Reign of the Favored Women Read Online Free

his duties. This was the satisfaction he had sought—and gained. No more. No weapons were concealed on this man, or none that Ghazanfer could remove without a castrator’s skill. The eunuch bowed and exited.
    But the attaché’s frenzy continued to climb. He was down to mere hose when the door to the Kira’s back room opened once again to admit the silent bundle of veils and wrappers that is a Turkish woman in public.
    But then she wasn’t in public any longer.
    If I hadn’t guessed before, I knew at the first whiff of jasmine through broken slats who this woman was. I never saw her face, for though veils flew like waves parting before a ship’s prow, Barbarigo devoured her features in his hunger. I saw clearly the frantic collapse onto the room’s narrow cot. The ropes creaked dangerously under their double burden.
    Then I heard the all-too-familiar woman’s crescendo of her lover’s name, her “ Caro mios ,” her “ Amorosos ”. Her yellow kidskin slippers were just a rotted board’s distance from me as they kicked for purchase in her climax.
    Desires I thought had been cut from me rose staggering from the dead. With no place to go, they festered within. I thought I was going to be sick.
III
    An hour later, I was waiting for him in the niche between two shops when he left the Jews’ with his latest orders from the hell-born witch. My dagger was drawn, bejeweled and ceremonial though it was. Hadn’t Ghazanfer done me the khadimly favor of showing me my quarry was unarmed?
    “Barbarigo.” I stated his name.
    My adversary wheeled, still drunk with love. I have known I must fight him since we first came face-to-face, I thought, face-to-face again. Duel him, duel him. The demands of seven years drummed in my head. Mask to mask at Carnival in Foscari’s hall I had confronted him. Sofia Baffo had hardly been able to choose between us. Fate had chosen then; today it would again.
    Barbarigo dropped his hands from their post-coital fussing with sash and codpiece. By God, I would have him dead. He stared at the come-on wink of my dagger as if with long-lost recognition.
    “What?” he said, then stopped. He knew; every man recognizes death’s angel.
    He bolted suddenly. I’d fully expected him to. Though weighted down by my eunuch’s skirts, I was upon him in a moment. I caught him by the sash and flung him hard against the wall of a coppersmith’s shop. The burnished wares clanged together like a kitchen in full smoke and his new-wound turban tumbled to the ground, releasing his eunuch-like Western curls once more. I rammed my dagger through the foppish brocade under his left arm. His liquid brown eyes—I could see my beardless self in them—winced as the point of my blade stopped somewhere between skin and rib.
    Shopmen retreated into their back rooms. No one in Constantinople would lift a finger to stop a eunuch with his dagger bared. When the deed was done, they would reemerge and quietly set things in order again, merely muttering “honor” among themselves with awe rather than anger. To pry more into the matter would be decided bad taste—or decidedly dangerous.
    I slipped my blade, wicking blood to the hilt, through Barbarigo’s flesh, off the rib and down, until the next thing it found would be his heart. And yet I couldn’t drive it home. We stood eye to eye, panting in each other’s exhausted breath.
    “You—” Barbarigo swallowed and tried again, almost smiling with the pleasure to find each word was not his last. “You are the khadim who first brought me to her.”
    I drew my arm back for the lunge at such a lie.
    “You are,” he insisted. “Didn’t you come, telling me she’d borne a son and wanted a priest for him?”
    I couldn’t deny it. And if I acted now upon my impulse, would my part in all of this be exposed?
    Barbarigo had been speaking Turkish to this point. I switched to Venetian, for he could not recognize me as I did him and would have no reason to switch on his ovm.