The Bird King(5)
“You shouldn’t be so careless about your things,” said Nessma finally, having decided upon a line of attack. “You think that because you’ve ensnared my brother, you can walk around with your nose in the air like a lady and dirty the clothes we give you, but if you ruin your tunic, I will see to it that you don’t get another. We’re at war, in case you haven’t noticed. We can’t afford to keep idle slaves in silk.”
Fatima wondered whom Nessma was trying to impress. She lifted her chin. She had discovered that by walking softly and deliberately and keeping her eyes fixed on the person to whom she was speaking, she could inspire an odd kind of terror in whomever she chose. It came, she supposed, from her own ambiguity: she was something the sultan owned, not dissimilar from the weary-looking pair of trained cheetahs that had come home with him from Genoa, along with Fatima’s mother, when Fatima was still a secret tucked inside her mother’s womb. Yet Fatima too might be carrying a secret, as far as anyone knew. If that secret were viable and male, it would catapult her over all the other women of the palace and place her on a par with her own mistress, the sultan’s mother. She could be despised, but not dismissed.
“Do you have anything else to say?” she asked Nessma. Nessma flushed a little brighter. Her lower lip, pink and slick with whatever she had been eating, quivered slightly. Fatima reached out and wiped it clean with her thumb. She almost wished they would come to blows, giving her an excuse to rake her nails across the exposed column of the smaller girl’s neck. It seemed more honest. But Nessma only gritted her pearly teeth and trembled. Satisfied, Fatima turned on her heel and walked across the courtyard, through the weedy roses.
“Her heart is as black as her eyes,” came Nessma’s voice in her wake, much too loudly. “She will never learn obedience, poor thing—she hasn’t got enough wits to know what’s good for her.”
Fatima forced herself not to pause or give any sign that she had heard. She walked on stiff legs through the common room on the far side of the courtyard, where the flyblown remnants of lunch were waiting for the last of the harem’s serving women to clear them away. Here she steadied her breathing. A glossy, neglected dish of olive oil caught her eye: it was startlingly green, the first pressing of the season, and so heady with the scents of fruit and sap that it perfumed the room. A fly had succumbed to its temptations and was slowly drowning, wheeling in frantic half circles with its swamped wings. Fatima picked up the dish. It was glazed in contrasting shades of blue, which merged with the green of the oil and lent it a subterranean aspect, like a mountain spring she could hold in her hand. She plucked out the drowning fly by one wing.
“Sorry, little fellow,” she said, flicking it away. “You’ve got to fight or flee like the rest of us.”
The fly landed on the tiles at her feet and hobbled onward. Fatima stepped over it and made for the baths.
Lady Aisha was soaking in a hip-deep stone tub when Fatima arrived. Her white hair, still thick, was gathered into a knot at the top of her head; her eyes were closed, as though she had fallen asleep. Fatima’s eyes lingered on the knobs of bone that protruded from her mistress’s shoulder and spine, demarcating the flesh that hung upon them, giving her body a weightless, fragile appearance. It would be easy enough to lean on that shoulder, or to wrap her hand in the ample white hair and watch the bathwater close over it. A scant minute would suffice, for how long could an old woman hold her breath? A far more cynical kind of violence had been waged to procure Fatima’s mother, whose parents had sold her, screaming and wailing, to a Genoese man when starvation loomed, yet the thought of such a brisk, tidy end to Lady Aisha’s life filled Fatima with sudden exhaustion. She could not act in the way she had been acted upon, and wondered, as the steam escaped from a star-shaped skylight overhead, whether this made her nobler than her keepers, or simply less decisive.
“Sit,” came Lady Aisha’s voice, still clear and deep. She patted the edge of the tub without opening her eyes. Fatima sat, avoiding the wet spot left by her mistress’s hand.
“Lady Nessma says you came in here cursing me,” she said. Lady Aisha clucked her tongue.
“Nessma exaggerates as usual. I may have cursed you once, but not continually.”
Fatima rolled up her trousers and put her feet in the steaming water. It was strewn with lavender buds and dried linden, which clung in sticky clumps to the flesh of her calves. The task of cleaning the tub was, thankfully, not hers.
“You went to see our cartographer friend,” observed Lady Aisha. Fatima no longer wondered how she knew these things. Lady Aisha had eyes everywhere, though how this was achieved remained a mystery.
“I like Hassan,” said Fatima. “He isn’t afraid of me.”
“He ought to be.” Lady Aisha opened one veiny brown eye to scrutinize her bondswoman. “If you like him, you shouldn’t compromise his reputation—or your own, for that matter—by lurking about his rooms. A man of his peculiar gifts and inclinations can’t afford scandal.”
Fatima sighed and beat her head lightly against the flank of the stone arch behind her.
“I don’t see why it should be a scandal,” she muttered. “Everyone knows he doesn’t like girls.”
“You miss the point. For the sake of his dignity, we all assume he does like girls. That way, no one need make a fuss when men come and go from his quarters. But there must be a fuss if my son’s own concubine visits him alone. It ruins the symmetry of the arrangement.”