A tall man shouldered by me, an expression of avarice on his dark, narrow face. He resembled Rais Guzman, but had nearly black skin. So it wasn’t him yesterday, I thought crazily. It was an evil djin who can change colors at whim.
I had reached the guards.
Throwing myself between two of them, I hit at strong, hard arms holding scimitars. Warnings were shouted at me. But in my frenzy I continued clubbing. A weapon fell, clattering. And I rushed into the ceremonial square.
The Pasha’s retinue milled about, some mounted, some on foot, forming a circle to protect him. In his glory of jewels and satin, he knelt by a small, prostrate figure.
All warmth receded from me. I felt the ice congealing my blood. And each time I remember this moment, I again experience this same awesome chill.
Almanack, riderless, pawed his small, silvered hooves.
David lay on hard-packed earth, the Pasha’s hand cupping his small head so the relaxed features were turned toward me. The little cloth-of-gold robe was rucked up to show chubby legs. One shoe had fallen off, baring a foot. The gold fez was crumpled.
Shuddering, unaware of lascivious eyes, I hurled myself toward my son.
“David!” I cried in a shrill, inhuman voice. “David!”
I fell to my knees, trying to gather him in my arms. But the Pasha, who had put an ear to David’s chest, looked up. His face was contorted by hideous fear.
My heart twisted with anguish. “Is he dead?”
In the roaring mob, my question was inaudible, but the Pasha read my lips as I read his.
“The heart’s beating,” he said.
Joy exploded through me. Again I tried to embrace the small, still form. But Ahmed was wrapping me in a decorous, muffling cloak as he had that long-ago Sunday in Tripoli, and his lean hands held me back, restraining me.
Then I understood the Pasha’s tormented expression, and why he cupped the small skull so tenderly. The blood of David’s quick-witted, lively brain was soaking into parched, uncaring earth.
Four
The Pasha and I walked alongside the slow-moving litter that bore our son back to the Citadel. Guards holding rifles surrounded us. Servants protected us from the broiling August sun with parasols, and others waved ostrich fans to conceal us. I paid no attention. My eyes remained fixed on the small face white as its swathe of bandages.
The Pasha watched with the same concentration. Once he turned to say, “I never should have let him ride the pony.”
David was carried to the Pasha’s own room. In this airy chamber I once had recovered from a skull injury. The coincidence pierced my dread like a bright ray. He’ll recover, too, I thought hopefully.
The doctors were awaiting us. Most Islamic husbands would have forbidden a wife to remain in the same room with other men. The Pasha did not. But I was too distraught to consider the Pasha’s forbearing decency in letting me remain.
The five doctors, the foremost in Egypt, taught at El Azhar, Islam’s mother university, which had been founded in Cairo during the tenth century. Politely they kept their eyes averted from me. They undid the bandages and none glanced toward me when I cried aloud at David’s gaping wound. They shaved the yellow curls. They cleansed the dried blood. I held a hand to my veil, fighting back nausea, as one picked with pincers at the white bone splinters and another used a needle to stitch David’s flesh.
After they rebandaged the small head, they stood by the divan, consulting.
“Fragments of the bone are cutting into the brain.”
“The thinking power is destroyed.”
“He’ll continue in a coma.”
“Until he dies.”
“It’s the will of God,” they chorused.
Insallah. The will of God. The expression that sums up all the fatalism of the East.
“God wills,” said the Pasha imperiously, “that you use your every healing art on my son.”
“Certainly, Pasha. We shall do our utmost. But the damage is already done. The section of the brain that produces thought is mangled. Gone.”
My heart plummeted. My agonized eyes met the Pasha’s.
Hoarsely, he asked, “Is there no cure?”
None of the five answered. One doctor wiped sweat from his forehead, another lifted David’s limp hand and set it on the coverlet. In this long silence I heard my own sobbing breath.
At last the white-bearded physician said cautiously, “We could dose him with the powder of crocodile teeth.”
“There is no cure, Pasha, not for a brain so extensively damaged,” put in a younger doctor quietly.
The white-bearded man, obviously the senior, retorted, “Crocodile powder has worked miracles knitting bones.” He made an obsequious bow to the Pasha.
Apothecaries came with the medicine.
One doctor raised up David’s bandaged head, another dropped the diluted powder on his tongue, then closed his mouth. The small throat jerked convulsively and David swallowed.
His functions continued, but he had less control over them than when he was an infant. He didn’t respond to noise or light. A fly landed on his eyelid and he didn’t twitch.
The sky darkened. The Islamic day begins with nightfall, so the Nile Festival was officially over. The doctors remained, as did the Pasha.
The men discussed brain damage in abstract medical terms.
I watched the rise and fall of David’s small chest. With each breath I thought: He’s alive. Where there’s life there’s hope.
And during that hot August night, I made a vow. I would use my every ounce of strength to keep David alive.
After the morning prayers, when the learned doctors departed, I shed my robes and veil.
“It’s been more than twenty-four hours,” I said to the Pasha. “And he’s still alive.”
The Pasha sat on the divan that faced David. Wearily he asked, “Naksh, didn’t you listen? Didn’t you hear? They said his brain is irrevocably damaged.”
I bent over David, adjusting the sheet. His color was back, his rounded cheeks bloomed rosily. The white bandage seemed no more ominous than a play turban he had put on to pretend he was a man.
“He’s going to recover,” I said.
“No. Never.”
“When I sank into death, you grasped my hands to keep me alive.”
“I knew you’d still be human, not a vegetating thing.” Shuddering, he buried his face in his hands. “Naksh, Naksh,” he said, his gravelly voice muffled. “How I’ve been reproaching myself. If I’d insisted he ride on someone’s saddle he’d still be alive.”
“He is alive,” I said fiercely.
“Yesterday at the Nile Festival my Daood was killed.”
“He’s alive.” I insisted. “And as long as he’s alive, there’s a good chance he’ll recover.”
“Never in this world, beloved. Never in this world.”
“I’ll make him live and get well.”
He looked up. His eyes were all depth and tears, like bottomless gray wells.
“Naksh,” he said quietly, “you tell me often that in the East we hide behind veils and walls. And in the West you look unflinchingly on the truth. Now is the time for you to gaze upon the naked truth. Fate would have been kind had our son ceased to breathe. He’ll never again run, never make his small jokes, never smile at me, never smile at you. His lovely, bright spirit is gone.”
“He’ll recover. I’ll do everything that the doctors prescribe.” My voice shook with the intensity of my purpose. “I won’t let him die.”
“If there is a God, surely He’ll soon permit Daood’s body to join his spirit.”
The Pasha’s use of the Eastern version of David’s name had an ominous knell that frightened me as much as his words.
“I love my baby,” I cried passionately.
“And I loved him as my own life. Naksh, this I swear on the Koran and your Bible. I’ll avenge him.”
“Avenge?”
He gazed down at the still, small form. “I don’t beli
eve it was an accident,” he said bitterly. “The Mameluke rule profited the landlords. Isn’t it logical to assume that these landlords might wish a return to the good old days when the fellaheen starved? I believe a plot to assassinate me misfired.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to mention the Bedouins shoving at the cordon. My entire being, though, was focused on my need to nurse David back to health.
“We have a saying, Pasha. Where there’s life there’s hope. Please, please, help me tend him.”
“That is something I cannot do,” sighed the Pasha. “Not even for you, beloved, will I keep my brave little son a mindless ghost on this earth.”
Tears stung behind my eyelids. “So you’ve truly given up?”
“Haven’t I vowed to punish those responsible?”
Though we were at the sickbed of a small boy we each loved dearly, we came from opposite sides of the earth, and my desperate need to keep David alive was as incomprehensible to the Pasha as his punitive vow was to me. He stood, gazing down at the rosy face, then bent to kiss each eyelid. He was, I knew, bidding David farewell.
Not attempting to hide the tears that flowed down his cheeks, he left the room. The satin liveries of eunuch guards rustled as they bowed to a man in the throes of overwhelming grief.
Five
Lullah Zuleika helped me tend David.
Together we sprinkled salt at the entries of the Pasha’s chambers and nailed up amulets and charms. We sewed cowrie shells on all David’s little nightshirts to avert the evil eye.
She burned papers inscribed with verses from the sixth chapter of the Koran, stirring the ashes into orange sherbet.
“How can I give that to him?” I said aghast. “It must taste foul.”
“Those are verses of protection,” she said firmly. “They’ll cure him.”
So I spooned the black liquid into David’s mouth, and he swallowed it as he would anything, with a mechanical jerk of his plump throat. Cinders clung to his teeth. I moistened a towel to clean the very white enamel, then sat praying for the potion to work.
His eyes remained closed.
Lullah Zuleika’s sweet, round face became increasingly dejected. After an hour, she turned to me. “Tomorrow,” she said, “we could try other verses.”
“Yes,” I replied eagerly. “That’s what we’ll do.”
I clung to her superstitions with the desperate grip of a drowning person. My need was so great that I went through all of her rituals. But even if I had not, Lullah Zuleika was so good, so generous, so unstinting of her devotion that I would have relied on her. Each morning when she arrived, freshly bathed, her colorful silks floating about her firm, round body, my spirits would lift a little.
Uisha, too, was a bulwark of strength. Her coffee-colored face always sympathetic, she did all she could to help David and me.
On a night a week after the Nile Festival Lullah Zuleika burst in. She had been running.
“Naksh,” she said, holding a hand to her large and heaving bosom. “The Pasha wishes you.”
“I can’t leave David.”
“That’s why I came myself. To protect him from the djins of night.” She pulled me to my feet. “Go Ready yourself.”
“But—”
“Do you think I’d let harm come to our David?” she demanded. “Hurry.”
I hadn’t been apart from David since the accident, and even before I reached the harem bathhouse, an intolerable anxiety possessed me. I scratched and fidgeted, making it nearly impossible for Uisha to tend me.
The Pasha was waiting in the big, airy room across the hall from his own chamber—he had slept there during my illness, too. His graying brown hair was rumpled and damp. He, too, had just bathed.
As soon as he greeted me, I said, “Let’s go in to David.”
The light faded from his eyes. “Ahmed tells me he’s the same. True? False?”
“He hasn’t regained consciousness,” I admitted. “But Pasha, what if he does? If I’m not there he’ll be terrified.”
“He won’t waken, Naksh.” The Pasha sighed wearily. “Today we captured a man involved in the fracas.”
“Was it an assassination plot?”
“I don’t know,” the Pasha said grimly. “But I intend to find out.”
A memory of shoving men came into my mind. In my urgency to get back to David, I didn’t consider my next words. “Is he a Bedouin?”
“How do you know that?” the Pasha demanded, his fingers digging like steel into my upper arm.
“I saw a group of Bedouins push through the cordon.”
“And you never said anything? You never told me?” His grip tightened and I winced. He released me.
“David was already hurt, and it wouldn’t have helped him,” I said.
“And you never considered that any wrong done to him is my concern? Have you forgotten, my merciful Christian, that you live in the land of the cruel infidel? We don’t turn the other cheek here. You’ve been in Egypt four years, my beautiful Westerner. You don’t know what unforgiving monsters we are? Me, especially?” The lamp flame wavered as he drew a sharp breath. “My God, Naksh, even if I hadn’t loved him so much, he was my kin. My duty to him, as a kinsman, is revenge. That scum, he’ll tell me who paid him!”
Caught up in my need to save David, I was sickened by the thought of more vengeful bloodshed. “Why are you so positive he was paid?”
“Didn’t you just tell me that a group pushed through the cordon?”
“That could have been an accidental movement in the crowd. Besides, the captive might not be one of those Bedouins. He might a poor, deranged creature—then you’ll have tortured a lunatic.”
“Rest your gentle sensitivities,” he said. “The man’s perfectly sound of mind. My preference, of course, is to torture him. Alas, though, I can’t use the thumbscrews and boiling oil. You see, Naksh, he’ll talk more readily if he’s simply given time alone to nurse his fears before he’s questioned. At the moment he’s in the dungeons of the Citadel, brooding.”
“Maybe he’s not involved.”
“My educated one, how many interrogations have you conducted? I’ve been at thousands. I’ve learned to smell a lie. There’s a different odor to a man’s sweat. A hard, foxlike odor. And this one reeks. He reeks! He’s involved in a plot of some sort. And he can lead me to his master—or his masters.”
The Pasha’s gravel voice was implacable. I remembered my glimpse of Rais Guzman. He had been dressed as a Bedouin. Could he be the one the Pasha sought?
Then the anxiety of being gone from David pushed all else from my mind. “Pasha, David’s alive, and that’s all that really matters.”
The tension of rage left the Pasha, and the lamp threw long, sad shadows on his face.
His softened expression gave me hope, and I said, “He loves you more than me.” The truthful words hurt to utter. “He adores you. Seeing you might restore him.”
“Naksh, don’t you understand? He’s dead. And I loved his shining little spirit too much to bear looking on his corpse.”
I bent my head, weeping.
The Pasha’s arms encircled me. Caressing my unresponsive, perfumed flesh, he drew me to the alcove. “Come, let us comfort one another,” he said. “Naksh, I need you as I never have before.”
He wants to find comfort with the one who shares his grief, I thought, and managed to contain my anxiety. Under him I lay unresponsive and unmoving, shamed that now he understood my frigidity, sad that I couldn’t help him.
Afterward, when I tried to get up, he didn’t release me. “Sleep here,” he commanded.
“Pasha, I must get back to David.” My voice choked. “Please?”
“No more tears, Naksh.” His embrace loosened. “I won’t stop you from what you’re impelled to do. But why can’t you accept me? It’s impossible for me to rest until his murderers are brought to justice. Blood is our strongest tie.”
The two following nights the Pasha didn’t send for me.
Then, very late on Monday afternoon, a message came that he was waiting for me in the harem courtyard. As I entered, he was sitting on the marble rim of a fountain. In the glaring sunlight of the August afternoon, his face was puffy, his eyes dark-shadowed: if the laws of Egypt and its religion didn’t forbid alcohol, I would have believed him recuperating from a drinking bout.
“I’ve been in the dungeons last night and today,” he said. “The Bedouin cracked.”
“What did he say?”
“That all went according to the plan.”
“You mean … the plot wasn’t against you? It was against David?”
“Yes. Daood was their target.” The Pasha’s voice deepened with torment. “Six of them were hired to kill our son. They were paid by a courier from Constantinople.”
“Constantinople?” I echoed.
He nodded. “Seat of the once great Ottoman sultans. Their descendants are reduced to making war on babies.”
“The princess?”
“Yes. My ex-kadine’s money financed our son’s murder.”
It was in this same courtyard that the princess had sworn a vendetta against me and my child. I should have hated her. Yet my desolation was so complete that I had no room for hatred. Remorse was all I felt. “It was me she wanted to hurt,” I murmured.
“It’s not fitting to kill a woman in matters of this kind,” the Pasha said. “Her death wouldn’t be fitting recompense.”
“Does there have to be more blood?”
“The Bedouin told us where to find the rest of the hired scum. They’re still here in Cairo. But their leader left on the day of the Nile Festival. He’s the one that planned everything. He’s the one responsible for Daood’s death. And I have his name.” The Pasha looked into my eyes, slowly repeating, “I have his name.”
“What difference does all this make? Only David matters. Pasha, come back to the room with me?”
“I’ve given you my sacred oath to avenge our son.”
“David will respond to you, I’m positive of it.”
“I’ll find this man if it takes me the rest of my days.”
The Emerald Embrace Page 19
