“The flux?” said one physician, disbelieving. “We see that very often, and this seems not the flux.”
“It could be, sirs, that it is because my lord has a virulent case of it. In Egypt, I have heard, it is endemic and so is more benign than in these regions where there is little defense against it, and it is therefore overwhelming.” She clasped her hands together and lifted her face to the physicians imploringly. “I beg of you, lords, to let me treat Al Taliph, for the flux is not rare in the region where we live, among slaves and the poor. It is rare only among the rich and the comfortable. Let me treat him! He is almost in extremity. It can do no harm.”
Al Taliph’s hot hand lifted feebly to her throat then her cheek, as if both touched and rebuking. Again she gripped his hand and held it tightly. “What have you been giving him, lords, in treatment?”
“Purges,” said the younger physician. “And herbal wine.”
“O gods!” Aspasia murmured, and shuddered. Then she said, “I have your permission to order his treatment?”
They glanced at each other again, smiling, shrugging. “Love,” said the younger, kindly, “can often accomplish what the most skilled physicians cannot. His case is desperate. Your care can do no harm.”
“Aspasia,” said Al Taliph in a very weak voice. But she looked at him fiercely. “You are in my hands!” she cried. “You shall obey me, or die!”
Intense astonishment touched his sunken face, and he said nothing.
Aspasia beckoned to the huddled slaves near the wall. “Open the windows, lest my lord stifle, and fan him gently. Fetch me cool water with Syrian whiskey, a full goblet of it, in the water, and soft cloths. Bring at once a large goblet of goat’s milk, with three spoons of honey in it and a half spoon of salt. Order, from the kitchen, the boiled juice of beef in quantity. This, heated, must be given him every half hour, the milk and honey and salt every two hours. Hasten!”
The slaves remembered that this alien woman was a sorceress, and hurried to follow her commands, making the sign against the evil eye. The physicians said, ‘That is not the treatment for the flux, Lady. We give but boiled goat’s milk and rice.”
“I have said that in your country the flux is not so vehement, and is easily cured by rest and care. O gods! From what house did my lord contract this?”
She looked at Al Taliph with the eyes of a mother reproaching a child. “Lord, if you had but remained in this inn you should never have sickened!”
He tried to laugh but it was a feeble thing. She nestled her hand against his cheek and he kissed the palm. “You must help me,” she said. “You must not contradict my orders. You must struggle to retain what is fed to you. Thank the gods it is not cholera.”
He looked at his eminent physicians with the old satiric glint on his face but to his amazement the physicians nodded. “We leave you, lord, in the most competent of hands,” the older one said. “We shall see you at evening.”
They hesitated. Then they each formally lifted Aspasia’s free hand and kissed it deferentially. Al Taliph was more amazed. Aspasia acknowledged the accolade with a dignified inclination of her head, and an inner gratitude that she was not dealing with Aryan physicians who would have dismissed her like an impudent slave. They left her in a stately fashion, and she smiled at Al Taliph with tears in her eyes, and his fingers suddenly entwined themselves in the pale gilt of her hair, and she turned her head and kissed them.
The slaves brought the cool water and the strong whiskey in it, and Aspasia bathed Al Taliph with the mixture. She made him drink of the honey and milk and salt, then stared at him threateningly when he made a gagging sound. “You will only have to drink it again,” she said, and he made a wry face. Within an hour she forced him to drink the pungent beef broth. While waiting she sat beside him on the floor and watched his face constantly and pressed her fingers against his wrist and his throat. The feverish pulse began to subside. Long before evening he slept in exhaustion.
At evening the physicians returned and examined their patient. Then they said to Aspasia, “Lady, you have brought your lord back from the gates of death, and we do not know if it is your solicitude or your treatment.”
She never left him for many days, except to bathe and to partake of food for herself. She would not let a slave approach him without first washing hands and face with lye soap and water and wine. She watched his excretions. She fed him with her own hands, sternly admonishing him when he complained. She bathed him several times a day with the whiskey and water and his fever fell each time.
“Once,” she said to him, “you remarked that I was a veritable child. But women become mature humans and leave their childhoods behind them. However, this is not true of men, particularly when they are ill. They are the most petulant and intransigent of children.”
His strength was so returning that he could say almost with his former power of voice, “That is a woman’s illusion.”
“What we see in men is also an illusion, the most fatal of all,” she replied. “If Hera and Artemis and Demeter and Athene Parthenos did not guard us women, and comfort and guide us, mankind would have long disappeared from this earth.”
“Would that have been so terrible?” he asked her, teasingly.
“Not at all,” she said and they laughed together. Never had they been so tender, so dearly as one, not even in passion. But the resolution was gaining in Aspasia’s mind. Her lips were taking on a new firmness. I am young no longer, she would remind herself. I am now nineteen years of age, and I must take up my life lest it be too late. The infirmities of age come quickly to women. Then her heart would become weak and heavy and she would weep when she was alone.
She said to him lightly on one gold and crimson evening, when he sat up in his bed to eat the food she had prepared for him, “I will return you in good health to your wives and your women, and for that they should be grateful.”
He paused and looked at her intently. “You do not speak of yourself, my dearest one.”
She looked at the windows where the sun lay redly in a lake of emerald, and she said, “I hear far winds and they echo in my soul.”
He fondled her intimately, not understanding, and she smiled through her tears then fed him again. He could not have enough of her ministrations and when she slept on her cushions beside him he would rise on his elbow and look down on her pale face.
It came to him that she was no longer young but that she was more precious to him than life itself, and all other women were as naught. He could not speak of this to her. She would not comprehend, being a woman. She sighed in her sleep and he wondered why she sighed. “Far winds?” That was ambiguous but women were full of fancies and they meant nothing. He touched her hair and slept also, content.
CHAPTER 19
There was a great garden in the city, filled with birds and monkeys and fountains and many strange animals. The cholera had subsided and the city teemed again with noise and bazaars and caravans and music and shops and laughter, and bells, and the temples were crowded with those who gave thanksgiving that the plague had gone. Even those who sorrowed for the dead felt the quickening of the year, for the almond blossoms were blooming and the myrtle trees and the sycamores wore enameled green leaves. The olive trees were shining with new silver and the fruit trees were clouds of pink and white snow against a sky resembling an opal. Even the grumbling camels moved faster and the horses pranced.
Al Taliph and Aspasia sat side by side on a marble bench in this vast garden, watching the changeful colors of the fountains as they threw up their transparent arms in the sun. The armed eunuchs stood about them, and Aspasia’s attending women. Their litter waited, its carved golden roof shining in the light. Aspasia was at once sad, weary, and hopeful. Al Taliph held her hand in his under the shelter of her crimson cloak, and her eyes, above the veil, smiled upon him. He was still weak and sometimes he had fits of shivering in the night, but it was obvious that he would soon be well. His gauntness was decreasing.
“In four
weeks I shall be able to travel with my caravan,” he said. “We shall return home.”
She did not answer. She had averted her eyes. “You will not be sorry to leave Damascus?” he asked.
She shook her head. A scarlet bird alighted near them, avid-eyed, then lifted its wings in the sun and was gone.
“I owe my life to you, beloved,” he said. “Had it not been for you I should now have been gathered to my fathers.”
She still did not speak, for there was a sudden drawing of unendurable pain in her throat. Then she said, “But have you not told me that all is ordained? If it had been fated for you to die you would have died, lord, and no ministrations of mine could have delayed you.”
His laugh was almost as strong as before his illness. “I am not superstitious, nor do I believe in your Fates. I have told you, my rose of the valley, that nothing is fated and all that concerns man is an accident, for it is not possible that Deity is aware of our insignificance in the vastness of His domains.”
Returning health made him feel like a youth again. Last night Aspasia had slept in his arms once more, surfeited, and he had held her so for a long time as men hold their life’s treasure. No, she was not young, though still beautiful; he no longer thought of her beauty, remembering her ministrations and her devotion to him, and her tireless care. He thought of the hours when she had sat beside him, reading to him, anxiously watching every change of his expression. No task had been too repulsive for her, no aspect of his illness sickening or revolting. As a mother would have tended him so she had tended him, through nights of suffering and convulsive spasms in his belly, and though often he would urge her to rest she would only palely smile, and each day she had grown thinner and her eyes had enlarged in her translucent face. He never awoke but what she was there, bending over him. Sometimes she dozed in exhaustion, but her hand held his. His slightest movement had aroused her to full alertness, as a watchman is alerted at the most distant stir. She would permit no slave to attend him.
He said, remembering, and was greatly moved, “Tomorrow, my beloved, I will take you to my jeweler and anything he possesses is yours. It is a poor sign of gratitude for my life, but it is the only recompense I can make.”
She bowed her head and said to herself, Alas, is that all?
Then she said, “Lord, I want no more jewels, for I have much from your generosity.”
“How, then, can I repay you, Aspasia?”
A cool sweat broke out over her body. She must speak now or never have the courage to speak again. She lifted eyes clouded with tears to him and from behind her veil she whispered, “Lord, let me go, in peace, with your blessing.”
He was astounded. He turned so that he could more fully look down into her eyes. “Go, Aspasia? Where would you go, and why?” He could not believe it.
“I wish to return to my old home in Miletus for a space, and then go to Athens to open a school for young women who desire to be more than a mere bauble for men, and who wish to live as surely the gods intended a woman to live, for does not Athene labor endlessly, and Artemis, and does not Demeter attend the land, and is not Hera queen of Olympus and ever dutiful? The goddesses are potent in their sex. It was surely intended for earthly women to be important also, in their lives.”
Al Taliph was still incredulous, but a pallor ran over his dark face like a shadow of a white wing.
“You desire to leave me?” he asked.
“Lord, I must.” Now her tears ran over the edge of her veil, but her eyes were full upon him and straight.
There was a sick tightness in his chest, as if he had been wounded to the death. His hand left hers. He stared before him and she shut her eyes lest she weaken and implore him not to grant her wish.
He said, “How have I offended you, Aspasia, that you wish to desert me and leave me forever?”
Ah, she thought, if you had but loved me, even a little, I should not flee from you, core of my heart. But men cannot love to the measure of our hope, and that is their nature. Even if they love, the love is evanescent, and a new woman is a consolation and a forgetting. I do not reproach you, my darling; I reproach my own folly in that I have hoped when hope was impossible. I had forgotten what I had learned in the house of Thargelia and that was my grievous error. I am a woman.
Because she had not spoken he continued: “Then you tended me not out of love but as a slave would attend a master, a dedicated slave thinking of duty?”
She said in a low voice, “I have remembered our years together, and our affection and our joys, and you are a man of worth, lord, and must be preserved.”
“For what, for whom?” he asked with bitterness.
“You have wives and sons. Are they nothing to you, sire?”
He thought of three of his sons, now young men, of whom he was proud, and who had fortunate futures and who loved him. Though fathers did not cherish their daughters there were two whose beauty and gentleness were dear to him.
Aspasia said, “Return to your family and their love for you. You are still their lord and their protection. Is that not enough?”
He did not speak. His eyes changed with his thoughts and with his rebellious passions. Then he said, “Is not what I have given you of any value, Aspasia?”
“Lord, it is of inestimable value. I will never forget you. But I must go.
He lifted her veil to look at her face and he saw there the marble resolution and did not see how her lower lip trembled. “It is regrettable that you are learned, Aspasia,” he said in a hard voice. “Learning is not for women, for it makes of them not what nature intended.”
“To be learned one must also be intelligent, lord,” and she was deeply offended. “Is the intelligence of women to be wasted?”
“It is the nature of women to love and nurture and serve. The market place is not for them, nor commerce, nor the affairs of the world.”
“But you have not answered my question, lord.”
“There is no answer to absurdities.” He paused, and felt ill again and undone. “Is there naught I can do to persuade you to remain with me?”
Yes, she answered in herself. You can tell me that you love me—which would be a lie—and swear to me that above all things I am eternally dear to you. She said, almost inaudibly, “There is nothing which is in your power, lord, that can persuade me, for what I desire you cannot give me. It is true that you can take back your jewels and set me defenseless on the streets, as once you threatened. How I shall live then I do not know. So, I beg you to let me keep them and to set me free.”
“You believe I am cruel and ungrateful?”
O gods, she cried inwardly, is gratitude all you know, my beloved? A heavy faintness came to her. “I ask for no gratitude, which is a poor and reluctant and resented thing. I did what I had to do. Let us not speak of it again. There is of a certainty one thing you can still give me: peace.”
“You have known no peace with me?”
She put her hand to her throat where the pain was enormous. “No,” she said.
He was silent. The pallor increased on his face, but when she touched him in alarm he flung off her hand, and she shrank.
“Peace is for the dead,” he said. “Are you foolish enough to believe it is attainable for the living? Surely Thargelia taught you better!”
“We are, as usual, conversing, but we do not mean the same thing,” she pleaded. “The peace I desire is not the peace you would understand.”
He motioned to the litter-bearers. He said, “I only understand that you wish to leave me. I owe you much, Aspasia. I owe you several years of pleasure and conversation and the contemplation of your beauty. You have been my companion in my empty hours and have filled them with contentment and delight. No other woman has been to me what you have been, and I, too, will never forget.”
“The world is full of complaisant women,” she said, out of her pain. “I will not be hard to replace.”
This wounded him more than anything else and he made an abrupt gesture. “I have
a caravan leaving tomorrow. Do you wish to be part of it?”
Tomorrow! Then there would be no last parting, no last embraces. It was well, but it was also agonizing. “Yes,” she said.
“I have servants who will then take you to where you desire to go. I trust that pleases you, Aspasia.” He spoke dully and without emotion. “As for the jewels, they, too, are in gratitude, and I will also send to you a purse of gold coins.” He paused and smiled at her somberly. “Go in peace, Aspasia, if that is what you desire above all else.”
I do not desire that, beloved, she thought. But it is all that remains for me in this accursed world. It is a barren desire, the desire of the dying or the hopeless. But it is all I have.
They returned to the inn in a silence too sorrowful for words. That night he sent to her a large purse rich with gold coins—but no final word, no entreaty, no avowal. Her women gathered her possessions together and put them in her chests, gloating and smirking when she could not see them. They whispered to each other, “The foreign woman has been dismissed, and contentment will come to the lord’s house again. She has the evil eye. We will all rejoice in the harem when she is absent.”
The caravan departed, with Aspasia’s tent. There was no last farewell from Al Taliph, no sign of his solicitude. Aspasia thought, He has already forgot me. She lay on her cushions in the tent and when the caravan began to move she rose and moved aside the flap on the tent and stood in the doorway. Al Taliph was not there. The gates of the inn closed after the caravan, and it started on its long journey. Had Al Taliph appeared she would have run to him and would have implored him not to let her go.
Unfortunate are we, she thought with crushing despair, when the gods grant our prayers! She lay on the cushions again and covered her face with a length of silk and gave herself up to torment and to suffering she had never experienced before. She was like a shell cast up on the seashore, bereft of the vital creature which had inhabited it. She was empty except for the dolorous woe that blew through the shell of herself and whispered of desolation, of the breaking of a heart, and the ending of life and immortal loneliness. She shed no tears. The dead do not weep for themselves. They can only remember.