Sultan's Wife (11 page)

Later that night, when I examine myself in the privacy of my room, all over my poor red skin is as innocent of hair as any of Raphael's cherubs.

The next day Lalla Zahra tells me to make ready for my journey to Meknes. She hands me a book. ‘You are an educated and intelligent woman: I think you will appreciate it. Promise me you will read from it whenever you can.' Then she hugs me briefly and regards me for a long moment, her eyes glittering in the bright light.

It is small and simply bound in dark brown leather. I think, foolishly, it is a Bible and thank her for her kind gesture. But when I open to the flyleaf I find it to be ‘The Alcoran of Mahomet, Translated out of
Arabick
into
French
. By the
Sieur du Ryer
, Lord of
Malezair
, and Resident for the French King, at
Alexandria
. And Newly Englished, for the satisfaction of all that desire to look into the
Turkish
Vanities. London Printed, Anno. Dom. 1649.'

The heathens' holy book; and printed in London too! When I lift my head to voice my outrage, I find she has slipped away as silently as she came in. I throw the offensive book away from me; but when I go down into the courtyard there it is, perched on top of the bag of clothing and toiletries I am to take with me on my journey.

It is a Friday when we leave the city, the Mahometans' holy day. All over the city the eerie cries of their prayer-callers echo through the warm air like the cries of foreign birds.

Three of us travel inside a curtained box. The two other women are dressed in a similar fashion to me, in cotton kaftans with bright scarves bound around their heads. Like me, they are blue-eyed, but they look as foreign as the Moroccan women, with their dark brows and lashes. We sit in stultified silence as the cart rattles and jolts its way through the narrow city streets. Once I twitch aside the curtain and a shaft of sunlight cuts through the carriage like a knife. The girl next to me flinches and turns her head away. Her hands are never still, her fingers working listlessly against one another in a nervous fashion.

There are men everywhere, flowing in a stream towards the nearest mosque: men in white robes and little skullcaps; men in tunics and wide trousers that stop short of the ankle; men in turbans or beneath hooded robes. Their faces are as brown as polished walnuts and their black eyes are inquisitive. Their stares are frank, piercing: like hunters who have sensed quarry.

After what seems an interminable interval, but may have been only two hours, we come to a halt.

‘Are we here already?' asks the girl on the other side of the carriage.

‘You're English!' I cry, almost an accusation.

It is the other one who answers me. ‘Irish. We're Irish, not English. We're sisters, so we are, Theresa and Cecelia: sisters from Ringaskiddy, though there's not many as knows where that is so I just say Cork.'

Which explains the telling of the phantom rosary beads. My mother was fiercely anti-Catholic, blamed the old king's French wife for his, and therefore our family's, downfall; and when his son married a Portuguese
Catholic, she was incandescent with rage. I peer through the crack in the curtains. ‘We're in a forest.'

They relax visibly. ‘Mother Mary, thank you. Cecelia and I have sworn to be martyrs like Saint Julia and Saint Eulalia.' Cecelia bursts into noisy tears. Theresa pats her on the arm. ‘It's all right: you shall be like Saint Julia:
I
shall be Eulalia.' She turns back to me. ‘Saint Eulalia refused to recant her faith; so they cut her breasts off.'

Cecelia's sobs rise to a wail.

‘They put her in a barrel full of glass shards and rolled it down a hill, so they did. But even that was not enough to make her turn apostate; so two executioners tore her flesh with iron hooks and held flames to her wounds till the smoke made her swoon. And then at last she was crucified on a cross and after that they decapitated her, and a dove flew right out of her neck. It was a miracle!' Her eyes flash with fanatic fervour. ‘She was only twelve years old. Theresa and I have pledged our virginity to the Virgin Mother herself. We'll be Saint Cecelia and Saint Theresa of Ringaskiddy. There will be girls all over Ireland saying their prayers to us in years to come.'

I do not think this is much of a consolation for such a violent death, but the desire for martyrdom is not enshrined in the Protestant religion. ‘I envy you your certitude,' I say gently; and I do. Will my own faith bear me safely through the trials to come?

Suddenly the door to the carriage creaks open and a man peers inside. Cecelia stifles a shriek.

‘Sidi Qasem.' I incline my head.

‘Miss Swann. We will make a brief stop here.'

While the two Irish girls are availing themselves of a thick stand of vegetation, I spy in the distance, heading towards us, a long line of men, prisoners, making their way along the forest track. The man leading them rides forward to meet Sidi Qasem. Leaning from his horse, he takes the old man's outstretched hand and raises it to his lips. It seems there are hierarchies even amongst slavers.

Cecelia and Theresa stomp noisily through the undergrowth and stand beside me brushing burrs and grass seeds off their robes, their eyes trained
on the group of men approaching. ‘Holy Mother.' Cecelia crosses herself. ‘They look half starved.'

The sisters make for the safety of the carriage, but I cannot tear my eyes away. The men's hands are bound with rope, and heavy weights have been secured to their ankles to impede any attempt at escape. Where the iron moves with the movement of their legs, the weights have rubbed raw, red patches into the skin, and so they shuffle to minimize the chafing. Many wear no shirts and have been burned across the shoulders by the sun; their ribs show as clearly as the staves in a wrecked boat, and when they pass I see that a number of them bear livid weals across their backs.

I feel ashamed to be watching them with good food in my belly and silk against my skin. Their faces are bleak and hopeless, each man trapped in his own private hell – except for one. He turns his head towards me as the line passes the carriage. He is tall and his skin is fair, his beard showing through in little tufts of yellow. I realize with a shock that he is barely more than a boy. ‘Pray for us, lady!' he says in one language after another; then the overseer spurs his horse back and lashes at him with his whip so hard that the boy cries out and stumbles.

I turn away, my eyes swimming. What hope is there for any of us, that these men can be treated as little more than beasts?

Sidi Qasem appears beside me. ‘Why the tears, lady?'

‘Must they walk all the way to Meknes?'

‘They will walk, or they will die.'

‘And what will happen to them when they get there?'

‘They will help to build Moulay Ismail's new city. If they do not die on the march, they will certainly do so at Meknes. In a week; a month; a year if they are hardy. Ismail is a hard taskmaster: he makes no allowance for illness or frailty.'

‘Such a waste of human life, just to build a city.'

‘It is not “just a city”, Alys. It is a devotion to God. Our religion is a civilization-building religion: it came out of the desert and within a century it had created the greatest civilization in the world. Allah commanded us not to let a desert remain a desert, or a mountain to remain a mountain. The world must be transformed to the divine pattern; and it is in that
transformation that we find our connection to the divine. Meknes is a prayer to God, a single song of praise, and Ismail is both architect and praise-singer. We all play our part in the grand design.'

I shiver as I sit back down in the carriage, beside two girls determined to die for the Catholic cause, while Sidi Qasem speaks of murder as part of a divine pattern. I am surrounded by fanatics. The question remains, am I one too?

Three weeks I have been rotting away in this dark cell, surrounded by madmen and criminals. Three weeks is not very long in the greater scheme of things, I know: but time in the pitch darkness drags like perdition itself.

The qadi had me fetched to him in the first week, very pleased with himself: another foul crime solved, another criminal to be dispatched. The punishment for murder is to have a nail driven through the top of my skull with hammer blows. He told me this with relish. A short, squat man, he had that softness to him that comes only from a good living had from receiving plenty of
baksheesh
up the sleeve. Unfortunately, I had nothing with which to bribe him. I am a slave, no matter how elevated, and slaves do not get paid.

I asked him if the sultan was aware of my plight and he laughed in my face. ‘Why should the sultan give a fig's pip for one more black felon in this town? We have executed thirty already this month, and like rats there are always more.'

The very fact that I am still languishing in the gaol after three weeks away from my duties tells me everything I need to know: that I am expendable, forgotten. I wonder who is attending Ismail at his prayers, checking his babouches for scorpions or his food for poison, delivering messages, keeping the couching book. I torture myself at the thought of my replacement being given my room, throwing out my few possessions: the little my life has been reduced to. I wonder if even now he is taking a few minutes between his duties to sit in the courtyard where I so foolishly hid the spoiled babouches, enjoying the warm caress of the sun on his upturned face and
the scent of the jasmine tumbling from the catwalk. All I can smell here is shit and piss and sweat made sour by terror, and I can assure you none of it smells much like jasmine.

When the muezzin calls I turn to pray along with the other unfortunates. But who knows the direction of Mecca in this place, in such darkness? I think of Ismail making his rounds with his army of astronomers armed with their astrolabes and calculations, fiddling with their rules and angles, aligning the alidade with the degree of the sun to tell them precisely in which direction the Holy City lies, before the sultan can kneel and pray. All I can do is turn away from the bucket of shit and hope for the best.

One morning I run a hand across my jaw and find bristles there. Can it be that a spell in gaol is turning me back into a man? I allow myself a mirthless smile, then put my head in my hands. God loves a joke.

Suddenly the viewing window shuttles open and a voice calls, ‘Nus-Nus? Which one of you is the court official known as Nus-Nus?'

There are a few titters; but they stop when I stand up. ‘I am he.'

The guard opens the door and beckons me out. ‘And don't try anything or I'll take your leg off.'

Seated at a table in a side-room, sipping tea and swathed from head to foot in black, is a woman. I know who it is at once, despite the veil, by the thickness of her wrist and the colour of her skin, even though she is not wearing her usual jewellery. I am alert enough to say nothing. The guard shows no curiosity, and shuts the door behind him. I wonder how often women come to this noisome place for their last conjugal visits, and shudder.

‘So, Nus-Nus, this is where you are,' she says in Lobi.

‘So it would seem,' I reply in Senufo.

‘No one took the trouble to tell me until yesterday,' Zidana says. ‘I thought you were ill.'

I do not believe her: Zidana's spies are everywhere. ‘Why are you here?' She is taking a risk, and I doubt it is for my good. If Ismail discovers she has flouted his will by slipping outside the palace walls, even being his chief wife is unlikely to save her. I have seen him strangle one so-called favourite
with his own hands for the heinous crime of picking up a fallen orange from the ground to eat. ‘We are not paupers, to stoop to such behaviour!' he chastised as he choked the life out of her. ‘Have you no dignity? If you would shame your sultan by doing such a thing, what more would you do?' He had nightmares the following night, calling her name over and over again in his sleep –
Aicha, Aicha –
and the next morning his pillow was wet.

‘I needed to ask you about the list,' Zidana says simply. ‘Have they mentioned it? Do they have it as evidence?'

I sigh. ‘No one has spoken of it.'

‘Good. Well, that is something, at least.' She sips her tea and we sit in silence. ‘How is the sultan?' I ask after a long while.

‘Ismail is Ismail, but in a worse temper than usual. He sent Zina away last night without touching her. That's a first.'

‘He has not asked for me?'

‘He has not mentioned you to me.'

‘But who is keeping the couching book for him? Who is tasting his food?'

‘Do not torment yourself so,' she says, and rises to go.

‘Will no one intercede for me? You know I am innocent of the charge.'

‘When did innocence save anyone? Knowledge is far more useful.'

‘Indeed. I would not wish to be tortured,' I say suddenly, made bold by desperation. ‘For fear of what I might say, about my reasons for visiting Sidi Kabour.'

She laughs then. ‘Oh, Nus-Nus, show a little fortitude, a little Senufo spirit.'

And then she taps the door and the guard lets her out into the light and takes me back to the darkness. I am so caught up in my own thoughts that I eat mindlessly, like an animal, when they bring food. Forgetting that there may be stones in the barley bread, I bite down hard and crack a grinding tooth, and thus have a new woe to think upon.

The next day the guard comes for me again. ‘You're suddenly very popular,' he leers. I know something is up when he brings me a bucket of cold water, a handful of olive paste for soap and a knotted rag with which to
clean myself in the corridor outside. I turn away, trying for some degree of modesty, but he just laughs. ‘I've seen all sorts in here: nothing shocks me.'

Even so, his eyes fix themselves curiously on my crotch as I strip, but when I straighten and stare him in the eye he looks away. I wash and put on the clean linen breeches and long grey tunic he gives me.