is ingenious. But to whom would I give such a gift, Kiaya Khátún? I have no secrets!”
She had a laugh like a run of bells, a merry, silvered sound. It hung in the air, a fresh, clean sound to set against the lowering dark of the blindfold. And then, the drifting fragrance of her scent, light footsteps, leaving. A maid, a page, a pair of pages, springing into motion. There must be a staircase, by the sound of their footsteps: a gallery. Doors opened and closed, faint breaths of perfumed air.
Kiaya Khátún said, “Wait.”
Marthe, perforce, waited. The rose, she wrapped and tucked again into her sash. After a while, the young girls of the harem came, as she had thought they would, and picked over the trinkets and pendants. One or two of them had coin. She sold some pretty glasswork, and painted enamels. She sold the goblet, to one of the eunuchs, whcih probably meant to one of the senior women. The children came again, to see the miller grind his sheaf. Outside in the city, faintly, in the harem, the Muzzeins recited Adhan, the call to the midday prayer. Plates of food were carried past her, fragrant with almonds and butter.
Marthe waited.
The footsteps were heavier, and deliberate. “Peace be upon you,” said the Nubian who had spoken to her before, in the outer courtyard.
“And peace be upon you,” Marthe replied, hand on heart.
“My mistress would thank you for your patience,” said the Nubian.
“Time spent in paradise cannot drag,” said Marthe politely. “I thank your mistress for her kindness.”
“She will see you,” said the Nubian. “Please. Gather your wares. We will be ascending the stair, but do not concern yourself with falling. There is a rail, and I will follow. Do you need a page to assist?”
“Thank you, but no,” said Marthe. “As a winged horse, one ascends in clouds...”
“In truth, those of the harem live in glory,” said the Nubian. “But not yet in heaven. The first step is by your right foot.”
“Do I expect martyrdom or glory?” Marthe enquired, climbing.
“It is my expectation that the two are not exclusive,” said the Nubian. “But here in the harem, anything is possible. One strives for righteousness.”
“May you be blessed for doing so, god willing,” said Marthe amiably.
“And you, for your generosity,” the Nubian said dryly. “Wait here. When the pages announce you, step forward and bow. There will be a divan four paces ahead of you. If you are offered refreshment, accept.”
There would, of course, be a price. Marthe, metaphorically, girded herself. The doors were well oiled, the well-trained pages nothing more than a rustle of cloth and air, the room surprisingly fresh. A bird, caged, rattled its perch.
“Welcome,” said Kiaya Khátún. “The door is closed. You may remove the blindfold.”
“It is forbidden-”
“If you had been truly a man you would have died at the gates,” said Kiaya Khátún.
After the dazzle of light had faded, it was the bird Marthe saw first, the sardonic dark eye of a caged parakeet. Then, the face she had last seen in Dieppe, the polished olive beauty of Kiaya Khátún the traveller, the builder of secret alliances and weaver of hidden intrigues, with her cool dark gaze and soft painted mouth. The jewels around her throat were real and the embroidery on the ends of her sash and at her heels priceless. Kiaya Khátún had the eyes, Marthe thought, of a Byzantine saint, but the body of a houri, with high round breasts like young apples and a waist Marthe could span with her hands. It was impossible not to wonder if the patterned henna on Kiaya Khátún’s fingers extended to the golden curves of her wrists, to her rounded heels and fine ankles, but the translucent muslin of her gown was so skillfully pleated that the fleeting promises of reveal were never fulfilled.
“I told your grandmother you would find your own path,” said Kiaya Khátún. “The Sufis have been good to you.”
And then, one met Kiaya Khátún’s eyes, and understood that her gilded body was the frame for the honed machinery of her mind. Marthe said, “God has been kind.”
“Ah,” said Kiaya Khátún brightly, “And you learned manners, too. Please, be seated. There is sherbet, and wafers.”
“Generally, in the west, guests do not purchase children,” said Marthe. She sat.
“Really?” said Kiaya Khátún. “But of course, many things are different in the East, as you will discover. Tell me, what price did you pay the old woman for raising you? Service? Servitude? Joy?”
“Rather than service in the harem?” Marthe said. “It is true, I cannot bake a baklava with sixty-four layers of pastry, not to mention the green almonds, nor can I create a perfume to drive men mad with lust. I feel the lack.”
“Ah,” said Kiaya Khátún, “You value learning. But here in the harem we educate body and mind together. Riding beasts,” quoted Kiaya Khátún, ”Are no joy to ride until they’re bridled and mounted.”
“So pearls are useless, O jewel of the harem,” said Marthe, “Unless they’re pierced and threaded. Who, I wonder, pulls your strings?”
She had thought Kiaya Khátún playing, but in that moment Marthe felt as if the lioness had turned. She felt the brush of fur and claws on the back of her neck. And then Kiaya Khátún set down her untouched sherbert, and lent back, smiling, clasping her henna’d finger-tips around her muslin-clad knees. “Show me your teeth,” she said. “I should have known a child of your lineage would come armed in poetry. And now we have clashed swords and felt each other’s metal, shall we not lie down in peace? I was hoping you might lead me, as a gazelle, through the gardens of your voyaging.”
“You have taken the same roads yourself,” Marthe said.
“But not recently. Induge me,” said Kiaya Khátún. “Do they still offer tea and dates at the custom house at Messina?”
“If the dues are likely to be excessive,” said Marthe. “And quarantine escaped. Are you actually asking me if the cargo is searched? Because, yes: the more dates offered, the longer the search, the greater the dues. The tax on wine is up, but Venice has secured exemptions for honey and for sesame seeds. That is, of course, if one escapes the inner sea unscathed. I would be interested to know if the Sultan considers piracy a form of taxation?”
“One man’s pirate is another’s tax collector?” Kiaya Khátún said. “Is this not true of every sea? Would you not flee as much from the Maltese pirate as the Corsair? The Ottoman fleet was welcome in Toulose when Savoy was the enemy. Now Savoy is fêted and our sailors fend for themselves on the cold salt sea.”
“Qui portera la nouvelle à Audierne, Que la flotte est perdue excepté un navire...? O, who will console the widows of the Golden Horn...?”
“Unlike your king,” said Kiaya Khátún, “The Sultan, may God bless him, pensions the dependents of his soldiers and sailors: their sons, if promising, to be educated in his schools, their daughters taught weaving and embroidery. It is in the service of the people that taxes are paid: for defense, for education, for hospitals, to maintain the roads and waterways. A trader, you see the benefits. You have not tried the sherbet? The honey is from Greece: the cloves and cinnamon from the orchards of Kerala and Maluku, the sage from Provance: the cherries we grow ourselves, in the gardens of the Bospherus. It evokes pleasure, sweetens the lip and perfumes the breath,” said Kiaya Khátún, and, smiling, raised her own glass and sipped, so that her narrow golden-skinned wrists and fine hands became the definition of grace, her painted mouth, smiling, an invitation to intrigue. Her scent was heady with ambergris, the earthy sweetness of a woman’s body distilled.
Marthe, seated, found herself wrong-footed, as if a gust of wind had caught the sails and the deck tilted beneath her feet.
“Your mind has led you to the path of Islam,” said Kiaya Khátún. “Where women such as you and I might travel. Might you allow your body to follow?”
When she had pictured the women of the harem who had exclaimed over her clockwork miller, soft-voiced, soft-footed cherished beauties, Marthe had imagined a bashful deference, lowered eyelashes sooty with kohl and pale rice-powded cheeks. Kiaya Khátún stared Marthe in the face, making of her mind and body a bravura challenge.
There was a time for discretion, and a time for courage. Marthe, smiling, leaned forward, took the glass from Kiaya Khátún’s unresisting hand, and put it down on the pierced ivory table. Her own thin hands were tanned and dark, but in service of her own private vanity scrupulously clean and well tended, so that she was not ashamed to lay her fingertips against the rose-petal softness of Kiaya Khátún’s face. Kiaya Khátún’s eyes, seen close, were not black, but a glossy chestnut, threaded like the rarest lapis with gold, and her breath was as sweet as cherries.
“Are you seducing me?” Marthe said.
“Is it working?” said Kiaya Khátún, her painted eyebrows arched. “I hoped you were thirsty and struck by the sun...”
“Ask me later,” said Marthe, and leaned forward.
Behind her, the lute player drew a lingering chord from the strings, and one of the pages let the bar fall, softly, across the door. Kiaya Khátún’s robes parted, like clouds, under the touch of a fingertip: her body under it was as soft and white as the snow on Mount Ararat, as smoothly rounded as cupolas of a caravanserai. Scent lingered under the curves of her breasts, in the secret folds of her elbows and the hollows of her collarbones, and entwined in the flowering henna patterns of her hands and feet. “In you, a garden...” Marthe said.
As if by right, Kiaya Khátún ran her fingernails from the high neck of Marthe’s kaftan and along the buttoned seam, scored between her breasts, and to the hidden softness of her belly. Her hands were small and strong. In their wake, Marthe felt her breath catch in her throat, the sweat start under her arms, the heated liquid softening between her legs...
“Forgive me, Effendi,” Kiaya Khátún said, and slowly, inexorably, ripped the kaftan apart. Each edge, frayed, swung open. “Oh!” said Kiaya Khátún, “But what small breasts! Sweet, like a boy’s.” Her plundering thumbs, her conniving fingers, delved and dabbled. Sensation was as sharp as glass: Marthe’s nipples as hard as rubies, the slight curves of her breaths suddenly so sensitive every breath of air was as a zephyr from heaven. She dropped her head, panting, and Kiaya Khátún laughed. Marthe was not without recourse. “You hoped for more?” she said, more breathlessly than she would have liked, and twisted, so that she could slide her knee between the opening folds of muslin and Kiaya Khátún’s silk-smooth inner thighs, until they were hip to hip, until she could feel the little shudder of Kiaya Khátún’s breath and the tremble of her ribs against her own belly. Kiaya Khátún was not, God be blessed, as indifferent as she would like to appear. Marthe, emboldened, investigated the hard nipple that lept and tightened between her fingers, the high arch of Kiaya Khátún’s ribs, the softness of her belly and the smooth rise of her pudenda, soft as a girl’s.
“Ah!” panted Kiaya Khátún, twisting, so that Marthe reached to cup her hand where it was wanted, her palm against the beating pearl at the heart of desire.
“Here?” Marthe said, teasing. “Here? Here?” There was such heady triumph in holding another woman’s pleasure at her own fingertips. The thrill of it tightened her own thighs, beat through the pulse and quiver of her own sex.
“Harder!” Kiaya Khátún demanded. Already her hips were rocking, the short, fierce rhythm of a dance that would end only in the sweetest of small deaths.
The sound of the lute faded. There was no page, no bird, no whisper of eunuchs outside the door, no breeze rustling the awning outside the window, only the fierce scent and harsh breath of a woman on the precipice of desire.
Marthe, triumphant, closed her fingers, and Kiaya Khátún convulsed like a pierced gazelle. Colour had suffused her cheeks and flushed her neck and chest, and she was panting, so the jewels at her throat sparked fire and the tassells of pearls in her ears shook, a struck bell. Her hands, opened and flung out, were lax, the pattern of henna in her palms beginning to blur with sweat...
And then she opened her eyes. “So impatient,” Kiaya Khátún said, and crooked a finger. “Come closer, brave heart, let me teach you subtlety.”
She was not young, Kiaya Khátún, and she had long learned to adapt her body to the needs of powerful men. Marthe, as if entering between the gates of paradise, learned to please with fingers, with limber tongue and gentle lips, and then to demand with force. But always – “with grace,” Kiaya Khátún commanded, so that Marthe learned to display their slow-woven sarabande as if to unseen watchers, while the pages, bored, watched the doors, and the blindfolded lute player drew muted chords from muffled strings.
She was not an easy lover, Kiaya Khátún, so that Marthe struggled and triumphed and was overthrown again, and all the while her own body shivered and tremoured, her own desire curbed in service. Until at length Kiaya Khátún, rent and satiated, took mercy and slid between Marthe’s thighs, baring there the curled golden fleece of a fair European, damp and dewed with the evidence of long-denied need.
“Please!” begged Marthe, who never begged.
But Kiaya Khátún was laughing, a small gasp of a laugh. “I cannot,” she said. “It is like vermicelli! Like straw! Lukas, Armaud – to the baths, quick, and call Fatima, tell her to hurry!”
“What?” said Marthe, dazed. The fleeting warmth had gone.
“A wrap, quick – yes, that will do – and slippers-”
“But-”
“Quick! The boys will take you – they will look after you and make all well – these Frankish women! What did she teach you in that mausoleum of a house...?”
She had left her reasoning behind on Kiaya Khátún’s couch. The two pages had hold of her, their hot, soft hands- they were so young, children- making sure she was muffled in the robe and the loosened turban, a makeshift blindfold, her hair hopelessly tangled and caught in the silk. They were leading her along the wooden treads of the balcony and then down the treads of the stairs, then down again, to where the air was only steam, the stone slabs wet under her slippers. Her knees trembled. An older woman’s voice exclaimed, and then laughed. Hands, inexorably neutral, stripped her robe, each touch a shock against her sensitised skin. Desire, thwarted, shook through her. In careful, furious Turkish, naked but for her blindfold, Marthe said, “Be careful. I bite.”
“She speaks!” exclaimed the older woman. “Good. Come, girl, lie back. First the soap, then the plucking - like a chicken!” She cackled.
Resistance, Marthe had already discerned, was useless. Braced, she lay back, and was immediately dosed with a tide of water so hot she gasped. And then, like a cresting wave, the soap, all over, so that she was scrubbed by the rough-gloved hands of strangers. She felt scalded and stripped, while desire still simmered under her skin and ran through her hollowed-out bones. She had never - and then they pulled her legs apart, so that she tried to hide herself, and they had her hands, and someone knelt between her knees, and the worst of the whole was that she would take anything, now, a stranger’s hand, a hostile touch, anything, just to end the tension.
The first pain was the worst. “Now!” the old woman warned, and then the feel of her pubic hair gathered into the smallest sheaf, and – “Ah!” Marthe shouted – ripped from her skin. Pain peaked, subsided, simmered.
“Oh, hush,” scolded the old woman. “Every woman here does this once a week!”
She plucked the next lock of hair. It stung, the worst pain. Then the next, worse yet. Marthe, tormented, clenched her fists and panted. Again. Again. Her plucked skin was so sensitive she felt every breath of air, the rising steam, the brush of the old woman’s robe as she worked. It was torture. How any woman endured, Marthe wondered, because as far as she knew Islam enjoined cleanliness, not hairlessness.
“There. All clean!” exclaimed the old woman, and patted her affectionally. “Perfect for the fastidious one. Be off with her!”
The pages had hold of her again. Marthe was beyond shame, stumbling, clutching the robe. What had she planned? She did not know. Self-awareness, muffled, warned her never to trust, to know where the gate was, her knife, her gold, her own self. One of the pages stumbled. It must have been a long day for them, too, all that watching of walls: Marthe hoped there was some reward for the children. And then hoped, tiredly, that there would be for her too. Do not, she warned herself, misread this game.
The doors closed behind her. She stood, swaying, aware of the mingled scent of sex and ambergris.
“Take off the blindfold,” said Kiaya Khátún, laughing.
Someone had brought the bath, Marthe noted, to Kiaya Khátún. And made up the bed, so that she reposed between white sheets as an angel in paradise, clean and composed, her dark hair replaited and lying in thick coils over her bare shoulders with their trail of fingertip bruises.
“You are a lioness,” Marthe managed, dazzled all over again.
“You should call me Güzel,” said Kiaya Khátún, and opened her arms.