The Kadin - Bertrice Small [112]
At that moment the people loved their stern sultan, and he could do no wrong. They cheered him as he rode off to war and the beginnings of Turkey’s greatest conquests. How could they realize that eaten with cancer, his personality would change for the worse, and he would be renamed Selim the Grim—the title that fickle history would perpetuate?
In her heavily curtained litter, the noise of the crowd adding to the pain in her already throbbing temples, reclined the bas-kadin. Cyra did not want to make this trip, and despite the fact that past Ottoman women had accompanied their lords into battle, she was of the firm opinion that women did not belong on the batüefield.
Zuleika had insisted upon going to personally claim her vengeance, and so Cyra must go, too, lest the people misunderstand the sultan’s taking Zuleika, and her own future position be jeopardized and weakened.
It was not that she didn’t wish to be with Selim—she did—but at this moment she was annoyed with him. Of late he had ignored his kadins in favor of an overblown French ikbal who pandered to his dark moods. When they returned to Constantinople, the girl would be dead. Cyra had personally seen to that.
She had not done it out of jealousy or with malice, but because the girl had flaunted her small yet favored position to all in the harem, with particular emphasis in the direction of the kadins. Selim would have grown tired of her soon enough, but in the meantime the girl’s rudeness might be emulated by others.
She was not a bright creature, or she would have known better, and Cyra fully expected her to give Firousi and Sarina trouble, but it would not be for long. She would one day soon be given small doses of poison in her food, sicken slowly, and it would appear that she had died a natural death.
In all her years in Turkey, Cyra had arranged a death only once before—long ago in those early days at the Moonlight Serai. She had always tried to win her point with reason, and it distressed her to have ordered a death. However, she reasoned, the Frenchwoman was a troublemaker and must be disposed of lest she influence the other girls in the harem to similar acts of disobedience.
The baby, Karim, stirred in the crook of her arm and whimpered. Unbuttoning her blouse, she put him to her breast It annoyed her to take her five-month-old son on this long trip, but when Selim had suggested she leave him with a wet muse, she had turned on him like a tigress. It was no secret to those in the imperial household that the bas-kadin’s youngest child was her favorite.
Six-month-old Mahpeyker also accompanied her mother, because Cyra had insisted Karim have a playmate of his own age. Zuleika, though amused at the idea of the two infants playing, had not dared to laugh, for she knew that without Cyra’s presence she herself would not have been allowed to go. With unusual good nature, for she cheerfully would have left her daughter with a nurse, she, too, traveled with her child.
As the army made its progress through Asia, Cyra noted a change taking place in Zuleika. In the twenty-two years they had been together, the beautiful Chinese had rarely permitted her emotions to show. The bas-kadin liked and admired her friend, but she had always suspected that as happy as Zuleika was as Selim’s third kadin, she had never been able to forgive fate for the insult it had dealt to her pride, even though it had gained her that happiness.
Now, as they drew close to Persia, Zuleika allowed her thoughts to drift backward in time, and spoke for the first time in many years of the events which had made her a sultan’s third wife, rather than a shah’s first. For the slave who was now queen mother of Persia, she had nothing but contempt For the old shah’s concubine, Shannez, her hatred burned hot The sultan had promised Zuleika that she might name their