Hart, Mallory Dorn

by Jasmine on the Wind

  "You promised my choice of your women when I was ready, Excellence," Francho answered bitterly, aware he sounded like a spoiled child but needing to maneuver in the desperate tug-of-war. "You tell me you are happy the veil of grief has been lifted away from my eyes. Yet the very female whose face has accomplished this you will not give to me."

  "Can not, Jamal," Boabdil stated with a frown. He impatiently motioned Francho to rise from his knees and indicated he should sit on a pillow beside the couch. "I have given my pledge to General Reduan."

  "Reduan Venegas has a harem bulging with women. This one will merely amuse him for a time and then he will forget her. And she looks so much like my poor Sobeida. I have great need of her to mend my broken heart, to comfort me and remove my loneliness. You have made a promise to me also, Great Sultan," he pressed on intensely, a proud man just on the threshold of pleading.

  Chin jutted out in annoyance, Boabdil yanked the satin coverlet from his couch to wrap about his naked chest— although the valet knelt in the background with his linen shirt, not daring to approach—and stalked to a low table. He waved away the shadowlike servant who had rushed to pour him some wine and decanted it himself. "Well, what would you have me do, minstrel?" he asked. "Break my word to Reduan and thus anger him, a powerful noble and an officer of great importance to my army?"

  "While I am of no importance at all..." Francho's voice trailed off morosely.

  "Yes, you are important to me, personally. But Reduan is necessary to the freedom of Granada."

  "And will the removal of one Christian wench from his grasp erase his loyalty to Granada, Excellence?" This was an insolence for which another ruler might have had him punished.

  "Will the denial of the pretty-faced Goth ruin your loyalty to me?" Boabdil demanded softly, locking his brown stare with Francho's relentless blue one.

  Francho's gaze was unwavering. "Great Sultan, my loyalty was given, not bought, nor can it be sold along with a slave woman. Rather would I leave your employ than know you trust my integrity so little. I am neither slave like M'jambana nor an adoring dumb beast like that huge cat which stares so balefully at me from the foot of your couch. Perhaps I sometimes speak my mind with what seems disregard for your royal eminence, but I am your most loyal of subjects, not merely because you are my liege lord and the Sultan of Granada, but because through the love of the art of music there has been forged a bond of respect and friendship between two human beings. My Sultan, I ask you for the woman; I have been taken with her and I desire her. If I cannot have her I will be sad that my lord has broken his promise to me—and that is all."

  Francho was the first to drop his eyes from the silent dismay that went between them. Distress that was very real showed in the line of his slumped shoulders and lowered head. Strangely enough, had he truly been born Jamal ibn Ghulam, every word he had uttered would have been true. For all Boabdil's incompetence and indecision, Jamal had come to like the Sultan and would have stayed loyal to him through every adversity, stupid as such blind friendship might prove. The musician Jamal, absorbed by his art, narrow in his needs, was a much less complicated man than Francisco de Mendoza, born Venegas. The sensitivity, gentleness, and generosity Jamal liked in Boabdil might have been derided by the harder, more ambitious Christian knight.

  Visibly upset by Francho's dejected feelings, the Sultan clenched his jaw, considered a moment, and finally tossed down the last of the wine in his golden cup with a resolute air. "Very well. You shall have your slave girl, Jamal ibn Ghulam, but not as payment for your loyalty. As appreciation for your simplicity. You do not confuse me; black is black and white is white. You do not lie and I am grateful for that. I am also a man to whom the Great Allah has presented a wife of virtue and perfection, I know the joy of this. If you think you can gentle this tempestuous Christian to such a state, I will not deny your woman to you." He struck a small brass gong and the metallic boom vibrated through the room. "Reduan Venegas may be a powerful general but I am Sultan. I shall tell him I have seen the female in question and have decided to reserve her for my own harem. There is an unusual girl in my harem who was a gift from the Caliph of Smyrna, a slender female from somewhere beyond Trebizond, golden-skinned, with long, silky black hair and slanted eyes, and a mouth like the bud of a flower—and this one, with her pagan name, will I present to Reduan for consolation."

  A secretary entered the room, salaaming, to attend the Sultan's call. "I shall have your Christian moved to my women's quarters this very night and spare her the lice of the dungeons. My women will instruct her so she will know her place and her duties. And soon you may claim her."

  Francho struck his chest in salute, relief lighting up his face. He made a deep salaam.

  The Sultan motioned him out.

  "Now go and let me sleep. I am twice as weary as when you arrived."

  With heartfelt expressions of thanks Francho backed away toward the door but before he could exit Boabdil called out, "Jamal!"

  "Excellence?"

  The Sultan was smiling wanly again. "Reduan was told by the examiners that she is without maidenhead. She is young but she is not virgin."

  "No matter, Excellence, I want her still." Francho controlled the outrage suddenly constricting his chest at the thought of fingers poking and prying into Dolores.

  "You are indeed an odd one, minstrel. One minute you are a completely contained man with a strong control of emotion which you deem 'armor'; and the next minute you cannot live without the company of a particular, unknown female who somehow has reached your heart."

  Nonplussed for a second, confronted as he was with contradictions caused by his duplicity, Francho's mind yet worked. He pulled back his shoulders and grinned jauntily. " 'Tis simple to explain, my Sultan. I suffer the mercurial temperament of a true and most unique artist!"

  Boabdil's appreciative chuckle followed him through the portal.

  But once outside the bedchamber Francho's grin faded, he drew a deep breath for the first time in half an hour and nervously rubbed his sweaty palms on his brocade-covered thighs. He had managed to snatch Dolores away from a Moorish harem and Reduan's couch. Now what was he going to do with her?

  Chapter 22

  Dolores jerked her shoulder away from the prodding hands of the two red-sashed black-skinned guards driving her along a columned, open-sided gallery, but she quickened her pace to keep them from touching her again. She was dimly aware of fantastic, arabesqued arches and ceilings overhead, golden-washed by the soft light of hanging oil lamps, aware that her purchaser lived in splendor. But to her the veritable palace was uglier than the cracked-walled tavern she was raised in.

  She did not cry anymore. She had run out of tears on the long, hard trek through the mountains, when for warmth at each stop during the day she huddled together on the ground with the village women and listened to their sobs while she pretended a noblewoman did not weep. But she had wept later, silently, in the dark, with grief at Engracia's accidental death as they had fled from the Moorish patrol, from panic, from fear too, even certain as she was that Medina-Sidonia would ransom her and that the fiercely bearded, mustachioed soldiers would not dare to mistreat her as they were the shrieking country women who had neither the youth nor the comeliness to be considered for sale as concubines.

  But on what proved to be the last night of the march, as she rubbed her blistered and painful feet and sat drooping, half-supporting and half-supported by the back of another woman, a passing officer, scimitar and spurs clinking, stopped to chuck her under the chin. His eyes mocked her in the light of the small fire, and he delighted in informing her in Castilian that she could forget her fine airs; didn't she know the Sultan no longer ransomed prisoners? Her only value now was as merchandise on the slave block. He and his fellow officers only saw to her safety because they would get a share of the good price she would bring. And with a contemptuous laugh he went on, fading into the darkness. Tears started from her eyes again, tears of despair, for he was not just tormenting h
er, she fully understood. He was telling the truth.

  The slave block! Was this how her life was to conclude, in the degradation of a heathen harem? Was this where the hard road from Ciudad Real to Torrejoncillo to her lovely house in Seville was to end? She had heard the tales of Arab harems, stolen women clapped up in them and never seen or heard from again and all sorts of foul deeds perpetrated upon their shrinking bodies. Was this her punishment for daring to usurp Blanca Ganavet's place? Dear Lord, be merciful, she prayed forlornly over and over with an aching lump caught in her throat, do not abandon this penitent sinner....

  She could not run; the guards were alert and her feet and hands were chained with just enough slack to allow her to walk and minister to herself. She could kill herself, she thought, hugging clasped hands hard to her chest, but with what? The mountains where she could have hobbled to a cliff and flung herself off were behind them. Did she want to die? Oh no, no dear Mary, merciful Mother of God, she had hardly yet lived. Frightened, she could find no peace in sleep that whole night but slumped swollen-eyed, tears leaking down her face that such fate could happen, that she was helpless and entirely alone and destined to be sold like an animal into the hands of who-knew-what degraded and pitiless slave owner.

  Just before the guards came to rouse the captives and fling them some bread and a small water skin to share, the rosy light of dawn woke her from a half-doze, and she forced open her eyes to the sight of a cloudless sky and a wheeling, piping white bird making great, free circles on stiff wings high above their weary columns. It made her remember Dalila and think of the indomitable will and deadly strike of what was after all just a small parcel of feathers and claws, and a trickling of courage began to stiffen her depressed spirit. The cool morning breeze rippled across the fallow field where they had spent the night, and even with her tear-stuffed nose she could sniff the scent of flowering vines from the bowers shading the white farmhouses beyond the road. She wiped her nose with the wide, bedraggled sleeve of her gown, poured a drop of water on a clean corner of it, and patted her eyes to refresh them.

  The brightening light of a fine day seemed to reassure her that life was not over yet, dredging up her normal mettle. If it came to that, if she was offered and sold as a slave, no matter whether she was bound to harem or kitchens, there would always be an escape, a window to leap from, a pool to drown in, a sash to hang herself with. But a mirthless chuckle escaped her as her stubbornness reasserted itself: "Ay, mi madre, Dolores, you even have yourself believing you were born a lady. Noblewomen commit suicide. Common women, such as you, live." She pressed her lips together, and when a young officer approached her as they began the march she intensified her painful limping, showed him with a piteous look her lacerated feet, and hoped that greed to deliver her unmutilated would move him.

  It did and she rode on a donkey through the double gates of Granada. She rode tearless and numb, as unmoved by pleasure at the sight of the beautiful city rising on its hills as any captive would be on viewing her destined prison.

  With the main column of soldiers peeling off to their barracks, a smaller force herded the stumbling prisoners into the high-walled court of a forbidding edifice, lined them up, and made them stand as clerks moved down their ranks recording them and fastening numbers to their garments with sharp thorns. Raising her head Dolores saw the officer in charge salute a finely mantled Moor, the end of whose turban rose in a stiffened cockade above his head. Easily keeping in hand a prancing, head-tossing stallion, the Moor rode casually along the ragged lines of woebegone captives, looking them over. She saw him look directly at her, as if her eyes had called him.

  Cursing herself for a curious ninny, Dolores ducked her head and tried to look inconspicuous as she stood amid the trembling women and sniveling children, but in a moment the rider had halted his mount before her. The man motioned sharply, and a soldier jumped to jerk down the hood that shadowed her face; she raised her head up to keep the soldier from yanking her hair to do it for her. She thought her face must be smudged and tear-streaked, and because she had lost her small hennin and hair pins her locks hung tangled and dirty about her face. She looked straight ahead, praying she was unattractive enough to discourage the attention of the flat-faced, sparse-bearded man who scrutinized her closely from his high perch.

  But his grunt was low and meaningful, and the quick upward glance she stole was enough to freeze her heart. His covetous expression was not new to her, she had seen it on male faces before, surprised it even in the eyes of those old-fashioned men of chivalry who declaimed women as fragile flowers of innocence to whom they offered only purest thoughts. She had, in fact, reveled in the flattery of those lustful stares, when she was safe enough. Now, shrinking from the portent of it, she blurted out desperately, "Sir, I believe you are a gentleman. I am the Baroness Dolores de la Rocha; I am a lady to the Queen Isabella and I claim the protection of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia. I beg you to inform His Excellence, the Sultan, of my plight. If he will notify Don Enrique de Guzman through the Crown's couriers any ransom he asks will be honored."

  The Moor continued to regard her without change of expression, his eyes moving over her like an insult. Finally the straight and humorless lips moved. "Woman, I have two Christian Counts, a Marquis, and a dozen lesser nobles slaving out their lives in my copper mine in the mountains. The followers of Allah do not pamper dogs of infidels who murder women and children and exile whole cities of people from their homes. But you may consider yourself fortunate. Comely women do not bend their backs in the mining pits. There are better uses for them." He spoke in Castilian so she would understand, but he need not have said anything; his flinty eyes and toneless voice told the tale.

  He motioned again and the alert soldier yanked the entire cloak from Dolores's grasp. The hard eyes seemed to flick the clothes from her body, measuring her. Then, with a stiff nod and a sideways jerk of his head toward the building, he picked up his reins, turned the horse and passed on. Two soldiers came from behind him, grabbed Dolores by the arms, and marched her away from the rest of the captives and into the prison building. Up and down stone steps they dragged her until she found herself dumped into a dark cell with a tiny, high window allowing the feeblest blue glimmer of daylight. Overcome with despair because the grim-mouthed Moor had obviously separated her out for his own purpose, she sank bonelessly to the stone floor.

  A whimper escaped in spite of herself as she huddled in the rank darkness. "Oh, blessed Mary, Mother of God, take me away from here. This cannot be happening to me...." She tried to pray eloquently, but her captors had not even left her her garnet and silver rosary, and in her extremity she could call up nothing but the Pater Noster. Finally, in what seemed hours of fear listening to the heavy silence about her punctuated only by the scrabbling of mice in the shadows, the weighty door to her cell scraped and creaked back and a yellow circle of light bloomed to reveal a turbaned little jailer holding pike and keys and wearing a vest of heavy leather straps over his tunic. Behind him crowded two burly women with long plaits down their backs whose somber tunics swung over baggy pants and who pushed aside the obsequious jailer like a useless sack of beans.

  Silently, with no ado, the matrons went sternly to their business. Dolores gasped as the larger one grabbed her and hauled her up like a feather, in one expert motion twisting her arm behind her back so that any movement would wrench it from her shoulder, pinioning as well her other arm and body close to her own mountain of flesh. The other woman methodically pulled off or ripped off what was left of the clothes from her flinching limbs until Dolores stood naked but immobile in the iron clutch of her great-bosomed captor. Goose-pimpling, she had no choice but to suffer the expert examination of the main matron. The woman's sharp eyes moved carefully over her. Squeezing Dolores's jaws together painfully the strong hands forced her to open her mouth and in the light of the two lanterns they had brought the woman scrutinized her teeth and the lining of her mouth for sores, and then examined her scalp for vermin. The ques
ting fingers ran down her neck, pinched her breasts and her buttocks, pressed her ribs and upper arms, raised her hands and her feet to inspect them closely.

  Then the fat, cold hands moved slowly over her thighs and hips, lingering, giving them small, suggestive squeezes that caused Dolores to look up startled into the dark, glittering eyes.

  Unable to move without causing an excruciating yank on her arm, Dolores submitted to the rest of the examination, grinding her eyes shut through most of the indignity, managing not to squeal when the woman smiled and maliciously pinched her nipple hard between a rough thumb and forefinger.

  With a sly smile on her face, the examiner then bent for the two lanterns and moved them to illuminate a mound of dank straw that evidently served as a pallet. Dolores grunted as her strapping captor clamped tighter the arm about her waist and lifted her bodily off the floor, ignoring her wild kicking to carry her to the pallet and toss her upon her back with a snort. The woman immediately flopped right across her, pinning her down but at least shifting her mass so that her victim was not suffocated. The other examiner knelt by her feet, grabbing her ankles, and forcing up her legs so that her knees bent. Suddenly she felt her thighs shoved roughly apart, in spite of her straining resistance, and the matron easily introduced her shoulder and a stiff arm between them to keep them spread.

  "Do not fight us, stupid wench, and you will not be hurt. Goods to be sold must first be examined," the woman holding her down barked in her ear.

  This was a nakedness so humiliating, so bereft of any humanity or grace, that Dolores's eyes leaked tears of shame, her skin shrinking in dread, as if her body were being spitted and rent in two. Her eyes, darting about in helplessness, caught the jailer at the edge of the circle of light as he licked his lips and grabbed excitedly at his groin. Humming hoarsely the examiner ran her fleshy hand down Dolores's quivering thigh, kneading the softness of it, and just as quickly the hand returned to Dolores's knee to keep her legs from closing.