Read Online The Drowning Guard: A Novel of the Ottoman Empire by Linda Lafferty - Free Book Online Page A

newly applied henna on her wrist. Her skin was cool and damp, a pale blue white. With the supervision of two eunuchs, and wild-eyed scrutiny from the patient herself, the physician probed the Princess’s abdomen. There was no evidence of pain from the pressure of his fingers.
    Princess Esma pushed his hand from her belly, agitated at his touch. She threw the linen sheet over her nose, her eyes rolling back in her head.
    “The stink of rotten flesh haunts me,” she cried. “How can you not abhor it? Are you all fiends? My tongue can taste the stench, it is so thick!”
    The old doctor said nothing.
    “I dream of the Bosphorus choked with flesh. Heads bob in the current likemelons thrown into the sea! Angels plunge into the brine and though they flap their wings desperately, they cannot lift their souls to heaven.”
    The physician waited, silent. When she seemed a little calmer, he whispered to her. “We must speak in private, Esma Sultan.”
    The Princess looked up from her pillow, creasing her brow. But she waved away the guard and her handmaiden, though the Head Eunuch Saffron refused to leave, folding his massive arms over his chest in a stance of defiance.
    The Greek physician nodded and waited until the other servants had left the great room.
    “When you were born, it was the worst year of the Angel of Death,” he began. “A third of Constantinople died from the plague and there seemed to be no hope for any of us. You were born, a blessing, a girl. You would not have to compete with your brothers to be Sultan. The harem rejoiced at the birth of a beautiful daughter they could bathe and spoil.”
    “What good is it to be a mere woman?” cried Esma, throwing her head back on the embroidered silk cushion. “To be married and remain behind a harem wall? It is to be held prisoner from womb to grave and never be truly born. And if it were not for my husband’s death, I should live the same fate.”
    “Yes. It is highly unusual for a princess never to remarry, especially more than a decade after the loss of her husband. You confound all of Constantinople.”
    “I would rather have my head on a stake gawking at the fishmongers outside Topkapi than to ever take another husband.”
    “A daughter is spared the ugliness of a man’s world,” replied the doctor, scratching at his beard. “That was Mohammed’s command, was it not, to remain sequestered from the rougher, more brutal sex?”
    “You dare quote the Prophet to me, you Greek? Our Prophet demanded men’s respect of women, not sequestration! Besides… I saw, old physician. I saw enough brutality for a lifetime.”
    The doctor considered.
    “Perhaps you should tell me what you saw.”
    The Princess covered her mouth with a kerchief but spoke through the cloth, her voice muffled.
    “I saw the murder of my uncle, Selim. He took refuge in the harem and the murderers dragged him out to the courtyard and butchered him under the lime tree. They hacked him to bits with their scimitars. The blood splattered and puddled, clinging to the leaves where I used to play.”
    “You indeed saw too much, Princess. A woman should never see these things. She hasn’t the constitution.”
    She raised up on her pillow, supporting her weight on her forearm.
    “The constitution? Your words mock me and all women! I watched an old slave woman save my brother in an oven when they came to murder him. There is my constitution! When they learned of her cunning, I watched three of the animals rape her, to pay for her loyalty to the Sultan’s family. A servant woman who saved a male Ottoman! No assistance from men, no protection!”
    “All of the Ottomans seem doomed to suffer,” mused the doctor. “But I come to you to heal your condition.”
    The doctor hesitated. “If you belonged to my religion, I would tell you to confess your sins against God to the Patriarch priest. Then you would at last have rest in your confession and be at peace with God.”
    A great silence filled