by Jane Feather
She moved away from the window, too restless to sleep, filled with triumph. It was too soon to start counting the chickens, but the eggs were warming nicely, and one was surely permitted to indulge in a little premature fantasizing.
In the tower on the perimeter wall, Abul was lying beside Sarita. He thought she was now asleep, but she had lain wakeful beside him for a long time. He placed a hand on the curve of her turned hip. There was no flicker of response, not even the involuntary dancing ripple of her skin that always followed his touch.
He was filled with a profound depression, his body aching with need as if he had failed to achieve his own release in the past hours of lovemaking. But the need was more complex than simple bodily unsatisfaction. His need sprang from the deep spiritual lack of sharing. Oh, Sarita had tried to convince him she was with him, but the pretense had been transparent to one who knew her true responses as well as he knew his own. She had moved in her usual ways, had made the same lovely little sounds that never failed to delight him. Her body had tightened around him with her usual loving skill, but it had been a travesty of a woman lost in her own loving.
For some reason he had allowed her to continue, had seemed to fall in with the pretense, and he was now touched with self-contempt as he wondered how and why he should have done so. He should have shaken her out of it, told her that if she was not in the mood, then there was no need to feign arousal; that feigning bodily joy was the deepest insult a woman could offer a man. But when had Sarita not been in the mood for love?
He had let it continue because he had been afraid to stop, to face the fact that somehow he was failing her; and afterward, she had touched him gently, tracing the line of his jaw, his mouth, the deep shadow of his cheekbones, and had kissed him, not with her usual languid gratitude for pleasure received and shared, but with an ineffable sadness that first chilled him, then filled him with anger that she had not trusted him with the truth. He had hidden his anger as she had attempted to hide her physical indifference to his caresses, and finally she had fallen asleep. Now he lay bleakly in a wasteland of falsehood, wondering how and why it had happened and what shifting sands formed the basis of this love that he had believed to be carved in steel.
Careful not to disturb the sleeper, he slipped from the divan and dressed in the chilly moonlight. Then, for the first time since their loving had truly begun, he returned to his own apartments to face the dawn alone.
Sarita awoke at cockcrow. Her hand went automatically to the space beside her and felt its cold emptiness. Startled, she propped herself up on an elbow and called him. The quality of the silence in the tower told her she was quite alone. Why had he left her without a word?
She fell back on the pillows, remembering. Remembering that grim deception. She hadn’t fooled Abul, she had known it, yet they had both persevered, their bodies going through the motions. But their eyes had slipped away from each other when always they had held at the moment of total fusion; when their souls joined with their bodies in the final climactic experience that was sometimes an explosion, sometimes a gentle fall, sometimes a rushing, head-over-heels rumble through some violent elemental cascade that would leave them gasping for breath, laughing in exaltation, their flesh marked by the struggle.
Why had she pretended? It would have been so simple to say she was tired. He would not have been hurt, would have seen no rejection. But some deep-seated fear had prevented her from offering the truth as excuse. How could she be too tired to make love? Was there some dreadful canker within her, eating her from the inside? If she admitted the symptoms, allowed them to affect the way she lived, then she must take into herself the knowledge that something serious was amiss with her. So far she had battled on regardless, forcing herself to behave ordinarily, ignoring the ever-increasing debilitation, but she couldn’t ignore it any longer.
She drew in a painful gulping breath, and the lump in her throat seemed to grow, blocking the passage of air. She swallowed convulsively, futilely, and for a minute had the hideous sensation of drowning. Tears of desperation pricked behind her eyelids and rolled coldly down her cheeks, tracking into the hair behind her ears, dampening the pillow.
She didn’t near the door into the court open and was only aware of Kadiga when she stood by the bed, her face haunted with anxiety.
“You startled me,” Sarita said, hastily trying to wipe away the tears before the other woman could see them.
“I’m sorry,” Kadiga apologized. “I didn’t wish to disturb you if the lord Abul was still with you.”
At these words, Sarita’s tears began to flow again, and she gasped for breath as her nose blocked and her mouth filled with saliva that she couldn’t swallow. Kadiga pulled her upright and began to pound her back until the choking stopped.
Exhausted, Sarita fell back again on the divan. Her eyes gazed up at Kadiga, filled with the fear of her own death. “What is the matter with me, Kadiga? I am going to die, I feel it.”
Kadiga shook her head, mute in her own terrified knowledge of the truth. Then suddenly she turned and ran from the tower. She ran down the cypress path, around the Myrtle Court, and into the gilded antechamber of the caliph’s private apartments. There she stopped, faced with a trio of armed men in front of the door at the rear. Before she could lose courage, she stepped forward, eyes lowered, veil drawn tight across her face.
“What business do you have here, woman?”
“I have most urgent business with the lord caliph,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “It is imperative I speak with him immediately.”
One of the soldiers shook his head. “He is bidding farewell to his guests in the court of the alcazaba. If you would have speech with him, then bring your business to the Mexuar during the hours of justice.”
Kadiga turned to go, suddenly feeling reprieved. She had tried after all. It was hardly her fault if the caliph would not hear her. Then she saw Sarita’s eyes filled with pain and terror, and she stopped. “I will wait here for the caliph,” she said. The soldiers protested vigorously that this was no place for a serving woman. The caliph did not grant private audiences to such as she.
“I am attendant to the lady Sarita,” she said as firmly as she could, though her voice quavered. “The lord Abul will grant me an audience.” Then, before they could push her forth from the chamber, she sat down cross-legged on the floor against a column and prepared to wait, her lowered eyes on her clasped hands in her lap.
The guards exchanged glances, then shrugged. When it came to the captive in the tower, matters tended to be irregular, and besides, the caliph in general had an open ear for his subjects’ woes.
Thus it was that when Abul, grim-faced after the miseries of the night and the forced good fellowship of Kaled’s departure, returned to his private apartments to prepare for the day’s business, his eye fell upon the motionless, dark-clad figure of Kadiga, occupying a position of determined prominence in the antechamber.
She sprang to her feet as he entered and stepped forward hastily. “My lord Abul, I would beg—”
“The woman says she has private business with you, my lord,” one of the guards interrupted officiously. “She was very insistent that it concerned the lady in the tower, and we thought it best to permit her to remain. If you wish us to remove her, my lord …”
Abul gestured him into silence. He looked at Kadiga as she stood before him, raising her eyes to meet his gaze. There was no mistaking the urgency in their dark depths. “Come within,” he said quietly and walked past the guards into his chamber, Kadiga following soundlessly on slippered feet.
The guard drew the door closed behind her, and she stood silent, trying to still her racing pulse, to regain the courage that had driven her to this place but that had ebbed during the long minutes of waiting.
Abul went to a table where stood a carafe and a goblet. He filled the goblet and drank deeply before turning back to the silent, immobile woman. “What is your business with me, Kadiga?”
There was some
thing in the gentleness of his tone, the quietness of his eyes, that gave her courage. “I am afraid to speak, my lord caliph, yet I do not know how to keep silent.”
“You have no need of fear,” he said, putting the goblet back on the table. “What passes between us in this room will remain between ourselves. What must you tell me of the lady Sarita?”
“I believe … I believe … my lord, I believe she has swallowed something that is not beneficial,” Kadiga said with a gasp, knees trembling, palms sweating. It was done now. The die cast. And she had thrown herself upon the mercy of Muley Abul Hassan.
Abul was very still, enclosed, it seemed, in the deceptive gossamer of a spider’s web. “Do you know when Sarita swallowed this … this malign substance?” he asked finally.
“Regularly, for many weeks, I believe, my lord.”
Cold entered the marrow of his bones. “Do you know how it has been administered?”
Kadiga moistened her lips. “By myself, my lord caliph.”
Abul did not misunderstand her. “How should this be, Kadiga?”
Kadiga’s knees buckled beneath her, and she found herself crouching on her heels on the carpet of Damascus silk that in winter covered the cool marble floors of the Alhambra. Her head was bent, body hunched, as she tried to overcome her terror. Once she told this, she would be vulnerable to any accusation the sultana chose to level at her.
“Be not afraid,” Abul said. “Come.” Reaching down, he took her hands and drew her to her feet. “There is no need to sit on the floor. Sit there.” Gently he pushed her toward a divan. “Sit.”
Kadiga did so.
“Let us use straight terms now,” Abul said, as the spider wove its adhesive thread ever more tightly. “It is poison you talk of.”
Slowly, Kadiga nodded.
“And you have inadvertently administered it?”
Again she nodded.
“In what, Kadiga?”
Kadiga saw the executioner with his knife. She saw the iron clamp. She smelled the hot pitch fire of the brazier, heard the excitement of the crowd. She shook her head, unable to answer him.
“If you will not tell me this, Kadiga, why would you tell me anything?” Abul kept his patience, although he did not understand the woman’s reluctance to follow through with her revelation.
“Because I believe she will die if the physician can do nothing,” Kadiga said on a sobbing gulp. “The bane has such a hold upon her now that I know of nothing that will stop it. But perhaps Muhamed Alahma will have the secret.”
“But how can he know if he has the secret if you will not tell me how you believe it administered?” His voice revealed none of the panicked, feverish impatience he felt as he saw Sarita’s life trickling away into the sand, and the cold in his marrow solidified into ice. A life without Sarita … that flaming, vibrant presence snuffed … It was not to be endured. “Tell me,” he said, his desperation no longer concealed, and Kadiga answered.
“I believe it to be contained in the draught she takes against conception.”
“And you mix this draught?”
Kadiga nodded. “From … from a potion made up by … by …” But she faltered and wailed her own terror. “She will accuse me of false witness, my lord, and they will cut out my tongue—”
“Hush now,” he said, laying a steadying hand on her shoulder. “No one will accuse you of anything. I have told you that nothing that passes between us here will be laid at your door.” Kadiga’s sobs continued to fill the room, and he left her, going over to the archway onto the portico, allowing the cool morning air to calm him as far as anything could. “You talk of the lady Aicha, is that not so?” He looked over his shoulder at her.
Kadiga nodded an affirmative, her gulping sobs still filling the chamber.
“And you believe Sarita has been taking this poison for some weeks?”
Another affirmative nod. “The effects are slow and subtle, my lord. But I believe they have become—”
“I now know what they have become,” he interrupted with sudden harshness, directed entirely at himself for ignoring the insidious growth of the canker, for allowing himself to accept Sarita’s apparently insouciant dismissal of the indications of ill health. “To your knowledge, is it customary for venom to work in these ways?”
“Some, my lord. But I have little experience. Muhamed Alahma—”
“Yes, if anyone knows, he will. Go now. Through the portico. Return to the tower and tend Sarita. You may leave the rest in my hands.”
Kadiga arose and crossed the room to the portico, where he still stood. “You need fear nothing,” he said. “The caliph’s powers of protection are not negligible, and his power to reward is of the highest.”
Kadiga glanced upward at him, her eyes misted with tears, but the fright had left them. “Yes, my lord Abul,” she said, and sped away beneath the rising sun, back to Sarita’s tower.
As Abul stood alone, despair entered his soul like some great crouching black creature, exuding the destructive miasma of hopelessness. Sarita was now in the irreversible grip of a venom. He knew enough, had seen enough, to fear the worst. She would be lost to him. Then hard on the heels of despair came fierce resolution. He would not let it happen. Sarita must fight it. He would infuse her with his own strength, encourage her to throw off the bane. She was young, strong, healthy. Muhamed Alahma had rare skills as a physician, apothecary, and alchemist. He would be able to do something if Sarita fought with him.
He strode back into the room and flung open the door to the antechamber. “Send for Muhamed Alahma immediately. He is to await me here.”
The startled guards watched as the caliph left the antechamber with unusual haste, his robe swirling around his booted legs. When he passed beneath the windows of the seraglio, Abul’s hand unconsciously closed over the small dagger in the deep pocket of his robe as Aicha’s face rose in his mind’s eye. Deliberately he released his grip on the jeweled hilt and drew forth his hand, taking a steadying breath, washing his mind clear of the polluting image. He did not know how he was going to deal with her, but he knew that he had to keep his head clear of the rioting images of revenge, images that would interfere with his ability to infuse Sarita with the strength and determined belief in her powers of recovery without which she could not win through.
He reached the tower and entered at speed and without ceremony. Kadiga appeared at the head of the stairs to the sleeping gallery as he crossed the court. He beckoned her downstairs. Her face was gray.
“Is she worse?” He whispered the question so Sarita would not hear. Kadiga nodded and he said softly, “She is to know only that she can and will be well again. Is that clear?”
“Yes, my lord.” Kadiga seemed visibly to take a grip on herself as she accepted the sense of the caliph’s words. “But Zulema has such a tender heart, I do not know if—”
“If Zulema cannot maintain such a front, then she must keep away,” Abul said in a brisk whisper. “You will explain things to her as you see fit. From now on, the only people to approach Sarita will be myself, Muhamed Alahma, yourself, and Zulema, if you believe she is to be trusted.”
“Oh, indeed she is, my lord. If she has the strength, there is no one better in a sickroom.”
“Good.” He nodded and went to the stairs.
“Abul?” Sarita’s voice was weak and quavery. “I thought I heard you.” She tried to sit up, to smile. “I am still abed, is it not shameful?”
“Not in the least,” he said. “You are going to remain abed for quite some time, querida.”
“But we are to go to Motril,” she protested, fighting the need to fall back again on the cushions as she drew desperate, shallow breaths.
“All in good time.” He sat on the edge of the divan and supported her against his shoulder. “Kadiga, bring a robe and slippers.”
Sarita leaned back against him, too bewildered and exhausted to wonder why they were dressing her in this strange fashion. Kadiga slipped the soft shoes on her feet whi
le Abul fastened the robe down the front; then he lifted her into his arms.
“What is happening?” she finally managed to demand as he carried her to the stairs. “Where are we going?”
“To my apartments, where I can keep you under my eye,” Abul told her. “And when you are quite well again, hija mía, you and I are going to have a very serious and possibly disagreeable talk on the subject of honesty. You have been keeping things from me, and I am most displeased.”
Sarita lay still in his arms, suddenly amazingly reassured by his tone and words. If she were going to die, he would not talk to her in such fashion. “I will be well again, won’t I, Abul?”
He looked down at her. Her eyes were filled with pain and fear, but beneath he saw trust. That trust was the only weapon he had with which to combat the poison. “What foolishness is this, Sarita? Why should you not be well again? You are wearied and have taken some infection. Muhamed Alahma will physic you, and you will rest. If you had said earlier that you were unwell, matters would not have come to this pass.”
“But I am not accustomed to feeling unwell,” she tried to explain. “I thought it would go away. Do not be vexed.”
He smiled down at her as his heart turned over with love and dread. “I am only a little vexed, and you will earn your pardon by doing exactly as the physician says and swiftly getting well again.” Lifting her slightly in his arms, he brushed his lips across her brow, his spirits dashed anew at the icy clamminess of her skin.
“I can walk,” she said. “Put me down, and you will see that I am in no wise an invalid.”
“No.”
Sarita had neither the strength nor the inclination to argue. But the dreadful sense of being alone with her fear and confusion had been banished by Abul’s calm, reassuringly exasperated presence.
