It is not a long journey, she repeats to herself, a mantra. But it is a journey that means stepping into the unknown

TO stay or to go? Just when Bilhah thinks she has decided, something — a stray comment, a thought, a shiver of fear — comes along, and her decision evaporates. During the early morning leisure hours in the gardens, she shuns the company of both Katerina and Aisha, although she feels them watching her. She goes for long walks alone.

How long does she have before Hurrem Sultan pushes her? How long before another emissary leaves to Jerusalem? For this must be her destination, she is fed up of being chased from country to country, she needs to find a place to stay, to rest.

Jerusalem. She searches her mind for things she has heard about it. Stories, comments, snippets of description. There is little in the way of details: what the people there eat, how they dress, how they support themselves. Instead, she closes her eyes and sees a shining, glowing vision of gold and purple and aquamarine. But when she tries to look closer, everything blurs and fades.

To travel, you need to have faith — either in the world or in yourself. It is too dangerous, too frightening, to go out in the world without being able to trust. Anyone might be readying themselves to attack you. Anything might destroy you.

So you are combative and you hate yourself, or you withdraw and try to live a solitary existence until you think that you are like that silver birch that grew in the river near your house in Salonika. One day the storm rains and winds uprooted it and carried it away. It was gone, and you could look at the river, stare and stare, and there was nothing to mark it, to recall that there had once grown a tree, that there had been anything there at all.

That is what it is like to leave the place you know, the place where you are known. You are in danger of becoming nothing at all, of disappearing into the storm waters with no one to mourn your loss.

That is what it means to travel to Jerusalem. But to stay? That would mean marriage to Kamram.