Boxes within boxes.
“Your bath.” Tuan-Yu.
Orthodox and Heaven Blessed.
His title went unsaid. Although Zaq was willing to bet that the servitor in the crimson changfu with the silver embroidery had muttered it under her breath. Some mornings, particularly in the first month after he’d given the order that no one was to use any of his titles, Zaq had actually seen the girl’s lips move as she swallowed her words. Only Zaq’s further announcement that this would be regarded as the height of rudeness brought her mumbling to an end.
He was too old to be this childish, Zaq knew that.
“Does your—” The servitor stumbled over the mistake and blushed prettily. No one ever did anything in the pavilions but prettily or with grace and style, and even her apology was elegantly simple. “I’m sorry, sir…Do you wish me to bathe you?”
Her name was Winter Blossom On Broken Rock and the Emperor had named her himself. He called her “Broken” or “Winter Blossom” for short, names to which she answered with downcast eyes and a demure, almost coy smile. She was the fourteenth handmaiden to attend him since he killed the intruder and the first he found bearable enough to have in his presence.
Some days, Zaq still felt too raw to face anyone, but those days were fewer than they had been and were getting fewer year by year. It was the hope of finding a way out of his predicament that had made life less wearisome. At first he’d only wanted to step down from the throne. Now Zaq knew that his only hope was to abolish himself altogether.
“Sir…?”
He’d forgotten to answer her question.
Five years ago, she’d have stood there, dressed in her silk changfu and looking expectant until he noticed her or remembered for himself, but Zaq had put a stop to that. All queries were to be asked when they arose and the girl was not to wait for him to notice her.
He was still to be regarded as invisible beyond this room, that was unchanged, but in here…It had taken Zaq and the Library months and one of the worst battles Zaq could remember to work out this compromise. No one was to wait on his every word and no one was to guard him. He would walk the Forbidden City as he wished and except on those days when 148 billion souls absolutely had to watch him take a bath or a new concubine or offer respect to those emperors who had gone before, he would remain Zaq.
The boy who’d made the mistake of waking up one morning and mentioning to his mother that he’d been visited in the night by a butterfly.
Such rules were simple both to make and to enforce. All Zaq had to do was reach an agreement with the Librarian and all those in the Forbidden City knew instantly what was expected of them. Some days Zaq really believed he was the only emperor ever to notice that all of those who served him, the eunuchs and concubines, serving girls and palace guards, were interchangeable manifestations of the Library itself.
Oh, he knew they were flesh all right, Zaq could vouch for that. Flesh and blood, bone and sinew. Still merely animated, though.
“Come here.”
Winter Blossom On Broken Rock looked pleasingly puzzled. She was already as close to him as modesty and politeness allowed.
“There,” Zaq told the girl, pointing to a spot at his feet and she did as he said.
Eyes as dark as clouds on a winter night and hair that fell in a splash across her shoulders, black onto crimson, the silver butterflies and golden blossom of her silk robe glittering in the morning light. He passed her a dozen times a day in the outer gardens, at the table, standing mute in a corridor with eyes cast down as he staggered by under the weight of dreams and loneliness.
“What’s your name?”
“Broken, sir.”
Zaq waited.
“Sir?”
“Your full name.”
“Winter Blossom On Broken Rock, sir.”
“And before that?”
Once again the girl looked puzzled. So puzzled, as she sucked her cheek and chewed prettily at her bottom lip, that Zaq almost forgot to watch her eyes for signs of the darkness.
It was there, though.
Zaq was sure of that.
“You have my bath,” he said.
She nodded and began to strip, moving to a line of melody heard only in her head. When Zaq’s own expression stayed blank, her fingers suddenly faltered at the fastening under her right arm as if the tune had failed.
“Aren’t you joining me, sir?”
“Why would I do that?”
Because it would be fun? Because nothing else makes sense? He could almost hear the answers in his own head as the Library whispered them to the girl.
“Hurry up,” he said.
All pretence of fun was gone. She removed her silk gown swiftly but clumsily, yanking an undershift over her head and almost getting trapped as her pale arms caught in its short silk sleeves. She looked, as she always looked, elegant and vulnerable.
“Now wash.”
Climbing into the marble tub, she sank into the steaming water and let it close over her shoulders until only her head was exposed.
“Free your hair.”
She looked at him, eyes huge. In all the time since he’d noticed her Zaq had never asked this. Everything else had been offered or taken. He’d tried to find out if Winter Blossom On Broken Rock had a life when not with him, asking her endless questions and memorising her answers to see if they remained consistent, which they did over months and even years.
In the early days of his being Chuang Tzu, Zaq had crouched in a night-soil trench, trying to discover if the trench was really used. And sure enough, no sooner had he hidden himself than half a dozen servitors came in, laughing and chatting as they pissed noisily from the long bench above.
The Library was very clever.
A week later, bored with watching the trench, he wondered aloud whether servants ever fucked and less than a day later turned a corner in a vegetable garden to find a serving girl rutting noisily with a boy from the kitchens. So intent were they on providing him with proof that neither even looked round when he stopped to watch.
“Let me,” Zaq said, unwinding the ornate knot that kept her oiled tresses in place. And the girl sat in silence while he did so.
The most important job in the known galaxy was his. Tuan-Yu. Orthodox and Heaven Blessed. Dreamer of Worlds. His very existence kept alive the 2023 fragments of the unformed shell and 148 billion people who had watched him untie the hair of a serving girl.
This was the figure to which Zaq always came back. It was a hard number to imagine, and he’d tried.
There were a hundred billion stars in the spiral. In other words, for every star in the galaxy there lived at least one person who owed her or his continued existence to Zaq. At fifteen he’d demanded that the Librarian show him a hundred billion stars and kept up his demands until his request was finally met.
So many lights coalesced inside his head that it was like looking at a single star, until Zaq looked more closely and distances emerged, large beyond imagining. It was like falling into infinity, except that the moment Zaq decided this the Librarian widened its remit to include other galaxies, each one circling a black hole that ripped light into darkness.
When Zaq awoke it was three days later and his skull echoed with thoughts of foam and simultaneous states of being and absence. A week later, while walking between the smallest of the private pavilions and the gate leading to the outer garden, he decided that something really had to change.
He’d been working on making the change ever since.
CHAPTER 32
Marrakech, Summer 1977
“You know about ould Kasim…?”
Yeah, Moz knew. Idries had told him already. The old Corporal had been beyond angry when Malika finally got back to the Mellah, after helping deliver the parcel for Hassan’s uncle.
Moz should have stayed around but Malika had insisted on making her own way back. At the time she’d seemed more furious about Moz changing his mind and agreeing to take Hassan’s job than she did
about him being the first boy to get into her pants.
Now Moz wasn’t so sure. “You know where she is?”
“Haven’t seen her.”
“Really?”
“That’s what I said.” Hassan seemed anxious to be rid of him.
“Okay,” said Moz.
The other boy shook his head as Moz wandered away, a Perrier bottle in one hand, his other deep in the pocket of khaki trousers ripped at the knees. Whoever had made them had sewn chain between the ankles, so that Moz looked like a hobbled camel.
That was fashion, apparently.
Hassan’s own suit was Italian wool with a thin chalk stripe and five-button cuffs, double stitching on the lapel and on all of the button-holes, even those on the five-button sleeve. A tailor at Hotel Mamounia had made it to a pattern Hassan had seen in a magazine.
This, a present from his uncle, was fashion.
Also, in part, a disguise.
Malika was missing. Nothing else would have dragged Moz from Riad al-Razor back to Café Georgiou, the tourist café in Gueliz that Hassan would one day inherit from his uncle.
It was an irony not lost on Hassan that Moz, who wanted more than anyone he’d ever met to be nasrani, avoided Gueliz because this was where Hassan now spent most of his time.
“Me?” Moz halted outside the dog woman’s house, taking in Corporal ould Kasim on his rickety stool surrounded by a sea of abandoned tabloids, a tray of pastries now reduced to a few sticky crumbs and a half-full tea glass which the midday heat was keeping blood hot.
“Of course, you. Who do you think I’m talking to?”
Raw anger was the only emotion Corporal ould Kasim ever expressed, all others, even cold hatred and icy contempt, seemed beyond him. As if his time in the French police had somehow scrubbed all subtlety from the palate of his emotions. An old-fashioned army truck forever stuck in first gear was how Moz’s mother once described the man, in a voice so sad it spoke of broken hopes that a higher gear might exist, just waiting for her to find it.
“Yourself, I imagine…” said Moz. “I can’t think of anyone else who’d be interested in what you’ve got to say.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“So?”
Sidi ould Kasim scowled. “Come here,” he ordered, waiting for the boy to amble over. It didn’t help the Corporal’s temper that he was gathering an audience, beginning with the two hajj who lived next to the dog woman’s old house. Cousins, they were forever squatting in their doorway playing backgammon. Their wives would also be watching, from behind wooden shutters that blinded two tiny first-floor windows.
In the Mellah one only had to sneeze and an old woman five streets away would immediately want to know what the doctor had said. The wives watched from behind closed shutters because houses in the Mellah were either too poor or too Jewish to have mas-rabiyas, those ornately screened balconies found across most of North Africa.
Jewish houses had windows at the front and shutters instead.
“Where’s Malika gone?” The old man’s voice carried a brook-no-argument, watch-yourself kind of tone.
“I don’t know,” said Moz, gulping from the Perrier bottle he still held in one hand. “Why don’t you tell me?” The mineral water came from Celia’s supplies at Riad al-Razor, obviously enough. He’d taken it along with some speed when he woke to find the morning he’d been planning to spend at the riad unravelling around him. Celia and Jake were locked into some argument and neither had seemed particularly pleased to see him.
Sweeping one hand through his spiky hair, Moz let his shades follow the old man’s gaze towards the backgammon players.
“Do they know what you did to her?”
She’d left the house early on Saturday. The bread had not been made since, the floors went unswept and litter had begun to build up in layers around the old man’s wooden stool. A random circle of dirty tea glasses stood going sticky and dust-encrusted in the heat.
“I did nothing.” Ould Kasim’s voice was contemptuous. “You’re the problem. You and those friends of yours.”
“Maybe you did more than just beat her…Is that what happened?”
“Watch your mouth.”
“Maybe you buried her in the cellar.”
“I’m warning you,” said the Corporal.
“You’re warning me?” Moz said. He looked the soldier up and down with all the disgust he could manage. “Maybe you should be the one worrying about the police. You pervert—”
Sidi ould Kasim stood.
It was meant to be frightening. A threat. Don’t make me stand up. Don’t make me come over there. Why do you bring these things on yourself? Moz and Malika knew the litany by heart. And no doubt Malika’s mother had known it before that, when she was still alive. It went with the unbuckling of his belt, the clenching of a fist, the twist of one shoulder, signals of what was to come.
Moz could almost taste his own fear. A miasma made from old memories and reactions that clung to his body like steam from a hamman. All the same Moz managed to make his shrug dismissive, he was proud of that.
And if he got hurt. So what?
A single graze on Malika’s arm had always hurt him more than the darkest bruise on his own body. They were tied, connected in ways neither of them wanted to talk about. Sometimes, when Malika glanced at him, Moz could see that knowledge written in her eyes.
Their names began with the same letter, they lived in the same house, in rooms exactly above and below each other, they were born in the same month, a year and a day apart, both had parents who were dead, his mother had been nasrani and so, Malika insisted, had her real father.
And then there was ould Kasim.
They both hated the man and had talked about running away when they were small. As they got older, it became not running away but escaping to find a new life…He’d let her down. All that stuff with Celia. His hands inside Malika’s knickers on the roof.
Finding Malika had become the only thing that mattered. Because Moz knew, as well as he knew his own smell, that Malika would not have run away without him.
“Where are you going?” The voice was a shout behind him. One that Moz chose to ignore.
“Don’t you dare walk away from me!”
The sensible thing to do would have been to keep walking. Instead, Moz turned and began to walk back, throwing up one arm to meet the belt as he had a hundred times before.
Only this time Moz stepped into the blow, more or less by accident, and the buckle which came whistling down wrapped the leather around his wrist. So Moz grabbed the strap below the buckle and yanked, almost pulling ould Kasim from his feet.
Cardamom, cheap brandy and a lifetime’s bitterness, Moz could smell them all on the old man’s rancid breath. Now was the moment Moz had waited for, the one where he ripped the belt from Sidi ould Kasim’s hands and turned it on its owner, beating Malika’s persecutor to his knees.
Malika and Moz had dreamed about this endlessly, in between making plans to run away, poison the old man with bad meat or wrap his drunken body in a sheet and drop it down a well behind La Koutoubia.
“Let go,” Corporal ould Kasim ordered.
“Make me.”
The backgammon players were on their feet now and the oldest of the wives had come to the door, bringing with her the smell of cheap rose-water and lamb tagine.
Stepping back, Moz yanked hard on his end of the belt, watching the old man stagger, then dig in his heels and yank back.
Moz grinned.
It was this more than anything else that stoked the old man’s fury. Bringing up one knee, the soldier aimed for Moz’s groin and when that failed he stamped the edge of his boot down the front of the boy’s shin. Only Moz’s foot was no longer there.
“Missed,” said Moz. A very childish thing to say, but he didn’t care.
The Corporal, the man who claimed he could reduce hardened prisoners to whimpering obedience with a single pebble and a short length of string, could no longer even kn
ee someone properly. Moz wanted the group standing opposite to understand that.
“You know,” Moz said loudly, “I haven’t got time for this.” Stepping back, he yanked viciously on his bit of the belt and watched the old man stumble, going down on one knee in the dust.
“See you,” Moz said, dropping the belt.
And there it might have ended if only Sidi ould Kasim had let Moz leave. But as the boy turned away, already readjusting his shades and sweeping one hand through his hair, the Corporal regained his feet.
“No you don’t,” he said, swinging the belt harder than ever. The heavy buckle of the belt hit Moz’s shoulder, bruising flesh as its metal tang pierced his shirt and lodged in his skin below the collarbone.
Odd, thought Moz.
Without further thought, he pulled the buckle from his chest, watching the underlying flesh pucker beneath cloth as the tang pulled free. The next thing he did was turn round and smash his Perrier bottle hard into the side of Sidi ould Kasim’s head.
Two days after this, Major Abbas pulled Moz off the corner of Boulevard Mohammed V. The Major did this by the simple expedient of pulling up next to the teenager in a grande taxi, pushing open a door and ordering Moz to climb inside.
The boy would no sooner have refused than try to make a run for it, both of which were known to be very dangerous options where the Marrakchi police were concerned.
“Leave it,” Major Abbas snapped, when Moz leant forward to wind down one window. There was something in the way he said this that scared the boy.
“You seen Malika recently?”
Moz shook his head.
“Anyone looking for her?”
“No.” She was a foreigner’s brat, Corporal ould Kasim’s responsibility. No men from Derb Yassin were out searching through the narrow alleys of the Mellah, fired up on rumours and outrage. She wasn’t worth the effort.
“You’re Marzaq?” The new voice was sharp, like broken glass and edged with an accent which was new to the boy.
Moz nodded. Anything else would have been pointless.
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