American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [43]
She thought she might start to cry but she didn’t.
So you are a shaman, he said, holding her close.
Your shaman, she said.
1623
The festivities ended and Hyacinth accompanied Parvin back to the palace. He brought her to the Sultan’s chambers where Kaya was waiting for her, and they had no privacy in which to say good-bye. They didn’t know when they would be able to see each other again. As he was leaving, he pressed a rose petal into her palm.
When Parvin opened her hand and looked at the bruised petal, Kaya clucked and told her to forget him.
“They say you are going to be a Haseki,” said Kaya, “the Sultan’s favorite. Then you will never go back to the Old Palace.”
“How can I be a Haseki? The Sultan knows I don’t like him. I’m just the one he enjoys right now. As long as I don’t have his baby, I’ll be safe.”
“Believe what you like,” said Kaya, brushing Parvin’s hair. “But the talk in the Valide Sultan’s suite is that you will be a Haseki. Cheer up. You’re going to be rich.”
2005
Now it was dark. You could hear the faraway sounds of cars and the heaving of trucks going by in the night if you listened, but Honor and Milo weren’t listening to anything but the story. They were working in the dark, following a moonlit trail, hunters in a green-black deepening forest, fishermen at sea.
Do you think she and Hyacinth will be together? she asked.
No, he said. This story is tragic. The Sultan will keep them apart.
Will she end up with Avedis?
Then his love won’t be unrequited, and I told you, this one is tragic.
No, it would be. She loves Hyacinth.
1623
One day a eunuch arrived to take her to Avedis’s workshop. It was an important occasion. None other than the Sultan himself was going to be present. The eunuch, who was not Hyacinth, explained that, as he understood it, although Avedis had not entirely completed his project for the Sultan it was almost finished and the metalsmith had requested to have Parvin dance for him in order to make the final touches and that the Sultan had only agreed to such a meeting if he were in attendance, because of course no one could view her dance without the express permission of the Sovereign. Parvin only half listened to the eunuch as he babbled on and didn’t think to mention that she was in no mood to dance or that the thought of seeing that strange and unhelpful Alchemist again reminded her of the day that Hyacinth had stopped her from jumping out of the carriage. She missed him. She pulled her silk skirts tightly in her delicate hand and lifting her feet softly followed behind the eunuch as he skittered and wobbled across the palace grounds to Avedis’s workshop. At one point she turned around to look for her love because she thought that she could sense his presence, but she saw nothing except lonely gardens, and she had no idea that she had missed him by an instant. His dark shape was hidden in the shadow of a wall, not twenty feet away from her.
Avedis had prepared an elaborate presentation, during which he said, as he told them what he was going to say, that he would reveal to them how he had discovered the secret formula for the making of cymbals. Not just any cymbals, but the ideal cymbals, the gleaming discs from which would ring the celestial music of the spheres. He stood up in his workshop, the dim light filtering through glass jars filled with jewel-colored liquids and flickering off the bronze cups lining the shelves reflecting onto him in a deep coppery color that made him appear like a bronze statue come to life. He was a tall, thin, wizardish-looking man with the unconsciously haughty and slightly silly air of an aspiring academic. He wore a long beard that lengthened his already long face and made his kind, sincere, searching eyes appear to be floating even higher in the lofty realm of the mystical than they actually were. He possessed a ridiculous hopefulness and his heart was visible on his face and Parvin, after getting over her disgust at having to sit beside the Sultan with her hand on his broad knee,