An Evil Eye

55

Far up the Bosphorus, the pages who watched the tapers in the sultan’s chamber nodded drowsily. The young sultan, almost stifled by the weight of the great brocade across his bed, dreamed about women and ships.

On the floors above, some seventy women lay asleep. Talfa sprawled hugely across a divan, her black slave flat on her back on the floor at her feet, snoring. Overhead, Bezmialem’s pretty eyelids flickered as she dreamed, not for the first time, of the moment she had turned back the quilt and started creeping up between the old sultan’s mottled thighs. On divans in other rooms, girls slept in a tangle of beautiful limbs, like puppies; lips parted, fingers unfurled, unguarded. What were their dreams, as they stirred and whimpered in the dark? They dreamed of the Circassian hills, no doubt; and of sheep bells and gunshots in the ravines; they dreamed of jewels and soap; of jealousies and love: galleries of dreamers, every one of them following the moving images that flitted innocently behind their eyelids.

Not quite everyone, perhaps. Here and there, a sigh, a moving hand, a caress: for love, too, has its place in the gallery, in the darkness. And what of fear? Of eyes that stare in the dark, of rigid limbs, cold hands, and the icy clutch on the heart among those unfortunates who hardly dare to sleep? They must be counted among the seventy.

Ibou, the chief black eunuch, tries to lift that obscurity with a burning lamp: he, too, is not asleep. He wakes, rises, and lights the lamp to sit with his head bowed, wearily padding in his mind from floor to floor, from room to room, trying to remember everything he has seen, trying to forecast everything that may occur. Now and then his hand drops to the little plate beside him, and he pops another sweetmeat into his mouth, and chews.