The Emerald Embrace

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  The exquisite toilette, rather than bolstering me, intimidated me, for with each step the silk caressed my scented thighs and breasts, reminding me of the Pasha’s coming embrace. I had forgotten the reality of him, and remembered only the tales of his cruelty.

  The eunuch opened a door in the wall, a narrow door I’d seen often: it was so ordinary I’d assumed it a servants’ entry.

  We were in the vaulted hall of the Pasha’s apartments.

  Our footsteps muffled by thick carpets, we crossed to a brass-bound door. My muscles tensed and I moved slower, for I believed it to be the Ceremonial Alcove. But it was an office lined with pigeonholed documents. Ahmed sat cross-legged at a low scribes’ table. He bowed gravely and went back to writing.

  My natural curiosity overcame my fear. “Do you always work through the night, Ahmed?” I asked.

  He raised his grave eyes. “I’m performing one of my duties as chief vizier. Inscribing your name.”

  I looked down. Arabic books aren’t bound like ours, but sewn together and stored in boxes. I couldn’t read the top page. Ahmed turned it toward me.

  “This is proof,” he said, “that any child born to you is the Pasha’s child.”

  I read aloud, “‘On the night of April 29, the Pasha was with the slave Naksh.’” Swiftly, before Ahmed could halt me, I dipped his reed pen in the inkhorn, slashing out the words the slave Naksh, writing in English, Liberty Moore.

  “The name I gave you is the highest accolade,” Ahmed reproached me.

  “My father named me after what he—and I, too—cherished most.” My bravado buoyed me a little.

  “You are Naksh, the most ravishingly beautiful woman to come through that door.”

  And mostly to put off the inevitable, I asked, “Do you still believe the Pasha will join the Enlightened Ones after sleeping with me?”

  “It’s not for me to alter a man I admire with my life. I merely wish him to observe a Westerner and Western ways.”

  “Observe?” I gave a bitter laugh.

  “There’s not another woman in Egypt who wouldn’t consider this her night of nights.”

  “And there’s not an American woman who wouldn’t consider being enslaved in a harem the greatest of dishonors.”

  “You aren’t in America,” Ahmed pointed out, getting to his feet. “Come.”

  We went up and down several flights of steps, turning through Moorish archways. The shadowy twists somehow characterized the life of Eastern women, never seen, hidden away for one man’s pleasure. The American laws concerning man’s guardianship over a woman had seemed harsh to me: here, the most respectful term a servant could call one of the kadines was “guarded lady and concealed jewel.”

  We stepped down into an octagonal hall with porcelain wainscoting of a lovely, faded blue design.

  “We’re in the oldest section of the palace,” Ahmed informed me. “Saladin used these quarters.”

  I looked around, my anxiety tempered with awe. Saladin, the great and chivalrous opponent of Richard Coeur de Lion. “Then this hall’s over six hundred years old,” I murmured.

  Ahmed opened a low, antiquated door, admitting me to a room. The door shut softly behind me.

  In one corner of the chamber was a smoky lamp, and by this dim light I could see my surroundings. I gasped. In the East, where mattresses and sleeping pads are rolled up by day, there are no normal, curtained four-posters.

  The entire Ceremonial Alcove was a bed.

  A bed unlike any other.

  Its posts were of gold inset with huge sapphires, the workmanship intricate, from an earlier age when a goldsmith would dedicate his entire life to producing one precious object. The hangings, spun from gold thread, gleamed with diamonds and rubies the size of cherries. The Ceremonial Alcove was more magnificent than any throne, worth an emperor’s ransom.

  “Overdone, isn’t it?” said the Pasha from the shadows.

  The smoky light wavered, growing brighter as he carried the lamp toward me.

  In his robe and turban he had seemed a spare, definitely middle-aged merchant. But his nightshirt, which was open to the waist, revealed a muscular chest covered with crisp brown hair. His calves were strong with riding muscles. His shoulders were wide. He looked like the conquering soldier he was. And his virile strength heightened my apprehension—and made me more determined not to show fear.

  “Did Saladin sleep here?”

  “Not too often,” the Pasha replied. “You told me your father taught you history. Don’t you remember? Saladin kept busy elsewhere, beating off your crusaders.”

  “In Jerusalem and Acre,” I said.

  He raised the brass lamp, holding it high while his gaze moved over my body. “Your hair’s a brighter gold than the bedposts, and your eyes a deeper blue than the sapphires, and your lips, though red like the rubies, are far more precious because, soft and trembling a little, they invite kisses. Your lovely long legs and your tiny waist and magnificent breasts—or what I can see of them—are like glimpses of paradise. But I better not go on like this. It could only annoy an educated young American scholar like yourself to know you’re far more beautiful than the Ceremonial Alcove.”

  He was grinning as if he, I and the bed were equally amusing.

  “Is it a law that we must sleep here?” I asked, and my voice quavered.

  “A tradition followed by my predecessors. Maybe we hope to be inspired to heroic carnal feats. Besides, a certain respect for tradition is expected of a ruler.”

  He set down the lamp, taking my hand, first kissing the palm, then the inside of my wrist. The touch of his warm lips raised small hairs on the back of my neck. He reached for the layered cloak, his hands trembling momentarily on my shoulders before he let the silk drop, a shimmering pool around our bare feet.

  “Don’t be nervous,” he said. “Consider the humorous side. A merchant and a scholar’s daughter are about to lie together where once the mighty Saladin slept.”

  “Isn’t it time,” I asked, managing to keep my voice cool, “that we forgot my stupid mistake? We both know you’re the Pasha.”

  “Do we?” he asked.

  He took me in his arms. It was then that I realized his jesting was as spurious as my bravado. Passion shook his arms and thighs. But a wave of revulsion chilled me, for my entire being longed for Stephen.

  The Pasha’s hands moved on my back, caressing me through the sheer fabric. His fingers cupped the side of my breasts. Though the night was warm, my skin turned to ice.

  Against my ear, he said, “Come into Saladin’s bed, Naksh.”

  He pulled me next to him on the soft mattress. Around us, the hangings gave off a musty, metallic odor, and the jewels glinted dully, like the eyes of watching beasts. The Pasha took off my night shift. His caresses on my thighs, breasts, arms were tender, yet I had to repress my shudder when he held my hand around his erection, pressing my fingers to the hot throbbing, guiding my thumb along the ridged tip. “In our faith,” he said, “we’re circumsised.”

  So that was what the biblical term meant. In giving me the knowledge, the Pasha wished to draw us closer, yet his words affected me in the opposite manner, making me feel yet more apart, a forlorn stranger enslaved in a strange world.

  I felt as though I were standing apart, watching in this ancient part of the Citadel as a man’s virile body pressed on a girl’s tensed flesh. I watched his lips kiss my nipples, and from my removed distance, I saw his passion was held in check. And then I realized that he, too, was watching. Not at a remove, but close. His eyes were fixed on mine, trying to get a clue as to what would please me.

  He kissed my lips, moving between my perfumed thighs, whispering, “Naksh, it’s all right. Don’t be so nervous. This comes to women. They survive and are happy.”

  He believed my tension came from fear of losing my virginity!

  He believed me a virgin. Of course he did. For so I’d been represented when sold to Ahmed, so represented, doubtless, when I was given to the Pash
a.

  “Pasha—” I started, trying to push him from me so I could explain.

  But he pressed into me.

  At the ease of his entry he gave a strident gasp. Peering at me, his gray eyes were bewildered, hurt, as if a friend unexpectedly had turned traitor to strike him a mortal blow. Then his eyes pierced my soul as his flesh pierced my flesh.

  “Naksh?” he demanded roughly.

  “I … yes. I have already had a man.”

  “And for this you kept me waiting these long, weary months,” he growled. And with that his assault began.

  His hot, sweating, punitive body pounded against mine, seeking to annihilate my womanhood; he used his penis as a battering ram to destroy my femininity, which had unknowingly betrayed him. Grasping my buttocks, he plunged with deep, agonizing strokes. I shuddered and closed my eyes.

  “Look at me, damn you,” he ordered hoarsely.

  His battering continued endlessly, until the muscles of my thighs and my pelvis ached heavily and inside I was torn and arid, until every memory of sexual pleasure was obliterated and I could no longer believe my ecstatic response in Stephen’s arms aboard the Hassam. The jeweled bed swung around me, and forever I was staring up at the Pasha as he extinguished my carnal being. Despite my agony, I could see the hurt in his gray eyes.

  A cry, as of defeat, poured out of him, and then it was over. He rolled from me, covering his face with one hand.

  Struggling to sit, I pulled the coverlet to hide myself.

  “Naksh, my congratulations.” The contorted twist of his mouth proved that his cynical tone didn’t come easily. “You took me in completely. You play the innocent well.”

  I clasped my shaking arms around my knees, realizing that the hours of brutality had not soothed the baffling hurt that had driven him.

  “I didn’t realize you expected a virgin,” I said. My voice was amazingly cool and rational.

  “Oh?” He pushed up to face me. “You thought I was being patient for a whore? Or the victim of a hundred corsair rapists?”

  “I wasn’t raped.” Though he had obliterated the memory of my joy with Stephen, I couldn’t surrender the memory of that memory. “I gave myself willingly.”

  “You have spirit, Naksh. I admire that, as well as your stupid honesty. So you didn’t think it would matter to me that you desired others, but not me? How many? How often?”

  “One man,” I murmured. “One night.”

  He leaned toward me, examining me by the smoky light. I could feel the heat of his breath. Finally he leaned back against the jeweled bedpost.

  “I believe you,” he said. And asked in a silky tone, “Naksh, do you remember the two methods of leaving my harem? The second way, the sack in the Nile? You could have had a thousand men for a thousand nights and be punished no more.”

  Menace crowded into the Ceremonial Alcove. “It happened before I came to Egypt. I wasn’t unfaithful.” I let out a shuddering breath. “Pasha, you laugh at me, my schooling, the West. I’m a joke to you, no more. I know purity’s important where there’s love or marriage. But why should it matter to you in my case?”

  “The question, Naksh, proves your ignorance about Oriental despots.”

  “How can you joke about ordering my death?”

  “You’re afraid, aren’t you?” His lips smiled but his eyes didn’t. “Too afraid to see the humor in a slave girl crossing wits with the loathsome tyrant who owns her body and soul.”

  I was very afraid. Yet his reminder of my enslavement flicked like a lash at my raw, desolated nerves. He had destroyed part of me. I wasn’t going to let him claim my spirit.

  I raised my chin. “You don’t own my soul, and you never will.”

  “Never, never,” he mimicked. “How you love parroting that meaningless word.”

  “I am afraid, but I can’t understand why. Death’s certainly preferable to slavery.” And I added recklessly, “For me, any woman’s life in Islam is slavery.”

  “And you, my free Western spirit, what do you know of our ways? Or are you, charming scholar, the first who’s looked without predetermined disdain on our faith and our life?”

  “True, I know very little,” I retorted hotly. “But I’m learning fast. Haven’t you yourself just given me an excellent lesson in Eastern tenderness? I await my next lesson, the one in justice and mercy. That’s drowning in the Nile, isn’t it?”

  Without warning, he grasped my throat. Despite my frantic pushing, I couldn’t dislodge the thumbs biting into my windpipe.

  In the struggle, the coverlet fell from me. He pressed hot kisses on my breasts, so when my lungs filled to bursting he must have felt the wild reverberations of my heart. Releasing my neck, he shook me by the shoulders. He was weeping. His intense and contradictory emotions baffled me and touched me with pity.

  I ceased struggling. He was taken by surprise at my sudden limpness and let go of me. But his hands had been bracing me and I fell back. As I did so, the side of my head slammed full force against jewel-encrusted gold.

  I woke to voices and hands moving on me. They’re going to drown me, I thought. Trying to elude the shadowy forms, I managed to raise my head a fraction of an inch. Pain burst across my skull. I sank back.

  “Don’t try to move, Naksh,” a gravelly voice ordered. “Stay still, beloved.”

  Forlorn tears of humiliation oozed from my eyes. Hands lifted me, gentle hands, yet the pain was excruciating. I whimpered.

  “Be careful, damn you!”

  Why should they be careful? What difference did it make if I were alive or dead when I was thrown into the Nile? Again I was shifted, and this time the pain flowed over me, an inescapable tidal wave of agony, and just as the dark and lonely sea closed overhead, I heard my Father’s silvery voice reading Shakespeare: I am dying, Egypt, dying.

  Thirteen

  I drifted below the pain.

  Burning daggers stabbed in my head, and whenever anything thicker than cool water was fed to me, I would vomit feebly. Moving was such torment that even the least shift in position wrenched a groan from me.

  I had cracked the side of my skull on the gold bedpost. Though some dim logic informed me that my fall had been accidental, my fevered brain was utterly convinced that my agony was part of the Pasha’s vengeance. Sometimes I gabbled my fears aloud.

  Once, I let myself sink further below the pain. Drifting downward, falling, retreating into velvet dark.… This must be death, I thought. What a fool I’ve been to resist it. Death’s so pleasant and easy.

  Strong hands clasped mine. “You aren’t going to be drowned. Do you hear? I won’t let you die. I refuse to let you die.” The voice was harsh and commanding.

  I tried to escape, but the hands continued to grip mine, drawing me, reluctant, from the soft, impervious depths up into light and pain.

  In my stronger moments I wanted Stephen. I knew enough not to cry out for him.

  I woke.

  No daggers stabbed my head. The pain across my brow was normal, as if I’d read too long by candle. A light fell across my coverlet, creamy pale, like the spring sun in Washington. “Father,” I whispered, and the word came out a feeble croak.

  Then I realized the domed ceiling was ornamented with exquisitely calligraphed verses from the Koran. With a terrible wrench, I accepted that my home was a world away.

  Uisha bent over me. She touched a cool palm to my forehead, smiled, then held up a finger and disappeared. A few minutes later, she returned, followed by the Pasha. Bowing low, she backed away to give us privacy.

  He sat on a floor pillow. His face was lined with weariness.

  “Understand one thing, Naksh,” he said quietly. “Neither you nor Uisha is in any danger of being drowned.”

  “That was my sickness talking,” I said in a leaden tone. “How long have I been ill?”

  “Four days—almost five.”

  “Where am I?”

  “My room.”

  “Why?”

  The earnestness vani
shed from his tired face. “Why? Naksh, you screamed so loudly when we tried to move you that I figured you longed for my despotic presence.” The teasing lights glinted in his gray eyes. “Wasn’t I right?”

  I shrugged weakly.

  “Now rest,” he said.

  The next two weeks I recuperated in his alcove.

  The harem medical staff tended me with respectful obeisances that made me uncomfortable. Uisha was the only nurse I wanted—but she was trapped in a prison of silence.

  The Pasha’s brief yet frequent visits were an abrasive relief—and an enigma. He was completely unromantic. He never so much as touched my hand. He neither alluded to our time in the Ceremonial Alcove nor acted apologetic. Finally I concluded that baiting me about the West amused him. After each of our small tilts he would lean back, grinning. He’s never had a woman jester, I decided.

  One hot morning in the middle of June Uisha bore in a heap of gorgeously colored silk. It was the first time I’d dressed, and all the clothes were new. She helped me into the bodice, lovely aqua shot silk cut in a low curve at the bosom buttoned with silver to the waist and falling in a kind of loose skirt to my knees, half covering my deep blue harem trousers. She adorned me with my gold bangles and anklets, but my rings were too loose to wear.

  The exertion of dressing wearied me, and I lay back in the pillows.

  The Pasha came in carrying a flat box. After him trotted a boy with a cherrywood pipe as tall as he. The Pasha sat, clamping his strong white teeth on the amber mouthpiece, inhaling as the boy held a flame to the clay bowl, then lifting a hand, waving. The boy, Uisha and the liveried eunuchs left the room.

  Why did he want us alone? I was afraid and my pelvic nerves twinged painfully.