by Jane Johnson
My expression made her laugh. “Such an innocent! Did you really think I was too stupid to learn your language?”
It isn’t my language, I thought but did not say. I wondered why she would use such deceit, then realized it had been to bore the old woman till she went away.
“Why do you think I am here?” she asked then.
“Because you were captured by the sultan.”
“Wrong. It was his brother who took the town of Martos. It was al-Zaghal who captured me.”
I waited for her to explain.
“Al-Zaghal has no interest in women, Gatita. I can tell you that much. I tried all I knew with him.”
I closed my face to her, feeling trapped in that baking heat, hemmed in by dangerous words and memories. How I wished I might escape while La Sabia was away. The zahira was barefoot. Her embroidered slippers lay abandoned on the floor, the gold thread in their embroidery catching stray shafts of sunlight. I was sure I could outpace her. But I already knew the courtyard wall was unscalable: I had failed to climb it while they dozed one afternoon.
At last she stopped. “Why are you eyeing me like that? Did you think I was some silly girl who would faint at the sight of a naked Moor? You look as shocked as my father did when he found me with Alfonso.”
And then she proceeded to tell me about the caballero who had come riding through her town on a fine bay horse; his long dark hair like a flag; his guards all in livery, to show he was a rich man. How her father had housed the men and stabled the horses, since he was the mayor of the town and had the largest house. How Alfonso had told her she was lovelier than the moon, that he wished he was a cloud so he might cover her at night; and then her father caught him doing just that. “I begged Alfonso to take me with him. But he was a coward. He pretended he had urgent business and rode out. And that’s how I ended up here.”
“Your father sold you to al-Zaghal?”
“No.” She tutted. “He tried to sell me to God. To send me to a nunnery, but I refused to go.”
“Nunnery?”
She placed her hands together as if praying and made a pious face. I had seen captured slaves in the square with their hands pressed together like that as they called on their God to save them.
“My father refused to ransom me back from al-Zaghal because I had defied him.” She laughed bitterly. “Nun or whore, what a choice! Still, I’d rather spend my life on my back than on my knees. The sultan will become my slave: mark what I say! Once I finally give myself to him, I will make him so crazed with desire that he will give me the world!”
I stared at her, taking this in. Perhaps, if he ever reclaimed me, this information would earn me a bonus from Qasim.
La Sabia returned with a tray of sweetmeats and a jug of citrus water. I could see the ice crystals floating in the liquid as she poured a tall glass for her mistress: snow gathered from the mountains of the Sierra Nevada and kept in the ice pit beneath the kitchens. I could imagine it cooling my throat. But I refused it all the same. “It’s Ramadan,” I reminded her. “You’re not supposed to eat or drink till sundown.” Another morsel to report.
Isobel shifted languorously onto one elbow so that her breasts fell together under the sheer silk of her tunic. She caught me peering and rearranged her contours subtly so that her upmost hip jutted in a sinuously seductive curve. She craved admiration wherever she could find it, each admiring glance another coin to add to the treasury of her self-worth, even the meagre tin dirham of a slave’s gaze. But I would not give her even that small satisfaction. “The sultan is very strict about the observance of Ramadan,” I said steadfastly. “Were he here, he would punish you for breaking the fast.”
Isobel reached for the glass. “Well, he’s not here, and when I get my hands on him, he won’t care what day it is, or whether he’s Muslim or Christian, Castilian or Moor. I shall make him forget Ferdinand and Isabella: he will think only of Isobel!”
Momo and I were running through the orchards at dawn, our bare feet wet with dew. The air raced past my shoulders and I was laughing, my mouth wide with happiness, as I bolted toward the quince tree beneath which we had hidden our treasures—some little soapstone animals, a ball of polished marble, a flute we were not allowed to play inside the palace. I touched the tree first. I had won! I turned to crow, and in that moment he caught me around the waist, pulled me down and kissed me.
I lay there in a daze, my entire body suffused with a sweetness that made me want to cry. And that was when the muezzin’s call came, breaking into my dream like a thief to steal it away.
I rolled over and reached for the memory of the clean planes of Momo’s face, the long, fine nose. His limpid eyes, flecked with gold…Gone. All of it, gone. My brain hurt with the effort to remember, but he had been erased from my memory like marks on a wax tablet wiped smooth.
Desolate, I stared at the ceiling. There were seventy-seven cedarwood strakes up there. I had counted them. Every patch and dimple in the walls, every crack in the tiles on the floor, I knew them all. And now their dull detail had replaced Momo. I cursed my existence. It was not only Momo I had lost. Some days when I awoke I no longer knew who I was. Some days I didn’t care. When I thought about myself and my journey to this point, I felt my past had belonged to someone else. The routine and the boredom that went with it eroded my spirit, stole me from myself, made me as dull as a stone. By the end of the summer, one day ran into the next, indistinguishable from the last, one week from another. My horizons had lowered till I was looking only at the ground, shuffling my feet. Any belief I had in possibility, and escape, had slipped away. Looked at one day at a time, the change to my world seemed innocuous, unremarkable. And yet in the space of four months, I had become a completely different person.
In the desert, they say the big dunes are always in flux, the grains of sand that build them ever shifting with winds that lift a layer of dust one day and settle it the next, the dune moving its position by increments so tiny you would never notice it unless you left one day and did not return for the year—to find the entire series of sweeping scimitar dunes had crawled ten camel lengths from where it was.
And so, as I changed the incense in the brazier, my mind inured to the foreign chatter of my mistress and her evil old maid, I almost missed the reference to my beloved. But then it came again, the words Prince Mohammed. My heart lifted like a lark soaring into a clear blue sky. “The prince has returned?” I asked, suddenly alert.
“Nothing to do with you.” La Sabia turned her back to me.
Isobel twisted her braid in her fingers, examining the smooth snake of hair for split ends. “How old is the prince?” she asked nonchalantly.
The old woman shrugged. “Who knows, or cares?”
I know, and I care. As La Sabia poured the herb tea with which Isobel always started her morning, I saw in the twining thread of golden liquid the column of his throat. Suddenly I could not stand still. I dropped a spoon on the tiles, where it fell with a resounding clatter. The old woman gave me the sort of shake a dog gives a rat. “Go and fetch a clean spoon, you fool!”
I didn’t need to be told twice. My brain had come to life. I was Blessings, and I was going to escape!
I slipped out into the baking sun, to find the area behind the hammam deserted apart from a thin palace cat batting the body of a bright blue dragonfly from one paw to another. When it saw me, it abandoned the maimed insect and, leaping up the woodpile used for heating the water, disappeared up the wall and over the roofs.
I would do the same! I grabbed the handle of a big metal bucket by the door and set it down, inverted, on top of the woodpile. I pulled the hem of my robe up till I could hold it between my teeth, and clambered up onto the bucket, which at once rocked. No, I told it fiercely. No!
Concentrating on the wall above it, I grabbed at where a brick had crumbled loose, skittered my feet up almost to the same height and slapped for the brick edge. For a moment I hung there, feeling the inadequacy of my arm muscles after months in c
aptivity in the harem, my breath soughing out past the damp cotton in my mouth: then desperation drove me upward onto the top of the wall, and I was aware of the space yawning away below me.
I spread my hands on the roof tiles, trying to get my balance. They were round-backed and slick. Feeling horribly exposed, I inched sideways toward the corner, my heart beating in my throat, set my foot in the mortared angle and reached up to the roof tiles to either side. Bringing my second foot up felt terrifyingly precarious. I executed three heart-stopping moves and had the top almost within grasp, when my slipper parted company with my foot. I made the mistake of looking down to watch it spinning toward a slave girl carrying a heap of linens.
Fighting the urge to vomit on her head, I caught the brass spike at the apex of the roof and swung myself over, pressed myself flat to the tiles on the other side. I risked a peek and saw the girl pick up the slipper and turn it over, as if the mystery of its wild flight might be read on its sole. She looked up. For a piercing second our eyes met and hers widened; then the spike gave way and I fell down the other side, the tiles ripping my robe and the skin of my legs. Then I was airborne.
In the desert, life is lived low to the ground. I had never even seen stairs until I got to Zagora, the first town I reached when I left the desert, and entered a rich merchant’s house. The first sight of them made me cry. I could not conceive of how anyone could bear to sleep in an upstairs room. I crouched in the courtyard all night, waiting for the djinn to come and get me. Until then the greatest height I had ever experienced had been on camel back, with my anet ma, my maternal uncle. He had wedged me between him and the high-cantled wooden seat the men use for long desert trips, high at the front and back so they can sleep in the saddle as their animal paces across the great emptiness. I had not much enjoyed the experience: the ground had seemed a long way off, the sky too close for comfort. And when I did inevitably fall off, the air had rushed past in just this way. But sand had provided a much kinder landing than now.
I felt the impact as if a mountain had fallen on me. My leading leg buckled and pain jolted from my ankle to the top of my head. Someone was shouting—several someones. I tried to pay attention to their words, but the pain came at me like a million burning ants setting fire to everything in their path. I opened my mouth to scream, but it was stuffed full of cotton. And then there were hands on me, hands rough and hands smooth, against my skin, and the memory of that night in Fez began to engulf me again.
The robe swallowed all my cries and then, mercifully, I passed out.
Old men, sombre-faced and long-bearded, in caps and black robes, chased me with knives. Sometimes, as I tried to escape them, I climbed a roof and fell endlessly, through time and skies, the world spinning. Sometimes I was on the ground and they were advancing on me. But I could not run. The panic filled my legs with urgency, but they did not work anymore. Sometimes the old men had the face of the vizier, sometimes of La Sabia. “I’ve got you now!” she gloated. Sometimes Isobel de Solis leaned over me. “Let’s find out what you’ve got under there, shall we?” She pawed at my clothes.
I awoke sweating and trembling. No cedarwood strakes in this ceiling, but a thousand plaster teeth coloured with lapis and gold. A small candle lantern cast dancing sprays of light off patterned wall tiles. These were no slave’s quarters. I lay still, remembering the fall and the landing. My right leg felt full of molten metal. I moaned.
Wood scraped on stone and Momo came into view, older than when I had last seen him, his hair close cropped, his cheeks hollowed, a refining of skin over bone, as if his boyishness had been burned out of him.
“Blessings!”
The body is always aware of change; it is the head that resists the knowledge of difference. Without understanding why, I began to shake.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, which did not help.
“What is it?” I croaked.
He took my hand in his. This was the moment I had yearned for so long, but now I was terribly afraid.
“Ah, Blessings, what were you doing? Dressed like a girl, climbing out of the harem…”
Could he really have forgotten? “I heard you were back,” I whispered.
“It’s all my fault. Your poor leg…” His eyes were filling up.
“Oh, that.” I managed a grin. “It was not my best landing. But my leg will heal.” I had to be brave: princes should not weep.
“I asked them to let me tell you,” he choked out. “But I…can’t.” He rubbed his hand across his face. “They tell me I am a man now and that I must behave like one. My uncle…” He shook his head. “No, this is about you, not me. Oh, Blessings…”
All this apologizing.
“They dosed you with poppy. You were delirious. For a lot of that time. I worried you’d lost your mind.”
Flickers of the dreams came back to me. The old men, the knives…Panic seized me. I pushed myself up on my elbows.
“Dr. Ibrahim did the best he could with poultices and drawing pastes. But they didn’t work, and then he said you would die. And my mother said the hand of death was upon you, that it was Allah’s will. But I could not believe it. I…I sent to Córdoba, for better doctors. Qasim went for me: he had contacts there, he said. I sold the sword from my uncle to fight the infidels with to give Qasim the money for the doctors. I daresay they will punish me for that when they find out. But I don’t care. And they saved you. Oh, Blessings, I’m so happy you’re alive. But I have to tell you…” He drew a deep breath. The anguish in his regard was unbearable. “They had to…”
His words were lost in the storm surge of blood in my ears. I tore at the rich bedcover with brutal strength and it fell away. There, spangled with the light of the candle lantern, was my left leg, bandaged where the roof tiles had ripped at me. But as to the right…There was my thigh, my knee and then— “Where’s the rest of it?” I wailed.
“Your foot was smashed to pieces. It started to rot, and the smell…”
“My foot rotted?” Dead rats rotting in Fez drains, sick sweet and carrion stench, maggots swarming over them…Bile rose in my throat. I swallowed it down. “But how will I run?” Stupid question. How would I walk? How would I do anything at all? I had seen cripples in the marketplaces of Morocco, gimping along on sticks or pushing themselves around on wheeled trolleys, begging for coin. Was that my future? Would this grown-up prince, who had come back with stubble on his chin and a deeper voice, who spoke of swords and being a man, send me off now that I was broken? I turned away so he would not see my loss of composure. The concept of asshak, the dignified acceptance of even the worst fate, was the bedrock of my people.
“Don’t, Blessings, don’t. If I could take your pain and bear it myself, I would.”
I lay there, shamed by the desperation in his voice. He had sold his sword, risked his uncle’s fury, sent his father’s vizier to Córdoba for better doctors, saved my life. But for what? To be a palace cripple? Self-pity welled up again. I forced it down, like the bile. Then I showed him a mask of my face. “I will survive this,” I told him, and watched as his grimace relaxed. “Thank you for saving me, my prince.”
“Oh, Blessings,” he said, choking. “If I hadn’t encouraged you, this wouldn’t have happened. Everything they say about me is true: I am cursed.”
“What do the stars know? They’re just there to help us navigate a course in the darkness. They can’t tell you your future. But I can.”
“Can you, Blessings?”
“I was taught by my mother: our people believe that the power of seeing is passed down the line, from mother to son. Or daughter.”
“How do you do it? By numbers, or lines of the Quran? Or with chicken entrails, like the ancients?”
“Every man’s fate is written in his hand, not in the stars,” I said, taking his into my own. So warm, but more muscled than it had been, some coarseness on the pads of the fingers, calluses in the palm. He was no longer a boy: they were making him into a warrior, and if he went to war, I knew I w
ould lose him. “Look here,” I said, tracing a vertical line. “Such an old man you will grow to be, though there is suffering to bear on the way. Here is where your heart lies.” I touched the spot just above the centre of his palm. “Love is always with you, closer than you think. Be careful to keep it close.”
He laughed and tried to pull his hand away. “You’re such a little heathen.”
I held on to him. “Don’t put me aside because of my leg,” I said fiercely.
Momo looked as if I’d struck him. “Do you think I’m some sort of monster?”
“I won’t be able to walk or run, or do the things we used to do. I won’t be able to do anything much at all.”
“You will,” he said. A deep line formed between the hawk’s wings of his eyebrows. Then he said, “Blessings, you shall be my Special Guardian, always by my side. You will be my guard, and I yours: by Allah the Most Mighty and Merciful I swear it.”
I almost laughed and spoiled the moment. I could not even stand, let alone defend him. “Should we swear it in blood?” I nodded to his belt-knife.
He looked shocked. “Make a blood covenant? Blood is najis, unclean. That would be an affront to God.”
He had changed in more ways than appearance, I thought. I bowed my head. “Prince Mohammed, I will be your Special Guardian.”
The hug he gave me stole my breath. It was almost worth losing a foot just for that.
Almost.
6
Kate
ENGLAND
FIVE YEARS EARLIER
Kate’s visit to Hampton Court had been a belated gift to herself after finally biting the bullet and breaking up with Matty, who had never had the least interest in anything older than the musical revolution of the sixties. Or indeed, for the past few years, an interest in anything other than the bottom of a glass or any substance that detached him from reality. In all that time she had been trying—and failing—to persuade him to get sober. She thought of herself as a trier, someone who did not give up easily, but in the end she had had to walk away before she was sucked down into the vortex of chaos Matty created around himself. She still felt guilty. When she’d said she had had enough, he’d looked even more hangdog than his springer spaniel, Dylan, did when caught peeing on her best rug.
