by Jane Feather
He caught her to him and as he did so was filled with a great surge of rage … astonishing, irrational, cleansing. She had done this to them both. He lifted her in his arms, feeling how insubstantial, incorporeal almost, she was, and his fury found voice in a throbbing, impassioned whisper. “How could you have been such a fool? To attempt such an arrogant, lunatic interference? How could you have believed you knew anything of my people? After everything that has gone before?” His arms tightened around her with a convulsive violence that he knew could as easily have been used to hurt as to support. He felt her shiver, but she did not answer him.
He carried her out of the court to where Yusuf waited with the mule train, the dappled gray palfrey, and Abul’s powerful black. Abul swung onto his horse, cradling her tightly against his chest. He put spur to his mount, and they galloped out of the palace court, along the road to the border with Granada, Yusuf following with his slower charges.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Abul rode up and up into the mountains, well away from the beaten track and the manned passes, up into the wilderness, until he reached his destination.
A tributary of the Genii flowed swiftly down the mountainside, settling in little dammed pools, rushing over tiny waterfalls. The ground was well irrigated, the grass and moss lush, the olive trees straighter and more silvery green than usual. Deep in the hillside was the entrance to a cave.
Abul had come here with his father many times in his boyhood, and on his thirteenth birthday, his father had brought him here and left him alone for a week to make shift for himself, to learn the power and wisdom that came from acquaintance with oneself, with learning and understanding one’s strengths, with recognizing and making provision for one’s frailties. Abul had intended to impart these things to Boabdil …
Yusuf toiled up the mountain in his wake. He tethered the mules and the palfrey and took his leave of his lord. “Return here in one week,” Abul said, “if you choose to throw in your lot with mine. If you do not, then I hold you to nothing.”
“I will return,” Yusuf said and rode his pony back down the mountainside.
Abul still held Sarita, but now he set her on her feet, a sickness in his belly, consumed with one desperate, dread-filled need that now superseded his anger, although the two were somehow interdependent. When she moaned and swayed, he grabbed the round collarless neck of the sack she wore, holding her upright. With his free hand he pulled his knife from its sheath and slashed at the garment, dragging the knife downward, rending the material from neck to toe, tearing it from her body so that she stood naked.
He examined her with his eyes and then with his hands, touching every inch of her skin, turning her around, lifting her limbs, unable to believe that he could not see the massive, livid bruising of the rack, the cuts of the whip, the torn, burned flesh of pincer and clamp. But her skin was whole. Whatever they had done to her, they had not scarred her body with their ghastly instruments.
Sarita seemed to float upward from the trance that had held her since Abul had appeared, a figment of the dreams that had eluded her in the days of her captivity. She became aware of him, of her nakedness, of his intense scrutiny, and she shrank away from his eyes. “I am so dirty.” Her voice croaked from her parched throat. It seemed suddenly the most important thing, the only thing that mattered, and it filled her with embarrassment. “Do not look at me.”
“You need to sleep,” he said, his voice sounding strangely disembodied, even to himself.
She shook her head. “Not until I am clean. I am rank.” Indeed, the reek of pain and terror, of the fetid air of her successive prisons, seemed to enwrap her in a noxious aura. She put her hands to her head, a fluttering, distressful gesture. “My head aches.”
He saw how the hair was dragged back from her forehead, the bright, dangerous fires doused, the subversive extravagance of curls forced into submission. He cut the tight string at the nape of her neck, pulling the hair loose, and heard her sobbing sigh of relief, seeing the tears glitter in her eyes.
“Sleep now,” he insisted, but she shook her head.
“I am filthy. I cannot sleep.”
Abul did not understand the imperative, but he did understand that he must accede to it. He brought soap, toweling, oil, and strigil from the saddlebags and led her to the riverbank. “The water will be cold,” he said. The early spring sun had had little time as yet to warm the waters flowing from the peaks of the Sierra Nevada.
“It does not matter.” She shook off his hand and stepped in. The icy cold brought blissful relief to her swollen feet and ankles, and she barely felt its freezing on her skin as she plunged into the pool, dropping her head under the water that soothed her wrenched scalp and eased the ache at her temples. She drank greedily, drank until her belly was stretched and her throat numbed with the cold.
“Come out now, Sarita!” Abul commanded briskly from where he stood at the water’s edge, apprehensively wondering if he was going to have to go in after her. But she staggered upright and out onto the bank. He rubbed soap on his hands and scrubbed her body and hair, then pushed her back into the water. “Wash it off quickly!”
She obeyed, hearing the anxiety beneath the brusqueness. She dipped beneath the surface, washing the soap from her hair, watching it froth around her with a dreamlike fascination.
“Sarita!” Abul’s voice pierced the trance, and she stumbled to shore again. He scrubbed her dry with the towel, rubbing her hair until it no longer dripped down her back, before anointing her with oil and slowly, thoroughly, applying the strigil, pulling the dirt from her body, feeling the lines of her body take on shape again at each purifying stroke as if she were again beginning to inhabit her flesh. She stood quite still for him, lifting her arms, parting her legs, raising her feet, when he so instructed. And when he had finished, she took a deep breath, inhaling the freshness of her hair and body, the mild sweetness of the oil, curiously redolent of a tender innocence.
“I am going to sleep now,” she said, and curled without further word on the soft turf of the riverbank.
Abul wondered whether to move her into the cave, but decided she would come to no harm where she was. He fetched a blanket and spread it over her, but she kicked it off with a sleepy, childish petulance that, despite everything, made him smile.
Sitting with his back to a rock, he stretched out his legs and settled down to watch her. There was complete stillness in this mountain aerie, ruffled only by the natural sounds of a world undisturbed by man, and by the cropping and shuffling of the tethered animals. After the hideous knife-edge of the last terror-filled days, Abul felt a great weakness, but he knew it was the weakness that preceded the rejuvenation of the spirit, and he allowed his mind to turn in on itself, his spirit to flow untrammeled by conscious thought and the devising of plans, or by speculations on the future.
As he watched and the sun grew high, the sleeping figure on the grass slowly unfolded from its fetal curl, as if in sleep the body craved the delicate touch of the soft air, the healing caress of the as-yet spring-muted midday sun. Her skin seemed to lose its waxen composition under his watchful eyes, to expand, to round out with the return of the inhabiting spirit.
In midafternoon, he lit a fire, assembled various items from the saddlebags, and put them to use, his eyes constantly flickering to the sleeper, noticing if she had changed position, watching for the first signs of a return to the waking world.
The sun was dropping behind the mountain when Sarita woke and sat up all in the same moment. She looked around her, her eyes clear and focused. “Abul?”
“I am here.” He came toward her.
“I did not think I had dreamed you this time.” She held her hands up to him, and he pulled her to her feet. “I don’t seem to understand anything just yet except that I am hungry … hungry as if I have never been anything else.”
Abul lifted her and carried her over to the fire. “It’s getting chilly. You should wear something now.” He took a woolen cloak from one of th
e packs and wrapped it around her shoulders. “Sit on that rock.”
Sarita did so, watching curiously as he ladled kuskus into a wooden bowl from an iron kettle over the fire. “Did you cook this?”
He glanced around. “I don’t see anyone else.”
She only smiled and plunged the wooden spoon into the bowl. The contents were sweetened with honey, almonds, and boiled raisins. It was bland, filling, ineffably soothing. Finally, she laid the bowl and spoon on the grass beside her. “How did you know how to cook kuskus?”
He shrugged. “I once spent a week here on my own. I learned many things … how to trap and shoot, skin and cook. I thought your belly might need a little lining before you eat anything more exotic.”
She smiled again and stretched, then drew her knees up to her chin, hugging them, the smile gone from her face and eyes.
Despite the way he was caring for her, something lay between them. Despite the cessation of terror, and she knew Abul had suffered it also, for she had felt it in his body as he had caught her to him when she’d emerged from the Inquisition’s prison—despite that, the absolute peace of renewal was missing. Now she remembered the blunt force of his anger in the prison court.
“You are very angry with me.” She looked at him over her drawn-up knees.
Abul considered and found that his anger had left him at some point in the long peace of the day. “I was. Very, very angry. But it was a confused anger, arising from my own dread. I had been living in such terror, knowing where you were, knowing what you were enduring, imagining what I could not know, yet I could do nothing quickly. When I saw you at last and realized that you were alive, although I knew you had been hurt … realized that I had you back again … I was consumed with a blind rage.” He reached for her hand. “It is passed, querida.”
She came onto her knees into his arms, needing now only the tenderness of his body as reassurance. “I could not bear your anger,” she whispered, nuzzling against his warmth, knowing that for the moment that was the only truth. She wanted no more words, only his body speaking to hers.
Abul opened her cloak as she slipped down on the turf beside the fire, laying bare her body in the fireglow, moving over her with delicate healing touches, drawing from her the gentle cadences of a purely sensate response to loving. He brought to her a peaceful release, freeing her mind finally from its terrifying anchorage in her body during the reign of pain.
“Sarita?”
“Shhh.”
Abul smiled and shook his head in amused resignation. “Sarita?”
“Shhh. You’ll frighten him, and then we’ll have no dinner.” Her impassioned whisper came over her shoulder, her eyes darting green exasperation before she turned back to her self-appointed task.
Abul’s smile deepened. Sarita was lying flat on her belly, the top half of her body hanging over the riverbank, as she devoted all her powers of concentration in a battle of wits with the speckled trout resting beneath a large flat stone. The trout’s erstwhile companion lay gaffed on the grass, evidence of her success in this unsportsmanlike method of fishing.
“Forget tickling our dinner and come over here. I want to talk to you.”
The note in his voice this time brought her back full length on the bank. She rolled over and sat up, shaking water off her bare forearm. “What can be more important than dinner?”
But Sarita knew what he was going to talk about.
She had been dreading it since she awoke in his arms this morning, remembering they had talked only of his anger yesterday. There was so much else they must discuss. How he had effected her release, and, more importantly, when they would return to the Alhambra.
She had no intention of not returning with him. If she could not assist him by her absence, then she would remain at his side. But her spirit was heavy at the thought of returning to that beleaguered atmosphere, with Abul so distracted by anxiety, and herself so unable to offer material assistance in his troubles.
“Several things,” Abul said. “Are you coming here, or am I coming to fetch you?”
Sarita put her head to one side, regarding him quizzically, wondering if she could divert the coming talk. “It might be more interesting.”
He shook his head. “No, it wouldn’t.”
“Oh.” Reluctant but resigned, she stood up, rolling down the sleeve of the simple linen robe that had been packed in the traveling wardrobe carefully assembled by Kadiga and Zulema.
“Well?” She stood against his knees, pressing her own warmly against his, arching her body backward, so that her hair tumbled down her back, and her face lifted to the sparking sun.
“What do you want to do now?” Abul asked, squinting up at her.
“Tickle trout, of course.” She straightened and laughed down at him. “I thought I’d made that clear.”
He caught her hands and pulled her down to the grass. Apart from a mock indignant squawk, she acceded and settled cross-legged, her hands roaming through the grass in search of the dainty, tiny petals of emerging wildflowers.
“It’s a serious question, Sarita mía. What do you wish to do now?”
She frowned, recognizing the grave note in his voice. “I am coming with you. It is not a question of wishes or decisions. You must go back to the Alhambra, and I am coming with you.” Her seaweed eyes held his in fierce determination. “You will not send me away again, Abul.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” he said, leaning back against his rock with an almost lazy movement that struck her as puzzlingly inappropriate in light of the subject matter. “Now that I know what happens when you take matters into your own hands, hija mía, I know better than to let you loose.”
“Yesterday you were very angry about it, and today you are laughing,” Sarita said, quite lost. “You were right to say I do not understand your people and was foolish to attempt to interfere. It was a bitter lesson, Abul, and I learned it. Your anger I can understand, but do not laugh at me now.”
“Ah, querida, I am not making light of that.” Remorsefully, he sat up and drew her close between his knees, catching her face. “Do not ever believe I do not know what you endured.”
“But it is passed,” she said. “Let us leave it that way and discuss the future, since I think that is what is behind this.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “And I wish to know how you would most like to shape that future.”
Sarita shook her head. “You must return to the Alhambra, Abul. We must fashion what we may out of that. You have been away overlong as it is … and for that I must blame myself.”
“We do not return to the Alhambra,” Abul said quietly. He had been debating how best to tell her the price of her freedom and had decided to let it come out as it would.
“Why not?” He could feel the tension in the sharp question and sensed that she almost knew what he would tell her.
Gently, he stroked her mouth with the flat of his thumb. “There are many roads in a man’s life, Sarita. I do not wish to spend the rest of my life on the same road, so I will take a new direction.”
Her eyes met his, wide and direct. “You have exchanged Granada for me.”
He chuckled and pinched her nose, trying to show her how lightly he considered the matter. “Granada proved to be worth the price of a soul. How many man-made things can substantiate such a claim?”
She pulled back from the teasing caress. “No, Abul, I will not believe such a thing … I cannot … I could not live with myself if I believed …”
“Hush, foolish one! Do you think I am nothing without the caliphate? That is a grave insult, Sarita.”
She looked up to the mountains, thought again of the eagle with its clipped wings, and looked back at Abul in anguish. “Do not pretend, Abul. You know that you are Granada and Granada is you. You are bound within and to each other—”
“And you are talking arrant foolishness that is insulting to boot,” Abul interrupted. “You would take from me the will to set my own priorities, to choose my own path, to decide u
pon a future different from that laid down in the hearts and minds of those who can neither see nor imagine beyond the ends of their noses.”
Sarita flinched from the power of a genuine anger. Abul was the most self-determining man she had ever met. He rarely acted without due thought; she did not believe he could be forced into a course of action he believed wrong or in some way detrimental to a larger plan. Neither did she believe he would waste time and energy on regrets, once his decision was made. And if he had chosen herself over his caliphate, then she must accept that decision with all the joy and gratitude it brought with it.
Thoughts tumbled in her head as she struggled to rectify her error and find for once the right thing to say. In the end, it seemed most natural to refrain from apologies and protestations of innocence that would only lead her into deeper waters.
“What is it that you wish to do, then, Abul?”
“There are choices,” he said, following her as easily as if those tense moments had never happened. “If you wish it, we could build ourselves a cabin up here and enjoy the rustic life—”
“Keep goats,” Sarita said with a mischievous assumption of excitement, clapping her hands. “Goats and chickens. We have sufficient water. There are olive trees, and perhaps we could grow—”
“It will be rather cold in the winter,” he broke in gravely.
“Yes, I suppose it will. The tribe always went down to low ground during the winter months.”
“We could take to the open road, if that would please you,” Abul suggested, pulling up a succulent stalk of grass and sucking it with every appearance of pleasure.
“I believe it is hard for two people to live that kind of life. It needs a community.”
“Well, perhaps you would like to go to Barbary.”
For some reason, that alternative had not occurred to Sarita. To leave the peninsula … to cut every last thread with Spain … with her homeland, the people of her race … She swallowed. “Yes, but what is there?”
