by Hana Cole
‘I can try and help you get a job with my master if you want, but you must promise not to run away.’
And with that Daniel stoops down and hoists up his burdens, muscles bulging as he walks off into the glaring sunlight.
‘Wait!’ Etienne cries out, but the Mamluk’s manservant does not turn around.
‘Daniel!’ he screams. His insides are squirming. He feels utterly bereft, like a small child who looks up from his game to find he is alone. He had convinced himself that Daniel and he were going to find a way out of this together. He has no plan for this - adrift, rudderless in this teaming, hostile city. Strange brown faces stare at him as they pass by, and his ears ring with the harsh, guttural tones of the Arab bargain hunters.
‘We can’t just abandon them,’ he sobs into his hands. ‘We just can’t.’
His head feels so heavy now he can hardly hold it upright. He feels sick with hunger and with fatigue. Behind the tailors’ shops there is a big pile of off-cut material. It calls to him, an enticing refuge from this sea of disillusion. With barely a glance to check if the coast is clear, he nestles down into it until he can no longer see out.
Drifting off to the buzz of the day’s trade, Etienne falls into a daydream about stealing rose perfume. He will steal and bottle and send it, unmarked, to Adamadia. She will know it is from him, of course. He pictures her face, broad with delight, hand on her racing heart. It will be the best and most daring thing she has ever heard of. News will pass around the governor’s palace quicker than a forest fire. The boys will be so jealous. They will do their best to pretend it isn’t a big thing, but secretly they will be wishing it had been them with such courage. It will be the talk among the servants of the palace for years to come, for sure.
Cocooned in the folds of cotton and linen, his eye catches on one of the patterns cushioning him. Black, red and orange flowers swirl against a white background, intertwining, then separating back into their distinct forms. Round and round they wheel, tumbling through the drowsy corridors of Etienne’s mind, until the pattern becomes a mosaic on the palace floor, the one in the main reception hall with long vines wrapped around a hunting scene. A perfectly manicured pair of feet pad silently over the tiny tiles, and then, there is only the deepest sleep.
*
‘Seize him!’
Etienne jolts awake. He can hear angry voices approaching and he knows their wrath is directed at him. He jumps up from his makeshift bed, fighting the urge to look back and see how close they are. What an idiot to fall asleep right there in the market where the servants of the governor’s household come every day. Curse it. Curse everything, he thinks as he scrabbles out of the fabric tendrils. Please God, Please Allah, don’t let them get me.
He scuttles from the rows of market stalls where there are too many locals willing to stick out their hand and grab hold of a runaway slave for the governor’s pleasure. Across the open ground by the Coptic church and into the maze of backstreets that make up the old medina he flees, ever more like a rabbit trying to bob and twist its way out of the fox’s path.
He runs and runs. His lungs burn, his tongue aches for water and his legs feel as flimsy as a newborn foal. Dimly aware that he has no idea where he is, he takes each turn as it presents itself, skipping over doorsteps and the legs of beggars, scampering over low walls, through courtyards and even through a lean-to hut that turns out to be someone’s house. It is only when he rounds a corner, heart strained to breaking point, and sees the same sycamore and the wide open square, that he realises he has run himself in a circle back to the church of the Copts.
Both the men chasing him are waiting. One is the eunuch who looks after the governor’s harem and the other is Abubakr’s right-hand man, a stick of a man with big horse teeth who sprays spit when he speaks. Through the sweaty film that stings his eyes, Etienne makes out a third man who has caught up with them; Abubakr himself. His eyes dart in every direction. There must be a way out, an exit not covered. Please God, show me which way to go.
‘The love of Christ needs no sharp blades.’
Panic coursing in his veins, Etienne almost doesn’t hear the voice straining above the bustle of the square. It is only as he hovers in indecision, his breath catching up with him, that his surroundings cease to be a blur and he realises he is listening to the French of the Chartrain. He spins round. Despite his predicament, the men closing down on him, the inevitable capture and beating, he can’t run now. He screams out.
‘Jean! Over here! Jean!’
The small figure standing before the church ceases his sermon and looks over.
‘It’s me. Etienne. Over here!’
The eunuch arrives between Etienne and the French preacher. Etienne sizes up a route. Maybe I can dodge him, he thinks. God will clear a path. He races towards the church. All three of the governor’s men are tightening the circle they have made around him, shouting out to each other.
‘Jean! It’s me!’ Etienne yells.
The preacher peers at him as he draws closer. Etienne sees his lips move in a whisper. The eunuch is upon him now. Etienne ducks his first lunge, and runs wide. The eunuch makes another grab for Etienne from behind. Etienne thrashes and writhes but the other men are upon him too. He is about ten feet from the boy now - the withered leg, those pale grey eyes. His heart soars and despite his hopeless predicament he begins to laugh.
‘The governor’s palace!’ Etienne screeches as they drag him away. ‘Come to the palace. It’s me. Etienne. Remember?’
The last thing Etienne sees as he is hauled away is the diminutive figure with the translucent eyes raise a cautious hand and make the sign of the cross.
*
Etienne doesn’t know what is worse, the pain of the beating itself or the example that is being made of him in front of all the other boys. They all feel sorry for him, he knows that, but he also knows that from now on, no matter what happens, they will never be able to look him in the eye without remembering this moment. Even if he ever manages to escape again and even if Adamadia comes with him, there will always be this. The moment he failed. Failed in front of all these people.
When he was small, he had been playing with some older village boys and as he chased one of them into his house, the boy had slammed the door on his hand. It was an accident, but he knew from the searing hot pain and the blood smearing the doorframe that it was bad. He had been so desperate for them not to think of him as a cry baby that he bit down on his cheek so hard it took weeks for the ulcer to heal. He had managed it though, all the way back through the village and across the field to his house. He opened the door, still chewing on his mouth and telling himself to be brave. Then his mother had looked up and there was something about her face, the way she was looking at him. ‘Oh my poor baby, what have you done?’ He couldn’t help it, he had started to sob.
And now, as he is released from the whipping post, he prays to God not to cry as he is led back along the corridor lined with the pity-filled faces of his friends. But all he can think of is his mother’s face, so sad for him. She is the only person in the world who has ever felt his sadness as her own. Who probably ever will. He bites down hard on the inside of his cheek, just as he had done then, but he cannot stop the tears squeezing from his eyes. He clamps his lips shut, determined not to make any sound, so maybe people won’t remember it so badly.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The basket weavers’ stalls were on the corner of the square, shaded by the same sycamore that gave shelter to a Coptic church. Gui gave a wry smirk. Is this how God answers a beggar on his knees? He thought as he crossed over to the shop fronts, their thresholds covered with nimbly-wound trays, spiral-lidded pots, loop-handled infant cribs.
He was expecting a small man-boy, but Tariq the eunuch was ageing, and he carried a perfectly rounded pot belly on the jewelled waist of his pantaloons. It was hard to picture him as a friend of Yalda, sipping mint tea in an elegant harem, but circumstance often made unlikely allies. When Gui told him w
ho he was, the man was polite but nervous. His keen smile belied by the way his shoulders drew away from Gui and his eyes refused direct contact, preferring to hover at the entrance of his stall where a young boy sat braiding long reeds into baskets.
Tariq worked as a clerk in the main slave market, he explained. Hundreds of slaves came through the market, all documented; the weight, height, provenance and condition of the merchandise, the price paid and the name of the owner. If Gui’s son has passed through the market between October and November as he believed, then his sale would be recorded in one of the ledgers.
At a cost of the remainder of Gui’s coins, Tariq said he would leave the door to the administrator’s room unlocked that night and the ledgers on his desk in the far left hand corner of the room. Guards patrolled the Treasury next door, as money was held there overnight. It would be to Gui’s skill to take what he needed undetected. The ledgers, of course, were in Arabic. Gui could tell from his apologetic shrug, that the eunuch was offering no further assistance.
Gui meant to head directly back to his room after the meeting but the ground of Coptic church, sticky with sap from the tree, halted him. Pausing, he could not help but wonder at the interior, the cool, silent wood. Outside there was a boy bent down to drink at the fountain. His skin was light brown. Gui narrowed his eyes against the light trying to determine if the skin was naturally brown or a white skin, darkened by the sun. Still stung by his encounter with the young European slave, he watched as the boy wiped his mouth and hobbled on.
Hovering by the church’s porch, Gui wondered if someone would hear confession. Did they hold the same Hours as he once had? His feet felt glued to the stone. The power of consolation wrestled with shame at his appearance. The fine velvets of Zonta’s clothes were worn and dirtied from his journey. He looked exactly as he was – a world weary outlaw with nothing in his purse and nowhere left to turn. How different a welcome might he receive were he to step through the threshold as a cleric of Rome? He pulled his hand over his face, admonishing his vanity, and shouldered open the door.
Cool air and frankincense bathed his face. It roused the most terrible longing to be standing in his church at Montoire, rosary in his hand, knowing for certain that there was redemption in suffering. He approached the iconostasis. It was decorated with the abstract geometry of foreign meditations, not the unforgiving eyes of ancient martyrs. First he knelt, then he touched his forehead to the ground at the crossing.
‘Christ. God incarnate. Pardon this sinner.’
The relief that soaked through him felt like a sin. He felt like a drunkard, lips touching a long-denied draught. Heart cramped with conflict, he rose to find himself under the gaze of a priest whose eyes looked right through to everything - the black eyes of the ancient martyrs.
‘What are you seeking, brother?’
Gui put his hand to his head as he stood, dizzied by the great, domed vaults, the vibrant arcs of coloured light at the windows. For a moment he thought he might vomit.
Then he said, ‘My name is Gui. I am an ordained priest of the Holy Catholic Church. I was a canon of the Cathedral of Chartres, exiled to a small parish because I freed a woman, falsely accused of heresy. She is the mother of my son. For ten years I lived in the betrayal of my parish as I did of my own family. My son joined a crusade and has been brought here by slavers. I don’t know if I have forfeited the salvation of my soul but I cannot, will not, see my son forfeit his for my crimes. If it is anyway in your power to assist me in this, then I beg you now, in the name of God’s love, do so.’
The priest listened unblinking as Gui told his tale - his grim discovery of the slave ship at Corsica, how he chased it to Alexandria, his encounter with Yalda and the eunuch who directed him to the slave markets. For what seemed like an eternity the priest stared, saying nothing, until Gui became aware that the only thing reflected in those pitch black eyes was the guilt he harboured in his own soul - his own worst judgement of himself. Once Gui had seen his devil, the priest spoke.
‘Return here with the ledgers from the market tonight. I will read you the Arabic.’
Gui fortified his stomach with a carafe of date wine, arriving at the market in the long hours of night. A pair of guards stood outside the treasury entrance just as Tariq had said. Every half an hour one of them made a tour of the building. In time, with his colleague mid-way through his tour, the remaining guard sloped off for an inevitable piss.
Walking swift and light, Gui entered the building, footsteps echoing through the corridors. The auction room with its rows of benches and horseshoe dais shimmered empty and innocuous in a flood of moonlight. It could have been a theatre. Time pressing at his chest, Gui slipped behind the dais. There were two corridors. To the right were the administrator’s offices, the airy salons where the wealthy were tended to away from the sweaty chaos of the main market. To the left, a narrower passageway wound back to the tradesmen’s entrance; the pitch dark corridor through which the human merchandise was funnelled for sale.
Gui paused, momentarily transfixed by the gloom. He reached out to the wall for support, fighting the imperative to inch his way along that corridor so he might walk on the same dirt as his son and inhale the same fetid air, just as he had on that boat at Corsica. Although he could barely admit it to himself, there was an unquiet corner of his heart that needed to check his son was not still cowering in some filthy, forgotten room, waiting for the hand of God to deliver. Both hands pressing against the wall, he let his head hang down heavy on his neck. Etienne is gone from here and so will your chance to find him if you don’t hasten, he scolded, then turning his back on his guilt, he stole towards the offices.
The door to the administrator’s room was unbolted, as the eunuch had promised. Gui grabbed all four of the hide-bound ledgers on the desk. Unbolting the wooden shutters, he threw the ledgers out in front of him and was gone before the guard came round to complete another tour.
The Coptic priest flared a torch over the table and searched the scrolls with his Hellfire eyes.
‘This one.’ Gui’s intuition guided him to the tenth month of the previous year. Lists of names. Endless lists. Etienne, if he were even among them, would be near impossible to identify. Gui watched over the priest’s shoulder as he read out the descriptions one by one, and shook his head to each. When they had done it a hundred times over, the bell sounded out some minor Hour of the night.
‘Go to your prayers. Please,’ he said to the priest. ‘I have seen enough to recognise the words I need.’
Gui scrutinised every entry with burning eyes, as desperate to read a description that might match Etienne’s as he was terrified. November. He tried to remember where he had been. Aboard a boat? Already in Alexandria looking up at the stars, wondering if Etienne and Agnes were seeing the same heaven?
He turned another sheet and recognised one word, copied out a dozen times - Origin : France. His hand shook as he scanned, right to left, finger wavering beneath the ornate cursive. Could it be? His heart was thudding high in his chest even before he finished reading: Male, Twelve years, Blond, Good health, Literate. Gui closed his eyes and rested his face on the page. The pulse at his solar plexus told him without doubt it was his son.
‘Etienne.’ He re-traced the entry with his fingertips as though he were touching his child. Good health. His eyes moistened. The dreamed-of euphoria at proof of his son’s life locked fingers with the dread fist of all the cruelty he had witnessed. He looked back down at the ledger, needing to reassure himself it was as he thought. Two more words jumped from the page: 12 dinar. He reeled backwards, body shaking, and for the first time in his life, he invoked the Devil.
The pressure of the priest’s hand on his shoulder made him flinch.
‘I am so ashamed I let this happen,’ he whispered. ‘He doesn’t even know I am his father.’
The priest peered over the ledger, then turned his eyes onto Gui. There was no judgement but neither was there pardon.
‘He was sold to t
he slave master in the household of the governor Al Kamil here in Cairo,’ he said. ‘He has been lucky.’
Chapter Twenty-eight
The sun had shone in a cloudless sky, but now its rays fell below the treetops, the temperature was dropping fast. A figure hastened along the path, a shadow in the gloaming. Agnes caught the motion from the corner of her eye just as she was about to lock up for the night.
‘I am Octavia, a novice with the Benedictine Sisters of Blessed Virgin at Houx,’ the nun said, eyes hunting fretfully. Framed by her wimple, the timid face was still plump with youth, belying the austerity of her black and white uniform.
Agnes’s heart skipped. ‘Near Maintenon?’
The girl nodded quickly, as though acknowledging some indiscretion it were better not to dwell on.
‘Lady Yolande de Coucy sent me.’ Retrieving a scroll from her satchel, the nun extended it stiffly; a mission accomplished.
Agnes let out an audible gasp. Weeks had gone by, rolling back the winter darkness, and she had pushed the flicker of hope that was Lady Yolande from her mind. Now though, as she heard the name again, she felt a corner of her heart lift. I told you so. Neat and concise, the letter was a commendation of Sister Octavia, and an thickly-veiled offer of help.
Agnes studied the girl before her. Her menses can not have long begun. To charge such a young girl with such a task? Responding to the scrutiny, Octavia said,
‘My sister Isobel was Lady de Coucy’s chambermaid.’ She gave a fragile smile, and Agnes could tell there was a story too difficult to begin.
Agnes threw a handful of camomile into the pot that swung over the hearth, and ladled out a draught for the girl. Red-raw fingers pressed around the wooden cup, the nun took a cautious sip. Eyeing her host from over the rim, she put Agnes in mind of the deer, eyes glinting in the woods, whenever she put out food for them. How still she had to stand, how patient, before they would trot forward.