The Sultan's Wife

by Jane Johnson

  My next appointment is the one I am most looking forward to. The Coptic Bookseller visits Meknes seldom. He has made a special visit at this auspicious time with an addition Ismail has requested for his famed collection of holy books. Not that Ismail can read a word of these volumes himself (what need when he can pay scholars to do it for him? Besides, he has the whole of the Qur’an by heart, a skill which he likes to demonstrate frequently). But he loves his books and treats them with great veneration: he has a great deal more respect for his books than he does for human life.

  After the usual fulsome greetings and inquiries after his wife, children, mother, cousins, and goats, the Egyptian leaves me to fetch the order from the strongroom he rents when he is in town, and I idle away the time breathing in the scents of old leather and parchment, touching the well-loved covers, poring over the engraved verses. The bookseller is breathless and flushed and the hood of his djellaba is wet through when he comes bustling back. When he takes the book out of its linen wrap, I can see why he has not kept it amongst his usual stock, for its beauty steals my breath. Its bindings have been gilded in two tones of gold. Intricate patterns are tooled into a central panel contained within a bold double border. It reminds me of the carpets in the sultan’s own chambers, gorgeous things from far-off Herat and Tabriz.

  ‘May I?’ I keep my face very still, but my hands are shaking as I reach for it.

  ‘From Shiraz. Made in the time of the early Safavids. See the cutwork on the inner board? It is exquisitely done, but very fragile.’

  ‘Is this silk or paper?’ I run my fingertips over the delicate openwork pattern cut into the inside of the cover, revealing jewel-like lozenges of turquoise beneath.

  The Coptic Bookseller smiles indulgently. ‘Silk, of course.’

  I open the volume at random and come upon the 113th Sura, the Al-Falaq. Tracing the swirling calligraphy with a finger, I read aloud: ‘I seek shelter with the Lord of the daybreak, from the evil of what He has created, and from the evil of darkness when it falls. And from the evil of witchcrafts when sorceresses blow on the knots, and from the evil of men when they envy me…’ It could describe my world. I look up. ‘It is an edition worthy of the beauty of the words it contains.’

  ‘It is indeed a priceless treasure.’

  ‘If I were to tell the sultan you say this book is without price, he is likely to shrug and say that nothing he can give will be sufficient and that therefore he will give you nothing.’ I pause. ‘But I am authorized to make you an offer.’ I name a very substantial sum. He cites one twice as large, and after some polite haggling we settle somewhere between the two.

  ‘Come to the palace the morning after the inauguration,’ I tell him, ‘and the grand vizier will honour this agreement.’

  ‘I will bring the book to the sultan tomorrow.’

  ‘I must take the book with me now: Moulay Ismail is impatient to see it. Besides, tomorrow is the day of gathering: he will not see visitors.’

  ‘In this weather? If one drop of rain touches it, it will be ruined. Let me bring it to the palace myself on the sabbath, suitably boxed for presentation.’

  ‘I will lose my head if I do not return with the book, and ugly though my head is I have become oddly attached to it.’

  The man gives me a crooked smile, and I remember that despite the vaunted wife and children he is known to have a boy or two whom he pays well for their favours, a practice that may well be acceptable in Egypt but had best be hidden in Ismail’s Morocco. ‘Ugly it is not; I would not see it parted from the rest of you, Nus-Nus. Take it, then: but guard it with your life. I will come for payment on the morning of the sabbath.’ Sighing, he wraps it reverently in the linen and hands it over. ‘Remember: it is quite irreplaceable.’

  I would be lying if I say I am not anxious about carrying such a treasure, but I have only two more errands to complete: some spices for my friend Malik, and a quick return to the herbman to pick up Zidana’s items.

  Malik and I are in the habit of trading favours: we have become friends by necessity as much as by inclination, since he is Ismail’s chief cook and I the sultan’s food-taster, amongst my many other duties. Mutual trust is useful in such circumstances. Malik’s needs – ras al hanout mixed to his own recipe and an essence of attar to which Ismail is partial in his couscous – take me back to the Spice Quarter, where I make the necessary purchases. Thence it is only a short step to the hidden stall of Sidi Kabour.

  I duck beneath the awning and am surprised to find the place unattended. Perhaps Sidi Kabour has slipped out to take tea with a fellow stallholder, or to fetch more charcoal for his brazier. I move the bottle of musk to one side and am gratified to see that Zidana’s list is gone. Perhaps the herbman has gone to fetch an item kept in more discreet premises…

  Another minute passes and still there is no sign of him. The heady scent of the incense burning in its brass container is becoming quite stifling. It is not the usual pleasant fragrance Sidi Kabour favours – a little elemi resin mixed with white benzoin – but a more complex combination out of which I can detect wood of aloe and the clashing scents of amber and pine resin, one sweet, one acrid, which no one in their right mind would combine.

  Come along, I mutter, and feel my gut twist with anxiety. Wait or go? My anxiety begins to mount. Soon the sultan will begin his afternoon rounds and expect me to accompany him as I always do. But if I go back without Zidana’s purchases, she will fly into a fury or, worse, into one of those silent musings that tend to precede an act of cruel retribution. Being caught between the two of them is the daily peril of my existence: sometimes it is difficult to know which of them is the more dangerous: the sultan with his towering rages and sudden outbursts of violence, or his chief wife with her more subtle terrors. I am not sure that I believe in the efficacy of her magic, for, despite being raised in similar traditions (I amongst the Senufo, her with the neighbouring Lobi), I like to think I have acquired a degree of enlightenment on my travels. Of her ability to use all manner of subtle poisons effectively, though, I have no doubt at all. I do not enjoy ferrying poisons for the empress, facilitating her wicked death-dealing, but, as a slave of the court, I have little choice. The Meknes court is a spider’s web of connivance and deceit, confusion and intrigue. Making a straight path for yourself in such a place is near impossible: even the most upright man can find himself fatally compromised.

  I pace fretfully to the back of the shop. Boxes containing the spines of porcupines and the eyelashes of mice (those belonging to male mice in one box; those to female mice in another), antimony, arsenic and gold dust; dried chameleons, hedgehogs, serpents and salamanders. Charms against the evil eye; love potions; titbits to draw djinns as surely as sugar draws wasps. As I make my way along the dusty back wall, I am confronted by an enormous glass jar full of eyeballs. Recoiling, I catch my hip on the shelving and the jar wobbles dangerously, setting its contents jiggling, till they all appear to be staring at me, as if I have woken a host of trapped djinns. Then I realize the angle of the shelf shifted when I banged into it. I set the linen-wrapped Qur’an down carefully beside me and adjust the shelf so that the jar sits more safely, and applaud myself for averting disaster. I wonder how Sidi Kabour has procured so many human eyeballs, but then realize the pupils are vertical slots, like those of the eyes of cats, or goats.

  I must make my way straight back to the palace to attend Moulay Ismail, and explain to Zidana that her requests are being fulfilled and that I will return for them later that day and hope that luck is still running with me. It is the only sensible thing to do. I turn decisively; too quickly… catch my foot on some obstacle on the floor behind me, and lose my balance.

  I am usually agile, but the eyeballs have unsettled me – or possibly even caused my fall, just as I was congratulating myself on evading their evil influence – and the next thing I know I am on my back with my head jammed up against a pile of baskets, which now totter and come tumbling down, covering me in porcupine spines, dried s
corpions and – I pick something off and hold it out with distaste – a veritable plague of dead frogs. In some agitation I spring to my feet, brushing the vile things off me. The spines and scorpions’ claws caught in the wool of my burnous are hanging on for grim life. I pluck them off one by one, then catch up the back of my cloak to examine it and see that I have also managed to knock over a container of cochineal, which is creeping upwards through the white wool in a greedy red tide.

  All composure deserts me: the cloak, a fine piece, finer than any I could ever afford to buy for myself, was one of Ismail’s own, and now it is ruined. Usually when you are given a gift you can do with it as you will, but the sultan has an acute memory and an unfortunate way of asking why you are not wearing whichever item he has grandly presented to you: I have seen more than one man lose a limb, or his life, over an unsatisfactory answer.

  Snatching up the corner, I begin to wring the red liquid out of it, only to find it thicker and darker than cochineal and sticky on my palms; and now a bitter tang fills my mouth and nose, a smell that has nothing to do with crushed beetles, or incense or anything beautiful or sacred.

  Looking down in some dread now, I find that the obstacle over which I stumbled is indeed the corpse of Sidi Kabour. Someone has slit his throat for him as neatly as a sheep’s at Eid. His handsome white beard has been severed too and lies on his chest in a great clot of gore. And in the moment of his death his bowels have voided, which is the filthy smell that underlies the iron: the incense brazier must have been laden with whatever came to hand in an attempt to mask the stink.

  A great sadness fills me. Muslims teach that death is an obligation upon us, a task to be completed and never shirked; that it is neither a punishment nor a tragedy, and not to be feared. But somehow that gentle philosophy does not encompass the brutality of this death. Sidi Kabour was a fastidious man in life: that he should have been butchered so and left to lie in a sea of his own blood and filth with his eyes gazing unseeing into the gloom is repulsive. I bend to close those poor, staring eyes, and find something protruding from his grey lips. I prise it away.

  Even before I examine it I know with a dull certainty what it is. A chewed corner of the list I made of Zidana’s demands: clearly the old man tried to prevent its being taken by eating it. That, or someone has forced it into his mouth. The rest is gone, but whether into Sidi Kabour’s gullet or the hands of his murderer I do not know. Nor can I stay to find out: for another terrible thought strikes me; then another.

  The first is that I am covered in blood and will be clearly marked out as the assassin. The second is the memory of laying the priceless Qur’an down at my feet when righting the shelf on which the jar of eyeballs rests.

  Feeling bile rise into my throat, I turn around, only to have my worst fears confirmed. The once-spotless white of the protective linen is now dyed a patchy crimson. I rip the fabric away from the precious object within…

  Blood upon a holy Qur’an is a terrible sacrilege. But blood upon the Safavid Qur’an for which Ismail has been pining presages a slow and painful death.

  For me.

  3

  I stare at the ruined book, and then at the dead man, trying to take in the enormity of the situation, thought spinning off uselessly in all directions. I should declare the murder, make a statement to the authorities, assure them of my innocence. But who will believe a slave? For that is all I am, whatever my status inside the palace. Within its walls lies a magical, protected realm; but outside, I am nothing but an overdressed black man covered in an honest merchant’s blood. And if I am arrested, I do not fool myself into thinking that the sultan will be so concerned as to save me from my fate: he is much more likely to fall into a temper because I am late and lop off my head the moment he sees me again.

  I tear off my ruined cloak and bundle the blood-soaked Qur’an inside it. I look around and see Sidi Kabour’s ancient burnous hanging on a peg beside the entrance. He does not dress the part of a rich man: but that is the Muslim way, not to proclaim a better fortune than your neighbour. I stalk over to the cloak, only belatedly realizing I am leaving a trail of bloody footprints in my wake. The burnous is too short, but I feel anonymous in it; except of course for my jewelled yellow slippers, which are now a dull crimson. In this country, only women wear red footwear, and, whatever else I might be, I am not a woman. Off they come, into the bundle with the book. Better barefoot than bloodstained; better to be taken as a beggar or a Jew than a murderer. I pull the long, pointed hood up over my turban, hunch my shoulders to disguise my height, sling the bundle over my back and walk quickly out into the souq with my head down.

  ‘Sidi Kabour!’

  The voice is curious, inquiring. I do not turn around.

  *

  At the first set of gates I am waved in by the palace guards, who are too bored and chilled to be curious about my change of attire. I cross the processional square and pass quickly by the magazines and the vast barracks, where ten thousand of the sultan’s Black Guards are stationed; then through a second set of gates leading into the pavilions.

  Striding at speed, I dodge piles of building sand and pyramids of lime mortar; vats of tadelakt plaster, stacks of timber and tiles. I run past the koubba, where the sultan keeps the gifts he is brought in tribute. (How furious the givers would be to know that the rare items they so carefully selected have been thrown in a great pile to gather dust. Ismail is like his small son Zidan; he grows bored with his gifts minutes after receiving them.) The guards should have challenged me: a running, bloodied, barefoot man carrying who knows what under his arm; but they are inside, sheltering from the weather.

  As I draw closer to the sultan’s pavilions, the personnel are of necessity more alert. ‘Hoi! You there! Show your face and tell us your business.’

  It is Hassan, and behind him are three of Ismail’s most trusted guards, terrifying-looking men half a head taller than I and massively muscled. I have seen Hassan break a man’s neck with his bare hands, and Yaya take a lance through the thigh without so much as blinking. I push back the hood of the burnous. ‘It’s me, Nus-Nus.’

  ‘You look like a drowned rat caught stealing bread from the granary.’

  ‘Laundry.’ Which is at least true in part.

  ‘Well, you’d best get into the dry or it’ll be soaked for a second time.’

  I walk quickly past them through the vast horseshoe archway and into the great hall, my bare feet slapping and skidding on the marble. I can hear a knot of courtiers coming in my direction. I reach my room, an antechamber to Ismail’s pavilion, and slip inside just before they come into view.

  In the fountain in the courtyard outside I wash my feet and hands of blood, hoping no one is watching, and then bury the ruined babouches in the loose soil beneath the hibiscus. But what to do with the burnous and the Qur’an? My sparse little chamber is still a grand space, with its arched window, cedarwood ceiling and zellij walls, but other than my narrow horsehair divan it contains only a prayer mat, a lap-desk for my writing implements, and a wooden chest on top of which sits one incense burner and a candlestick. These, the clothes I stand up in, the contents of the pouch I carry and those in the chest, are the sum of my worldly possessions.

  I put aside the incense burner and candlestick and empty the contents of the chest on to my bed and barely have time to stow the bundle inside when I hear the sultan’s voice.

  ‘Nus-Nus!’

  That voice is unmistakable. No matter how quietly he speaks, no matter the crowd or the chatter that surrounds him, it affects not just my auditory senses but something visceral, deep inside. I throw off the spoiled crimson robe, put on the first thing that comes to hand (a dark blue woollen tunic), kick on my old babouches, dash out and prostrate myself.

  ‘Get up, Nus-Nus! Where is the book?’

  My poor dazed wits have not yet created a plausible excuse for the whereabouts of the ruined Qur’an. I lie with my forehead pressed against the cold tiles, imagining people asking: Did he die wel
l, poor Nus-Nus? Was there much blood? What were his last words?

  ‘The book, boy! Get up! Go and get it! How else are we to record my amendments?’

  It takes a moment or two for comprehension to seep into my addled brain and the wave of relief when it comes almost renders my legs inoperable. I scramble to my feet, run back into my room and grab up the book and the lap-desk and run back outside.

  Ismail watches me steadily. He tugs on his beard, which is very dark and divided into a neat fork. Above it, his eyes are bright and black, the lids heavy and hooded. There appears to be a glint of amusement in his regard, as if he knows something I do not, which may well have to do with the time and manner of my departure from this earthly life. But he is wearing green today, which is a good sign. Green is his favourite (being the Prophet’s own colour) and wearing it tends to signify that he does not have bloodshed on his mind. Red, now – or yellow – that is a different matter. We all look to ourselves when he wears red or yellow, or has his page carry a change of clothing.

  ‘Come!’

  He turns his back on me and I fall into line along with the foremen of works, a great gaggle of them, followed by the Raid Mohammed ben Hadou Ottur (known also as Al-Attar, the Tinker) in conversation with three other court luminaries, and lastly the Hajib: the grand vizier himself, Chief Minister Si Abdelaziz ben Hafid. It is the Hajib who now catches me up and walks beside me.

  ‘Are you well, Nus-Nus? You seem a little winded.’ His fleshy lips are curved into a smile, but expression does not reach his eyes. We all have our masks in this place.