The Black Tulip

Voyage to İstanbul

With the gold coins left behind and her family still asleep, Laleena sets out before dawn, the ache of her goodbyes still fresh. The road through the Caucasus Mountains carries her by camel, an animal she has never ridden before, and she is surprised at how graceful it feels. Riding so high above the ground gives her a new view of the only home she has ever known. At village after village, the group stops to collect more girls, all of them said to be bound for husbands waiting in İstanbul. Laleena and the others are too shy to speak to one another, but she can read in their faces exactly what each girl has given up to be there. Eventually the camels give way to mule carts, and days of dusty travel leave the girls’ faces and clothes so coated that they must wrap their heads and bodies just to breathe.

Then, without warning, the air changes. Trees Laleena has never seen before, palm, lemon, and orange, line the road, and another girl explains that what they are smelling is the sea. Laleena’s heart leaps, and she blurts out that they must have finally reached İstanbul.

Cafer Efendi, the tall, mustached brother who speaks little but carries more authority than his harelipped brother, corrects her flatly. The upcoming city is only Batum, and İstanbul is still far off. They’ll recognize İstanbul when they see its minarets. When Laleena asks about the huge shapes floating on the water, he tells her those are ships, and that she will only be taken by them all the way to İstanbul if she behaves herself along the way. He warns her to ask fewer questions before she gets into trouble.

Father had once told her stories about the Black Sea spread before them now, black and murky, said to be haunted by mermaids who lured sailors to their deaths on the rocks. Fear and excitement tangle together as she studies it.

At Batum, the group is joined by many more girls, mostly from Circassia and Abkhazia, until nearly two hundred of them are herded aboard a ship called the Hürriyet, a name that means Freedom. The oldest girls are sixteen or seventeen; the youngest cannot be more than three or four. Below deck, they are packed into a windowless storage room that reeks of moldering hay. Whenever the crying grows too loud, a man appears with a whip to silence it. Some girls faint outright. Laleena spends most of the crossing seasick and loses all track of time in the dark.

Eventually Cafer Efendi pulls her out of the hold and up into the fresh air, then into a cabin where men lounge on divans. They examine her hands and pronounce them too delicate for hard labor, study her eyes, and ask her age. When she answers that she is twelve, one of them forces her mouth open to check her teeth. Laleena bites down on his hand as hard as she can, and he answers with a slap while the others laugh.

Back in the hold, Laleena stumbles over a small crying girl named Lena, whose long, wavy white hair and quiet sobbing remind her achingly of her own little brothers. Laleena gathers Lena into her arms, wondering aloud how anyone could hand a baby over to a stranger for marriage.

An older girl overhears her and corrects her without any softness. They are not being taken as brides at all. They are slaves, bound for the slave markets. The hold erupts in cries and overlapping languages as the truth spreads from girl to girl. Laleena thinks of the tin soldier’s promise to follow her destiny and cannot understand why that destiny would lead here.

When the ship finally reaches Trabzon, Laleena mistakes the city’s minarets for İstanbul once again, and Cafer Efendi corrects her once more, visibly relieved himself to be leaving the wretched ship behind. He explains that the girls are about to be split up, some bound for İstanbul, others for İzmir, Salonica, or Cairo. Laleena begs to know what will happen to Lena, and Cafer Efendi finally says both girls are headed to İstanbul. In Trabzon, the traders divide their captives into groups of fifty and load them onto smaller boats.

The new boat proves even more cramped than the first, and rough winds toss it worse than anything before. Thirsty, seasick, and worn thin, Laleena finds herself almost hoping the mermaids from Father’s stories are real, so the sea might finally dash the ship against the rocks and end the nightmare.