by Jane Feather
Abul sat up, awake the instant he heard the urgency in the caller’s voice. “One minute.” He swung off the divan.
“What is it?” Sarita rolled sleepily onto her back. “Who is there?”
“The guard.” Abul dropped his robe over his head and went to the curtained doorway.
Sarita sat up, yawning, listening to the low-voiced conversation taking place in the main chamber. She could hear few of the words, although she thought she heard Aicha’s name spoken.
Stealthily, she slipped from the divan, creeping naked to the curtain. Disappointingly, she could hear the voices fading as Abul and the guard walked away to the far end of the chamber. Drawing aside the outer edge of the curtain, she put half an eye around. The two men were standing by the door, open onto the antechamber. Abul was speaking rapidly, although she could hear nothing, but his gestures were sufficient to convey the urgency of what he was saying. Then the two men left the chamber.
Sarita stood frowning. Perhaps it was not to be expected that Abul would have taken the time to inform her of what was causing the disturbance, but she expected it nevertheless. She turned back to the divan, looking for the wrapper she had discarded earlier. Picking it up from the floor, she put it on, wrapping it around her body as she stepped to the doors to the portico and drew back the heavy curtains.
The first streaks of daybreak showed above the mountaintops when she pushed open the door and went outside, shivering in the dawn chill, the marble paving icy on her bare feet. Suddenly the air was rent with a trumpet blast and a thundering of drums from the ramparts of the alcazaba. It was a shocking tympany, and she stood stunned. Then a pale blaze of light shot into the sky from the topmost watchtower of the alcazaba.
Sarita ran out into the center of the courtyard, staring upward toward the mountain. As she looked, answering flares went up from the watchtowers governing the mountain passes.
Was the Alhambra under attack? It was the only explanation. She hastened inside and threw open the door to the antechamber. A solitary guard stood outside; otherwise the antechamber was deserted. “Send Kadiga to me,” she ordered in her still halting Arabic, forgetting that women did not give orders to men in the Alhambra; forgetting also that men did not acknowledge unveiled women. But the guard did acknowledge her. His eyes grazed her face as she stood in the doorway; then he stalked across the antechamber to the far portico, where he said something to a lad waiting outside.
Sarita returned discreetly to her seclusion to await Kadiga, who was bound to have some information, even if it was only speculation. Restlessly she went again to the court, listening to the continued summoning tympany from the ramparts of the alcazaba, watching the fires competing with the sun’s crimson radiance spilling over the mountain peaks. She felt no sense of alarm, only a mounting excitement warring with her frantic curiosity. It didn’t occur to her that Abul would fail to meet and withstand whatever threatened outside the walls of his Alhambra.
“Sarita?” Kadiga’s voice called from inside, and she turned and ran back.
“Kadiga, what is going on?”
“I am not sure,” Kadiga said. “But it is being said that the lady Aicha and Boabdil have disappeared from the tower of the cadi.”
“Is that all?” Sarita sat down on the divan, absently rubbing her cold feet. “I had thought there must at least be a besieging army at the gates.”
“If the lady Aicha reaches the protection of her father, then the lord caliph will have many enemies ranged against him,” Kadiga told her.
“But is it not the caliph’s inalienable right to make what provision he chooses for the women in his seraglio?” Sarita was feeling for words now as she tried to fit the impressions she had garnered with a possibly differing reality.
“Yes, in theory, but in practice it is not always the case.” Kadiga drew up a footstool and sat down. “The caliph’s wives are all connected with the great families of the kingdom. Insults are hardly borne, and if it is felt that the caliph acted unjustly and whimsically toward the daughter of the emir of the Mocarabes, then it will cause much dissension in the kingdom. Once the lady Aicha comes under the protection of her father again, the lord Abul is in a losing position.” Kadiga frowned, plaiting her fingers. “It would be different if the caliph had sent his wife in disgrace back to her father, but if she fled cruelty and injustice, her father would be bound to come to her defense because his own honor would have been insulted. Do you understand?”
Sarita nodded slowly. She understood that just as she understood something else. The cruelty and injustice Aicha would claim were directly attributable to her own presence in the Alhambra. “Oh, yes, I understand. I hadn’t realized. I had thought the women here to be of no signal importance.”
“Mostly we are not,” Kadiga said with a slight smile. “But for those who wish to make themselves important, if they have the right connections, they can do so. The lady Aicha is such a one. Her father will not willingly give up the footstep she provided for the Mocarabes in the ruling family of the Alhambra. Boabdil would eventually have been caliph, and his grandfather’s family would have gained much prestige and power as a result.”
“Yes, I see.” Sarita stood up. “I had better dress, Kadiga. This does not seem like a morning to face in a wrapper with sleep in one’s eyes.”
Kadiga went to the wardrobe. “What would you wear?”
“Riding dress,” Sarita said without hesitation. If she still had her orange dress, she would have worn that. Somehow she felt that she needed to be equipped for action, and the gowns of the seraglio, designed for lying around and eating apricots, were not appropriate with which to face whatever was about to happen.
“I can manage myself,” she said, taking the garments from Kadiga. “Do you fetch food. The lord Abul has not yet broken his fast, and he will need to do so when he returns.” He would return soon, she was convinced. Apart from anything else, he was not yet properly dressed.
He arrived just after Kadiga had brought in a tray of bread, dried fruits, and cheese.
“Are you hungry?” Sarita hurried over to him, anxiously examining his expression as she took his arm and drew him into the room. “Has something dreadful happened? Kadiga says Aicha and Boabdil have disappeared.”
“Then you know all there is to know,” he said, running a hand through his hair in an uncharacteristic gesture of weary futility.
“But what does it mean?” Sarita pressed, urging him to sit before the tray of food.
Abul did not immediately reply. He broke bread and cut a piece of cheese. Sarita knew nothing of the bubbling yeast of insurrection already fermenting in the kingdom under Aicha’s busy mixing. She could have no idea of her own unwitting role in the troubles, and he could see no reason to tell her. “It means that I have a deal of work to do, to repair fences,” he said eventually, offering her a smile.
Sarita returned the smile, but Abul’s attempted insouciance was not convincing. There were taut lines around his mouth, a forbidding shadow in his black eyes. “Are you trying to find her?”
Abul shrugged. “The watchtowers covering the passes through the mountains have been alerted by flares, but I doubt they will have taken such a route. Aicha will have gone to her father.”
“Can you not catch up with her?”
“Unlikely.”
Sarita poured jasmine tea into a fluted cup and passed it to him, anxious to confirm Kadiga’s interpretation of events. “She will say bad things of you?”
Abul looked up and suddenly laughed. Sarita looked so avidly concerned, her head on one side, her eyes bright with intelligence as she tried to understand without pestering him too much. “Yes, querida, she will say bad things of me, and they will fall on fertile ground.”
“But what can her father do to you?”
“Stir up trouble, initiate a challenge to my leadership.” He shrugged again. “It is a nuisance, because the Spanish are always on the watch for a sign of weakness within Granada that they can exploit. I tol
d you this once before.”
She nodded, remembering. “So what will you do?”
“Prepare to defend myself,” he said succinctly. “Launch an offensive of my own.”
“You will go to war with your own people?”
“I hope it won’t come to that.” He stood up. “I have to dress.”
Sarita followed him into the sleeping chamber. “Why does Aicha hate you? It can’t be just because you took Boabdil from her.”
Abul tossed his robe onto the divan and stood naked, stroking his chin as he contemplated the question. “Aicha has always had plans of her own,” he said. “Unfortunately, I have only recently realized their extent. She is an ambitious woman and through her son could see a way to fulfill the ultimate ambition.”
“Ruling Granada through the child?” Sarita stared in astonishment. How could she ever have believed women in this society were so thoroughly conditioned to their inferiority that they had no ambitions beyond the daily satisfaction of their needs?
“Quite so, Sarita. I am in the way, that is all. If she can contrive to remove me, then she will have her father’s support to put Boabdil in my place.” He pulled on a pair of britches and reached for a tunic. “Such an outcome will suit the Mocarabes very well.”
“You do not seem unduly concerned,” Sarita observed. “Or at least not unduly surprised.”
“The caliphate of Granada has long been an uneasy seat,” Abul told her. “I have withstood several such challenges in my term, as my father did before me … and his before him.” He strapped on his sword belt and, booted and spurred, crossed the chamber, taking her chin in the palm of a gloved hand. “I do not know when I shall be back.” His lips grazed hers. “Be good and do not overtax your strength.”
“You will be gone many days?”
He shook his head. “No, for I cannot risk leaving the Alhambra undefended. I go to gather what support I can from those sympathetic to me. The garrison here must be fortified and brought up to full strength. I will need to call in such support from those who are allied with me.”
“And there are such?” She had a wretched image of Abul, friendless, without supports, facing a massively allied opposition.
“Of course there are,” he said, pinching her nose in customary fashion. “Now promise me you will take good care of yourself while I am gone.”
“Promise me you will take care of your self,” she retorted. “There is little harm I can come to within these walls. I have nothing to do but sit in the seraglio and practice my Arabic.”
“Are you complaining, Sarita mía?”
“No, because I do not wish to add to your troubles. But I would much prefer to ride with you, as I am sure you know.”
“I know it. But it cannot be, even though I wish it. Your presence would not add to my consequence, I am afraid.”
“A mere woman …” She sighed heavily in mock indignation. “In the tribe of Raphael, women ride with their menfolk.”
Abul clicked his tongue reprovingly. “But you left the tribe of Raphael, hija mía, of your own free will, as I recall.”
She smiled. “True enough. And I remain here of my own free will, although you do things so differently. Go now, and come back safely and with all speed.”
He left her, but beneath the immediacy of the present situation, they both knew that the question of the future had again raised its head. How long would it be possible for Sarita to live contentedly in Abul’s world? For as long as he had no reason to leave her side, she could find all the purpose and satisfaction she needed in their loving partnership, but when business took him from her, she was left in a vacuum that the energetic, self-motivated woman of the tribe of Raphael was beginning to find suffocating.
Sarita paced the porticos and walked restlessly in the court, thinking of Aicha. Aicha had never suffered the pangs of inactivity. She had had all the excitement of her plots and her plans to keep her brain alive. Plots and plans and malice, Sarita reminded herself grimly, thinking of the deadly bane so carefully administered. Such activities would not suit herself, so what could she do to keep herself occupied, to give her a sense of purpose while Abul wrestled with his own problems? And just how serious were those problems? Had he been making light of them when he said he was accustomed to facing such challenges? What would happen if the challenge succeeded?
Abul without the Alhambra … It was an inconceivable thought. He loved the place, but it went deeper than that. His soul was embedded in the very fabric of the palace, its history a part of his own. Wrenched from this place, he would be half a man, condemned to wander the world as an exile with no more function and identity than Sarita felt she had behind the walls of the Alhambra.
It was too dreadful a thought to contemplate, and she tried to push it from her. Abul was absolutely in command. The role of caliph sat on his shoulders with all the ease of a well-worn mantle. It could not be taken from him by one unaccustomed to the duties and obligations of the position … by one who saw only the power and rewards to be gained from the position.
And yet deep in her soul was the thought that Abul without the Alhambra would solve all their problems. There was nothing she could imagine more satisfying than wandering the world at his side, taking life as it came, facing challenges as and when they fell, in the manner of her upbringing. But Abul was not of the tribe of Raphael, and such guilty thoughts were the same as wishing him harm. And never could she desire such a thing. She would find no joy in a life that would inevitably destroy the man she knew.
Abul returned the following day. He brought with him ten thousand men to swell the numbers in the garrison and the promise of support, in the event of outright attack, from the emirs of three of the great families. But he also brought a growing unease. The alliances had been offered wholeheartedly, as he had expected, but he had heard more of the opposition from his anxious friends and supporters, and realized that it had been growing apace in the past month or two. It was clear that his father-in-law had been busy for quite some time before Aicha’s poisoning of Sarita and subsequent fall from grace. It would seem that Aicha had been conducting a clandestine correspondence with the Mocarabes under his nose.
There had been little he could do to hide his ignorance of the extent of the damage, and he had felt the criticism, for all that it had not been expressed. But he stood convicted of negligence, and if the message from the Mocarabes was that the caliph, for whatever reason, had lost his grip on affairs of the realm, then he had done nothing to dispel the rumor.
Several pointed references had been made to the Christian captive he had taken as his concubine—the information presumably again disseminated by the Mocarabes. He had treated the subject lightly but had been in no doubt as to the dangerous undercurrents. Men looked askance at one who lost sight of important things when in the grip of an obsession. Women were not to be taken seriously except as currency in the diplomatic world of alliances. And a Christian captive could be of no use to a man at all, except between the sheets.
Unfortunately, Abul recognized a certain truth in the implied criticisms.
Sarita came running to meet him in the Court of the Cisterns as the party rode through the Gate of Justice, heralded by the bells from the watch tower. The sun had some warmth in it, and she wore no cloak. She stood to one side of the court in a robe of turquoise velvet edged with silver lace, her hair amazingly tidy, caught beneath a snood of silver netting, her uncovered face lifted to the sun, her eyes searching the throng for contact with his.
Still raw with the abrasions of his negotiations, he wished she had not come to meet him with such blithe disregard for the mores of the Alhambra. But he knew they had an agreement; Sarita was not bound by those mores. If she were, he would be in a stronger defensive position than he was now.
He swung off his horse and turned to the vizier, who was waiting for his attention with a degree of urgency. “There is a letter come from the emir of the Mocarabes, my lord caliph.” The vizier bowed, extending the rol
led parchment.
“I cannot read it here,” Abul said, anxiety and irritation investing his voice with a snap. “Bring it to me in my office in an hour.”
The vizier bowed and turned to go, but Abul called him back. “On second thought, you may give it to me now. But come to my office in an hour.” He took the parchment, thrusting it into the breast of his tunic, and turned his attention to the officer of the guard, waiting for orders as to the disposition of the new troops.
Sarita stood for a minute longer in the corner of the court, then turned and made her way back to the caliph’s apartments, trying to stifle her resentment. It would have cost him nothing to have acknowledged her presence as she waited with such loving eagerness for the touch of his eyes.
But perhaps matters had gone badly and he was distracted, she told herself. He would come to her as soon as he could. She must learn to be patient.
Abul felt her leave the court even though he had not seen her do so. And he felt her pique because he knew so well how she would react to such an apparent slight. He dealt swiftly with remaining business in the Court of the Cisterns, then strode off, the parchment burning a hole in his tunic with its urgency, but his mind stretching toward Sarita, who must be soothed as she would soothe him.
There was no sign of her when he entered the main chamber of his apartments, and no sign of her in the sleeping chamber. But the doors stood open to the portico, and he went without hesitation. She was talking softly to the green finches in their cage, pushing grains of millet through the bars.
“Poor things,” she said without turning around as he joined her. “Why do you not free them, Abul?”
“They are happy enough,” he said. “They sing.”
“There are songs of sorrow as well as of joy,” she said, turning now to face him. “Your business prospered?”
“I have the support I sought,” he replied. “The alliances still hold.”
