Sultan's Wife

by Jane Johnson

  She whacks me with the staff, but luckily there is little strength behind the blow. ‘Do you think I am as much of an idiot as you? Who would leave gold and jewels behind in the mule-train? Go and fetch them at once! Makarim will go with you. If you are not back here by noon, I shall send the guards for you.’

  We are both subdued, Makarim and I, as we leave by the iron gate and walk along palace corridors. I wonder briefly whether ben Hadou might lend me the money to pay Zidana; then decide that he probably would not. Who, then? My mind is a perfect blank. At last the silence is broken by Makarim, who asks, her face full of dread, ‘What is in the potion? Will I die?’

  ‘I expect so,’ I say gravely.

  She stops and stares at me, round-eyed. ‘It was poison?’

  I almost laugh aloud at her terror. Let her think just that, I think, remembering her malicious plotting, the hurt she did Alys. I say nothing.

  Makarim hugs herself and shivers. ‘There has been so much death already these past months.’ Her face twists and tears fill her eyes. ‘Oh, I don’t want to die …’

  ‘So much death?’ A cold hand grips deep inside my chest. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The bloody flux: it has carried off so many.’

  ‘Alys?’ My voice is so hoarse I can hardly get the word out.

  She gives me a slit-eyed look, then nods. ‘Oh yes, she was one of the first.’

  I go hot then cold and start to shake as if gripped by a fever. The blood beats so loudly in my ears I do not catch the rest of her sentence, but stagger back against the wall and slide down it, till I find myself sitting on the ground.

  Makarim watches me curiously. ‘Are you unwell, Nus-Nus?’ A small smile flickers across her lips: despite the possibility that death has spread his wings over her, she is enjoying this.

  I have no words, just look at her dumbly, frozen to the spot despite the intense heat of the day. It seems there is nothing to be said; nothing to be done. Zidana will take my head, and it will not matter one whit. I have played my part. I have got Momo away to a new life, out of the perilous toils of this place. I bow my head.

  You would think that nothing could impinge upon my hopelessness, but I cannot help but notice a trail of ants winding their way across the corridor, from a crack between the intricate zellij tiles on towards the distant courtyard, each bearing a grain of rice or a crumb of bread. I watch them marching on, tiny creatures carrying on their little lives despite being dwarfed by the monumental architecture of a mad sultan’s dream. I watch them in a sort of trance, from which I am abruptly interrupted.

  ‘Nus-Nus: you have to come with me!’

  It is Abid, the sultan’s body-slave.

  ‘I have been looking everywhere for you,’ he puffs, out of breath.

  ‘He cannot go anywhere,’ Makarim pronounces, glaring at the boy. ‘He is on the business of the empress.’

  Abid glares back. ‘Moulay Ismail demands his presence at once in the assembly rooms.’

  And that is that: even Zidana dare not gainsay the emperor. Makarim pulls at my sleeve as I drag myself to my feet. ‘Was it poison? Tell me truly.’

  I stare at her dumbly. Then I shake my head. ‘Quite the opposite.’

  ‘I will live?’

  ‘I am sure you will outlive us all.’

  Restored, she at once recalls her task. ‘Quickly, then, give me the money now and I will take it back to Zidana and save both our skins.’

  I stare at her as if she is mouthing gibberish. ‘I have no money. No jewels. I have nothing. If she must have my head as payment, then so be it. What do I care? You can go back and tell your mistress that.’ Then I follow Abid down the corridor to my cabinet to collect my notes, and then on towards the assembly rooms.

  A great group of ministers and qadis has been convened, including a new vizier: a spare, pockmarked man with an obsequious manner, he wears a plain robe and no jewels, and appears to be Abdelaziz’s opposite in every visible fashion. The sultan is seated in state, two servants wafting cool air over him with huge ostrich-feather fans. If he recognizes me when I rise from my prostration, he makes no sign of it: his eyes slide across me without interest. At his feet sits Aziz, reed pen poised over the paper on his lap-desk to take note of the proceedings. Ben Hadou enters a moment later and, having given my notes a cursory glance, launches into a very full account of our time in London. The first business of the day is of course the treaty; but Ismail waves an irritated hand at the ambassador as he begins to outline the terms agreed. ‘Circumstances have changed since you left to negotiate this matter, in case you had not heard. We have expelled the infidel from Mamora, so now we have another port at our command. The Spanish left behind some excellent cannon, so with those and the English guns you have brought back, as well as the excellent muskets and powder the English king has gifted us, I think we are in a somewhat stronger position to renegotiate terms. I shall insist King Charles sends me another ambassador.’ And he rubs his hands in some glee at the prospect.

  The dismay on ben Hadou’s face would have been comical, had I the heart to find it so. Instead I watch without interest as he bows his head and rolls up my copious notes into a tight scroll, his movements suggesting he would like to tear them into pieces and throw them in his sovereign’s face. But he is much too careful a man for such a gesture, the Tinker. When he raises his head again his expression is bland. He answers the sultan’s questions about court life – about the king, his palace and estates – concisely, always careful to play down their magnificence. White Hall, he tells Ismail, is a labyrinth of passageways full of moth-eaten wall-hangings, spiders and their webs, linking great empty chambers in which Charles’s meagre courtiers rattle around like seeds in a gourd. ‘Parts of the palace date back many centuries and newer sections have been added on over the years in an arbitrary fashion. It lacks the grandeur and epic proportions of your own great achievement here, your sublime majesty.’

  Ismail is gratified to hear this: he leans forward. ‘And what of his wives?’

  ‘Under Christian law, sire, he may take only one, and Queen Catherine is a mousy creature, with teeth like a buck rabbit’s. Unlike a rabbit, unfortunately, she has failed to breed.’

  ‘Then who will succeed him? He is well over fifty now: he should be wasting no time in putting the Portuguese infanta aside and getting himself an heir on another!’

  As ben Hadou explains the great difficulties surrounding the English succession, my attention wanders back to the White Swan. I wonder whether she was alone when she died, whether anyone could have saved her; whether Zidana helped her on her way. I wonder when, exactly, it happened. Was it when I was availing myself of a glass of good French wine at the Duchess of Portsmouth’s table? Or perhaps when I walked in the rose garden about a month ago, and dreamed of sitting there with Alys, breathing in the fragrance of the flowers in the gentle English sun? Maybe she died of a broken heart not long after I took Momo away with me.

  I torture myself with these thoughts, every so often catching a phrase here or there of ben Hadou’s descriptions of the English court. Now, they are discussing the women …

  ‘Are they all as pale as the White Swan was?’ the emperor asks with interest, and my heart clenches tight.

  ‘For the most part they are a dull lot,’ the Tinker opines, ‘brown of hair and covered in paint and patches to cover their pox scars.’

  This pleases the emperor mightily and he prompts his ambassador for more and more detail on the subject, especially of the king’s mistresses.

  ‘You should ask Nus-Nus about those,’ a voice says nastily. ‘He spent a great deal of time with the English king’s whores.’ My head shoots up. I turn to find Samir Rafik watching me, his lips curved into a scornful smile. ‘You see how he mourns them?’

  The emperor is sitting forward on his divan, regarding me with a curious expression. ‘Nus-Nus, come here.’

  I take a step forward, another.

  ‘Kneel.’

  I do so, an
d Ismail reaches out a hand and touches my face. ‘You are weeping?’

  I am? My hand rises to my cheek and comes away wet.

  ‘Why do you weep?’

  I find I cannot answer.

  ‘Perhaps he weeps in shame!’ Rafik says into the silence. ‘He and the Kaid ben Hadou took English concubines while we were in London, and when the Kaid Sharif and I complained at their debauchery, they sent us off into the countryside on some wild goose chase that would keep us out of their way while they carried on defiling the good name of Islam, of Morocco and of your sublime majesty’s embassy.’ And now he takes from beneath his robe a great scroll that he unrolls and proceeds to read, a long list of precise notes detailing every instance in which any member of the embassy has strayed from the straight path, and much invention besides, reserving always the worst lapses for his enemies: myself and ben Hadou.

  Ismail’s face has darkened ominously, but I find I simply do not care: and anyway most of the charges are plainly absurd. A wild peal of laughter escapes me, enraging the sultan still further. ‘You laugh?’ he roars; and that just makes me laugh more. I can see ben Hadou gazing at me aghast: if it is not bad enough that Samir Rafik has made his desperate gambit before we even get to the chancy matter of the long-dead printer and what little is left of his bony old head, which he knows will not satisfy our bloodthirsty sultan, now his deputy has gone quite mad. He gives me an urgent stare, as if he can will me back to rationality, but it’s too late for that now.

  The sultan is on his feet. ‘Sharif!’ he yells, and the kaid practically crawls forward. Ismail kicks him upright. ‘Is it true?’ he screams. ‘Have these men brought shame on their religion, their country and on ME?’

  Sharif looks despairingly from the Tinker to me and back again, at a loss as to what to say that will not make matters worse. I become aware of the assembled ministers’ rapt attention: they are like hyenas, waiting nervously for the lions to finish their business before nipping in for the scraps. Because as long as it’s someone else’s blood that is spilled, that means they’re safe – for the time being.

  Ismail thrusts his face into Sharif’s. ‘Did they cut out your tongue in London?’

  ‘N-no, sublime majesty,’ he stutters.

  ‘Well, answer the question, then. Did these men consort with women and betray the faith I placed in them?’

  ‘S-sire, your s-servant Nus-Nus is … is … a eunuch.’

  Ismail regards him as if he is a cockroach. One that he is about to stamp on. Then he begins to wrestle his dagger out of its sheath, and the thing gets caught in his sash, which sends him into apoplexy. ‘I will kill you all, every one of you!’ He gets the blade free at last, puts it to Sharif’s scrawny throat. ‘Now tell me the truth!’ Spittle flies, showering the kaid’s upturned face.

  ‘I … ah … did see Nus-Nus drink a g-glass of wine,’ he manages to get out, rolling his eyes like an Eid sheep. ‘And … ah …’ He tries to recall some other peccadillo against the precepts of Islam, something incriminatory but not too serious. ‘And … ah, the Kaid Mohammed b-ben Hadou … ah … had his p-portrait p-painted.’

  ‘Twice,’ Rafik adds spitefully.

  ‘Twice,’ Sharif concurs.

  ‘Son of a dog!’ He pushes the kaid aside and launches himself at ben Hadou, who puts up his hands to ward off the sultan’s frenzy. ‘The word of Allah forbids the making of images! You shall die for bringing this shame down upon me, the Champion of Islam, the Defender of the Faith!’ He stabs the Tinker in the leg, and ben Hadou falls to the floor with a shriek. For a moment there is a lull, as if Ismail’s sudden bloodlust may have been satisfied, then he shouts for his guards. ‘Take them all to the lion enclosure!’

  I had thought I did not care whether I lived or died. But when you are trapped in a pit with seven hungry lions circling and the prospect of being torn apart and eaten alive, it is rather a different matter.

  ‘Keep together!’ ben Hadou tells us. I have bound my turban around his thigh, but he is already weak from blood loss. ‘If we get separated it will make it easy for them to take us one by one. Throw sand at them, rocks, pebbles – anything you can find.’

  ‘Throw him at the lions!’ Samir Rafik cries, gesturing at Sharif, who is clearly going to be of no use in repulsing giant predators, the sight of them having rendered him immobile, huge-eyed and practically dead of terror. ‘That’ll keep them busy for a while.’

  For a heartbeat it seems as if the Tinker is actually considering this cruel option; then I realize his wound is slowing his thoughts almost to a standstill.

  ‘Wave your arms at them and yell,’ I suggest, remembering what we were told as children, growing up in a region in which lions hunted prey; but that was a tactic designed to scare off a lone animal, not seven starving beasts. Still, this keeps the lions at bay for a few frantic minutes, but before too long they decide the noise poses no threat to them and begin to circle in again.

  The lions of Barbary are reputed to be the heaviest and most powerful of all lions, and certainly these are monstrous-looking beasts. One might even call them handsome or even noble in different circumstances, with their massy bulk and vast black manes, their wide faces and intelligent amber eyes. It’s just that for now, maddened by the smell of the kaid’s blood, and no doubt deprived of food for several days, all that crafty intelligence is bent on weighing up how to worry large chunks of flesh out of us with their truly massive teeth.

  It is the females who take the lead: huge tawny creatures, smooth of coat and sharp of eye. They are smaller than the two males, but what they lack in bulk and mane they more than make up for in ferocity and guile. Two feint an attack, dodging in and back out of reach, distracting us while another prowls silently behind us and, correctly assessing the victim least likely to do damage, snatches Sharif by the arm. The poor kaid howls in agony and digs his heels into the sand: but the lioness is by far the stronger. With a wrench of her great head, she drags him away, and there is nothing the rest of us can do to save him. The noise is horrible – the tearing and crunching; the screams …

  Now the male lions move in and try to muscle the female out of the way, and a moment later a vicious fight breaks out. The roars of the great beasts reverberate in my breastbone as I stare about me, weighing our few options. At the edge of the enclosure is a wide ditch, full of water – too wide for the lions to leap across – and after this a tall iron fence. After discovering the ability of lions to dig after the incident in the slave matamores, and some other less successful methods, it has been determined that this is the best way to keep the beasts from getting out and ravaging the palace population, though it mars the spectators’ view of proceedings. Usually, it is just some poor, anonymous slave who gets thrown to the lions; that it should be four prominent members of the returning English embassy means that the event has drawn quite a crowd. They are all crammed up against the fence – people I have known for years: palace functionaries, guards, stablemen, potboys and slaves; lords, merchants; as well, of course, as the blessed sultan himself and even the Empress Zidana and her sons – waiting for us to die. Watching poor Sharif being torn limb from limb with expressions of rapt avidity that make me feel quite sick.

  ‘Quickly, make for the ditch!’ I say to ben Hadou, calculating that our chances against lions on solid ground are likely to be significantly smaller than they may be in the chancy waters of the moat.

  Desperation lends him strength: together we race across the pit, the Tinker’s arm draped across my shoulders for support. We make it to the ditch before the lions give up their tussle over what is left of the kaid, and Rafik and I both thrash our way across the ditch to the fence. With my hand wrapped around an iron post, I hazard a look back, to see ben Hadou splashing and yelling wildly at a determined lioness, who has also braved the water. ‘I cannot swim!’ he cries.

  Rafik sneers. ‘Bad luck for you.’ Then he shins his way up the iron railings and levers himself over the spikes at the top, falling to the other s
ide scraped and bloody, but intact.

  For a long moment I hesitate. I could save myself as easily as Samir Rafik has done; but seeing Kaid Sharif ripped apart by the lions has imprinted itself horribly in my memory, and I hardly knew the man; with the Tinker I have shared a great deal more, though I have not always liked him. How could I live with myself if I left him to perish in the jaws of the lioness? Besides, only an hour ago, I was wishing death would take me. Now, strangely, it comes to me that I would prefer to live, even without the White Swan in the world. Drawing deep, I summon up Senufo spirit; my mask, the kponyungu.

  I failed to complete my initiation into the Poro, the secret male society that teaches the young men of the Senufo wisdom, strength and responsibility, for I was taken by the slavers in the year in which I began to learn our rituals. But I had made the kponyungu dance, and I knew its power. In our culture the purpose of the mask is for the battling of evil, whether of this world or the next; natural or supernatural. Sometimes a mask is a passive shield, a smooth carapace to turn aside evil; but it can be an expression of utmost aggression. I conjure into my mind the powerful jaws of the crocodile, the teeth of the hyena, against which nothing can resist; I add the tusks of a warthog and the horns of the musk-ox; and between them I set the chameleon, the creature of change. As an afterthought I imagine a troop of ants marching up and over the mask with the determination of the unstoppable. With a snarl, I plunge back into the water, and unleash all the anger and fury and grief I have ever felt through the mask. This is no longer my second face; it is my own. And I am no longer Nus-Nus, half-and-half, eunuch, slave; my name is Akuji. And I am Dead, Yet Awake.

  The lioness stares at me uncertainly. Then she wrinkles her muzzle, showing the full extent of her vast incisors: but it is a gesture more of fear than of hostility. After a few seconds charged with violent potential she wheels away, throwing up a great wash of water, and lumbers back on to solid ground to join the others in their feast.