“Every spring for many years I watch this poor woman get sick without a sickness,” he said, his voice barely louder than the rasp of sand grains against the window. “I’m tired of watching. I’ll tell you where the nestinari are dancing if you promise to take her.”
I hadn’t even noticed when he’d gotten up from his chair and come to ours, but Baba Mina held his hand now, against her cheek, then kissed it.
“And what if you tell me?” I said. “We have no car to get there.”
“Then leave the way you came here.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant this, or if he was trying to trick me.
“On the village bus? The driver will never take us.”
Then I could see his lips stretching and his dentures shining like they were made of the fire. “Why bother to ask him?”
EIGHT
IT SO HAPPENED, SIX CENTURIES AGO, that Murad the Godlike One — he who first called himself sultan, he who defeated a great many peoples, seized their land, and made from his Ottoman tribe a mighty empire — fell in love with a Bulgarian maiden and desired to wed her.
Murad’s armies had conquered Adrianople and turned it into their capital city. There in Adrianople, the Godlike One plotted his European expansion. The Byzantines were already paying him tribute, and their turn to meet him in battle would come soon, but it was other wars Murad needed to plot first — with Bulgarians, Serbians, Magyars. Not a fortnight before, he had sent his spies into the land of the Bulgars and now the spies were recounting — such and such strongholds, such and such armies. Only one of them was gloomy, and when the sultan addressed him, the man began weeping. “I weep for you, my lord,” he said, “because I love you. You may conquer the world one day, but what good is this if you never see them?” And the spy told him: where a mighty river flowed into the Black Sea, where the sands were the color of Makassar ebony, beautiful women danced barefoot in the fire and the fire did not burn them. “No, my lord, the flame makes them so pretty it is for them that I weep now. For I shall never again see them.”
For days all Murad saw were the bare feet of maidens dancing on live coals. The feet, white and puffy, raised sparks in his mind and like tired birds these sparks landed on his heart and burned it. Soon enough, the great sultan was standing aboard a fast boat, and three hundred other boats followed behind him. At the place where a mighty river flowed into the Black Sea there was a village and in no time its elders were bowing before the sultan. “I’ve come to see the women dancing,” he told them, “so start the fires!”
A thin crescent hung in the sky by the time the wood had turned to embers. And since Murad’s feet never touched land that the blood of his men had not made pure first, he waited in the boat, right by the black shore. No wind stirred the night and only the sea sighed deeply. Sorrow filled the sultan’s heart. He had accomplished so little and there was still so much more that needed doing. As it happened with each nightfall, his grandfathers rose within him, lustful for conquests, and began to pull him eagerly in a thousand directions. How tired he was. How weary. And if Allah had come to ask him what he wanted, in this very moment, he would have said, “A sigh of rest, Almighty, in a boat by a black shore, waiting for beautiful women.”
A drum began beating in the night; a bagpipe joined it. So deep had the sultan sunk in thought that he hadn’t noticed anyone coming. And so it seemed to him now that the flame took flesh — a girl in a white robe, with her hair so long it almost touched the embers and white like the bones of the world. Then the girl gave out a loud shriek, and when she threw back her head her hair really swept the embers; its ends crackled and the stench of battle filled the air.
This was an omen, Murad knew. But good or bad, he wasn’t certain. More girls rose from the fire and he watched them carry their infidel icons, jumping and thrashing, crying like flame birds from the Arabian Desert. Soon he didn’t see the others — only the girl with the white hair.
He could not wait for the dance to be over. He waved to his soldiers to stop the drum from beating, the bagpipe from shrieking, and he called the girl to come near. Yet the girl wouldn’t listen. She kept spinning and turning and so the sultan ordered his men to bring her over. Embers had stuck to her bare feet, to her long gown, and when she waded into the sea the water hissed and smoke rose in thick puffs.
What fool, she said angrily in his language, dares stop my drum from beating? What fool pulls my girl out of the fire?
For such words, many a head would have rolled already. But Murad only smiled softly. “Get in the boat,” he told her, “I’m taking you with me.” The girl’s hair floated around her, like a thing living, and for a moment the sultan watched it. A strange feeling bloomed in his heart — that he had met this girl before, that he had always known her. When next he looked up, more girls in white gowns had surrounded his boat like jellyfish flocking.
These are my girls, one of them said to his left, and then another: And if you want one, I’ll let you have her.
On one condition, a girl said to his right, and to his left a girl repeated, Yes, yes, on one condition.
They’re mad, Murad was thinking, an evil jinn has possessed them. But he could not look away from the girl with the white hair.
Give her a drum, some other girl uttered.
Give her a bagpipe, cried another, though which one he couldn’t tell rightly — they all spoke too quickly.
Let her finish her dancing.
Yes, yes, don’t wake her before the dance has finished.
And when you conquer the Bulgars …
… slay them all if you wish to …
… but the land my girl crosses dancing …
… you must swear to protect it.
You must allow my girls to do their dancing.
Swear it, they cried. Swear it!
And before Murad knew it, he, the Godlike One, the first great sultan, had sworn an oath for the ages.
* * *
“Whatever land the dancing girl crossed in her trance, he would protect it. The Christians who lived on it would be allowed to keep their churches; the nestinari to do their dancing. They would pay almost no taxes. And when a Turk reached their border he dismounted and his horse was unshoed at a smithy. Then he led it on foot to the other side, to another smithy, where the shoes were nailed back on. All this they wrote down in a firman. And the land the girl crossed dancing they called the Hasekiya, from haseki, or the favorite wife of the sultan. But the girl never lived to see Murad, her husband—”
“Why didn’t she?” Elif whispered. We were hiding in the barn at the back of their house now because, well, what better place did we have for hiding? I had chucked pebbles at her window and she had led me across the dark yard.
“Sneeze once and my father will kill us,” she’d said, and pulled me behind a bale of rotting hay.
“He might kill us without me sneezing.” Then I’d told her about my visit to Baba Mina’s; about Murad and the girl dancing, though not nearly in so much detail.
* * *
For seven days the girl danced in her trance, the drum drumming behind her. Not once did she stop to eat or drink water. Seven, fourteen, seventeen villages she encircled and still she kept dancing. And in his boat Murad waited for the jinn to release her. But on the eighth day a messenger reached him — the Serbian armies were marching against Adrianople. “Return at once, my lord. The men need you!”