by Jane Johnson
‘I am glad to hear it. I would be most distressed if anything bad were to happen to you.’ He looks down. ‘It seems you have cut yourself.’
My heart shudders. ‘It’s just mud.’ I hold his gaze defiantly and watch as the smile fades from his mouth, leaving his face as inhuman as a reptile’s. Then he allows his hand to fall so casually it looks accidental, but in such a manner that it brushes my groin. He watches as I try and fail to repress my revulsion.
‘So you say, Nus-Nus. So you say.’
His eyes pin me for a moment more, then he turns and powers his way through the entourage to join the sultan, a tangible reminder to me and all others that he regards himself – he alone – as being on a par with our sovereign.
Ben Hadou’s pale gaze sweeps over him, and as it does so I can feel the dislike flow off the kaid, a dislike tinged with contempt, though his face remains stony. Then he turns his head and those grey eyes – sharp, watchful – come to rest on me and I feel as if in those seconds he has perceived everything that has passed between my enemy and me.
The creation of the imperial palace complex at Meknes is an act of immense hubris, grand to the point of monomaniacal. We have heard from some of the better-connected French captives that their king is attempting a similar project, on a rather meaner scale, though currently it is not much more than a hunting lodge in the middle of a mosquito-ridden swamp. When Ismail first heard about it he laughed dismissively. ‘Those Europeans, all they create are follies, personal extravagances that can amount to nothing. But when my project is completed it will be a city of magnificent distances: the grandest offering to the grace of God that anyone has ever made. I am taking a waste land and transforming it to the glory of Allah. His holy word shall be writ large upon the ground, upon the walls and in every detail: his eternal and infinite design brought into existence in the corporeal world!’
The waste land today is being recalcitrant: we encounter problem after problem, which I must minute carefully in the records book as we go. My scattered wits have made me a poor scribe, and the rain does its best to compound the problem, blurring the ink and even completely washing away the words in places. As soon as I am dismissed I run back to my chamber. If I do not write down right away the precise instructions Ismail dictated and deliver them at once to the chief of works at once his wrath will be swift and sure.
I sit cross-legged on my divan, open the lap-desk and, dipping my reed pen in the ink, write carefully: ‘First, the Bab al-Raïs to be reinforced with iron studs and horizontal bands. A new chief craftsman to be found to add a sunburst design and crescent moons, since if the French king is to designate himself Roi Soleil, Ismail will command both day and night. The new design to be achieved before the inauguration.
‘Next, the guardhouse to be demolished and rebuilt on the east side.
‘Third, the outer wall nearest the mellah to be moved back by fifty paces; which will entail razing the houses within that compass in order to allow a proper space to be maintained between our domain and the inhabitants of the city. The occupants to be informed by proclamation and ordered to begin work at once. Dwellings will be found for them in the meantime, but they are to shift the rubble themselves beyond the site.
‘Fourth, the carved frieze in the Koubbet al-Khiyatin to be redone. This time it is important to choose a master artisan who is literate.’ (Unfortunately for the original carver, the smiling vizier pointed out that the script which should have read ‘The majesty of God’ over and over in elegant Kufic script had been misspelled in the first instance and now reads ‘The chains of God’, the error then replicated a dozen times over.)
These are not the only instructions I have to remember, but they are the only ones I need to write down. The wolf will have to wait …
I run to the office of the chief of works, pass him the notes, make sure he understands them; then trot the mile and a half to the other end of the palace to the harem.
The harem is in all ways a forbidden place, its name deriving from the word for forbidden, which is haram. To enter into a harem is to cross an invisible line, to move from public into private, from profane to sacred; it is like lifting a veil, trespassing into an intimate space. In the outside world, people hold this barrier within their hearts and minds, but in Ismail’s palace the transition points are more tangible: four guarded gates of iron. I am forced to explain my unscheduled presence at each one, even though I am one of very few permitted to move between the two worlds – male and female, outward and secret.
It is the chief eunuch of the harem who stares down at me. ‘Yes?’
Qarim is one of Ismail’s own: men raised to be totally loyal to the sultan. His brother Bilal is a door-guard to Ismail’s private apartments, a lad with muscles like cedar, and a brain to match. Most of these guards are no more than nineteen or twenty years old, but they are huge. I am a tall man, but they top me by half a head and are twice as wide. ‘You know who I am, Qarim. You see me every day.’
‘Not usually on this day, or at this time.’
The high, light timbre of his voice never fails to take me by surprise, it is so at odds with his size. They say this is what happens with those who are cut early in life.
‘Do you have a letter of permission?’
‘Qarim, you know that if I did, it would be one I had written myself, as the sultan’s scribe.’
This logic seems to fox him: he continues to stare at me.
‘I have been running errands for the empress,’ I add.
He looks down at my empty hands, then back up at me. I hold his gaze and at last he inclines his head and shouts to a wiry, dark-skinned lad of six or seven, ‘Go find Amina and tell her that Nus-Nus wishes to see her mistress.’
The boy scampers off. ‘Amina, Amina!’ echoes down the halls like the cries of a trapped bird.
I make to walk on, but Qarim’s massive hand closes on my arm. ‘It would be best not to take the empress unawares.’
At last, the boy comes back, and behind him is a hugely endowed woman whose red slippers slap noisily on the marble. Her face drips with sweat, and her headcloth has been tied in haste. She looks thoroughly out of temper. ‘Where are Zidana’s things?’ she demands.
‘Alas, I do not have them and that is why I need to speak to her in person.’
Amina curls her lip. ‘She’s busy. She sent me to fetch the items she ordered from the souq.’ She eyes me suspiciously, as if I have hidden them about my person and am refusing to hand them over, then at last sighs and beckons me to follow her.
I walk behind her, watching those enormous hips dip and sway with a sort of dreadful fascination. A man would be crushed beneath her like a dog beneath an elephant’s foot. Large women are highly prized for their abundance here, where only a poor man would have a thin wife. The women gain weight deliberately by feeding on zumeta, a rich paste of nuts and butter and the crushed seeds of tifidas, the bitter melon. I swear you can watch them growing before your very eyes.
It seems to take an eternity to reach the empress’s quarters, but on arrival there, for one horrible moment, I think I have walked into a pit of magic, a place into which Zidana has either summoned a gathering of demons or transformed her women into monsters, for the faces that turn towards me in the flickering lamplight are hideous, deformed and dripping. And then I remember that today is fifth day, when the women give themselves up to arcane beauty rituals and that the figures before me are not djinns but court ladies caked in masks of clay and pulped vegetables, their hair piled up in sticky coils and plastered with henna and oil.
The aroma of almonds and myrtle fills the air; incense burns in the niches around the walls. All around the room lies the evidence of their alchemy: low brass tables stacked with dishes of eggs and milk and honey; glass jars of bright oils, pomegranate peel and walnut bark; bowls of coloured clays and heaps of henna leaves.
Even disguised by a mask of red clay streaked with dripping henna, Zidana is unmistakable: her jet skin gleams between th
e acres of red fabric in which she is draped and the dozens of shining gold bracelets on her legs and arms. She wears a rope of pearls looped many times around her bull-like neck, and huge gold earrings drag her lobes towards her shoulders.
‘My lady, forgive me –’ I begin.
She waves her hands at the other women. ‘Go away, go away now! Have you no shame? Hide yourselves!’
‘It is only Nus-Nus,’ someone says and the rest titter, watching me playfully over the veils they hold up over the lower parts of their clay-caked faces. They bat their eyelids in a horrible parody of flirtation.
Only Nus-Nus. This is all I am to them. A thing on which to practise their seduction techniques.
‘Are we not beautiful, Nus-Nus?’ Laila is more comely than most, with pretty ankles and hands that flutter like a lark’s wings.
Once upon a time I would have courted pretty Laila; but now I feel the useless ache, and look away. ‘Zidana’s ladies are as shining stars to the perfect moon that is the empress herself,’ I say neutrally.
‘Stop tormenting the poor man and get away with you!’ Zidana throws a bowl at Laila and it strikes her on the shoulder, a shower of red petals fluttering out like bloody feathers. After that, the women go quickly, leaving the empress and me alone. For any other man to be alone with the empress would warrant the loss of his head: but I am only Nus-Nus.
Nus-Nus is not the name with which I came into the world, and I hope it will not be the name I take with me when I depart this life, but it is the name I have borne ever since being presented to Zidana, five long years ago. I was led into her chamber, head down and trembling, wearing only a loincloth, an iron collar and fetters. She screeched at the guards to remove the collar and fetters. Not out of sympathy, but because the presence of iron will warp a magic spell. Even when the fetters were struck from me I kept my head down. Her feet were as dark as mine, pink along the sole. Her ankles, I noted, were sturdy. I watched the feet circle me and knew she was taking me in from head to toe – the tribal cicatrices patterning my back, the criss-cross scars left by the trader’s whip; the silver slave-bond in my ear. With the stick she always carries she lifted my chin and looked me in the face.
You would expect a sultan with the pick of a continent as well as foreign captives brought to him from all corners of the world to have chosen as his Chief Wife the most glorious of women. Zidana, however, has never been pretty. But those eyes strike through flesh and bone to the very essence of a man’s soul. When she looks at you, you sense that she has assessed every flaw and weakness in you and the best way to exploit them. Fear is your first reaction, and first reactions are to be trusted.
‘Where is your pride?’ she said softly, turning my head one way, then another, examining me from every angle. Her voice was as light as her body was heavy. ‘You are Senufo: you are a warrior. Remember that.’
Warrior! I could almost have smiled. In my tribe I was much teased for preferring songs and drums to spears and warcraft.
‘What is your name?’
I told her, and she smiled; and when she smiled you could see the Lobi girl she had once been. Our tribes were near-neighbours to the south of the once-mighty Songhai Empire in that part of Africa traders traditionally refer to simply as ‘Guinea’, not bothering to distinguish between all our separate countries with their distinct lineages, kingdoms, religions and peoples, just as they call the lands to the south of Morocco merely ‘the Sudan’ – the south, or ‘the black’. It does not matter to them where we come from, or who we are: they take us and remake us in the image that best suits them: as bodyguards, warriors, concubines and eunuchs.
Then she said in our local dialect, ‘We are nothing to these people, no more than a lump of flesh they can control. But our knowledge and our spirits are our own, and we must keep them strong. Information and will: those are the keys to power.’ She leaned forward and her eyes glittered at me. ‘Do you know what they call this drink, boy?’
I gazed at the bowl steaming on the table and said nothing.
‘It is coffee, a drink both bitter and sweet, just like life. I take mine with half milk and half water,’ she said. ‘Half-and-half, or in Arabic nus-nus.
And that’s what I shall call you: because until you take power over what has been done to you, you are a half-thing.’
Now, I lean in towards her and am assaulted by her scent of musk and neroli. ‘Is there somewhere more private we might speak, my lady?’
‘We are alone, Nus-Nus, unless you had not noticed.’
‘Spies have long ears.’
She smiles: a flash of gold where the precious metal has replaced her natural teeth. It is said that when she was bought her front teeth were extracted, lest she bite down on a man’s private parts, but that may be a vile calumny. Zidana has always had more subtle and dangerous weapons in her armoury than mere teeth.
I follow her into the inner chamber, which she crosses quickly, carefully skirting the rug. This she flips up, revealing an opening through which the top of some dark stairs can be glimpsed. She eases herself down through this opening with a sinuosity that belies her bulk. ‘Follow me.’
A light blooms in the dark below and as I descend I see a long, low-ceilinged chamber with a divan pushed up against the farthest wall, a table bearing a large mortar and pestle, a brazier and some glass retorts, lined on all sides by many-drawered cabinets and shelves displaying jars and boxes much like those in Sidi Kabour’s shop.
A magician’s den, right under Moulay Ismail’s nose!
A sneeze escapes me: something about the smell down here, musty and unpleasant. ‘I am honoured, majesty. Who else knows about this place?’
‘No one … living.’
‘Apart from the builder.’
Zidana’s smile is eloquent. Wonderful: so now I am the only living being with whom she has shared this secret? My position seems ever more perilous.
She turns her luminous eyes upon me. ‘So, Nus-Nus, where are the things I ordered?’
I decide to be forthright. ‘Sidi Kabour is dead: murdered.’ I tell her what has happened, even down to my own idiocy. When I get to the matter of finding part of the missing list crammed in the poor man’s mouth she interrupts explosively: ‘You wrote down my needs? And then left the list for anyone to find?’
‘I left it where only Sidi Kabour would know to look for it.’ The excuse sounds unconvincing, even to me.
She walks around and around the chamber, muttering furiously. Is she mumbling charms, summoning Merra ben Harith, the king of the djinns, or Demouch, commander of afrits, to drag me to hell? I wonder how fast I can dash up the steps and hoist myself into the salon above; how far I can run before the guards get hold of me. I take a step backward, and eye the stairs covertly; but not covertly enough. Zidana stares at me. ‘What’s the matter with you? The threat is to me: I have many enemies who would love to lay hands on such a list and accuse me of sorcery.’
‘Everyone already calls you “The Witch Zidana”,’ I point out.
‘There is a large distance between suspicion and evidence.’
‘The list was in my handwriting,’ I remind her, but all she does is purse her lips and look at me contemptuously. ‘What would such a one need with such items? No one would believe they were for your own use.’
Her eyes bore into me. ‘So why are you so down-at-mouth?’
Reluctantly, I tell her about the ruination of the Persian Qur’an; that the Coptic Bookseller will be seeking payment on the sabbath and that Ismail will surely have my head for spoiling his treasure.
‘And where is it now, this “holy” book?’
‘In my room, wrapped in the bloodstained cloak the sultan gave me.’
She clucks her tongue. ‘Ah, Nus-Nus. You see the trouble that comes when you serve two masters? This is what happens, you see: your loyalties are divided and it confuses your thoughts. You should have made separate visits to the souq for the two commissions. Mixing sacred texts and dark magic can never have a go
od outcome.’
Although she has converted to Islam, taken a Muslim name and participated in the ceremony that made her Ismail’s wife before God, Zidana still follows her own beliefs, the ancient religion that comes out of the dark heart of the jungle. When she prays, it is to Thagba and his minions rather than to Allah the All-Merciful. Through her sorcery she can call upon the afrits and djinns of the Muslim world to wreak their own special havoc, but also upon the thila, the children of the forest, those anarchic beings who answer only to Thagba. She may wear silver amulets containing verses from the Qur’an pinned to her clothing, but next to her skin lie fetishes made from God knows what horrors.
She continues to walk about, muttering, and again I have the sense that I am eavesdropping on a conversation with someone I cannot see, and the hairs on the back of my neck start to rise. At last she turns back to me. ‘I have a plan. I will send a girl to fetch the cloak and the book from you and I will ensure they are restored to pristine condition. And then you will do something for me.’
That night, I accompany the sultan to the mosque for the evening prayers, taste his food and eat a very little of my own. I sit with him then in the company of twenty or so of his women, all of whom are armed with musical instruments and fearsome amounts of kohl, under the watchful eye of Zidana and a dozen of Ismail’s beloved cats. Eventually he makes his choice of partner for the night, and at long last those of us who are surplus to requirements are waved away.
I retreat gratefully to the solitude of my room to make the necessary entry in the couching book:
First 5th Day, Rabī al-Awwal
Aziza, Guinea slave, gold front tooth, long neck. Virgin.
I sit there staring bleakly at this bald notation, before closing the book with a sigh and putting it aside. Only then do I think to open the chest. Where the burnous and the Holy Qur’an were there is now a yawning space. Somehow, Zidana has contrived to have them removed; just as she contrived to have little Aziza deflowered this night. Aziza is no threat; whereas Fatima, sister to the Hajib, must be kept out of the sultan’s eye. Abdelaziz has long had designs on the succession. His lineage is noble, though his family were till his own rise impecunious. Ismail entrusts him with all aspects of state, including the keys to the Treasury; even Zidana fears to threaten him directly, though two of his food-tasters have mysteriously perished. When all is said and done, she is a slave, with no lineage and no status, except that which is accorded her by the sultan’s own whim. And he is a whimsical man, as all know to their cost. I have with my own ears heard Abdelaziz advise the sultan that his acknowledged heir should be of true Moroccan stock if the kingdom is to be safeguarded after his death (may the Compassionate One be minded to make that terrible day long hence). Only the Hajib could ever risk his wrath by suggesting such a thing and survive; but Ismail indulges his vizier, treats him like a brother. Though by no means does he treat lovely Fatima as a sister, buxom little baggage that she is. Three years ago she gave birth to a boy; unfortunately the child perished: just as well, or he would have outranked Zidana’s second son. Last year she gave birth to another boy, but this one has thus far proved more hardy. Of Fatima there was no sign tonight, though; no doubt she was indisposed by some carefully measured dose of aconite.