by Peter Kerr
It had broken her heart to leave her mother, and she had cried herself to sleep every night for weeks after becoming installed with over a hundred other girls – most of them older, though some even younger – in the sumptuous surroundings of the king’s private quarters within the palace grounds.
Pedrito noticed that Farah had frowned and nodded her head almost imperceptibly at this admission of Saleema’s. But she remained silent. Also, for the first time, Pedrito was able to take a close look at Farah’s face in the direct light of the lantern, and he was suddenly made aware that she was not, perhaps, as old as he had previously thought. Although there was no denying that her features revealed the evidence of a life of hardship, there was an underlying vibrancy about her look as well. Pedrito was intrigued, but any revelations about Farah’s past would have to wait until Saleema had completed her own. She was in full flow now, and clearly deriving great relief from being able to get it all off her chest.
She related how the first few months in the palace were spent being tutored in the etiquettes of the royal household by former concubines. These women had passed their prime, in their king’s eyes at any rate, but had been favoured by being retained as members of his large train of female servants, along with whatever children they may have had by him. During this time, the king would pay periodic visits to the harem to make, according to his whim, a ‘selection’ from within the ranks of his more experienced concubines, while also appraising the assets of the novices and discussing their progress with the head eunuch. In this context, ‘progress’ meant the girls’ aptitude to learn and accept the king’s somewhat individualistic partialities in the ways of the flesh.
Pedrito was relieved to hear Saleema add that even the thought of being touched by that strutting peacock of a man – old enough to be her father, if not her grandfather – did nothing to her own flesh but make it creep.
Fortunately, as the months passed, the feeling of worthlessness that came from being pampered on the one hand and regarded as a mere chattel on the other had been balanced by a sense of thankfulness for not yet being chosen to join the king in the isolation of his personal chambers. Saleema drew a wry smile from Farah when she declared flippantly that it was a wonder the old rake had the energy to satisfy all his wives, never mind attempt to sample frequent ‘side dishes’ picked from his extensive menu of concubines.
Pedrito liked this girl’s spirit. Although a Muslim and, for all he knew, a devout one, she didn’t appear to subscribe to the received Islamic tenet that women should automatically accept that they were subordinate to men.
Then, as if to substantiate this impression, she said, ‘My father gives my mother more respect than he does the ewes in his flock of sheep – as well he should – so why should I allow myself to be regarded as nothing more than a young doe by a lecherous old buck rabbit?’ It was for this reason, she continued, that she had resolved to escape from the royal palace before the king had finally decided to ‘honour’ her with a command to join him in his gossamer-draped burrow. And her chance had come earlier this very day.
The palace, she explained, had been in an unprecedented state of disorder as measures were taken to reinforce its defences against any possible attack by the Spanish invaders. Although the king had been going to great lengths to assure everyone in the city that the Christians would soon be driven back off the island, it had become obvious nonetheless that he was taking no chances with his own security. So, while the palace guards were preoccupied in supervising the bolstering of the Almudaina’s fortifications, Saleema borrowed a hooded cape from one of the kitchen maids and slipped out of the palace by a door normally used only by the lowlier members of the royal staff. She had then made her way through the busy streets, neither knowing where she was nor where she was going, until finally finding herself at dusk in the kasbah quarter. There had still been plenty of people about, and after asking for directions to the nearest city gate, she found a little alcove in a quiet passageway and hid there until nightfall. Then, alone now in the deserted maze of alleys, she crept through the darkness towards, she hoped, the Gate of Chains and, inshallah, to her freedom.
‘I was frightened, and I wasn’t even sure if I was going in the right direction any more. Then I saw a glow of light coming from what appeared to be an inn, so I … then those two men … they tore the cloak from me and –’ She stopped abruptly, wringing her hands, tears welling in her eyes again.
‘History repeats itself,’ Farah muttered, almost inaudibly, then added, ‘though not completely, thanks be to Allah.’
Pedrito wondered what she’d meant by that. He hesitated for a moment, unsure whether or not he should pry into something that may have been nothing more than a casual remark. But, as ever, his innate sense of curiosity got the better of him.
‘History repeats itself, you said. Sorry if I’m poking my nose in where I shouldn’t, but –’
Farah wagged a finger. ‘You don’t want to hear about it, believe me.’ She handed Pedrito the bowl. ‘Here. I’ve finished tending our little lady’s injuries, so put some fresh water in that and clean yourself up. Look at your face and hands – all smudged with dirt – and there’s a cut on your neck – and look at your knuckles, all grazed and bloody too.’
Pedrito couldn’t resist a chuckle. ‘Yes, well that’s what comes of punching a bull’s nose with a ring in it.’
‘A bull?’
‘Al-Tawr – that’s what they call the pirate I had the difference of opinion with back in the alley.’
Farah frowned again. ‘And how, may I ask, do you happen to know his name?’
Pedrito shook his head. ‘You don’t want to hear about that, believe me.’
But Farah was insistent. ‘Ah, but I do want to hear about it.’
‘Just as I want to hear why you said history had repeated itself, maybe?’
Now Farah shook her head. ‘Nobody’s interested in my story. This kasbah is full of all sorts of freaks and cripples, and nobody cares about our past – least of all us freaks and cripples. No, we just get on with the life fate handed us and say nothing. It’s the best way, I promise you.’
There were a few moments of silence, then it was Saleema who spoke: ‘You saved our lives, Farah. Surely you can understand why we’d want to know a little about yours.’
She stared at Farah in a searching way, eliciting a look from her that suggested to Pedrito that, although these two women were complete strangers, some sort of affinity existed between them – a vital link that only they could sense. Saleema, who now seemed to have regained her composure, got to her feet and helped Farah up from the basket she had been sitting on, then onto the comparative comfort of her stool. This done, she indicated to Pedrito that he should take Farah’s place on the basket, before taking the bowl of water from him and starting to clean his scuffed knuckles. She then glanced sidelong at Farah, her brows arched in anticiptaion. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘we’re waiting.’
Pedrito’s admiration for this girl’s spirit was increasing by the moment. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, she was picking up on Farah’s positive lead and actually taking control of the situation. Even Farah herself was obliged to concede an admiring little smirk. She realised, apparently, that she had met her match in this determined little lady. So, with a sigh and a shrug, she started to tell her story…
Like Saleema, she had been taken from her parents’ home in the countryside to become a concubine of the king – the same Sheikh Abú Háqem, in fact, who ruled Mallorca to this day, and whom Saleema had just described as a lecherous old rabbit. But this had been over twenty years ago and he had been a comparatively young man of not quite thirty. Farah had only been fifteeen years old herself, and still totally innocent. Yet despite this – or possibly because of it – within a few months she had been taken by the king as one of his many wives, and had soon become established as his favourite. The attentions and luxuries that were then showered upon her would have been enough to turn the head of any unsophisti
cated young girl, and Farah readily admitted that she became totally besotted by it all. She was a queen, to all intents and purposes, and she revelled in every extravagant aspect of her position.
Before long, she fell pregnant, and it seemed to her that her cup of good fortune was filled to overflowing. She prayed to Allah that her child would be a boy, as he would become the king’s firstborn ligitimate son, and therefore heir to untold wealth and privilege.
Saleema had drawn up a basket beside Pedrito, and they both sat spellbound as Farah continued her tale…
During her pregnancy, her every fancy had been indulged by an army of handmaidens, and the king himself had devoted an inordinate amount of his time to be with her. Gifts of jewellery, exquisitely embroidered robes, exotic fruits and endless selections of elaborate sweetmeats specially concocted by the king’s personal confectioners were lavished on her continually. And Farah loved it all.
But such favours bestowed upon one particular wife are bound to provoke jealousies in a palace awash with female competition, and in Farah’s case the result was to prove fateful in a way she could never have imagined.
Yamínah, the wife whom she had replaced as the king’s favourite, sought the services of a soothsayer to make a prediction on the suitablity as heir to the throne of Farah’s unborn baby. The king was made aware of this, yet despite an avowed mistrust of mystics, he offered no objection. The child’s worth, he assured Farah, would be judged by the wisdom of Allah, and not by a handful of lizard bones scattered on the floor by some wizzened old hag clad in sackcloth. He therefore decreed that, in the interests of domestic harmony and for no other reason,Yamínah could have her way.
The soothsayer’s prophesy, delivered to the king in suitably baleful tones after she’d run her fingers over Farah’s abdomen, was that the child would indeed be a boy. At this, the king smiled cynically and, with a forbearing gesture, bade her continue. The soothsayer’s reaction was to glare at Farah, her face contorted into a grotesque scowl. Then, after much woeful moaning, she declared, ‘But on his body, the infant will carry the mark of the devil!’
The king’s response had been to dismiss the old crone with another gesture, but one notably less lenient than before, after which he’d laughed and joked with Farah about stupid supersititions and how thoroughly he repudiated them. Yamínah had been appeased, peace and goodwill had been restored to his household, and Farah should think no more of this silly exercise. The boy child, their boy child, would be a fine, healthy and worthy heir to the kingdom of Mallorca, and in this he put his trust in Allah.
At first, Farah had automatically accepted the king’s reassurances, but after a while it dawned on her that, if he truly rejected the soothsayer’s prophesies, why would he have referred to the ‘boy’ child, when there was no other way of telling that her unborn baby would indeed be male? Consequently, the suspicion was sown in her mind that, if the king trusted one aspect of the soothsayer’s predictions, then it followed that he must at least be inclined to give a modicum of credence to the other.
She became more haunted by this possibility as her pregnancy progressed. Moreover, the king’s increasingly infrequent visits to her chambers served to exacerbate her anxiety, and to such an extent that, by the time she finally went into labour, Farah had become convinced that the resentful Yamínah had succeeded in laying some sort of curse on her baby. Such intrigues, in the mind of a young and still relatively innocent country girl, were seen as routine features of life in the court of a king.
‘Look,’ the midwife had gasped moments after delivering Farah’s child, ‘he has the devil’s mark, just as the soothsayer foretold!’ She had then thrust the newborn infant into Farah’s arms, almost as if passing her a burning log. ‘See there – a birthmark – the stamp of the devil!’
The king, who had been waiting discreetly in an anteroom throughout the birth, then entered, his expression grim. One look at the tiny blemish on the skin of his son and heir was all it took.
‘This creature is the work of the infidel’s god,’ he growled. He turned to the cowering midwife. ‘See to it that its heathen life is ended without delay, and have the body burned!’
Farah’s voice began to quaver as she related to Pedrito and Saleema that the king had then swept out of her quarters without saying a word to her, or even taking the briefest of glances at her face, which was still sweat-soaked and flushed from the agonies of bearing his child.
There had been only one thought in Farah’s mind now, and that was saving her baby’s life, even if it meant endangering her own. She knew very well that defying the king in such a situation would mean being subjected to some terrible form of punishment, if she was caught. But she would cross that bridge when she came to it. Her first priority was to escape, but to do that she needed help, and quickly.
The same fates that had condemned her newborn baby to death then sent her a guardian angel, in the most unexpected form of Layla, one of the ex-concubines who had been assigned to Farah’s train of personal servants. Whether Layla’s action was a result of her resentment at having been rejected by the king, or whether it was because she felt a need to get back at the scheming Yamínah for some previous slight, Farah neither knew nor cared. All that mattered was that Layla had been in a position to overhear the king’s command to the midwife and had taken it upon herself to come to Farah’s aid.
The first thing Layla had done was to lie to the midwife that she, Layla, had been instructed by the king to get rid of the baby, so the midwife was free to go, without risk of being exposed to further contamination from the ‘devil’s brat’. Farah revealed that what followed had been similar to Saleema’s experience today, in so far as she had slipped out of the palace disguised as a servant girl, but with three important disparities – there was no impending attack on the city to distract the palace guards, she was still weak from giving birth and she was carrying a newborn baby in her arms.
‘Anyway,’ said Pedrito, ‘I presume this explains why you said that history had repeated itself.’
Solemnly, Farah nodded her head. ‘But I added “though not completely”, remember? I also said that you wouldn’t want to hear my story, and I think I’ve probably told you enough of it already.’
‘But you can’t just leave it there,’ Saleema objected.
Farah gave her a chastening look. ‘Ah, but I can, and I think it’s best that I do. The rest of my story doesn’t make for pleasant listening, believe me.’
Saleema was about to attempt another protest, but Farah was having none of it. In familiar style, she wagged a finger. ‘No, no, little lady, all you need to know is that I survived.’ She looked askance at her crutch, which was standing propped against the donkey’s stall, then smiled wryly and added, ‘Well, most of me did.’
No one spoke for a while, the only sounds to disturb the silence being the guttering of the lantern’s candle and the slow, heavy sighs of the snoozing donkey.
For reasons that he couldn’t explain, Pedrito was starting to feel a strange urge – a compulsion, almost – to learn more about this fascinating woman. And it wasn’t just his natural curiosity at work either. But he realised that even more important was her right to keep to herself whatever details of her life she chose. His inquisitiveness, then, would be held in check, and the rest of Farah’s story, no matter how intriguing, would have to remain a mystery.
What he hadn’t bargained for, though, was that Farah, irrespective of her physical disabilities, was still susceptible to the same craving for attention as any able-bodied member of the fair sex. She had told him when they first met that she didn’t want anyone’s sympathy or pity, and Pedrito had absolutely no doubt that this was true. However, a need for sympathy and a desire for attention, no matter how superficially similar, are two entirely different emotions in the female psyche, and if Pedrito hadn’t known this before, he was about to be enlightened now.
‘Of course, I never did find out if it was Yamínah who alerted the guards,’ Farah bl
urted out after the silence had become almost unbearable. ‘I mean, I suspect she did, and I even wondered for a while afterwords if she had actually set the whole thing up with Layla. But if that had been the case, Layla would have had to know in advance that my baby was going to be born with a birthmark, and that would have been impossible. Unless, of course, the midwife was in on the conspiracy and actually made the mark herself with some sort of dye. I never had a chance to put that to the test. Anyway, if the midwife did do that, it would have meant that the soothsayer’s prediction had also been part of Yamínah’s plot for my downfall.’
Saleema was quick to urge Farah on. ‘You say you never had a chance to check if the birthmark was real. How do you mean?’
That was all the encouragement Farah needed. As was evident in the rapt expressions of the two young people sitting opposite, she had now been afforded the attention she sought – and their sympathy, far less their pity, clearly didn’t come into it. Not yet, anyway.
Farah went on to tell how she had scarcely taken three paces outside the door when a cry rang out from one of the palace balconies. It was the voice of a woman alerting the guards to her escape. Farah couldn’t be sure if it was Yamína’s voice, but she had always supposed that it was. Not that it would have made any difference anyway, because her fate was already sealed. She had rushed across the palm shaded avenue outside the palace and on into the narrow alleyways of the kasbah, where she thought she would have a better chance of melting into the crowds. Fortunately for her, the shouts of the two pursuing guards were ignored, the humble inhabitants of the kasbah clearly more sympathetic towards a young servant girl fleeing with a babe in arms than towards a pair of scimitar waving soldiers.
Although in a state of panic and totally unfamilar with her surroundings, she’d had enough presence of mind to keep heading in the direction of the sea. Her idea was that, if she could only make it to the harbour, she might be able to stow away on a ship and thereby make good her escape from the island. But she was already in a state of exhaustion and getting weaker with each step. She could hear from the guards’ shouts that they were gaining on her. Wracked with pain and gasping for breath, she had stumbled on, and then, just as she thought she was about to collapse, she saw the twin towers of the Gate of Chains rising up ahead of her.
