by Byron Rempel
The Moors didn’t seek men to harvest their coffee and pluck the rose of saffron. They wanted to fill their concubines. Evil, evil women. It was to prevent the spread of immorality, they said. To satiate the sexual desires of the female slaves. They had no idea of woman’s yearning.
From my tent I heard the clatter of the town. Rising voices in the language of the Moor, dogs barking, horses’ hooves, tiny bells and the call to prayer. Chickens scattering in front of me, the hammer of the blacksmith, the crack of his fire. Carts and distant music. The waters of fountains. Coins counted. The labyrinth of the souk. I would be sold.
Yet the horse continued, wound down the cobblestones until the noise quieted, until only the calls of women and laughter of children reached my ears. I tried to move the haik to see. One eye was free, but the tent still obstructed my view. Now I saw shadows, shadows through a mist of tears. When we stopped I heard the Moor’s voice. Someone else held the horse. Someone touched my leg. A small hand. A boy.
I kicked at him, and he laughed. His hand explored further up my leg. When he got to my knee a woman called out what sounded like an admonishment. Her voice nearer, until the boy either left or stood away from the horse. I shouted to her. I shouted for help. I knew the Arabic word. In Spanish I pled my cause and asked for the mercy of woman on woman.
“He will sell me for a trinket,” I said. “He will brand me with hot irons. I who was once a Bride of Christ have become the chattel of a beast, my vows shattered, doomed for eternity. He who promised everything has left me with nothing. I pray for some drowsy syrups from your household, enough to release me from this sin and let me be with my Husband in the next world.”
I never knew who the woman was, and whether she had pity because she was Christian or knew of nuns or only of the suffering of women. But she did speak my language, for some minutes later hands came underneath her tent, and found my bound hands. Into them she put a small vial. All was quiet.
Seconds later the Moor took off the tent and pulled me off the horse so quickly I almost dropped the philter. We went through the arched door into a courtyard, and before a wide and bearded man and a metal table of mint tea and dates he stripped off my cloak so I stood naked but for my pearls and sapphires. He untied my wrists and rubbed them free of marks, but did not look inside my fists. When he turned me around in front of the man I quickly brought the vial to my nose, looked at it, smelled it. As an infirmaress I had tended the abbey herb garden, had mixed the potions and memorized my star charts. I knew my humours and their seasons, the holes to cut in skulls to release spirits. But all my learning could not penetrate the bottle. I needed to taste and smell it to know its effects. The murky green meant lettuce certainly, with purple mulberry juice. Also necessary were opium and hemlock. If I were lucky, bryony for hallucination. I only needed too much.
The fat man asked to see my buttocks. He said they reminded him of the dunes of his great deserts, between them the oasis of the Ubari. When the men both stared as I bent over the table, I gave each mint tea a dose from the vial. I stood apart from them now. They reclined on their cushions and sipped their tea with greed and lust. I lowered my eyes and remembered my home and let a smile play on my lips. The fat man and Moor laughed at my coyness, and money changed hands.
Moments later, the coins fell from their hands and onto the tiled floors, some of it rolling to my feet. I bent and picked them up, bit into one or two. The men were sprawled now on their cushions, the whites of their eyes showing, their mouths silent. The fat one took longer. I stripped the Moor of all his vestments, of his headscarves and robes and sandals, and put them on. I stripped the other man too, and bundled up his clothes and put them in the Moor’s bag. All the dates. All the coins. Then I strode out the door and leapt onto the Moor’s horse, pushing away the boy who held it, and galloped ’til I could see no more the minarets.
The End
“Right. Happily, ever after.”
“She took over. I had nothing to do with it, Julia.”
“Heard of that. Never believed it.”
“I’m thinking it’s not quite the end. She goes back to lead the Reconquista and drive the Moors from Spain.”
“Your readers want your heroine to kill her lover and join the army. You’ve given this some thought.”
She had. And she hadn’t.
“Send me the manuscript. Now get out.”
She’d finished the ending by the second day of the conference, Christophe at the Sorbonne with another talk, or a panel—she didn’t want to know. When she hung up the phone the room on the Seine was quiet. Did she want to give it more thought? She’d got the story down. Intrigue and betrayal, love and loss. All the trappings of a heartbreaking, exotic kidnapping. Some things had to be left alone. Sometimes magic needed more space than logic. She’d left the university so she could stop analysing everything.
But she deserved a crepe. She put on boots, boots with heels. She shouldered her satchel, empty of page. At the first stand she requested one with lemon and sugar. Simple. Her arrival was complete. She ate the ambrosia while she watched the ghosts of French peasants forever marching to the Crusade of the Faint-Hearted.
She walked to the Petit Pont, thought she might pick up a book or two—a novel, nothing academic. The lemon bit at her lips. At Shakespeare & Company she knew she was just blocks from the Sorbonne, and smiled. Her arrival wasn’t complete after all. All she needed was to have one more crepe standing beside the Seine. With Nutella this time, so that the chocolate melted among buttery folds and painted her fingers. And shared with Christophe. She hurried to rescue him.
Outside conference room doors she heard the familiar tones, the languages of science and art uncomfortably wed. If she were French she could walk into the room, pout, stride out. And he would run after her, and she would tell him Julia wanted to see her manuscript. Or was that an American movie ending. But she couldn’t even bring herself to open the door. What if he didn’t know the script?
But that was silly, wasn’t it, and what had she quit the university for, if not to free herself from constraint.
She opened the door and its creaks made everybody turn to her. She forgot to look at faces. The small room looked like a corner of Versailles, with tall windows and ornate chandeliers, painted niches and mirrors, conference tables lining the walls. Someone motioned for her to close the door. She scanned faces, found none familiar, and closed it with a bang.
After a few more dead ends, she found an official looking table. They couldn’t find his name on the conference time table, but Anna explained he’d only come on at the last minute. They directed her to an organizer who knew Christophe’s name. He claimed they hadn’t invited him, but he had seen him in the halls. Asking about positions, looking for work, it seemed. Asking everywhere. Last saw him at the Librarie Philosophique, asking them.
Anna said, I mean Professeur Christophe Auguste de Latour de Mantes-La-Jolie. That Christophe.
The organizer smirked. That Christophe.
“Why do you have that little smile,” Anna said. “What’s that mean? Why does ‘That Christophe’ get a little smile?”
He puffed out his cheeks and blew.
Anna pushed his chest.
“No blowing,” she said. “No little smiles and no blowing. Got that?”
“Madame,” he said.
“And none of that either.”
Down the hall from an open room there was laughter. Anna looked to see if more French were making fun of her. She could feel her heart beat, too fast. She would not analyse why the man was so awful. He was French. One got frustrated with the French, that was all. When she turned back the man had escaped.
Anna sat on a bench. She puffed out her cheeks and blew.
It felt good, so she did it a few more times. It felt much better than thinking about Christophe lying to her about speaking here, on the first days in these Elysian Fiel
ds. But in the next minute, as if she had willed him to life, he walked in front of her. His head down, muttering to himself, his briefcase a weapon to frighten students.
“Christophe!”
“Ah, Anna.”
“What are you doing?”
“Yes, going to give another talk. A little busy, can we talk later?”
She stood up and grabbed his sleeve. She blew air from her cheeks once more. Why could her nun do it, and not she? Bound and shackled. When he shook off her grip and looked around him, she spoke in the kind of voice she usually reserved for saying goodbye to dying cats.
“You don’t have to lie to me anymore,” she said. “This is us, in Paris.”
His eyes were wide. He shook his head and put his hand on her shoulder. “I am late. But listen to me, you are my truth. I never lie to you.”
He pointed down the hall. Students and professors grouped around a door as if going to a lecture. “You see?”
Anna nodded. Maybe it was the air of Paris, saturated with diesel and history. She blew away that smog, and thought she saw the outline of an ordinary man. “Okay. I’m coming to listen then. I wanted a crepe, on the Seine.”
“You don’t want more conferences anymore. That’s not for you. Classes and lectures and history. You’re not an academic, not now, not ever. Go to our home, to your fables and romance.”
He already rushed down the hall, jostled into the crowd. At the end of the corridor she thought she saw him stop in front of someone, bring his hands together in a plea.
Anna walked behind, bumping into people she hardly saw. Her vision clouded, her face hot. She reached up and undid her hair, let it spill out of control on her shoulders. Around the door, normally dour profs and serious students laughed at something. Her first instinct was to pull her hair back up, wipe her cheeks. But she saw they were enthralled by someone at a table.
“Your cornices are critical,” he said, “your slate tiles have slipped.” He put his arm around the timid man who stood beside him, who wore a tunic and held a crude mallet. “I offered to help. Like you can see, I got lots of experience with turrets.”
The table advertised that medieval castle being built from scratch in the Burgundy woods. The same re-creation Christophe had mocked as populist the first time they’d been at the conference, the tunic-sporting, time-traveling academic he’d shunned. Now the man beamed at the carpenter next to him. “So anyway, there was the Queen of Coleridge Park,” he said, “hanging from the tower by one hand, a book in the other.” His voice a mix of French and Québécois accents. “Her hair a rose blossom on an ivy wall, but huge flakes of snow on her neck bit with a thousand frozen teeth. ‘I refuse to get hypothermia in my own castle,’ she said. The pigeons on the next window leapt into the air and made little snowstorms of their own.”
He let his audience soak up the exotic image for a few moments, let his gaze wander across the crowd until he stopped on one person. He smiled, and Anna thought instead of running down the corridors of the Sorbonne, or going back to the apartment on the Seine, or ever pretending to believe the lies of Christophe again, she would stay to hear how the story turned out.
“The book tore at the spine, and she watched her reputation tear all the way down the side of the page. And then it was free.”
“The FalconMoor,” Anna said, “a deconstruction of the parameters of romance.”
“Lot of work,” said Zap, “for one book.”
THE END
The author wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to the numerous editors, pilots, architects, professors and students whose complicit or unwitting guidance helped create this organism, including Karen Stoecker, Kate Speers, Luce Lafontaine, Yseult Saint-Jacques, Suzanne Morton, Patricia Ivan, Denise Audet, Monic Robillard, Josie Teed, Lori Schubert, Maurice Mierau, Biscuit and Hugo for their loyal support, and that insatiable muse, my wife.