The Sultan's Wife

by Jane Johnson

  The lioness stares at me uncertainly. Then she wrinkles her muzzle, showing the full extent of her vast incisors, but it is a gesture more of fear than of hostility. After a few seconds charged with violent potential she wheels away, throwing up a great wash of water, and lumbers back on to solid ground to join the others in their feast.

  Ben Hadou stares at me, wordless. I cannot imagine what he sees, and for once I no longer care. I do not think, I simply act, and there is such purity in the simplicity of the deed that it sears through me, a bolt of elation and power, as if I am channelling every ancestor I have ever had. I grab a handful of his robe and haul the Tinker unceremoniously behind me, out of the water and up to the iron fence. Then, suddenly, there are guards swarming over the fence – four, five of them, armed with spears and swords. So this is it, I think: if the lions do not kill us, the bukhari are here to make sure we do not escape our punishment, to prod us back into the pit. But they pick up ben Hadou and carry him out of the pit; and then they come back for me.

  They treat us as carefully as if we are valued guests of the sultan who have by some terrible misfortune managed to tumble amongst lions.

  38

  Rajab, 1092 AH

  Samir Rafik’s freedom did not last long. The sultan, ever contrary, took against him for his selfish escape from the lion-pit and sent him to be tortured. Under Faroukh’s ministrations he admitted that the charges against the Raid Mohammed ben Hadou and against me, as his deputy, were false.

  Although of course the Tinker did have his portrait painted in London. Twice.

  And took a palace servant to wife.

  And I had indeed tasted both wine and ale during our stay in England.

  And, of course, most heinous of all, I stole the sultan’s son away and gave him up to the English king. But without any evidence, it seems that Rafik decided against mentioning this last and greatest offence.

  But there was no whoring or drunken revelry, as he testified after our arrest, and other members of the embassy, seeing the lie of the land, now decide to throw in their lot with ben Hadou, rather than with the man on the rack.

  By the time Faroukh carried out his most exquisite procedures, the grand vizier’s nephew would have sworn to anything, and indeed does. I hear that he has admitted to all manner of bizarre crimes, including the murder of the herbman, Sidi Kabour, which he claimed was part of Abdelaziz’s plot to oust Zidana and her poisonous offspring, itself partly inspired by his uncle’s desire to imprison me in his house as his catamite. But since none of this has anything to do with the sultan’s orders regarding information relating to the London embassy, it is dismissed as empty babbling, and the man who tells me of it apologizes profusely for repeating such defamatory nonsense.

  Rafik expires not long after.

  Ben Hadou is reinstated as Ismail’s first minister. I am granted my freedom. (When I remove at last the silver slave-bond from my ear, my head feels oddly light, lopsided. I throw the bond into the moat: it seems a fitting resting place for it.) I think in the moment in which the kponyungu took me, the sultan saw something in me that made him decide he did not wish to have me as his scribe, or his Keeper of the Couching Book, or even as his Servant of the Slippers any longer. He appoints me a high officer of the bukhari instead, and sends me to Fez.

  *

  It is there, four months later, that I receive a message from the Empress Zidana. The courier shifts from one foot to the other, awaiting my response. He has dust all over his clothes; he has not even had time to wash.

  ‘Tell your mistress that I shall come to her in three days,’ I say. The delay does not please him, but now that I am a free man Zidana does not exercise the same power over me she once did. I watch him go with misgiving: if I never see Meknes again it will be too soon. Even the thought of the harem fills me with a furious, burning anger at the waste of Alys’s dear life, and I have no wish to see the woman who wished her ill for so long, and may well have hastened her on her way. But I have made a promise to a friend, and that promise must be honoured.

  And so the next day I go to visit the alchemist, Nathaniel Draycott. I find him in the garden room bordering on the courtyard of ben Hadou’s house, distilling some sort of viscous orange liquid. When I greet him, he beams at me through his thick spectacles, taking in my unaccustomed uniform and no doubt changed demeanour. ‘My dear Nus-Nus—’

  ‘Please, call me Akuji. I have dispensed with my former name.’

  He blinks at that. ‘Akuji,’ he says slowly, then repeats it to himself. ‘Most unusual. I must remember to tell Elias when next I write. Here, try some of this.’ He offers me a spoonful of the liquid. ‘It’s an oil pressed from the fruit of ancient trees that are native only to the south-west of this realm, or so they tell me.’

  The oil is slick on my tongue and tastes sweet and slightly nutty. As I savour it, the call to prayer sounds from the Qarawiyyin Mosque and trembles across the whole walled city, to be followed moments later by the muezzins of a hundred others. It is an unearthly sound: even after several months here, I have not got used to hearing it. Is it this that lends such an extraordinary sensation to my swallow of the oil?

  Nathaniel smiles, and when the final notes have died away he says, ‘The common folk called this substance “argan”, or perhaps that’s the tree. My Arabic is improving all the time, but I believe it’s a Berber word. The peasants collect the undigested kernels once their goats have eaten the fruit and subject them to a complex and extremely time-consuming process of roasting and pressing. Then they use the oil thus produced sparingly in their cooking, and it is indeed delicious; but I have reason to believe that once further distilled and refined it may have near-magical properties – for the complexion and the digestion, and also to combat ageing – it may perhaps prove to be even more miraculous than the Primum Ens Melissae.’

  ‘It’s about the elixir that I’ve come.’ And I relay to him Zidana’s message.

  For a moment he looks disappointed. But he brightens when I assure him he may return to his refining process within the week. He goes to change – into a red turban and a long black gown. With this costume and the beard he has grown these past weeks, he could pass easily for a scholar, a taleb at the Qarawiyyin.

  I take his bag and sling it over my shoulder, and together we wind our way through the dusty, narrow streets of the medina down towards the river and the funduqs, where horses await us. We have just crossed the bridge beneath the university’s walls when a hand reaches up and tugs at my burnous. I look down.

  A dreadfully deformed wretch of a beggar is sitting there on the ground, his pitiful collection of alms laid on a square of coarse cloth beside him. Leprosy, or some other ravaging disease, has eaten away his extremities – his nose and lips, and most of his fingers and toes. It has also taken one of his eyes, and left vicious furrows in whatever other skin is visible. I cannot recall ever seeing a more hideous sight. ‘Salaam aleikum,’ I say softly, and dig reflexively in my money-pouch for a few coins for the poor soul, but he pulls yet more insistently at my cloak.

  ‘Nss-Nss…’

  ‘He appears to know you,’ Nathaniel says, gazing at the beggar somewhat appalled. Even London offered nothing as viscerally repulsive as this poor creature.

  Recognition comes over me as slowly as sunrise in winter. It is the grand vizier. Or, rather, it is what is left of him after being dragged for miles across stony waste land, tied to the strongest mule in the sultan’s stables.

  ‘By Maleeo… Abdelaziz.’

  The remnant of the man who had me gelded gives a ghastly smile – teeth gone, tongue a stump – and tries to haul himself to the ruins of his feet, before subsiding, defeated.

  I should enjoy a moment of bitter triumph at the sight of my enemy thus reduced, but all I feel is pity. From the bag over my shoulder I take one of the smaller flasks of Nathaniel’s elixir, and cast it into the beggar’s lap. ‘You deserve everything that has happened to you,’ I tell him grimly. ‘But I know what it
is like to be mutilated.’ I leave him staring in bemusement at the golden liquid, no doubt thinking it a cruel trick. He’ll probably just throw it away. Well, if he does, it’s his choice.

  *

  Zidana and I eye one another warily through the clouds of incense rising from her burning brazier. It is fiendishly hot in the room, even without the fire.

  ‘You’ve changed,’ she says.

  ‘So have you.’ It is true: she looks greatly different to the last time I saw her: no less vast, indeed perhaps more so, but somehow rather than giving the impression of being consumed by her bulk, she now appears abundant, full of life. Ironically, it transpires, that is exactly what she is. Full of life. Despite her age, for she must be nearing fifty. Doctor Friedrich tells her he believes she is pregnant with twins, which is regarded as the greatest of good luck in this country. When she gleefully announces this, I feel like sighing: more monsters to be brought into the world. But I congratulate her nevertheless.

  She walks around me. ‘No slave-bond?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor slave-name either?’

  ‘People call me Akuji now.’

  ‘Dead, Yet Awake.’ She grins. ‘Not very Islamic.’

  I shrug. ‘It’s my name.’

  ‘So, have you brought me the alchemist?’

  ‘He is here in Meknes.’

  ‘You are a good boy to have found him for me. His elixir is wondrous. Though unfortunately I had to get rid of Makarim: after she drank the stuff Zidan became infatuated with her, a situation that was absolutely unacceptable, given that she was my maid.’ Her eyes gleam. ‘We are going to do great things, he and I.’

  I had heard Makarim’s body was found with strangle-marks on the neck, but of course no one is likely to accuse Zidana. ‘He will work for you only on two conditions. First, that he will not live in the palace, but will maintain a house of his own in Fez; and second that you will not use his work to harm others.’

  I expect her to explode in fury, but she just pouts, the gesture of an unnervingly younger woman. ‘Now, where’s the fun in that?’

  ‘Did you kill the White Swan?’ I had not meant to ask so baldly, but suddenly I have to know.

  She looks at me strangely. ‘The mad Englishwoman? Are you confused in your head, Nus-Nus-No-More? The White Swan is not dead, she is just mad, and put away.’

  ‘But Makarim told me…’

  I force myself back to that terrible moment in the colonnaded walkway, with the sunlight slanting between the pillars and the long train of ants heading for the courtyard.

  What exactly had Makarim told me? There had been a long list of victims of ‘the bloody flux’ and that Alys had been ‘one of the first’. She had not actually said she was dead, but, expecting the worst, I had heard the worst. Dead, Yet Awake? More like Alive, But an Idiot. I am too stupid to live.

  ‘She is in the Little Palace, on the edge of the city. After the little boy was so cruelly taken from her, she went quite mad, poor thing, and Ismail couldn’t stand to have her around any more, so he sent her there.’ Zidana speaks as if she had no part in Momo’s ‘death’: perhaps by now she had persuaded herself of it.

  I feel a rough, wild joy swelling inside me, a seed of unbearable hope, and have to turn away before Zidana can see it; but her black eyes are fixed on me, unblinking.

  ‘I saw you amid the lions,’ she says almost admiringly. ‘I saw the warrior within.’ When she smiles, you catch a glimpse of the Lobi girl she once was, such a very long time ago.

  But the illusion is soon dispelled. She crosses the room to a carved wooden box and brings it back to the brazier. From it she takes a fat little fetish doll twinkling with jewels and another, tiny, with blue beads for eyes: both go on the brazier, where they sizzle and smoke. ‘Both dead,’ she declares with satisfaction. She holds up the third, all white with a floss of blonde hair. ‘As good as,’ she says carelessly, and on to the brazier that goes too. At last she draws out the figure of black clay, its white eyes bulging, as no doubt my own are right now, remembering the hellish trapdoor in its chest and what I had seen in there. ‘Shall we see if they’ve regrown?’ she asks mockingly, twitching the hem of its robe. She sees the look on my face and bursts out laughing. ‘Ah, poor Akuji: still as easy to tease as the slave who was Nus-Nus.’ Then this figure too she casts on to the fire.

  *

  The Little Palace is a tranquil place surrounded by a garden full of citrus and olive trees, with bougainvillea tumbling over its walls. Cats lounge in the shadows, slit-eyed, at ease. All the way there, walking fast, I keep thinking, perhaps she played her part too well. Perhaps she really has gone mad. But then the wild joy rises up again to swallow these black thoughts. After all that we have been through, I cannot believe that what is written in Fate’s Book could be so cruel.

  It is Mamass who opens the door to me, in a plain cotton robe and hijab, looking very grown up. She stares at me blankly, confused by the uniform. When I grin at her, she shrieks with delight and hugs me like a child, then remembers herself and solemnly asks after my health and well-being.

  The shriek has attracted attention: there is a movement in the shadowed corridor behind her, and suddenly a voice says, ‘You look so different… and yet, and yet… it is you!’

  Mamass bobs her head and slips away grinning, leaving Alys and me to stand face to face for a long, charged moment, gazing each at the other as if we would eat one another. When I take her in my arms I can feel how thin she is, fragile as a bird. But I can also feel the strength in her: an extraordinary, steely strength.

  ‘Momo is safe, and well, and waiting for you,’ I say at last, into her hair.

  She lifts her face. It is wet with tears. Nus-Nus would have hesitated, but Akuji’s hand rises and touches her cheek, gently wipes them away. She lays her hand over mine and presses it to her mouth. Her lips are hot on my palm: I can feel her breath on my skin. ‘I thought you were never coming back,’ she says, and I remember the last time she said those words to me, and all that has changed in that time.

  ‘Come to London with me,’ I say, and then I cover her mouth with my own and we do not speak for a long time.

  Epilogue

  A week later Alys and I take ship on one of Daniel al-Ribati’s merchant vessels, slipping swiftly and anonymously away with a very few possessions, with letters from Mr Draycott to the Royal Society, and with a number of flasks containing his mysterious elixirs. Ben Hadou, cognizant that I had saved his life, gives me a good sum of money, in return for which I undertake to ensure that his new wife, Kate, is safely dispatched to him on the ship’s return voyage, along with a list of items as long as my arm for the house in Fez, to be ordered from the London markets.

  What life will be like for us in London it is hard to imagine. England is not like Morocco, where black men take white women to wife on the sultan’s orders and no one thinks twice about it. Perhaps we shall have to marry in secret and live outwardly as mistress and servant, like the Duchess Mazarin and Addo, a King of the Road under the adopted guise of the slave Mustapha. But we shall have Momo, and Momo has been the key to all of this. And just as well, since it is highly doubtful that we shall make children together. We make an unlikely family, but neither Alys nor I care greatly about the approbation of the world: we have survived worse than hard words and hard looks, and whatever future we can forge together will surely be better than the pasts we have suffered.

  Besides, the king made me two promises before I left: that he would do his best for Alys if ever the sultan were to release her from his harem; and that if I were to return and would wish it, I should have the position of a royal musician at White Hall, and I hope that, given these circumstances and our own fortitude and determination, we shall prevail against the odds.

  Is it so much to ask that men and women be no longer slaves and are free to make their lives together?

  We can but hope: after all, other miracles have been known to occur.

  Historical Note
/>
  Moulay Ismail was the Sultan of Morocco from 1672 to 1727: a remarkably long time to rule over his ‘basketful of rats’. One clue to his success lies in the name by which he was often known: ‘Safaq Adimaa’, or ‘The Bloodthirsty’. Another can be derived from his policy of exerting authority via display, by generating awe in the populace through the pomp and grandeur that surrounded him. In this, as in the extent and application of his power, he was the last sultan who can genuinely be said to have been on a par with his European counterparts.

  In his fifty-five years as absolute monarch he humbled the wild mountain tribes of the Rif and Atlas, recaptured the coastal towns of Tangier and Mamora, Asilah and Larache from foreign powers, maintained Moroccan sovereignty by defending it against the Ottoman Turks; rebuilt mosques, shrines, bridges, kasbahs and of course the extraordinary palace complex at Meknes, the remains of which are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

  In 1703 a visiting ambassador asked one of Ismail’s sons how many brothers and sisters he had. After three days he was presented with a list of 525 boys and 342 girls. In 1721 he was reputed to have ‘700 Sons able to mount Horse’. (The last of Ismail’s sons is said to have been born to him eighteen months after the sultan’s death, which is quite a feat.) His wives and harem members are even harder to keep track of, since even in official records most are noted by a single Arabic name, often bestowed upon them only on their conversion to Islam, whether by choice or duress. Amongst them all there is only one constant: Lalla Zidana, bought as a slave from the sultan’s brother for the sum of sixty ducats. By all accounts in her later years she was a huge and monstrous presence, vastly fat, strangely dressed and dreaded by all as ‘the witch Zidana’. Despite this – or maybe because of it – she maintained a thirty-year ascendancy over Ismail’s affections and exercised absolute power over his harem. Her eldest son, Zidan, was proclaimed as Ismail’s heir, despite not being his first son. However, he was disinherited by his father in 1700 in favour of Zidana’s equally worthless second son, Ahmed al-Dhahebi, ‘the Golden’.