Sultan's Wife (52 page)

‘Nss-Nss …'

‘He appears to know you,' Nathaniel says, gazing at the beggar somewhat appalled. Even London offers 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.

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.

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'.

After Ismail's death in 1727 there was an almighty succession battle amongst his surviving sons, and in a very short time the unified kingdom of Morocco fell apart in a stew of civil war and moral dissipation.

Meknes has been called a second Versailles. Moulay Ismail and Louis XIV shared a fervour for building as well as for power, and both were passionately involved in the construction of their respective palaces. Versailles may not have been built with slave-labour, but Louis was heedless of the lives and safety of his workmen. In the bitter winter of 1685 there were almost forty thousand men working on the site, despite the terrible cold and the ravages of disease, and many of them died. Of course, the fate of the thousands of slaves at Meknes was even more terrible. But where Versailles was symmetrical, ordered, elegant, the palace complex at Meknes, with its fifty connected palaces, mosques, courtyards, barracks and parks, was vast and rambling in its ever-shifting design, as walls and pavilions were constructed, then demolished, at the arbitrary whim of its creator.

His successors continued with his building programme, but in 1755 the shocks of the huge Lisbon earthquake, which is believed to have reached a magnitude of 9.0 on the Richter scale, severely damaged the site, reducing to rubble in minutes what had taken many decades and thousands of lives to create. Of Ismail's madly ambitious project, only his extraordinary mausoleum, parts of the Dar Kbira, the vast granary, some of the outer walls and the city gates remain. Despite this, the ruins are well worth visiting to gain a sense of the sheer scale of the sultan's megalomania.

Charles II had no legitimate children. But records show he engendered somewhere between a dozen and fourteen illegitimate offspring, and very likely there were others who did not survive or who were not recognized. Wherever he was billeted during the long years of his exile before the Restoration in 1660, he sowed his seed: from Jersey in 1646, to The Hague
in 1649, from Paris in 1650 to Bruges in 1656. Alys Swann is a fictional character; but Moulay Ismail is reputed to have had at least one and maybe two English wives with whom he was much enamoured, one of whom died (or disappeared) and another, later than my Alys, who gave birth to a son who was designated an accredited heir, also by the name of Mohammed (although it must be said that Mohammed is the preferred name of first sons in Morocco).

The Moroccan embassy of 1682 arrived in London in January under the command of Mohammed ben Hadou Ottur, sometimes known as ‘the Tinker'. The almost-seven-month visit is well documented in the records of the day, and is particularly colourfully described in the diary of John Evelyn, who writes that ben Hadou was ‘the fashion of the season'. The ambassador had his portrait painted twice, both by anonymous artists. One of these handsome portraits can be found in the archives of the National Portrait Gallery in London.