by Lisa Hilton
As I passed the kitchen quarters, I heard loud exclamations, the same words I had heard that night in the square, ‘maligno’, ‘demonio’. Was this something to do with what had happened to my papa, with the men who had come for the book, with my strange disguise? Why did the slave think I might hurt her? I made my way back to Adara’s room, feeling very lonely. She was still sleeping, one hand bunched under her chin, soft snores rustling in her throat. I picked up her looking glass from where it lay amongst a huddle of jars and combs and carried it to the window. I had not often seen myself in a glass, but there was nothing strange to me in my appearance. My skin was coppery-coloured, like many people in Toledo, and many people in the city too had green eyes, though not so bright as mine. My hair was unusual, true. I had never seen anyone with hair so light and clear as mine, but I knew the reason for that. I had the blood of the northmen in me.
It didn’t matter that I didn’t look quite like other children, my papa told me. It meant I was special. When he washed me in warm water scented with rosemary and dried me carefully with a bleached linen cloth, he told me that I was a true child of Toledo, the city where all magic and learning were mixed. They were my mother’s people, he said, the northmen who had come to Spain even before the time of the caliphs. The Moors called them ‘al madjus’, in their Persian language – ‘fire-worshippers’ – and from there we had our Spanish word, ‘mago’.
He told me of conjurers who could change their shape to run with the winds and shift the storms that carried the dark birds of their longships; who spoke with the old gods through the blood of sacrifice. They were cruel, proud people, he said, fearless. When they fought, it was easy to believe they had magic in them, so wild were they, so reckless. And beautiful, he said, the most beautiful men the people of the caliphs had ever seen. There was a book by a Moorish traveller who had journeyed up along the rivers to Rus, at the peak of Europe, and his stories were full of awe at these fair giants, their white skin inked all over until it gleamed like green glass, who carried longswords as heavy again as a man, who could fight without armour, or even a shirt, for the cold could not touch them.
Their god was Odin. He had two pet wolves, Geri and Freki, who brought good luck to those who saw them. They left some of their magic behind in Toledo, along with their pale hair and light eyes, like my mother’s hair, my mother’s eyes, which were also mine. So I carried a little of their strangeness in me and one day, my papa said, we would sail away together, on a ship, to their lands of ice and forest where bonfires blaze at midsummer and the sun never goes down. And maybe my mother would be waiting there, and she would bind flowers in my hair and take my hand to dance.
I could still be comforted, back then, by the memory of my papa’s stories. I smudged away the tears, took my doll and pattered out into the courtyard, pulling the hood of my robe over my face. The old porter was wrapped in his cloak, snoozing, and didn’t see me as I stretched up to unlatch the street door. I felt strong, defiant. I knew the way home well enough from my walks with my father. All I had to do was make my way towards the tower of Santa Maria and I would find myself in the Zocodover. I was happy again, now that I was outside, though it felt strange to be alone in the streets, and I soon reached the market. For a while, I wandered amongst the stalls, feeling as though I had been away a long time. My nose twitched at the smell of manchego, and I stopped to stare at a heap of little partridge laid out on a trestle, their delicate grey breasts soft and quivering in the morning breeze as though they were still alive. I wished I had a coin in my pocket for a fresh magdalena, to squeeze the almondy sweetness of the cake between my teeth. No one noticed me amongst the housewives and servants jostling with their baskets, and I skirted the edge of the square until I came to where our house had been.
It was only then that I truly understood. Of course our house was not there. They had burned my father’s books and our house with them. All that remained was an ugly heap of blackened timbers and the staircase, tottering crazily amongst the rubble, leading nowhere. The space of the ruins seemed pathetically small. How could this have been my home, where my papa had his shop, where I played and did my lessons and watched the mountains from the window that was vanished as though it had never even been there? I felt sick. Suddenly, coldly, I knew that my papa would not return for me, as Adara had promised. He was never coming back. I began to cry again. I felt panicked, tiny. Clutching my doll I began to run about howling, ‘Papa! Papa!’ until a woman with a bundle of laundry and a washboard on her back stooped to touch my shoulder, peering into my smeared face.
‘What’s the matter, little one? Are you lost?’
I pushed back my hood and held out my arms to her, my sight blurred with tears. But she did not pick me up and carry me home. She dropped the washboard and the clang disturbed the buyers around us.
‘Santa Madonna! It’s Benito’s child!’
Suddenly there were people all around me, pulling at me, shouting. The woman pushed me away so roughly I fell down and began to crawl away from her, my sobs shocked back into my throat, choking me. I was so small. I had never known the quickness of hatred, or fear, or the knowledge that came to me now – that if I did not escape, these familiar people would hurt me. A gobbet of spit landed on my neck, a booted foot caught me beneath my elbow, sending me sprawling again. All I could see were cruel, twisted faces, cruel hands reaching for me. I squirmed to my feet and began to run, still holding tightly to my doll, the bitter burned smell of the black beams of my home mingling with the bodies of the crowd.
I moved so fast that for a brief, almost joyful moment I felt as though I were flying, and then I became aware of a silence behind me. I came to a halt, heaving great swallows of air into my chest, and then I turned around. No one had followed me. They stood there, huddled together, gazing at me. And then I recognised that smell on them, that thick, acid reek pushing out from their pores: fear. I took a step towards them, and they shrank from me in one movement like a wave.
They were afraid of me.
I raised my chin and cocked my head to one side, a play-act of listening. It seemed as though I could actually hear the troubled patter of their hearts. Suddenly I wanted to laugh. My doll was in my left hand, dangling against my hip. I raised my right, thumb tucked around my middle fingers, index and little finger raised like two horns. Cuerno. The sign of the devil. I gave them the sign of the devil, and then I did laugh. I laughed in their faces, and turned my back on them, and ran for my life.
*
Adara swept into the courtyard in only her chemise and took me by the arm so hard that her varnished nails dug into my flesh.
‘Where have you been?’
I tried to speak, but I was gulping back sobs, shuddering, barely able to breathe.
‘Did anyone see you?’
I managed to nod. ‘I went to the marketplace.’
Adara dragged me back to the room, her face grim.
‘You are to stay here, do you understand? Or I’ll lock the door on you.’
She left me. For a long time I stared stupidly into space. My papa was never coming back. Then the tears came again, kindly, and I wept until I fell asleep, bundled on the floor, with a strange peacefulness that came from knowing I was alone.
*
The year turned. I crept about the room and the courtyard, playing listlessly with my doll whenever Adara was there. I stroked the mark my mother had made against my red dress, I watched as the turning sun from the high narrow window fetched out the colours from its folds. Without my papa’s lessons, our walks and visits, the days seemed hopelessly long. Somehow, I knew better than to ask Adara where my father’s books were stored, but it was not so hard to find them. There was a storeroom behind the kitchen-house, stacked with jars of oil and preserved lemons, and here was kept my papa’s trunk filled with his books.
As the first heat of spring began to mount, the household maids rested in the afternoons, so I could prowl about unhindered by their mutterings. I removed one book
at a time – just the smaller, lighter ones – and carried them to the courtyard, hidden inside my cloak. So long as she could see me, Adara paid me little attention now and so for a time I could read and read. In truth, I understood little of what I traced from the pages. Sometimes the book would be in a language I did not understand, sometimes it would be filled with page after page of strange diagrams and numbers, but my papa had taught me well, and even just the scent of the pages, their soft, dusty touch, made me feel a little closer to him. I whispered the odd words to myself, ran my fingers along the dancing signs of our old tongue. It soothed me, and the hours passed much faster.
‘Quite the little scholar, aren’t we?’
Adara was standing over me, her powerful body blocking the light.
‘How dare you steal?’
‘I’m not stealing. These are my papa’s books. My books!’
She snatched the volume from out of my hands and I feared she would tear it, but she held it away from her body like a live thing.
‘Do you know what a heretic is, Mura?’
‘Yes. Someone who does not follow the teachings of the church.’
‘And you know what they do to heretics?’
‘I think so.’
‘They burn them. They tie them up and burn them until the flesh melts off their bones and their eyes burst like figs. Would you like that, Mura? Would you like that to happen to you?’
I was terrified. Her face twisted with hatred, like the faces of the men who had come to take my father, like the people in the marketplace.
‘But my papa is a good man! He told me there was nothing bad about his books!’
For an answer she had the porter whip me with his belt until the blood ran from my back and put a huge padlock on the trunk. I had never in all my life been struck. Then she dragged me to our room and pushed me onto the bed, the sheets clinging painfully to my flayed skin.
I think it started to grow in me then, a little seed of hating. I was not to let the servants look at me, I was not to walk abroad, I was not to read my own books that my father had left me. I had tried to be quiet and good and I had been beaten. She would be sorry, I would make her sorry. I lay on my stomach to spare my back, biting at the sheets with rage. And then I must have slept.
*
I dream of a city. A city of spires and domes and palaces, but ruined and broken, with huge buildings sliding into the mud of a stinking river, as though giants have begun to make homes there but grown tired and wandered away. A teeming city, where delicate music dances through the nights across filthy alleyways, and the sound of laughter and the clatter of silver plate mix with the nightmare cries of the lost and the dying in the streets. There is a woman before me. I can see only the back of her red silk dress and her bright gold hair coiling down it. She stretches out her hand to me, and in the touch of her fingers I know her, my mama.
We take a step, and then it seems we can fly, floating over the city, the two of us, seeing it all at once, like birds. Below us, through the darkness comes a train of mules, laden with heavy sacks, and in the dream I know that the sacks are filled with gold. We approach a window with a single candle burning in the night. Bells are ringing everywhere, the streets are full of torches and movement, but in the window stands a man, quite still, his head turned to one side as though he is listening for something far away. He is a young man, I feel, though in the dream his face is covered by a black velvet mask. His lips are cut as fine as a statue’s; a warm mouth, a greedy mouth. His clothes are black too, so that he blends with the shade behind him, and when he turns away to speak, only the high blade of his cheekbone is visible in the light of the little flame. He speaks my tongue, Castilian, but the dream shifts before I understand his words.
A dream of shadows. Grey and black and purple in the folds of the night. We are amongst them, sometimes, my mama and I, the cold earth hard beneath us as we run. Miles and miles we cover, hungering, never tiring, every sense alert in the cold air for the throb of blood in a living thing close by. We do not heed the rain or the snow, our muscles moving smoothly, strongly, through wet black forests and across icy screes of rock. I know a wild delight, a joy beyond thought: only the mad pleasure of the hunt and the lure of the kill.
Sometimes I am myself, Mura, standing alone with the walls of a high city behind me. They come to me silently, their eyes glowing amber in the dark. I stretch out my arms to them and as I do I feel kinship, the warm tug of recognition, like a skein of silk wrapped around my body. It stretches back, far back to a place where there are no villages or people – only the forest and the shadows, and the moon overhead, watching where dark blood blackens the ground. I am of them and not of them, I hear them and I call them and I am never afraid. I stand above them as they feed and I feel a presence near me. I will see her face now, in the dream, I will see my mama’s face that I have never seen – but as I turn she is gone. I try to call out to her, my wolf-mother, but she is away with them, running with the wind. Instead I see the young man, the masked man, with that strange half-smile on his face, somewhere beyond the shadows, waiting for me.
*
When I woke, I was calm again. I had seen her, and she had left me something like a medicine, something to take away the pain of being alone and helpless. That little seed of hate: a gift from my mother, a gem of ice, a northman’s diamond with fire in its cold heart. I could find it, and I could make it smoulder.
I peeled my stinging body from the bed and tried the door. Locked. Adara had gone up to meet her gentlemen. Shadow-soft, I pattered across the room and opened the box where she kept her jewels. I filched one of the silver pendants she hooked through her ears and then I tugged at the hem of her sheet where the linen was worn until a little piece came free. I squeezed painfully at one of the welts on my raw back until I had a bead of blood in my palm, then I dipped the metal hook into the blood and drew a pentagram on the scrap of cloth, just like the one my mother had sewn into my dress. I knew why she had put it there now – I had read enough in my father’s books: silver and blood, to bind a demon.
CHAPTER THREE
LITTLE FOOL THAT I WAS, I THOUGHT MY CHARM HAD worked. As my skin healed, Adara grew kinder. She rubbed my wounds with a sharp, astringent salve and as she ran her hands over my body she told me that she was sorry, that she had promised my papa to keep me safe, and that she had to protect me. I did not quite believe her, but I wanted to, so very much. Something bad must have entered into Adara, I thought, but I had made it go away. She even promised to take me to Mass, if I was a good girl and did not meddle with what I did not understand.
The house was closed on Sundays. The ladies slept even later than usual, their rooms shuttered against the pealing bells that fluttered across the city, until early evening, when they emerged smoothed and scented to quarrel across the courtyard like a flock of jays, glimpses of turquoise and scarlet flashing beneath sober Sunday cloaks, no paint on their faces but their hair elaborately coiled beneath starched linen coifs, pearls plunging enticingly into hidden bosoms.
‘Are they going to church?’ I asked Adara. She laughed and said yes, though I couldn’t see that it was funny.
‘But they are all dressed up. Like a play.’
‘Yes, little one, and they are the actresses. You’ll see, Mass is a fine marketplace.’
‘So we shall go too?’
‘Not today, little one, not just yet. Think we’re going to have a visitor instead. We must get ready.’
I wondered who it could be. Someone important, I thought, as we walked over to the hammam. Toledo was full of bathhouses, some of them just wooden shacks with a brazier and a bucket, others with deep tiled pools fed with icy spring water, where the shock of the cold stole the breath from your steamed body. Adara’s house was so fine that it had its own bath, reached by a wooden walkway that led round the kitchen-house, built in whitewashed stone, a steam room, a washing room and a resting room, all thick with heat and the scent of coal tar and orange blossom essence.
I left my dress in the resting room and followed Adara’s naked behind to the bath. I couldn’t help comparing my own thinness to the luxurious roundness of Adara’s body, her heavy, conical breasts, the rich curve of her dark belly with a furze of tightly curled hair at the fork of her legs. After we sat awhile in the delicious heat, Adara helped me to use the soap and pumice, then we went to the washing room and poured bowls of water over ourselves until our skin was sparkling and polished. Adara took a long time massaging almond oil all over her body and showed me how to do the same, then she used her own silver comb to work through my hair and spread a muslin cloth over my shoulders so the oil should not stain it as it dried. I felt a strange mixture of happiness and sorrow as she tended to me. This was what my mother would have done, we would have walked to the bathhouse together each week with our fresh clothes in a cloth bag, and she would have washed me and combed out my hair.
‘Come,’ she said, handing me a clean white tunic. ‘Now for your visitor.’
‘Papa!’ I cried out, and knew as soon as I did that my swift flash of joy was mistaken.
‘No, little one, not your papa,’ she said soothingly. ‘Someone who wants to meet you.’
There was a lady waiting in the courtyard, seated on a settle by the fountain. From the evidence of the silk cushions that had been brought out, and the respectful way in which the maids served mint tea from the finest chased silver jug, I thought that she must be very important indeed. I curtsied and said good evening as politely as I knew how, mindful of what my papa had taught me, and cast my eyes down meekly as the lady and Adara spoke of the weather and the busyness of the city and the problem of maids, in that way that all ladies do, everywhere. I peeked up at her from under wisps of my floating hair. She was black skinned, like Adara, but where Adara’s skin was so smooth and tight it looked set to split, her face was pouched and marked with black pocks. She was so fat she wheezed like a lapdog and the heavy jewels that covered her fingers seemed to ooze from her flesh like resin from a tree trunk. She stuffed a whole plateful of pastries into her mouth, one after another, as she chatted and nodded, brushing the crumbs from the precipice of her black silk bosom. When the pastries and the polite remarks were done she told me to stand.