The Mer- Lion (49 page)

For a woman used to the free life of the Berbers, the very thought of confinement in a seraglio was distasteful. But the reality was worse even than her imaginings. The harem quarters just beyond the court of the black eunuchs had been left to deteriorate as the former Moulay, growing senile, lost his lust for life. The rooms smelted dank, unused; the tapestries and wall hangings had grown moldy; dust and spider webs were everywhere; mice had made nests within the couches, their droppings covered the rugs. The grounds were even worse. The gardens were forests of weeds. The fountains had fallen over while the catchpools, green with scum, now hummed as fertile breeding places for mosquitoes.

As she stood, dismayed at her surroundings, she heard screams in the background. Retracing her steps, she flung the harem doors open only to find her way barred by guards. The screams, torn from many male throats, rose and fell and stopped and started anew. Hastily
closing the doors, she fled into the garden and there, burying her face in her robes, tried to keep out the sounds of her husband's handiwork.

The Moulay had issued orders that no male relative of his was to live past noon that day. Throughout the length and breadth of the palace and the city, soldiers of the new monarch sought out and slew royal brothers, uncles, and cousins.

One of the younger uncles had had the resourcefulness to make his way to the harem wing. Dashing past the startled guards, he ran through the rooms to the gardens. There, ignoring the startled woman, he flung himself at the stone wall. He had almost scaled it when he was hauled down by his pursuers and hacked to pieces before her eyes. As the coup de grace, one of the soldiers skewered on his scimitar the sighdess head, tongue lolling from its gaping mouth. They would have left the headless, twitching remains behind, but the queen blocked their path.

"I could have you beheaded for entering my quarters," she reminded them. "But I see the blood-lust upon you, and you are not yourselves. I shall forget I have seen you, but first get that wretched thing out of here. Now! Go!"

Suddenly aware of where they were and who she was, the soldiers quickly grabbed the royal relative by its heels and dragged it out, its neck spitting a trail of blood behind it.

Thus were Tunis and its queen introduced to their new Moulay. When the slaughter was over, the heads were brought before him as he sat on his throne at the head of the marble stairs in the Court of the Stone Lions. There, one by one, each head was displayed and identified, its owner's name checked off on a scroll. Then, the head was added to the stack in the center of the courtyard.

When the last head was placed on this pyramid of staring eyes, protruding tongues, and hideously distorted faces, the heap of human heads towered above the Moulay's own. The flies buzzed about the drying blood clinging to flesh and bone. The Moulay Hassan, his feet shuffling in the pool of blood that was spreading on the courtyard tiles, slowly circled the heap, talking first to one and then another of his dead relatives.

His ghastly one-way conversation with the heads was interrupted by a slave, carrying a small casket. Kneeling before the Moulay, the
slave opened it. Within was the still sweet-smelling head of his father, the Moulay Hamid.

"Ah, there you are," cooed the Moulay. "The party would not have been complete without old father himself, now would it?" Reaching out, he stroked its cheek, recoiling as the flesh fell away from the skull. At the Moulay's direction, the slave carefully removed the skull and placed it at the very top of the pyramid of heads.

The new Moulay giggled with delight and demanded an accounting of the slaughter. "One hundred forty,
jalala al-malik"
murmured the gray-bearded recorder of the scroll.

"Speak up,-man," shrieked the Moulay. "How many?"

"One hundred forty."

"You needn't shout, man, my head can still hear
...
unlike those over there." The Moulay snickered. Then a new thought struck him. "Including the Moulay Hamid or not?"

"No,
jalala al-malik,
not including him. I did not think to count him."

"But you should have. He, too," the Moulay giggled, "was a relative. The closest relative I had. And he is dead along with all the others. But I live! And no one"—he looked about him—"no one will ever tell me what to do again."

He returned to his skull pyramid, pulling a tongue here, pushing an eye out there. Then his voice dropped as he confided in his dead relatives, "I would have destroyed the Prince's Cage, you know, but I may have need for it. A thing grows in my queen's womb, and if it is a boy—" He had no need to finish. Everyone knew what he meant.

And as is the way with courts and courtiers, the queen sequestered in her harem back in Tunis was informed of his every word, and especially what was implied as the fate of her child if a male.

The queen's duty to tribe, country, and husband dictated she produce a boy. So she slept with a sword under her bed, ate only the flesh of male animals, drank no milk (which is the fruit of the female), and put aside her silky garments in favor of the heavy wool robes of a man. Even though she did all these things, she could not discipline her thoughts. And they dwelled on having a daughter.

When the midwife, crouched low beside the birthing chair, caught
the bloodied body of the babe and began to moan, the queen knew her prayers were answered. The babe was female. The child was named Aisha, after the favorite wife of Mohammed, Messenger of God, to whom the queen had prayed.

"I name you also Kahina after your Berber ancestress, the princess-prophetess, who drove the Arabs out of Carthage centuries ago. May you, my daughter, do the same."

The Moulay neither came to see the babe nor even acknowledged formally that there was a child. Abhored and ignored by her father, the little Aisha blossomed under her mother's doting care. At about three, she began to realize that she was special, a princess, a beautiful one at that, and she cajoled, charmed, and commanded her servants into allowing her a surprising degree of freedom within the palace.

By the age of six, she had the run of the Dar al Bey. No hiding place or hidden nook had escaped her notice. The servants, accustomed to seeing her run gaily up and down the corridors with her token bodyguard—patient, unintelligent, unimaginative Ahmed—in tow, seldom took notice of her comings and goings. Poor hapless Ahmed, who had trouble enough just keeping up, could not manage to keep track of where she went. Even he was forbidden to enter her favorite place, a garden just beyond the harem itself, barely within the seraglio proper, and adjacent to the long-vacated Moulay's apartments. Here, she soon discovered, she was safe from friend, slave, and even mother. No mere mortal dared enter these grounds without serious second thought, and Rami ah avoided anything to do with the Moulay as if he were leprous.

As Aisha's freedom elsewhere was curtailed and her education expanded, the garden became more and more her refuge. One day when forced to begin learning Turkish, the language of the enemy, she fled here from the harem. "Isn't it enough I know Berber and Arabic? To learn that—" She searched for an epithet and could find none apt, so spat vehemently. Absently, she began, as she often did, to tease the carp that still lived in the pool. Over the years she had with patience and instinct tempted their curiosity until the gold and red and red gold mottled fish came to explore her teasing fingertips. From there it had been a simple matter to teach them to feed from her hand. The placid things learned quickly to allow her to scratch

their shimmering bellies with one hand while they fed greedily from her other hand. Today they had only begun to eat when an enormous shadow darkened the water and sent them scurrying. Turning about, the little girl saw a short, rotund man wearing the largest turban she'd ever seen. Atop it was an even larger crimson feather that trembled in the breeze and would have wafted away but for the jewel almost as red and almost as brilliant that held it fast. The man's face, although set in a smile, troubled her. Its lips were fat, its eyes small, its chin wreathed with fat and its skin oozing perspiration. Yet - there was something about the face that was familiar, reassuring. It was this quality that misled the child.

"You charm the fish well," the man finally said.

"Better even than Ahmed, and his people were fisherfolk," she boasted.

"Ahmed?"

"My bodyguard."

"I see no one."

"He's not here. He's out there"—she gestured vaguely, sweep-ingty—"somewhere." She giggled. "Probably he's asleep."

"You should be tired, too. It's hard work coaxing the fish."

"Me, tired? Never. I could play games with the fish for hours."

He paused, irresolutely for a moment, then, unaccustomed to denying himself anything, asked, "Have you ever played Naked Frog? It's my favorite game."

"Is it fun? Would you teach me?"

"Gladly. But to learn it we must go inside."

Trustingly, the little girl placed her small hand within the pudgy grasp of her new friend and the two went inside.

Hours passed and Ramlah grew first concerned with Aisha's absence, then fearful, then hysterical. Eventually, a search turned up a sleeping Ahmed outside the entrance to the gardens of the Moulay. The gates were barred from within. Only Ramlah's tongue and the lash of the captain of her bodyguard, a Berber left behind to protect her by her father, persuaded the petrified slaves to break in. The garden was empty.

Not so the second chamber within. There on a low couch sprawled a small, still form, its clothes scattered about, its nether region splattered with gore. And glaring at the intruders from just beyond
the child was an irate, near-naked Moulay, his fat forearms resting familiarly on the naked child's chest.

Ramlah, overcome with a murderous rage that rendered her speechless, stood frozen as he screamed epithets at her, her bodyguard, and at the whole world for disturbing him at his pleasure.

It was the word pleasure that restored Ramlah's voice. "Pleasure, you say? What monarch is so sick as to seek pleasure upon his daughter's body?"

The Moulay blinked and shook his head. Then came the realization. In his quixotic impulse to taste a female after devoting himself exclusively to men for years, he'd ravished his own flesh, his own daughter, his only heir. He had enjoyed the child's resistance and enjoyed her screams, but he was not so depraved and without compunction that he could simply continue to lie there. He drew back, and Ramlah's Berber captain resolutely strode forward, picked up and carried the bloodied body of the still-unconscious child from the room. Suddenly Ramlah grew seven feet tall as she looked upon her husband with loathing. "Know you what you've done today. Incestuous monster, Mohammed—upon whom be praise—will bar you from heaven's gates. On Earth, no monarch will speak well of you; no slave give you shelter. You are mad. You have committed the unspeakable sin, you have lain with your daughter. And if you so much as speak to Aisha again, word shall reach my father. Then, once more, the Berbers shall be down upon your head, and this time they will cut off that thing you misuse so, cook it before your eyes, and stuff it down your throat! And I shall cheer them on, for you little, stupid, crazy man, you have deprived your country of a future and condemned your own line to extinction. Your daughter may rule but she is no longer a virgin and can never wed, thanks to you. Think long on that, oh Moulay Hassan, daughter-ravisher!"

She turned on her heel and left the room. Back in her own quarters, she gazed down into the unconscious face of her daughter, its pale cheeks streaked with tears and its eyes blue-shadowed. Fearfully, she patted the cheeks hoping to rouse her gently. Aisha awoke screaming. Before her eyes, Ramlah saw something flicker and die in her daughter. Aisha awoke, prematurely a woman at age six. Never again did the halls of the Dar al Bey echo to a child's carefree laughter or thoughtless giggle. With one brutal thrust, her
father had made Aisha
a
woman.' And though neither mother nor daughter spoke of what had happened behind the doors of the Moulay's apartment, every night for months, even when sleeping in her mother's arms, Aisha awoke screaming.

From that day on, she put away her dolls, her toy dishes, every reminder of eventual motherhood. Instead, she dressed like a boy and demanded she be treated as such. Particularly, she insisted that she be sent to school as if she were a prince.

At the Prince's School, maintained at the Dar al Bey as at every major Arab palace for the purpose of educating the sons of royalty and the nobility, Aisha was the only pupil. Quickly and eagerly she learned, at the feet of the wisest and most scholarly men in the land, to read, write, and speak classical languages in addition to her mother's native Berber and her father's Arabic tongues. Mathematics. Astrology. Geography. History. Aisha mastered them all, plus the languages of Tunisia's erstwhile allies, the hated Turks and despised French, taught her by slaves from those countries purchased for the purpose and later resold at the vast slave market in Tunis.

In the harem she learned to sing, to dance, to play the three-stringed guitar, to do needlework and painting, and to use cosmetics: henna to make her long, thick mane gleam like molten gold, and kohl to make her large almond-shaped eyes seem even darker and more unfathomable.

Her first visit to her mother's tribe was at age seven. There as
a
Berber princess, she was to be taught to think for herself, to hunt and shoot, to wield knife and scimitar, to ride both camel and speedy desert horses. But first, she had to live down her Arabic heritage and prove herself to her peers,
a
group of children as fair-haired as she.