The Damiano Series (75 page)

Hakiim sat the woman down with a rag and a pot of water. Beside the pot he placed a small lump of lard soap.

“You see that big baby there,” he said to her in Arabic, pointing at Raphael. “You pretend he's your baby. Wash him all over. And don't waste soap.”

She glared not at Raphael (who had greeted her arrival like the coming of springtime) but at the sky. The Moor stood above them both with arms folded. He scowled, but he was rather more curious than annoyed.

Raphael smiled at Djoura, and he sighed. He put his hand out toward her neck, awkwardly, and when she flinched away he touched his own throat.

“He likes your singing,” explained the patient Hakiim.

“Does he?” replied the black dubiously, for no one else in the slave chain had expressed similar feelings. (She addressed her master without respect, indeed without civility, but Hakiim had expected no different.) But then Djoura, like Hakiim, had to laugh at Raphael's eloquent expression. “Well, then, he must be a person of very good taste.”

She soaked the rag, wrung it out, and soaped it. “Close your eyes,” she barked at Raphael and she touched the rag to his cheek.

He started with surprise at the cold contact and Djoura laughed again. She proceeded to lather his puzzled face.

“Hah! You poor sieve-head! How pink you are, underneath the dirt!” she chortled. “We'll see just how pink we can make you. We'll get that hair too. Maybe it's pink as well, when all the sand is out of it.”

But when she dribbled water onto the blond head, he sputtered and shook like a dog. Perfecto cursed from his spot on the square of carpet, and Hakiim backed off. Both the merchants retreated some yards away.

“Good,” growled the black. “Being stupid has it uses. You got rid of them, and if I'd done it, they'd beat me. Or they'd try!

“I don't like them,” she whispered, pouting furiously. “And I most especially don't like the Spaniard. They can crawl in with any of the girls they like, they think—it's their natural right, they think.

“Until they met ME! I showed them, you can tell the world.”

Raphael's head and face ran with thin lather. He squinted his eyes against the sting of soap. Djoura gave him a careful rinse, using as little water as possible. “Sand is better for washing,” she instructed him. “It doesn't crack the skin like soap, and doesn't waste good water. We had sand yesterday and I gave myself a good scrub. Hah! You should have seen these ignorant ones look at me, like baby owls along a branch, blinking. They know nothing, being content to stink.

“But here there is not sand, but only dirt. Who can wash herself in dirt, I ask?”

Looking slyly around first, she dabbed the soapy rag at her own face and hands, and then thrust her arm with the rag down the front of her many-layered clothing. As the cool rag swabbed her skin, she sighed in ecstasy. Raphael watched every move with interest.

Having washed down to the fellow's neck and up each arm, Djoura sat back and announced, “Now you have to get up off your hams, eunuch, so we can pull that shirt off you.”

But she had no real hope of being understood. She scuttled around behind the fellow and yanked on the garment, but there was too much of it, and his legs were tangled in its folds. “Curse you!” she growled, but without real rancor, for washing the eunuch was the first interesting thing for her since being sold to Hakiim in Tunis. “How you stare at me with those big blue eyes of yours—just like a white cat! I wonder you can even see through them. Well, the shirt's all stuck to your back with blood. We'll have to soak it off.”

When the water hit Raphael's back, he stiffened and gasped. Djoura put a hand on his shoulder. “It's all right. It won't hurt forever,” she whispered, adding soap. She examined the length and number of the scourge marks with a kind of respect. “Pinkie, you must have done something pretty terrible to deserve THIS!

“I, too, cannot be broken,” she hissed into his ear, “though maybe they will make me a sieve-head in the end, like you.”

She smiled grimly at the thought. “Or maybe I'll only pretend to be one, and amuse myself laughing at them all.”

There were long openings in the back of the eunuch's gown—not whip slices, for they were parallel and neatly hemmed. She wondered at them while she reached her hand through and worried the cloth from the wounds. Perhaps some kind of iron chain or body-collar had passed through these. If so, this eunuch must have been a handful when he still had his senses. Her approval of him grew by leaps and bounds.

“You may not know it,” she whispered (as though the hills were full of spies), “but I am a Berber! People think I am not, because I am black, but Berbers are really of all colors.” Then she giggled. “Maybe even pink!

“To be a Berber, it is only necessary that you live like a Berber and follow the ways of the Prophet,” she added with hauteur, and she crawled back in front of him to glare deep into his eyes. “To be a Berber is to be free!” she hissed, with no thought of the irony of her words.

She threw back her head and all the coins and tassels on her headdress bobbed together.

Raphael listened carefully to the sounds Djoura made. His eyes devoured her color and shape and his skin rejoiced at her touch, even when it hurt him. For her song had broken his terrible isolation, and her chatter kept him from despair. So now, as she at last fell silent, with her brown eyes looking full at him, he tried to give her something of the same sort back.

He repeated the chant she had sung at the other end of the line, word for word, note for note, with perfect inflection and time.

Djoura clapped her hands in front of her mouth. “Oh, aren't you a clever one!”

It was not actually cleverness, or not cleverness in the sense the black Berber meant. Raphael's repertoire of music was immense, and neither pain nor transformation could steal it from him.

He knew that piece. He repeated it for her an octave down, where he found this new instrument (his throat) was more comfortable, and then to the Berber's amazement, he followed the solo chant with the traditional choral response.

The woman sat stock-still in front of him. The rag she had been wringing fell from her hands. “You are a Berber too? My kinsman? And I have been making mock of you!” She bit down on her Up until the pain of it brought her feelings under control.

Could this pink fellow be a Berber? She had just said there might be pink Berbers.

Well, if he were not, then he OUGHT to have been a Berber, between the lashes on his back and the knowledge of the chant.

But how could he have ever lived in the high desert with that silly coloring? Why, he was already sunburned; she could tell because her fingers left white marks on the skin as she touched him.

Perhaps he had not always been this color. Perhaps he had lain in a dungeon some long time. She had heard that years in the darkness could bleach the finest dark skin to white.

She harked to the querulous complaint of the women in the shadows behind her. She reminded herself that they were not alone, Pinkie and she. She listened. Hakiim's reply to the complaint could not be made out, but the Moor was laughing. He laughed a lot, swine that he was. She could not hear the Spaniard. She imagined his hard little eyes watching her.

It was necessary to keep busy, or they would take her back to the far end of the wall and she would never get near this fellow again. “Lie down,” she whispered. “Lie down, Pinkie, on your side.”

He seemed to understand her Arabic, which was heartening, and further convinced her that her ideas of his ancestry were correct, but he was so clumsy in his movements that she had to push him gently onto his left side. “There. Now we'll get your long legs and your bottom.

“I've never seen a eunuch close up,” she added conversationally, “not what he lacks, anyway.” But as that thought led to another, she scowled. “The man who makes a eunuch out of a Berber ought to have his own balls torn off and his belly ripped open and both holes stuffed with red ants! He should lose his eyes and his tongue first, and then his feet and then his left hand, and then his right hand… and…”

As she spoke, searching her imagination for greater and greater punishments to inflict on this nameless castrater, her hand with the rag continued to soap and scrub, until by the time she arrived at the words “his right hand,” her own had climbed up the tube of the white linen gown, where it made an astounding discovery.

She popped her head under the hem of the gown to verify what her fingers told her, and then very quickly withdrew it. Out of ingrained habits of concealment, her features adopted an expression of heavy boredom as she dipped the rag once more into the pot of water. She hummed a little tune as she rinsed it out.

The blond man stared at her with bright interest and scratched at the spot she had left wet. The Berber could barely hide her grin. “Don't do that, Pinkie. If they see you playing with that, you'll lose it for sure.”

Casually humming, she scrubbed his other leg. And his sickness-fouled buttocks. It must have been the fellow's very foulness, she reflected, that spared him. Hakiim had been too delicate souled to examine him, and Perfecto…

Djoura had never granted the Spaniard an ounce of sensibility, but it was he who had dumped the blond among them and called him a eunuch. Maybe he had just been too lazy to look. The black woman leaned forward and put her finger under his chin. She was smiling no longer.

“Listen to me, Pink Berber, if there's a grain of sense left in that poor head. Don't lift your skirt around anyone here except me. Not even to make water. Do you understand me?”

The blond stared back at her.

“Do you understand me?” she hissed in her urgency.

Raphael's clean face sweated with effort. His mouth opened. “I want,” he said, slurring like a man drunk on kif, “I want to understand.”

She ran her hand over his sleek wet hair.

“Here's your soap,” she said flatly to Hakiim. The Moor drew back his hands in distaste. “Wrap it in the rag.”

While she did so he took a glance over at the blond eunuch, who sat gazing vacantly at them, his hands in his lap, as neat and sleek as some mother's favorite child. “Was he filthy?”

The Berber rolled her eyes and deposited the wet rag in Hakiim's hand. “Of course he was. And sick, I think. He cannot be left to himself. You had better put me next to him.”

The Moor's jaw dropped. “You WANT to be next to him? My sweet lily of the mountains: the fellow is yours!”

Night fell: Raphael's first night in captivity. He lay on his stomach, trying to look up at the stars.

It was getting bad again. As soon as Djoura had gone away from him—ten feet away, which was as far as the chain would allow—the confusion rose like a mist from the ground, enfolding him.

And the desolation.

His Father had abandoned him. In all the length and breadth of Raphael's existence that had never happened. He would have said with confidence that that couldn't happen. Without His presence an angel should go out like a light.

And perhaps that was what had happened.

He lay with his cheek on bare earth, all his muscles tightened as though to ward off a blow. His eyes closed against a vision of hatred, borne on a face which might have been his own. Why he was so hated he could not recall, nor did he remember how that hate had led to… to this. He shivered, despite the sultriness of the night, for he didn't want to remember.

He wanted to remember something good: something which would provide a comfort to him in his misery. He searched in his memory for His Father.

And found to his horror that without His Father's presence in his heart, he could not begin to imagine Him. He couldn't even call up a picture of His face, for all that came to him, unbidden and insistent,

was the image of a sparrow on a bare branch, its drab feathers fluffed and its black eyes closed against the wind.

Whenever he moved the iron collar chafed his neck. He also found his eyes were leaking. That was uncomfortable, for it made the ground muddy. He laced his hands under his cheekbone, to keep his face out of the mud.

But the damp earth released a dark, consoling sort of smell, and he was glad for it. He turned his attention to the little noises of the camp, where the women were whispering lazily before falling asleep.

The rule of midday had been reversed now; the chain which had spaced the slaves out at maximum distance to one another now tinkled in little heaps as six bodies huddled companionably under five blankets.

Raphael and his nursemaid had been removed from the communal length of chain and put onto a special little chain of their own. He didn't have a blanket, and didn't know he ought to have had one. The Berber had a blanket, but she also had a lot of clothing on her body, so she threw the blanket to Raphael.

It was a magnanimous gesture, but as he didn't know what to do with the blanket he let it lie in a heap, till she crawled back and reclaimed it.

He heard one of the slaves stagger out of the cluster to make water, squatting on the dirt with her skirts lifted. That was also how Djoura had taught him to do it, that evening. It seemed to him, even in his newborn clumsiness, that there might be easier ways to go about it.

But all his memories had been turned upside down. It seemed this human head could not contain them properly—not the important or meaningful memories. He could recall scattered images of his visits upon the earth: a black horse, a white dog. A young man with black hair and a white face.

He remembered singing.

Always Raphael had been fond of mortals. He thought them beautiful, even when only in the way a baby bird is beautiful—through its awesome ugliness. Some mortals, of course, were more beautiful than others.

Finally he had something to cling to. To build on. Raphael made a song about the baby-bird beauty of mortals. Turning on his side he began to sing into the night.