People of the Book (34 page)

“Nura, of course, came here with nothing but the torn robe she stood up in. She has a small retinue to serve her; myself and a handful of half-trained tribal girls who have no allegiances in the city.”

I was too astonished by her frankness to say anything. I glanced with concern at the turbaned boy standing by the wall. “Do not worry about him,” she said. “He is Nura’s brother. He was to be taken for a catamite but, as a favor to his sister, the emir forbears for now from having him used so. I am to train him for a page.” She sighed again, but a hint of a smile lit her eyes.

“You think me irreverent? It is natural to lose your reverence of princes when you’ve seen them limp-membered and panting like dogs. I was concubine to this emir’s grandfather. The old goat’s flesh already stank of death when he took me to his bed. This one,” she said, inclining her head in the direction of the throne room, “I suckled, and I’ve watched him ever since. A brat born and a bloody tyrant grown. He had the head struck off every high-bred youth in the city who might have challenged for the throne. And now he has it, and he throws it all away and puts the very city at risk, simply to scratch an itch in his crotch.”

She tossed her head then and cackled. “I have shocked you! Do not mind my rough old tongue. I have grown too bent with age for any further bowing.” She stood, rising with an ease that belied all her talk of infirmity. “You will see how it is, soon enough. You are to attend the emira tomorrow. I will send a girl to fetch you.”

I wanted to thank her for her openness, but as I began to speak, I realized that I had no idea how to address her. “Please, what is your name?”

She smiled then, and gave another cackle. “My name? I have had so many names I hardly know which one to give you. Muna, I was called when the old man wished his withered cock was hard enough to have me every night. ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,’ eh?” The cackle died, and her face folded in on itself. “Then I was Umm Harb for the strong son I bore—just one of the brave youths who died at the point of his half brother’s sword. It seems that name sticks in throats now. So they call me just Kebira.”

The old one.
So she was the old one, and I was the Moorish woman, and neither of us a person beyond the withering of our flesh or the blackness of our skin. I had a sudden glimpse of my own future here in this gorgeous prison, bitter and nameless and worn out in the service of the contemptible. The pain of the thought must have shown in my face, for she took a sudden step toward me and wrapped me in a swift, bony embrace. “Be careful, my daughter,” she whispered, and then she slipped away, the boy following like a shadow.

I woke the next morning to a scent of roses that thickened as a sun whose heat I could not feel beat down on the massive outer walls. It is a perfume that even today brings back a memory of despair. I dragged myself from the divan, washed, dressed, performed my prayers, and waited. A girl came with warm water for my toilet and another with a tray containing apricot juice, steaming rounds of flat bread, a dish of creamy yogurt, and a half dozen ripe figs. I ate what I could, then waited again. I feared to leave the room lest the summons to the emira come while I was absent.

But the noon prayer came and went, then the evening prayer, and finally the night, and I rose from my prostrations and went to bed. No summons came that day, or the one after. Finally, on the afternoon of the third day, it was Kebira and the page who came to fetch me, and Kebira’s old face was drawn and grave. She closed the door and leaned against it. “The emir has taken leave of his reason,” she said, speaking quickly and in a cracked whisper, even though in that empty palace it was hard to know whom she thought could overhear. “He rode in last night, late, and was with the emira until after dawn prayers, when he had a meeting with the nobles. Well, he conducted his business with them and then demanded that they stay and join him in the courtyard for some entertainment. This,” she said, and her lips thinned as she hissed the words, “turned out to be watching his wife take her bath.”

“Implore the pardon of God!” I could not credit her words. For a man to glimpse another’s wife unveiled was a matter for blows. To deliberately display a wife’s body to others was an unthinkable dishonor. “What manner of Muslim could do such a thing?”

“What manner of
man
could do such a thing? A man grown coarse and arrogant,” Kebira said. “The nobles are appalled—most of them suspected it was some pretext of the emir’s to have them executed; they left here fingering their necks. And as for the emira, well…You will see for yourself how she is. The emir has heard that you are here, and he demands an image to take with him when he rides out again tomorrow after dawn prayer.”

“But that is impossible!” I cried.

“Impossible or not, you are commanded to do it. He was furious that none had yet been made. So come quickly with me now.” Outside the door, the beautiful page waited, carrying the box of pigments that Hooman had sent to me.

When we reached the salon, Kebira knocked upon the door and said, “I have brought her.”

A serving girl opened the door and slid out, so swift to exit that she almost knocked me over. One side of her face was red, as if from a recent blow. Kebira pushed me forward with a hand to the small of my back. The boy glided in behind me, set down the box, and slid back out again. I realized that Kebira herself had not entered the room, and I felt a moment of panic when I realized that she did not plan to present me, or to in any manner ease this first encounter. I heard the door gently pulled closed behind me.

The emira stood with her back to me, a tall woman in an embroidered gown that fell heavily from her shoulders and spilled across the tiles at her feet. Her hair, still slightly damp, hung freely down her back. Its colors were remarkable, for it was not one hue only, but many: dull gold entwined with warm, gleaming umber, lit from beneath with streaks as red as sudden tongues of flame. Despite my nerves, I was already thinking how to render it. Then she turned, and the look on her face drove all such thought from my mind.

Her eyes, too, were a remarkable color: a dark gold like honey. She had been weeping, the redness around her eyes and the uneven mottle of her pale skin testified to that. However, she wept no longer. The look upon her face was not grief, but rage. She held herself rigid, as if she were braced with an iron flagstaff. Even so, or perhaps because of the effort her regal posture was costing her, she shook all over with a barely discernible tremor.

I made my salaam, wondering whether she expected some kind of bow or prostration. She said nothing in reply, but stared at me, and then she raised a long hand with a disdainful gesture. “You have your commands. Get to work.”

“But perhaps you would like to sit,
ya emira
? For this will take some time….”

“I will stand!” she said, and the eyes brimmed suddenly. And stand she did, for the rest of that entire, interminable afternoon. My hands shook under her fierce, wounded gaze as I opened my box and arranged the materials. It took all my will to empty my mind of noisy thought, and even more to raise my gaze to her, and study her as I had to do.

I do not need to tell of her beauty, for it has been celebrated in many famous poems and songs. I worked without a break, and she did not move or take her eyes from me. When the
muezzin
’s call for
salat
sounded, faint and plaintive through the thick walls, I asked her if she wished to stop and pray, but she just shook that heavy mane of hair and glared at me. Finally, when it was about to become necessary to call for the lamps, I realized I had a likeness. The decorations I could complete in my own chamber. These would be, perforce, simple, but if what the emir craved was an image of his wife—her beautiful face and her queenly bearing, then he had it here.

I rose to show her my work, and she regarded it with that same unfliching, angry stare. If her expression changed at all, it was in the brief flicker of a fleeting triumph. She stood there still, even as I packed my implements. Only when the young page entered did she stir. “Pedro,” she said, calling him to her. She leaned to him, caressing his brow with a swift, tender kiss. Then, she turned her back on us and did not acknowledge our going.

After making my delayed prayers, and taking some food and drink, I looked again at the parchment with fresher eyes and mind. Then I saw clearly what she had accomplished. She had stood to show that she was unbowed by whatever mad acts of violation the emir had committed. The image he would carry away with him was of a queen unconquered, a rock he could not break. And I realized something else, as I studied the portrait. There was no hint in it of the tears or the trembling that revealed the struggle behind her show of strength. I knew that she did not want to display these to him, and in their concealment I had become her accomplice.

I worked through the night to complete that first work for my new lord. Just before the dawn prayer, Kebira scraped on my door, and I handed it to her, too exhausted to care what her reaction might be. But I might have known that she would let me have her view, whether sought or not.

“‘The angels enter not into a house where there is a dog or a likeness’—are those not the words of our Prophet? If the emir seeks to displease God, he has found the right instrument in you. But I wonder if even the emir wished for so faithful a rendering.” She smiled, a bitter little smile of satisfaction, and left me. Too tired to fathom whether I had been insulted or complimented, I made my prayers without waiting for the call, then fell onto my divan and into a long, deep sleep.

In the weeks that followed, it sometimes seemed as if I never fully awakened. I had thought that there would be other calls to the emira’s chamber, chances to make portraits more carefully composed and thoroughly realized than that first fevered effort. But no summons came, day following day.

The emir had ridden out not to some skirmish, but on a long besiegement of a Christian hilltown that commanded some of the city’s key supply roads. For the first weeks of his absence, I dedicated myself to learning what lay within my new world, exploring the precincts of the women’s palace and making drawings of its tiles, fountains, and carved inscriptions. But even with this pleasant distraction, many hours remained unfilled by either occupation or companionship.

As I wandered aimlessly from one beautiful, silent chamber to another, I longed for meaningful tasks such as I had done for my father, and pined for the bustle of our mud-walled house. There were times I sighed even for the abrasive banter of the preparers of the ground. In those months, at least, I had had too much toil to taste the poison of idleness. Some days, I kept entirely to my room, breathing the stultifying scent of the roses until the light failed and I fell upon my divan in an exhaustion that I had not even earned.

After many weeks of this, I sent a sherbet girl to seek out Kebira. I begged her to ask the emira to let me paint her, but the request met with curt rejection.

“Well, can I not paint you, or the young page?” I asked the old woman. The boy, Pedro, had followed one day and stood behind me as I drew an inscribed spandrel, watching my hand for hours with his strange, unchildlike stillness. But Kebira would neither sit for me nor allow the boy to do so.

“It is one thing for the emir to condone the sin of image making, but I will not willingly further such work,” she said. She was not harsh about this, merely resolute. I wondered at the strength of her faith, that had withstood so many years of battering. I wondered how she felt now, in the service of a
rayah.

She laughed at me gently when I asked this. “As far as the world is concerned, she is not any longer a
rayah.
The emir put it out that she had embraced Islam, praise be to the Almighty. But I know it is not so. I hear her pray her infidel prayers, call on her Jesus and her Santiago…. Neither of them seem to hear her, though….” And she cackled again, and left me.

That night, I lay on my pallet thinking how little I knew of infidels’ religions and wondering why Christians and Jews were too stiff-necked to recognize the Seal of the Prophets. I wondered from what manner of home the emira had been snatched, and if she missed the familiar rites of her childhood.

The scent of the roses had waned, and their petals had fallen when the emir returned to the palace, riding to the gate by night so that the people would not see him, bloodied from a battle injury. When Kebira came to fetch me in the morning, she told me that he had taken a cut to the brow from an arrowhead that must have been dipped in foulness, for the wound, which had gashed his eyelid, stank and festered. Nevertheless, he had gone straight to Nura without troubling to have the cut seen to, or even removing his rank battle dress. Kebira’s wrinkled face folded as she told me this, as if the stench of him lingered in her nostrils.

Like a fool, I welcomed the summons to the emira’s rooms, so hungry was I for something to do. I hurried through the salons and up the stone stairs, eager for the challenge of work. The minute I saw her I realized my folly. The woman I faced seemed lit from within by a rage that burned her like a torch. Her hair was elaborately dressed with strings of pearls and bright jewels that seemed to catch the glow of its red strands, but she wore only a plain haik draped loosely around her. The servant who had brought my box slipped out silently, and I looked down, trying to escape the dreadful wrath of her gaze. She shrugged the haik from her shoulders. It fell to her feet, and when I looked up, she stood there before me, naked.

I looked away again, deeply shamed.

“This”—the word was a hiss such as a snake might make—“is what my lord wills you to paint today. Get to your work!”

I knelt and reached for my pen. But it was no use. The tremor in my hand and the grief in my heart would not allow me to grasp it. The words of the Koran were seared in my mind.
Tell the believing women to lower their gaze and be modest, and to show of their adornment only that which is apparent, and to throw their veils over their bosoms.
How then could I make an image of a naked woman? To do so was to defile her.