It seemed a kind of miracle, not only that the plants survived the siege, but that they could bloom at all within the dry shell of the city.
‘It’s beautiful!’ I hadn’t known until I walked into that leafy court how much I needed, or had missed, the sight of greenery and flowers.
The woman inclined her head. ‘Al-Jannah, same word for paradise and garden,’ she said softly.
On one side of a second doorway, a wooden ladder led to a flat roof. On the other, a brick oven sent a thin plume of smoke into the sky. I heard a man’s voice beyond the garden wall, a baby crying further off – then nothing but the steady shrilling of cicadas from the shadows.
The woman stooped to light a taper from the oven, then stepping through the door, transferred the flame to a brass oil lamp in an inner chamber.
‘For ahlan,’ she told us, ‘for welcome to house.’ The invitation was a bridge for me to cross. Limping after her, I felt a hopeful, fishlike movement in my breeches.
John was behind me in one sense, ahead of me in quite another. The shepherd back at Haddertun had trained two dogs to work the flock – the old dog barked, the young one worked in silence. But when the old dog died, the other naturally took on the task of barking at the sheep. Like Jos and John. Because it now seemed that John Hideman understood what was required, before I even thought to ask.
‘Mebbe I’ll set here on the steps a piece,’ he said, and took care to avoid my eye. ‘Then in a while I’ll take the time to slice some mutton for the grill. If the lady don’t object?’
Inside the further chamber, the woman had already reached a curtain stencilled with an interlaced design. She lifted it to show a jackdaw’s nest of rugs and cushions flecked with sunlight from a lattice in the wall – and in the centre of the nest, a chick. In fact a little girl of five or six with snaggled hair, smooth olive skin and her mother’s fine black eyes.
The woman set down the jar and cloth and knelt to whisper something to the child in their own tongue, then hoisted her onto her hip. ‘I take her to thy man,’ she said. ‘He is kind, yes?’ More a statement than a question.
The little girl peered round her shoulder at me, while she was borne out through the door and down to where John Hideman, whistling softly, sat on the steps above the sunken pool. Leaving me to wonder how the woman came to understand so much about us in so brief a time. I heard the murmur of their voices, saw her set down the girl and dip her bowl into the pool. Saw John pull off his silver ring to spin it for the child’s amusement.
‘He has small brothers of his own at home. She will be safe,’ I told her mother later as she unlaced my boot.
‘He tells me, yes. He hath the way, Alia understand.’
She already had my stinking, cheesy foot in both her hands, and raised the toes until I winced with pain.
‘Need time to mend, but we do this.’ She washed and dried it carefully, anointing it with scented ointment from her jar. A gift of service which appeared to please her near as much as it pleased me. Indeed, by then the heavy perfume of the balm, the dextrous movement of her fingers and the dark fall of her hair tickling my shin, had all combined to make an obvious point. Or rather raise one in an obvious place. I gulped, and more than once.
She only had to look to see how things were standing, and I needed her to look! One part of me at least was more than ready, knew exactly what to do. The rest, hampered by some misplaced sense of courtesy, was still unsure.
But in the end a peal of childish laughter from the garden was all we needed to decide us. The woman met my eyes across the pulsing pole-tent in my breeches and gravely nodded her acceptance. And then, almost before I knew what she was doing, moved on from offering one comfort to attending to another, setting down my foot to stand and drop her cloak, unlace a colourfully broidered bodice, step out of slippers and full Turkish trousers and finally throw off a cotton shift. To shock me again, at least as much by her directness as by the woman’s form that she revealed.
I don’t know if she trembled, or if it was just me.
I stared at her thin body, meshed with sunlight from the latticed window and glossed with perspiration. There were hollows either side of her thin neck, and all her ribs were visible. Gaunt bones. But living flesh. And I could see, or thought that I could see, in her broad hips and softly drooping breasts something abundant that the siege had stolen from her. She had a little sun or star, a nimbus of blue rays tattooed beneath one collar bone. I looked at it, and wondered if the roughness of my hands would scratch her naked skin.
She stood for a long moment fingering a lock of her black hair then sank onto her knees. ‘Thy wish, Seigneur,’ she asked me quietly. ‘Yes?’
But what I mainly understood was her consent. Which meant, I told myself ungallantly, that no one afterwards could say it was a rape.
Taut as a bowstring, you might say that I couldn’t move – if what I had in mind had not involved a good deal of quite violent movement. I felt my joints, my fingertips, the sweat between my thighs, the hair rise on my forearms, my tongue against my teeth. I tasted the sweet taste of my own saliva – to find that I was dribbling. (I wasn’t gaping like a fish. I wouldn’t say that I was slobbering exactly – I wasn’t drooling! It’s only that my mouth was open, and I’d forgotten how to swallow.)
Remembering eventually, I closed it – gave my chin a furtive wipe and nodded silently in answer to her question.
The woman murmured something else, a plea containing her god’s name. A thing that I remembered later, but barely noticed at the time. In a strange, fatalistic gesture she drew her coppery fingers down her face, then closed her eyes and fell back suddenly onto the cushions at my side.
Her brass anklets made a soft, metallic sound. The soles of both her feet were painted red. Deliberately she raised her knees and parted them. A frame within a frame. Another door into another universe. A coarser thing than an enchantment; the vixen-scented gate of life itself!
For once I knew that there was nothing that I could or should be saying – although I may have gasped a bit. I had the ailment, she the remedy. My need and her acceptance spoke directly to each other. That’s all there was to know.
With my heart beating like a kettledrum. Panting at one end, dribbling at the other, I made a brutish noise midway between a growl and moan, and fumbled with the buckle of my belt. It felt as if someone had thrust a burning iron through me from arse to tip, which must inflame and thrust through her in turn.
She was all women. She was Eve, and I was Adam gobbling great mouthfuls of the fruit of knowledge… dripping juice!
If death itself awaited me I could not have desisted.
I was the lance and she the quintain.
I was the bull, she was the gate.
CHAPTER TWO
The woman’s voice again beside the pool instructing me to see each day as a new page in the story of my life.
I want to loiter in the green bower of her enchanted garden, in that golden city at the far end of the world – lie naked in her curtained chamber. Or loosely clad upon its roof. Extend each day. Prolong each night. Halt time itself!
Considering where this is taking me, I’m loathe to turn the page and see the next illumination. Because that’s what I do. I dodge unpleasant truths. It’s what I’ve always done but can no longer get away with.
Her name, she said – the name her father gave her – was Khadija,
in honour of the Holy Prophet’s first, most favoured wife. She was the widow of a Syrian merchant, who’d brought her and the child to French-speaking Acre before its Moslem occupation, and lost his life during the siege. She had no maids to help her, and until the city fell had kept house for the merchant’s brother, now a prisoner in Tyre.
All this she told us that first afternoon while we sat on her chamber floor, the four of us, on rugs set round the cloth she spread for our repast. Me with my injured foot stuck out before me. John with the wide-eyed child Alia close beside him marking every movement of his sunburned hands. We ate the skewered mutton he’d cooked in the brick oven by the door. We washed our greasy fingers in a bowl of scented water and dried them on the towel Khadija held for each of us in turn. And all the while I watched the spidery lamp-cast shadows of her lashes on her cheeks, impatient for a chance to catch her eye, to show her what I wanted, and how badly.
But of course she knew. The downcast eyelashes, the flushed cheeks, a certain kind of heaviness in all her movements, an odour I could not mistake, convinced me that she knew.
I cleared my throat and shifted my position on the rug, raising the knee of my good leg to hide the signs of my conviction from the others. A man with an erection…
What drives the body of a man? What drives the sun across the sky?
It took a little while to settle her child to sleep behind the curtain, and by then Khadija had produced more bedding from a stack of mattresses and cushions in a recess of the chamber wall. John took his bed out into the garden, to sleep wrapped in his cloak to foil the biting flies.
We lay inside, wrapped in nothing but my need. I was that night as I had been in my first weeks of my marriage to Elise; impossible to satisfy. But when at dawn I tried to do again what I had done before the meal, and twice more in the night, Khadija reprimanded the most eager part of me with a light slap.
‘Al-Heurmak
hath need of rest.’ She smiled at me and smoothed the loose hair from her eyes. ‘I rise? You will allow?’
‘If that is what you want,’ I told her, stiffly in more ways than one.
‘I go early. We have need of bread, Sayyid, and other things.’ I gave her what she asked to market for provisions, and watched her dress and cloak herself and then perform her morning prayer.
‘Holy Prophet hath decreed we cover ornaments of body, except for hands and face,’ she told me when I asked why she dressed so plain. ‘Hide woman’s shape in street, but show in house.’
When she had gone, John grilled us mutton collops for our breakfast, and then set-to to cut up the carcase of the sheep for distribution to the neighbours. The four of us could never hope to eat a quarter of the beast before the maggots found it – and I planned selfishly to keep the house just to ourselves.
‘We’ll need to make it look as if it is already full of soldiers,’ I said determinedly, ‘and say the rest are off elsewhere to anyone who asks.’
‘An’ prove it with the sight of dirty platters an’ bedding for a dozen,’ John thought would do the trick. And grown men that we were, we sniggered like a pair of naughty boys as we ran round about the house, to drag out mattresses and smear dripping over knives and platters strewn across the floor. The child, Alia, watched us anxiously with one hand to her mouth, and when she heard her mother’s light tap on the outer door rushed off to hide behind the fig, with nothing showing of her but a hank of black hair and a pair of bright eyes peering round its trunk.
The woman set a large rush basket of provisions on the bricks, to view the pigsty we’d made of her neat house with sorrow.
‘But soldiers will not come,’ she said when I explained. ‘Go see. They are too busy with bad women in the harbour.
‘And Seigneur, go to hammam at Khan A-Shuna in Pisan quarter.’ She made a show of wrinkling her nose. ‘Time for nice bath, you think?’
The main street to the harbour seethed with figures, mostly women, hurrying up from the docks with baskets on their backs or bundles on their heads. Crowded tenements on both sides of the road were piled one on another within the broken boxing of the city wall. We could see the masts of ships, and glimpse the dazzle of the water in the pool before we reached the quay – and when we did it seemed as if the whole world and his wife was there already. Every man who wasn’t Genoese or a Pisano was a drunken soldier, and every female who wasn’t cloaked from head to foot was a Venetian whore.
Nowhere in our travels – not in Lyons or Marseille or Tyre – had we beheld such women. Dressed in bright silk, with painted mouths and hair dyed very red or very black or shiny golden-blonde – with loops of silver harness-bells tied to their wrists and ankles – they took their breaks from clients standing at the rails. Or else along the quays. To part their silks with frozen smiles. To sound their bells and entertain the queues of soldiers on the gangways of their floating brothels.
John Hideman, gaping like a beggar at a banquet, turned suddenly to stare at a blank wall. A sure sign he was thinking and about to speak.
‘Mebbe I’ll stop an’ watch the boats awhile if it’s the same to you, Sir Garry,’ he said solemnly in the plain French he used these days more often than his native tongue. ‘Reckon there’s a tidy bit to learn from watchin’ boats unloaded.’
I laughed and took three bezants from my purse.
‘No doubt there is, but you’ll need money if you want a whore,’ I said and dropped the coins into his palm. ‘You’ll have enough there for as many as you like, and food and drink besides.
‘But what will you do sir?’ was all he asked.
‘I’ll find a church and light a candle for poor Jos’s soul. Then go and have a bath as I am bidden.
‘And John,’ I said, as if the thought had just occurred. ‘Stay with the ladies if you like. There’s nought I need, and you know where to find me in the morning.’
He took the money without looking, whistling softly though his teeth. ‘Then I’ll see you after Tierce, Sir Garry.’ He gave the warehouse wall an understanding smile. ‘An’ rest easy, Sir, I’ll not show up before.’