by Jane Feather
“Yusuf will come for her in an hour.”
Fortunately for Sarita’s peace of mind, she couldn’t understand the short sentence and saw only the two women bow again as the caliph left the pretty little court.
“Lady, will you come down?” Kadiga called up to Sarita, still hanging over the gallery. “Your bath is prepared.”
“I do not want a bath,” Sarita declared, descending to the courtyard. “And even if I did, I am quite capable of giving myself one.”
“Oh, but you will enjoy a bath, my lady,” Zulema said, coaxing, her smile sweet as she came over to Sarita. “You must have been long upon the road to have become so dirty.”
Sarita glanced down at her bare feet. They were certainly grubby, and there was dirt beneath her fingernails where she had pried loose the backboard of the wagon … had it only been this evening? She was aware suddenly of fatigue, a rare sensation, but this she sensed came from the day’s emotional strains as much as from the physical trials she had endured. A most enticing fragrance curled with the steam from the tub, and the prospect of a bath became appealing. She moved to unlace her bodice, but Kadiga was quicker, and before she was fully aware of how it had happened, the two had stripped her of the orange dress and her shift beneath. She wore nothing else; she never did in the summer.
“No, leave my clothes,” she protested with a note of panic as they seemed about to discard the only things she possessed to connect her with the person she had been before Muley Abul Hassan had scooped her off the road.
Kadiga held up her dress and shift, looking doubtful. “They are in need of washing, lady, and the seam is torn.” She indicated a rent at the back. It must have happened when she had snagged herself on a splinter from the wagon, Sarita thought, snatching the garments from the other girl’s hands.
“Then I will wash them. And do not call me ‘lady.’ My name is Sarita.” She laid her clothes carefully on a table.
“But we are your waiting women,” Zulema said in her soft voice. “Will you step in the bath?”
“I shall not be here very long,” Sarita declared firmly, stepping into the deep water. “And if you must pretend to wait upon me while I am here, I insist you call me by my name.” She slipped down with a little whimper of pleasure as the hot scented water came up to her neck.
Zulema bent over her, pouring water over her hair. Sarita closed her eyes under the unaccustomed luxury of having her hair washed for her. All her life she’d been bathing in streams and rivers, using the coarse soap her mother made from rendered animal fat. In winter, they made do with an occasional pan of water heated on the brazier. The wonderful luxury of this bath served to increase her sense of unreality, and she wondered vaguely where she would have been by now if Muley Abul Hassan had not been on the road in search or her … in some filthy lodging in the stews of Granada probably, or hiding in a doorway …
“Why do you say you will not be here long?” Kadiga asked. She lifted Sarita’s feet, then exclaimed with a thrill of horror at their condition. “Allah! But look at your poor feet!”
“What’s the matter with them?” Alarmed, Sarita struggled up against the back of the tub and peered at her feet, held in both hands by Kadiga. They looked perfectly normal to her.
“But they are so hard,” Kadiga said. “Look, Zulema, only feel. They are like wooden boards.”
“There’s nothing the matter with them!” Indignantly, Sarita jerked her legs back into the water with a splash.
“We must rub the skin with oil and pumice,” Zulema said. “It will no doubt take many days to restore the softness—”
“I am not going to be here several days,” Sarita interrupted with some acerbity. “And I like my feet just as they are. How will I be able to walk if they are soft?”
“You do not wear shoes?” Kadiga stared. “It is not a Christian habit to wear shoes?”
Sarita thought of the merchants and the ladies she had come across in the towns on the tribe’s travels when she had been selling the gloves her mother made out of kidskin. She shrugged. “Some do, if they live in houses in towns. But we who live on the road do not need them, except in winter, when there is frost or snow upon the ground. Then I wear clogs.”
Her two attendants were looking at her as if she were some barbarian from the outlands. It occurred to Sarita, as she looked around her exquisite surroundings, that from their perspective such a viewpoint was probably justified. But how to explain the freedom of the road to birds who had only lived in a gilded cage? She decided not to bother. She would not be here long enough to form a true friendship with these women, so there was no need to explain herself.
Zulema had finished with her hair and was now soaping her arms and neck while Kadiga worked on her feet and legs. It felt very strange to Sarita, but she didn’t know quite how to stop them, and anyway, it was not unpleasant in her present otherworldly trance. Without thought, she knelt up in the tub when Zulema asked her to, and then squealed in furious protest, slapping away her hands as they moved onto the most intimate territory.
“Don’t touch me!” she exclaimed when Zulema sprang back, an expression of hurt bewilderment on her face.
“But why not?” the woman asked. “We are your attendants.”
Sarita stared at her for a minute, then grabbed the soap from Zulema’s hands and grimly washed herself while the young women stood watching in the same confusion. “Christians do not touch each other there, whatever infidels might do,” Sarita said, standing up. “Pass me the towel.”
“Not even men and women?” Kadiga demanded as she began to dry her. “What a strange race you must be.” She chuckled impishly, and Zulema allowed herself a giggle.
Sarita flushed. “It’s different between men and women.”
“Well, of course!” Kadiga exclaimed, throwing up her hands, and the two Moorish women collapsed with laughter.
Sarita felt a bubble of answering laughter in her throat. They were making fun of her strange prudishness, but they were also sharing the kind of secretive laughter she was accustomed to sharing with her girlfriends of the tribe. A chuckle escaped her, and then they were all three laughing, and she ceased to notice as they dried her with an objective thoroughness before anointing her skin with a perfumed oil.
After all this cleansing and perfuming, reassuming her worse-for-wear shift and orange dress seemed somewhat inappropriate, and she was not in the least surprised when Kadiga produced an emerald silk robe, richly embroidered with flowers and peacocks. It fastened down the front with little loops of material over pearl-colored buttons. Only they were not pearl-colored, Sarita realized. Each one was a perfect, pink-tinged, translucent jewel. Again that sense of unreality flooded her. What was she doing here?
After the previous comments about her feet, she didn’t balk at the slippers, although their pointed toes seemed ludicrously exaggerated and she couldn’t imagine how she would walk in them. But then she was only going to bed, up in that gallery in that wonderful cushioned embrasure. In the morning, when she had slept off this trance, she would be able to face what had happened and decide what to do about it.
“Do you wish to eat before you go to lord Abul?”
The question from Kadiga brought her back to reality with a jarring thud.
“Go where?”
“To lord Abul. Yusuf will come for you in half an hour. We must brush your hair, but if you wish to eat first, there is fruit and pastries.” Zulema moved to a table set beneath one of the marble columns, where a bowl of dates and figs sat beside a dish of savory pastries. “There is honeyed sherbet, or orange flower water if you prefer.”
An unpleasant tremor started up in the pit of her stomach, and Sarita felt suddenly queasy, all sleepiness vanished. Yet why was she taken by surprise? For what other purpose had she been brought here? His attitude, the kiss, should have made it clear, but in her dreamy drifting she had lost touch with reality.
She had just been prepared for the bed of the lord Abul as assuredly as in
the other life her mother would have prepared her for Tariq’s bed. But she could not take issue with these women as to the plans made for her this night. Only with the man who had made them could she discuss them.
“Yes, I am hungry,” she said, her voice amazingly calm as she realized that indeed she was hungry, ravenous in fact, having eaten nothing since midday. And she would need her strength to deal with whatever awaited her at the hands of the caliph of the Alhambra.
Chapter Four
The two women rubbed her hair with a towel and brushed it while she ate: delicious flaky pastry cases filled with lamb and rice and pine nuts. She would have liked a tankard of the rough red wine that had always accompanied her meals hitherto, but it seemed she must make do with the innocuous, though pleasant-tasting, sherbet. Her hair sprang out damply in extravagant curls under the careful brush strokes, the bright color glowing under the light of the oil lamps. She nibbled a date and had the absurd image of herself being groomed and fattened for the sacrificial altar. It was not a sacrifice she had any intention of supplying.
That was a bold thought. How could she be so sure when she had no idea what choices were available to her? She had fled one sacrificial altar already today. She was not going to be able to run from this one … not tonight, at least. She would need to find a more subtle way of avoiding it. Absently, her finger went to her mouth, to the spot he had kissed, and she felt again that strange emanation of sweetness in the air around her. This was not a man to fear. And then with a blinding sorrow came the vivid recollection of how the blemish had occurred: the wild passion of that moment, the desperation of their love—a desperation that had led to Sandro’s death. Maybe she did not fear Muley Abul Hassan, but she would fight to her own death to keep him from taking what had belonged to her lover. She threw back her head in an unconscious gesture of purpose and defiance.
Kadiga ceased her brushing, asking with a puzzled frown, “It is enough? It is not quite dry yet.”
“Enough?” In the intensity of her reverie, Sarita had ceased to be aware of her attendants or of the rhythmic brush strokes, and she now shook her head briskly. In the light of her determination, these preparations were pointless. “Yes, it is quite enough.”
“Then if you have finished eating, I will prepare your face.” Zulema came forward, and Sarita saw that she carried a tray on which were a variety of little jars and brushes. She dipped a slender pointed stick in a pot of kohl.
“No!” Sarita cried, horrified as she realized what the other woman was about to do. She jumped off the ottoman. “I will not have that … that whore’s paint on my face!”
“But, lady, it is customary.” Again that note of hurt bewilderment was in Zulema’s voice. She stood there holding the stick of kohl. “You must darken your eyes to be pleasing.”
“I am no whore,” Sarita spat. “I do not need to please any man.”
There was a stunned silence in the court: a silence filled by the soft plash of the fountain, the faint sputter as one of the lamps fueled with perfumed oil caught a breeze from the upstairs windows.
“You have been given to the lord Abul against your will?” Kadiga finally ventured.
“No, no, not given—” Sarita began.
“Sold, then?” put in Zulema.
Sarita shook her head. “No, neither sold nor given. I belong to no one.” They looked blankly at her, and she tried again. “I was leaving my tribe because … oh, because I had to … and your lord Abul, who had seen me earlier in the afternoon, decided …” She paused. They were still looking at her as if struggling for comprehension. “Your lord Abul decided he wanted me,” she said baldly. “So he took me.” Did he always simply take what he wanted? she wondered. He certainly had the air of a man to whom nothing was gainsaid. It had been one of the first things she had noticed about him.
The two women nodded with expressions of relief as all became clear. “You are the caliph’s captive. You belong to him.”
“No!” Sarita exclaimed in frustration. “That is not in the least the case. I may be a captive, but I do not belong to the caliph. I belong only to myself.”
She saw that she had lost them again, but before she could begin a more elaborate explanation, there was an imperative bang at the door.
“It is Yusuf,” Kadiga said. “He has come for you.” She drew her scarf across her face. Zulema did the same before hastening to open the door. The man who had accompanied the caliph that evening stepped into the court. He didn’t acknowledge the two women who had moved to one side, but laid a bundle on a bench beside the door.
It was her own, Sarita recognized. She remembered dropping it when the caliph had swept her up, and she had assumed it was lost forever. Now, with a joyful exclamation, she hurried over to examine it. Everything was there: the wooden combs for her hair, the silver bracelet her father had given her on her twelfth birthday, the lace mantilla that had belonged to her grandmother, her clean shift, wooden clogs for the winter roads, and best of all, the twelve silver pennies. Everything that established her in her own familiar world was there. The present fairyland receded properly for the first time since she had entered it, and she felt a resurgence of her real self.
The man called Yusuf said something to her in Arabic. She shook her head, indicating incomprehension, and saw his face darken. He spoke again, harshly, and she realized he had thought she was refusing to do whatever it was he wanted.
Kadiga spoke rapidly in Arabic, explaining that Sarita didn’t speak that language. The man’s face cleared.
“You are to go with him,” Kadiga said in Spanish. “But he doesn’t like it that you do not cover your face. It is not modest and God-fearing for a woman to show her face in the company of a man not of her family … except for the lord Abul, of course,” she added. “That is different. He is our supreme lord, and we are all of his family.”
For answer, Sarita looked directly at Yusuf, meeting his eyes. She smiled and said politely in her own language, “I am ready to go with you. But I am not of your people and I do not hide my face.”
Kadiga translated rapidly and Yusuf shrugged, as if the matter no longer interested him. He turned back to the door, gesturing that Sarita should accompany him. A boy stood outside the door holding a lantern. The extra light seemed unnecessary to Sarita as she followed Yusuf through the garden and down the cypress-lined path with its torches still flaring in their sconces. The entire Alhambra was lit up like the market square during Shrovetide revels, and people were scurrying about their business as if it were broad daylight.
Yusuf turned into an arcade surrounding a court with a long rectangular pool in its center. Lilies floated on the water, and light and music spilled from the arched doorways they passed. Sarita paused to peer through one of these archways, but her companion barked something at her. She couldn’t understand the words, but the tone was sufficiently peremptory for the meaning to be clear. As a point of principle, however, she lingered for a few more seconds. There were men in the hall within, lounging on ottomans and divans, some deep in conversation, some engaged over chessboards, the sounds of lute and lyre providing a delicate accompaniment to their entertainment. No women, though. But then in the tribe such a male gathering would have excluded womenfolk also. They would have been sitting around campfires, not disporting themselves among silks and frescoes and fountains; someone would have been playing a guitar; a few voices would have contributed a song, instead of the professional musicians here in the gallery. But in essence the scene was familiar to her.
Yusuf seized her arm. She pulled it free, making an elaborate play of brushing at her sleeve where his hand had been; then she turned from the hall, gesturing airily that they should continue on their way. The look on his face was daunting, and she held her breath for a minute, trusting that some umbrella of protection came to her from the interest of Muley Abul Hassan. Apparently her trust was not misplaced, for Yusuf swung abruptly on his heel and strode ahead of her along the portico.
At the e
nd, they turned within an archway into a quiet, lamplit hall where two men—guards of some sort, she judged by their uniform robes and the curved scimitars at their belts—stood on either side of a doorway at the far end. It seemed they had entered some sanctum, and the sounds of the palace faded behind them.
Yusuf approached the door, knocked softly, waited, then opened the door and waved Sarita into the caliph’s presence.
Abul believed in the virtues of variety when it came to love partners, and although for the sake of domestic politics he had until their falling-out ensured that his wife was clearly his favorite, he regularly summoned other women from the seraglio. His four concubines were all free women, the beautiful daughters of the great Morisco-Spanish families, given to him to cement alliances or to buy friendship. They posed no threat to Aicha and seemed content enough to inhabit the seraglio in the Alhambra, coming willingly to their lord’s bed when summoned and engaging in sometimes intense competition as to who might please him the most. He was aware of the competition and amused by it and was not averse to stirring the waters now and again by summoning one woman several nights in a row. But in truth, none of them pleased him more than another. They had all borne him children, which gave them status and permanency. Maternity made a woman special in the seraglio, while it separated her from her lord, who throughout her pregnancy left her to the sole attentions of the other women and on the production of a healthy child gifted her with clothes and jewels. These gifts were again a source of fierce comparison and competition.
In addition to these secondary wives, Abul had on occasion bought a female slave who had caught his fancy, or taken into captivity a particular woman as part of the spoils of battle. These women had not the legal status of his concubines and, once they no longer pleased him, became ordinary members of the palace household. They were assured of the caliph’s protection throughout their lifetime, but beyond that he troubled little about them once he had tired of them. Women had but two tasks: to minister to their lord’s pleasure and to be fruitful if he desired it of them. He did not breed children on the bodies of his slaves, and they were free to marry once they had left his bed. Abul considered himself a considerate master.