The Mirror Thief(80)

Could Narkis know about her? It seems unlikely. If he did, why would he care? A pure product of the Ottoman boy-tribute system, he’s always seemed perplexed by the tangle of agnatic bonds that defines the Frankish world. I come from Macedonia, from high in the mountains. Before the Ottomans took me, I had never seen a church, or a mosque. I had seen no writing of any kind. I had not seen gold, or glass. Now I have traveled to Mecca, to Punjab, to Kathmandu, to China. I do not think of my family. If they ever try to think of me, then they have no way of understanding what it is I have become. Likewise, Narkis could hardly understand what Perina signifies to Crivano. But what does Perina signify? If none but Crivano himself can say, can she be made to mean whatever he wishes? Can she be said to mean anything at all?

What if the haseki sultan knows? The idea stops him in his tracks, as if the wall he walks beside has just collapsed to reveal an unsuspected maze of hidden passageways; for an instant he’s lost, dislodged from whatever current has been guiding his mindless path through the streets. A short while ago he crossed a bridge. Was it the bridge behind the house of the Garzoni, or the one behind the Corner palace? He dithers for a moment at a constricted junction until a pack of revelers—four wigged and rouged young men wearing ladies’ gowns, in pursuit of a plump fifth diapered like a baby and otherwise nude—charges around the north fork and scrambles past him. Crivano spits a curse at their backs, continues the way they came.

He met the haseki sultan only once. Her summons arrived some months prior to his first encounter with Narkis, and Crivano thought nothing of it at the time: she was negotiating with a group of Genoese bankers and needed an interpreter’s services. I have heard favorable reports about you, Messer Crivano. The sound of that old name on the air—not Tarjuman, the name the viziers had given him—raised gooseflesh under his fine new caftan. You were born in Cyprus, yes? Tell me about that.

Even in middle age she was relentlessly beautiful, nestled like a jewel among her cushions. Her scarlet entari worked with gold thread, the g?mlek that billowed from her sleeves sheer as spidersilk. Terrifying. Grotesque. Like anything made beautiful by pure necessity must be. And after the fleet returned from Tunis, your orta went east to fight the Safavids, is that so? A full hour of questions, each one put to him in his native tongue. Her speech inelegant and tedious, but clear, and free from errors. The Genoese bankers never arrived; in time, Crivano was dismissed. Practice, he assumed. Although he never could decide whether the haseki sultan was practicing a language new to her, or one from years before that she’d forgotten. He’d heard the rumors, of course: the sultan’s favorite concubine was the daughter of one of the Republic’s most ancient families, installed in the harem after being abducted by pirates from a family galley when she was little more than a child. Crivano had always found the tale difficult to believe. Having now spoken with her, he figured her more plausibly as the issue of Dalmatian fisherfolk than any sort of displaced Frankish noble. Still, it was remarkable, wasn’t it, how rapidly the sultan’s favor turned toward the Republic after this girl bore him a healthy son?

So the rumors persisted. And always at their margins, in whispers that were not even whispers, a more profound fantasy lurked. If this haseki sultan truly was a child of the Republic, wasn’t it possible—however remotely—that her supposed abduction had been orchestrated from the outset by the Council of Ten? That an unlikely ploy to place one of their operatives inside the harem had succeeded beyond their wildest hopes? That their girlish spy had risen to become the Turks’ de facto empress, and had birthed the sultan his heir? It was marvelous and perverse to imagine: where for centuries all the armies of Christendom had been thwarted, this once-nubile creature had prevailed. Small wonder Lepanto could be so easily forgotten.

A ridiculous scenario. But like a weaving drunkard measuring his steps, the more Crivano tries to steer his mind away, the more insistently it returns. If it were so—and it couldn’t be—what would it mean for him? If the long puppet-strings that guide his movements do not terminate in Constantinople, but merely round the pulley of the haseki sultan to end somewhere in the darkening streets he now treads, how would that change the nature of his mission? Where might the unknown architect of this peculiar conspiracy have placed Perina in its structure? How is it possible?

However Crivano tries to conceive the plot, it refuses to hold a shape, and remains formless as a gob of spit. What preoccupies him in these speculations about the haseki sultan—in these conjectures about a woman who, so far as he can judge, simply hungers after flat mirrors and intends to see them manufactured by her subjects—are the echoes of his own story he hears in them. A child of the Republic sails the pirate-haunted seas, there to be redirected and transformed. A Christian child bows toward Mecca; who can say what is in that child’s heart? When, after many years, the child encounters a face from home, what recognitions occur? Which are disallowed? Which can be evaded?

How is it possible? It’s a stupid question. The girl’s existence seems improbable only because he’s never considered that it could be the case. He went so long without news of home or family, without giving them a thought. He had to. His eventual freedom depended on it, on his seeming indifference. When he needed signposts and antecedents, he never sought them in the world, but only in myths and fancies half-remembered from his childhood, refashioned according to his momentary need. He always found them. Was his indifference only seeming? If so, what did it conceal? These are better questions, but they slide from his attention like quicksilver on an ointment slab, and he’s disinclined to pursue them.