Glory and the Lightning (15 page)

The multitudinous women of the palace unceasingly teased and even lightly tormented Kurda, and his eunuchs, but they feared him also, for at his will he could order whippings and other punishment for the women of the harem. Only the princesses—the wives of Al Taliph—and especial favorites—were safe from his malice and his detestation of their sex. But this western woman, who was neither princess nor true concubine, and not even a slave, pretended to be unaware of his very existence, he whose trousers were of silver or cloth of gold and embroidered with scarlet and blue and yellow and purple, with a vest equally magnificent and a turban even more so, and whose girdle was of gold studded with gems and who wore a curved sword of magnificent workmanship. He might have been a leashed jackal, for all her attention. She sought no favors or privileges from him, as did the young concubines and the female slaves, nor did she reward him with a gold coin or a pretty gift when he was sometimes indulgent to women’s foolish female whims. Once only had she looked at him directly, and with impatience, and she had lifted her lip at him and then had turned away. Ah, he had no testes, and for that she despised him! She, the impure, had dared to think herself superior to one who was pure. She had never seemed aware that even the uncastrated male slaves of the household, and the lesser free male servants, respected him for his power and that the lord Al Taliph often deferred to his opinions and asked his advice.

Ah, but she was growing old! It would not be long before she was banished to the lower stratum of the harem, to tend children and wash the feet of new favorites and oil their young bodies and serve them. Then he, Kurda, would have his revenge. He would order her flogged at sunrise every day until she died of it, and then he would have her body thrown to the pariah dogs who infested the mountains. None would mourn her. She was feared and hated not only by the noble wives but by the entire harem, who would rejoice in her final fate, this insolent and impertinent one who not only disdained Kurda but the wives, also, and the other concubines.

In the meantime, however, she was ominous and alien. Gloomily, Kurda watched her. She had traversed half the blue and white tiled courtyard, and was standing now by the jade fountain, an enormous bowl in which a white marble dolphin seemed gracefully to leap and dance in the iridescence of the springing waters. She put her hand in the rippling bowl, and smiled upwards at the dolphin, and Kurda saw her foreign profile and shuddered. Not for her the decent and decorous veil of a virtuous woman, which not only concealed features from the lustful gaze of random men but protected women’s delicate complexions from the furious sun. Truly, Ahriman guarded his vile own! Her lips were like a pomegranate, her cheeks softly vermillion, her neck and forehead like milk, her nearly bare shoulders—obscene!—like the marble of the dolphin, itself. Nor was her nose the subtly curved nose of a patrician woman; it was straight and with an impudent tilt at the end. This betrayed her slavish origins. As for the wanton color of her hair—no woman ever possessed such fairness. It was certainly dyed, but that was expected of one of her advanced age. Al Taliph ‘s mother had dyed her hair, but it had been black dye, which was permitted a woman. But the color of this woman’s hair—like the hair of the displaced Greek woman from Cos (now returned to her home)—was obviously and flauntingly false. The western barbarian women had no regard for propriety. Ah, sorrowful and strange it was that the heroic emperor, Xerxes, had not conquered them! However, again, Ahriman protected his own, and Mithras was too patient and benign, even in the case of barbarians who did not know or honor him.

Kurda, more and more gloomy, observed that Aspasia was wearing a robe of scarlet, as scarlet as her mouth, draped cunningly and tightly across her lovely bosom and hips and then falling in lustrous silken folds and flares to her feet which were shod in golden and jeweled shoes. The robe was elaborately embroidered, but daintily so, and appeared less fabric than an airy gossamer woven in rainbows. She wore no covering on her head, and her fair hair lifted in a hot and perfumed wind coming through the myriad long pointed arches of the courtyard. The blue and white tiles of the floor reflected her; the water of the fountain threw radiant shadows on her face, and darting reflections. Her milk-white round arms were clasped with bracelets of gemmed vipers and there was a necklace of opals about her throat. Kurda was superstitious. He thought her an evil spirit, so strange was she and so potent in the affairs of the palace, and so inexplicable, and he made the sign to warn off demons. Sometimes he, the powerful Kurda, feared her, and he grovelled with shame in his mind at this indignity.

(Incredible and most alarming to him was the fact that she did not spend her time in the harem, nor did she sleep in one of the chambers assigned to the princesses. She slept with the lord Al Taliph—it was rumored, and Kurda could not debase himself enough to believe that—and she had a gorgeous chamber of her own, surpassing the chambers of the wives. She had ten female slaves to attend to her exclusively.)

The master of the eunuchs was an immensely tall and immensely fat man, with a huge belly and a great pallid face, as smooth as an infant’s buttocks. His tiny black eyes were sunken in his facial flesh; he had a nose like a mushroom, a fat sullen mouth pouting like a peevish child’s, and a number of chins so full that they concealed his neck. His whole appearance was gross, even grotesque, and when he spoke Aspasia could hardly refrain from smiling, so high and thin and girlish was his voice. But she knew at once how dangerous he was, how full of vindictiveness and malignance. She had heard that all eunuchs were like such as he, detesting women, murderous, lustful for the infliction of torture as other men were lustful for girls. But surely Kurda surpassed all his brothers in these attributes. She knew that though he hated all the other women in the palace, even the princesses he served so sedulously and guarded with such ardor, he hated her more than all others. At first she had been inclined to pity him, believing he mourned his mutilated state, but she soon learned that he was proud of it, accepting it as a superior endowment. His big belly, naked and hairless, protruded from between the sides of his patterned vest, and his navel was tinted rose, which Aspasia thought particularly obscene.

Once she had asked herself idly, Why does he loathe me more than the other women, and why does he fix his eyes upon me with such a desire to kill? It did not come to her for some time that this was because he had a woman’s love for Al Taliph, and he had learned that the satrap loved Aspasia as he had never loved any other woman. Worse than all else, however, Aspasia was treated like an empress in this house, and never was she banished to that part where the women lived but sat at feasts with the satrap and his guests at the table, bold, shameless, conversing as men converse, and held all in fascinated attention. The guests did not disdain her or regard her as worthless, as they did even their own wives and daughters, and this inflamed the jealous Kurda. They gazed upon her like men under the spell of a golden moon set upon a mountain top.

Again, it was the privilege of the master of the eunuchs to strike a recalcitrant young concubine or slave girl who became mutinous in the harem, or punish her in some other corrective fashion, which did not mar her skin or bruise or truly injure her. Kurda understood that from the moment Aspasia entered this palace she was beyond his corrections and that he must speak to her with even more respect than he did Al Taliph’s wives. How this was he did not know; hence his hatred and resentment of her, this alien barbarian woman.

She had a fascination for Kurda, also, the fascination of deadly hate, the fascination of a besotted woman who studies her flaunting rival. He did not think Aspasia beautiful; he told himself that she was repulsive and sighed over the blindness of his beloved satrap. Her very scent revolted him, for she did not use the heavy languorous musks of the east. A perfume as of hyacinths or lilies floated from her as if it were the natural exhalation of her body. She had but to appear to make him stare at her as if at a basilisk, unable to move until she was gone from his sight. Only her death or banishment would have satisfied him. His dreams were of such; he had only to wait for the hour when Al Taliph wearied of her. These were the dreams not only of Kurda but of the offended wives and the other ladies of the harem. They had thought Narcissa intolerable, for she had assumed, as the favorite, the airs of a sultana, and condescended even to the wives. This one was infinitely worse, as she was infinitely more beautiful. It was even rumored in the murmurous harem that Artaxerxes, himself, having glimpsed her in the palace, had desired her and had offered for her a sum equal to the ransom of a kingdom. But no woman of the harem believed this; only Kurda did so believe, for he knew it was true.

Watching her with fury today, as he always watched her, Kurda saw her, as usual, lifting her head from the fountain and looking ahead into the hypnotizing vista of the high blue and white pointed arches which led from the courtyard like the myriad diminishing reflections in a mirror. They seemed to extend into infinity, growing smaller with distance, one within another, an illusion of endlessness. They pierced the white fretted stone of intervening walls, stone so exquisitely carved and designed that it appeared made of intricate lace. They were floored with that glasslike tiling of blue and white which was never sullied with dust or even a fallen leaf, but only duplicated the passing colors and shapes of those who traversed them. To the right the floor and walls and arches ended in low white steps to the tremendous hanging gardens and grottoes and pools and tiny black bridges of ebony and beds of flowers and masses of oleanders and cypresses and palms and myrtle and oaks and strange fernlike trees and winding paths of red gravel. Here strutted peacocks and in the waters stood flamingoes, as rosy as dawn, and yellow and brown ducks and black and white swans, and herons with red beaks. The banks of the ponds, as green as emeralds, tumbled with cascades of flowers of massed hues, over which blew clouds of varicolored butterflies. Rare birds of all colors hung in gilt cages from the branches of trees, and conversed with those free nearby. There was little if any grass here, and so the ground was covered with ivies and other creeping plants or left silvery bare with raked sand and sparkling white gravel. Here and there stood huge Chinese vases filled with flowering branches whose blossoms were like drops of blood or dripping gold, or lapis lazuli. Over all loomed a blazing sky of color of the peacocks’ breasts, filled with a light so intense that the eye could not gaze upon it for long. It robbed shadows of any darkness, so that even those which lay on gravel or flowers or sand had only a fainter incandescence. The heat was dry and acrid, and so no scent rose from the earth except that of aromatic dust and stone which seemed to be on the point of igniting.

The very fountains appeared to be liquid stone and were very warm. In the colored bowls bright fish lazily swam or rose to the surface for air. Water lilies, pale or pink, were closed tightly against the sun on their pads of floating green leaves. There were few statues and these were of bronze rather than marble, and were of bizarre form, and startling to western eyes. Some depicted female deities with many twisted arms and hands and breasts, with frightening faces of malevolence and supernatural ferocity, and some were of turbaned male deities correspondingly fearful, with flames emerging from mouths or shoulders or embossed shields, and all possessed squat and muscular misshapen legs and bare feet with many toes. Aspasia found them horrifying and repulsive, especially those with jagged teeth protruding between Negroid lips. Occasionally she discovered one holding a severed head by the hair, and she would shudder. She had already discovered that the eastern mind was far more complicated and involved and obscure and unknowable than the western mind, which had a certain clarity and a straightforwardness of reasoning. That western mind proceeded from one logical point to another, but the eastern mind spiraled and twisted and was mysterious beyond her comprehension. Yet she found it interesting and tantalizing, for all its obscurity and hints of arcane darkness, and even its implications of things not in human context and beyond humanity, and its lack of directness. Once the old philosopher in Thargelia’s house had said, “Nothing human is alien to me.” Had he ventured here, Aspasia would think with some humor, he would not be so certain, or would conclude that there were things, superficially human, that could not be understood or which had emerged from some unseen sentient power which did not resemble humanity at all, but had the qualities of elementals or similar appalling natures.

It was only by ignoring the statues, which in some weird fashion echoed the Oriental mind, that Aspasia could enjoy the gardens at all. She preferred to cultivate the birds and the peacocks and the tame herons and flamingoes and parrots or look at the brazen or blue barren mountains which enclosed the green and fertile valley. She was endlessly fascinated by the hanging gardens which covered the walls of the gardens, themselves, dropping from the earth above the walls in billows of leaves and blossoms, all jeweled with unseen rills of water. But none was fragrant. It was only at night that unseen jasmine and roses breathed out sweetness under the moon. However, Aspasia, to her own amusement, preferred not to visit the gardens at night, for once, doing so, she had seen that the statues had acquired a kind of monstrous life of their own, fierce, distorted, and threatening, and she had been namelessly affrighted. She knew that her own people were not notable for compassion or disinterested tenderness, but the eastern mind, as exemplified in their works of art, had elements of complicated cruelty and indifference to agony repellent to the western spirit. “All men are the same,” the philosopher had didactically stated. Now Aspasia emphatically disagreed.

It was not that the Oriental mind was inferior to the western. In many occult and subtle ways it was superior. But it had components unique to itself, elusive, and enigmatic, oblique and bewildering to the western intelligence. Often, in conversing with Al Taliph and his friends, she was aware of her own bafflement, for arguments were never concluded satisfactorily but seemed to continue on into labyrinths which she could not follow and which eluded her. They led nowhere which she could discern. To the Oriental, argument was only to enlarge mystic vistas but never to ultimately enlighten. Western man established the initial base for an argument, defined his terms, demolished his opponent with irrefutable logic or was demolished by his own ineptitude of reasoning.