People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

  “Prepare yourself,” he said, and pushed aside the curtain. I felt panic rise in me, and I backed away from him.

  “Be at peace. After this meeting, it is unlikely that we will ever see each other again. If you have questions regarding your work, matters of material or technique, you are to write to me of these things—I am right, I think, to recall that you are lettered? Most strange, in a girl—another reason we were deceived—and you are to send me, from time to time, samples of your work for review. I will reply and instruct you as best I can, and if I see areas that require improvement, I shall write of them to you. Although you are far from attaining the rank of master, you are to assume a position that normally would fall to one of such a standing. No matter your feelings toward me, do not discredit my skills, or your own. The work that we do here will live longer than any of us. Remember that. It is of far greater importance than any…personal sentiments.”

  A sob escaped me. He winced, and spoke to me coldly.

  “Do you think you are the only one brought here bound and humbled? The emira herself walked through the gates of this city in chains, driven at spear point before the warhorse of the man who became her husband.”

  He did not need to tell me this: the scandal of the emir’s beautiful captive had been the subject of salacious gossip among the preparers of the ground. Listless as I had been during those months, this story had captured my interest, for it touched on certain aspects of my own history. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion on the matter.

  Early in his rule, the emir had famously refused to pay the city’s customary tribute to the Castilians. From now on, he said, “the royal mint makes nothing but sword blades.” Constant skirmishes had been the result. In one of these engagements, the emir had ridden into a Christian hamlet and carried off the daughter of its tax collector. No one had thought anything about the emir taking spoils of war; the Prophet Muhammad himself had taken wives from among both Jews and Christians when his forces had defeated them. It was understood that captives joined the harem from time to time, and rape was briefly legalized as marriage. What had shocked the city was the emir’s elevation of this captive over the emira, a Sevillian noblewoman, the emir’s cousin and the mother of his heir. She had been banished from the palace to her own house outside the walls from where, it was said, she schemed constantly, elicting support from the Abu Siraj, whose ferocity in matters of faith was notorious. The rift had passed far beyond the walls of the harem, and even beyond the city, and rumors now said that the crown of Castile was looking for a way to exploit it.

  The Persian eunuch entered then, with goblets of sherbet. Hooman signaled me to take one. “The emir has charged me with his orders in this, and I tell these to you now so that there will be no misunderstanding. The emir is, as you know, very often gone from the city on campaign. He has confided that at such times he misses the sight of the emira, and desires likenesses to which he can turn at such times.

  “You will be painting, therefore, for an audience of one. The images will be seen only by the emir, only when he is alone. Your work will be safe, therefore, from the iconoclasts, and you need not fear charges of heresy.”

  I had been looking at my hands, wrapped around the goblet, for most of his speech, unable to bear the sight of his face. But now I looked up sharply. He stared back at me, as if challenging me to speak. When I said nothing, he lifted the haik and handed it to me.

  “Put this on now. It is time for me to take you to the palace.”

  My mother had taught me to walk in my veil as if I had no feet, gliding over the ground as gracefully as a waterbird slides upon liquid. But after so many months living as a boy, I had lost the art. I stumbled several times as we made our way through the crowded alleys of the medina. In their summer attire, the merchants in the courtyard of the caravansary looked as colorful as a field of flowers: there were men in striped Persian linens, Ifriqiyans in jellabas of saffron and indigo, and here and there, moving circumspectly, yellow-breeched Jews, their heads bare of turbans as the law required, even under the punishing sun of noonday.

  The sun was blinding as we finally reached the approach to the palace. The walls had been white once, a hundred years ago, but the iron-rich earth had bled through the stucco and warmed them to a rosy madder. With my one uncovered eye, I looked up and saw the inscriptions carved on the great arched doorway, countless numbers of them, as if the voices of a thousand believers had been caught in the swirling stonework, trapped on their way up to the heavens: There is no victor but God.

  I entered the huge wooden doors of that place knowing that I might never leave it. An old woman, her face cracked like a dry wadi, received me into the women’s quarters.

  “So this is al-Mora?” said the crone. The Moorish woman. In this new life, I was not even to have a name.

  “Yes,” Hooman replied. “May she give good service.” And so I was passed off with no more thought than a hand tool. I parted from Hooman without returning his farewell. Yet as the old woman drew the door closed beside me, I had a sudden urge to turn and run through it, to clutch even his despised arm and beg him to deliver me from the palace, whose walls loomed suddenly like a prison.

  Since my capture, my mind had fed on every kind of fear. I had pictured myself performing crushing toil in the foulest places—beaten, exhausted, abused. Now, the old woman held out a hand for the haik, which she passed to a beautiful boy, I judged not more than seven or eight years old, who hovered behind her. She signed for me to take off my sandals. A pair of embroidered slippers lay ready for me inside the door. She beckoned me to follow her, and we passed from the portico into rooms whose magnificence has stolen the words from the mouths of the poets.

  At first, it seemed as if the walls themselves were in motion, the ceiling swooping down toward me. I raised a hand as if to steady myself, and closed my eyes against the dazzle. When I opened them, I forced myself to look at one small area of the room only, at tiles glazed and colored in blue-green and brown, black and lilac, so cunningly laid that they seemed to be spinning in pinwheels around the lower third of the wall. When I could look up, I saw that the swooping ceiling was in fact a lofty dome, from which descended an upside-down forest of plaster, each shape an echo and a harmony of its neighbor.

  We walked, it seemed, through an endless series of chambers as lovely as they were various. Once or twice, a serving girl slid by, nodding deferentially to the older woman and shooting a swift, curious glance at me. In the soft slippers we passed silently through mazes of slender pillars and beside long pools, still as mirrors, reflecting the numberless entwined inscriptions above.

  Eventually, we began to climb stone steps into an elevated section of the palace that narrowed as it rose. When we reached the top, the old woman, breathing hard, leaned against the wall and groped in the folds of her garments for a large brass key. She fitted it into the lock and opened the door. The room was round, its white walls bare of decoration except for some remarkable carved and painted stone spandrels around a pair of arched windows set high into the far wall. There was little furniture: a small silk prayer rug, Persian and very fine; a slim divan covered in bright cushions; a low table inlaid with mother-of-pearl; a book stand; and a carved sandalwood chest. I walked to the windows, stood on tiptoe, put my hands to the sill, and hoisted myself up so I could glimpse the outside. The view was of gardens thick with fruit-bearing trees. I recognized fig, peach, almond, quince, and sour cherry, their boughs so laden with fruit that you could not glimpse the ground below them.

  “It will do for you?” The old woman spoke for the first time, her voice cracked with age, but cultured. I dropped down from the sill and turned, embarrassed. “They told me of your task, and it seemed good to find you a room alone for the peace and privacy of your work. This one has not been used since the last emira left the palace.”

  “It will do very well,” I said.

  “A girl will bring refreshment. You must tell her if you require anything particular. You will fi
nd that most needs can be met here.”

  The old woman turned to go, signaling for the page to follow her. “Please,” I said swiftly, my head full of questions. “Please, if it is permitted to ask, why are there so few people in the women’s quarters?”

  The old woman sighed and pressed the heel of her hand to her temple. “May I sit?” she said, already easing her frail body down onto the divan. “I do not think you have been long in the city.”

  It was a statement more than a question.

  “You come here at a troubled time. The emir presently has but two thoughts in his mind: the war with Castile and his appetite for the girl he now calls Nura.” Her eyes, buried in that lined face like a pair of bright pebbles, scrutinized me closely. “In his folly, he has sent away his cousin Sahar and all her household. The emir trusts no one. He knows his cousin and her taste for conspiracy. He also has sent away the concubines—handed them off hastily to his favorite officers, lest any one of them became a tool of vengeance for Sahar and her son, Abu Abd Allah, who keenly feels his mother’s insult.

  “Nura, of course, came here with nothing but the torn robe she stood up in. She has a small retinue to serve her; myself and a handful of half-trained tribal girls who have no allegiances in the city.”

  I was too astonished by her frankness to say anything. I glanced with concern at the turbaned boy standing by the wall. “Do not worry about him,” she said. “He is Nura’s brother. He was to be taken for a catamite but, as a favor to his sister, the emir forbears for now from having him used so. I am to train him for a page.” She sighed again, but a hint of a smile lit her eyes.

  “You think me irreverent? It is natural to lose your reverence of princes when you’ve seen them limp-membered and panting like dogs. I was concubine to this emir’s grandfather. The old goat’s flesh already stank of death when he took me to his bed. This one,” she said, inclining her head in the direction of the throne room, “I suckled, and I’ve watched him ever since. A brat born and a bloody tyrant grown. He had the head struck off every high-bred youth in the city who might have challenged for the throne. And now he has it, and he throws it all away and puts the very city at risk, simply to scratch an itch in his crotch.”

  She tossed her head then and cackled. “I have shocked you! Do not mind my rough old tongue. I have grown too bent with age for any further bowing.” She stood, rising with an ease that belied all her talk of infirmity. “You will see how it is, soon enough. You are to attend the emira tomorrow. I will send a girl to fetch you.”

  I wanted to thank her for her openness, but as I began to speak, I realized that I had no idea how to address her. “Please, what is your name?”

  She smiled then, and gave another cackle. “My name? I have had so many names I hardly know which one to give you. Muna, I was called when the old man wished his withered cock was hard enough to have me every night. ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,’ eh?” The cackle died, and her face folded in on itself. “Then I was Umm Harb for the strong son I bore—just one of the brave youths who died at the point of his half brother’s sword. It seems that name sticks in throats now. So they call me just Kebira.”

  The old one. So she was the old one, and I was the Moorish woman, and neither of us a person beyond the withering of our flesh or the blackness of our skin. I had a sudden glimpse of my own future here in this gorgeous prison, bitter and nameless and worn out in the service of the contemptible. The pain of the thought must have shown in my face, for she took a sudden step toward me and wrapped me in a swift, bony embrace. “Be careful, my daughter,” she whispered, and then she slipped away, the boy following like a shadow.

  I woke the next morning to a scent of roses that thickened as a sun whose heat I could not feel beat down on the massive outer walls. It is a perfume that even today brings back a memory of despair. I dragged myself from the divan, washed, dressed, performed my prayers, and waited. A girl came with warm water for my toilet and another with a tray containing apricot juice, steaming rounds of flat bread, a dish of creamy yogurt, and a half dozen ripe figs. I ate what I could, then waited again. I feared to leave the room lest the summons to the emira come while I was absent.

  But the noon prayer came and went, then the evening prayer, and finally the night, and I rose from my prostrations and went to bed. No summons came that day, or the one after. Finally, on the afternoon of the third day, it was Kebira and the page who came to fetch me, and Kebira’s old face was drawn and grave. She closed the door and leaned against it. “The emir has taken leave of his reason,” she said, speaking quickly and in a cracked whisper, even though in that empty palace it was hard to know whom she thought could overhear. “He rode in last night, late, and was with the emira until after dawn prayers, when he had a meeting with the nobles. Well, he conducted his business with them and then demanded that they stay and join him in the courtyard for some entertainment. This,” she said, and her lips thinned as she hissed the words, “turned out to be watching his wife take her bath.”

  “Implore the pardon of God!” I could not credit her words. For a man to glimpse another’s wife unveiled was a matter for blows. To deliberately display a wife’s body to others was an unthinkable dishonor. “What manner of Muslim could do such a thing?”

  “What manner of man could do such a thing? A man grown coarse and arrogant,” Kebira said. “The nobles are appalled—most of them suspected it was some pretext of the emir’s to have them executed; they left here fingering their necks. And as for the emira, well…You will see for yourself how she is. The emir has heard that you are here, and he demands an image to take with him when he rides out again tomorrow after dawn prayer.”

  “But that is impossible!” I cried.

  “Impossible or not, you are commanded to do it. He was furious that none had yet been made. So come quickly with me now.” Outside the door, the beautiful page waited, carrying the box of pigments that Hooman had sent to me.

  When we reached the salon, Kebira knocked upon the door and said, “I have brought her.”

  A serving girl opened the door and slid out, so swift to exit that she almost knocked me over. One side of her face was red, as if from a recent blow. Kebira pushed me forward with a hand to the small of my back. The boy glided in behind me, set down the box, and slid back out again. I realized that Kebira herself had not entered the room, and I felt a moment of panic when I realized that she did not plan to present me, or to in any manner ease this first encounter. I heard the door gently pulled closed behind me.

  The emira stood with her back to me, a tall woman in an embroidered gown that fell heavily from her shoulders and spilled across the tiles at her feet. Her hair, still slightly damp, hung freely down her back. Its colors were remarkable, for it was not one hue only, but many: dull gold entwined with warm, gleaming umber, lit from beneath with streaks as red as sudden tongues of flame. Despite my nerves, I was already thinking how to render it. Then she turned, and the look on her face drove all such thought from my mind.

  Her eyes, too, were a remarkable color: a dark gold like honey. She had been weeping, the redness around her eyes and the uneven mottle of her pale skin testified to that. However, she wept no longer. The look upon her face was not grief, but rage. She held herself rigid, as if she were braced with an iron flagstaff. Even so, or perhaps because of the effort her regal posture was costing her, she shook all over with a barely discernible tremor.

  I made my salaam, wondering whether she expected some kind of bow or prostration. She said nothing in reply, but stared at me, and then she raised a long hand with a disdainful gesture. “You have your commands. Get to work.”

  “But perhaps you would like to sit, ya emira? For this will take some time….”

  “I will stand!” she said, and the eyes brimmed suddenly. And stand she did, for the rest of that entire, interminable afternoon. My hands shook under her fierce, wounded gaze as I opened my box and arranged the materials. It took all my will to empty my mind of noi
sy thought, and even more to raise my gaze to her, and study her as I had to do.

  I do not need to tell of her beauty, for it has been celebrated in many famous poems and songs. I worked without a break, and she did not move or take her eyes from me. When the muezzin’s call for salat sounded, faint and plaintive through the thick walls, I asked her if she wished to stop and pray, but she just shook that heavy mane of hair and glared at me. Finally, when it was about to become necessary to call for the lamps, I realized I had a likeness. The decorations I could complete in my own chamber. These would be, perforce, simple, but if what the emir craved was an image of his wife—her beautiful face and her queenly bearing, then he had it here.

  I rose to show her my work, and she regarded it with that same unfliching, angry stare. If her expression changed at all, it was in the brief flicker of a fleeting triumph. She stood there still, even as I packed my implements. Only when the young page entered did she stir. “Pedro,” she said, calling him to her. She leaned to him, caressing his brow with a swift, tender kiss. Then, she turned her back on us and did not acknowledge our going.

  After making my delayed prayers, and taking some food and drink, I looked again at the parchment with fresher eyes and mind. Then I saw clearly what she had accomplished. She had stood to show that she was unbowed by whatever mad acts of violation the emir had committed. The image he would carry away with him was of a queen unconquered, a rock he could not break. And I realized something else, as I studied the portrait. There was no hint in it of the tears or the trembling that revealed the struggle behind her show of strength. I knew that she did not want to display these to him, and in their concealment I had become her accomplice.

  I worked through the night to complete that first work for my new lord. Just before the dawn prayer, Kebira scraped on my door, and I handed it to her, too exhausted to care what her reaction might be. But I might have known that she would let me have her view, whether sought or not.