"I have been a man of peace," Boabdil declared in as ringing a tone as he was capable of, "but I am a man and I am a ruler. The gauntlet of aggression has been tossed at my feet. In my surprise I have hesitated a moment. Now, good sirs, I pick it up and fling it back—as the gauntlet of war. The hand of the Sultan Abu Abdullah upholds the Sword of Allah! Now shall we ride forth with the terrible cries and the ferocious might that once chilled the blood of our ancient foes. Los Reyes Católicos will go down to perdition where waits Roderigo the Goth to greet them. We shall vent our fury, we shall have our vengeance; the scurrilous enemy will now suffer our full wrath. The vengeance of Allah will be turned upon them. War upon the infidel, this I decree—Abu Abdullah, Great Sultan of Granada, Champion of the Hand and the Key! And thus let it be known in every corner of my realm."
From the astonished murmur of voices sprang a few shouts of approval, "Aye, Great Sultan, so be it!" And then, with a joyous outburst of relief the majority of the council members scrambled to their feet to cheer their ruler. With regal aplomb Boabdil stood before them calmly smiling, but Francho knew he was soaking up the unaccustomed sound of their approval like a man shriveled by years of rain allowed finally to bask in the sunlight. A few listeners in the back slipped out of the chamber to speed the news of the Sultan's declaration of war throughout the city.
***
Returning to his house somewhat earlier in the evening than usual to help Ali prepare the rice and meat for supper, Francho found the boy sitting on his pallet conversing with a mantled young woman who jumped up in frightened confusion as Francho stooped through the doorway. She stammered out that she was a friend of Ali's and was just leaving, but the boy quickly piped up in spite of her warning glance, "Azahra is my sister, Jamal."
"Your sister!" Francho exclaimed. "You told me you had no family, rascal."
"I said I had no one who could care for me," Ali wavered. "Azahra tried, but I was a great burden to her."
Clasping her hands nervously the girl glided toward Francho, moving with a natural, sensual grace that rippled the light mantle she clutched about her and that did not entirely conceal the lines of her short, supple body and her large bosom. Her features—why, she was only a child, Francho realized, abruptly terminating the tenor of his thoughts. Dark-skinned and pock-cheeked, with huge eyes, the irises black as jet in a sea of white, her plain face was that of an uncertain girl set upon the ripened form of a mature woman.
"Please, sayed, don't be angry with Ali." The lovely, liquid eyes held the same hopeful trust as her brother's. "It is all my fault; I shouldn't have come here. But I miss him. We have never been so long separated."
"And I suppose he has a mother and father somewhere about too?" Francho broke in sharply.
"No, sir, we have no one. Oh please, please, he did not really mean to deceive you. He had no place to live; that was true."
"Then where do you stay?"
"Where I am employed, at the Inn of the Golden Horn."
Francho frowned his displeasure. "What sort of sister are you that you could let your little brother roam the streets and sleep in doorways? Why don't you share what you have with him?"
Tears rose in the girl's dark eyes. Looking more closely Francho saw that beside pimples her face was also disfigured by a thin scar that traced a painful white line from one ear to the point of her chin.
"I did, good sayed, for as long as I could. But the proprietor did not like Ali and beat him and kicked him, until I saw it was better for Ali to find his own shelter than to have his bones broken by that brute of a man. He used to grab Ali by the arm and twist it and I thought surely one day I would hear Ali's poor little arm snap—" The tears spilled out of the great, black-lashed orbs that seemed to inhabit her whole face.
"Here now, girl, don't weep," Francho said in a kinder tone, ashamed of himself as she wiped her eyes with a corner of her mantle. He saw her suddenly become pale and trembly, and, afraid she would faint, he led her to the pallet and made her sit on it. Ali hovered about so anxiously that Francho directed him to bring a cup of wine. "But why do you stay in the employ of such a man?" he asked, immediately realizing how foolish was such a question in a city overcrowded with unemployed.
Azahra told him a sad tale of a mother too ill to work who had sold her to Zatar of the Golden Horn as a bond slave for seven years, hoping for a miracle to occur so she could buy back her daughter from slavery; and whose hopes had ended in the grave and left Ali alone to linger about the Golden Horn, where his sister managed to pass him enough food to keep him alive. "Oh, I beg of you, you have been so kind to my little brother, do not abandon him now. He is a good boy and very willing to earn his keep."
Pityingly, Francho soothed her. "You have no need to become overwrought, Azahra. I have no intention of abandoning Ali."
"And that terrible Zatar beats her for nothing," Ali cried out. "She showed me. He is a mean and cruel man. Show Jamal the marks," he urged Azahra. "Jamal is very strong; he will go there and punish him." The child's eyes glowed with hero worship as he gazed at the tall friend who sheltered him and who was so important he was sometimes in the very presence of the Sultan as one of his musicians.
Azahra blanched with fear. "Oh no, you must not do that, sayed. Ali is stupid. It is Zatar's right to strike me if he wishes."
But Ali pulled down the mantle from her shoulders and Francho quickly stayed her hand from drawing it up again. She wore a sleeveless jacket. The flesh of one upper arm showed purple-greenish bruises, in the outline of cruel fingers. Both rounded arms and probably her back, Francho imagined, were covered with red welts, as if from a whistling willow whip. He pictured the weeping young girl cringing helplessly in a corner as the paunchy proprietor flayed at her with the whip and a dark frown appeared between his brows. "What is it that you do at the inn? Are you a cook?"
"I... I am a dancer."
Of course! Now he knew why the expressive eyes had seemed so familiar and the walk so undulating. "But you are a very good dancer. I have seen you; you dance with your face veiled."
"He makes me do that. It intrigues the customers and serves to hide my scar and the ugliness of my skin."
"If you do not misbehave, then why does he hit you?"
Azahra hung her head. "B... because he makes me lay with him and he hurts me and sometimes I just cannot bear it," she whispered. Then, with shamed eyes, she pulled the mantle about her and rose, trying tremulously to smile through the pallor that still lay on her face. "I must leave now, sayed. Zatar will be raging if he finds that I am gone."
Clenching his jaw against the swinishness of Azahra's master, Francho amazed himself by offering the dancer sanctuary. She could keep house and cook for him and share Ali's pallet, and he would give her a small sum for her services. Ali's face shone as if he looked upon a bearded god, but Azahra shook her head sadly. She was legally the property of Zatar, and prison awaited anyone who aided a slave to escape. And the innkeep would not sell her. Others had offered thrice what he had paid for her, so Zatar had gloated, but she drew hordes of patrons to his common room. "And above all," she added, tonelessly, "he lusts for me and he delights in tormenting me."
Francho tipped up Azahra's unhappy face. "Would you rather stay here with Ali? Well then, we shall hide you. Since you have danced with a veil no one on the street will recognize you, and you will make sure to keep away from the vicinity of the Golden Horn. If he looks for you he will never conceive that you are hiding so close, he will think you have fled beyond the city."
Still Azahra hesitated. "It is not for myself that I fear, I am but a worthless slave. But I do not wish to bring trouble upon you, sayed."
Francho's laugh was a deep rumble. "I have a few friends at the Alhambra who will help me in case Zatar discovers where you are. Powerful friends. He can do me no harm, Azahra, be easy about that," he assured her with a certain pride.
"Jamal is a Royal Musician, Azahra, and sometimes he plays for the Sultan!" Ali announced to her proudly.
>
Azahra's midnight eyes filled again, this time with tears of gratitude. She clasped her hands. "Oh, you are so kind, sayed. Surely the blessings of Allah and the compassion of Fatima will follow you always."
"Good, then the matter is settled. Zatar has gained from your dancing many times what he paid for you. Your debt to him is ended." Francho brushed away her thanks in embarrassment. "Now tuck up your mantle, sister of Ali, and see to our supper. This has been a long, weary day."
He went through the curtain to his small chamber, feeling through his back the grateful eyes of the two orphans beaming upon him. Immediately, calling himself fool as he exchanged his turban for a more comfortable little skullcap and his heelless leather shoes for raffia slippers, he began to regret his impulsive offer. It was bad enough he had come to feel responsible for that scamp Ali, but now to bring a half-grown girl, a runaway slave, into the house was sheer idiocy. He wanted no fracas with the owner of the Golden Horn to spoil his anonymity in the neighborhood. It was known that he was employed at the Alhambra as a musician, but so were a hundred other trumpeters, drummers, instrumentalists, and singers. But since the Sultan had insisted he dress as befitting a Head Musician, he came and went from his house with a concealing mantle over his new tunics and narrow pantaloons. He expected his exalted position to be discovered eventually by his neighbors in the Albayazin, and then there would be a horde of beggars swarming on his doorstep, and his movements around the quarter would be more remarked. But he was safer to preserve his insignificance as long as possible, and having the Golden Horn's popular dancer hiding in his house was not the way to do it.
Still, in pity for the young girl's undeserved bruises and welts he had reacted by offering her haven, and now, even upon sober reflection, he hadn't the cruelty to withdraw it. He could only hope fat Zatar would give Azahra up as a bad bargain, or that at least he or his agents would not find out where she hid.
Chapter 21
The Sultan received his Grand Vizier in the royal garden, a lush, grassy area with pink oleander bushes, iris, white roses and poppies, myrtle trees, jetting fountains, and a spoked wheel of tiled paths leading to a serene lily pond in the middle. Resting on silken pillows under a tasseled canopy the Sultan motioned the spare Comixa to another heap of pillows, lower than his own. Francho sat on the rim of the lily pool strumming a lute softly, with less interest in their discussion of the gala tourney and banquet to be held in honor of Gazul's continuing and successful raids on Spanish towns than in the sparkling blue water of the pool, where one of the floating gold-and-white lilies suddenly became Leonora's sweet face laughing up at him.
He didn't want to think of Leonora, it disturbed the "persona" of Jamal ibn Ghulam by reminding him of Francisco de Mendoza, an incautious overlay that might cause him to stumble. But he would have to be less than human to view the glorious pinks and golds of the drifting blossoms and not recall the delicate beauty of his lady.
He was living, in fact, as celibate as a monk and had done so all these months. He worked off his physical restlessness with daily long and vigorous swims—a concealing towel tight about his hips—in the great pool of the palace baths, then by getting pummeled and pounded and massaged, and often by finding a willing partner for a friendly, grunting wrestle on the carpeted area set aside for this. He assiduously ignored the female slaves around the palace who slid flirtatious eyes at him and politely avoided the bolder, diaphanously veiled ladies of the Court, who tossed provocative looks along with their roses when he performed at banquets and who begged the fortunately unwilling Sultan to lend his splendid balladeer to their houses.
He was often restive in his silken but solitary bed, yet he hoped to keep it so, even if the physical hunger for a woman's warm body sometimes drove him to late night pacing of the large and finely appointed chamber and private patio the Sultan had insisted he inhabit at the Alhambra so that he would always be near at hand. He did not want any woman. He would wait for Leonora.
But he could do nothing to control the erotic dreams caused by his necessary chastity, nor the involuntary physical responses to them that woke him in sticky wetness, breathing heavily and more aware than ever, in the flower-perfumed darkness, of his loneliness. What irritated him was that most of these dreams involved not Leonora but Dolores. He often dreamed he lay naked and powerful in the springy grass of the garden, drawing to him, then clasping to him with eager arms a woman's smooth, warm, silken body, a body that fitted its curves into him and moved so exquisitely against him that in a second his maleness had grown to bursting with desire and so had his heart. And finally, in his dream he rolled on top of her and with a powerful thrust into the secret, hot damp she opened to him, he possessed the writhing, moaning woman and moved over her so frantically that when the release came— in his dreams and in reality—he thought it would fling him across the room. But just before it happened he would look down triumphantly at the passionately gasping woman beneath him and the closed eyes were tilted ones, the waves of scented hair spilling across the pillow glinted auburn, the moist, delicious mouth that tantalized his dream was wide and full and pink-lipped. Over and over he dreamed it was Dolores his body craved; nor could he keep blaming it on deprivation, for there were close at hand graceful and pretty women—their flimsy veils hid little—and he deliberately pictured them unclothed when he relaxed just to force the seductive innkeeper's daughter from his dreams. But nothing worked.
Even when he allowed himself to think of Leonora, her small, white hand light as a feather on his arm and her melting eyes, even if he heard in his head over and over her soft voice saying the glorious words, "There is none I would have for a husband but you, Francisco, and so I will wait, for however long I must," even then flips and flashes of mocking, wide gray eyes swept by dark lashes, the turn of a glowing velvet cheek, of an arched neck thrown back in a throaty chuckle, and the taste of a hotly clinging mouth intruded themselves into his reverie.
Iridescent, fan-tailed goldfish darted up to try nibbling at his fingers. Could a man love two women at once? Physically desire them, yes, but not love, he decided. After all, what virile man would not want to possess the erotic beauty and spirited charm of the Baroness de la Rocha, captivated by the impudent glint in her eye that Francho knew was a legacy from the streets? He frowned and stared doggedly at a bobbing water lily until Leonora came strongly into his mind—the honey ringlets blowing over the alabaster forehead, the limpid brown eyes shaded by curling lashes, the frequent gay music of her laugh accompanied by enchanting dimples he had ventured to capture with the tip of his finger only to have them disappear as she struggled to look solemn, and he knew that this lady was worth his very life. What was she doing now, he wondered forlornly, this very minute?
Pangs of loneliness caused him to flip his hand abruptly so that the water flickered with tiny, gleaming fish panicked away from tickling at his fingers like a litter of nursing puppies. He remained watching their aimless dartings, but suddenly, like well-trained servitors, his ears picked up a change in the tenor of the conversation going on under the shade canopy. It was almost as if his ears swiveled in that direction of their own accord while he still gazed at the water.
"But you are not going to send the maiden on this long journey in such perilous times?" was the shocked question from the Sultan's lips that had caught Francho's attention, for it was voiced louder than the murmur that had gone before.
"I must, Great Sultan, in spite of my own fears, for very soon it will be too late." The usual dour expression on Comixa's face was even more pronounced. "My niece's marriage has already been postponed twice, and I fear that the Emir of Tetuan will break the agreement altogether if he is made to wait longer for his bride. You realize how wealthy and influential this potentate is, an excellent political bridge to Egypt. I cannot allow such a brilliant match to slip away from my ward. It is my duty as her guardian to see her safely and advantageously married."
"But how do you propose that the Lady Fatima reach Morocco?
All of our ports are solidly blockaded, Shaitan take the infidel dogs."
"The Emir has already sent a large vessel to fetch his bride; it is waiting off the fishing village of Almuncar. It will mean a roundabout journey for Fatima and her train and partially through territory under Christian sway, but the infidel will hardly expect such a cavalcade in the southeast. And we will turn their eyes in the opposite direction with heavy and concerted raids in the northwest from Mala to Moclin. If Allah so wills it, in ten days' time Fatima will ride safely through to Almuncar."
Because his throne was more secure than ever, Boabdil considered his longtime advisor with a compassionate gaze. The pinched look of misery had faded from his mild face, the dark smudges gone from under his eyes. "You will sorrow to see the lady go, is that not so, good Yusef? You keep your feelings hidden but I have known you many years. The more crabbed your face, the sadder your heart."
A grudging smile flitted across the old Vizier's face. "One of your noblest qualities, my Sultan, is your sympathy. Yes. I shall miss my elegant Fatima. She graced my house as a daughter with her soft laughter and obedience, and it comforted an old man's soul to watch her bloom into a lissome, rounded, and lovely woman. Well, I have done my best for her, and tomorrow she will leave. She is a dutiful maid. Allah will watch over her."
Francho had picked up his lute and was languidly strumming it, he was unconcerned outwardly but a ferment of excitement inside. A lofty Moorish noblewoman leaving Granada to marry the powerful Emir of Tetuan would certainly be taking with her a magnificent dowry, which meant a long train of mules laden to their tails with exquisite gifts, precious jewels, and money. What a prize of booty for Don Iñigo and the Crown!
Hart, Mallory Dorn Page 51
