His moment of panic came during the actual ceremony, if ceremony it could be called, in the private Majlis of the Governor’s Palace. Nobody present but the witnesses (two Medinan sheikhs), a couple of the bridegroom’s fellow officers, Tussun, young Medhet with a late rose tucked into his turban scarf as though he and not Thomas were the groom, Thomas himself and the imam, a small man with a face like a little red-eyed Highland bull under the longest turban Thomas had ever seen. A fretted window opening high in the wall made him wonder if Anoud was there. He remembered that sometimes the bride herself or her kinsfolk arranged for her to be close by and hear the ceremony, sometimes not; it was no business of the bride-groom’s. But present or not, when the few words before witnesses were spoken, they would be bound together.
The imam was speaking to him now … “Ibrahim Agha, is it your wish that you take as your wife, the woman Anoud bin Aziz ibn Rashid?”
A Muslim wedding was not such a great matter after all, he told himself; he could denounce the girl as easily as he could marry her, so long as he paid the proper price and did her no dishonour. He could take other wives — it was a thing that need scarcely change his way of life at all … But nevertheless, because Anoud had no male kin to take her back into their home, and because he had been bred among people whose view of marriage was different, he knew that once the words before witnesses were spoken, he would be bound to her as surely as though she had been standing beside him and the words spoken by a minister of the Presbyterian kirk, and their names written down afterwards in the parish register of births, marriages and deaths.
“Until death us do part …”
“It is my wish,” he said.
The imam turned to Tussun, who had taken it upon himself, as Thomas’s commander, to play her father’s part.
“Tussun Pasha, commander of all the Sultan’s forces in Medina, is it your wish that you give the woman Anoud as wife to Ibrahim Agha who stands before you?”
“It is my wish,” Tussun said.
“Then be it according to the wishes of both of you.” And that was all.
Thomas wondered if it was only imagination that he heard a faint sigh from behind the window fret, and remembered the torch-lit garden-court of the house in the Fatamid quarter on the evening of Tussun’s wedding, but he hurriedly brushed the memory aside.
24
The heat of the day had faded to a thick coolness like milk, and the scent of the late jasmine and the pale spikes of the henna flowers in the half dead wilderness of the women’s garden hung heavy on the air, mingled with the resiny smoke of torches, as Thomas’s friends — a larger company than had been present at the ceremony — saw him on his way to the harem on his wedding night.
Most of them had partaken freely of arak, and grown lewd and happy, but Thomas himself, sticking firmly as ever to the injunction of the Prophet, must go to his night of nights stone-cold sober on coffee and rose sherbet, which he had always found abominably sweet. He wished that Colonel D’Esurier could have been there, and Zeid; Zeid above all … He was inclined to think that he had made a quixotic fool of himself, and to wish that the whole thing was not happening.
Yet had not the Prophet himself married the widows of his companions who had died of battle, to give them the shelter of his mantle? But those had been marriages in name only … Tussun’s arm was across his shoulder, and Tussun’s voice, laughing and a little thickened with arak, proclaiming in his ear, “This is the night of all the splendours! Go to it, old desert falcon, it is time you were begetting sons!”
They brought him to the door of the women’s house and thrust him in with friendly thumps on the back and much good advice. The door shut behind him. He heard their voices and laughter outside, but knew that, though Tussun and Medhet would make the gesture of guarding the door for a while, there would be no attempt to follow him.
He was alone, the empty stair before him lit by a torch in the angle of the wall. Somewhere close by he sensed movement and lighter laughter, but there was no movement to be seen.
He began to climb.
The stairs ended in a wide entrance chamber from which arched doorways led away on three sides to inner chambers and little screened balconies. At the far side, a door stood ajar, letting out a slender shaft of lamplight to mingle with the milky pallor of the rising moon that pooled the empty floor. The sense of life nearby, breath caught, eyes watching, was stronger here. Kadija would not be far off, he thought, and with her the other women she would have brought in to help make ready the bride. He crossed to the door and pushed it open, shutting it firmly again behind him, and turned to his left, where a curtain, not quite drawn, let out a stronger lamplight to meet him.
He had chosen the group of rooms with care, largely because they contained this particular one, and was not surprised that Anoud had taken it for her private chamber. The beautiful blue and white hyacinth tiles that lined the wall niches, the delicate star-and-lozenge fret of the window traceries, had both escaped the destructive fervour of the puritanical Wahabis and were almost unbroken; the whole chamber was faded, weather stained, the ceiling blackened with lamp-switch, but it had been a beautiful room and still retained the ghost of its beauty as dried flowers will sometimes retain the ghost of their living scent.
The lamp that he had found for it burned on a low sandalwood table, and by its light he saw Anoud sitting among the piled cushions of the divan, beneath the window whose shutters were set wide to catch the soft night air from the garden. She was waiting for him, pressed stiffly back to the wall behind her with an air of being pinioned against it.
“The blessing of Allah the All Compassionate be upon the night,” Thomas said, and crossed the room and sat down on the divan beside her. Her gaze, that had seemed to be waiting for him at the door, tracked him across the room. She moved a little, making room for him. But nothing more. Was it going to be all for him to do?
He had been instructed by Tussun and others, that he must strip off her clothes, and that she would probably resist him; that it was the right, almost the duty of a well-brought-up girl to resist him as strongly as she pleased (he remembered the claw marks down the sides of Tussun’s face when he returned to his friends after his own marriage night); but that equally it was his right and his duty to fight down her resistance. She would expect it of him.
Only he could not make himself believe that this remote girl sitting tensed against the wall beside him, was expecting — at least in the sense that Tussun meant it — any such thing. And he could not think how to begin. A kiss with his arm round her would have seemed the obvious way; but he had also been warned by Tussun that the one thing he must not attempt to remove without her consent was her yashmak, that some women, otherwise stripped naked, went through their whole wedding night with their faces still veiled. And she seemed much too withheld and anonymous inside all those loose garments for him to even consider putting his arms round her. Yet instinctively he knew that physical contact, the communication of touch, older than any spoken language, was the thing they both needed at this outset.
Except for her eyes, her hands folded together in her rose-crimson lap were the only part of her that was accessible. He reached out and took them between his, feeling that they were cold. She tried to draw the wounded left one away. He did not let it go.
“No,” he said, “don’t do that.”
“It is ugly.”
Thomas turned it to the light of the lamp and examined it quietly. The wounds had healed well and cleanly, save for one place where the little finger should have been, which was puckered and slightly crusted. The scars were still purplish, but eventually they would fade. Holding her hands, he noticed them properly for the first time. They were slim and hard, almost like a boy’s. “It is not ugly,” he said seriously. “Those are honourable scars, don’t hide them as though they were something to be ashamed of.”
He looked up and met her gaze, and for the instant a trace of a smile hovered between them. His hands moved a littl
e further, up under her loose sleeves. The palms of her hands were traced with delicate bridal patterns of red-brown henna; the scent of spikenard and lemon-grass came to him from within the gold-worked breast folds of her thobe. When he turned to the business of unfastening her belt — the belt with the gold cords and drops of turquoise and coral — one hand moved for a moment to check him, then fell away to lie palm open on the cushion beside her. Whatever her rights, it seemed that she was not going to exercise them. Had she perhaps been told that coming of an alien people he would not understand them? Or did she feel her life to be already his in some way that stripped those rights from her? Quietly and methodically, with careful concentration, he set about undressing her, while she slipped down further into the cushions and made no attempt to withstand him. The Lady Nayli had not been in the least like this … He shied away from the memory that had remained for so long an evil taste in the back of his mind; striving quickly for a happier one to drive it out; but Jenny Cochrane laughing in the sun-warmed grass had not been like this either; nor had the Pleasure Pavilion girls of his acquaintance. Certainly it had been a mistake to have rigidly obeyed the Prophet and come to his wedding night quite so stone-cold sober. Maybe if he had had just one cup of arak it would have been better for Anoud too. He glanced at her apologetically, and found that while he had been concentrating on other matters, she had taken off her yashmak.
She lay completely naked to his gaze now among the bright embroidered cushions, and looked up at him, gravely waiting, while he knelt over her, looking down. It seemed to be the first time that he had seen her face, for the one other time, the first time of all, it had been not so much a living face as a white mask of shock. Now the mask was gone, and he was looking at Anoud herself. She was no beauty, her nose was too long and her jaw too sharply angled for a woman; but her mouth, the colour of watered wine, was wide and mobile with great sweetness in it. He liked her mouth. Her body was too thin for Arab tastes, and he was surprised to see how pale it was in the lamplight, silky pale as a freshly peeled almond save for the faint flush remaining where the hair had been plucked from under the arms and the woman-parts at the base of her belly and between her thighs. He had heard that women suffered that torture before their marriage night, the hair stripped off with plasters of melted sugar and lemon juice by the older women, and his own flesh cringed a little in sheer physical sympathy. Kadija had done her work well, not a hair remained, but the lips of the girl’s vulva were still sore.
He pulled off his turban and began to unbind his waist-shawl.
In a little he was as naked as she in the lamplight, his own scars exposed in exchange for hers. He lay down beside her, one arm across her body, and reached to quench the light. For an instant the darkness was opaque and webbed with violet clouds before his eyes, then his sight cleared to receive the cool wash of moonlight through the window fret, a delicate arabesque of light and shadow, stars and lozenges across Anoud’s body. He felt her tense without moving, and said, “Do not be afraid. We have all night before us, and I will not do anything until you tell me that I may. I will not do anything all night, if you do not want me to.”
“If you do not do anything all night,” Anoud said in a small dry voice, “do you know what the women will say when they come to look for the signs and find none? They will say I do not please you; or that I have been wanton, and you found no barrier to your spear where you should have found it.”
But Thomas could feel the fear still cold in her, and did not know what to do about it, being unversed in how to deal with that particular situation. Horses were another matter, horses he understood … He fell back on the familiar, and instinctively began to calm and reassure her much as he would have calmed and reassured Lulwa his favourite mare, with hand and voice, drawing his hands lightly, caressingly, over shoulders and arms and flanks, talking to her softly; the words did not matter, only the voice, and he scarcely realised that he had drifted into telling about the hills of his boyhood, the Lowland Scots words slipping in and out amongst the Arabic unnoticed. “You would like the hills around Broomrigg. Green, they are, and bonnie in the spring; and the curlews at their mating up on the high moors; and the hawthorn scenting …” And never even thought how he had spoken much the same words to the Lady Nayli, because that time they had been for his own sake, and this time they were for the girl’s, and therein lay all the difference in the world.
Under his hands and against his body he felt the fear sinking away and a faint warmth waking. He could see her face in the patterned moonlight, turned up to his from among the strong dark mane of hair, the lips parted, a questioning line between her brows. “I do not understand,” she said, “but the sound is sweet.”
Without knowing that he was going to do it, Thomas bent his head and kissed her, tonguing her lips apart. She made to twist her head aside, brought up her hands as though to thrust him off, then surprisingly, linked them together at the back of his neck, and relaxed, her mouth growing soft under his though she did not yet know how to kiss.
He had all but given up words, and betaken himself to small crooning sounds; his hands had changed their purpose, and were playing with her, their caresses straying nearer and nearer to the secret places, seeking to rouse delight in her to match the faint unexpected shimmering of delight that was waking in his own loins, the sense of urgency between his thighs. “Come, bonnie love, come — come —”
He felt her stir, her breathing quickening as she pressed towards him. He felt the first tentative movement grow and blossom as she parted her thighs to let him in.
*
Later, much later, with the moon already sinking, he left her, pulling the heavy folds of his burnous over her that she might not grow cold while he was away, and went down the stair and out by the side door into the garden-court.
The water in the half empty pool that was greenish and scummy in the daylight, was bright now under the sharp-edged black shadows of the vine leaves, and shattered into fountaining quicksilver as he plunged in. He ducked his head under, and came up blowing, obedient to the Prophet’s law that after lovemaking every part of the body from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet must be cleansed by ritual bathing. The coldness of the water made him catch his breath. He was sharply aware of the night about him; the faint white stars of the jasmine flowers, the swooping and swerving flitter of bats overhead, feeling himself one with them as though he had one less skin than usual between himself and the world, the worlds, outside his own being, aware of the water-like trickles of white fire on his body as he climbed out, the shapes and sounds and scents of the night, the full ripe face of the tide-pulling moon. He had never felt quite like this before, never been so piercingly aware, even in that long-past hour in the desert that had turned him to Islam, of the one-ness of all things in the hand of God.
He wrung the water out of his hair, and went in again through the side door. Back in the chamber with the hyacinth tiles, he felt for and found the rough cotton towel that lay ready, and rubbed himself down. The moon had changed position and no longer came in through the window fret, and the chamber was very dark; only the quiet even breathing told him that Anoud was there and asleep.
Soon the voice of the muezzin would float out over Medina in the day’s first call to prayer. Soon it would be time to give her the piper’s plaid brooch that was his morning gift to her.
But not just yet; there was still a little of the night left. He was still cold from the cistern under the moon. He slipped in under the burnous with a sense of homecoming, and lay down against her to get warm between her breasts. She roused a little without waking, and put her arms round him. It was not that he had forgotten the Lady Nayli, but he was free of her, for she had lost all power to cast ugly shadows in the back of his mind. A lovely contentment welled in him, like the clear-skied quiet after storm. He had received his own morning gift.
*
Two days later, leaving a strong garrison under Din Agha to hold Medina, Tussun and Thomas l
eft the Holy City, the one for Jiddah, the other, with his picked four hundred, for Mecca; both at the outset following the same way, the ancient Pilgrim Road that linked the two sacred cities of the Prophet.
A mile or so out of Medina where the track entered the hills, at the place where Ahmed Agha had raised his cairn of heads — now taken down and buried — Thomas wheeled his horse aside from the dust-raising column, and climbing a low outcrop of rock, sat for a few moments looking back the way they had come. The morning light was already beginning to quiver, so that the distant walls among the green of palms and fig gardens might almost have been a mirage that would dissolve away as he looked at them. He knew this was the last view he would have of Medina until he came riding back, whenever that might be, and he felt for the first time the tugging ache of the man who no longer rides free, but has given hostages to fortune and must leave part of himself behind him every time he rides away. Would all be well with her until he came again? He had left money, enough to last until presently he could send more. He had put her in the care of the new Governor.