by Jane Feather
And after this afternoon … The sour taste of her words rose again to his tongue. Perhaps he should just let her go. Maybe her body did respond to his, but that was one of those quirky tricks of nature. There was no meeting of mind and spirit between them, no common ground, and without that, the simple appeasement of lust was a hollow act, lacking the bright gilt of truly satisfying congress. She obviously detested him, had no interest in trying to understand him, in learning about the ways of his people. He had wanted to understand her … plumb that untamed essence that so drew him. And he thought he had tried. He had tried hard not to intrude on the sorrow and anger that had driven her from her people, while at the same time telling her that he understood and accepted those feelings and the reason for them; he had tried to understand some of the forces that contributed to her denial of the sensual currents flowing between them. And he had tried to show her, gently yet irresistibly, how the magic between them could be explored.
Leaving the officer of the watch still standing in the middle of the antechamber, Abul went out onto the portico. He had tried, and had completely failed.
Bitter disillusion slopped over him like dirty dishwater. Let her go. Let her go and find whatever she sought. She would discover little but danger and hardship, of that he was convinced, but the sooner he forgot about her, the sooner he would reestablish his inner harmony. Aicha and Boabdil were sufficient abrasions without his involving himself with a belligerent, obstinate, reckless runaway who had more pride than sense.
But Muley Abul Hassan had his own pride. Even as he turned to go back into the antechamber and dismiss the officer of the watch, he realized that the thought of defeat at the hands of that diminutive creature of the olive grove was utterly unpalatable. At some point since he had brought her to the Alhambra, he had entered a contest of wills with her. Was he really prepared to shrug his shoulders and bow out? And was he really prepared to leave her unprotected to suffer the inevitable dangers that awaited the lone and unwary within the borders of his kingdom?
He wasn’t. Even after all she had said, he could not with equanimity abandon her. She would never survive, free and unmolested, and he found that despite his disillusion, he could not tolerate the thought of her suffering. And there was another reason. It was also because of her accusations of this afternoon. The shock and hurt he had felt then would never be assuaged if he admitted total defeat. He would bring her back, would bend her to his will, would oblige her to acknowledge and fulfill the passion with which she responded to him, but now he cared nothing for gentle persuasion. He no longer had the time or the inclination for such lengthy and frustrating tactics, and since Sarita didn’t believe in delicacy in her dealings, then why should he?
A plan began to form: a plan that held the sweet kernel of revenge even while it would ensure that she remained unharmed. And Abul needed revenge for the insults of the afternoon and for the absolute, public rejection embodied in this latest, desperate flight. Sarita would learn a lesson about the nature of life in the kingdom of Granada and the powerful protection of the caliph, but it wouldn’t appear to her like the arbitrary vengeance of a despot. She would believe she had brought it upon herself by ignoring his warnings. There was a subtle logic to such a reprisal that gave him a twisted satisfaction. He wanted her back, but for one reason only. He wanted from her just one thing now, and when he had taken it, then surely he would be free of this obsession.
He went back to the antechamber. The officer still stood at attention, waiting for the caliph to pronounce judgment. “Return to your post,” Abul said, waving a dismissive hand. He rang a handbell that would bring the vizier to him and then summoned Yusuf.
Yusuf received his instructions in customary grim silence.
“You understand exactly what you are to do?” Abul finally said, opening a strongbox and drawing out a velvet pouch.
“Yes, my lord Abul.” Yusuf bowed. “She will not emerge from the ravine until daybreak, so there will be ample time to track her movements, and, dressed as she is, she cannot fail to be noticeable. I will have four men. We will not miss her, and Ibrahim Salem will cooperate readily enough for the right price.”
“She is not to be hurt,” Abul reiterated. “She may well be frightened, but she is to suffer no physical hurt. That is quite clear?”
“Quite clear, my lord Abul.”
“Then go about your business, Yusuf. I would have the woman back within the walls of the Alhambra by tomorrow sundown.”
Yusuf bowed low and left, the voluminous folds of his burnous rustling about him. Abul returned to his neglected guests. Spending the better part of a day in Ibrahim Salem’s compound should convince Sarita of the foolishness of rejecting the caliph’s protection.
Sarita reached the bottom of the ravine in a slipping, sliding scramble that left deep scratches on her hands and feet. However, once down in the dark shadows, where the river flowed strongly, she felt secure from detection. The moon and starlight couldn’t penetrate the base of the ravine, although the river glistened now and again as the clouds parted. Her locked door and the dangling rope would not be found before morning, when Kadiga and Zulema came to attend her. But then she would be in the city, lost in the back alleys. If she could not find a merchant caravan or some other fellow travelers to offer protection, then she must set out herself, over the mountains to the Guadalquivir River and so into Castile. She would provision herself in the city and then travel by night, taking the mountain paths as she remembered them from the tribe’s earlier journey.
She followed the river, passing one or two peasant huts and ramshackle outbuildings, a few patches of cultivated land, but saw no sign of human life. But then, people went to bed with the sun and rose at cockcrow; only in the cool hours of early morning could hard laboring be accomplished.
The dark huddle of the city walls became visible at the head of the narrow path snaking up the side of the ravine to the track that led into Granada. Sarita knew she dared not approach at night. The city gates would be shut and there would be watchmen to challenge her, and she had no wish to draw attention to herself. Dawn would be soon enough, and then she would make her way immediately to the bazaar. It would be teeming with life, she knew from when she had visited it with her mother last week. She would be able to buy food and drink there, and lose herself in the general mass of humanity while she decided on her next move, depending on whom and what she found in the city.
She was conscious of a bone-deep weariness and quite suddenly sat down on the mossy grass beside the river. Down here, in the cool, well-irrigated bed of the ravine, the dry scrub and thornbushes of the mountainside gave way to rich grass and soft moss. Using her bundle as a pillow, Sarita lay on her back and gazed up into the sky. Being alone in the outdoors didn’t frighten her. She was used to the night sounds; indeed, they had been the lullaby at her cradle since she had memory, although she was accustomed to sleeping within a circle of protective fires and the ever-alert prowling pack of wolf hounds. But she was away from the open road down here. There would be no brigands this far from the possibility of plunder. If there were wolves, she would take her chances with them. Her eyes closed, and she fell into a dreamless sleep.
She awoke in the first gray light of dawn and found herself looking into a pair of solemn brown eyes staring down at her from a round, olive-skinned face. She smiled at the child, who clutched his herdsman’s crook more tightly and continued to stare in silence.
Clearly the boy was not used to coming across sleeping women when he went out with his goats at dawn. Sarita offered him a cheerful greeting, but it succeeded in sending him scampering across the grass as if pursued by a spirit of the damned.
Presumably he didn’t speak Spanish. Sarita shrugged and stood up, stretching and yawning. She was hungry. Yesterday’s alfresco dinner seemed a long time ago, and it occurred to her belatedly that she should have asked Kadiga and Zulema to bring her supper before she turned them away. But there was no repairing the error. She would have to br
eak her fast in Granada. She drank from the river, splashed water on her face, and pulled her comb through her hair.
Looking behind her and upward, she saw the roofs of the Alhambra rising above the ramparts. Her absence would be discovered soon enough now. What of Abul? How would he respond to the news? With relief, probably, she thought, after what she’d done to him yesterday. She saw his face again, when she’d left him. It was a bad last memory to take away.
Resolutely, she turned her face toward the jumbled roofs of the city of Granada. The climb out of the ravine was steep, but the path was defined, unlike her unorthodox route down during the night. When she reached the summit, she found the road thronged with peasants bearing produce from their own smallholdings, mule drivers with trains of laden beasts, caravans of Morisco-Spanish merchants on horseback, going both to and from the town. There were a few women, heavily veiled, carrying pitchers and bundles, walking in groups, their heads lowered as they moved among the men.
Sarita, in her orange dress, with her flaming hair unbound and uncovered, was as conspicuous as a meteor in the night sky. When she’d made this journey before, it had been in the company of her mother and other members of the tribe, and always with a male escort. Swiftly, she unfastened the scarf holding the bundle at her waist and threw it over her hair, drawing it across her mouth. She lowered her eyes to the ground in imitation of the Moorish women. She still stood out, but at least now she drew less attention.
She passed through the city gates, clutching her bundle tightly; to her fanciful and fearful mind, the twelve silver pennies, such an invitation to robbery, seemed to shine through the material, advertising her wealth to all predatory eyes. She was not challenged at the gate and plunged immediately into a side street, where the overhanging upper stories of the buildings almost met in the middle, providing a dark tunnel down which she sped, keeping close to the walls.
Two men moved casually into the street when she was halfway down it. They wore striped burnous and tarbooshes under their turbans. The hilts of their curved knives glittered from the folds at their waists. Sarita sensed them behind her; then a woman appeared in a doorway, shaking out a rug, a child wailed from an open upper window, and the street became like any other, and she shook alarm from her. If she remembered correctly, she would emerge into a square, and then the fourth street off the square would take her to the bazaar. There would be so much going on, so many other foreigners, that she would merge with the crowd. She would buy food from one of the stalls and discover if there was a company she could join going to Castile.
The men behind her kept their distance. She was impossible to lose in that vivid dress, and they were in no hurry.
The street opened onto the square as she had remembered. A tired-looking donkey stood, head hanging, at the central well while a man loaded water barrels on either side of its thin flanks. Flies buzzed over a pile of ordure in the far corner of the square, and a tribe of hungry cats scavenged in the stinking kennel. Sarita’s nose wrinkled at these marks of urban life. The open road, olive groves, and mountain pastures smelled a lot sweeter than these cobblestones and the dark interiors of the houses she passed.
A group of women appeared from one of the side streets, water pitchers on their shoulders, and made their chattering way to the well. Sarita crossed the square at the same time, hoping to merge with them. But they stopped and looked at her from dark eyes above veils. They looked with shock, with amazement, with disgust at her bright dress, her sun-browned calves. They too were barefoot, but their robes concealed their feet.
Sarita returned their stares for an imprudent instant. She took in the threadbare garments, the gnarled and reddened hands, the stale smell of them, and their hostility. It was the latter that sent her scurrying across the square to lose herself in another dark and noisome alley.
The din of the bazaar reached her long before she could see it. Shouts, cries, ringing bells, the thump and roll of ironbound barrels on the cobbles, the high-pitched skirl of a tin whistle.
Emerging into the chaos of the bazaar, Sarita felt safer. Here there were people like herself, dressed in the garments of the Christian world. Women as well as men, but the women were not alone. And then she saw Tariq.
He was standing at a stall, drinking from a leather flask, two of the elders of the tribe beside him. They were examining a pair of fleeces, Tariq gesticulating at the purveyor of the fleece, a bent old man with a stained beard and no teeth.
Her heart lodged somewhere in her throat, and she had to force herself to breathe, long and slow, as she melted back into the alley, wiping her clammy palms on her skirt. Why hadn’t she anticipated the possibility of coming face-to-face with some member of the tribe? Because they had become so distant in Abul’s fairyland … that was why. They were still in the olive grove; it was not at all surprising that they should be in the town. They would recognize her immediately … the orange dress, her hair, her shape, everything about her was distinctive both for those who knew her and for those to whom she was a stranger. She was surrounded by danger. She stood in the shadow of a doorway, waiting for the quivers to die down so that she could think clearly again.
Then she became aware of the slow approach of two men. It wasn’t so much that their steps were slow as that they were purposeful. She looked around. One way lay Tariq. The other way lay this slow, deliberate approach. Behind her?
Behind was the open door of a hovel. A naked baby crawled between her legs, a crust of bread clutched in his fist, gathering dirt as he progressed. She stepped backward, away from him. And then one of the men leaped, so fast she had no time to run, even if there had been anywhere to run to. He caught her up, burying her head in the wide sleeve of his burnous so that her screams were muffled. But they wouldn’t have been heard anyway in all the tumult from the bazaar. She could smell his robe, the spice on his breath, and she could smell her own terror. Then the other man was there, flinging something around her, bundling her up as Abul had done in his cloak when he’d scooped her up from the road outside the olive grove.
But this time she knew, as surely as she knew her own name, that there would be no pleasant tower at the end of this abduction, no gentle persuasion, no soft-spoken attendants.
Why hadn’t she heeded Abul? She hadn’t because she had preferred to take her chances, and she had taken them with open eyes, and now lost … lost absolutely.
Chapter Twelve
Sarita fought against the hot, smothering darkness, the bands pinning her arms against her sides. She fought against the darkness and the restraints with all the fury of a petrified animal. Her teeth sank into an iron-hard arm holding her. Her legs kicked free of the blanket and made contact—a contact that brought a violent Arabic expletive from somewhere outside the stifling confines of the blanket. A hand clamped over her mouth and nose, holding the blanket against her face, cutting off the air supply, and her lungs stretched agonizingly, panic rising in her chest, black spots dancing in the red mist behind her eyes. She stopped her struggles, and instantly the pressure was lifted. She gulped the hot, stale air from within the blanket, the pain in her chest easing as the life-giving supply rushed into her lungs. And then she lay perfectly still, sobbing for breath, not daring to move lest it be interpreted as a renewal of resistance and that deadly pressure be applied again.
Self-directed anger washed through her, then ebbed to be replaced with a desperate, hopeless resignation. She should have foreseen something like this … should have foreseen Tariq’s presence … should have worn the clothes of the Alhambra … should have taken the mountain road immediately … should never have ventured into the city …
But self-recrimination would achieve nothing.
Where were they taking her? To what were they taking her? Rape, murder, robbery … ? Probably all three. Her life, the life of a woman and an unbeliever, meant nothing to these men. Abul had told her so. If she didn’t provoke them, if she did everything they wanted, gave them everything they demanded, behaved like one
of their own women, then maybe they wouldn’t harm her. But she could find no certainty in her heart.
She was being carried fast, her bearer all but running, and she could tell by the panted exchange the two were having that his companion was keeping pace with him. She wished she could see … wished she could breathe the open air … wished she could scratch her nose where a strand of rough wool was tickling. She sneezed violently, and dust from the blanket filled her nose and mouth. Tears started in her eyes, itchy and salty as they stained her cheeks.
Then she sensed that something had changed. Although she could still see nothing, she had the feeling that they had moved within walls. The brisk pace of her bearer slowed to a walk. Suddenly, she was set on her feet, the blanket pulled away from her, and she found herself in a courtyard surrounded by walled buildings, narrow doors leading into dark passages. Presumably the passages led to the street.
She sniffed, wiping the tears from her cheeks with her scarf, knowing she must look as pathetic and terrified as she felt, but unable to summon the pride or the will to confront her abductors with boldness. She had had no such trouble with Muley Abul Hassan. But these two were not of the caliph’s stamp.
She managed to look at them at last. They were standing a little apart from her, as if no longer interested in her, looking around with the air of men who waited for someone. One of them glanced at her, and she shivered at the look in his eye. He showed her the same indifference as the soldier who had prevented her from leaving the Alhambra, and she knew he would as easily put his knife to her throat if he decided to do so. Indifference was worse than lust, she realized. If he thought her of no more account than an ant beneath his feet, she had no leverage with which to affect his attitude or decisions.
She wondered whether she could run from them; take them by surprise and hurl herself into one of those dark passages out of the courtyard. But they were standing so negligently away from her, completely unconcerned about the possibility that she might take it into her head to do something about her situation, that she realized escape must be impossible. If it led to recapture, then she would suffer even more. Better to bide her time, watch and wait, and try to control her terror. But whom were they waiting for?
