The Sultan's Wife

by Jane Johnson

  I am angry with God!

  You don’t know how it feels to drown

  You are not swimming in the sea of love

  You are just a shadow of the Sun and

  I am angry with the shadows!

  I am angry – with the devil who took my manhood from me; with the sultan, who fills his palace with eunuchs for fear his collection of women will breed indiscriminately; with the harem women, who see me as no more than a sexless servant; with Alys, who has made me burn with an ambition that can never be fulfilled. But, most of all, I am angry with myself. Night after night I lie in the darkness questioning who I am, what I have become; what I may be. Must the loss of my testicles define me? Is there so little to me that the cutting away of two small balls of flesh should make such a difference to my identity, reduce me to a being that is less than a man? What is a man, after all? More, surely, than a beast that fertilizes a female. I think about the men I have known: my father, a once-proud man laid low by battle wounds and sickness, who ended his life lying on a rush mat issuing petulant orders to anyone within earshot, a king whose kingdom had been reduced to the confines of a tiny, stinking hut; my uncle, who, having fathered a dozen children, found himself unable or unwilling to feed his ever-growing family and one day simply disappeared, taking only his spears and his calabash with him. The doctor: a man fully endowed, but who never showed any interest in women at all, of which I was aware; or in boys either, to my relief. All that drove him was his quest for an understanding of the world: it was a hunger in him, an appetite that could never be assuaged, the only thing that ever made him happy. There are the guards on the outer gates – entire men still, whose treatment of women has little of romance to it, serving largely to satisfy an urge and thereby to produce more children to replenish the palace staff.

  The sultan? He is far more than just a man, nearing the divine: there is no profit in examining such an example.

  As for the other palace eunuchs: well, there is an odd spectrum of humanity…

  There are those who have embraced their new state of life so thoroughly they have practically turned into women: whose breasts and bellies have grown pendulous, whose skin is as soft as a pillow; who rub powdered butterfly wings on their faces each morning to prevent any unsightly growth of stubble. For the most part they seem content with their lot, happy to sit all day gossiping with their charges, eating and eating, waiting for the next thing to happen about which they may talk. Then there are those like Qarim and Mohammadou, who take what pleasure they may find together as tenderly as man and woman, as if the cutting has changed not only their bodies but their very nature. Seeing them with their heads bent close together, the smiles they secretively exchange, I almost envy them: they have found a certain peace here with their new estate that would be hard to do in sight of the wider world. Is it wrong to say that seeing them happy makes me feel emptier still?

  I am like none of these men. I shall never be a father, nor a man who abandons his family; I shall never, if I can help it, be a soft man with breasts and a belly like bags, nor one who takes his pleasure with other men; nor a brute, nor a sultan. So I must make of myself what I can. I may be a slave, and a gelding at that, but I still have some pride and spirit left to me.

  I am Nus-Nus. I am myself. I must, as Zidana charged me, find the iron in my soul; the warrior within. And perhaps that will suffice.

  *

  Well, something seems to have changed. A few days later Zidana says to me, ‘My, Nus-Nus: I must say you are looking very fine recently. Like a minor king. Something about your carriage, perhaps?’ She walks around me, giving voice to her big, deep-throated laugh. ‘A little straighter in the spine, if my eyes do not deceive me; a little freer of movement. Have you been rattling your shackles, my boy, feeling your liberty a little too much while your master is away?’

  I look at her askance, and she just grins wider. ‘You can tell me, you know: I shall not betray your confidence. Is there a girl?’ She leans closer. ‘Or perhaps a boy?’

  I can feel the shutters come down behind my eyes. I cannot afford to be so transparent. She shrugs, annoyed by my lack of response. ‘I’ll be watching you, Nus-Nus,’ she threatens.

  So: it seems I am a book full of clear calligraphy, easily read by scholars of human foibles. This will not do: I must be careful to encode my feelings, especially from Zidana. For she is right, of course: the discovery of my new-found strength, which makes me walk taller and hold my head higher, is not fuelled by resentment or vengeance, but by love.

  For it is love, this feeling: I may as well admit it.

  Part Three

  16

  Safar 1088 AH

  Ismail returns in the early spring, not in the best of tempers: plague has descended on the north, sweeping in from the ships in Algiers and Tetouan, and he has barely outrun it.

  Plague. The word spreads like running fire through the court until everyone is whispering about it. They have heard rumours of the European sickness that some call the Black Death, which comes on with shivering headaches, intolerable thirst, vomiting and stabbing pains, followed by great glandular swellings in the groin and beneath the arms. Drought grips the land: everyone is already thirsty and hot and headache-ridden. Add the usual panoply of stomach complaints into the mix and you can imagine the panic that grips us. In the harem the women (who never have enough to do) inspect one another’s bodies constantly for signs of the black roses they have heard appear on the skin of the afflicted, presaging death. Bruises and insect bites provoke hysteria.

  Even Ismail is not immune to the paranoia. What am I saying? He is the worst of them all, despite the fact that the name of every man destined to die is already recorded in the Book of Fate, and no medicine or precaution can therefore cure or prevent his inevitable fate. Yet every day I am sent to fetch Doctor Salgado, who, for the sake of his own health, has avoided strong spirits since his last near-death experience with our lord, to inspect the sultan: to judge his temperature and his tongue, the colour and scent of his urine; the consistency of his stools. Every day, despite being declared healthy by the doctor, Ismail calls for his astrologers and numerologists, who cast his omens and calculate his luck (which is remarkably, uniformly favourable). Salt is strewn at the cardinal points around the palace to dissuade djinns from entering and bringing the plague in with them, mischief-makers as they are. Hyacinths are planted in all the courtyards: their scent is well known to cleanse the air. Ismail orders the talebs to write verses of the Qur’an on scrips of paper, which he then ingests. He has Zidana make up tisanes and potions for him. She sends me to the souq almost daily for ever more items, and over the passing weeks as the plague comes closer the list of requirements grows ever more bizarre – chameleons, porcupine spines, crows’ feet, crystals and stones from the Himalaya, lapis from the pharaoh tombs, hyena skins and spiderwebs. But when she sends me to fetch her back the corpse of a newly buried child, I refuse.

  She laughs at me. ‘If you don’t do this for me I will just find another way.’

  I incline my head to this piece of blackmail, but say nothing and she does not press the point, so I go away, feeling as if I have escaped her evil influence. But the next day there is a great wailing in the harem: a child of one of the black slave-women has gone missing. My eyes meet Zidana’s. She has that blank, brazen look that I recognize only too well, and I know exactly what it means. I do not sleep that night.

  The plague passes through Tangier, taking with it many of the hated English, who are currently occupying this strategic port, key to the Mediterranean trade routes, gifted to their king in the marriage portion of his Portuguese bride. It reaches Larache and Asilah, sends its tendrils down the coast to Sale and Rabat. Traders bring it inland with them: every week it creeps closer and appalling stories reach us of entire families succumbing, of farms where the livestock starve to death; stray sheep wander untended in the hills; merchant caravans plod the trade routes without the benefit of their overseers. It reaches Khemis
set and Sidi Kacem, barely a few dozen leagues away.

  We wait in the airless heat, hardly able to breathe, praying that by a curious twist of fate it will pass us by and fall instead upon Marrakech. Surrounded by hysteria, I cannot help but feel some dread. I have not seen this disease at first hand, but I have heard about it from my old master, Doctor Lewis, and with him I saw its aftermath, the great outpouring of superstitious horror that still infested the city of Venice thirty-odd years after the last outbreak. He was much fascinated by the pestilence, and by the fervent belief of the Venetian population that they had been delivered from its worst ravages by the power of prayer. ‘These people are no more civilized than your own,’ he told me more than once as we went about the city. ‘They put their faith in grand gestures – but rather than sacrificing animals and enemies to secure the favour of their idols, they sacrifice vast sums of money in commissioning towering buildings and religious paintings, thinking it will buy them indemnity.’

  In a little backstreet the doctor went into an apothecary’s shop and bought a pair of the curious bird-beaked masks that Venetian doctors had worn to go about the city in safety. He put one on when I was not looking and took me greatly by surprise, so much so that I fell down in the street. When I had recovered myself, he showed me how they had stuffed the beaks with herbs to cleanse the air they breathed, and then tutted. ‘I am sure, however, that the pestilence is not airborne. We’ll have to hope for another outbreak so that I can test my theories.’ I shivered, and sincerely hoped such an occurrence would be avoided: to be trapped in that city – so beautiful to the eye at first sight but so full of narrow, dark passageways, dank corners and foul-smelling basins that must surely harbour every disease – was my nightmare.

  We made our way out to San Giobbe in the north-west of the city, close to the Jewish ghetto, where we had business, then visited the Church of the Santissimo Redentore and finally the Scuola San Rocco to satisfy the doctor’s curiosity about the city’s plague-churches. For the most part the images we saw in them were far distant from reality, full of big white angels, glowing madonnas and corpulent babies; but in a studio close to the Scuola we found the young artist Antonio Zanchi completing a monumental painting that showed in graphic detail the barely clothed corpses of plague victims being handed down from bridges and out of windows to brawny men who stacked them in their into newly black gondolas; bodies thrown down into the canals; the afflicted displaying their horrible buboes and boils. I was transfixed as the man worked. To lay paint on to canvas, to create shape and perspective on something flat and plain, seemed to me a quite magical process, and also disturbing in a way I could not explain. I felt almost as if he were bringing the plague back into the world by depicting its effects so graphically.

  As he worked Zanchi told us about San Rocco, the Italians’ patron saint of the plague. We had seen images of him all over the city: attending the plague-stricken in the hospital, where of course he too had succumbed to the disease; lifting his robe to show the plague-mark on his thigh. According to Zanchi, the saint then crawled into a wood and lay there awaiting death, attended only by his little dog, which brought him daily loaves stealthily robbed from the city’s bakers; but in reward for his goodness in tending the sick, an angel came down to tend him, and so, miraculously, he was saved.

  I could see that my master was sceptical, though he waited until we were outside before declaring, ‘More superstition. People do recover from the plague: make it through to the fifth day and your body’s humours have won the battle. Nothing to do with prayer or goodness: I’ve seen more sinners than saints fight their way back to health! But it’s not called the Great Mortality for nothing – they say it carried off one in three in this place in 1630.’

  One in three. I remember this dire pronouncement now.

  Alys. Zidana. Ismail.

  Alys. Zidana. Me.

  Alys, Ismail. Me.

  Night after night I torment myself with dread.

  Messenger birds arrive from Fez bearing terrible reports day after day. People are dying in the souq, in the street, falling off their mules stone dead on their way to market. At the tannery, where it is thought the noxious smells of the guano and urine used to cure the hides must surely keep the pestilence at bay, a man keels over into one of the dyeing pits unseen by his fellow workers. His corpse comes to light dyed such a virulent yellow that at first it is thought to be a demon from a lower hell. The pest is no respecter of status or goodness: sherifs, nobles and marabouts are amongst the reported dead; imams and muezzins too. Ismail returns messages ordering a census, instructing the Fassi kaids to divide the city into sectors and count the number of dead in representative streets to suggest a mean. By this method it is soon calculated that over six thousand have already perished; the number is doubling and redoubling week by week. The Tinker seeks an audience with the sultan. ‘Sire,’ he says solemnly, ‘this pestilence is deadly and out of control. We should decamp from Meknes into the mountains.’

  Of course, Abdelaziz, positioned at the sultan’s right hand, opposes him. ‘Meknes is perfectly safe, my lord: no one is infected here and we can make sure it does not enter our gates.’ He takes Ismail by the arm – the only man who could ever dare to touch the sultan without his permission – and leads him away. Ben Hadou watches them go, then turns and catches my eye. ‘Still alive, then, Nus-Nus?’ he asks softly. ‘I thought you might like to know that Abdelaziz’s nephew has gone away. I’ve had him sent to Fez.’ His eye twitches: a wink or a tic? Hard to tell with the Tinker.

  Ismail has the gates of the palace locked and issues orders that Meknes is to be completely isolated and that all travellers arriving from infected towns are to be put to death on sight. He is vehement: he will not leave his new capital, though he frets constantly about the omens and makes us check his body night and day for any sinister signs of the disease. He even spends two consecutive nights sleeping alone, for the first time in the five years I have served him, and when he chooses a girl after this the coupling is perfunctory, as if he has his mind on other things.

  Some days later comes the first fatality in Meknes. Is it coincidence that it should be the wife of the keeper of the messenger-birds who succumbs? Ismail has all the birds slaughtered: he believes them to have flown through infected air. We wait. Perhaps it was some other malady that carried her off, some sickness that mimicked the signs of pestilence. We are all still speculating when three more suddenly die, quite unconnected with the dead woman.

  When Ismail hears this he turns pale. He makes me tell him all I know of the plague in Europe, all I learned from my former master, saw on my travels. He has bird masks made for the court and insists we all wear them in his presence. Masks over masks. Food is prepared for him only by Zidana’s hand. She sits with her head bent over her cooking pot while he sits opposite her, telling his prayer beads. This would make for a homely sight were it not for the fact that Zidana has a big white beak strapped to her face, while the emperor sits there, watching her every move like a gigantic bird of prey. He eats away from the court, which means that Amadou and I are accorded the same privilege, and though the diet is monotonous (chickpea couscous day after day) we do not sicken.

  Just as it seems the epidemic will not take hold in Meknes, the plague claims its first victim in the harem: Fatima. It is the headache first, then pain in the joints, and no one thinks much of it to start with, since Fatima is always complaining about something or other, seeking attention. But when the sweats come and the buboes swell, her screams can be heard from one end of the palace to the other. Ismail is distraught: she has given him two sons, though one is dead. He sends for Doctor Salgado to attend her.

  What can the poor physician do? The pestilence has its claws deep into her vitals by the time he arrives. He cools her, he bleeds her, he wraps her in cold towels. When this fails to have any useful effect, he consults with Zidana, who makes up poultices to draw the evil humours out of the boils. The pus that spurts out is so foul-smelling th
at even the doctor must go out into the courtyard and vomit. An hour later she is dead, and so, by curious coincidence, is her boy. And so, in one fell swoop, the Hajib’s succession plans come to naught.

  When word reaches the sultan, he storms to the harem, meets Salgado hurrying away and, in a moment of madness, or grief, takes his sword and runs him through, there and then, for failing to save her.

  So here we are, trapped inside the world’s most magnificent palace, stalked by death and ruin and with no one to tend to us in our peril. I am sent into the medina to find, by whatever means possible, another European doctor. Wearing my bird mask stuffed with herbs, I leave the palace and go out into the city. It is a strangely changed place. The central square is deserted, by people at least. Thin cats skulk in the shadows and mew plaintively as I pass; feral dogs lie exhausted in heaps, there being no one to chase them off. I find a mule wandering in the abandoned spice quarter: all the stalls and funduqs are closed up. In the alleys of the medina there are just blank walls and locked doors. Although all family life in Moroccan houses goes on behind these closed façades, it is eerily quiet; even the pigeons seem to have flown. As I near the mellah, a piercing shriek sets my heart racing and suddenly a woman comes running around the corner of the street, stark naked. To see a woman unclothed in a public place is so unprecedented that I simply stand transfixed. She runs right at me, her long black hair snaking around her head, her mouth open in a wail. Blood runs from her cheeks: she has torn them with her nails. The signs of plague are upon her: dark roses on her thighs and chest. Terrified, I flatten myself against a wall, and she runs past me, unseeing.

  Maleeo. Ancient Mother, preserve me!

  I walk on quickly towards the mellah. At the house of Daniel al-Ribati I knock loudly on the door. The sound echoes down the narrow street, an intrusion into the silence. It is so still I can hear my own breathing, made stertorous by the mask. For a long time I stand there, waiting, and hear nothing within. Then a shutter opens on the window above, and I see, indistinctly, a figure. Impossible to tell whether it is Daniel himself or one of his household, until a voice says, ‘Who is it?’