Sultan's Wife (19 page)

Soon, however, monkeys are all the rage in the harem: everyone wants one. The place is alive with their chattering and screeching and the smell of their shit. I am not popular with the servants, who have to clean up after them; or with the harem guards, who must put up with the noise of the beasts all day and night. Now that the women are not bickering and fighting amongst themselves, the monkeys have taken over. Every day there is a vicious fight; those who intervene risk being bitten. In the end Zidana has them all rounded up and slaughtered. With her own hands she harvests their brains and internal organs for her magic. Alys is inconsolable.

After that, I keep Amadou in my courtyard.

Months pass. Ismail takes Abdelaziz with him on a visit to his armies in the Rif and along the north coast as far as the English encroachment at Tangier to assess their needs and the taxes he must therefore extract from the Jews and the corsairs. Alys is curiously unnerved by his absence. She takes me by the arm one day, oblivious to the stares of the courtyard women. My nerves sing at her touch, even through the thin cotton of my sleeve.

She turns her heart-shaped face up to me and my head suddenly feels immensely weighty; it is all I can do to master myself and resist the urge to
bend and kiss her. ‘He will come back, won't he? Ismail? It's not so dangerous in the north, is it?'

Disappointment kicks me in the gut. Stiffly, I assure her that the sultan is both blade- and bullet-proof. Who would dare to kill the Sun and Moon of Morocco? God would strike a man dead at the very thought. This is said only half in jest; half of me believes it. For the rest of the week I stay away from the harem, going about my duties mechanically, making my reports to ben Hadou and the other functionaries who have been left in charge in the sultan's absence. The Tinker is a hard taskmaster: he keeps the palace running like French clockwork. The court is calmer without the presence of the sultan and grand vizier; even the harem spats and rivalries dissipate.

But I cannot stay away for long: Zidana summons me to entertain her entourage since Black John is indisposed. But, as I strum my oud and punctuate the songs with poetry, I direct Rumi's undying words to one pair of ears only:

Alys watches me intently; even when I do not look back I can feel her eyes on me. I wonder, is she thinking of me? I think so often of her it feels almost a reality. Almost, I can imagine lying with her, skin to skin. But then my mind shies away from the charade that would follow and I chide myself for my stupidity.

At night I take my beloved leather-bound volume of Rumi to my bed and seek solace in the long-dead poet's words.

I
am
angry – with the devil who took my manhood from me; with the sultan, who fills his palace with eunuchs for fear his collection of women will breed indiscriminately; with the harem women, who see me as no more than a sexless servant; with Alys, who has made me burn with an ambition that can never be fulfilled. But, most of all, I am angry with myself. Night after night I lie in the darkness questioning who I am, what I have become; what I may be. Must the loss of my testicles define me? Is there so little to me that the cutting away of two small balls of flesh should make such a difference to my identity, reduce me to a being that is less than a man? What
is
a man, after all? More, surely, than a beast that fertilizes a female. I think about the men I have known: my father, a once-proud man laid low by battle wounds and sickness, who ended his
life lying on a rush mat issuing petulant orders to anyone within earshot, a king whose kingdom had been reduced to the confines of a tiny, stinking hut; my uncle, who, having fathered a dozen children, found himself unable or unwilling to feed his ever-growing family and one day simply disappeared, taking only his spears and his
calabash
with him. The doctor: a man fully endowed, but who never showed any interest in women at all, of which I was aware; or in boys either, to my relief. All that drove him was his quest for an understanding of the world: it was a hunger in him, an appetite that could never be assuaged, the only thing that ever made him happy. There are the guards on the outer gates – entire men still, whose treating with women has little of romance to it, serving largely to satisfy an urge and thereby to produce more children to replenish the palace staff.

The sultan? He is far more than just a man, nearing the divine: there is no profit in examining such an example.

As for the other palace eunuchs: well, there is an odd spectrum of humanity …

There are those who have embraced their new state of life so thoroughly they have practically turned into women: whose breasts and bellies have grown pendulous, whose skin is as soft as a pillow; who rub powdered butterfly wings on their faces each morning to prevent any unsightly growth of stubble. For the most part they seem content with their lot, happy to sit all day gossiping with their charges, eating and eating, waiting for the next thing to happen about which they may talk. Then there are those like Qarim and Mohammadou, who take what pleasure they may find together as tenderly as man and woman, as if the cutting has changed not only their bodies but their very nature. Seeing them with their heads bent close together, the smiles they secretively exchange, I almost envy them: they have found a certain peace here with their new estate that would be hard to do in sight of the wider world. Is it wrong to say that seeing them happy makes me feel emptier still?

I am like none of these men. I shall never be a father, nor a man who abandons his family; I shall never, if I can help it, be a soft man with breasts and a belly like bags, nor one who takes his pleasure with other men; nor a
brute, nor a sultan. So I must make of myself what I can. I may be a slave, and a gelding at that, but I still have some pride and spirit left to me.

I am Nus-Nus. I am myself. I must, as Zidana charged me, find the iron in my soul; the warrior within. And perhaps that will suffice.

Well, something seems to have changed. A few days later Zidana says to me, ‘My, Nus-Nus: I must say you are looking very fine recently. Like a minor king. Something about your carriage, perhaps?' She walks around me, giving voice to her big, deep-throated laugh. ‘A little straighter in the spine, if my eyes do not deceive me; a little freer of movement. Have you been rattling your shackles, my boy, feeling your liberty a little too much while your master is away?'

I look at her askance, and she just grins wider. ‘You can tell me, you know: I shall not betray your confidence. Is there a girl?' She leans closer. ‘Or perhaps a boy?'

I can feel the shutters come down behind my eyes. I cannot afford to be so transparent. She shrugs, annoyed by my lack of response. ‘I'll be watching you, Nus-Nus,' she threatens.

So: it seems I am a book full of clear calligraphy, easily read by scholars of human foibles. This will not do: I must be careful to encode my feelings, especially from Zidana. For she is right, of course: the discovery of my new-found strength, which makes me walk taller and hold my head higher, is not fuelled by resentment or vengeance, but by love.

For it is love, this feeling: I may as well admit it.

Ismail returns in the early spring, not in the best of tempers: plague has descended on the north, sweeping in from the ships in Algiers and Tetouan, and he has barely outrun it.

Plague. The word spreads like running fire through the court until everyone is whispering about it. They have heard rumours of the European sickness that some call the Black Death, which comes on with shivering headaches, intolerable thirst, vomiting and stabbing pains, followed by great glandular swellings in the groin and beneath the arms. Drought grips the land: everyone is already thirsty and hot and headache-ridden. Add the usual panoply of stomach complaints into the mix and you can imagine the panic that grips us. In the harem the women (who never have enough to do) inspect one another's bodies constantly for signs of the black roses they have heard appear on the skin of the afflicted, presaging death. Bruises and insect bites provoke hysteria.

Even Ismail is not immune to the paranoia. What am I saying? He is the worst of them all, despite the fact that the name of every man destined to die is already recorded in the Book of Fate, and no medicine or precaution can therefore cure or prevent his inevitable fate. Yet every day I am sent to fetch Doctor Salgado, who, for the sake of his own health, has avoided strong spirits since his last near-death experience with our lord, to inspect the sultan: to judge his temperature and his tongue, the colour and scent of his urine; the consistency of his stools. Every day, despite being declared healthy by the doctor, Ismail calls for his astrologers and numerologists, who cast his omens and calculate his luck (which is remarkably, uniformly
favourable). Salt is strewn at the cardinal points around the palace to dissuade djinns from entering and bringing the plague in with them, mischief-makers as they are. Hyacinths are planted in all the courtyards: their scent is well known to cleanse the air. Ismail orders the talebs to write verses of the Qur'an on scrips of paper, which he then ingests. He has Zidana make up tisanes and potions for him. She sends me to the souq almost daily for ever more items, and over the passing weeks as the plague comes closer the list of requirements grows ever more bizarre – chameleons, porcupine spines, crows' feet, crystals and stones from the Himalaya, lapis from the pharaoh tombs, hyena skins and spiderwebs. But when she sends me to fetch her back the corpse of a newly buried child, I refuse.

She laughs at me. ‘If you don't do this for me I will just find another way.'

I incline my head to this piece of blackmail, but say nothing and she does not press the point, so I go away, feeling as if I have escaped her evil influence. But the next day there is a great wailing in the harem: a child of one of the black slave-women has gone missing. My eyes meet Zidana's. She has that blank, brazen look that I recognize only too well, and I know exactly what it means. I do not sleep that night.

The plague passes through Tangier, taking with it many of the hated English, who are currently occupying this strategic port, key to the Mediterranean trade routes, gifted to their king in the marriage portion of his Portuguese bride. It reaches Larache and Asilah, sends its tendrils down the coast to Salé and Rabat. Traders bring it inland with them: every week it creeps closer and appalling stories reach us of entire families succumbing, of farms where the livestock starve to death; stray sheep wander untended in the hills; merchant caravans plod the trade routes without the benefit of their overseers. It reaches Khemisset and Sidi Kacem, barely a few dozen leagues away.

We wait in the airless heat, hardly able to breathe, praying that by a curious twist of fate it will pass us by and fall instead upon Marrakech. Surrounded by hysteria, I cannot help but feel some dread. I have not seen this disease at first hand, but I have heard about it from my old master, Doctor Lewis, and with him I saw its aftermath, the great outpouring of
superstitious horror that still infested the city of Venice thirty-odd years after the last outbreak. He was much fascinated by the pestilence, and by the fervent belief of the Venetian population that they had been delivered from its worst ravages by the power of prayer. ‘These people are no more civilized than your own,' he told me more than once as we went about the city. ‘They put their faith in grand gestures – but rather than sacrificing animals and enemies to secure the favour of their idols, they sacrifice vast sums of money in commissioning towering buildings and religious paintings, thinking it will buy them indemnity.'

In a little backstreet the doctor went into an apothecary's shop and bought a pair of the curious bird-beaked masks that Venetian doctors had worn to go about the city in safety. He put one on when I was not looking and took me greatly by surprise, so much so that I fell down in the street. When I had recovered myself, he showed me how they had stuffed the beaks with herbs to cleanse the air they breathed, and then tutted. ‘I am sure, however, that the pestilence is not airborne. We'll have to hope for another outbreak so that I can test my theories.' I shivered, and sincerely hoped such an occurrence would be avoided: to be trapped in that city – so beautiful to the eye at first sight but so full of narrow, dark passageways, dank corners and foul-smelling basins that must surely harbour every disease – was my nightmare.

We made our way out to San Giobbe in the north-west of the city, close to the Jewish ghetto, where we had business, then visited the Church of the Santissimo Redentore and finally the Scuola San Rocco to satisfy the doctor's curiosity about the city's plague-churches. For the most part the images we saw in them were far distant from reality, full of big white angels, glowing madonnas and corpulent babies; but in a studio close to the Scuola we found the young artist Antonio Zanchi completing a monumental painting that showed in graphic detail the barely clothed corpses of plague victims being handed down from bridges and out of windows to brawny men who stacked them in their into newly black gondolas; bodies thrown down into the canals; the afflicted displaying their horrible buboes and boils. I was transfixed as the man worked. To lay paint on to canvas, to create shape and perspective on something flat and plain, seemed to me a
quite magical process, and also disturbing in a way I could not explain. I felt almost as if he were bringing the plague back into the world by depicting its effects so graphically.