by Jane Johnson
I lay listening there in terror. It was Momo’s uncle, Muhamed al-Zaghal. If the sultan was an olive root, his brother was iron.
“It would be best for all of us if you were to die right now. I should have the guts to destroy you myself. Put a cushion over your mouth and finish the task my brother started. And he is no better, sniffing after Christian women like a dog. I am the only one fit to lead our people against the unbelievers. I should do it. Take the necessary action.”
What could I do? I had no weapon and Momo’s uncle was the fiercest warrior in all Granada. I should launch myself at him, screaming, sacrifice myself for my friend. After all, I had just promised that very thing. My muscles trembled with intent, but when I stuck my head up, it was to see the sultana sweeping into the chamber, Dr. Ibrahim in her wake. She stopped when she saw her husband’s brother, and I ducked back down.
“What are you doing in here?” She had no fear of anyone, that woman.
Al-Zaghal looked as guilty as a jackal in the sheep pen. “I came to see how the boy was.”
“That’s more than his father has done,” the sultana said grudgingly.
I heard shuffling, the movement of fabric. Then the doctor said, “His breathing is easier and his heart is beating more strongly. I think he will live.”
Al-Zaghal muttered his excuses and slipped away. Dr. Ibrahim and the sultana stayed awhile, talking quietly. Then I heard the sultana dismiss him and the scrape of wood on tile as she pulled a stool closer to the bed.
“My son, all my hope resides in you. All the hope of the kingdom rests on your shoulders. You must come back to us!”
All this talk of kingdom, I thought. But none of love.
Momo did not stir. Soon she was striding around the room again. “And Hasan, what is he thinking, bringing that bitch-whore into my palace?” The stool, kicked hard, skittered across the floor. “How he disrespects me. Me! A woman of the Prophet’s line. He married me only so he could grab the throne. If there were any justice in the world, I would rule here. They say the Castilian queen holds the reins of power, this Isabella. So why not me? I cannot even rule my own palace! I will not have that woman under my roof. An unbeliever, a kafir. How dare he? If I were a man…”
If Aysha were a man, I thought, the whole world would cower in terror. She frightened me even more than al-Zaghal. I had once seen her backhand an unfortunate slave who had been clumsy with the hot sugar paste used to remove her mistress’s moustache. The slave had cracked her skull. I never saw the girl again, and no one even spoke her name.
Into the silence dropped a long, deep sigh. I held my breath till I thought I might burst. Then her footsteps recommenced, at last dwindling as she left the room. Even so, I did not move. If she caught me, she would be furious at what I had overheard. Her bitter anger, her sharp jealousy.
I did not understand then how jealousy can poison a heart.
Finally I felt safe enough to crawl from my hiding place and lie beside Momo. His chest rose and fell, rose and fell: it seemed my wish had been granted. But we are never happy with our bargains, are we? For now, I did not just want him to be alive but to open his eyes and speak to me, to embrace me as his dearest friend.
I propped myself up on one elbow and looked down at him. Beneath the bandage his face was so beautiful I felt a tightness in my chest. This was perhaps the only time I would have the chance to do what I knew I had to do. Only I would know. It would be a secret that I hugged to myself in the darkness, that would give me hope when there was none left in the world.
I bent my head and kissed him on the lips.
His eyelids fluttered, then flew open, and I saw myself reflected in the widening dark pools of his pupils—small, thin, anxious, all nose and eyes, like a scared bird.
“What are you doing?” he croaked.
“Nothing.” The age-old denial of children everywhere caught in the act of trespass.
“Blessings,” he said, and smiled.
I had never been so happy.
Momo’s miraculous return to consciousness was soon blared about the palace. Doves were gathered and released, trumpets sounded, drums beaten: it was a great to-do. But something had gone out of him—whether from the blow itself or the circumstances of the injury; or that his father never showed the least regret over it. Not that he remembered anything about what happened: he made me tell him all I had heard and seen. He latched on to the mention of the Christian woman who had made his mother so furious. It was, perhaps, easier to focus his woes on a stranger than to look closer to home. He became obsessed with her. And maybe he was right to be.
“This captive is a new player on the board,” Qasim said thoughtfully when I went to make my weekly report to him. “And she could be dangerous.”
“To Momo?” I stared at him.
“Maybe, in time, to all of us. Or maybe she’s not important at all. Perhaps…” His black eyes regarded me beneath their heavy lids. “Perhaps you might go into the women’s quarters and tell me what you hear, what you see, what she says.”
“Me? How can I enter the women’s quarters?” It was forbidden for anyone except the sultan himself to enter there.
“A bit of kohl, some earrings, the right outfit: you’ll make a lovely girl.”
Momo watched me as I drew a long line along the base of my eyelid, extending it to a wing beyond the outer corner.
“How do you keep such a steady hand?”
In all honesty, I did not know: his proximity was distracting.
“You’ve done this before!” he accused.
I had. But that was a tale for another time.
“You will tell me everything, won’t you? I can’t bear to see Mama so unhappy.”
And so, I was to be paid twice over for my single task: once in coin by the vizier and once with the gratitude of my friend, which seemed a good bargain to me at the time. Clothes from the washing line, one of the sultana’s head scarves and some earrings I had kept of my mother’s, and the transformation was complete. Momo tilted his head to consider me, then laughed long and hard and led me out to one of the still pools in the courtyard, where I stared at myself in wonder. A girl. I was a girl.
The courtesans’ quarters lay directly above the main living area of the royal harem, just a few corridors and some stairs from where we ran and played. But despite the easy entry past the guard, it might as well have been a world away.
I thought the women’s quarters would be quiet and dull, full of quiet, dull young women. I thought to slip among them, watching and listening, committing to memory a swaying walk or a fat waddle: embellishments to my spying mission that would entertain Momo when I returned. I was so stupid.
There were some very ancient women here, bent-backed and white-eyed, their faces as wrinkled as old fruit, their hands and nails orange with henna. Some had lines tattooed on chins and foreheads or to the side of their noses. And all wore kohl, just the way the women from my tribe did, to protect them from the spirits and the evil eye.
Their eyes were watching me now. I had not realized then how every change and arrival in the harem is immediately examined for messages about the state of the outside world, in the way our trackers interrogate the landscape through which they move for signs of wild beasts, quicksand and water.
“What is she thinking of, coming in here with no henna?” one of the old ones said.
“She will bring the djinn in with her.”
They made signs against that.
“She must have come with the zahira.”
I knew that word: it meant “witch.”
They made signs against that too.
“Who do you serve?” one of them asked me.
“Why, God, of course.”
They laughed, but indulgently. “No, dear, who is your mistress?”
“The sultana, Aysha the Pious,” I said promptly.
“Then why are you here and not in her apartments?” The sultana had separate quarters in an exquisite pavilion whose windows overlook
ed the gardens and the city beyond.
I bent in conspiratorially. “She sent me to take a look at the new arrival.”
“She is not here, the infidel.” An old woman spat, expelling an olive pit with such force that it rebounded against the wall. “The sultana, peace be upon her, decreed she be placed in her own quarters adjoining the baths rather than in here, polluting our air.”
A slave girl carrying linen said, “Come with me.”
She wove a convoluted path down winding corridors, narrow stairs and through sunlit courtyards. I had not realized how much of the Alhambra had been hidden from me. All the courtyards were enclosed: I did not once glimpse the wider gardens or even the pavilions of the main palace, though they could not be far away. It was such a labyrinth I began to wonder if I would be able to find my way back.
At last she stopped at a doorway to a hammam I had not seen before. “In there,” she said softly, and gave me the linen.
Inside, it was hot and steamy. There was so much perfume in the air that I sneezed, which cleared enough of an eddy in the vapour for me to make out a figure in a marble tub. If this was the Christian witch, it seemed to me that a lot of fuss had been made about nothing. Where I came from the women were strong, with black hair and eyes like the night, their sun-baked skin as brown as bark and about as tough. This one was as pale as a wraith. I almost walked away then, to report back to Qasim with a sneer.
I wish I had.
For when Isobel de Solis rose from her bath, every impression of weakness vanished like the coiling vapours from which she emerged. She stood with her shoulders back and her chin high, making no attempt to hide any part of herself.
I had never seen a woman naked before, bathing opportunities being limited in the desert, and never having acquired this peculiar habit of stripping and steaming and scrubbing, I never used the royal hammam but instead confined my efforts at cleanliness to dabbing dubiously at myself out of view of everyone, with a cloth dipped in wash water. Which merely added to Momo’s view of me as a little heathen. So I regarded her with curiosity, even though I had no appreciation for the aspects of her that appeared to have driven the sultan wild. To me, breasts were appendages like camels’ humps for storing sustenance—and hers seemed unimpressive. The rest of her was slender and girlish. But then her eyes came to rest on me. They were the green of a flame that changes its hue when a charlatan throws mineral powder into the fire.
She clicked her fingers and spoke in a foreign tongue. One of the women scuttled like a big black beetle to stare at me. “Lady say you her slave now,” she rasped in horrible Arabic.
“What?” I laughed nervously. “I’m not her slave.”
“She choose you.”
“She can’t choose me. I’m the sultana’s servant.”
“You belong Lady Isobel.” The old woman dug her fingers into the meat of my arm. I caught a whiff of her, bitterness distilled. Sheeba, grown in the kitchen garden to ward off parasites. Who would wear wormwood as a perfume?
“What your name?” she demanded.
“Jihad,” I told her defiantly. Struggle.
She gave me a hard stare, then conveyed my insolence to Isobel. I saw a frown pleat a deep line in the perfect brow and thought: She is really quite old. Nineteen, at least. Then she responded to the crone with a stream of harsh-sounding words.
“The lady will call you Gatita,” the crone said. “‘Little cat.’”
A drowned kitten’s corpse being carried away in a bucket. I shivered.
“And I am La Sabia—the Wise One. I earn my name. Do not forget.”
“I earned mine too,” I said, hardening my muscles against her fingers. “It’s a Muslim name and you are in a Muslim kingdom, so maybe you should get used to that.”
Her expression did not change by so much as a flicker, but abruptly I was lying on the wet tiles and blood was singing in my ears. I was just getting used to the unlikely idea that the old woman had put me there, when she kicked me in the stomach. Even though she wore nothing more substantial than a soft leather slipper, the blow doubled me up like a dying wasp.
Her voice seemed to come from a long way away. “¡Pequeño demonio!”
In my two years at the palace I had been treated with if not kindness, then something that to my love-starved self seemed close to it. No one here had ever hit me, not even the vizier. No one except the gardeners had even shouted at me. I lay there, stunned.
La Sabia took my lack of movement as further insubordination. “Get up!” When I did not immediately leap to my feet, she gave me another kick in the small of the back.
This time injustice and pain drove me upright and I flung myself at her, biting, and thrashing my arms: a desert dervish of hate and panic. Someone pulled me off her at last—but only after I had her down on the floor and had ripped a hole in her dress with feral teeth, trying to get at her flesh. Isobel de Solis sat back on the edge of the marble bath with her fists held to her mouth. “¡Bravo, bravo! ¡Vamos! Gatita.” And when the old woman struggled to her feet with murder in her eyes, she laughed even more.
I was hustled away into a cell-like room and locked in with nothing but an enormous brown cockroach that scuttled out of the pallet, the only other thing in the room.
On the first day, I sat there devising ways to kill them all, including the cockroach. By the second day, I was weeping with hunger, convinced they would starve me to death and bury my body in the kitchen gardens to nourish the quince trees. By the third day, I was talking to the cockroach.
The door opened, and light streamed in around a silhouetted figure. For a moment I thought it was Momo and he had come to save me. Then it spoke. “So, Gatita, you lie. The sultana has no slave called Jihad. ¡Qué extraño!”
My hope fell away like a stone down a well. I had been abandoned. I sat very still and small, trying to show nothing of myself to her.
She took my inaction for submission. “Aha, no more tooths, diablita. Maybe you learn. Come!” She took me by the arm. “You teach lady Muslim court manners. Ha!” She spat to one side. “As if savage understand such things. But lady like you and she determined, want speak good to sultan when he return.”
My ears pricked up. “The sultan is away?”
“No concern of you.” The fingers pinched tighter. “Hurry.”
“You can’t treat me like this. I am the prince’s friend—”
She laughed. “Prince no here. Sultan and brother take him away, learn fight, be a man, not mother-boy.”
Cold dread washed over me as I recalled al-Zaghal’s threats when Momo lay unconscious. It would be so easy for my friend to have an accident: to fall from a horse, to slip during sword training, for a blunt practice-blade to be replaced by a honed weapon. Or poison: silent and unseen, easily administered by the enemy’s servants…
And if Momo died, what would happen to me? My entire existence was defined by my relationship to him. I was a royal companion, a slave purchased precisely for the purpose of providing the young emir with a friend. I shadowed him, took lessons with him, was treated like a little lord, living a life of such luxury neither I nor any member of my tribe could even have conceived of it. But without him I was nothing, just a bit of human rubbish that could be thrown away, tossed back into the filthy, dangerous streets from which I’d come.
As soon as I was able, I stole a scrap of paper and fashioned a pen from a pigeon’s feather, dug the sharp end in my wrist and used the blood as ink. On it I wrote four lines of text. When the blood was dry, I scattered salt grains on the paper to keep the djinn away from it. Then I spat on it and hid it in a wall outside, moving aside the creeping carpet of the protective Mother of Thousands plant. Now water, earth and air, all bound by the salt, would surely keep him safe.
5
It was one of those late-summer days when it felt as if the earth had soaked up a whole year’s sunshine in a single day and was giving it back in stupefying bursts of heat. It was also Ramadan: most of the staff were asleep, wai
ting out the long hours till sundown. I had been in captivity for six weeks and could now understand and speak passable Castilian, and still Qasim had not reclaimed me and Momo had not returned.
Bored with the way her mistress consistently mangled the Arabic language during our long lessons, La Sabia took herself off to find some refreshments, there being not a single slave around, a fact that had made her curse. As soon as the old woman was out of sight, the witch clutched my hand. “Now, Gatita, we can talk freely.”
This sudden complicity shocked me: there had never been a chink of light between the two of them before. They had always appeared to me to be two aspects of the same being: Foreign Woman, turning the beautiful side of her face to me one moment and her withered side the next.
“Tell me quickly, Little Cat—how do I say to him ‘Great One, your cock is so vast, how will I ever be able to accommodate it’?”
I was lost for words.
She laughed: the throaty gurgle of a washerwoman. “Don’t you understand?” The pressure on my hand increased. “Have you not experienced the pleasure of a man between your legs, Gatita?”
The words But I am only twelve trembled in my mouth. I said nothing. Some memories you bury deep. Some you dig up again uncontrollably to get a good whiff of their putrefaction. But no matter how long they have been buried or how often you exhume them they retain their power to poison your life.
Fez: a moonless night. My face pushed down into the stones at the river’s edge in the dry season, the smell of goat dung and rotting vegetables. A hard hand on the back of my neck, the other under my robe.
“No,” I said flatly now. This conversation I would not be reporting back, I decided.
She gave a disappointed pout. “Well, you can still help me with the words if I explain them. So, Great One…?”
“Malik,” I said without expression. We went through the rest as best I could manage. She repeated each phrase to me with perfect intonation.
