The Aviary Gate (12 page)

Annetta, of course, who for a few weeks in their very early days in the palace had been sent to work in the eunuchs' quarters, was dismissive of Celia's timidity.

‘Men without
cogliones!
' she would say, a hand on an indignant hip. ‘And with those names? Hyacinth, Marigold, Rosebud and I don't know what.
Faugh!
why should we be afraid of them?'

But even she was afraid of Hassan Aga.

‘He looks like the dancing bear I once saw in Ragusa,' Celia remembered her whispering the first time they set eyes on him. ‘And those cheeks! Like two great puddings. Why, my old Mother Superior had more hair on her chin than he has. And those little red eyes.
Santa Madonna
, they chose that one well! He's as ugly as the Pope's rhinoceros.'

But at his glance – a glance that would have been enough to have made any of the other
cariye
faint dead away – she fell silent soon enough, and quickly lowered her gaze.

But now Celia was no longer afraid. Hassan Aga looked at her without speaking and then turned on his heel and walked ahead of her, leading the way along a dark corridor.

It was evening now and each of the four eunuchs accompanying him carried a flaming torch in one hand. Celia watched the figure of the Chief Black Eunuch recede, his tall white hat of office now no more than a ghostly silhouette sailing ahead of her into the darkness. For a big man, it struck her, he was strangely nimble on his feet.

Flanked by the four more junior eunuchs, she too began to walk along the corridor. There was no sensation in her legs now. Instead she was able to observe how she seemed to be gliding, floating almost, her golden slippers barely touching the floor. A delicious languor filled her body. Celia put her hand to her neck, feeling the heavy pearls clustered at her throat, and smiled. It was so quiet she could hear the sound of her robe pooling behind her, the soft rasping of silk on stone. It was all so much like a dream – and there was really no reason to be afraid.

The figure of Hassan Aga blurred, and then jerked suddenly back into focus again. One of the eunuchs put out a hand to steady her but she recoiled from him in disgust. Ahead of her the corridor stretched out, never-ending. Strange shadows, orange and black and formless, reared up along the stone walls. This was her wedding night, wasn't it? Were they taking her to Paul? At the thought of him, Celia felt her heart leap in her breast. But her eyelids felt as if they were made of lead.

‘Hold her, can't you! The girl can hardly stand.'

Two hands, one on either side of her, grasped her beneath the elbows, and this time she did not resist.

The next thing she was aware of was being carried into the vast, vaulted emptiness of the Sultan's bedchamber. She had no memory of getting there, only a shadowy recollection of Hassan Aga, the rolls of his fat neck glistening with sweat, placing her in the centre of an enormous divan in one corner of the room, its jewelled canopy held up by four columns, twisted like sticks of gilded barley sugar. Paul? But no, she remembered now, she wasn't going to Paul. She was looking up instead at a domed space the size of a church basilica.

‘What have you done to her?'

Celia had never got over her sense of strangeness at the sound of Hassan Aga's voice, a high-pitched reedy sound. It was forbidden to speak at all in the Sultan's quarters, and here was the great Hassan Aga, whispering like a boy. He did not sound like the master of the House of Felicity now.

Cariye Lala, on the other hand, sounded savage.

‘I've done nothing!' Her fingers, so sure and nimble in the Valide's hammam, fumbled with the buttons on Celia's robe. ‘She must have got hold of more opium somehow; someone's given her a double dose …'

‘Who?' Hassan Aga again.

‘Who do you think it was?' She spat the words out. ‘Who else could it have been?'

Celia's head nodded forwards on to her chest. From somewhere nearby came a low moaning sound of distress. She tried to look round, but now her eyes were rolling up into their sockets and sleep was sucking her down – down, down, down – into the abyss. Hands, more of them, were undressing her. She made no protest. Her body was as limp and weak as an infant's. They removed her robe, but left her with the white chemise still demurely covering her shoulders and breasts. The moaning sound was closer now.

‘Help her, can't you?'

That strange fluting voice again, sounding from somewhere close. Celia was aware of more hands, small ones this time, fluttering near her, propping her up with an assortment of silken bolsters and coverlets, coiling them round her, up to the waist. The face of the young servant girl, shiny and swollen with tears, appeared beside her for a few moments and then receded. The girl's cheek, and Hassan Aga's, were almost touching. And it was from the girl, Celia now saw, that the moaning was coming: an inarticulate animal sound of terror.

Celia sank into blackness again.

She was at home, in England. At a window casement sat her mother. She was sewing, in her red dress. Her back was turned to Celia, so she could not see her face, only her hair, brown and sleek as an otter's, caught at the nape of her neck in a golden net. The late afternoon sun glanced off the diamond-shaped panes. Celia tried to call out to her, tried to run, but she found that she could not. No sound came from her mouth; and her legs would not move, held fast as if they were buried in quicksand.

When she woke again she was lying stretched out on her stomach on the divan. A small splashing sound came from the far wall of the
room, where a recess contained a fountain, but apart from this there was no other sound in the room. Amongst the bolsters and cushions surrounding her was a tiger skin, its tawny stripes glimmering in the candlelight. She put out her hand to stroke the fur, and as she did so a small movement caught her eye: the hem of a man's robe.

For several moments Celia lay quite still, her eyes closed. Although her mouth felt dry, and there was a strange bitter taste on her tongue, a warm and sleepy lassitude paralysed her limbs. Cautiously she opened one eye. The hem of the robe was in the same place, but there were no feet protruding from beneath it. He must be standing with his back to her. The robe twitched again, and Celia heard a faint chink of porcelain, a drinking cup or a plate being set down, followed by a soft cough. Dreamily her eyes closed again. Her body floated gently on top of the silken coverlets as if she were in a warm sea.

‘Awake at last, little sleepyhead?'

With an effort, Celia swam up to the surface again. Somehow she managed to kneel up on the divan: her arms were crossed over her breasts, and her head was bowed so low that she could see nothing at all of the man now approaching her.

‘Don't be afraid,' he was standing in front of her now. ‘Ayshe, isn't it?'

Celia thought of Annetta; remembered how they had clung together, right until the moment when the ship went down. We survived that, Annetta had said to her, and we'll survive this.

‘No, Majesty …' with an effort, Celia rolled her tongue around the words. ‘It is Kaya.' Her voice sounded thick.

‘Kaya, then.'

He was sitting beside her now. He reached out and pulled the thin shirt from one shoulder. She saw his hand: the skin was fair, slightly freckled, the nails polished until they shone like moons. On his thumb he wore a ring of carved jade. Did he expect her to look up at him? She did not know, and it did not seem to matter much. He was stroking her shoulder, and as he did so his robe fell open and she saw that beneath it he was naked too, and so close now that she could smell him. A big man. A sweet musky smell came from the folds of his robe, but mixed with this perfume was another unmistakable scent: a rich male odour of sweat and skin, armpit and groin.

‘How fair you are …' he drew his fingers gently down her neck and along her back, making her shiver. ‘May I look at you?'

It was some moments before Celia realised what he was asking her. Then, still kneeling, she raised her arms to pull off the chemise. Although it was a warm night the air in the room felt cool. She shivered a little, but she was quite calm. Submissive. Will it hurt, she wondered? Look: I am not afraid, she told Annetta in her mind, not afraid after all.

‘Lie back for me.'

His voice, when he spoke to her, was gentle. With a small sigh Celia lay back amongst the peacock-coloured cushions. Her limbs felt supple and warm and strangely boneless. When he parted her legs, she turned her head to one side and looked away. But it was so pleasant lying there, after all, and his touch was so soft against her skin, that she did not try to pull away, even when he fingered between her legs, stroking the soft milky skin of her thighs. All sensations were magnified: the fur of the tiger's tawny pelt against her cheek, the heaviness of the jewels at her neck and in the lobes of her ears. Wearing only jewels, she realised, made her feel doubly naked, and yet she felt no shame. She felt him cup one breast with his hand, pinching and sucking the nipple until it hardened. She arched her back, wriggled down still further into the bed.

For how long she lay like this, Celia did not know. For long trance-like moments she could almost forget that he was there at all. He did not seem to want to kiss her, so she kept her head turned to one side, and found herself looking round the chamber instead. A folding table in the centre of the room contained a tray of fruit and flowers, and a flask of some cooling drink, water or iced sherbet.

Next to them a curious object now caught her eye. It was a ship. The figure of a ship in miniature. And not just any ship: the vessel was the distinctive size and shape of a merchantman. Celia blinked. She was looking at an exact replica of her father's boat. It looked as if it were made of something fine and brittle; something caramel-coloured. It's a subtlety, a sugar subtlety! Just like the ones John Carew used to make! But it can't be, she thought, what could such a thing possibly be doing here?

It was a dream, of course. But the little ship seemed so real that for a moment its sails seemed to billow, its pennants fluttered in the
breeze, and sailors, tiny men no bigger than her little finger, swarmed the decks. And a feeling of such pain came over her she almost cried out loud.

Then suddenly there was a commotion outside: a loud banging on the door, a woman's slippered feet running across the room towards them. Eunuchs, the same four who had escorted Celia to the Sultan's chamber earlier that evening, ran in after her.

‘Gulay!' He sat up. ‘What's this?'

‘My lord … my lion …' A young woman, whom Celia recognised as the Haseki, the Sultan's favourite, was weeping, crouching at his feet and kissing them; wiping them with her long black hair. ‘Don't let her … don't let her take me away from you.'

‘Gulay!' He tried to pull her up, but she clung, still weeping, to his feet. ‘What nonsense in this, Gulay?'

She did not reply, but shook her head incoherently.

‘Take the girl,' he signalled brusquely to the eunuchs. ‘Take all this, and get out.'

And so, bowing low, they raised Celia up and escorted her swiftly from the room.

Elizabeth's application for a reader's pass at the university would take several days to be approved. While she was waiting she spent the days trying, alternately, to sleep, and not to think about Marius. She failed in both.

Her nights were fitful. Sometimes she dreamt she had found Marius again, other times that she had lost him, and she woke each morning with a feeling of such desolation in her heart that she wondered how much longer she could stand it.

It was cold and she did not feel like going out. Misery seemed to have sapped her energy for even the most basic sight-seeing. Instead she took to sitting with Haddba in the hall. Elizabeth found her company soothing. She accepted Elizabeth's need just to sit still, and asked no questions.

They did not talk much. Instead the boy, Rashid, would bring them tea. He brought it on a tray in two tiny little glasses like perfume phials. The liquid tasted very sweet, more like sugar than apples.

‘If there is anything you need – a newspaper, cigarettes, whatever – you simply send Rashid out for it,' Haddba said.

But I shall be gone by tomorrow, Elizabeth would think, but somehow she never was.

Dearest Eve

It seems strange to be writing you a letter, but certainly in keeping with the spirit of this place which doesn't seem to have changed at all
for the last fifty years, and still doesn't have computer connections of any kind. (I should think this notepaper has been in the same drawer for at least that long. Can you see the old telegram address on the bottom of this page? I wonder, when was the last time anyone sent one of those?)

Elizabeth took off her shoes, and tucked her feet up under her on the sofa to get warm. She sucked the end of her pen. ‘The weather is cold and grey …' she wrote after a while, but a voice inside her head kept saying: and I'm cold and grey and I want to come home, and it's only pride that's keeping me here. Elizabeth glanced down at her mobile to check for messages.
And Marius hasn't texted me, not once, since I've been here … No. No. No!
She scratched out the words about the weather, and then looked around the room for something else to write about.

Oh, and did I tell you? [she wrote with an animation that she did not feel] It turns out that this isn't a hotel at all, but a sort of guest house. There's a film director who has taken a room here for three months; a French professor ditto; and some sinister-looking Russians who don't talk to anyone and who I'm sure must be something to do with the white-slave trade. Oh, and a mysterious old American woman, who wears amber beads and a turban, and looks as if she has read too many Agatha Christie novels …

There was a faint sound on the other side of the hall. Elizabeth looked up and saw that she was no longer alone. She had been joined there by a man. He sat behind the newspaper that Rashid had brought for him.