The sea was Hakiim’s hope; once he reached the water, temperatures would be temperate and the air moist. But the sea was a very long way away, many days by muleback. Heat had crumpled the airs of Granada so that no line could be discerned between earth and sky, and the air itself smelled like ashes. The Moor had one hand on his mule’s girth strap, and was peering into the high distance when Perfecto addressed him.
“You think I’m crazy, no doubt,” grunted the round-faced Spaniard. “You must think I’m crazy, after the way I acted with the eunuch.”
But Hakiim glanced at his partner’s expression, and for the first time in weeks he tended to believe that the man was NOT crazy, for this hangdog attitude was every inch the old Perfecto. The black glint was gone from his small eyes and his fat-shrouded jaw no longer clenched and unclenched.
“I never thought you were crazy,” answered Hakiim, with more regard for the amenities than for the truth. “I merely thought you… ill-advised.”
Silence fell, impossible for the Moor to endure. “It seemed that first you wanted too much for the eunuch, and then, as soon as he was found to be of value, too little. That’s all.
“But it is done, and no great loss.” He raised his foot to the round wooden stirrup.
Perfecto put one hand on Hakiim’s shoulder. “Old friend, I can explain.”
Hakiim smiled uncertainly. He no longer wanted explanations, but to be out in the clean air, away from Perfecto and Granada both. “I am to meet a troop of fursan outside the Alhambra at noon. They will let me ride with them all the way down to the sea, but I must not be late.”
Hakiim’s sleek and restive mule pawed the desiccated earth with his hoof. In reply Perfecto thrust one finger at heaven, swaggered behind the house, and returned with his own beast, already bitted and saddled. “I will ride with you to the Alhambra,” he said. “That will give us time.”
Hakiim was not happy, but he was one of that sort who, while not especially kindly, has a great deal of difficulty being rude. He allowed Perfecto to mount beside him.
The mules danced their first few steps, finding their balance under saddle. The Spaniard coughed and cleared his phlegmy throat. “It has to do”—he chewed his Up silently for a moment—”with a promise I made once. That I would do something for someone. If it needed doing.”
Hakiim frowned. He suspected Perfecto of talking nonsense. Like a child. Like a Spaniard. “To do what, and for whom?” He led his animal along a street so narrow that pedestrians darted into doorways to allow them to pass.
Perfecto’s animal followed. The Spaniard’s reply was inaudible and so Hakiim turned and asked him to repeat it.
“It does not matter to whom I gave the promise, does it? It was a promise and I was therefore honor bound.”
Hakiim, as a dealer, thought this attitude was so much dung of the mule. What was more, he was certain that Perfecto had no more illusions than he himself. But as he turned to say something of this nature, they rounded a hump in the road, and a white donkey, carrying a man and two sacks of wood, rammed nose-to-nose into his mount.
There was a great thrashing and hawing, and Perfecto’s innocent mule received a kick in the chest from Hakiim’s. When the incident had resolved itself (the donkey rider backing his animal along the alley and into a cul-de-sac) Perfecto pointed urgently along a cross street that led out of the gates of Granada.
“Here. You will arrive at the fortress at the same time as if you had cut through the city. AND, we will be able to hear ourselves talk.”
“I don’t want to be able to hear ourselves talk,” whispered Hakiim to himself, but he turned the mule’s head.
“As to what the bargain—or rather the promise—was, well, that was to depend on circumstance. As it happened, it was necessary that I sell this man in Granada.”
It was cooler outside the wall, and undeniably fresher, but Hakiim’s mood was unimproved. “Not man, Perfecto, but boy. And how can you…”
Quite calmly the Spaniard corrected his partner. “Not boy, Hakiim, but man. The blond was never a eunuch.”
Hakiim let the reins slide down his mule’s neck. For some moments his tongue forgot speech. “And you knew it?”
“From the beginning. But I knew that you would be very unhappy with the idea of selling an entire, so I thought it better to pretend.”
Perfecto, jogging along on the mouse-gray back, looked more complacent than ashamed.
Hakiim thought furiously.
“I should have suspected something when the Berber woman refused to be sold without him.”
Now it was Perfecto’s turn to raise his eyebrows. “Berber woman? Djoura?”
Hakiim made a negatory wave. “She… always claimed to be a Berber. Pay it no mind.”
But Perfecto’s little eyes squinted littler. “Are there, then, black Berbers?”
“A few,” Hakiim admitted. “In the west and south. But that doesn’t mean that she is one…”
Perfecto gave a heavy sigh. “It would be a dangerous thing, to sell a woman of Berber tribe as a slave, in a land where the Berbers have the sharpest swords,” he said.
“You are referring to Tunis?” Hakiim mumbled nervously.
“I am referring to Granada,” answered the Spaniard.
The wall of the city rose to their left, gray but gleaming like milk in the sun. Below was a bank of shale that crumbled down to a series of turtle-backed hills. The sprawling fortress called the Alhambra, red walled and white towered, gleamed from half a mile away. Hakiim took a deep breath of sage-dry air and listened to the cicadas in the dust.
But for Perfecto, now, he’d have solitude.
‘There is a world of difference between selling a Nubian who CALLS herself a Berber and is not, and selling a man YOU call a eunuch, and who is not. What will happen when Rashiid finds out he has been tricked?”
Perfecto urged his animal close beside. “Tricked? It was not I who told him Pinkie was a boy, but Djoura herself.”
Djoura. Hakiim’s brow knotted. “Yes! Our black lily must have known. Was she in this business with you?”
Perfecto spat off to the side. “No. Djoura is only perverse.
“And Rashiid can have no complaint to us, since Pinkie did not cost him one shaved copper!”
Hearing an unmistakable jingle, Hakiim turned his head. Perfecto had taken out his moneybag and was shaking it in his hand for emphasis. Hakiim’s own profits were kept in a discreet bag-belt which wrapped his body beneath his shirt. It was a heavy belt, but not so full as this moneybag.
A sudden guess made Hakiim blurt, “So you were paid for taking the eu—the blond.”
Perfecto laughed, and at this moment Hakiim’s mule stopped dead and pawed the black shale with his foot three times.
“A bad omen,” grunted the Spaniard. “When a mule does that. Take a good look before stepping onto the ship you engage, old friend!”
Then he added quickly, “No, I was not paid for taking the Saqalibah, or at least not in gold. I told you I did it for someone to whom I owe a number of favors.”
Hakiim was getting tired of being told that. “Which makes me suspect the fellow was no more a legal slave than a physical eunuch,” he replied. “Tell me, Perfecto. Who puts you under such strange obligations?”
“I will do better than tell you,” the Spaniard proclaimed. “I will introduce you.”
This was too much. As though Hakiim had any desire to meet Perfecto’s low European friends… “No time,” the Moor said shortly.
“All the time in the world,” replied Perfecto, and he laughed.
“Go meet the devil, you damned paynim!” the Spaniard bellowed, swinging his moneybag (heavier than gold), down on the back of Hakiim’s neck.
These visitors were so fancy that not only Fatima and Ama had to be hidden but the furniture as well. The normally concealed household bedding, however, was subject to a good deal of attention, as the dining room was strewn with pillows and the spread long ago embroidered by Rashiid
ben Rashiid’s mother hung dimpled from the ceiling. (This use of her handiwork would have surprised Lucrezza, wife of Pablo, very much.)
Ama found this all very hard, as she perched on a heavy oak table in her hidey-hole at the corner of the house. Since all the floor was taken, she was forced to crawl along the tops of the piled European furniture. Like a cat. And there were no cushions to make her position softer.
Better to be an old drudge like Fatima and supervise the cooking in the kitchen house than be locked up like this, in stifling heat with nary a toy or amusement all evening. Djoura was scrubbing pots, and even Raphael had been taken from the little wife of Rashiid, for he was to play for the guests.
Ama felt a stab of resentment. Wasn’t it she who had sensed the value of the musician, when Rashiid hadn’t wanted him for free?
And for that matter, wasn’t the blond a mere European? Why did Raphael get to attend the party, while her pure Moorish bottom rested on the hard wooden furniture her people despised?
Ama would turn the tables on all of them, she promised herself. Big tables, like the one she sat on.
Hasiim Alfard, lean and dry-faced Berber of Morocco, looked to go the night without cracking a smile. His two lieutenants, Masoud and Mustapha, sat like dusty shadows at his feet, and unbent no more than their qa’id.
Rashiid’s reaction to this was a grin like that carved on a turnip-face. He knew such an ingratiating and constant smile displayed a certain feeling of weakness before his powerful guests, and so he wiped the expression from his face again and again.
But it came back unnoticed, and in fact, there it was now, splitting his wide face and revealing teeth of various assorted shades. “You find it crowded in Granada, Qa’id Hasiim, after the tents of your people?”
Hasiim’s right hand dipped into the spiced lamb, went to his mouth, and rinsed itself in the crockery bowl before he replied. “I find it… dirty,” said the Berber. “But then, what can I expect? It is Granada.”
The dry man (only his lips were moist, wet with the grease of Rashiid’s expensive hospitality) turned slowly away, distracted by the ud player in the corner.
“Dirty?” echoed the heavier man. “Ah, yes. Unfortunately. But you say rightly, my honored friend; it IS Granada.” Rashiid erupted in fruity chuckles. “My own people…”
But the qa’id turned back to the food as though Rashiid were not even present. It meant nothing to him that Rashiid had “people,” such as the gentry of Granada counted them. In fact, he might as well have admitted to Hasiim that he had been born with the name of Paolo. He would have found himself neither more nor less respected on that account. The city man was not a tribesman of Hasiim’s, and that was all that mattered.
The Berber pulled a piece of gristle from the lamb on his trencher. He examined it, frowning hugely.
Rashiid sweated. In all his years in business he had failed to learn that one cannot impress a fanatic any more than one can impress someone else’s watchdog. He tried.
“It is so hard,” he began, “to maintain the mosques decent and clean in a place like this, in a city where no one knows how to keep Ramadan properly, and infidels wander the streets freely as the faithful.”
Once more Hasiim scooped, bit, chewed, and swallowed before answering. “There is no need for mosques,” he said, his voice totally devoid of expression. “In our hills there are no mosques.”
Rashiid cleared his throat, but said nothing. He had begun to lose hope for this particular gathering. Why had he invited this fellow anyway, with his stiff-necked puritanism and unwillingness to be pleased?
The answer surfaced unbidden: because Hasiim was of very high lineage, and his cavalry was barracked in the Alhambra. These fursan were among the most powerful and fanatic of the Berbers, who were the most powerful and fanatic among the Arab conquerers of Spain.
The man of Granada felt an almost unconquerable desire to sit in a chair. Forty-two was too old to be squatting on the floor like a peasant.
Music intruded into his consciousness. The melody of the blond slave’s music soothed his nerves as nothing else could. At least he need have no fear for the quality of his entertainment.
As a matter of fact, Hasiim was listening to Raphael with peculiar, brooding intensity. So were his silent fellows. Rashiid waited until the end of the piece before he spoke again.
“Handles the instrument well for a straw-haired barbarian, doesn’t he?”
Hasiim’s eyes (brown and shallow set, like those of an Arab horse) flickered. “There is no music worth making except that which glorifies Allah,” he stated. “And there is no instrument worthy of praising Allah except the voice of a man.”
Rashiid felt a mouthful of eggplant stick halfway to his stomach. His face prickled all over. He turned to Raphael, who sat tailor-fashion on the hard floor behind the guests.
But there was no need to direct the slave, for at Hasiim’s words Raphael had put the wooden ud down at his feet. “Shall I sing, then, for you?” he asked, his blue eyes staring directly at those of Hasiim.
Rashiid’s terror of nerves resolved itself into a fury, that the boy should dare speak to an honored guest in that familiar voice.
But Hasiim forestalled his discipline, replying, “Yes, of course, if you can do so without impropriety.” (For among the things which do not impress a fanatic are manners.)
Raphael closed his eyes. He took a breath, let it out slowly, and then began to chant the same evening song he had shared with Djoura on his first day in chains.
In the kitchen the woman heard him. She raised her head and her hands clenched the handles of the cauldron she was dragging from the fire (black hands, black cauldron). Her eyes stung with tears she did not understand.
In the chamber of cushions, no man spoke until the song was over. Then Hasiim stood up and walked over to Raphael.
“You!” he hissed. “Could it be you are a Berber?”
The blond smiled as Hasiim lowered his leather-tough body beside his. “No, I am not. But I sing that song together with my friend, who is a Berber.”
“His name?” pressed the other, for Hasiim knew the name of almost every desert soldier quartered in Granada.
“Her name,” Raphael corrected him gently, “is Djoura.”
Now, in spite of himself, Hasiim Alfard smiled, and his face creased into dozens of sun wrinkles. “And how, in the name of Allah’s grace, did a barbarian like you meet a Berber woman?”
“We are slaves here together,” the blond replied innocently.
“No, a Berber cannot be a slave,” stated Hasiim, as though saying, sheep cannot be green. “Not even a Berber woman.”
“Djoura is,” Raphael dared to say. “She is cleaning pots in the kitchen right now.”
There was a hideous silence.
Chapter 7
Saara’s second procession through the worm hole was less eventful. The dragon was gone, but Gaspare stepped out into the cleft of sunshine, where that creature had so long been chained, and squinted. And sniffed.
“Doesn’t smell bad, considering.”
Saara didn’t bother to turn. “Why should it, when he wasn’t fed for twenty years?”
Gaspare made a worried noise at that, and followed Saara into the next dark tunnel. “Speaking of which, do you think we can trust its —his—promise, not to eat Festilligambe?” His words rang and echoed through the darkness so that they were barely understandable.
“He didn’t eat you,” was the Fenwoman’s reply, and then she put her fingers to her lips for silence.
Gaspare didn’t see the finger. Indeed, he saw very little of anything in the deepening gloom, and soon began to stumble. The witch was forced to take his hand.
It was long, this tunnel, and as sinuous as a serpent. But like a serpent it was smooth. It became more and more difficult for Saara to walk cautiously. But the amiable builder of the tunnel had been chained in the middle of it since its first construction. The Liar might very well have made changes; the very
regularity of the walls and floor might well be designed to delude the wanderer away from caution, so she goaded her ears to hear and her skin to feel.
While feet are moving, time is passing, but neither Gaspare nor Saara had any sense of time’s progression, and the weariness of their black march turned into irritability.
Gaspare fell, twisting his body like that of a cat in his effort to keep the lute from striking the ground. The instrument was saved, but its back-curving neck smacked Saara sharply on the thigh as it fell. She hissed her annoyance.
Gaspare himself whispered his curses to the floor, but as he clambered to his feet again (disoriented in the darkness), he remarked very calmly that a witch ought to be able to call fire to hand at need.
Delstrego had.
Saara was still massaging her leg, but this implicit criticism stung her worse than the blow. “I have heard a little bit too much about Damiano Delstrego lately,” she said between clenched teeth. “And what a great witch he was. There is a difference between accomplishment and simple talent, you know. Or perhaps you don’t know!
“Of course Damiano could call fire. He had fire coming out of the top of his head! But it took me to teach him to make clouds.”
Gaspare snorted. “So who wants to make clouds, except a peasant in a drought?”
Both had forgotten the necessity for quiet and for caution as well. Gaspare strode bullishly down the corridor, one hand tracing the right wall for support.
Until he fell again.
Saara heard the thunk, followed by a small weary whine like that of a child. All her anger melted away.
“Don’t get up,” she told Gaspare, and she lowered herself beside the young man. “And don’t talk. Give me a minute to think.”
Damiano ran through Saara’s memories like a bright but tangled thread. Her powers had been his, for a while, and his powers had been hers, for another while. Bodies, too, had shared as they might.
For a short time. Such a short time.
But surely Damiano’s favorite magic should be accessible to her. To make a fire without anything to burn…
She fished into the unsorted depths of her mind and came up with brown eyes. A lot of curly brown hair, in snarls.
The Damiano Series Page 67