“‘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.
“I said get to your work!” Her voice was louder now.
“No,” I whispered.
“No?” she hissed.
“No.”
“What do you mean, you insolent black slut?” Her voice was a high, thin whine, such a cry as a cornered fox makes.
“No,” I said again, my own voice breaking. “I can’t do this. I know what it is to be raped. You can’t ask me to assist your rapist.”
She advanced on me, picking up the heavy lid of my box. I felt a wind whistle past my ear as she raised it. I did not even lift a hand to defend myself, but waited for the crack of it against my skull. She threw the lid, and it splintered against the stone floor. Then she picked up a jar of pigment and hurled that. The worm scarlet splattered against the tile and oozed down the wall. She was crazed, looking around for the next object to fling. I stood, and grasped her by the wrists. She was far taller than I was, and stronger, but as I touched her, she sagged against me. I bent for her haik and covered her. I folded my arms around her, and we fell together onto her divan and lay there, soaking the cushions with our grief.
From that morning, we spent our days and nights together, and I made many beautiful images of her. I made them for her, and for myself, for the pleasure of doing it. Oh, I made the emir a picture to take back with him to his failing siege, but it was not a picture of his wife. I painted a figure reclining so that the face was not recognizable; a lewd arrangement of thighs and breasts that were nothing like Nura’s. They say the fool was pleased with it.
Her voice, in the darkness. “You were crying out in your sleep.” She laid a long hand gently on my breast. “Your heart is pounding so.”
“I dreamed of my father—the vulture tearing at—No, I cannot speak of it….”
She held me close and sang to me softly in a low hum that recalled the soft voice of my mother.
Another night. I woke and turned to her. The moonlight glinted on her eyes, which were open, staring into the darkness. I touched her hand gently, and she turned to me. Her eyes caught the light. They were wet with unspilled tears. Slowly, she began to speak.
They had impaled her father on the iron gatepost of his home. They killed her mother in front of him as he writhed in his helpless agony. She had to listen to his screams of pain and grief as she hid with her sister and brother in a space under the floorboards of the house. Then they set the house on fire. She had run out, clutching her brother by the hand, and slipped in her mother’s blood. Her sister had kept running; her brother stayed to help her. She saw a knight snatch up her sister and drag her up onto his horse. What became of her, she was never able to discover.
She tried to run with her brother, but in her confusion they fled right into the path of a great war stallion. “I thought the hoofs would mash us to pieces,” she said. But the rider wheeled his mount. “I looked up and saw his eyes, peering down at me through the slits in his visor. He unhooked his mantle and threw it down to cover me.”
The other knights recognized that their lord had made his claim. When someone tried to drag away her brother, she had clung to the boy and pleaded with the emir to s
ave him.
“He granted me that, and in return, God forgive me, I feigned desire for him. To this day, he has no idea how my gorge rises and my inner parts shrivel when he comes near me. When he is inside me, all I can feel is the agony of my father, skewered like a beast….”
I placed my hand on her lips then. “No more,” I whispered. I stroked her skin as gently as I could. In the dark, I could not see my own dark hand, just the shadow of it as it passed across her pale flesh. I tried to make my touch as soft as a shadow. After a very long while, she reached for my hand and kissed it. “After he…after I lay with him, I never thought I would be able to take pleasure in another human’s touch,” she said. She turned, and raised herself on one elbow, gazing at me. I think it was at that moment that I let myself forget I was a slave. It was a mistake to do so; I recognize that now.
Within the month, rumors began to reach us from elsewhere in the palace of urgent meetings and bitter debates. The enemy had broken the emir’s siege and retaken control of the hill. Our forces had been pushed back to the surrounding plain, where they were scrambling to retain control of the main supply road. It was crucial that they not fall back any farther, especially at this time, for if they lost the road before the fruits of the harvest were brought in, it would be a hungry winter for the city.
The swollen rose hips were ripening around the high window, and the emira reclined on a divan beneath it as I painted her, trying to match the glow of the reddening fruits to the lights in her hair. Her face was serene, although still heavy with sadness. She fingered the pearl at her throat.
“Your craft, it makes you fortunate, I think. You at least will have something to offer to a conquerer, if the city should fall.”
I dropped my brush. It fell on the tile, smearing the pale glaze with a saffron slash.
“Do not look so astonished,” she chided me. “These walls are thick, but even the thickest walls can be breached by treachery.”
“Do you have reason to fear it?” I could barely speak.
She tossed her head and gave a small laugh. “Oh yes, I have reason. The emir’s son, Abu Abd Allah, comes and goes from the palace, his faction growing with his father’s waning fortunes.”
She was tall, as I have said, and could easily reach up to the high windowsill. She stood up then and grasped the spray of rose hips resting there. As she reached out, the roundness of her belly revealed itself. She, too, was ripening. But of this, she had not spoken. And so therefore neither had I. Was the child as repulsive to her as the act by which she had gotten it? Until I could fathom her feelings on the matter I thought it best to keep my peace.
She turned the rose hips in her hands. “I do not rely upon seeing these roses budding here again in the springtime,” she said. Her voice was neither sad nor frightened, simply matter-of-fact. But the expression on my face must have been dreadful, for she came to me then and folded me in her arms. “We cannot know the future, nor can we change it,” she whispered gently. “It is best to be realistic about such things. But we have the time we have been given. So let us treasure it while we can.”
And so I tried to do so. And there were hours, sometimes even days, when I pushed aside my fear. I had dreaded growing old in this palace. Now, that was all I hoped for.
The nights grew cold. I woke, shivering, at dawn. I was alone on the bed. She was kneeling by the window, praying in a language that was not Arabic. She had a small book in her hands.
“Nura?”
She twitched in surprise and motioned as if to hide the book. Her face as she turned to me was severe.
“Do not call me that!” Her tone was harsh, and I flinched. She softened. “It recalls to me the stink of the emir.”
“What name should I call you?”
“Before, I was Isabella. It is my Christian name.”
“Isabella…” I said, tasting the unfamiliar sounds on my tongue. I held out my arms. She came to me. I asked if I might see the book, having glimpsed a flash of color as she closed the pages. Together, we looked at it, a beautiful little volume, filled with luminous illustrations. The paintings were neither aiming to exactly copy nature nor were they an idealized, formal representation, but some interesting melding of the two. The saint or the angel in one picture might be indistinguishable from that in the next, but there would be details, such as a little dog, or a wooden table, or a sheaf of grain, that the artist had represented just as if from life.
“It is called a Book of Hours,” she said. “Just as you have prayers such as fajr at dawn and maghrib at sunset, and so on, Christians, too, have prayers for morning, which are called matins, and vespers, for evening, and others, so that the day may be marked by devotion.”
“This artist is very skilled,” I said. “Can you read the words?”
“No,” she said. “I cannot read Latin. But I know most of the prayers by heart, and the pictures help me in my devotions. The doctor brought me this book. It was very kind of him.”
“But the doctor…surely he is a Jew?”
“Yes, of course. Netanel ha-Levi is a devout Jew. But he respects all faiths, and people of all faiths seek his care. Otherwise how would he work for the emir? This book was given to him by the family of a Christian patient who had died.”
“But isn’t it dangerous, that he knows you pray to the Christians’ God?”
“I trust him,” she said. “He is the only one I really can trust. Except for you.”
The golden eyes looked into mine. Her hand touched me lightly on the side of my face. She smiled one of her rare, bright smiles. I turned my head against her shoulder, hoping to catch some of her warmth, while it lasted.
There were horsemen. They had breached the outer walls and now they trampled the myrtle court. Their hooves rang on the stone. There was the clang of metal, and shouting.
Her hand was cool on my hot shoulder. “You were crying out in your sleep,” she whispered. “Were you dreaming of your father again?”
“No,” I said. “Not this time.”
We lay silent for a while in the dark.
“I think I know what was in your dream,” she said at last. “I, too, am consumed by thoughts of it. The time for silence is past. We must make plans. I have been thinking about what would be best.”
“Allahu akbar,” I murmured. “‘What is, is. What will be, will be.’”
She turned to me then and took my hands in hers.
“No!” she said, her tone firm and urgent. “I cannot trust my life to God’s will as you do. I must make provision for my survival, and my brother’s, and that which I carry.” She placed a hand on her swollen belly. At last, she had acknowledged it. “I stand in need of protection. If it seems as if we will lose the city, Abu Abd Allah will have me killed, I am certain of it. He will use the chaos of battle to cover his deed. He does not want to see this child born.”
She rose, restless, and paced the chamber. “If it were not for Pedro…There was a convent near our house. The nuns there were very kind to me. I used to think how fortunate they were, those women, shut away together. Safe. Not married off in girlhood, facing childbed after childbed till fever or bleeding claimed them. I always wanted to join them.” Her lovely head drooped then. “I was going to be a bride of Christ, and instead—” She cradled her belly protectively. “I think the nuns would still take us, in spite of everything. We would be safe there; the sisters have the ear of the Castilian monarchs.”
I sat up and looked at her in disbelief. I could not bear to spend my life locked up in the prison of an infidel convent. How could she propose it?
“They would not let us be together. Not as we are now,” I said.
“No. I know that,” she said. “But we would see each other. And we would be alive.”
But what kind of life? Lying about a faith I did not profess. Forced to worship idols. Living without true prayer, without my art, without human touch. But all I said was, “Your brother could not come.”
“No,” she said. “Pedro
could not come.”
When the emir learned of his wife’s pregnancy, he sent the doctor directly to her. Even in Ifriqiya, I had heard of this man, Netanel ha-Levi. His healing skills were as renowned as his poetry, which he wrote in a most beautiful Arabic. I had not thought a Jew could master our poetry, the language of the Holy Koran. But it seemed that in al-Andalus, where Jews and Arabs worked side by side, such a thing was not unheard of. I had picked up some verses of his and scanned them with a skeptical eye, and at the end of it, that same eye brimmed with tears from the beauty of his words and the emotion he conveyed through them. Ha-Levi’s counsels to the court went well beyond medical matters, and Kebira said that if it were not for the doctor’s wisdom and his ability to sometimes temper the emir’s crueler impulses, our ruler might have slipped off his throne long since.
I was working on the last touches to a likeness of Pedro when the doctor came. The emira had asked me, of late, to give her a rest from posing. I thought it because she was uneasy at the change in her appearance as the child grew within her. To me, her rounder face, her heavy breasts were very beautiful. But she insisted that I give her a respite. One day, she swept the dates off the large polished silver serving dish and propped it up against the wall. She made me stand before it and stare at my reflection. “Make a portrait of yourself. I want you to see what it is like, this relentless business of being looked at.” She laughed. But she was serious, and kept at me, despite my hesitation. She disliked my first attempt. “You must look more kindly at yourself. Look with tenderness,” she said. “I want the portrait I would paint of you, had I your skills.” So I stared at my face and tried not to see the lines that had been etched there by loss and anxiety. I painted the girl I had been in Infriqiya, the protected, cherished daughter who had not known fear and exile, who had never been a slave. That portrait, she approved of. “I like this girl. I shall name her Muna al-Emira, the emira’s desire. What do you think?’’