Palace of Tears

Eviction from a harem

I remember the day we came to the Old Palace. It was such a long time ago, but it feels like yesterday. Doomed to exile, we handmaidens gathered our lady’s belongings and hoped for the best. No one had any warning, but somehow we all knew what to do. We began packing our belongings, what few we had, and set about complying with the inventory check of our lady’s possessions. Hers was more complicated. She sat on her throne — dazed, wooden — while her chief of staff berated the treasurer for daring to assume a gift from the previous sultan should return to the treasury. They squabbled for hours, it seemed like, naming forgotten names and recalling old grudges between them personally, saved for just this occasion.

Harem politics changed on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. Our lady was once one of us, brought in from the far reaches of the empire as a slave. Whether she was taken violently or less so, we don’t talk of such things. Perhaps those who were brought in with her (or already here) often teased her of her origins, but those rivals were either long gone or their own positions in the hierarchy so precarious now that they knew what not to say. No one knows how long our lady was a cariye, the war that tore her from her people, or how many names she had gone through in her lifetime as her rank progressed over the years. There are rumors, certainly, and no one knows…