Let him sing his songs of praise now, and boast of his close relatives in high places. As the Almighty hadn’t lifted a finger in defense of his seraph up until now, Lucifer was confident that He wouldn’t be quick to reach out a hand to an archangel of human clay.
Now—what to do with the fellow. Lucifer’s first idea, when he had solidified his strategy, had been to keep his brother as he had discussed keeping Saara: caged in squalor, under his eye.
But he had had to toss that idea away, for even in the wretched form into which he had been locked, Lucifer didn’t trust Raphael’s influence upon the palace staff.
Not one of them was loyal, he reflected bitterly. Not a damned one of them, no matter how much he burned and beat them.
Least of all did he trust Kadjebeen, who had trundled out into the middle of the room and stood regarding the man on the floor. Kadjebeen was TOO handy, and inclined to have ideas.
But he was useful.
“Have this thing scourged,” Lucifer growled to his servant. “I want him half-killed. Then find… find Perfecto of Granada wherever he is and sell the brute to him. If the slaver has no money, give Raphael to him anyway and tell him I’ll collect later.
“He is not to refuse.”
As Kadjebeen scuttled (albeit unwillingly) off to set the wheels of torture in motion, Lucifer regarded the fruit of his labor.
The fall of flaxen hair half hid Raphael’s features—which were as always, except for the light which had gone out of them. But there was a pale dust of hair on the arm which poked out of the simple white sleeve, and a network of fine lines creased the flesh between the thumb and forefinger. The robe had fallen crumpled to one side, exposing one quite ordinary leg up to the knee. The man’s breath came raggedly, and a trickle of blood ran out of his nose.
Lucifer chuckled to himself. “As perfectly imperfect as any on the earth!
“Behold! I have made a man,” he whispered aloud, and then he shook his head at his own cleverness. “If that isn’t creation,” he added, “then I don’t know what is.”
Chapter 3
Dull anguish rolled over him like waves of an untiring ocean, pierced by bolts of lancing pain. But worse than the pain was a nagging conviction which lay beneath it that something was missing; something was terribly wrong. Confusion thwarted all of Raphael’s efforts to think; he had no weapon with which to fight it, for he had never before known what it was to be confused.
“I am screaming at myself,” he thought wonderingly. He heard the parts of his body—his wounded back, his bruised cheek, and savagely twisted hand—howling their protest against the rest of him. “I know,” he replied to the pain. “I know what you are saying, but I can’t help it. I can’t.”
Not for comfort exactly, but for understanding, he threw himself upon mercy.
“Tell me what it is, Father,” he begged within himself. “Tell me how to hear this pain rightly. I’m frightened; tell me what it is that is so wrong, which I’ve forgotten and I know I must remember.”
But this message only echoed in his ravaged head. No answer came.
No music, no words. No vision, comfort, chiding, or instruction. No touch of awareness at all. The Other within him was gone as though it had never existed. And suddenly Raphael knew that THAT was what had been wrong—wrong beyond pain and beyond confusion. A dreadful closed emptiness within him.
He flailed his arms, not knowing what the motions were. He made noises.
Lombardy in August could not hold a candle to the heat of the Moorish State of Granada during the same month. In Lombardy the grass was dry, but at least it was grass.
On the brown hills forty miles south of the Andalusian city the ground was crazed like pottery glazing. The midday heat drove even the birds from the sky. Beasts of all sorts sheltered in the shadows of the rocks.
Beside a sheer walled table of stone (a divot laid carefully on the dry dirt) a single iron chain looped in swags through seven iron collars. Seven slaves had spaced themselves out evenly like birds on a fence, seeking their own space in the sliver of shadow left by the table’s overhang.
Three of the women were Saqalibah: the pale, broad-faced people who had been slaves to the Moors for so many hundreds of years that they fell in the same class with the Arab horse and other animals of pedigree. Two others had spoken Spanish as children, and one spoke Spanish, Arabic, and Langue d’Ouil, all of them badly, and was uncertain in her muddled memory which language had come first. The last woman, at the end of the chain, was a black, dressed in heavy desert indigo, complete with tassels and coins. She had been put at the end of the chain because she picked fights.
All the slaves were women. The merchants Perfecto and Hakiim specialized in women—women and eunuchs.
Hakiim gazed sourly at an eighth slave, who writhed over the sandy ground at the end of a separate chain. His partner, Perfecto, had brought him in about an hour ago, slung over the back of a pack horse, and dumped him there on the ground. Neither Perfecto nor Hakiim could bring himself to touch him.
“The currency of that one’s understanding has been devalued, I think,” Hakiim drawled to Perfecto. “If it is not entirely counterfeit.”
Perfecto could do little but shrug. “I had reasons to buy him.”
Hakiim didn’t want to start an argument, for Perfecto was a man of chancy temper. And he was underhanded (like most Christians), and unpredictable. Hakiim was not a Spaniard, and he had no desire to gain enemies in a country where he had so few friends.
Still, that the fellow should wander off into the dry hills and return with THIS—this piece of damaged property, probably crazy to boot. Perfecto usually had good business sense, at least.
“Saqalibah?” mused the Moor, turning the blond head gently with a boot toe. “Either that or Northman, I imagine. We might as well claim he is Saqalibah; with a eunuch, purity of line cannot matter.
“Were it not for the scars, he would make a good harem boy. Or… plaything. Fine face, to be sure, and the coloring is uncommon.”
Perfecto regarded his prize with a jaundiced eye. Truth to tell, he liked his prize less than Hakiim did, having been forced to pay good money for him and to act grateful into the bargain.
And he shuddered, remembering the interview during which he had acquired the slave. Perfecto hated doing business with the Devil’s crew. His fears ate through him like acid, worse and worse with every summons, and he longed for a graceful way to close the account which stood between the Devil and himself. But it had been almost twenty years now since Perfecto opened this account with a bit of casual homicide, and pay out as he might, the Spaniard always seemed to be in the red.
Perfecto wasn’t at all sure what he had been forced to purchase. Was this pretty-faced imbecile a straight bit of goods—some court eunuch who had incurred hellish displeasure, or the slave of some high official who had perhaps made contract with Satan and then tried to recant? He had a splendidly noble face, after all, or would have had, had any intelligence remained behind it.
Or was this but the Devil’s bad joke on Perfecto himself, ready to change into a lion or a monstrous adder when least expected? Perfecto had certain nightmares…
He answered Hakiim grimly. “He must have been some man’s little toy once. But he’s a bit large for such cuddles now.
“And of course there will be scars on the back, especially with the way he’s grinding the dirt in.”
For the blond slave had stopped thrashing and lay quietly now in his much stained linen, directly on the wounds of his back.
Hakiim glanced covertly at his partner’s disgusted face. The Moor could no longer restrain himself. “I quite agree! My friend, tell me; why did you accept the creature? Even for free he would have cost too much…”
Perfecto’s fingers pierced holes in the arid Andalusian earth. Sand dribbled out of his balled fists and his eyes were like little beads of brass.
Hakiim relapsed into silence.
At the far end of the line the black w
oman began to chant a Berber chant, in the tight-throated, ornate, ululating fashion of the desert. Every time the little company stopped, the black had to do something strange: throwing pebbles at a tree, or covering herself with sand, or swinging her chain back and forth. Otherwise she ignored everyone in the party, slave and slave merchant alike, except when they got in her way.
Perfecto’s lips drew back. Now all he needed was trouble from that bitch, who was unfortunately too valuable to bruise.
Hakiim, too, lifted his head. He had more tolerance for the chanting than Perfecto had, for it was familiar music to him. But because it was in the Berber tradition, it unsettled him. The Berber tribes had swept the length and breadth of Islamic Spain a handful of times. They out-Arabed the Bedouin tribes with their narrow-minded asceticism and xenophobia. Even now, under the more urbane rule of Muhammad V of the Nasrid dynasty, Berber warriors made up a goodly number of the forces of the Alhambra. Berbers were not to be found on the end of a chain.
Perhaps it was not only on account of her temperament that Djoura had sold so cheap…
Hakiim forced this worry out of his mind. After all—who in the State of Granada knew or cared with what accents a black slave sang her songs? “There’s our lovely she-ass again,” he sighed instead. “Making her presence known.” Then he shrugged.
In Granada they would sell the black. None of the upstart Muwalladun would care what she called herself; to them, all blacks were Nubian, just as all blonds were Saqalibah. Being young, sound, and well-proportioned, she’d bring a good price. In Granada they’d get rid of the entire chain of slaves.
Except, perhaps…
But as his glance fell on the eunuch, who lay within two yards of the rug the merchants had spread for themselves to sit on, Hakiim started and did a clear double take.
For the imbecile had lifted himself up by his hands, and he sat bolt upright, his ludicrously fine face filled with wonder as his deep blue eyes sought along the length of chain, until they rested on the ebony face of the singer. He stared intently, swaying side to side with the beat of the chant.
Hakiim almost choked with amusement. Perfecto followed his partner’s eye and a grin stretched his features. The imbecile’s parody of emotion was just too perfect.
“Look,” giggled the Spaniard. “Our eunuch is in love. With Djoura the Nubian, no less.
“At least he can sit up,” Perfecto continued. “Maybe by tomorrow he’ll be able to walk, and then we can move again.”
“He’ll walk,” retorted Hakiim. “Just let the Nubian lead him, like a goat leads the sheep.”
And that quip called forth an idea. “The fellow is a bloody mess and must eventually be cleaned up. Let’s give him a real treat in the process. We can bring Djoura to take care of him.”
Perfecto looked less than satisfied by this idea. “What if she kills him? What if he kills her? The investment!”
“If she kills him,” answered Hakiim, rising to his feet, “then I’ll cover whatever he cost you out of my own pocket, and I’ll buy her a box of sweets as well. If he kills her—well, I’ll crawl to Mecca on my knees.”
Then the swarthy Moor turned and grimaced pleasantly down at his partner. “Or do you want the privilege of washing the half-wit yourself?”
Perfecto waved his acquiescence to Hakiim’s plan.
Since the black was at one end of the long chain and the only place where the eunuch’s collar could be attached was on the other, bringing them together occasioned much shifting, curses, and complaints. None of the women wanted to squat in the sun, so the displaced slaves bickered and poked at one another over a few square inches of shadow, until the chain was folded in the middle, and the unhappy slaves were crowded together with exactly half the elbowroom they’d had before.
Hakiim sat the woman down with a rag and a pot of water. Beside the pot he placed a small lump of lard soap.
“You see that big baby there,” he said to her in Arabic, pointing at Raphael. “You pretend he’s your baby. Wash him all over. And don’t waste soap.”
She glared not at Raphael (who had greeted her arrival like the coming of springtime) but at the sky. The Moor stood above them both with arms folded. He scowled, but he was rather more curious than annoyed.
Raphael smiled at Djoura, and he sighed. He put his hand out toward her neck, awkwardly, and when she flinched away he touched his own throat.
“He likes your singing,” explained the patient Hakiim.
“Does he?” replied the black dubiously, for no one else in the slave chain had expressed similar feelings. (She addressed her master without respect, indeed without civility, but Hakiim had expected no different.) But then Djoura, like Hakiim, had to laugh at Raphael’s eloquent expression. “Well, then, he must be a person of very good taste.”
She soaked the rag, wrung it out, and soaped it. “Close your eyes,” she barked at Raphael and she touched the rag to his cheek.
He started with surprise at the cold contact and Djoura laughed again. She proceeded to lather his puzzled face.
“Hah! You poor sieve-head! How pink you are, underneath the dirt!” she chortled. “We’ll see just how pink we can make you. We’ll get that hair too. Maybe it’s pink as well, when all the sand is out of it.”
But when she dribbled water onto the blond head, he sputtered and shook like a dog. Perfecto cursed from his spot on the square of carpet, and Hakiim backed off. Both the merchants retreated some yards away.
“Good,” growled the black. “Being stupid has it uses. You got rid of them, and if I’d done it, they’d beat me. Or they’d try!
“I don’t like them,” she whispered, pouting furiously. “And I most especially don’t like the Spaniard. They can crawl in with any of the girls they like, they think—it’s their natural right, they think.
“Until they met ME! I showed them, you can tell the world.”
Raphael’s head and face ran with thin lather. He squinted his eyes against the sting of soap. Djoura gave him a careful rinse, using as little water as possible. “Sand is better for washing,” she instructed him. “It doesn’t crack the skin like soap, and doesn’t waste good water. We had sand yesterday and I gave myself a good scrub. Hah! You should have seen these ignorant ones look at me, like baby owls along a branch, blinking. They know nothing, being content to stink.
“But here there is not sand, but only dirt. Who can wash herself in dirt, I ask?”
Looking slyly around first, she dabbed the soapy rag at her own face and hands, and then thrust her arm with the rag down the front of her many-layered clothing. As the cool rag swabbed her skin, she sighed in ecstasy. Raphael watched every move with interest.
Having washed down to the fellow’s neck and up each arm, Djoura sat back and announced, “Now you have to get up off your hams, eunuch, so we can pull that shirt off you.”
But she had no real hope of being understood. She scuttled around behind the fellow and yanked on the garment, but there was too much of it, and his legs were tangled in its folds. “Curse you!” she growled, but without real rancor, for washing the eunuch was the first interesting thing for her since being sold to Hakiim in Tunis. “How you stare at me with those big blue eyes of yours—just like a white cat! I wonder you can even see through them. Well, the shirt’s all stuck to your back with blood. We’ll have to soak it off.”
When the water hit Raphael’s back, he stiffened and gasped. Djoura put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right. It won’t hurt forever,” she whispered, adding soap. She examined the length and number of the scourge marks with a kind of respect. “Pinkie, you must have done something pretty terrible to deserve THIS!
“I, too, cannot be broken,” she hissed into his ear, “though maybe they will make me a sieve-head in the end, like you.”
She smiled grimly at the thought. “Or maybe I’ll only pretend to be one, and amuse myself laughing at them all.”
There were long openings in the back of the eunuch’s gown—not whip slice
s, for they were parallel and neatly hemmed. She wondered at them while she reached her hand through and worried the cloth from the wounds. Perhaps some kind of iron chain or body-collar had passed through these. If so, this eunuch must have been a handful when he still had his senses. Her approval of him grew by leaps and bounds.
“You may not know it,” she whispered (as though the hills were full of spies), “but I am a Berber! People think I am not, because I am black, but Berbers are really of all colors.” Then she giggled. “Maybe even pink!
“To be a Berber, it is only necessary that you live like a Berber and follow the ways of the Prophet,” she added with hauteur, and she crawled back in front of him to glare deep into his eyes. “To be a Berber is to be free!” she hissed, with no thought of the irony of her words.
She threw back her head and all the coins and tassels on her headdress bobbed together.
Raphael listened carefully to the sounds Djoura made. His eyes devoured her color and shape and his skin rejoiced at her touch, even when it hurt him. For her song had broken his terrible isolation, and her chatter kept him from despair. So now, as she at last fell silent, with her brown eyes looking full at him, he tried to give her something of the same sort back.
He repeated the chant she had sung at the other end of the line, word for word, note for note, with perfect inflection and time.
Djoura clapped her hands in front of her mouth. “Oh, aren’t you a clever one!”
It was not actually cleverness, or not cleverness in the sense the black Berber meant. Raphael’s repertoire of music was immense, and neither pain nor transformation could steal it from him.
He knew that piece. He repeated it for her an octave down, where he found this new instrument (his throat) was more comfortable, and then to the Berber’s amazement, he followed the solo chant with the traditional choral response.
The woman sat stock-still in front of him. The rag she had been wringing fell from her hands. “You are a Berber too? My kinsman? And I have been making mock of you!” She bit down on her Up until the pain of it brought her feelings under control.
The Damiano Series Page 57
