Sultan's Wife (51 page)

‘I … ah … did see Nus-Nus drink a g-glass of wine,' he manages to get out, rolling his eyes like an Eid sheep. ‘And … ah …' He tries to recall some other peccadillo against the precepts of Islam, something incriminatory but not too serious. ‘And … ah, the Kaid Mohammed b-ben Hadou … ah … had his p-portrait p-painted.'

‘Twice,' Rafik adds spitefully.

‘Twice,' Sharif concurs.

‘Son of a dog!' He pushes the kaid aside and launches himself at ben Hadou, who puts up his hands to ward off the sultan's frenzy. ‘The word of Allah forbids the making of images! You shall die for bringing this shame down upon me, the Champion of Islam, the Defender of the Faith!' He stabs the Tinker in the leg, and ben Hadou falls to the floor with a shriek. For a moment there is a lull, as if Ismail's sudden bloodlust may have been satisfied, then he shouts for his guards. ‘Take them all to the lion enclosure!'

I had thought I did not care whether I lived or died. But when you are trapped in a pit with seven hungry lions circling and the prospect of being torn apart and eaten alive, it is rather a different matter.

‘Keep together!' ben Hadou tells us. I have bound my turban around his thigh, but he is already weak from blood loss. ‘If we get separated it will make it easy for them to take us one by one. Throw sand at them, rocks, pebbles – anything you can find.'

‘Throw
him
at the lions!' Samir Rafik cries, gesturing at Sharif, who is clearly going to be of no use in repulsing giant predators, the sight of them having rendered him immobile, huge-eyed and practically dead of terror. ‘That'll keep them busy for a while.'

For a heartbeat it seems as if the Tinker is actually considering this cruel option; then I realize his wound is slowing his thoughts almost to a standstill.

‘Wave your arms at them and yell,' I suggest, remembering what we were told as children, growing up in a region in which lions hunted prey; but that was a tactic designed to scare off a lone animal, not seven starving beasts. Still, this keeps the lions at bay for a few frantic minutes, but before too long they decide the noise poses no threat to them and begin to circle in again.

The lions of Barbary are reputed to be the heaviest and most powerful of all lions, and certainly these are monstrous-looking beasts. One might even call them handsome or even noble in different circumstances, with their massy bulk and vast black manes, their wide faces and intelligent amber eyes. It's just that for now, maddened by the smell of the kaid's blood, and no doubt deprived of food for several days, all that crafty intelligence is bent on weighing up how to worry large chunks of flesh out of us with their truly massive teeth.

It is the females who take the lead: huge tawny creatures, smooth of coat and sharp of eye. They are smaller than the two males, but what they lack in bulk and mane they more than make up for in ferocity and guile. Two feint an attack, dodging in and back out of reach, distracting us while another prowls silently behind us and, correctly assessing the victim least likely to do damage, snatches Sharif by the arm. The poor kaid howls in agony and digs his heels into the sand: but the lioness is by far the stronger. With a wrench of her great head, she drags him away, and there is nothing the rest of us can do to save him. The noise is horrible – the tearing and crunching; the screams …

Now the male lions move in and try to muscle the female out of the way, and a moment later a vicious fight breaks out. The roars of the great beasts reverberate in my breastbone as I stare about me, weighing our few options. At the edge of the enclosure is a wide ditch, full of water – too wide for the lions to leap across – and after this a tall iron fence. After discovering the ability of lions to dig after the incident in the slave matamores, and some other less successful methods, it has been determined that this is the best way to keep the beasts from getting out and ravaging the palace population,
though it mars the spectators' view of proceedings. Usually, it is just some poor, anonymous slave who gets thrown to the lions; that it should be four prominent members of the returning English embassy means that the event has drawn quite a crowd. They are all crammed up against the fence – people I have known for years: palace functionaries, guards, stablemen, potboys and slaves; lords, merchants; as well, of course, as the blessed sultan himself and even the Empress Zidana and her sons – waiting for us to die. Watching poor Sharif being torn limb from limb with expressions of rapt avidity that make me feel quite sick.

‘Quickly, make for the ditch!' I say to ben Hadou, calculating that our chances against lions on solid ground are likely to be significantly smaller than they may be in the chancy waters of the moat.

Desperation lends him strength: together we race across the pit, the Tinker's arm draped across my shoulders for support. We make it to the ditch before the lions give up their tussle over what is left of the kaid, and Rafik and I both thrash our way across the ditch to the fence. With my hand wrapped around an iron post, I hazard a look back, to see ben Hadou splashing and yelling wildly at a determined lioness, who has also braved the water. ‘I cannot swim!' he cries.

Rafik sneers. ‘Bad luck for you.' Then he shins his way up the iron railings and levers himself over the spikes at the top, falling to the other side scraped and bloody, but intact.

For a long moment I hesitate. I could save myself as easily as Samir Rafik has done; but seeing Kaid Sharif ripped apart by the lions has imprinted itself horribly in my memory, and I hardly knew the man; with the Tinker I have shared a great deal more, though I have not always liked him. How could I live with myself if I left him to perish in the jaws of the lioness? Besides, only an hour ago, I was wishing death would take me. Now, strangely, it comes to me that I would prefer to live, even without the White Swan in the world. Drawing deep, I summon up Senufo spirit; my mask, the kponyungu.

I failed to complete my initiation into the Poro, the secret male society that teaches the young men of the Senufo wisdom, strength and responsibility, for I was taken by the slavers in the year in which I began to learn our
rituals. But I had made the kponyungu dance, and I knew its power. In our culture the purpose of the mask is for the battling of evil, whether of this world or the next; natural or supernatural. Sometimes a mask is a passive shield, a smooth carapace to turn aside evil; but it can be an expression of utmost aggression. I conjure into my mind the powerful jaws of the crocodile, the teeth of the hyena, against which nothing can resist; I add the tusks of a warthog and the horns of the musk-ox; and between them I set the chameleon, the creature of change. As an afterthought I imagine a troop of ants marching up and over the mask with the determination of the unstoppable. With a snarl, I plunge back into the water, and unleash all the anger and fury and grief I have ever felt through the mask. This is no longer my second face; it is my own. And I am no longer Nus-Nus, half-and-half, eunuch, slave; my name is Akuji. And I am Dead, Yet Awake.

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.

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 Kaid 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.