People of the Book (33 page)

When I awoke, they had laid me on the brocaded divan in Hooman’s private quarters. Hooman stood over me, the lines around his eyes crinkled like crushed vellum. “It seems we will not have to trouble the eunuch maker after all,” he said. “How fortunate, how very fortunate we are, to have been so deceived by you.”

My mouth was dry. When I tried to speak, no words came out of it. Hooman handed me a goblet. There was wine in it. I drained the cup.

“Steady, child. Surely the Muslim daughters of Ifriqiya do not quaff their wine so thirstily. Or are you deceiving us as to your faith, also?”

“There is no God but God and Muhammad is his messenger,” I whispered. “I have not tasted wine until this day. I drink it now because I have read that it gives courage.”

“I do not think that you are lacking in this thing. It has taken courage enough, surely, to live this lie among us as you have done. How came you here, in the
jellaba
of a boy?”

Hooman knew well enough that I had been sold into his service by the Banu Marin, who kidnapped me from the hajj caravan. “It was my father’s wish that I disguise myself after we left our city,” I said. “He believed I would be more comfortable making the desert crossing if I could ride beside him, rather than stay confined all day to an airless litter. He said also that I would be safer in the guise of a boy, and events proved him right….” At that, the memories pressed on me, and the wine, on my empty stomach, made my head spin. Hooman placed a hand on my shoulder and pressed me gently back against the cushions on his divan. He stared at me and shook his head. “I have always thought myself the most observant of men. Now that I know the truth, it seems impossible to have not known it. I must be getting old, indeed.”

He reached out and ran his hand once again over my face, but this time, he used a touch light as mist. He sank down onto the divan beside me. My clothing had already been loosened, and his hand easily found my breast.

Much later, when I could think about it clearly, I consoled myself that there were many worse ways in which I might have been raped. I had been waiting for it, in truth, from the moment the Berber raiders appeared at the top of the dunes. Hooman’s famous hands did not leave a mark on me. When I struggled and thrashed and tried to get free of him, he subdued me with a skillful grip that pinned me helpless without hurt. Even when he came into me, there was no roughness in it. The shock of it was greater than the pain. I believe I suffered less, in truth, than many brides upon their wedding bed. And yet, when he finally let me rise, and I felt the wetness dribble down my thigh, my legs folded up under me and I knelt by his divan and vomited sour wine on his fine carpet until there was nothing more in me. He gave a great sigh then, adjusted his robes, and went out.

Alone in his quarters, I wept for a long time, composing the list of my life’s losses, from my mother’s death to my father’s murder to my own enslavement. And now, the new, darker place in which I found myself, robbed of my body in the most fundamental way. For an instant, there was a consoling thought; that my father, dead, could not know of this dishonor. But then I realized he must have died imagining just this. I retched again, but there was nothing left.

The eunuch Hooman sent to me was very young. The sight of him reminded me that there were others who suffered losses worse even than mine. The floodtide of my self-pity began to abate. He was a Persian boy who spoke no Arabic. I expect Hooman had considered that, in choosing whom to send. He removed the fouled carpet with an efficient discretion, and then returned with a silver ewer and basin of warmed rosewater. He gestured that he would help me bathe, but I dismissed him. The thought of another’s touch was repulsive to me. He had brought a robe for me to wear, and he took my old garments, holding them far in front of him as if they smelled. Which I suppose they may have done.

I did not sleep for most of that night. But as the sky lightened toward dawn, I realized with relief that Hooman would not return, and fell into an exhausted, dream-racked doze, in which I sat again on the straw mats, listening as my mother hummed at her loom. But when I tugged on her robe to seek her attention, the face that turned to me wasn’t her smiling, patient one, but the ravaged face of a corpse, whose pitiless gaze passed right through me.

The boy woke me, arriving with a new set of clothes. I had not known what to expect. Was I to be got up as an odalisque, since I was destined for the harem? But the clothes he brought were noblewoman’s dress: a simple gown of rose-pink silk, which looked very well against the color of my skin. There were some lengths of Tunisian chiffon in a darker rose, the fabric so fine that I had to double it to wind a veil that would cover my hair. Last of all, there was a blue-black haik in the lightest merino that fell from the crown of my head to the tip of my toes.

When I had dressed, I sat on the divan, feeling despair welling once again inside me. The voice of Hooman interrupted my weeping. He stood outside, asking my permission to enter. Astonished by this, I did not answer. He asked again, in a louder tone. I could not school my voice, so I said nothing.

“Prepare yourself,” he said, and pushed aside the curtain. I felt panic rise in me, and I backed away from him.

“Be at peace. After this meeting, it is unlikely that we will ever see each other again. If you have questions regarding your work, matters of material or technique, you are to write to me of these things—I am right, I think, to recall that you are lettered? Most strange, in a girl—another reason we were deceived—and you are to send me, from time to time, samples of your work for review. I will reply and instruct you as best I can, and if I see areas that require improvement, I shall write of them to you. Although you are far from attaining the rank of master, you are to assume a position that normally would fall to one of such a standing. No matter your feelings toward me, do not discredit my skills, or your own. The work that we do here will live longer than any of us. Remember that. It is of far greater importance than any…personal sentiments.”

A sob escaped me. He winced, and spoke to me coldly.

“Do you think you are the only one brought here bound and humbled? The emira herself walked through the gates of this city in chains, driven at spear point before the warhorse of the man who became her husband.”

He did not need to tell me this: the scandal of the emir’s beautiful captive had been the subject of salacious gossip among the preparers of the ground. Listless as I had been during those months, this story had captured my interest, for it touched on certain aspects of my own history. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion on the matter.

Early in his rule, the emir had famously refused to pay the city’s customary tribute to the Castilians. From now on, he said, “the royal mint makes nothing but sword blades.” Constant skirmishes had been the result. In one of these engagements, the emir had ridden into a Christian hamlet and carried off the daughter of its tax collector. No one had thought anything about the emir taking spoils of war; the Prophet Muhammad himself had taken wives from among both Jews and Christians when his forces had defeated them. It was understood that captives joined the harem from time to time, and rape was briefly legalized as marriage. What had shocked the city was the emir’s elevation of this captive over the emira, a Sevillian noblewoman, the emir’s cousin and the mother of his heir. She had been banished from the palace to her own house outside the walls from where, it was said, she schemed constantly, elicting support from the Abu Siraj, whose ferocity in matters of faith was notorious. The rift had passed far beyond the walls of the harem, and even beyond the city, and rumors now said that the crown of Castile was looking for a way to exploit it.

The Persian eunuch entered then, with goblets of sherbet. Hooman signaled me to take one. “The emir has charged me with his orders in this, and I tell these to you now so that there will be no misunderstanding. The emir is, as you know, very often gone from the city on campaign. He has confided that at such times he misses the sight of the emira, and desires likenesses to which he can turn at such times.

“You will be painting, therefore, for an audience of one. The images will be seen only by the emir, only when he is alone. Your work will be safe, therefore, from the iconoclasts, and you need not fear charges of heresy.”

I had been looking at my hands, wrapped around the goblet, for most of his speech, unable to bear the sight of his face. But now I looked up sharply. He stared back at me, as if challenging me to speak. When I said nothing, he lifted the haik and handed it to me.

“Put this on now. It is time for me to take you to the palace.”

My mother had taught me to walk in my veil as if I had no feet, gliding over the ground as gracefully as a waterbird slides upon liquid. But after so many months living as a boy, I had lost the art. I stumbled several times as we made our way through the crowded alleys of the medina. In their summer attire, the merchants in the courtyard of the caravansary looked as colorful as a field of flowers: there were men in striped Persian linens, Ifriqiyans in
jellabas
of saffron and indigo, and here and there, moving circumspectly, yellow-breeched Jews, their heads bare of turbans as the law required, even under the punishing sun of noonday.

The sun was blinding as we finally reached the approach to the palace. The walls had been white once, a hundred years ago, but the iron-rich earth had bled through the stucco and warmed them to a rosy madder. With my one uncovered eye, I looked up and saw the inscriptions carved on the great arched doorway, countless numbers of them, as if the voices of a thousand believers had been caught in the swirling stonework, trapped on their way up to the heavens:
There is no victor but God.

I entered the huge wooden doors of that place knowing that I might never leave it. An old woman, her face cracked like a dry wadi, received me into the women’s quarters.

“So this is al-Mora?” said the crone.
The Moorish woman.
In this new life, I was not even to have a name.

“Yes,” Hooman replied. “May she give good service.” And so I was passed off with no more thought than a hand tool. I parted from Hooman without returning his farewell. Yet as the old woman drew the door closed beside me, I had a sudden urge to turn and run through it, to clutch even his despised arm and beg him to deliver me from the palace, whose walls loomed suddenly like a prison.

Since my capture, my mind had fed on every kind of fear. I had pictured myself performing crushing toil in the foulest places—beaten, exhausted, abused. Now, the old woman held out a hand for the haik, which she passed to a beautiful boy, I judged not more than seven or eight years old, who hovered behind her. She signed for me to take off my sandals. A pair of embroidered slippers lay ready for me inside the door. She beckoned me to follow her, and we passed from the portico into rooms whose magnificence has stolen the words from the mouths of the poets.

At first, it seemed as if the walls themselves were in motion, the ceiling swooping down toward me. I raised a hand as if to steady myself, and closed my eyes against the dazzle. When I opened them, I forced myself to look at one small area of the room only, at tiles glazed and colored in blue-green and brown, black and lilac, so cunningly laid that they seemed to be spinning in pinwheels around the lower third of the wall. When I could look up, I saw that the swooping ceiling was in fact a lofty dome, from which descended an upside-down forest of plaster, each shape an echo and a harmony of its neighbor.

We walked, it seemed, through an endless series of chambers as lovely as they were various. Once or twice, a serving girl slid by, nodding deferentially to the older woman and shooting a swift, curious glance at me. In the soft slippers we passed silently through mazes of slender pillars and beside long pools, still as mirrors, reflecting the numberless entwined inscriptions above.

Eventually, we began to climb stone steps into an elevated section of the palace that narrowed as it rose. When we reached the top, the old woman, breathing hard, leaned against the wall and groped in the folds of her garments for a large brass key. She fitted it into the lock and opened the door. The room was round, its white walls bare of decoration except for some remarkable carved and painted stone spandrels around a pair of arched windows set high into the far wall. There was little furniture: a small silk prayer rug, Persian and very fine; a slim divan covered in bright cushions; a low table inlaid with mother-of-pearl; a book stand; and a carved sandalwood chest. I walked to the windows, stood on tiptoe, put my hands to the sill, and hoisted myself up so I could glimpse the outside. The view was of gardens thick with fruit-bearing trees. I recognized fig, peach, almond, quince, and sour cherry, their boughs so laden with fruit that you could not glimpse the ground below them.

“It will do for you?” The old woman spoke for the first time, her voice cracked with age, but cultured. I dropped down from the sill and turned, embarrassed. “They told me of your task, and it seemed good to find you a room alone for the peace and privacy of your work. This one has not been used since the last emira left the palace.”

“It will do very well,” I said.

“A girl will bring refreshment. You must tell her if you require anything particular. You will find that most needs can be met here.”

The old woman turned to go, signaling for the page to follow her. “Please,” I said swiftly, my head full of questions. “Please, if it is permitted to ask, why are there so few people in the women’s quarters?”

The old woman sighed and pressed the heel of her hand to her temple. “May I sit?” she said, already easing her frail body down onto the divan. “I do not think you have been long in the city.”

It was a statement more than a question.

“You come here at a troubled time. The emir presently has but two thoughts in his mind: the war with Castile and his appetite for the girl he now calls Nura.” Her eyes, buried in that lined face like a pair of bright pebbles, scrutinized me closely. “In his folly, he has sent away his cousin Sahar and all her household. The emir trusts no one. He knows his cousin and her taste for conspiracy. He also has sent away the concubines—handed them off hastily to his favorite officers, lest any one of them became a tool of vengeance for Sahar and her son, Abu Abd Allah, who keenly feels his mother’s insult.