OTTOMAN EMPIRE 1472
AFTER SEVERAL LONG HOURS in the sultan’s library, I went to soak in the hammam.
I was painstakingly translating Ptolemy into Turkish at the behest of Mehmed himself, who had summoned me from Athens upon hearing of my linguistic capabilities – so advanced for a boy of seventeen. My head was a wrung-out dishrag after a day of slow writing, and I longed to steam away the intellectual rigour of the task.
It was late afternoon, and the külliye thrummed with activity. I strolled past the domed central prayer hall – arched with bands of coloured stone and mosaic tiles – and the pretty arcaded courtyards with babbling fountains, then past the cluster of madrasas, where my new friend Raziye was teaching a class on the Islamic sciences.
Beyond the campus lay the whole of Constantinople.
The sultan’s mosque was built upon the high spine of the city, and everything within the city walls unfurled below – neat gardens and small farms, domes and colonnades and great monuments, towering marble columns topped with bronze statues and gilded crosses, and the jewel in the sultan’s crown: Hagia Sophia herself.
When I’d first arrived by sea, Constantinople was a fairy tale. A glorious marble palace was built into the sea wall, dotted with countless balconies and grand statues of sea beasts, and it felt like I had entered a storybook. Now I understood the depths of the poverty in the place, the way the poor lived in the narrow cracks between the rich like ants in the grout between tiles, the way disease spread like a flash flood and hunger gnawed at the bones of children.
All great empires were the same, at the heart of them.
Still, I sucked in lungfuls of cypress-tinged air, the scent laced with lemon and jasmine and Mehmed’s favourite honey-pistachio baklava, and smiled inwardly. I had only been here for a few months, but the seven-hilled city was starting to feel like home.
The changing room in the hammam was cool and quiet. At the centre was a marble fountain, ringed with wooden galleries in which several members of the sultan’s Porte relaxed with tea, coffee and sherbet beneath the vaulted mosaic ceiling. The air was a mingling of heady perfumes: bergamot and patchouli, cedarwood and citronella, lavender and neroli. The pegs were hung with some of the finest garments I had ever seen – jewel-toned kaftans of brocade and velvet, taffeta and cashmere, embroidered with metallic thread in motifs of flowers and branches and endless knots, suns and moons and stars. I was at once painfully aware of my good fortune, and profoundly grateful that I had not spent another life begging for scraps on the streets of Yerevan.
The men’s hammam was fogged with steam, and the main bath was empty but for a cluster of the sultan’s advisers talking in low voices, so I slipped into one of the smaller domed chambers notched between the iwan corners. Sparks of pain shot up and down my wrist and into my thumb – the perils of too long spent writing – and I shook them away with a grudging wince.
After steeping in the sensual heat of the water for a few moments, another young man of around my age climbed into the private bath with me.
Immediately I sat more upright, averting my gaze to the small woven basket he had set down. It contained a key purse, perfumes and a comb studded with mother-of-pearl. A richly embroidered towel was laid over the top, along with an extraordinarily thick-lensed pair of fogged eyeglasses.
‘Merhaba,’ he greeted me, running his hands along the tiles as he submerged his torso in the water. ‘Apologies if I bump into you. I am almost entirely blind.’
I nodded a subtle acknowledgement, before realizing that was useless to him. ‘Merhaba.’
‘I hope you do not mind the company,’ he went on. ‘Only, I have not spoken to another soul all day long.’
‘Not at all,’ I replied, my Turkish smooth and natural. I would always favour good company over solitude.
There was something familiar about the boy – his deep-brown eyes, his close-cropped hair, his beaked nose and his high cheekbones flecked with beauty spots. Had I seen him at an ulamā chamber, perhaps? He seemed too young.
He rested his head against the edge of the bath and sighed into the warmth. ‘Have you ever thought about how many trees are felled just to power the hammam’s furnace? Sooner or later, we will be using wood faster than the earth can grow it. Although we have recently begun to use olive pits and sawdust as fuel, and they seem to work adequately enough.’
Leaning my head back until it was submerged in the water, I ran my fingers through my hair and sat back up. ‘You work in the hammam?’
‘No, but I have a deep compassion for the world around me.’ He rested his arms along the ridge of the bath, making no effort to wash himself with the soaps and scrapers he had brought with him. ‘The cycle of nature, of flora and fauna, of growth and death. Our earth is the most precious thing we have. We do not think enough about protecting it.’
Perhaps due to the heat in the bathhouse, the softness of his tone or the very nakedness of our bodies, the moment seemed oddly intimate, as though he had confessed something expressly vulnerable.
My eyes went once again to the toiletry basket; something about it had snagged my attention. A brown leather-bound notebook tied with a slender red ribbon, the whole thing no larger than a pocket square. Next to it lay a narrow pen made of intricately patterned reed.
That was when I knew.
In every life in which it was possible, Arden carried a notebook. In all his centuries, he had likely written more words than he had spoken aloud. He’d once told me, on a canal boat in Venezia, that a thought did not become real to him until written in ink.
‘Arden,’ I whispered.
His shoulders tensed almost imperceptibly, ripples of muscle twitching on the boned ridges. ‘Quite. Although here I am Emir.’ A light snort. ‘You are beginning to know me rather well, even though most of our encounters have been as short as they were fraught.’
Nerves flooded my body, and our familiar banter slid from my tongue unbidden. ‘I admit I am glad to see the back of the Wars of the Roses.’
He tilted his head in my direction. ‘Mmmm. Though I do wonder how it all worked out.’
Arden, here, naked, beside me .
Our bodies, mere feet apart, bare for each other’s eyes to roam, more vulnerable and exposed than we had ever been before each other. I wondered just how much of me he could truly see. Had the tether led him so easily to me despite his dim vision?
Tucking my feet up on to the seating ledge – legs covering my chest and heels covering elsewhere – I asked, ‘Do you really serve the sultan, then? Or are you only here to kill me?’
He gave me a wry smile. ‘The sultan commissioned me to illuminate a muraqqa of the stories of the devil Iblīs.’
My brow furrowed in confusion as I thought of how detailed the miniature paintings were – how intricate and precise the calligraphy. ‘But you have poor eyesight.’
‘Indeed. It was a shock to me when I was summoned. I think the sultan really wants me for his seraglio.’
The royal harem.
Arden’s expression betrayed no emotion; he was getting better at concealing his feelings.
Still, I caught the flicker of dread as he added, ‘The High Porte have been grooming me rather heavy-handedly.’
A barb of jealousy spiked my heart. Mehmed famously had a taste for young noblemen. Trying to disguise how protective I felt of him, I asked casually, ‘Will you go?’
His jaw was tight as he answered, ‘I might not have much choice.’
The revelation sat between us for a few moments, as potent and tangible as the perfumed steam. Questions rattled through my mind, chaotic and unclear. Was he only staying here because of me? Would he kill me sooner, to free himself from the situation? And, most ridiculously of all –
‘Have you ever …’ I started, but trailed off, throat dry.
He quirked an eyebrow at me, as though he knew exactly what I was trying to glean from him. ‘Ever what?’
‘Made love.’ The words sounded simultaneously crass and childish, and my cheeks pinkened. ‘To anyone, in any life.’
‘For coin, yes,’ he said flatly. ‘You?’
I shook my head, feeling like an almighty fool. Of course Arden was no virgin. Still, the thought of him being so intimate with another person … It should not have felt like a betrayal, but it did.
Plucking a bar of lilac soap from his basket, I began scrubbing at my chest in an attempt to dispel the awkwardness that had descended. ‘How did you convince Mehmed to summon me from Athens? How did you know I was there, let alone of my skills?’
‘I did not.’
I blinked, the soap suspended above my shoulder. ‘You mean …?’
‘Fate brought us together, this time. Not I.’
The thought was strangely moving. I looked up at the painting behind Arden’s head: a depiction of a group of nude women bathing in a hammam not unlike this one.
‘Do you believe?’ I asked, vaguely aware that I was interrogating him. ‘Not just in fate, but … in God, I suppose. Any of them.’
As he adjusted himself on the seating ledge, I battled the urge to look down at the lean lines of his body. The dark hair on his chest. The hard grooves of his hips.
‘I am not sure,’ he said. ‘If I had been born here and only here, I think I would devote myself to Allah. The teachings are beautiful, and I often find myself swept away on their current. But I was not born only here. And what happens to us … it defies the teachings of the Qu’ran.’
I rubbed at my neck with the soap. ‘In what sense?’
‘Well, the fact we reincarnate, for a start. We do not lie in our graves awaiting our Day of Judgement. And there’s the mechanics of it all. For Muslims – and Christians, too – the soul is breathed into the body by God at some point shortly after conception.’
‘Whereas we seem to die in one life and be born into another almost instantaneously?’ I mused. ‘Our souls never seem to exist in a womb.’
‘Exactly.’ He once again stared up at the mosaicked vaults and domes of the ceiling, eyes blurred and unfocused. ‘I’ve been tracking our births and deaths over these last few centuries, and they are usually within moments of each other. Which would suggest, then, that a soul is born at first breath.’
‘What about the other major religions? Do we fit neatly inside any of them?’
A subtle shake of his head. ‘Elements of us, yes. But not us in our entirety. In Judaism, as in Islam and Christianity, the soul transcends to a kind of afterlife, which we obviously do not. For Hindus, souls are infinite. Their energy has existed since the dawn of time, and they’re reincarnated from one life to another. Thus, all souls are bound to sa?sāra – the infinite cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.’
‘Like us,’ I said triumphantly.
‘Like us, but not like us.’ There was something wistful to his expression. ‘Hindus also believe that souls are continually reincarnated in different physical forms according to the law of karma. At the time of death, the sum total of karma determines our status in the next life. Human or beast.’
‘We’re always human.’ I reached into his basket and retrieved the mother-of-pearl comb, dragging it through my wavy hair.
‘We are. And our standing in the next life appears entirely random, no matter what atrocities we commit against each other.’ His hand curled into a fist at the thought of it. ‘If karma had a bearing, we would surely be locusts by now. Buddhists believe in reincarnation, but not that there is an eternal, unchanging soul that transmigrates from one life to the next. It is more a flame of consciousness, heavily influenced by morality and karmic energy.’
Dropping my comb-bearing hand into the water, I let all of this sink in. ‘So, theologically speaking, we should not exist.’
The idea was profoundly lonely, that our existence fell outside the beliefs of most of the world’s population. It made me feel wrong, somehow. Shunned by the gods, broken in a way that could not be mended by worship or prayer.
Alone, but not alone. Because there was always Arden.
And together we were sacrilege.
As though to escape the weight of the moment, Arden submerged himself underwater, running his hands over his head and face, then breaking the surface once more.
All at once, I wanted to be held by him. I wanted to press our warm, clean, perfumed bodies together. I wanted to mourn together and hope together. I wanted to be together , in all the ways it was possible to be so. A clashing of mouths, a tangling of limbs, his hands on my body and mine on his. I wanted – oh, how I wanted – to feel our existential pain melt away beneath his touch.
Truth be told, I had wanted it for centuries. I had burned for it.
And centuries were a long time to spend burning.
This being has slaughtered you more times than you can count , I reminded myself fiercely. You have slaughtered each other, and still you know not why.
But my traitorous body would not listen to logic.
In this crooked universe, there was only me and Arden.
For the thousandth time, I longed to ask him why he did this to us over and over again, but I knew he would shut down. There would be no answers. Not today, and perhaps not ever. But it was comforting to know he too agonized over the how .
His hand started to rummage in the basket for something, and with a snap I realized he needed his comb – which was still in my curled hand.
‘Here,’ I said roughly. ‘Let me.’
Without allowing myself the luxury of forethought, I slid along the seating ledge and began combing his short black hair. As the spokes glided over his scalp, he let out an almost imperceptible shudder, then swallowed so hard his throat bobbed. He moved towards me, only a few inches, the water shifting around his body. The heat of him pressed against me, even though we did not touch.
As I combed, a strange kind of urgency came over me, somewhere between panic and possessiveness.
Soon, he would belong to the sultan. Every inch of his body, his mind, his soul.
But I wanted him to be mine.
Blood rushed and pulsed through my body, and I was dizzy with it. Laying the comb on the tiles, I leaned over and cupped a hand around his neck.
His eyes fluttered shut, and he hung his head against my wrist.
‘Evelyn, I … I can’t …’
‘Why not?’ I urged, unexpectedly fierce.
Breathlessly, his hand went to my side, his skin somehow both warmer and colder than the bathwater. Part of me expected a blade to my ribs, but it was only the hard-softness of his palm. ‘You know what I have to do.’
I leaned in, until our lips were mere breaths apart. ‘So don’t.’
His grip on my ribs tightened, desperate and raw, and I let out the smallest of gasps – shocked by how deep and masculine the sound was. In his throat, a frantic pulse thudded against my palm.
As our lips finally touched, soft and hard and desperate, every inch of me shivered before igniting into flame, and his tongue flickered over mine and I moaned.
My hand went to his hip, the edge of my thumb nestling into the crease between thigh and inguina, and as the coarse breath slipped from his throat, there was a gathering in my lower belly. A pulsing of desire, deep and pristine and singular. His lips went to my jaw, my throat, and I was almost dizzy with the need to feel him inside me.
There was only one thought on my mind, bright and sharp as an emerald:
I have never wanted anything more.
Then, behind us, a cleared throat.
Folded arms. Livid grimace. Around a thick waist, an embroidered towel finer than any other.
The sultan.