by Jane Johnson
He took the board from her and tipped the onions into the sizzling oil in the base of the steam tower, moved them around with a wooden spoon till the air was fragrant; then pinches and scatters from half a dozen unlabelled jars went into the onions, and suddenly her nose was twitching. Was that cumin? Cinnamon? Something sweet yet savoury, too complex to identify.
“What was that you just put in?”
“A little bit of magic.” The rest of the vegetables went into the spices, and the couscous into the steam compartment above them.
“That’s not very helpful!”
“I can’t just give away my secrets. You have to earn them.”
“I peeled vegetables!”
“You’ll have to peel a lot more than that.” He paused, calculating. “Four point five tonnes.”
“I’m not that desperate to know.”
Abdou shrugged. “Okay.” Deliberately infuriating.
The smells were making her mouth fill with water. “Do you always cook on Fridays?” she asked.
“Not just Fridays. Why do you look so surprised? It’s not so unusual. Everyone I know cooks. You have to eat, no?”
Kate thought about the men she knew. Left to themselves most would be living like hogs, eating straight out of the fridge, the microwave or the takeaway. She couldn’t imagine any of them throwing spices into a pot in such a devil-may-care fashion.
“Food is an embrace,” he said, casting her a sideways glance that made her stomach flip. “It’s how we express love.” He turned the gas off, wrapped a clean tea towel around the steamer and quickly washed, dried and put away the utensils and chopping board, till the place was pristine again. “Ready?”
By the time they had carried the pot of couscous up the long hill to the Alhambra, Kate was ravenous. In a little bit of the garden barred to tourists they found that Omar and Mohamed had spread a bright flatweave rug and set up a little portable gas stove between the citrus trees and roses. While Mohamed took the steamer from Abdou, Uncle Omar made a sweeping chivalric gesture that seemed to offer her the whole world of the courtyard. “Marhaban, Kate. Sit, sit.” He ushered her into the shade beneath one of the trees. “To save your lovely skin.”
Kate laughed. “No one’s ever complimented my skin before.”
Abdou paused in his preparations. “Really? England must be full of fools and blind men.”
She watched the men pottering, stirring and sniffing while she washed her hands under the stream of water Mohamed poured from a big pewter kettle. She sniffed her hands. They smelled of roses.
“Roses!”
Mohamed opened the lid so she could see inside. Petals floated in the shadowy depth. “Alhambra roses,” he confirmed, glancing shyly at her as he handed her a linen cloth. “I scavenged the fallen ones from the rose beds and added them myself.” He seemed very pleased by her delight.
The men also washed their hands in the scented water and dried them on the cloth. Then Uncle Omar reached into some hidden pocket inside his capacious overalls and brought out a small jar. When he unscrewed the lid, Kate recoiled at the odour that sprang from it. “Good God, what is that?” She watched in fascinated horror as he approached the steamer. “Oh no, he’s not— Please don’t let him—”
Too late. A great dollop of the noxious-smelling substance fell audibly into the sauce. Uncle Omar stirred and stirred, then tasted the result and beamed. “Now it’s ready.”
“What did he just put in there?” asked Kate, suspecting manure or suchlike.
Abdou tapped the side of his nose. “Better not ask.”
“I want to know.”
“Curiosity killed the cat—isn’t that one of your English sayings?”
“It smells as if the cat died a long time ago,” she said, grimacing.
He laughed. “It’s not that bad. It’s smen.”
For a moment she thought it was even worse than she’d imagined. “Say that again,” she said, hoping she’d misheard; thinking that if it was what it sounded like, she’d be making her excuses and fleeing back down the hill.
“Smen,” he said again. “Fermented butter. When a Berber child is born, our mothers take some of that day’s butter and seal it in a jar. They keep it unopened until the child is grown, and only then, when it’s safe, do they open the jar.”
“Safe?”
“From the djinn.” He took the jar from his uncle and dropped a spoonful of the contents into the earth at the foot of the nearest tree. “There: that’ll appease them.”
“They’re easily pleased,” Kate observed, wrinkling her nose at the pungent stench.
“Not at all. To them it’s the height of luxury—like a cellared wine, or aged beef. This one is eighteen years old today. It’s Mohamed’s jar.”
Mohamed beamed. “Today, I am man.”
“Eighteen years.” Kate felt a bit faint, imagining what eighteen years could do to butter.
“I look more old, I know,” Mohamed said sagely, turning his baseball cap from back to more conventional front.
“Well, congratulations, Mohamed. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. I’d have brought a card.”
“Is pleasure, Señorita Kate. That you here is best gift.”
The smile he gave her was incandescent: the men of this family were frighteningly handsome. She’d bet Uncle Omar had been pretty devastating in his day.
Omar—clearly an old hand at this—spooned the couscous into a heap on an immense patterned plate, then tidied the edges till the grain formed a perfect golden dome. Upon this he arranged the vegetables, raying them out in green and red and orange from the centre in a colourful sunburst. Abdou produced from his duffel bag a single small plate and Omar carefully excavated a portion of the arrangement as a generous helping for Kate, and topped the small grain mountain with several spoonfuls of the aromatic sauce. Including the rank old butter.
All three men watched her expectantly. Clearly she was the guest and would thus eat first, but was it some sort of test? Bracing herself, Kate took a tentative mouthful, certain she would gag and have to force a swallow. The sauce sang in her mouth. Though symphonic in its complexity, there was no hint of the disgusting smell. It seared, it soared, just the right side of fiery. She closed her eyes, experiencing a kind of small ecstasy. “My God,” she said when at last able to speak. “That’s incredible.”
As if she had uttered a benediction, “Bismillah,” Omar proclaimed, formalizing the blessing. They all tucked into the main dish, their hands busy among the vegetables, forming the couscous into little balls that they popped into their mouths as if performing a trick. Kate realized why she had been given a plate and spoon, and was grateful for Abdou’s foresight.
Inevitably, once the last golden grains had been licked from fingers, there came the traditional ceremony of mint tea, accompanied by some of what looked like last night’s almond biscuits in their little zellij shapes, and the peaches from the market, sun warmed and luscious.
Kate leaned back against the tree, replete. She could not remember the last time she had felt so content, so delighted by an experience. Not since she and Jess were young, after a picnic at the beach, falling asleep with her head on her mother’s leg and her feet buried in the hot Cornish sand, with the sound of gulls and playing children melding into a single note above the soft shooshing of the waves as they washed up on the shore.
Jess!
The thought of her sister was insistent and electric: so shocking that she dropped her tea. “Ow!”
Abdou, quick as a cat, caught the glass before it hit the ground. “Are you okay?” He set the tea glass down and dabbed at her arm with the linen cloth.
She was about to answer, when her mobile phone went off, as if summoned by her thought. She retrieved it from her bag, swiped the green symbol and held the device to her ear. “Jess?”
But it wasn’t Jess who answered.
“Damn you, Kate. Running to hide our son from me. How could you sin like that?”
The courtyard, the
citrus trees, the three men, the scents of spice and jasmine evaporated like the figments of a dream and Kate felt as though she was falling endlessly through a cold, black void.
26
Blessings
ALMERÍA
1484
“Not like that, like this.” I took the kohl wand from Rachid’s fingers and, leaning toward the mirror, drew a fine line along the base of the lashes on my own eyelid. “See? It’s just a matter of keeping a steady hand.”
The boy giggled. He looked younger than his eighteen years, I thought from the lofty age of twenty, and younger still in the inexpertly applied cosmetic. It’s an understatement to say I was bored. I was beyond boredom: I felt as if I’d been swallowed by a vast djinn down into the world of its stomach, a world so grey, featureless and inescapable. In the months since Mariam had given birth and lost her child a cloud of gloom had descended upon the court-in-exile, and particularly upon the young sultan and his wife. Mariam was hardly seen at all; Momo had taken to his bedchamber. As a result, I found myself, as now, at such a loose end as to be forced to spend time with his witless younger brother.
“Do you think me handsome, Blessings?” He batted his eyelashes at me in a grotesque parody of female coquettishness picked up in the harem, where he sat for long hours at his mother’s feet. It was for this reason that I kept his company, for he parroted to me every word she spoke behind those closed doors. It was how I kept abreast of the gossip. And how I earned my coin from Qasim, by passing it on.
“Very handsome, Rachid.” I yawned. “A veritable Prince Ahmed.”
“The one who went to Samarkand and bought a magic apple?”
We had been reading tales from The Thousand Nights and One Night. “The very one, just like you, the youngest son of a sultan. The one who rescued the Princess Pari Banu.”
“I’d rather be her.” He fluttered at me again. “And you should be Mercury Ali.”
“Quicksilver Ali the Cairene? The trickster from Cairo?” Not very flattering.
He grinned. “You’re from Africa. And Shahrazad describes him as beardless and well favoured.”
I touched my chin, couldn’t help it.
“Why don’t you have a beard, Blessings?”
“You don’t have a beard,” I countered.
Rachid looked affronted. “I do—see?”
He came at me so close that I thought for an alarming moment he was going to kiss me.
“I see no beard,” I said, drawing back.
“Are you blind?”
He was pouting now. He’d inherited some of Momo’s beauty, but the lack of inner fire made him unattractive to me, even though he was so much more malleable and available than his elder sibling. Perhaps that was why he sparked no interest in me. Some people seem to love only what they cannot have. These are the same people who when they get what they have always wanted, want it no longer and seek to destroy it.
He took the mirror from me and tilted his head this way and that so that his glass earrings flashed in the candlelight.
“Well, I suppose my beard is very fine. But it’s clearly there.” He paused, considering. “Do all the men in your tribes wear kohl?”
“Yes,” I said wearily. “But not for beauty, as I’ve told you before. Black is a protective colour: it wards off bad luck and evil spirits.”
“I shall put some more on, then,” he declared, twisting the wand in the little vial. “This place is full of bad luck.”
I sighed. “Don’t you have other friends?” I remembered how annoying I had found him as a boy. As a man he was even more so.
“They only want to hunt and ride and fight with swords. They are brutish louts who smell of old meat. None of them is graceful or elegant. Not like you, Blessings.”
Was he admitting to a tenderness of heart for me? I got to my feet. Or rather, my foot. “Look, Rachid, you’re a nice lad, but you’re not my type.”
He gazed at me like a kicked dog. Then his eyes narrowed.
“It’s always my brother with you, isn’t it? You moon around after him like some lovesick maid. Tell me, would you bed him like a woman or like a man?”
My whole skin went cold. My hands itched to take a dagger to him and stab and stab. “What are you talking about?”
“I have eyes. I’ve noticed the way you look at him.”
So, he knew nothing. I took a step toward him and I think he must have seen the depths of violence I might sink to, for he backed away with his hands up.
“Sorry, Blessings. It’s just…” His face crumpled. Tears spilled, spoiling the kohl even more.
Good heavens, where was his pride, his asshak? “Pull yourself together, Rachid,” I said harshly. “Your brother is my king, and I am his Special Guardian and his most loyal subject. There is nothing more to it than that.”
Then I pushed past him, banging the door on my way out. I climbed the stairs two at a time all the way to Momo’s chamber. There, I did not even bother to knock but barged straight in. “Your brother is a bloody little worm.”
Momo was sitting on the divan, his feet up on a tapestried stool. He was bareheaded and wore—or perhaps more correctly, half wore, a brocaded silk robe that had fallen from one side, revealing a golden shoulder and smooth pectorals. The sight of him unmanned me, putting my fury out as surely as water on a fire. He stared at me, then pulled his robe straight. “Rachid? He’s harmless. Don’t you knock anymore? I might have been doing…anything.”
“You don’t do anything up here,” I said pettishly, sounding like the object of my earlier wrath.
“I’ve been studying.” A pile of books towered beside the divan. “A king needs to acquire as much knowledge as he can. I’m reading the Picatrix, trying to understand the nature of prophecy.” He gestured for me to take a seat among the colourful floor cushions, and as I did so, straightened up, pulling the robe closed over his distracting chest; then he read at length from the book in his lap. I caught the words convergence and diversion of planets, fixed stars as a reference and a woman wearing a red dress and rope…
During this tedious stuff I fell into a doze and into a deep-buried memory in which the voice of Dr. Ibrahim threaded its way into my mind as I lay in my sickbed drifting in and out of consciousness, my foot swollen and rotting: “Blessings, such a cruel name.” A hand lightly on the crown of my head. “Little one, how you have managed to keep your secrets all this time I do not know. Well, it is not down to me to make disclosures. I am a doctor, not a spy.”
“Blessings?”
I startled, half in, half out of the memory.
“Are you listening? I thought I might learn more about the conjunction of the stars and how they can affect a man’s fate.”
The wretched prophecy again. “What use is it to know such things? We’re down here and the stars are up there and there’s not a damned thing we can do about the way they move,” I said briskly.
“Something thwarts me at every turn. All I want is to do the best for my people. But what can I do from this godforsaken place on the edge of the sea? My father is squatting in the Alhambra, getting sicker and blinder every day. And here I am, with a mother who rails at me every day about taking my fate into my hands. Does she expect me to snatch back my kingdom with ten palace guards and a cripple?” He saw the look on my face. “Sorry, Blessings. I’m becoming as mad as a trapped rat in this place. I’ll bite anyone who comes at me. How is your leg?”
“Still missing.”
“I really am sorry—that was uncalled for. I am frustrated at every turn. Even Mariam won’t talk to me. I can’t remember the last time we—”
I felt like putting my hands over my ears and singing La la la la to drown him out, like a child avoiding a parent’s scolding.
“Sorry,” he said again.
“You don’t need to keep apologizing. You’re a sultan, remember? I’m just Blessings, a poor heathen cripple from the deserts of deepest Africa.”
If he heard me, he gave little sign of it. H
e put his head in his hands and muttered, “Do the stars hate me, Blessings?”
“How could anyone hate you?” It was exquisite agony not to be able to put my arms around him and try to comfort him. But what comfort could I bring him? It was I who had betrayed him. “There must be something that can be done about Mariam. Have you sent her gifts? Perfumes and silks? Dishes of sugared nuts and little almond biscuits?”
He looked up. “My gifts come back unopened. I even sent troubadours to sing to her while she was in the hammam. She threw her pot of olive paste at them and screamed at them to be gone. She ate the treats, though. She’s getting as plump as a goose. People have even started wondering if she’s pregnant, but how can I tell them no, because she won’t let me near her? Your mother was a wisewoman: don’t you know any love charms?” he asked wryly.
I thought of all the talismans I’d made for him over the years. Small use they had been. “Magic doesn’t work,” I said sourly.
A frantic rapping at the door prevented further discussion, and Qasim put his head around before Momo could even bid him enter.
“Sire—” He saw me lying there among the cushions and stopped.
Momo waved a hand. “Say whatever you have come to say. I have no secrets from Blessings.”
Ah, but he has plenty of secrets from you, said the narrowed glance of the vizier. “Visitors, sire. My spies report a dozen of them, all in black, on dark steeds, approaching along the ravine. I suspect they bring messages from your father. You should, uh, dress yourself, sire, and come downstairs.”
Momo considered this. “Messengers? At this hour?” He sighed. “Well, I suppose they have had a long, hard ride. Tell the cook and have some rooms readied for them. And roust out the stable boys.”