by Jane Feather
The gates clanged shut behind them, and they were in a court that Sarita recognized as similar to the court of the alcazaba in the Alhambra. There was much that was similar in this Moorish fortress with its internal palace, but it was on a much more modest scale than the Alhambra and lacked the majestic mountain setting. However, it throbbed with fighting power. There were soldiers everywhere, and the ramparts bristled with armored watchmen.
They took her into a round stone chamber set into the gate tower, where the officer of the watch waited. He stared at the slight lad with the dirty face and the unusual green eyes and wondered what felt wrong about him.
“What is your business?”
“I come from the Alhambra. I have a message for the emir.”
“Then give it to me.”
“No, it must be given in person.”
The officer of the watch stared and stared. Was the lad a potential assassin? But there was no way he could get close enough to the emir to do any damage, not if he was under guard. And there was something very strange, very intense, about him. The emir must be told.
“Lock him up,” he said to one of the men who had brought her within the fortress.
“But I must—”
Her protest was cut off as the man slammed his palm across her mouth, gagging her. She was half carried, half dragged from the chamber and thrust into a small, dark square of space set into the thick wall. A heavy bar thudded over the door, and she stood, bruised, terrified, shivering in the black, stone-cold air. Would they leave her here, forgotten, to wither away in the darkness?
* * *
Yusuf heard her go. He must wait until tomorrow night before starting back to the Alhambra if he was to lie successfully.
He sat up abruptly. Why had he ever thought such a thing was possible? He rose, mounted, and rode as if pursued by the entire army of the Abencerrajes, hauling the mule behind him. He had no idea how he was going to explain to the caliph what he had done. He expected to lose his head; indeed, could see no other deserved fate. He had acted against every tenet of his personal beliefs and against those of his society. He had disobeyed the order of his supreme commander, he had obeyed the crazy whim of a woman, and he had knowingly put at risk a possession the caliph held most dear. Why?
The woman had convinced him of something. Something about herself. She would try, and maybe she would succeed. And Yusuf loved Muley Abul Hassan as much as he sensed the woman did.
But now he had to inform the caliph of what he had done, of the woman’s plan, of the danger in which she now lay. He knew he had to do so, without knowing why.
His lathered pony, foam-flecked at the bit, staggered through the Gate of Justice, ridden into the ground. The mule had been abandoned hours earlier, and the pony carried the other beast’s burdens to augment its own. Yusuf flung himself to the ground in the Court of the Cisterns as the pony folded to its knees, head hanging, breath coming in heaving gasps.
Yusuf, heedless of the exclamations in his wake, ran from the court to the Mexuar, where he would expect to find the caliph, since it was the hours of justice.
Abul’s mind was not on the issue in front of him, and he was aware of it. He could think only of whether Sarita and Yusuf were yet through the passes. The vizier was presenting a troublesome matter of thievery, and the accused was shaking in his chains. His hand was at stake, and only the caliph could pronounce judgment.
The sounds of a disturbance came from the antechamber, and Abul looked up from his frowning examination of the massive emerald on his index finger. Yusuf appeared, breathless, drawn, urgency radiating from him with the sweat pouring down his face.
“What has happened?” Abul was on his feet, striding down the hall. “Where is Sarita?”
Yusuf gasped, wrung his hands, struggled to find the words as he faced the alarm in his lord’s eyes and realized absolutely that the love he bore this man had caused him to make the wrong decision. By allowing the caliph’s dearest possession to put herself in danger, Yusuf had done the one thing that would overset the caliph’s equilibrium. The lord Abul would do anything to protect his Christian houri.
“Tell me!” Abul laid hands on Yusuf, and the audience in the hall of the Mexuar drew back, riveted by the blind passion emanating from the caliph.
“My lord, not here,” Yusuf managed to gasp.
Slowly, Abul brought himself under control, became aware of the people around him, of the alleged thief and his accuser, of the vizier’s alarmed expression. Whatever had happened to Sarita, nothing would be gained by his own panic.
He turned to the vizier. “I have not the time now to give this case the consideration it warrants, and I will not make a hasty judgment. Bring them back in the morning, when I have had more time to consider.” He swept an encompassing look around before saying to Yusuf, “Come.” With a vague gesture of dismissal to those within the hall, he strode toward the private mosque at the rear, Yusuf on his heels.
In the utter peace of the small, exquisite room dedicated to prayer and meditation, Abul went to the niche facing east and stood staring at the inscription above, drawing strength, before he said, “Tell me what has happened.”
As Yusuf stumbled through the tale, the caliph moved not a muscle. When the man came to a halt, Abul turned slowly, and Yusuf trembled at the look that fell upon him.
“I am to assume that you have lost your reason,” Abul said almost musingly. “I do not believe it just to punish the lunatic for falling foul of the changes of the moon.” He fell silent.
“Pronounce my death, my lord,” Yusuf said in anguish. “I did what I did because of my love for you. I believed the woman could succeed—”
“As I said, you have lost your reason,” Abul interrupted in the same dreadfully calm tones. “I will put no other construction on your action.”
“What must I do, lord?” The plea was a bare whisper.
Abul turned to the window overlooking the lush river valley. He was filled with a vaporous emotion that he knew would petrify if he allowed himself to think of what might be happening to her. “You will go back,” he said. “I do not care how you do it, but, by Allah, you will discover what has happened and you will bring that information back to me. You will not rest, nor break your fast, until you return here with the information I seek.”
“By Allah,” Yusuf said, prostrating himself before the prayer niche. “By Allah, I will neither rest nor break my fast until I have obeyed my lord’s will.”
Abul remained in his stillness after Yusuf had left the little mosque. They would have no reason to hurt her. But would they need a reason? No, but she would be more useful to them alive. They might see a way to make political capital out of the living Sarita, whereas her dead body would but feed the vultures. If he held on to that, he could retain his sanity until Yusuf returned. And Yusuf would return. When he knew what was happening, then he would know what to do.
Why hadn’t he thought she might come up with such a piece of lunacy? A woman who climbed down silken ropes into a ravine to escape the velvet bonds of a man she loved because he didn’t accept her point of view was capable of anything. But she was also capable of survival. He could hold on to that, too. Sarita was no weak vessel. She knew how to fight.
But she didn’t understand his people. She didn’t understand the true nature of this conflict. She saw it in terms of the black-and-white survival of Muley Abul Hassan as caliph of Granada. But it wasn’t that simple. If that were all it was, Abul would have thrown the whole bag of tricks to the Spaniards months ago. Family pride had kept him fighting a battle he no longer wished to fight. And what Sarita did not realize was that what she had just done was going to have the opposite effect from her carefully constructed intention. She had just tossed his opponents the one throw of the dice that Abul could not—would not—win. He would not sacrifice Sarita for his family’s supremacy in Granada.
Chapter Twenty
The sound of the bar lifting outside her prison shocked Sarita out o
f her fear-struck daze. She pushed herself away from the wall at her back and faced the light as the door swung open, bracing herself for seizing hands, harsh commands.
Four soldiers stood outside. The foremost gestured brusquely and she stepped into the passage, huddling into the burnous, shrinking into the hood like a tortoise withdrawing from the unknown.
One of the men took her arms, lifting them away from her body, and she realized they were going to search her for weapons.
“I have a knife,” she said hastily. “On my right side.”
They took the knife and ran only perfunctory hands over her, hands that discovered nothing of remark in the slight frame of a young lad.
“Move,” the leader commanded, jabbing her in the small of the back.
“Where are you taking me?” She found her voice and the resolution to sound like someone who had something to offer, who would not submit to the role of enemy prisoner. “I must talk with the emir.”
“You’re going to do so,” the leader said. “Whether you’ll be glad you did or not is another matter.” He laughed, and the others laughed with him.
They jostled her through passages, across courts, along colonnades, the architecture familiar yet nowhere near as elaborate as the Alhambra. The absence of water was most conspicuous: there were no fountains, no carefully directed streams, and as a result little flora. The place struck Sarita as Spartan in its lack of elegance and amenity. Finally, they entered an antechamber where guards stood alert at a studded door at the rear.
Her heart began its frantic drumming again as she thought what lay beyond that door. Death. Unless the emir of the Abencerrajes was willing to listen to her.
The door was opened and she was propelled into the presence of the emir, her four guards crowding around her. With a sense that it was the only correct approach, she raised her head and faced the emir without flinching, her eyes meeting a pair of chilly gray ones.
The emir of the Abencerrajes was a tall man, rather older than Abul, she decided. He was fiercely bearded, strong-jawed, but there was no expression in his eyes, no hint of curiosity, of warmth, no sense that this was a man to be trusted. Slugs crawled down her spine, leaving a slimy trail of fear as Sarita realized that she had in all probability gambled and lost. This was not someone to be won over with promises and truth. Not unless it suited him.
But perhaps it would suit him. She lifted her chin, and the challenge that Abul knew and loved so well was in her eyes.
“Who are you?” The emir’s voice was harsh, like a knife on stone.
She tossed her head, shaking off the hood of the burnous, then raised her hands and unwound the turban. “Sarita of the tribe of Raphael.” Her hair cascaded around her shoulders, a startling brightness in the gloomy hall.
There was utter silence.
Sarita stood still, waiting, the turban dangling from her hand, her gaze unflinching. Then the emir drew a slow breath.
“So,” he said in the Spanish she had used. “So, Sarita of the tribe of Raphael, what business do you have with me?”
“A private tale, my lord emir.”
Again there was silence before he spoke thoughtfully. “I will hear you in private, but not in the garb of a goatherd. I would see what it is that has so led astray my brother Muley Abul Hassan.”
The slugs resumed their crawling as Sarita recognized her ultimate vulnerability in the enemy court. Death was not the only thing to fear. “My clothing is irrelevant to my tale.”
He inclined his head. “Maybe so … maybe so. Nevertheless, it offends me to see a woman so attired.” He spoke swiftly to the leader of her guard. “Dress her appropriately and then bring her to me again.”
Her escort, who had fallen back in astonishment when she had revealed herself, now moved on her, salacious hunger in their eyes. The emir turned to leave the chamber by a curtained doorway at the rear. A nut of nausea lodged in Sarita’s throat as she realized he had abandoned her to these men, who would view her as fair game, a woman and an unbeliever, one who had flaunted herself deliberately and was therefore deserving of none of the consideration they might have accorded a woman of their own people.
But at the doorway, the emir paused and spoke over his shoulder, just as the leader of the guard caught her arm, pushing it up behind her back. “Find women to do this work. Our visitor belongs to me for the moment.”
The leader did not release her, but expressed his disappointment with a vicious jerk of her arm that brought tears to her eyes. But her relief at the emir’s words was so overwhelming she scarcely minded the pain.
In a very few minutes, she found herself locked in the same dark chamber in the watchtower, so far unmolested, but dread rushed with the swift pulsing of blood through her veins.
The door opened and two women entered, one bearing a branch of tallow candles, the other a length of material over one arm. They said nothing to her, indeed barely raised their eyes over their veils as they set the candles in a corner, revealing the tiny cell with its stone floor and walls, its lack of any furniture … a lack Sarita had already discovered for herself.
She maintained her own silence but forestalled any attempt they might make to undress her by pulling the burnous over her head and matter-of-factly unfastening the britches and shirt. They drew breath sharply when they saw the strip of linen binding her breasts, and one of them went to help her unfasten the knot Kadiga had tied to secure the band at Sarita’s back. When she stood naked, they held out a robe of some flimsy white material that offered little protection from cold or from interested eyes. It was not the dress of a respectable woman of the seraglio, Sarita realized with a sinking heart. It was the robe of a houri.
Was it meant to humiliate her? Designed to reduce the importance of her message to the babblings of a love slave? Probably both, she decided, wondering whether to refuse the change of dress, to insist on her lad’s clothes again. But that would achieve nothing. Her only chance was to convince the emir of the validity of her tale, and if he would only grant her an audience in this provocative and demeaning garment, then she must do her best with a dignified manner and calm, coherent speech to overcome the impression the clothing accorded her.
Curtly, she refused the slippers the women pressed upon her, but she took the veil, feeling that anything that increased bodily concealment could only be of benefit. It covered the fiery turmoil of her hair, smothering its potentially inflammatory quality. However, she left her face exposed, needing to make some statement of independence.
The door banged open just as she had finished adjusting the veil, and the two women jumped back against the wall. The leader of the guard ran his eyes over Sarita, an insolent scrutiny that clearly looked beneath her costume; then he jerked his head toward the door. As she passed him, his hand brushed her hip beneath the thin material, and the slugs began their crawl again. But she ignored the touch, averting her proudly lifted head as if disdaining to notice him.
This time they took her into a small, intimate chamber with silk hangings on the walls and silk rugs scattered over the mosaic floor. The emir was lying upon a divan, sipping from a jewel-encrusted goblet. He offered no greeting as she stood just within the doorway, where she had been thrust by her escort, who had immediately retreated. He examined her in the same unnerving silence, and she kept her eyes fixed on the wall above his head, on an intricate design of flower knots delicately traced in gold and silver leaf.
Almost lazily, the emir placed his goblet on the low table at his side and rose, his robes flowing and settling around him. He crossed the room and flicked the veil from her head. “My tastes run rather more to the voluptuous,” he observed, one hand moving over the delicate lift of her breasts beneath the diaphanous material.
Sarita tried not to shrink, tried to keep rigidly still, as if the touch were being administered to clay rather than to living flesh.
“But Muley Abul Hassan has always had very definite preferences,” the emir mused, flicking at her nipple with a fingertip
. “Are you as cold and unresponsive as you appear?” he wondered. “It’s to be assumed not.” Shrugging, he turned from her, and Sarita’s knees shook with relief. “Well,” he said, “you have a tale to tell. Tell it.”
To her dismay, her voice quavered when she began. She stopped, swallowed, and began again. The emir had resumed his position on the couch and lay listening to her, his eyes half closed, one finger running around the rim of his goblet.
“Well, that is a tale indeed,” he said after she had finished. “A quarrel in my friend’s harem is excuse for war. The entire kingdom of Granada is up in arms because of the jealousy of women.” He laughed suddenly, richly, and most unreassuringly. “So, Sarita of the tribe of Raphael, you will renounce your claim upon the lord Abul, whatever that claim might consist of, and will return whence you came, leaving matters as they were before you appeared.”
“That is what I have said,” she affirmed, but she was cold with despair. The emir gave no indication of taking her seriously. “I will go from here to Cordova. You may escort me to the border if you doubt my word.”
“Oh, I do not doubt your word,” he said, still chuckling. “So you say I have been played for a fool by the Mocarabes.”
“I said only that they have the most to gain by the lord Abul’s abdication.”
“Well, that is not untrue,” he conceded.
“And the reason they give for the demand that the lord Abul abdicate is not good and sufficient reason, and no longer exists in any form anyway.”
“Mmm. You certainly have courage, Sarita of the tribe of Raphael. I know little of the women of your race. Are you unusual?”
He sounded genuinely curious, the mocking laughter gone from his voice and expression, and the question took her by surprise.
“I do not know,” she faltered. “Will you give me safe passage to Cordova, my lord emir?”
He stroked his beard, his eyes half closed as he meditated. Then he said, “Possibly. But you will not object to being my guest for a little while longer, I trust.”
