by Hana Cole
The boy nods vigorously. ‘T’shirabu. Maa’.’
He lets Etienne take an extra long sip. Etienne closes his eyes as he draws in the cool from the ladle. It feels like bathing in a stream. He wants to ask the boy what the other word, maa, means, but the boy is casting anxious glances over his shoulder. Before Etienne gets a chance the water-bearer scurries off to the tent-inn.
‘Shirab, Maa’,’ Etienne whispers, embedding the sounds in his memory.
Their captors saunter back. Bellies full, they salute their colleagues and ready the horses. Do they have children of their own back home? Etienne wonders. Do their children know what they do? Probably they do. He recalls the Moorish slaves he saw back in Marseille. It’s not a sin to buy and sell Mohammedans in Christendom, so why would it be a sin to sell Christians in their lands?
Opposite him Daniel is trying to clear a fly off his face by shaking his head, but the fly keeps landing on a different part - his nose, forehead, hair line. The caravan hits a large bump in the road that sends them all bouncing up off the floor.
‘At least the fly’s gone,’ Etienne whispers across to Daniel and the older boy smiles. A tired smile that makes wrinkles on his dusty face, but a genuine one. He badly wants Daniel to say something back so they can strike up a conversation. Anything to lift the dismal silence that hangs like a pall. But Daniel says nothing. It feels to Etienne as though no one wants to interrupt their misery with imitations of another, more carefree time. So they stare down at their legs, silent witnesses to their own private shame.
Etienne is pretty sure they are going to the slave markets. The place that, unknown to them, was their destination all along. The world he knew before he boarded that terrible boat feels like another lifetime ago. He has spent so much time since wondering about all the what- ifs. What would have happened if they had realised that rickety old ship couldn’t possibly be a pilgrim boat, or if they had been a bit faster, a bit luckier on those docks in Corsica? What if that big storm had sunk the ship? Would any of them have survived, clinging to bits of wood until someone came to rescue them? What would it have been like to drown? Just like Jean did.
Etienne thinks about drowning a lot. He can still see his friend, gasping for air, throwing his hands about in panic, his terrible, wild eyes. He had tried to save him. His shoulder still hurts sometimes where he tried so hard to pull Jean up. If only he had been able to pull a bit harder, and those men hadn’t seen him. If they hadn’t jabbed at him like that he is sure he would have been able to pull his friend to safety. But then Jean would have known the shackles of that boat, and being beaten. And what it is like to be about to be sold.
Finally they arrive in a great city. Smoke and the sweet smell of incense mingle with the dirt and smell of decay. Naked, filthy children roam amid piles of rubbish and wild dogs. Worn down men with legs as thin and brown as twigs carry bundles of rags on their heads alongside donkeys, oxen and bawling, hump-backed beasts, their riders all wrapped up in black.
The wailing Mohammedan prayer punctuates the day, even in the most squalid places. As frightening as it first sounded to him, Etienne has come to anticipate it, almost look forward to hearing it. He doesn’t understand a word and he knows it is the worship of a false god, but the devotion brings a comfort with it. He wonders if the Devil might be getting to him. Or perhaps it is a sign. If his God is more powerful than the one they call Allah, then might the Christian God of all things be able to speak to him, even through this Heathen prayer? He has some vague recollection of Father Gui once saying that God is in everything.
The caravan stops. Voices outside bark as though they are arguing. The lock on the door of their carriage rattles, then, harsh words from the barrel-chested man who holds a stick in one hand and a whip in the other. There is the usual jerk and stutter as they all try to stand and move forward under the burden of the shackles.
Blinded by the white-hot sun, Etienne squeezes his eyes shut for a moment. He opens them to find they are in a vast square. Before them is a towering stone building with huge domed vaults, and awnings that stretch half way across the square. Hundreds of people, black-skinned, brown-skinned, white-skinned, weave around the pillars; some are chained together as they are, some carry ceramic pots on their heads. It is so crowded there is barely space to stand. If only they weren’t tied together, Etienne thinks, it would be impossible for their captors to keep track of them all. Most of the shouting seems to be coming from inside the building. It reminds Etienne of the sheep market at Illiers he sometimes went to when the farmer was down a hand. He feels his stomach flip.
‘Look!’ Someone nudges him. ‘Over there.’
In front of them a chain of girls are being led around the other side of the building. They look clean and well fed, certainly not like they have just arrived from overseas, even though some of them are fair. A man with a stick beats a clear path through the crowd, slapping at the straying fingers that reach out to fondle the merchandise. Most of them wear a simple sleeveless tunic but as Etienne peers closer his eyes pop to see that some of them have their breasts exposed. Ripples of heat pulse through his body, and although he can feel his face turning crimson, he cannot look away. A slaver’s sudden bark makes Etienne start. Head is still swivelled towards the naked girls, he has no time to find his feet as the others trundle forward and he has to scramble to right himself before a little bandy man with a misshapen hand reaches him with a birch.
They are marched up some stone steps, worn down in the middle from wear, and into a single storey, wooden annex at the back of the main building. Thin slats of brilliant sunshine pierce the gaps in the walls along the dismal corridor. It smells of lime and piss. The contrasting light makes it hard to see where they are going and the group edges forward, bunching into each other until another man, whom they have not seen before, tells them to halt. And then strip. Etienne feels a fist of panic bunch in his guts. He turns to Daniel.
‘But my knife.’
‘Your knife? Give it to me. Quick.’
Etienne has tied the blade to his inside leg with a piece of twine and his fingers work frantically at the knot as around him the other boys reluctantly begin to undress. Daniel secretes the weapon inside his shirt as he pulls it off, and when the guards are looking elsewhere, kicks it into the darkness.
Even though Etienne knows he would never have had the chance to use it, that Daniel has saved him from a beating by getting rid of it, as he watches it skittle across the floor beyond his reach, tears swell the back of his throat. He isn’t sure why he feels like that about a knife, when much worse things have happened to them. But it was such a good knife, and such a great honour to receive it as a gift from a real knight.
When Etienne the knight gave it to him, he had such a clear picture of himself standing in that black and white uniform, over-looking some fortified promontory under the baking desert sun, defending the last pride of Christendom with that very knife belted at his waist. Being a knight of the Orders would have been a good thing to be. For some reason that he doesn’t really understand, Etienne realises he had come to believe that while he had the knife with him, no real harm would come to him.
A brown-skinned man with a cloth wrapped around his waist steps forward with a bucket. A fat belly hangs over his cloth but he has strength beneath the flab. From the way his arm muscles pop as he lifts the bucket, Etienne can tell it is full of water. At least it isn’t lime. Yet, as good as it feels to be free of the chains, Etienne feels more frightened now. There had been some reassurance about being all tied together, inseparable.
Eyes to the floor, they trail along a hallway, earth and sand at their feet. There is a double door at the end of the corridor, big enough to fit a horse through. From the other side a cacophony of voices echo, dim to a murmur, then crescendo once more. Etienne’s heart thumps hard as they approach. It wouldn’t feel any worse, he thinks, if he knew there were gallows on the other side of that door. He casts his eyes to Daniel, desperate for a reassuring exchange, but Daniel i
s staring at the ground, lips moving silently.
A tall man, clothed in billowing silk, comes to look at them. He has a long nose but it is thin and pointy, not curved and fat like a lot of the other brown men. It makes him look fiercer than the other slavers and Etienne guesses he is important. He is carrying a roll of parchment. He walks their line once or twice, lips pursed together like he is considering a choice between things that aren’t all that good.
‘Raise your hand if you can read,’ he says in a crisp French that makes Etienne start. For a moment he is paralysed as he deliberates whether or not he should admit to being literate. Why would the elegant man want to know that? He wants to believe it will be something good but everything he has experienced so far tells him it can’t be. Still, there is something about the man’s expectant poise and the power of his own need to believe that somehow, despite it all, God has not turned His back on them that prompts him to raise his hand. At once, four or five of the boys raise theirs, including Marc. Etienne knows for sure that Marc can’t read, and straight away the familiar tug of dread pulls in his gut as the man stalks over and flicks a sheet at Marc.
Marc screws up his eyes, trying to look like he is concentrating, and puts his finger on one of the words, as though touching it might make it easier to decipher. The man jerks the sheet away and shakes it at him again. Marc jabbers something about sheep from the Bible and the man blinks in disbelief, then nods at one of the slavers. The man pulls out his whip and beats Marc until he is scrunched up in a ball, crying out for mercy. Etienne stares at the floor in front, heart hammering guilty. One of the other boys who said he could read starts to cry.
Etienne looks up to find the turban man towering over him, eyes narrowed. His hand shakes as he takes the parchment. It is an extract from the Gospel of Matthew, the bit about the Magi visiting Jesus he has read a thousand times with Gui. His whole body melts with relief as he begins to read, and the man’s withering squint lifts into a surprised arch. Etienne widens his eyes expectantly, but the man gives a curt nod and glides away without so much as a word. Mouth hanging open, Etienne has no time to articulate his confusion. The next thing he knows, the big doors open, and they are pushed towards the bellowing crowds.
*
Etienne awakes to the call to prayer. The room is hot. Geometric patterns of sunlight flicker through the carved lattice. He draws himself onto his elbows. There are five other boys lying on the ground with him, all asleep. He doesn’t recognise any of them. Two of them are brown-skinned, the others olive, from southern lands of Christendom, he supposes. None of them seem harmed. He puts an eye to a star-shaped hole in the lattice. There is a dusty courtyard where two dogs lie under a feeble tree, its branches drooping towards the sun-bleached ground. In one corner there is a water pump, the earth around it dark with moisture.
A tiny, brown man wearing a long, white shirt and a piece of fabric wound around his head comes to the fountain. Etienne ducks instinctively, then, cranes his head up slowly to watch the man as he splashes his face and neck with water. The back of Etienne’s neck feels sweaty and grimy - it would be good if they let him use that pump later.
‘Vuoi da bere?’
Etienne jumps at the voice. One of the olive-skinned boys is talking to him. He doesn’t understand the tongue but the boy is holding out a clay pot. Gingerly, Etienne takes it and noses the contents. It is water. Eyes on the boy, who is making cupping gestures for him to drink, he takes a sip. It is clean and sweet. He gulps some more and wipes his mouth with the back of hand.
‘Shirab. Maa’,’ Etienne says proudly. His face falls as the boy bursts out laughing.
‘Ma sei Francese, tu?’ The boy says. ‘Français?’
Etienne nods stiffly and the boy offers his hand in the way that men do.
‘Alberto,’ the boy says. ‘That man,’ Alberto nods to the courtyard. ‘He is Abubakr. Is our boss!’
Etienne peers back out through the patterned shutters. It seems unlikely that the skinny brown man could be anyone’s boss, but he shrugs congenially as the boy continues his introductions.
‘I am from the island of Sicilia.’ Alberto speaks slowly in a blend of his mother tongue and Norman French that Etienne can recognise. ‘Maybe you have heard of it?’
A little shorter than Etienne, Alberto has huge, cow eyes and his face is framed by dark ringlets that tumble to his shoulders. Thick brows make it look as though he is concentrating hard, even though Etienne thinks he probably isn’t.
‘No?’ The boy laughs and his heavy brow lifts.
‘Where are we?’ asks Etienne
Alberto lowers himself into a comfortable squat. ‘We are in Cairo, Egypt at the home of the governor Al Kamil. You came from the market?’
Etienne contorts his face into a grimace he hopes will hide the shame that heats his guts whenever he thinks back to it.
‘Is a terrible place I know.’ The boy holds a smile on his face but Etienne catches his eyelashes flicker down. ‘I went twice. My first time at the market I was bought by a Tunisino. Bruttissimo.’ He puckers. ‘But then I pray many, many times for God to take me away from that place and the Tunisino, his ship sink.’ Alberto pats Etienne’s arm, ‘But here you have been lucky. The governor is a man of culture. That’s why he wants only smart boys like us.’
‘What for?’
‘To do works. You know, cleaning, prepare some rooms. Carry food.’
Etienne hopes he hasn’t understood well enough. Cleaning and preparing rooms is for girls.
The other boys begin to stir from their afternoon slumber.
‘Sometimes we do reading to his children,’ Alberto continues. ‘You can read, no?’
Etienne nods. ‘There was a man at the market. He asked us.’
‘See, I know already!’
‘Al Kamil wants his sons to learn all the knowledge of the world,’ says another boy who says his name is Giacopo. He looks a bit like Alberto, with the same heavy brow and olive skin, but he has straight hair that hangs like a velvet curtain above his eyes.
Sitting in a tight circle they introduce themselves, jabbering in a mixture of their own tongues, Occitan, French, the odd word of Arabic. From what Etienne can tell they are glad to have another addition, someone to show the ropes to. He wants to tell them about his journey, the friends he has lost - Daniel, Marc, Jean. He wants to ask them about their journey, if any of them had to watch their friends drown before their very eyes, or left to choke in a cloud of dust, their small, lifeless bodies tossed into the water. He wants to know if it is possible to recover, if such memories can ever fade, or if they will always sneak up on him, ready to stab his heart and stop his breath.
Every morning, after prayers, Abubakr gives them their tasks for the day. Usually Etienne works with Alberto, or with a dark-skinned boy called Yossef from Catalonia who is a whole head shorter than Etienne even though he is fifteen. He has big owl eyes that it turns out are not very good at seeing, so he keeps an eyeglass in his tunic for any close up work like polishing the plates or dusting the ornaments. His mother is Jewish and he isn’t too sure who his father is as his mother has never mentioned his name, other than with a curse beforehand. Yossef is the only one who speaks Arabic properly and he translates it into Occitan so they can all get a gist from there.
Etienne likes working with Yossef. He knows a lot of things - about different customs from different lands, the beliefs of the Mohammedans, the stars. Pointing out the different stars in the night sky, he tells Etienne that the Greeks worked out how the earth moves among the heavens. Etienne has heard them talk a lot about Greek this and that and finally, as they are on their hands and knees in one of the courtyards pulling up weeds from between the stones, he plucks up the courage to ask.
‘Where is Greece. Exactly?’
Yossef sits up and grabs Etienne’s arm.
‘Look,’ he whispers. ‘There you are. There is Greece.’
They peer through a latticed archway that leads from the courtyard to one
of the gardens. Two girl appears from behind a huge ornamental vase that stands in the shade of a palm. For a moment Etienne just stares. Petite, with long black hair wound round and round upon their heads in a plait, they wear belted white robes that cover everything but their feet and hands.
‘You like them, no?’
Etienne blushes.
‘They are Greek,’ he says. ‘Everyone likes them.’
‘Do you lie with them?’ Etienne tries to sound casual.
Yossef shakes his head. ‘No one does. It’s forbidden to talk to the personal servants of the governor’s family. You would be beaten for sure if the governor heard of it.’
The girls pad back across the garden, carrying bunches of white flowers, eyes cast down.
‘So you can never meet them?’ Etienne asks.
Yossef scrunches up his eyes like he doesn’t understand how someone could even think such a thing was possible. Etienne scratches at his neck and begins to stammer his way out of the blunder when Alberto comes racing over.
‘Etienne! Come quick. There is another Francese arrived.’
Etienne leaps up. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Mah!’ says Alberto. ‘He just arrive but he won’t talk to us. Maybe he is from your boat, no?’
‘Maybe,’ he says, face breaking open with a smile. He can’t think how else a French boy could have found his way to the palace.
Come,’ says Alberto. ‘He is cleaning silver plates.’
Etienne races along behind the Sicilian boy, elated. It has been days since Etienne has spoken French. He has even taken to talking to himself aloud to remind himself what it feels like to say exactly what he means without having to contort his jaw around sounds that leave him feeling as though he has been chewing a tough old shoe. His heart is skipping beats as he tries to guess who it will be. Marc? Daniel? There is even some small part of him holding on to the hope that it might be Jean. That would be just like him – frail Jean with his limpy leg and eerie see-through eyes, showered with another miracle.
