by Jane Feather
“Ring the bell. Leila will come to you,” the woman said. “They left you to sleep.”
Sarita saw the handbell on the table beside the divan. She rang it, filled with a sharp annoyance that Abul should have left her alone, exposed in her sleep, for any within the Alhambra to come upon.
“How is it that you come to be here?” Aicha covertly examined the woman as she slipped off the divan. What could Abul see in her? She was tiny, unformed … no, ill-formed … with those breasts like small lemons and the barest flare to her hips. Childlike. But as Aicha watched, she realized that there was nothing childlike about the woman’s body. It was perfectly mature, perfectly formed, perfectly proportioned. Her waist was minute, and Aicha could see the beginnings of the rolls of flesh at her own waist, the lumping of her hips, the incipient sag of her breasts. She felt heavy and cumbersome beside this small-boned, slender creature. Perhaps Abul had also noticed the signs of overindulgence. She must give up the cakes and the sherbets, Aicha resolved uneasily.
“I am your husband’s prisoner,” Sarita replied, seeing no point in prevarication. Besides, she hardly wanted to give the caliph’s wife the impression that she was willingly engaged in a liaison with her husband. She turned with relief toward Leila, who came hurrying in with a robe over her arm.
“You are bought or captive?” The sultana seemed to find nothing strange in Sarita’s reply.
“The latter, it would seem.” She covered herself with the robe and felt instantly more comfortable.
“For what reason?”
Sarita shrugged. “Your husband’s whim.”
Aicha frowned. The woman sounded as if she resented her present position. But no woman could resent the caliph’s favor, and she knew her husband well enough to know that he would not force himself upon a woman. At least, she thought she knew he wouldn’t. But then, Aicha doubted he had ever met a woman unwilling to accept his favor and protection. The women of her own race would not consider they had such a choice, even if they were so blind as to be impervious to Abul’s most potent charms. Could he have met such a woman in this diminutive creature with that unruly tangle of flaming hair and those dauntingly direct green eyes? Kadiga and Zulema had confirmed only that the woman had not returned to her tower until dawn, but Fatima had told Nafissa of Abul’s dawn urgency. Incredible though it seemed, maybe here lay the explanation.
“You are unwilling to lie with my husband?”
Sarita heard the surprise behind the sultana’s question. She had been about to respond with a vigorous affirmative, but the words wouldn’t come. It was not as simple as that, was it? Not a simple matter of being unwilling to share bodies with Muley Abul Hassan. Because she knew that on the most primitive level, she was not unwilling … was desirous, even. Not that she was about to confess that to Abul’s wife, even if, as seemed likely, the lady Aicha would not be disconcerted by such a confession. A woman who already shared her husband with at least four others would probably accept another without rancor. But there was an invincible reason why she was resisting Abul.
“Who would not be unwilling?” she said finally. “Scooped up off the road and brought without consent to some … some …” She gestured around her, feeling for words to describe this extraordinary place. “Some fantastical place; as if one had no other life, no family, no personal attachments, no past, no future but what was to be imposed upon one.”
Aicha nodded her head slowly. “You are not of our people,” she said. “Our women accept such impositions. The women of the tribe of Raphael do not?”
Sarita sucked in her bottom lip, considering. Men made the decisions in the tribe of Raphael, and it was a rare woman who would challenge those decisions and a rare man who would accept the challenge. But women were nevertheless essential to the network, to the organization. They had their place and their function, and no man would ever interfere in those spheres where women ruled supreme. Unlike this place, where she had the unmistakable impression that women had no sphere, no function except that directly dependent upon a man’s whim and pleasure.
“Our women have some measure of power over their lives. But not sufficient, it is true.”
Aicha spoke the thought as it came to her. “And you do not accept these limits.”
Sarita shook her head. That was after all why she was in her present predicament. “No.”
It was unlike Abul to make such a mistake, Aicha reflected. Or to persist in a mistake, she amended. And it would seem that he was persisting in this one. Why else would he have brought the girl to the baths after what must have been a most unsatisfactory night? The first stirrings of unease disturbed her previous pragmatic acceptance of this new woman in the Alhambra. Could she hold a deeper attraction for Abul than the merely physical? Therein would lie a threat to the sultana from another woman. And only therein.
“Perhaps I can talk to him,” she said. “I have some influence with him and can perhaps persuade him to release you.”
Sarita wondered whether she really wanted the sultana’s intercession. But to refuse would be ungracious, and the woman was looking at her, smiling pleasantly, complicitly almost; but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. A flicker of disquietude touched Sarita’s mind, but she dismissed it. The sultana was only offering to help, had evinced no hostility, had shown only smiles and friendship. She understood the rules of this place as Sarita did not. It would be foolish to spurn her offer.
“Thank you,” she said. “I would be most grateful for your help.”
“I will walk with you back to the tower.” Aicha turned to the doorway. “You must tell me about yourself. It’s not often our seclusion is enlivened by a stranger from such a different world.”
Sarita didn’t see the calculating glint in the sultana’s eyes as she walked beside her out of the baths and into the brass-taloned glare of early afternoon.
Chapter Seven
“You are not concentrating, Boabdil.” Abul spoke mildly, disguising his exasperation as the boy made the same mistake in the same calculation for the third time. The boy’s tutor pulled nervously on his long beard and tried again to explain the mathematical principle.
Boabdil stared sullenly at the slate in front of him. He didn’t understand what Ahmed Eben was telling him, and he didn’t particularly want to understand. He would be caliph one day, and then none of this would matter. His father didn’t spend his days on mathematical calculations, or examining globes, or studying the Koran, so what was the point of having learned about all those things in the first place? The caliph went to war with his curved scimitar, and he ruled the kingdom of Granada from the Hall of the Ambassadors, and everyone did what he said, even the vizier.
He looked from beneath his eyelashes to the figure sitting with such contained stillness opposite him. His father was looking grave, but he always did these days. Boabdil hated this hour of the day. It was always a relief when the caliph was gone from the Alhambra on some business and Boabdil was spared the daily progress examination. He wasn’t good at his lessons, even when he tried, and he knew this displeased his father. His mother understood, though. She had always told him not to worry about doing those things that didn’t come easily to him, because when he was a grown man and caliph, there would be other people to do the things he didn’t want to do or wasn’t good at doing. And she’d always be there, even when he was caliph, to make sure things happened the way they were supposed to happen. When he’d lived with his mother and the other children in the women’s apartments, everything had been easy and comfortable. The children had always done what he’d told them because he was the caliph’s first son, and their tutors had never made him work at something he didn’t like. And when they wanted to go and play in the gardens or the stables instead of doing lessons, he had only to ask his mother.
Now, every minute of his day was set aside for some task or activity. There were only men around him, and he missed the perfumed, rustling, pillowy warmth of the seraglio. He missed cuddling in his mother’s arms whi
le she fed him stuffed dates and sugared almonds and preserved oranges. Tears welled suddenly behind his eyes, and he sniffed. His father would be angry if he cried and would tell him he wasn’t a baby any longer. His mother always wiped his tears and kissed him. A tear rolled down the side of his nose. Hastily, he wiped it away, looking apprehensively at his father.
Abul saw the tear, but he was more concerned by his son’s clearly apprehensive look. There was no reason for the boy to be afraid of him, but he did seem to be. Abul tried to control his impatience with what sometimes seemed the child’s deliberate stupidity, his babyishness, and the whining complaints when things didn’t go the way Boabdil wanted them to. He didn’t always succeed and was sometimes betrayed into an irritated snap, but he had never said or done anything to justify his son’s apparent fear of him.
Except that he had removed him from his mother.
That in itself was perfectly normal and should have caused no difficulties. The boy was now too old to live in the seraglio, and it was time he learned to live as the men of the Alhambra lived. But Abul knew that the bond between Aicha and her son was of a peculiar nature. Its intensity disturbed him, but he also knew that he had made no attempt to lessen it before it was too late. He had let matters in the seraglio go their own way, casually assuming that when the time came to remove Boabdil, he would be able to correct any damage Aicha’s excessive indulgence would have caused. But it wasn’t as easy as that. The maternal influence hadn’t lessened, even though Abul had restricted the time the two could spend together. And he knew that Boabdil hated him for those restrictions, just as he feared him, because he saw only unkindness where in fact there was the deepest concern and the father’s caring need to prepare his son for the world that awaited him.
On impulse, he leaned over and lightly brushed the tear from the boy’s face. “Don’t weep, Boabdil. It’s too lovely a day for mathematics. You shall have the rest of the afternoon free.”
The boy’s face lit up, instantly reassuring Abul, who began to think he had been fanciful, seeing hostility and fear in those now shining dark eyes. Boabdil mumbled his gratitude and leaped for the door.
His father called him back. “Where are you going?”
“To my mother.”
Regretfully, Abul shook his head. “No, not until sundown, Boabdil; you know that.”
The boy’s eyes were turned slowly upon him, and they held angry frustration and that same fear and animosity. Abul tried to smile, as if he didn’t see the look. He spoke invitingly. “Let us spend the afternoon together. Would you like to go hawking? Or ride in the mountains? Perhaps fishing?”
Boabdil shook his head and sat down again at the table, idly scribbling with his stylus on the waxed slate.
Abul felt his own anger rise with his hurt at his son’s rejection. Such an unexpected offer from his own father used to throw him into transports of dizzy delight, and he remembered each and every one of those father/son excursions, undertaken in the spirit of truancy with such wicked relish. Was it too late to build such a relationship with Boabdil? Even as he asked himself the question, he knew with a leaden heart that it was. He stood up abruptly.
“Very well, if you don’t wish to have a holiday, then I can only commend your studiousness. I will leave you to your lessons. You would do well to apply yourself to those calculations with Ahmed this afternoon. I will not expect you to repeat your errors tomorrow.” He left the room.
Boabdil stared through his tears at the slate and the impossible figures. His mother had told him that his father was being cruel when he separated her from her child. She’d told him that his father was a harsh man who mustn’t be angered or he might become even more cruel. The caliph had been only a peripheral figure in his life until Boabdil had been taken from the seraglio and installed in his own apartments with tutors and attendants. Then his father had become a very real presence. Everything that happened to him happened at his father’s ordering. His father was there every day, examining him, talking with his caretakers, making decisions about him. Decisions that made his life tedious and uncomfortable and kept him from his mother … Maybe his father would go off on one of his journeys and not come back.
A prickle of guilt ran up the back of his neck at the wickedness of the thought. But if his father did go away, then he, Boabdil, would be caliph, and there’d be no one to say he could spend only two hours a day with his mother.
Ahmed Eben was talking about the figures on his slate again, and with a sniff Boabdil tried to concentrate. He mustn’t get it wrong tomorrow. He’d already angered his father.
Abul stalked through the early afternoon peace of the palace, his customary serenity, the slight air of amusement with which he viewed his domestic world, destroyed by that encounter with his son. He was hurt, but he was also angry, and his anger was with Aicha. It seemed she undermined him at every turn, filling Boabdil’s head with fears and mistrust whenever they were together. The only way to stop her would be to remove the boy altogether from his mother’s sphere, and Abul shrank from imposing such a decisive separation. It certainly wouldn’t improve his relations with his son. But why would Aicha encourage the boy to regard his father with such fear and animosity? Surely they must both realize that no one would benefit—not Aicha, nor Boabdil, nor Abul—from such a mangled relationship. Or was it simply Aicha’s twisted need for power? Through her son, she would have a power that transcended the seraglio; a power that could eventually go further than managing to engineer for her own reasons the discrediting of an important councillor.
It was a most unpleasant train of thought, leading to an even more unpleasant conclusion. If Aicha was an enemy in his camp, and could be so proved, then she would have to be removed. It boded ill for harmony both within the Alhambra and without, where her father, the powerful emir of the Mocarabes, crouched, ever watchful over his daughter’s and thus his family’s interests.
It was in no great good humor that Abul went into the Mexuar. It was one of the two days of the week when he, or in his absence his cadi, administered public justice in this hall, and he was aware that his present lack of equilibrium would do no good service to his clarity of thought and therefore to those he judged. He walked through the hall and into the small mosque at the rear. The place of private prayer looked over the lush river valley, the prayer niche pointing to the east. Abul stood in contemplation of the inscription above the niche: Be not among the negligent. Come and pray.
He allowed the peace of the place to enter his soul, the sense of wholeness to return to him, the sense of being at one with his surroundings and with his God. He must find a way of giving this to Boabdil. Without this sense of certainty at one’s core, a man could achieve nothing. He owed his son one thing: the ability to face the world as a whole man, not a disparate and dismayed tangle of emotions and needs. Without that certainty of completion, a man had no authority, no power, none of the sense of himself that ensured he could rule justly, his wisdom trusted by those whom he ruled.
He could hear the movements from the hall behind him, indicating the arrival of the council, the cadi, the plaintiffs, and the defendants for the afternoon’s session. Renewed and at peace, Muley Abul Hassan returned to the work of his kingdom.
Sarita and the sultana reached the tower after a slow and pleasant stroll. Sarita’s unease dissipated under the older woman’s charm and friendliness. She found herself telling Aicha something of life in the tribe, but she stopped short of the events that had brought her to the Alhambra. Sandro was still too private a grief to be discussed in this easy female fashion, but she opened under the friendly questioning, the obvious interest, the aura of female companionship to which she was so accustomed.
She was aware of a quietness in the palace and assumed it was siesta. The dawn housekeeping was long over, the gardens tended, the day’s main business finished until the cool of the evening when things would start up again. From the alcazaba came the regular sounding of the bells from the watchtowers, but it was a
sound signifying ordinary routine, informing the inhabitants that all was well, that they could take their ease through the heat of the afternoon without worry.
“Do you not keep siesta?” They had reached the wicket gate of Sarita’s tower garden.
Aicha smiled. “But of course. Until sundown, when my son is returned to me.”
“Returned to you from where?” Sarita looked her puzzlement.
“Why, from his father.” Aicha shrugged with apparent carelessness, but Sarita sensed the edge beneath the surface. “His father has taken him from me. And now I may be with him for but two hours a day.”
“But that’s dreadful!” exclaimed Sarita. “Why would he take a child from his mother?”
“He wishes the child to show allegiance only to him,” Aicha told her. “He is jealous of any influence I may have.”
Sarita frowned, wondering why she felt something was not quite right. Aicha was smiling bravely, telling her that that was the way with men—they didn’t fully understand the depth of a mother’s love for her child, the wrenching pain of a separation for both mother and child. Abul saw only the need to educate his son as his heir, but the child was so young, so tender, so vulnerable. Aicha was so afraid that his father was expecting so much more of him than could reasonably be expected of such a baby. She was so afraid that the methods Abul used were harsh …
And then she stopped. “But I mustn’t trouble you with my private concerns, Sarita. They are between my husband and myself.”
“Yes,” Sarita said slowly. “Yes, I think they are.” She couldn’t reconcile the Abul she knew, the gently humorous, quietly wise, although compellingly persuasive man, with a man who would mistreat a child. Yet she had felt his power, his absolute assumptions about who and what he was, about the authority he held and the right he had to use it. The first time she had met him, she had recognized him as a man of Tariq’s stamp, but she had sensed a great difference between the two men. She knew what that difference was now. It was the gentleness in Abul, the sense that his authority and power were intrinsic and did not have to be fought for. They would never leave him. Such a man surely would not exercise that power and authority indiscriminately over a child.
