by Jane Feather
The answer came within a minute. A tall, imposing figure emerged from one of the passages at the rear or the court. His burnous was of richly embroidered silk, a gold chain hanging around his neck. His turban and tarboosh were of deep crimson, his beard long and luxuriant and as black as pitch. Sarita’s abductors bowed as he approached. He nodded pleasantly to them, saying something in a low voice before turning his gaze upon Sarita. His eyes were brown and hard as pebbles, and she shivered, crossing her arms over her chest in involuntary protection.
He stood looking at her, stroking his beard, his face impassive. Then he stepped over to her and took her crossed arms, holding them wide away from her body.
“No!” All resolutions of submission disappeared. She yelled in outrage, trying to snatch back her arms, but he laughed and tightened his grip on her wrists. She kicked out at him, forgetting her fear, forgetting the consequences of assaulting the men of this race. She achieved the desired result. The man jumped backward from her flailing legs, releasing her arms, a stream of invective pouring from his lips, all impassivity vanished from his eyes.
She waited with sick terror, standing as immobile as a petrified rabbit, waiting for the knife at her throat. And this time there would be no one to halt her death. But he didn’t approach her, instead called something rapidly over his shoulder. A servant came running from a passage. He had a piece of rope in his hands.
Her two abductors moved swiftly. One pulled her hands behind her back; the other bent and seized her ankles before she could kick out again. Helplessly, she watched as they fastened her ankles loosely with the rope.
“That was foolish,” the third man said in Spanish. “You are in the court of Ibrahim Salem, Christian, and I am going to buy you from these two men. While you belong to me, you would be advised to behave with more caution.”
She simply shook her head, rendered mute by his words as she was rendered immobile by the rope at her ankles and the hands pinning her arms at her back … immobile for the now long and careful scrutiny she was accorded by Ibrahim Salem.
He reached out and touched her hair, lifting it away from her shoulders. She jerked her head sideways and he laughed. “I believe I have a buyer for you, Christian. Hair that color has great appeal … although …” He stepped back and ran his eyes over her again. “Although you’re somewhat deficient in size.” He shrugged. “Well, we shall see.”
Reaching beneath his robes, he drew out a leather purse. Gold glinted in a shaft of sunlight penetrating the high walls of the courtyard as he shook a handful of coins into his hand. He held out the coins to one of the two men, who counted, nodded, and pocketed them. Sarita stared, appalled, as she was bought like a sheep in the market. “Put her with the others.” So saying, Ibrahim Salem turned and went back the way he had come, leaving Sarita helpless and alone with her two abductors.
They swirled the blanket around her again, pinning her arms to her sides, but this time leaving her head free. One of them picked her up and carried her across the court, into a passage that seemed to go deep into the bowels of the building. They stopped before a barred door with an inset grille at eye level, and the one not carrying her turned a great key in the massive iron lock, pushing the door open into a small, windowless room, lit by one evil-smelling oil lamp.
There were four women in the room, sitting on the earth floor, backs against the wall. To her horror, Sarita saw that they were all fastened to the wall by iron collars attached to chains. They looked up at first with the listless eyes of the helpless, then with a spark of interest as Sarita was set upon the floor against the far wall, still imprisoned in the folds of the blanket, her feet still tied. She tried to fight the iron collar but knew it was hopeless. Nevertheless, putting up even token resistance made her feel she still had something of herself left, and she added a few words of vituperation for good measure, although her spirit dropped into a bottomless well of despair when she felt the hard, cold collar on her neck and heard the snap of the chain in the bolt. They unfastened her ankles and removed the blanket before leaving the cell. The key grated in the lock.
Sarita stood against the wall, surveying her companions. They were all young women, all dressed in Moorish robes. But they carried an air of defeat that chilled her as nothing else had done so far.
“How do you come to be here?” she asked tentatively and without much hope of an answer. There was no reason they should speak Spanish.
But one of them answered her. “We are all sold to Ibrahim Salem. My brother sold me.” She shifted on the hard-packed earth. “He had a debt to pay. And you? You’re Christian, are you not? Were you taken captive?”
“By two men in the town,” Sarita said, sliding down the wall to sit on the ground. “Who is Ibrahim Salem?”
The woman stared at her as if she had asked an incomprehensible question. “You do not know of Ibrahim Salem?”
Sarita shook her head. Her stomach grumbled loudly in the dim, fetid cell, and she realized she still had had no breakfast. The body’s resilience amazed her. How could it possibly be concerned with food when she was sitting in the dirt, chained by the neck to the wall, a slave bought and paid for?
“He is the most important slave trader in Granada,” the woman was telling her. “He has men all over the kingdom acquiring for him. My brother knew whom to contact in our village.”
And two of his scouts had acquired her, Sarita thought in dismal truth. In this kingdom, there was nothing to stop them from plucking an unescorted, apparently friendless stranger off the streets and thereby turning a neat profit.
One of the other women began to moan suddenly, rocking back and forth at the end of her chain, her eyes closed.
Sarita’s interlocutor laid her hand briefly on the woman’s crossed knees and murmured something softly.
“Is she ill?” Sarita asked.
The woman shook her head. “No, but she has been sold into Tangier. The trader sold her to a merchant across the water. It is better to be sold in Granada,” she added simply, seeing Sarita’s puzzlement. “The men of this kingdom make kinder masters.”
The woman was laying out these facts with a dull matter-of-factness, as if it were well known that the hardships and degradations of slavery would be writ large in the Moorish kingdoms across the water, whereas here, on the peninsula, there might be a softness to relieve the condition.
The door opened, and a man came in. He said nothing, didn’t even look at the prisoners, but placed a large flat bowl on the floor in the middle of the space, together with a basket of bread, and left.
There was a thick porridge in the bowl, and the bread was stale. There was no water for hand washing, no towels, no implements. But Sarita was too hungry by now to worry about the niceties. She imitated the others, shuffling forward on the floor to reach the bowl and using bread and her fingers to scoop out the glutinous mass. It was tasteless, but it filled her up, and she licked her fingers clean, thinking how a few days ago she would not have worried about the stickiness. In two days in the Alhambra she seemed to have developed an inconvenient view of the importance of table manners … inconvenient, at least, in her present circumstances.
She sat back against the wall and took stock. A full belly had taken the edge off her despair, and since there was no immediate threat, fearful imaginings would be unproductive. However, there was nothing to encourage optimism either. There were no amenities in the cell, apart from the evil-smelling lamp and an equally noisome bucket, and as the long day wore on, the intermittent moaning and weeping from the woman sold into Africa became more nerve-racking.
The other women talked in Arabic among themselves, and occasionally the Spanish-speaker would include Sarita, translating for her, but their conversation was all about the families they had left, the circumstances of their servitude, and speculation as to who would buy them and for what purpose.
Sarita found it hard to participate, since the essence of the talk was the absolute acceptance of their present situation, of their ine
vitable future, and of the reasons that had brought them to it. They seemed to bear no grudge against the men who had sold them—not even the woman whose husband had tired of her and repudiated her in favor of a new wife, choosing this method to dispose of her. Sarita could think only that she should have run toward Tariq rather than away from him. At least she had a fair idea of what her fate would have been then, and she would eventually have been rehabilitated into the tribe. The absolute knowledge that what she had run from was now an infinitely preferable prospect to what she had run to brought her spirits to a new low.
At some point during the interminable hours, a man came and took one of the women. He unfastened the chain but left her with the collar. He spoke to her in harsh, guttural commands, pushing her ahead of him out of the cell.
“Where is he taking her?” The disturbance brought all Sarita’s fears to the fore again. In the hours of imprisonment, she had come to accept the configuration of the group, to rely on its stability. This abrupt disruption threw her back into the maelstrom of uncertainty, with all its attendant terrors.
“Maybe Ibrahim Salem has found a possible buyer,” her companion told her.
“We wait here until that happens?” Sarita was now trying to put some construction on what was occurring, to begin to want to order events and develop a sense of the future, and she realized she was emerging from the numbing carapace of shock. On the whole, she rather thought she’d prefer to stay numb.
The woman nodded. “If he has a private buyer in mind for you, then he will send to him, and he will come and inspect you. If not, then you will be presented at the next public sale Ibrahim Salem will hold.”
Sarita touched the collar she wore. She touched it with a shiver of dread, as if acknowledging its presence fully for the first time. It was cold to her touch, and she felt its heaviness. Her neck bowed beneath its weight, and an icy boulder of inevitability settled in her belly. She began to identify with the other women in the room; could begin to feel the insidious acceptance and resignation creeping over her, making her one with them and with the fate they would share.
The woman taken away did not reappear. A bowl of meat and rice was brought in at some point and set in the middle of the floor with a jug of water. Again they shuffled over and ate as best they could, drinking in turns from the jug. The meat was more gristle than flesh, and the morning’s inaction had done nothing to stimulate appetite. After one attempted mouthful, Sarita edged backward to her spot against the wall and closed her eyes. There was nothing to do but wait. Only her body registered the passing of the hours in this windowless cell, and she discovered that she could create behind her eyes the scenes of the outside world. If she tried really hard, she could even feel the sun’s warmth on her eyelids; smell the fragrance of crushed herbs and sun-dried scrub; hear the caw of a rook, the soft cooing of a pigeon, the delicate music of a mountain stream.
When the door opened again, she was so lost in her private world, her body sunk into a trance of escape, that for a minute she was unaware of the man standing over her. He spoke a harsh command, and she blinked at him, dazzled after the darkness of her closed eyes by the lamp’s dim light. He bent and pulled her up. The chain clanked, bringing her back to reality. He unfastened it and then pushed her ahead of him, repeating a one-word command, out into the passageway.
It seemed she was to make her way on her own two feet this time. But the weighty presence of the collar made her condition manifest, robbed her of the will to attempt an escape. There was no escape for a person wearing an iron slave collar, and obviously her escort knew it. He jabbed her in the small of the back, as if to encourage her, but there was that same indifference in his attitude … the indifference that negated her personhood, rendered her an object.
They emerged into the courtyard, and she was momentarily blinded by the sun’s dazzle. She stumbled, then stopped and looked up into the square of blue sky. The sun was low. It must be late afternoon. The man jabbed her again, and she started forward, removing her spirit now from her body, letting herself accept this as part of her fate. She could do nothing anymore to alter what happened to her. All she could do was remove the essence of her self from her body so that she was not touched, degraded, wounded.
They went into a passage across the courtyard. The man pushed aside a beaded curtain over an archway, and Sarita stepped into a dimly lit room, where four men lay on ottomans against the walls, a low table in the middle bearing a bowl of sherbet, goblets, a plate of sweetmeats.
Sarita stood just inside the archway, refusing to take in the people in the room or indeed anything about her surroundings. She was way up high, far, far away from what was going on down here in this sordid reality.
Ibrahim Salem took her elbow and drew her forward. He lifted her hair as he had done that morning in the court, and she endured in silence. He was talking in soft, persuasive tones, and she knew he was talking about her, describing her, selling her as if she were a prime beast in the market. But she would not listen; she would not let it touch her.
One or two of the men made various comments. One of them beckoned her, and Ibrahim pushed her over to the ottoman. The man looked her over, touched her skin, then nodded, pursing his lips.
Then a voice spoke behind them. It was a voice she recognized. It was Yusuf’s voice. Suddenly she returned to her body. She spun around. Never, ever in her wildest imaginings could she have believed she would regard this man with relief, with joy. But her heart leaped in her breast, and relief flooded her so that her knees buckled, and only with a supreme effort of will could she stiffen them. If Yusuf was here, then Abul must have discovered her whereabouts. He would rescue her.
Yusuf and Ibrahim were having a swift conversation. The other men joined in, and Sarita realized that she was being bargained for. Shame filled her now that she had allowed her self to return to her body. Shame and the disgraceful dread that Yusuf would decide she was not worth the price demanded.
But suddenly the other men fell silent, shrugged, rose from their ottomans, and left the room with a mute hand gesture of farewell. Only Ibrahim, Sarita, and Yusuf remained. Sarita watched as Yusuf laid a pile of ecus d’or on the central table. She watched in dreadful abasement.
Then Ibrahim called and a man came in. He had a key. The iron collar was removed from her neck. Her hands went up to massage the slim column, her head lifting as if freed of the world’s weight.
But Yusuf was holding something out to the man, who took it with a nod. It was a slender collar of braided leather with a small iron lock that had a strange device worked into the metal. As she stood, transfixed, he fastened this around her neck, the lock clicking in place. Her hands flew upward, plucking at it.
“No,” she managed to say. “No, I will not wear it. Take it off.”
“You belong to the caliph,” Ibrahim Salem told her with an almost genial smile. “All runaways in the caliph’s household wear the leather collar, so all will know to whom they belong. You are now of the caliph’s household. He has paid well for you.”
Her eyes went to the small pile of gold on the table even as she still plucked at the collar. She looked at Yusuf, who met her eye impassively before handing her a dark, hooded burnous. She put it on, obscuring her gay orange dress, drawing the hood over her bright hair. She was going back to Abul. But she was going back his slave, his possession.
Sarita knew that the world was divided essentially into the free and the unfree. Rural peasants were tied to the land and therefore to the owner of that land. He could command their labor or their lives in battle for him, and as he disposed of his land, so he also disposed of those who worked that land. In the towns, it was a little different, but men, women, and children were held in bond to those who had bought their labor. Breaking the bond brought imprisonment, torture, death. If one could not command the labor of others, one was by definition held in servitude by those who could. It was not always called slavery, but in essence it was. Only tribes like her own were tied neither t
o land nor to master. No one commanded their labor, and they took their possessions and their homes with them as they traveled, selling their labor, owing loyalty only to the clan and kinship network.
But now Sarita of the tribe of Raphael had left the protection of that network, and in a kingdom where slavery was known by no other name, she was owned, bought with a handful of gold, entrapped in a system of laws that took from her all freedom of movement, let alone of choice.
She followed Yusuf out of the house of Ibrahim Salem. In the alley, he mounted the waiting horse, indicating to Sarita that she should walk next to his stirrup. Once again she turned her mind inward, trod the open road in her mind, saw with her mind’s eye the winding path; the snowcapped mountains; the deep blue, limitless expanse of the horizon where the sky met the sea; the bright crimson of the dying sun as it slipped below the horizon, staining the sea with its crimson; the soft pink flush on the predawn sky. She saw all of these things, not the crowded alleys through which they passed, not the hurrying robed figures, the filth in the kennels, the mangy dogs and starving cats, the naked, squalling babies, the bowed women. She did not see them, and therefore they did not see her, enshrouded in the Moorish robe, walking in her slave’s collar beside a mounted man. What they saw was simply the body of the woman called Sarita of the tribe of Raphael.
Yusuf kept his horse to a slow walk until they passed through the city gate and onto the road leading up to the Alhambra. Here the crowd had thinned, movement was easier, and his horse picked up speed. Sarita made no attempt to keep pace. She walked along the side of the track, her head down, inhabiting her own world.
