The Fourth Queen, page 14
Helen lifted her chin instinctively to return the greeting, shaking damp curls back from her sweaty face. The women were holding hands and blethering like sisters, happy, relaxed. Were they talking about her? Was she going to be stared at for the rest of her life?
She thought of Queen Salamatu's deserted courtyard with its stagnant fountain and froths of untended blossoms. If she were a queen no one need ever see her; she could send people away if she were a queen. In her mind she began sweeping up fallen petals and scrubbing scummy tiles, unrolling soft carpets across the floors.
By the time she got back to her room, curtains were drawn across every doorway. She heard snoring as she passed, and quiet giggles or the murmur of invisible voices. On an impulse she stopped outside Naseem's room and called softly. There was the sound of scuffling and low laughter inside, then a strange woman's voice saying “Go away!” in Moorish.
“Don't worry about her.” Naseem opened the curtain a crack. “She's so rude.” She flashed a grin over her shoulder at someone inside the dim room. “Come in, please.” She reached for Helen's hand and the curtain gaped wider. “We were just playing.” She was naked, and her long plait was unraveled. Her lips seemed swollen and her strange pale eyes shone. Behind her, another woman was lying on the mattress, a shameless sprawl of languid brown flesh.
“I'm sorry—” Helen backed away. Naseem shrugged her broad shoulders and pulled the curtain closed.
BACK INSIDE HER OWN ROOM it was stifling. Peeling off her clothes, Helen sat down on the edge of the divan. Her legs looked pale and lumpy. She dug her nails hard into her doughy thighs, staring at the red pattern of tiny half moons she'd made. Two flies landed on her knee and began darting and butting at each other like tiny goats. A second later they were rolling over, buzzing and rasping their totie black bellies together. She flicked them off in disgust.
Chapter 24
July 19, 1769
MY SENSES ARE SWOONING FROM THE TREAT THEY have just received: of Helen dancing, with her blouse off and her pantaloons slung low on her hips. My eyes are replete from feasting on the pale hues of her nakedness, all the insides and undersides of Eden: the milky curves within a snail's shell, the silky depths of a leveret's ear, the gossamer veining on that shy anemone country wenches call “windflower.”
Then she sat beside me. Oh happy nose, to be so filled with the smell of her! Enough to make me bless this damned weather if it can produce that tart waft of licorice and mace; and that other scent that torments the monkey mind: of horseflesh and hay, and fresh fox-spray of a May morning.
It was the smell that really unhinged me, as though I were inhaling some essence of her, for what is a scent but a distillation of the skin's secrets, a steam rising from the deepest crannies of a body? She was talking to me, some nonsense about the queens. I suppose I answered, for the conversation continued for some minutes. But I was so overwhelmed by her proximity that it was some clattering clockwork creature that was blethering, while the real Microphilus was gulping down all the air in her vicinity, and ogling the coy folds of her belly, rolled up like rose petals beneath the silk of her kamise.
Earlier I did manage a passable brief dialogue with Batoom, on ways to subvert the Emperor's plans to send Helen to Sallee. “I will deal with the Emperor,” declares the Black Queen with one of her grand shrugs. “Now talk to her,” she orders and takes herself off to the kitchen. She claimed afterward that the sight was simply too droll for her to bear: the shy lass squirming to cover her bare paps, and the doting wee dobbin a-gabbling with his eyes fair popping from his skull.
Since then I have been maintaining a kind of abstinence, starving my famished eyes on alternate days, like a Papish penitent at Lententide. For she must not suspect that I love her; no, not now, while my form is abhorrent to her. Better let her think I'm attached to Batoom, a freakish puppet on a fabulous queen's strings. I must not, dare not, risk her scorn; for a woman's contempt is like milk on the turn. Once the curds have separated from the whey, nothing on this earth will amalgamate them back to creamy wholeness.
Meanwhile, I have been embarked on my activities as a Sleuth. The occupation proves the perfect distraction; otherwise I would be forever sniffing around Helen's quarters, like a terrier in heat, casting about for more whiffs of deliciousness.
I began by visiting Queen Zara. Dear God, how she has changed in the weeks since I last saw her! She refused to admit me at first, fearing I had been sent by the Emperor to spy on her. The poor queen's mind is full of such fevered imaginings, like a very titmouse in a tree, darting and jittering, supposing and counter-supposing in the same breath, until I feel exhausted after just two minutes in her company.
She is thin as a crane-fly, all wrists and elbows, and fly-away-home hair like sheep's wool a-trailing from a hawthorn thicket. And her eyes glitter with a deranged intelligence, quite unlike the delicate queen I remember. For there was ever something calming about the Lalla Zara in the past, a poised stillness to her perfect features, like one of your more stately water birds: a swan, perhaps, or a grebe, with her slender neck and small face looking mildly down, almost in surprise, at the swelling billows of her sumptuous body. I think perhaps this is why she so appealed to the Emperor: for the noble calm that so belied the wanton layers of soft flesh beneath her silks.
The flesh has quite disappeared now, and the calm. Today it was a gaunt carline who paced the cloisters of her rooms, with blood-caked nostrils and pink spittle at the corners of her mouth. She has a blue glass charm around her neck, in the shape of an eye, and it thuds against her painful breastbone, thud-a-thud-thud, up and down, as she moves. The emblem is thought to repel evil: she has had her slaves paint them all over her walls, in the palms of blue hands that are supposed to represent those of Mohammed's favorite wife. The effect is most unsettling, as though a disembodied audience had been bizarrely reconstituted and glares balefully down at the visitor.
So I sit myself down under this legion gaze, and begin asking information about her illness (when it started, if associated with any portents or foodstuffs, and the like). I can see she is trying to concentrate, but it is as though there is a hive of bees buzzing in her skull, so that I have to repeat my questions over and over while she agitates her bony head as though to shake them from her ears.
In the end it is her handful of slaves who reply, while their mistress sits scratching at her scaly ankles, staring distractedly around and calling for water every few seconds, which she then pushes away after barely a sip. It seems the distemper began some four months past, with surges of black vomit that prostrated her for days at a time, and with a scalp so hot and tender that she would allow no one to comb her hair, but demanded ewer after ewer of cold water to be dribbled continuously through her curls. Some days later the sickness would abate, only to recur the following week; abate and recur, abate and recur, accompanied each time by additional symptoms, such as strange splashes of brown pigment on the skin, inflamed eyes, black feces, bloody gums.
“And she has visions, Master,” pipes up one minuscule bint. “Yesterday I saw her crawling in the courtyard in the middle of the day. She was smiling, saying she was watching the baby mice. But I swear to Allah (who is merciful beyond our imaginations) there was nothing there but a few fallen jasmine flowers.”
I ask whether any have noticed signs of an intruder, and they look sideways at one another while one gets up and leads their ravaged mistress safely out of earshot. The rest then whisper details, with assorted wincings and shudderings, of some evil wee objects they have found in the queen's rooms composed of birds' beaks, wasp-stings and the like, bats' ears, and snakes' tongues. They are calling them “Afreets' porcupines.” I have seen the like at home in Pittenweem (though with marine components, for we are fisher folk), and they appear the very embodiment of evil, with a power to affright that can only compound whatever curses they contain.
“Has the Lady Zara seen any of these things?” I inquire, and they shrug severally in a helpless manner, and eye one another again. “Only the first,” admits one. “After that we were so careful, searching every day.” And they all nod miserably, gripping the multifarious charms they all wear around their dark necks. “Then last week, she found another. That's when her hair began falling out.”
I dismissed them to attend their mistress, while I sipped tea and pondered ways of uncovering the culprit (for I am loath to believe the porcupines came there of their own accord, however otherworldly they might appear). And, by and by, resolved to recruit a spy to be my eyes in my absence: the gnarled gardener who sweeps the litter around the queens' quarters. Indeed the Methuselah selected himself, for I tripped over him twice before noticing him at all. Upon my soul, there never was a creature more suited to his calling, being the very image of a heap of garden refuse, in color a mottled brownish and in texture rather angular and rustling, a veritable mullock of a man.
Requesting he examine an ailing rose in my garden, I hustle him away and order him to observe the activities in Lalla Zara's ménage, reporting anything untoward directly to me. With Invisibility on my side, I am hoping to ensnare our Witch (or whichever Familiar she has delegated to deliver her bristling deposits).
Next, I called on the Lalla Douvia, to discover (in as subtle a manner as I can manage) whether she has received any similar spiny harbingers. I found her among her flowers, peeping rosily out through the blossoms, a very picture of elfin majesty. Her courtyard is a cacophony of color, her walls and arbors quite massed with gaudy blooms; and hanging among them like fruit, her jeweled cages of trilling finches.
“Vale, Fijile!” cries she, disentangling herself and presenting me with a yellow rosebud and a dimpled hand to kiss. “Quis me visite?”
I wonder if I have mentioned the lassie's penchant for conversing in Latin? It is a habit I find quite taxing, especially when interposed with her native Spanish, with the Moorish smattered throughout for good measure. I wish I had never let her know of my facility in the language (hybris was ever my undoing). We might have been better acquainted by now had our conversations been less conjugatory and declensive. It does please the Emperor, however, to hear her spout her subjunctives. She is his Madrid Madonna, a pint-sized packet of the European culture he so values.
Anyway I embark on the painful process of explaining why I have come, making nouns and verbs agree as best I can, while her slaves set out tea beneath a bower of pink blossoms.
“I can hear her, you know,” interrupts the multilingual lass. “At night, when it is quiet. Moaning as though her heart is breaking. It hurts me to hear her like this.” And knits her rosy brow in distress.
Without mentioning the afreets' porcupines, I ask whether she has noticed anything untoward in the four months since Queen Zara fell ill. “Any strange ailments, in yourself or your slaves, any strange person visiting or lurking by the gates?”
She frowns thoughtfully for a moment. “There was that business with my slave Fatima, do you remember? Lots of the slaves were ill, all over the Harem. And she was one of the ones that died. But that must be more than a year ago now.” I remembered it only too well: a sudden virulent epidemic that had the tabibs all flummoxed, which stopped as suddenly as it started. “But we've been well since then, praise be to Allah, the All-merciful.”
She claps for a basin and begins scrubbing mud from her hands with a lufah. (This horticulture is a real passion of hers, to coax and caress her plants, draping and tying them as tenderly as most women gird their own bodies. According to my Methuselah, she long ago dispensed with her gardener, and does all herself nowadays, save the disposal of her refuse, which he arranges for her.)
“I am puzzled, though,” she continues, rolling up her dusty salwars so the slaves can wash her scratched feet. “Everyone says the Lalla Zara has been cursed. I mean, with all those hands painted on her walls, we all assumed—” Here her plump shoulders shudder briefly. “But you are talking as though there is something else wrong with her, some disease—
“Madre mia!” Now her dark eyes widen in alarm. “Are you saying we could all become like she is?”
Whereupon I hasten to assure her that no one else has shown any similar symptoms, that as far as I know no one else is in danger, that it may be a curse or a spell, or poison, or even a form of madness brought on by the sun, that I simply do not know but that the Emperor has charged me to investigate.
“Poor Fijil,” giggles she, seeming reassured by my blustering outburst. “Has the Emperor been badgering you?” Then, growing serious again: “Have you searched Salamatu's old quarters? They were always rivals. Could she have— Oh, I don't know how this bad magic works. But no one's been in there for months. Maybe she left something.”
I reflect on this while sucking up more tea, and upon the Lalla Douvia herself, who, having dandled her baby briefly on her knee for me, is now itching to return to her garden. Even as she mouths multilingual pleasantries, she cannot resist plucking the dead blooms from a nodding fountain of nearby magenta and balancing her little birdseed boxes into a tower.
It is strange, this patient obsession with her flowers and her finches, at odds with her habitual restlessness. Perhaps it feeds her somehow, to riffle her wee fingers through soft feathers and velvet petals, and let all her senses fill up with beauty and sweet music. Perhaps this is the secret of how she has healed herself. For though it is but three years since she was tortured into renouncing her God, she now seems a most carefree wench, dimpled and disheveled in her leaf-stained silks.
Little remains of her injuries today (the corrective khalehs here know better than to make permanent mar of a maid's beauty); her curls are halfway down her back again, thicker and glossier than they have ever been. And you would never guess her bonny hands had been in splints for so long—except there is something in their movements, a kind of clumsiness when brushing the hair from her face, as if she'd forgotten the use of her fingers and must use the sides of her paws as a cat does to wash its whiskers. Indeed there is something altogether feline about the Young Queen: her way of patting her garments when she settles down first on her carpet, as though arranging the stiff flounces of her Spanish petticoats; her pointy wee nose and plump cheeks, her mischievous wide eyes; and that slight sense she will pounce any moment and steal the ribbon from your queue de cheval.
And canny, too, to suggest searching Salamatu's quarters. For though I cannot suspect the poor White Queen herself (she was far too deranged to engineer such subtle mischief), yet her vacant burrow might prove an ideal lair for our spider. So, I have searched out the keys and will hie tomorrow, at first light, to open her rooms.
July 20, 1769
How quickly does Nature reassert herself! The White Queen has been gone but a scant few months and the Green Queen, Mother Nature, has quite taken over her quarters. Unkempt curtains of foliage, like green waterfalls, pour down the walls and shoots and tendrils crawl across the tiles like the fingers of so many drowning Ophelias. Frogs lurk in her stagnant pools and there was one floating, belly-up and bristling with flies. I tug some old silk awning from a tree and it disintegrates in my hands. Even inside her rooms, my feet whisper through drifts of pale dust and fallen leaves that have somehow seeped in beneath the locked doors.
For a long while I forget my mission, and simply wander through the sad spaces, pondering on the dear daft departed queen. I remembered her mad singing—some dizzy reels her Irish renegade of a father must have taught her—how she would clap her hands and skip some distorted version of the hornpipe, loud and wild and breathless, until her gates were plastered with children all jostling to catch a glimpse of the White Queen whirling in her silks like a dervish. And they'd copy her—what wean could resist?—until the Harem was full of wee spinning tops, plaits a-blur and a-bobbing, all laughing, all shrieking obscene sailors' rhymes.
She was fond of me, I think. She would call me her Leprechaun and beg for stories like a wee lassie, as though there were spongy bogs outben the palace walls, and peat blocks a-steaming and whistling on the fire. Yet the Emperor loved her, for all her lunacy. They say she was very tender in bed.
By and by I recollect myself and set to searching all her rooms, not knowing exactly what I am looking for. A miniature butcher's table, with discarded carcasses heaped neatly alongside? A teeny chiffonier crammed with detestable fragments? There are some marks that might have been footprints; a clump of feathers, such as a sparrow-hawk might discard; plus the dried husks of two small rodents; some sewing needles lodged between the tiles in one cloister. But nothing you would not expect in an abandoned apartment; nothing to prove or disprove this is the factory for our porcupines.
So little remains of us when we are gone.
Chapter 25
HELEN LEANED TOWARD THE MIRROR AND DREW A careful line of the blue paste close to her eyelashes. It stung slightly and she opened her eyes wide to stop the tears overflowing and smudging the color. Through the film of saltwater, they seemed to be swimming in the mirror: blurred green fish rimmed with blue.
Was this any better than the black? Sighing, Helen stared at her bleary eyes, at the gluey blue flakes on the lashes, then down at her tray of smeary tins and spilled powders. Behind her, Reema moved quietly around the little white room, sweeping, folding clothes. Outside, the slaves were topping up the jars, filling the air with the rumble of pouring water.
Did she look bonnier now than when she came? She tried a smile. Or just heavier, more stupid-looking? She was definitely chubbier around the face now, especially when she looked down. If she was lying next to the Emperor, leaning over him, she'd look like this, with these creases under her chin. And he'd be touching her with his black-spider hands, pulling her down to his dry beard and wet mouth. Her scalp tightened and she turned away.
