‘You’ll be there and back before the northern weather turns,’ Paul de Willem had assured him. ‘Nothing to it, my dear sir.’
Well, the king’s man had clearly never been in the Barbary. Nor can he have had the faintest notion of how business is done here or how extraordinarily difficult it might prove to find all those scores of people who were supposedly queuing up to be ransomed, never mind negotiate their release with a horde of slippery heathens. At this rate Kifft is going to be here for months more.
He settles himself creakily on to the stone floor of a small courtyard, in one corner of which a cheap table, so low it is hardly worthy of the name, and a few thin rugs have been placed for the convenience of an office. Smirking manservants have gestured that he would be cooler with his hat off, but Wilhelm Kifft is in no doubt that an atrium, whether in the shade or no, belongs to the outdoors and is on that account a place where a civilised Dutchman’s hat must remain firmly upon his head. The plume, which parted company from the ostrich some time ago, has succumbed to a disconsolate droop exactly matching his mood.
The accommodation is even more basic than he had feared. (‘There are no chairs,’ he has written to his wife, still reeling. ‘And nothing, my dear, that you would recognise as a bed.’) In renting a place to house both himself and any freed Danish subjects awaiting transportation home to the northlands, Kifft had assumed he would require it for a matter of weeks. Now he is bleakly coming to terms with the realisation that it will be next spring or summer before he can envisage escape. The process is proving so slow that he has not yet a single ransomed hostage with whom to share it.
Two beads of sweat are making their way from his furrowed forehead, down his cheeks and into the grubby lace collar that was once white. Wearily he palms them off, wipes his hand on his heavy wool breeches, hoists the stained black cape over his left shoulder and with a sigh picks up his quill to resume the totting of the thus far paltry accounts of Wilhelm Kifft, King Christian IV of Denmark’s much put-upon emissary to Algiers. The date is 5 September 1635.
27
In an agitation of haste Ásta flies down the airless streets. She pants through the gated arch that guards the entrance to the city from the sea and bursts on to the quayside. Fishermen have already landed the morning catch and are shouting their prices in a market so crammed with wares that she can hardly see across to the mole. Curses roar at her heels as she weaves a panicky path through them and brings a basket of giant crabs clattering to the cobbles.
At the far end of the mole a ship is being loaded with barrels. Janissary soldiers, their belted swords flashing in the sun, are already pushing people aboard.
Did he know?
Did Cilleby know, while the sun was spilling its latticed light over their wrapped bodies, that Marta was to go this very day? Did he know, as he nuzzled her awake with roaming tongue, that her daughter was at that moment running around the harem from room to room to find her?
A searing pain in her side is slowing her. It is like being in a dream where your legs are mired in mud and you cannot move them fast enough, you cannot get there in time.
He must have known. He knows every ship that arrives and departs. He watches every investment and every sale. He told her Marta was going – she cannot pretend he was not clear on that point – but not that it was to be the very next morning. Not that. Even as she pleasured him he must have known her daughter was on her way to the harbour.
It was Flower who took her aside when she returned to the harem, longing only for an hour of peace over her sewing to think about the night – the shock of his news and the bewildering ecstasy of what followed – and to think what she should say to Marta. She had to prepare her adored child for the unimaginable life that awaited her. She had to begin arming herself to lose her.
‘Ásta, Marta is gone,’ Flower whispered. ‘She looked for you to say farewell. Alimah told her last night that she would be sailing this morning. She was taken from the house an hour past.’
Ásta is nearly at the end of the mole, lungs bursting, her hand clutching her side. There she is. Surely it is her, standing a little apart from a group of veiled women waiting to embark, her hands folded in front of her. She is so very small. Ásta stumbles the last few steps towards her, trying to shout over the groaning of her breath.
Marta turns around. ‘Mamma!’
A janissary looks over lazily but makes no move. Unable to speak, Ásta beckons her a few steps away, so that they are standing with their backs to the others, facing the sea.
‘Slip … your veil … to one side. Nobody … paying us heed. Let me just catch my breath and I’ll do the same. There, it’s gone.’
‘Poor Mamma,’ Marta says, eyeing her mother’s damp, fiery cheeks. ‘Did you run all the way?’
‘All the way, my darling. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there when you left the house. I came as soon as I heard. It has happened so fast.’
‘I know, Mamma.’ Madame Alimah had said her mother was not in a position to say farewell because she preferred to laze around taking her pleasure, which didn’t sound quite like Ásta. She is so glad to see her mother now that she feels a little like crying, although she thinks it will be better if she doesn’t.
Even knowing her as she does, Ásta is amazed to see how calm her daughter is, how unruffled the rose-fair face with its spray of freckles that is her joy and her balm.
‘But we knew this time would come, didn’t we?’ Marta is saying. ‘I was thinking all the way down here of what you told me. Do you remember, Mamma? You said that if we were parted one day, we would be able to meet whenever we wanted inside our own heads, like you do with Egill and Helga and Pabbi.’
She reaches up to Ásta’s face and strokes her damp cheeks. ‘I was just practising when I saw you. It’s like going into a room, isn’t it? You’re inside a story that isn’t really true but it makes you feel nice while you’re there.’
She puts her mother’s hand to her lips and kisses it. ‘This is better, though, Mamma. I’m glad you came.’
The beauty and the agony of her child bending so much thought, so much kindness and all the wisdom of her ten years upon making this parting easier for her: Ásta is near choked by it. But Marta’s self-possession also calms her. Perhaps there was no need to prepare her daughter. Marta has had a whole childhood of preparation.
‘Do you know where you’re going?’ she asks, trying so hard to match the level tone that she could be enquiring whether Marta needs directions to the carpenter’s booth.
‘Madame Alimah says I’m going to live in the palace of the sultan. He’s an even bigger king than the one Pabbi went to see and kinder, Madame says, because he wanted to buy me when Pabbi’s king didn’t.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it, mín kaera,’ Ásta murmurs, thinking that Alimah knows how to tell a story as well as anyone when she feels like it.
‘Madame says the sultan’s palace is three miles round and has four thousand people in it. How many people did you say used to live on our island?’
‘Four hundred or so, I think. Maybe fewer.’
‘So imagine the size of this palace, Mamma. I will meet there women from every country of the world and train with them in many skills. My job is called odalisk and I might learn to make sherbet or sing like a nightingale or tell stories as well as Madame Husna. Some odalisks are even taught to read out from the Koran. That’s the task I’m hoping for, because once I can read I’ll be able to write you letters, Mamma. Does that not sound perfect?’
‘Did Alimah mention the sultan?’ Ásta asks, light as a feather.
‘She said that because I’m clever and pretty I might be specially chosen to serve the sultan, but that would depend on his mother, who’s in charge of the harem. Madame said the queen mother used to be a slave-girl herself once upon a time, from the country of Greece, so I should understand it is possible for anyone to do well in the Topkapi Palace.’
Was Alimah being artless, or so cynical that Ásta
is sick to think of it? Has she set out to hurt Ásta in the most effective way she could devise, even arranging for a replacement maidservant in plenty of time, or is Ásta’s head so full of sagas that she sees jealousy and vengeance everywhere?
Whatever the truth of it, Marta’s eyes are shining – just as Helga’s were on the day she left for Torfastadir. Two daughters, brimming with hopefulness. As she and Helga crunched along the shore to the fishing boat, it felt to Ásta as if her eldest child were leaving for the ends of the earth. How foolish that seems now. Helga was afire with the spirit of adventure and impatient of her mother’s tears. ‘It’s only Torfastadir, Mamma. You can practically see it from Ofanleiti,’ she said, ever one to exaggerate. But just as Helga was about to step on to the boat, the very moment she gathered her skirts and lifted a foot and gave a hand to the lead oarsman to steady her, she suddenly tore the hand away, rushed back and hurled herself into her mother’s arms in a hurricane of weeping. Ásta still smiles to think how Helga could never have a single emotion without making a scene of it. They stood there on the black shore, embracing as if they would never see each other again. She often thinks of this.
But little Marta does not cry, and for her sake Ásta will not either. When they hear the shout for the women to embark, she tugs the veil back across Marta’s face and quickly sets her own. For a few seconds more they stand with their hands entwined and gaze mutely into each other’s eyes, making the picture they will see for the rest of their lives.
‘She has the same eyes as yours,’ Ólafur used to say when Marta climbed on his knee and took to inspecting his own. He joked that he would have to keep a watch on her one day, for she would beguile any man who saw her.
My God or yours, may he protect you, my little one.
Marta rests her head one last time on her mother’s breast. Ásta buries her face in her hair and breathes in the smell of her. Then, with quick, neat steps, the child runs to the ship.
All afternoon Ásta finds reasons to be about the courtyard. She collects a heap of onions and toys with their skins. She tweaks a herb or two from the pots. Running out of excuses she even offers, to Gunnhildur’s astonishment, to pull water from the well.
‘Have you no embroidery today, Ásta?’
‘My fingers are stiff,’ she says, very brightly and in Gunnhildur’s opinion suspiciously, making a show of stretching them. ‘Let me help you instead.’
When Cilleby’s warning cough is heard in the vestibule, Gunnhildur grabs her jug and makes the customary exit up the stairs. Ásta stands up and flicks a speck of mint from her tunic.
When he sees she is not moving and determined to speak, his smile is replaced by a heavy-browed frown. ‘What is this, Ásta?’ he mutters, his voice low and tight. ‘Be so kind as to await my call. It is not fitting that we talk in public.’
‘Why did you not tell me Marta was being sent away this very day? Why was I not even alerted to say goodbye?’
‘I am not obliged to tell you anything,’ he replies with a brusqueness which, if she were less angry herself, she might recognise as defensive. ‘As a matter of fact, I had forgotten she was to go so soon, but this is not the place to discuss it.’
He makes to move past her and she reaches out to restrain him. He throws her hand furiously from his arm. ‘Never touch me like that. You know it is forbidden.’
‘Reveal then why you didn’t tell me.’ More intent on drawing blood than answers, there being no answer from him she can ever forgive, she hurls the questions anyway. ‘Am I really to believe the time of her sailing merely slipped your mind while you were’ – this with a sneer – ‘otherwise engaged?’
It is a pleasure to take the rake to his face. She watches the harrowing coldly.
‘Or must I believe, Ali Pitterling Cilleby, that you didn’t tell me because it is all just sport to you and you are as much a monster in your way as the sultan?’
He stares at her in disbelief. If he had remembered when the girl was to sail, would he have mentioned it? He has no idea. He was near out of his mind with happiness. But for such insults to be hurled at him in a place where the smallest slave-boy can hear, after everything he has done for her, everything he has said to her and to no woman before … He has no words.
Then, in the hush of the courtyard and to the satisfaction of at least a dozen hidden ears, he does have words. They come hard as a Damascus blade and crafted to kill. ‘What you, a slave-woman in my house, wish to believe or require to know are of no concern to me.’
And whipping his burnous about him, he strides straight back out of the house.
Long after the latch has settled, Ásta still has not moved. As Gunnhildur, peeling herself away from the harem gallery, rushes off to tell Flower, she has never in her life seen someone look more lost.
28
The winter of 1635 and the spring of 1636 are as dry as anyone can remember. There is barely enough rain to fill wells and fountains and to water the thirsty fields. Crops perish in the countryside and the market stalls of the city are often bare. What food can be obtained rises in price, and although Wilhelm Kifft is grateful for a royal purse fat enough to attend to his personal needs, he could have wished for a more auspicious time to keep a growing group of liberated hostages in couscous.
The free house is filling now but it has been slow, frustrating work. Even in this teeming slave-city, he had imagined that Denmark’s captive subjects would hear of his mission and simply flock to him at once, leaving him only to negotiate the ransom deals, a task for which he flatters himself well equipped: you merely have to keep in mind that all Turks, Moors, Berbers, Jews and the rest are scoundrels and liars and will invent any story to push the price up. But he has to confess – and he will have to find a careful way of making this point to the king’s commissioner when he presents his invoice and explains why it has taken so long – that he arrived with little idea of the delicacy of many situations.
Despite his best efforts he can find no owner willing to part with a slave-child. The children all seem to have been brought up as Muslims, so they are no loss to the civilised world, but there are a number of mothers who appear reluctant to leave without them. Kifft is not a man without heart, as he frequently assures himself, but he would need the wisdom of Solomon to sort out some of these cases. There is also proving to be a quite staggering number of adults who have embraced the infidel faith, may the Almighty God forgive them, although some do claim it was forced upon them. Of course he has had to tell a number of them that they have thereby forfeited their right to be citizens of the Christian realm of Denmark, which was upsetting for some. But, really, how can an Amsterdam merchant who dabbles in diplomacy (‘Never again, my dear, I promise you’) be expected to interrogate a man’s soul? Others, once hunted down, have pronounced themselves perfectly content to stew in their infidel practices and remain in Algiers, settled in a skilled occupation with a new family and no desire to be anywhere else.
Kifft mops his brow with a soiled lace handkerchief. It goes on and on. Some captives have retained the true faith but become so valuable to their owners that tempting inducements are being offered for them to stay on with their skills, which also raises the price demanded if they decide they prefer to go. There are more captives again who simply cannot be found, some gone to Tunis, some to Tripoli, some who were taken to Salé at first and are now rumoured to be here (but where exactly, God only knows). And with scores of Icelanders in the cemetery, and some suspected not to have received a Christian burial at all, it has been the work of months to arrive at a reasonable deduction of who among the original four hundred Icelandic captives remains alive in the first place.
Kifft struggles even to understand their names. He writes down the nonsense he hears, yet when he repeats the name to another of their kind he is looked at as if such a person has never been heard of and he is the one who is touched by the sun. Oh, the wild geese he has chased hither and yon as the weeks have mounted in this accursed city. He will leave soon,
no matter what.
Seated with uncomfortably crossed legs at his wobbly bamboo table in the courtyard, where he is expecting a visit from – he checks his paper – a Mr Aille Pitterlingk, Kifft shakes his head to swat away the buzz of problems. The feather in his broad-rimmed black hat sways sadly. This Pitterlingk sounds Dutch, which means he might be more amenable to reason than the natives, but he has proved most evasive over the months, sending messages, refusing to meet, keeping him guessing at every turn. Kifft recognises the tactics. If it were not that the fellow owns half the city and holds a particular hostage for whom Kifft might later find himself answerable, he would ignore him altogether and he could sing for his ransom money. Today Kifft intends to look him in the eye and demand an answer.
There was a farmhand at Ofanleiti once whose hand was cut off in an accident with an axe. Ásta has never forgotten him. For all the blood, pools of it, lakes of it, he was still surprised to find the hand gone. He had not felt its parting from his wrist. But when the scar began to form, then the hand that was no longer there started to madden him with pain. It burned him in the night and he woke the room with his cries. He was only a young lad. Ásta saw him once making to lift with it, and when he realised afresh that it was not there, he cried again.
Such has it been to lose Marta. At first Ásta went through the actions of living numbed of feeling. She rose and washed, she shelled chickpeas and stitched. She must have eaten. She sat through evening stories of which she heard not one word. And then the pain came. Now she feels her daughter every moment of the day, from waking to sleep. She smells her hair in the flowers, she hears her singing to herself as she sews at her side and sees her sitting among them in the rooftop garden, her face silver in the dusklight. But when she reaches out to stroke the sweet face, it is gone.
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