The Family Tree (7 page)

M
y father, Halfnose Nazir (so called because the sultan’s nose was the proper length for a nose, and anything less could be called only a half nose) owned our house near the palace. It stood on Peacock Alley, a twisting line of cobble too narrow for more than slender persons and very small beasts, a corridor that wound its way among houses and shops to the intersection with the wider avenue. The only part of our house that was visible was the grilled balcony that hung over the alley and the high wall set with a gate, its tiny window covered by a grill. Inside was a flowery courtyard, with a fountain and chicken coops and the kitchen and a flight of stairs leading up to the grilled balcony and the living rooms and then on up to the roof, which was hidden from other rooftops by vine-covered trellises. I was born there, and I lived there in considerable freedom, often accompanying my father to the marketplace when he went to procure produce for the sultan, or for the regent, Great-tooth the Mighty.

My mother, so my father said, liked to think of herself as highly bred. In Tavor, this meant that females did not risk encounters with lesser peoples by leaving their homes. My father was amused by it, I was usually irritated, because people had to do all the shopping for her and no matter what father and I bought at the market, she complained. Except for an occasional trip to grandfather’s farm, mother stayed in the house, in the courtyard beside the fountain, or in the grilled balcony that overlooked the modest traffic of the alley, or on the roof sometimes, with the caged birds and the vines, where she had a view of the more crowded avenue. She slept a lot. Sometimes I thought she was just lazy.

I was not always angry with Mother, however, for she was very pretty and she told lovely stories. It was she who taught me to read, with me curled on her bed holding the book and she at her dressing table, taking the jewels from her ears and fingers, dropping them into a china dish with a soft clinking sound before beginning to brush her hair. The sound of that clinking and the soft wisp of the hairbrush brings her back to me, even now.

I remember her stories. I remember her voice. She told me once that words were mysteries, that each time she spoke they flew from her mouth like butterflies that had hatched beneath her tongue, leaving her with no idea how they came there. “Do you ever feel that, Nassifeh?” she asked me. “That our words are not our own, that they were given to us by someone…someone else?”

I told her of course they had, by our parents and they by their parents, but this was not what she meant. “Why should this be
hairbrush
?” she asked. “Why should it not be
amthrup
? It could as well be. Who decided upon
hairbrush
?”

I thought about it, then told her that if each of us decided on our own words for things, we would not be able to speak together.

“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “I meant that some words feel very strange in my mouth, as though
they were not born there. As though my word would have been a different one.”

I never figured out what she meant.

My father enjoyed working for Sultan Tummyfat, so he always told us, but when the sultan went away for a while and Great-tooth took the regency, my father quit talking about his work. He said nothing either good or bad about the regent, except once I heard him muttering to himself, a growl in which he uttered the regent’s name like a curse.

The worst day of my life was my tenth birthday. Mother gave me a new mantle, and father gave me a treasure box and invited me to go to the market with him. I put on the mantle, put the treasure box deep into the pocket, and off we went to the fruiterers lane, stopping at the booths run by various peoples from various lands, armakfatidi and pheledas and kasturi. The fruiterers market smelled of ocris and oranges, dawara and dates, mangoes and marvellos, and the vendors always gave me bits to taste while Father haggled over prices and qualities and arranged for baskets, sacks, and boxes to be delivered to the kitchens of the sultan. Father was chewing a dried apricot with an expression of concentration on his face when the pheled guards came out of nowhere, seized him up, then seized me up as well when I shouted and ran after Father. The guards took us to the palace. Great-tooth was seated beneath the canopy of justice, like a toad under a leaf, the crier beside him trumpeting words of accusation—so I learned later. At the time, I had no idea what was going on. The executioner was waiting beside the block, all his teeth showing in a ferocious grin, and Father had not even time to claim innocence before his head was off. I started to run to him, only to scramble frantically away again at the smell of the blood, the horror of the severed head, while all the time Great-tooth merely stared at me as though I had been a bug of some kind.

The guards caught me and took me to the harimlek,
the female part of the palace, where they turned me over to old Bluethumb.

“Where do you live, child?” she asked me.

Between sobs and screams, I told the old one where I lived, and Bluethumb, after some conversation with this one and that one, sent me home with a guard. When we got there, the house was torn all apart and Mama’s body was lying in the courtyard, all broken from falling off the roof.

Later I was told that the news of Father’s execution had come quickly, and Mama had feared death less than she’d feared the torturers. Great-tooth had been known to kill one member of a family and then torture the others to death to amuse himself. Guards had come to search the house, as well, but that had been after Mama was dead.

The guard who took me home was bored, but kind.

“Gather up what you want to take with you,” he said. “You can’t stay here alone. I’ll take you back to Bluethumb.”

What was there to take? What I had on my back; what I could find among the clutter of the looted house. My other clothing. My books. There had been other, more valuable things in the house, but someone had already stolen them, and it wasn’t much of a bundle that I carried back to the harim.

“What did my father do?” I begged, the tears coursing down my cheeks.

“Great-tooth said something was stolen,” said Bluethumb. “We don’t know what. Something important, something secret.”

“My house was all messed up,” I cried. “Did they find whatever was taken?”

“Not that I know of, child. And that’s all anyone knows.”

And that was the only answer I ever got. They looked for my half brother in the neighborhood where he lived, but he had fled, with his wife and child. After a few days, Bluethumb told me I’d been purchased as a slave,
by the harim-masters, the eunuchs Soaz and Barfor.

“Who sold me?” I asked. “I belonged to Mother and Father. They were dead, they couldn’t sell me!”

Bluethumb didn’t know who’d sold me, though she’d seen the paper right enough, in the eunuch’s office. “Don’t worry over it, child. If you are the property of the sultan, no one will fool with you. It’ll keep you safe.”

Which was more or less true. They put me to work in the kitchen at first, scrubbing vegetables—which were never clean enough for the armakfatidi. Furthermore, the armakfatidi bothered me, even after I got to the point I didn’t tremble and squeak every time one of them grummeled at me. Eventually, I even learned to understand them, which, though I didn’t know it, was a rare talent, indeed.

Then, when Bluethumb found I could sew—Mother had also taught me how to sew—they put me with the chattery seamstresses, hemming veils and learning embroidery, then, when some of the concubines heard me telling stories to the stitchers, they brought me into the harim itself as a fetcher and carrier, mender of mantles and cooker of snacks. The concubines were plump and lazy (as the sultan preferred), while I was stringy and active. Also, I knew how to read Tavorian, which most Tavorians did not. Though there were few books in the harim, songs and love poems and such sappy stuff, Bluethumb had a brother working in the salamlek, on the other side of the great metal gate, and he brought books from the sultan’s library, books I wrapped in clean linen and read secretly and returned timely so no one even knew they were gone. I read everything! Even the great history of Tavor, the
Almost Three Years of Bedtimes
, where all our customs and costumes are set out, just as they have always been.

Everything I read or heard was grist for the story mill, tales and facts to be reworked and twisted and made to fit into the kind of romances the harim enjoyed: deathless love between male and female, one of each, unlikely
though that was. And adventure stories, where the princess dressed up as a boy and traveled far away. And stories about lands where females ruled, and all the males were conquered and locked up in cages. Once after I told that kind of tale, the harim decided to act it out—theatricals being one of their chief amusements—and at Sultana Winetongue’s bidding even a few of the eunuchs helped, playing the parts of the terrible males who got locked up forever.

I had just turned ten when I came. I was well past my fifteenth birthday when I was summoned by the sultan. Almost six years. There was little evidence of it when it came to pack. Anything I’d gained in the last six years was in my head, mystery and marvel and adventure from all those years of reading. My actual belongings made no larger a bundle than when I came.

The morning of departure came, sooner than I had thought possible early in the night when I’d lain sleepless, wondering how it would all happen, too excited and fearful to believe I would ever sleep. Still, sleep I had, and the birds nestled in the fretwork were just beginning their drowsy comments on the day when my eyes popped open like squeezed pea pods and I staggered to my feet trying dazedly to remember why I was getting up at all. The memory came quickly enough when I tripped over the bundle I’d packed the night before—after the other slaves in the room were asleep, as they still were.

The bundle made only a light burden for one hand. I pushed open the door with the other, shutting it softly behind me. Then was only a quick stop at the midden, a scuttle down a long corridor, past the kitchens, down a short side hall, up a full flight to the courtyard level, down another corridor, and there was the courtyard itself, with the pool and the fountain and some bent old person I had never seen before going from flowerpot to flowerpot with a watering bucket and ladle. Frowsea was waiting at the foot of the private stairs, and on the sultana’s balcony a set of clothes was laid out: full trou
sers and flowing shirt of white cotton, leather boots, a much-pocketed sleeveless vest of thick blue cotton, embroidered all down the front, a brightly striped woven belt, and a full-length cotton coat vertically striped red and blue and black. In addition I was given a white muslin head scarf with black-braided, gold-mounted cord and a plain black woolen mantle, which could be fastened on the shoulder with a golden pin, the head of a kanna, baying.

The sultana was nowhere in evidence. It was Frowsea who instructed me: “You and I are ponjic, girl. So far as the sultan’s folk are concerned, our tribe is a lesser people. Except for one or two of the animal handlers, you’ll be the only free ponja traveling in a largely scuinic-pheledian troop. Be careful to behave suitably, with modesty. So long as you have on trousers, shirt and headdress, you’re decently dressed. Never take off the shirt or the trousers, not unless you’re in a room by yourself or are readying for sleep. Only slaves and lesser servants expose their bodies. Free males cover themselves, no matter what tribe they are from. Well, unless they’re with a suitable female….”

“The prince knows who I am….”

“The others may not. And travelers meet up with other travelers. If you’re going as a ponjic boy, sort of a companion for the prince, try to act like a boy. What did you bring with you?”

I opened my bundle to display the few small books and several treasures, including my father’s last gift, the ebony treasure box with the hidden drawer under the false bottom. The box held sewing implements, and, in the hidden drawer, the gems the sultana had given me. Aside from these there was only my underwear, stockings and the pair of sandals I had on. Frowsea quickly added all the clothing that had been tried on the day before.

“That’s all,” said Frowsea, as she tightened the pack with great vigor. “Plus this letter, from the sultana to her son.”

“Can’t she write to him anytime?”

“Of course. Or see him, when he’s well enough to come here. But she hasn’t wanted him to come here, for fear someone here may be doing him harm. She hasn’t wanted to send letters for fear the letter carrier might be part of the conspiracy. She feels he will be safer without any touch of the harim.”

It seemed overly careful to me, though, to hear the females talk, it was perfectly possible to put a curse on a letter, or to kill with a glance. Curses were very powerful, if one had skill at it. Of course, some people could lay curses every day in the month and not raise a pimple.

I was given no time to consider the matter. Once I was dressed and the pack was strapped up, Soaz appeared like a jinni out of nothing, picked up the pack and told me to come along. We went down another way, rather than through the courtyard, and old Bluethumb was waiting by the last gate.

“Well, now,” she said, taking me by the shoulders and looking me up and down. “Don’t you look like a proper adventurer. All you need is a scimitar.”

I shuddered. I’d only seen a scimitar used once, by the executioner who cut off Father’s head, and I had no wish whatsoever to use one myself. Bluethumb was busy hugging me, however, and did not notice the shudder.

“You’ll keep your mouth shut if you know what’s good for you,” Soaz growled at the old one.

“Don’t be so puffed up, Soaz! I’ve kept it shut about more than this, I’ll have you know. Besides, better there’s someone to say she saw the girl go off to her brother. That way there’ll be no talk. No one’s interested in her brother, after all.”

Soaz grunted, rather like a poked guz, and unlocked the final gate, not the one made of great wooden planks with iron studs all over it and hinges forged in the shape of curly spears, but the little one set in at the side, only big enough for one person. He cracked it just wide enough for us to edge through, as though he was afraid
some harim air might escape, then shut and locked it behind us.