His feet move him at the pace of his thoughts, carrying him past glazed windows, frescoed walls, the opened and closing shutters of unfamiliar thoroughfares. No matter which way it roams or how far, his mind returns always to the same location: the girl Perina, the question that her existence poses. How is it possible? How is it possible? How is it possible?
He and the Lark left Nicosia some nine months before it fell, almost two years before their fathers and brothers died at Famagusta. The news came while the fleet was at anchor at Guiscardo, about to sail inland for fresh water. The Lark had been scraping the pan of his arquebus, blowing down its barrel. We have just gotten word, my boys, that Famagusta has fallen. Captain Bua on the quarterdeck, his voice quaking with rage. General Bragadin, God rest his soul, surrendered to Lala Mustafa with honor. And that son of a whore, he cut off his nose and his ears. The infidel savages flayed him alive, they stuffed his skin with straw, they paraded it through the streets on the back of a cow. And they will suffer heartily, my boys, for what they have done. The expression on the Lark’s face—anguished, frightened, furious, thrilled—echoed the contents of his own heart. Fatherless now. The last of their clans. Both thirteen years old.
Until today he has never once tried to imagine what it must have been like for the women: searching the harbor at Kyrenia for some Genoese or Ragusan captain willing to make arrangements, then crushed in the dark hold of a rolling ship among splintered crates and bolts of cloth, palms clamped over their children’s wet faces, because what if the Turks were to hear? During the sack of Tunis in 1574, word got round to Crivano’s orta that the wife of a Spanish officer had barricaded herself and her five daughters in a house on the harbor’s edge. The taunting janissaries took an hour to break her door, by which time the wife had smashed each young skull with a belaying pin and slit her own throat. What stories did young Perina hear from the downturned mouths of her mother and sister before the plague came for them? What might she remember of those stories now? How is it possible?
Could Narkis know about her? It seems unlikely. If he did, why would he care? A pure product of the Ottoman boy-tribute system, he’s always seemed perplexed by the tangle of agnatic bonds that defines the Frankish world. I come from Macedonia, from high in the mountains. Before the Ottomans took me, I had never seen a church, or a mosque. I had seen no writing of any kind. I had not seen gold, or glass. Now I have traveled to Mecca, to Punjab, to Kathmandu, to China. I do not think of my family. If they ever try to think of me, then they have no way of understanding what it is I have become. Likewise, Narkis could hardly understand what Perina signifies to Crivano. But what does Perina signify? If none but Crivano himself can say, can she be made to mean whatever he wishes? Can she be said to mean anything at all?
What if the haseki sultan knows? The idea stops him in his tracks, as if the wall he walks beside has just collapsed to reveal an unsuspected maze of hidden passageways; for an instant he’s lost, dislodged from whatever current has been guiding his mindless path through the streets. A short while ago he crossed a bridge. Was it the bridge behind the house of the Garzoni, or the one behind the Corner palace? He dithers for a moment at a constricted junction until a pack of revelers—four wigged and rouged young men wearing ladies’ gowns, in pursuit of a plump fifth diapered like a baby and otherwise nude—charges around the north fork and scrambles past him. Crivano spits a curse at their backs, continues the way they came.