Pillars of Light (16 page)

A pause. Then Yacub said, “The heart knows no bounds, my love. If we break them apart, they will only be in greater jeopardy, meeting one another in secret, in places of lesser safety. They do no one harm.”

“You say that now, but what if he gets her pregnant?”

“If he gets her pregnant, he’s a poor student of anatomy, my dear, and no son of mine!”

Nat, listening, had winced and coloured. So they knew the whole of it. And so did he. He knew full well that every day they met, every time they touched, he put Zohra in danger. A Muslim girl’s reputation was fiercely guarded by her family. Any hint of scandal and she would be unmarriageable in the eyes of her community. But he could not have stopped, not even if he’d wanted to. And he did not want to. The very idea turned him cold from the inside out.

Zohra laughed now. “Your father could talk the legs off a mule!”

“He’s always like this when Mother’s away visiting her sisters.” Sara’s sisters still lived on the family farm outside the city walls. “You’d think he didn’t pass a word with his patients all day long.”

“My father hardly talks to me at all. And Sorgan, he just sings to himself, and the twins are … well, they’re young. As for Malek, I don’t think he’ll ever speak to me again.”

Nat put a hand to her cheek. “I’m glad you didn’t go to Damascus, sweetheart. I think if you had, I would have died.”

Zohra stared at him, and at once he could see he’d overstepped the mark. In all their time together he had never made anything but light of the way they were with each other, and so she was able to
make light of it too: a friendship, just a loving friendship, but not something that would drive you to despair or death—that was for the tellers of tales only, the men who sat in the marketplace and told stories of love-fraught emirs and beautiful, merciless maidens; of girls forced to marry ugly old men, girls who pined away for the love of a young carpenter.

Zohra looked uncomfortable, and when he leaned in to kiss her she laughed and ducked her head away. Nat felt wounded.

He watched her pick up the little volume and rub a thumb across the soft, worn leather. “Can I borrow the book?” she asked, surprising him.

“Of course. Keep it as a gift.”

When they parted company at the door to the alley he caught her by the arm, pulled her roughly back and kissed her full on the mouth. It was something he felt he had to do—somehow she seemed to have slipped away from him, and he needed to lay claim to her once more.

“Zohra!”

The cry caused them to spring apart. Out of the shadows on the other side of the alley stepped a young man. For a moment he looked like a total stranger, older than his years, unfamiliar in this context. Zohra recognized him with a shiver—of shame, and fear. “Aisa—what? What is it?” But suddenly she knew with a horrible certainty who had been knocking on the door earlier and why. “Ummi.” A statement, not a question.

“I was looking for the doctor, Yacub …” He was uncomfortable, would not meet her eye.

Nathanael took charge of the situation. “I’ll come with you.” He stepped back into the house and seconds later re-emerged with a large leather bag over his shoulder.

Aisa was bewildered. “We need the doctor, old Yacub—”

“I am the doctor,” Nat told him firmly.

They ran through the narrow streets of the medina, avoiding the impenetrable crowds in the bazaar by skirting the market on its shortest side, a route that took them past the leatherworkers, the furniture makers and the woodworkers’ stalls. They had just come within sight of their street when a bloodstained figure came running towards them.

Zohra turned and stared. “Kamal?”

He did not stop.

“Kamal!”

The volume of her own scream shocked her, but he did not even look back. Dread gripped her now. “Allah, Allah … what has happened?”

The door to the house was wide open. Inside, distantly, the desolate lowing of an animal in unbearable pain could be heard. And someone else was singing, a child’s song, sweet and melancholy. The two sounds merged into something nonsensical, something jarring and discordant.

Zohra ran up the stairs, shoes and all, towards her mother’s room. Just outside, in the corridor, Sorgan sat on the floor, rocking from side to side, his eyes closed, his arms around himself, singing. It was an unnerving sight to see a grown man so, but worse were the noises from up on the terrace. Her father, Baltasar, bellowing as if possessed. She was about to charge on up the stairs when she glimpsed through the half-open door her mother, arms outflung, on the divan.

She ran to the bedside. Nima’s face was turned towards her, mouth open, features contorted. Her eyes stared into space; her hands were claws. Zohra sank to her knees. “Oh, Ummi. Oh no, no …”

Just moments behind her, Nathanael crouched and pressed his fingers against Nima’s neck. Then he bent his head and placed an ear against her belly. At last he straightened up.

“She’s dead, Zohra. I’m so sorry.” With a practised hand, he closed the lids over the staring eyes.

Aisa, propped against the wall beside the door as if it were the only thing holding him upright, made a small, inarticulate sound.

“This is a hard thing to say, but I’m afraid she did not die naturally.”

Zohra looked up at Nat, uncomprehending.

“I’m sorry, my love, but someone hastened her end.” Nathanael picked up the yellow cushion from the floor, the one Zohra used to prop Nima up in order to ease the passage of food and water. He turned it over, frowned, held it out to her.

The yellow silk bore a damp stain the size and shape of a mouth.

M
alek Najib was unaware of the drama unravelling at his family home as he rode out of Akka. All that he had come to do there he had failed at. He had been so determined, this time, not to rise to his father’s bait, not to lose control, to put the case—so clear to any right-thinking person—coolly and rationally. He had planned to introduce the subject of moving the family back to Damascus gradually over the course of his visit, to let the idea take root in his father’s stubborn mind, then to shore it up with unassailable argument and soothing reason. But he had reckoned without Baltasar’s savage, wounded pride and contempt for the man Malek held highest in his esteem, the Commander of the Faithful, Salah ad-Din.

He should, he knew, have allowed Baltasar to voice his criticisms without reaction, as the sultan himself would have done. Faced with the bitter fury of the broken veteran, Salah ad-Din would have listened to what the old man said with that grave smile on his thin, intelligent face, his eyes pinned on the speaker, as if weighing every word. And then he would have nodded, conceded the validity of Baltasar’s opinion and quoted some apposite verse
from the holy Qur’an that turned the attack aside. He would have re-engaged the man the next day, patiently, before slipping in a quiet doubt here, a gentle cavil there, until at last—even if it took many days—Baltasar would have announced he was moving the family back to Damascus after all, and any man who told him not to he would call a fool.

Malek sighed deeply. The sultan had given him permission to make this visit, having urged his lieutenant to move his family back to the capital. He was not sure which was worse: that he had not succeeded in his mission, or that he had to tell Salah ad-Din and see the disappointment—fleeting, well-masked but indubitably present—in the sultan’s eyes.

He was oblivious to the beauty of the day, to the artistry of the ancient city gates he passed through, to the soft ochre limestone of the city walls, to the bounty of the orchards through which he passed—the oranges and apricots glowing in their nests of luxuriant green leaves, the lemons shining like stars, the plums and figs swelling on the branch, the pomegranates just beginning to take on their blush—and, beyond, to the olives and dates growing by the river, to the swoop of swallows over the crops and the call of larks in the brilliant blue bowl of the sky. He took no pleasure in the smooth flow of his horse’s gait, the sheen on its chestnut coat, the intelligent carriage of its head, or in the smart figure he cut in his green tunic, embroidered with fine silver thread; the curved, damascened sword at his waist in its scabbard of figured leather; the supple riding boots that had cost him two weeks’ pay. All was as ash in his mouth.

He took the old road along the coast, skirting the marshland, then turned north and west towards the uplands. Tell el-Musalliyin, the Hill of Prayers, loomed on the skyline to his right; to his left, the sea stretched turquoise and sparkling, its waters plied by shipping on its way to dock in Akka’s spacious harbour, bearing trade goods from every corner of the world. Usually, this would have been
enough to lighten his heart, the idea that the markets were full to bursting, that his pay bought his family all they needed. But riding out that morning, he could not help but feel misfortune was brewing. At the moment it was a storm far out at sea, but soon it would sweep inland, and there would be nothing he could do to avert it.

Perhaps this was why he tarried rather than take the fastest route, up through the Toron range, north-east back towards Salah ad-Din’s camp. The thought of the sultan’s displeasure, no matter how courteously masked, was too painful to contemplate; he thought he might take the longer route and consider the words he would use to explain away his failure.

He took his rest that night curled into a hollow on the side of one of the tawny hills, woke with the dawn, made his prayers facing away from the sea, brewed some strong thyme tea to put strength in his bones for the ride ahead and ate the bread his cousin had baked for him before he left Akka, unaware of the yearning sighs Jamilla had given as she pummelled her frustrations into the dough, or the kiss she had bestowed on the final baked item.

When he saddled up the chestnut it seemed more skittish than usual, throwing its head and blowing hard for no reason. Wrestling it into some semblance of obedience, he pointed its head uphill towards the ridge and put his heels to its barrel, hoping that the extra effort required would render the animal more complaisant. It was the most handsome horse he had ever owned, taken during the surrender of the Hospitaller fortress of Kaukub, called by the Franj Belvoir; but it was also the most contrary. He had had bare weeks to convert it from its infidel ways, and it had proved resistant. On the ride down to Akka he had thought it more responsive, but now here it was again playing up, jigging in a circle, flicking its ears as if spooked by something. He hauled at its head as it tried to jaunt right again and at last fought it to a standstill as he scanned the uniformly brown scrub for the cairn that marked the trail. But then
the contrary animal circled again, pulling at the bit, and that was when he saw it.

A flash of silver to the north, down near the sea. Shading his eyes, Malek gazed into the distance but saw nothing but heat haze and a solitary hawk riding a current of hot air. He was about to wrestle his mount back towards the track when it came again: the sun winking off something far away, where Akka’s coast road turned north towards Tyre.