Shadow Spinner

by Susan Fletcher

  Up on the roof, a eunuch was shouting, pointing down at me.

  An answering shout on the street. Someone was coming.

  I tried to sweep the coins back into the sack, but my hands were clumsy and stiff. I looked back and saw two helmeted men sprinting toward me. Palace guards. I clutched my veil and ran, too numbed by fear to mourn for my lost fortune or count my injuries. Voices, coming near. I cut into a narrow alley and pressed myself into an alcove by a gate. My heart hammered in my chest; my breath came in ragged gasps. In the street beyond the alley, I saw them running past. I listened until the footfalls grew faint, then fled down the alley.

  Now I awoke again to the pain. My left elbow throbbed, my hands and knees burned, my good foot tingled from the impact, and my bad foot had shooting pains.

  No matter. Run.

  If I had been near Auntie Chava and Uncle Eli’s house, I would have known which alleys went through to other streets and which ones ended in walls. I would have known shortcuts and back ways to get from here to there. But this part of the city was strange to me. I knew from where the sky grew light that I had come down the eastern face of the palace. And I remembered that the bazaar lay to the south.

  So if I went far enough south—to the left—I would come to it. From there, I could find the storytellers house.

  Voices. I ducked into another alley, pressed myself into a niche in the wall until the voices had passed. Then I was off again.

  From time to time, I heard them, the voices. When they sounded near, I swerved into doorways or niches or alleys. Once, I tripped over a beggar sleeping in the street; he twitched and moaned. Another time, I saw three men lurking on a street corner. I stopped, backed away silently, cut into the nearest alley, and ran. I didn’t know which to fear most—the palace guards or the thieves and cutthroats who prowled the streets at night.

  Suddenly, I realized that I had stumbled upon the bazaar. It looked different now—dark and naked, stripped of its crowds and colorful wares. The bright canopies, which in daytime gave it a festive air, were rolled up and tied flush to the walls. Stale ghosts of bazaar smells hung in the air. I made my way back to the fountain in the carpet bazaar, and then began to blunder toward the storytellers house. Quickly, I told myself. Soon would come the call to dawn prayer, and the streets would fill with men hurrying to the mosques. A girl alone would raise questions.

  Three times I took a wrong turning, but always I found my way back. I hadn’t seen or heard a soul for some time now. At last, I found the corner where Ayaz had always blindfolded me. I hastened through the alley. There was the storyteller’s door. Safe!

  I knocked.

  Nothing. No sound.

  I knocked again.

  The door opened—just a crack. I saw movement behind it, and then all at once the door swung wide and a man was standing on the step. A jagged, puckered scar ran from his forehead across an eye to his chin. He stared at me with his one good eye, clutching the hilt of a huge scimitar.

  Chapter 20

  Abu Muslem

  LESSONS FOR LIFE AND STORYTELLING

  There’s more than one way to be crippled. I don’t mean that you can have a crippled foot or a crippled knee or a crippled hand. I mean you can be crippled in your heart. You can store up all your rage at someone, which can weigh down on your heart and twist it into a weird shape until you’re always aching underneath. After a while you get used to the ache—just like with my foot. You forget what it’s like not to ache. You forget that you’re aching at all.

  I turned to flee, but the man gripped me about my waist, lifted me, hoisted me over his shoulder. I squirmed and kicked; it was no use. The door slammed shut. He set me down with a gentleness that surprised me.

  “We have a guest,” he announced.

  Lamplight flared, and in a far, dark corner of the room I saw the storyteller, with Ayaz beside him.

  “Little Pigeon?”

  The man shifted aside, and the storyteller came toward me with the lamp. “Little Pigeon,” he said, “what have they done to you?”

  I glanced fearfully at the scar-faced man. He was squat, solidly built, and looked to be of middle years. One eye, the eye the scar cut across, seemed permanently shut.

  “It’s all right,” the storyteller said. “You can trust Kansbar; he’s a friend. Now tell me.” He lifted the lamp to my face. “Your eye. You’re bruised. What’s happened?”

  All at once, relief flooded through me in a rush so strong that it weakened my knees and took my breath for speech. I had escaped! A lump grew in my throat and I thought, for a moment, that I was going to cry. But I didn’t. I never cried. When the words finally came, they gushed out: about the Khatun, how she had locked me up. How she wanted to prove that Shahrazad had taken a lover. How she had hit me and kicked me. I told all the way through my escape in the basket and my flight through the streets, and then I went back to Zaynab. “I’m afraid for her,” I said. “She’ll be punished for helping me escape. The eunuchs—they were with her. Trying to stop her.” I remembered the paper she had given me and drew it out of my sash. “You have to help her,” I said. “She told me she knew you once, a long time ago.”

  The storyteller read while Ayaz held the lamp. Kansbar stood sentinel by the door. Shadows flickered across the old mans face; he looked grave. Once he glanced at me, raised his shaggy, pointed brows; then he returned to the letter again. I heard a moazzen call for dawn prayers, but the storyteller made no move to stop reading. Finally he folded the letter, locked it in a chest by the door.

  “We’ll go now,” he said, “to the mosque to pray. You stay here. You can pray in the courtyard but don’t open the door to the street. A woman will come to you—I’ll give her a key. She’ll take you to a safe place. Stay there until I come to fetch you.”

  “But Zaynab,” I said. “Can you help her?”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Wait,” Ayaz said. He disappeared through the curtain into the adjoining room and returned with a small copper jar. “Here.” He thrust the jar into my hands.

  It was heavy for its size; I nearly dropped it. I looked inside and saw coins. It was full of coins. This was his cache that he had greedily hoarded—probably all his life.

  “I. . . can’t take this,” I said.

  Ayaz huffed out an impatient sigh. “Well, you wouldn’t have to if you hadn’t foolishly dropped those ones Zaynab gave you. But now that you have . . . you’ll need them.”

  I glanced at the storyteller. He was smiling oddly, looking at Ayaz. Then he turned to me.

  “The coins will help you,” he said.

  Still I hesitated.

  “It’s a loan!” Ayaz said. “You didn’t think I was giving them to you, did you? You’d better be prepared to pay me back. Next time . . . next time we meet.”

  And then he was out the door, the storyteller and the scar-faced man behind him. I heard the grating of the key in the lock, and then their retreating footsteps. “Thank you,” I whispered.

  I went out into the small, shadowed yard, made ablutions in a pond, and prayed. Then I sat down inside to wait. The lamp, which Ayaz had set on the chest by the door, cast a pool of light on the chest lid. And in that light . . . lay the key.

  It would be wrong to look inside. The storyteller was helping me, and that would be breaching his trust.

  But then . . . How did I know he was helping me? I knew nothing about him! What if he was not like the good-magician grocer in the tale, but one of the Khatun’s creatures instead?

  Still, I had an idea about who he might be. If I knew for certain I was right, it would set my mind at ease.

  What harm would it do to look?

  I took the lamp off the chest and set it on the floor. Kneeling, I inserted the key, felt it lift the pins in the lock. I raised the lid.

  There, lying atop some dark, old robes, was Zaynab’s letter. I took it out, unrolled it, held it to the lamp.

  I’m not very good at reading. My mother tried to t
each me years ago, but we didn’t get far enough for me to read anything interesting, like a story. There were some words on this letter that I remembered. I saw my own name, Marjan, five times. And another word leaped out at me, because it was the word I was looking for.

  Vizier.

  I tried to find some words I knew near vizier, but I couldn’t. Zaynab’s handwriting was cramped and hard to read, and the ink had smeared in a few places, and the words reminded me of city streets—only much straighter—with rows of little buildings, and funny, upside-down domes, and tiny, waving banners, and even birds flying overhead. But vizier. I could read that.

  The Sultans old vizier, the one his father had before him, had known him since he was a boy. The vizier might have told him some stories. Maybe he had made up some of them, which is why no one had ever heard the Julnar story before. And then the old vizier was banished, Shahrazad had said, because he had gone against the Sultan in the matter of killing wives. And now here was this storyteller, telling a tale that no one but he and the Sultan seemed to have heard. And he knew of Zaynab. And Zaynab had sent him a message. A long message.

  I wished I could remember that old viziers name. Maybe I could find it in the note. It would be somewhere near the beginning. But I couldn’t read that part.

  I was about to put the letter back inside the chest, when I noticed a glinting in a corner. I pulled aside the dark robes and there it was, a length of purple fabric, embroidered with gold thread. I drew it out, unfolded the cloth.

  It was a robe of honor, such as the Sultan gives to his most esteemed retainers.

  A rattling at the door.

  Quickly, I folded the robe, tucked it beneath the others, then threw in Zaynab’s letter and shut the chest lid. Just in time. A creaking of hinges; a veiled woman slipped through the doorway.

  “Hurry!” she said. “Come with me.”

  I reached for the copper jar Ayaz had given me, but the woman was shaking her head. “No. Leave the jar. You can take coins, but no other possessions. Abu Muslem forbids it.”

  Abu Muslem?

  “Hurry!”

  I poured the coins into my sash, trying to separate them so they wouldn’t clink together. The woman shooed me out the door, locked it behind us, then led me by a twisting route through the poor neighborhoods of the city. My mind was churning. Abu Muslem. What did this have to do with Abu Muslem? Did she think I was one of the women he was smuggling out of the city? But why would she think that? Unless . . .

  Unless the storyteller was Abu Muslem.

  But what about Badar Basim and Zaynab and the robe of honor? Who but the old vizier could twist those three strands into a single thread?

  And then I knew. I felt stupid I had never thought of it before.

  The storyteller and the old vizier and Abu Muslem were one and the same.

  * * *

  I watched for landmarks in the slanting morning light along the way—a bird’s nest in a chink in the wall, a carved cornice above a doorway, a street where the walls were made of red stone. At last, we stopped at a rough-hewn courtyard door. The woman knocked. The door opened a crack; she spoke to someone, then shooed me inside. “Allah protect you, Sister,” she said. The door closed behind me.

  “This way. Come.” A thin woman with a long braid called over her shoulder. She had already begun to walk-wearily, I thought—across the courtyard. It was a poor courtyard, much poorer than Auntie Chavas had been. A few scrawny chickens clucked and fluttered as I came near. A bony donkey stood tethered to a stake. When I entered the cool darkness inside the cracked mud house, the woman motioned me to sit.

  “Are you thirsty? Would you like a drink of water?”

  “Yes, if you please,” I said.

  The woman moved deep into the shadows. I could see her pouring, could hear water gurgling into a cup. She handed it to me; I took off my veil. When I had finished, I saw that she was staring at me. “It is good to see you, Marjan,” she said. “Do you remember me at all?”

  At first I thought, with a wild hope that surprised me—that startled me, in fact—that she might be my mother. That there had been some mistake and she hadn’t died after all.

  But she was not my mother. I could see that now. She was about the age that I remembered my mother, but her gaunt face, with its small mouth and eyes that turned down at the corners, was not my mothers face.

  I shook my head then, no. Though there was something familiar about her. Something I couldn’t place.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I am Farah. I was your mother’s serving girl before she died.”

  My heart seemed to freeze in my chest. Farah. So long it had been since I had met anyone who knew my mother. And my mother had been fond of Farah. Had she been my mother’s only friend? I could see them now in memory, smiling together over something I had said or done. Farah had a low voice that I had found comforting, and kindly, serious eyes.

  “There are some things,” she said now, “that I would like to tell you. About your mother.”

  “I don’t want to hear about her.”

  A soft cry sounded from a dark corner of the room. I looked and saw two children—one an infant, the other not much older—asleep on a single straw pallet.

  “I’ve known the man they call Abu Muslem for many years,” Farah said. “I told him about you when I first learned who he is, a year after your mother died. He came to me this morning to tell me some things he had read about you in a letter. I think you need, Marjan, to hear about your mother.”

  I looked away, pretending not to listen, while she told me how, after my father died, my mother became the fourth wife of Aga Jamsheed and took me to live with her in his harem. I knew that already. But then she told me some things I didn’t know. “Aga Jamsheed was drunk with love for your mother,” Farah said. “He favored her above his other wives, which made them hate her.” When the Sultan began killing wives, Farah said, my mother began to pester Aga Jamsheed to take us out of the city, so that I would be in no danger from the Sultan. “Aga Jamsheed said there was nothing to worry about, that you were too young. But your mother wasn’t satisfied. ’Who knows how long he’ll keep killing his wives?’ your mother said. ’One of these days, he’ll run out of young women and start marrying children!’ She begged Aga Jamsheed to find Abu Muslem, to have him smuggle you and her out of the city. Aga Jamsheed refused. In time, he grew tired of her nagging. He commanded her to stop. But your mother would not. She loved you more than anything. More than food. More than water.”

  The old anger spurted up inside me, filling my chest, pushing against the base of my throat. I pulled back my skirts, pointed to my crippled foot. “Is this love?” I demanded. “Is this what you call love?”

  Farah met my gaze. “Surely that’s not all you remember,” she said. “You wouldn’t have heard how she fought for you—she was very careful about that, but . . . Don’t you remember the stories? She used to hold you in her lap for half the day, telling you stories she had made up especially for you. And some of your favorites she told over and over again—a thousand and one times!”

  And it came back to me now, against my will: how it felt to snuggle in my mother’s lap, warm and protected, while her voice led me on wild, fantastical adventures.

  “The quarrels grew louder and more spiteful,” Farah went on, “until Aga Jamsheed grew to loathe her. His other wives were pleased and agreed with all the bad things he said about her.

  “One night, your mother overheard him talking to his brother. He would divorce her, he said. And to spite your mother, he would sell you as a slave into the Sultans household.

  “I don’t know if he truly would have done that. I don’t think so. But things were so bad between him and your mother, she was sure he would. That’s why she did what she did. It was a terrible thing. But she was desperate. It was all she could think to do.”

  “She should have run away with me!” I said. “She should have escaped from the harem and gone to Abu Muslem
!”

  “She couldn’t,” Farah said. “Aga Jamsheed kept a guard at the gate, and none of the women were allowed out without his permission.”

  “She should have thought of something else—like Shahrazad! She didn’t just give up.”

  “Marjan. Not everybody can be as clever as Shahrazad.”

  “She shouldn’t have killed herself! That was the easy way for her! She should have stayed with me. I needed her to protect me!”

  “Listen. They would have killed her anyway for what she did to your foot. The Sultan had forbidden the practice of maiming girls to keep them from becoming his wives. The penalty was death. So she . . .” Farah pursed her lips, gazed up at the sky. She breathed in deep. “Well,” she sighed, looking back at me. “You know what she did. And afterward . . . Aga Jamsheed was afraid he would be punished for permitting you to be maimed. So he hired you out to the Jew. Then he and his family left the city.

  “That’s what I wanted to tell you, Marjan. Blame your mother for provoking her husband, for mistaken judgment of his character. Don’t blame her for leaving you to go on without her, or for not fighting hard enough. She was brave, Marjan. She fought. And everything she did was for you. She cherished you. She cherished you above everything.”

  I had the strangest feeling, then, as if my heart were softening in my chest. I could feel the blood pumping warm and fast into my arms and face and legs. I was crying then, crying for my mother, crying that I had lost her, crying that I had nursed my rage against her for so long. I was crying for Zaynab, and for Shahrazad, and for the dead girl who had lived in my room. I was crying for all the women who had died, all the misery that had come over this whole city because the Sultans first wife had hurt him.

  It seemed that in this world we were piling up hurt upon hurt, and hate upon hate, and then hurt upon hurt again. Forgiveness. We couldn’t forgive. We could only hate when we were hurt. And then the hurt and the hate would start up again—all in a terrible circle.