The Emerald Embrace Read online

  I was born to the gentler religion of hope, the Pasha to the virile tenets of Islam, and under the merciless blue sky, our hearts spoke two differing languages. We never heard one another.

  Six

  Twilight was falling when I got back to David’s side. Rearranging his coverlet, I sat on a floor pillow. My skin felt clammy. The Pasha’s revelation had thrown me into a state of despair. Until now the constant routine of nursing, the innumerable tasks of keeping. David’s helpless body functioning, had staved off total desolation. But the grievous guilt of knowing that the princess had punished me through my child made me question my own efforts.

  Was this still form David? Or had the princess banished him to a cruel limbo where he could neither communicate with humanity nor depart from it? Was I perpetuating her cruelty by keeping him alive? Did my Western belief in the importance of life overshadow the greater question? What qualities constitute life? At what point does one bow to the inevitable will of God? Insallah, I thought. The God of Islam is our God, too. In my chest I felt a cold pain, as if an icicle had stabbed my heart. I closed my eyes.

  When I opened them, the evening shadows were deeper. I had to peer to see David.

  His eyes were open!

  A subtle transformation had come over him. The corners of his mouth were lifted, and one brow quirked as if he were just awakening from sleep.

  His eyes grew wider and more alert.

  Joy burst through me. Why had I been doubting? David was here. My sweet, lively little son was better. He had returned to me. Thank You, thank You God, in the name of every prophet and saint who adore You. My body began to tremble.

  “Ma-ma,” David breathed.

  My shaking increased. Lullah Zuleika was in the room, and I tried to call out that she should summon the Pasha, but when I opened my mouth to speak, agitation overcame me and my palsied motions sent David’s charm-inscribed little silver goblet rattling across the tiles. I continued to gaze into the clear blue irises, terrified to glance away lest my David vanish again.

  “David.…” My lips formed his name, but no sound emerged.

  “Did you see I ride Almanack?” he whispered.

  Almanack. The Pasha had raised his own ivory-handled pistol to shoot the small injured beast. In my frenzy of joy, I planned how to find a double for the dead, silken-maned pony. My heart pounded furiously and I clutched David’s limp fingers.

  “You rode so … very well.…”

  “Like Father,” he breathed. Moisture shone on his face and he was breathing so rapidly that the pulse in his forehead tripped.

  “Exactly like Father.”

  “I ride now?” he asked.

  “You’ve been sick,” I whispered.

  “Now?”

  “Later Father will take you riding all you want.”

  “Now?”

  “Soon.”

  “Go now.” It wasn’t a question. His weak voice held the same impatience as when he had wanted to leave the harem for the freedom of the Citadel.

  “Not yet, my darling.”

  “Mama, I can’t stay with you.”

  And then, finally, I understood.

  The strength of my maternal love held David here. Alone, I willed him to remain alive. He had returned through infinity and eternity to ask me for release. He was begging my permission to play in the sunlit meadows which God in His unlimited mercy had provided that innocently brave small boys might play and laugh and gallop on never-wearying immortal ponies.

  I drew an aching breath. My every yearning was to keep David here, with me.

  Lullah Zuleika’s swift footsteps raced across the room, down the wide hall, her voice crying, “Pasha! Someone bring the Pasha! Quickly. A miracle has occurred!”

  David continued to gaze up at me, his blue eyes filled with pleading.

  The Pasha already had released him.

  But I—how could I let my son go? He was all I had.

  Yet as I gazed into his transfigured face, I was asking myself another question. How could I, who so prized freedom, condemn my beloved child to this caged imitation of life?

  There were more footsteps, but I did not glance from David’s face. His small features glistened with sweat, his nostrils were pinched and his blue eyes grew transparent as his spirit pierced its fleshly prison, begging me.

  Could I let him go?

  “Yes,” I whispered, and the word seemed wrenched from me, as if it were a vital organ. “Go and ride. Almanack is waiting for you, my darling.”

  He smiled, and then looked over my shoulder. His eyes shining as if he were gazing into the sun, he murmured, “Father.”

  The Pasha, who stood behind me, whispered the Islamic prayer: “To God you belong, and to Him you must return.”

  Small fingers slipped from mine, thick gold lashes closed over blue eyes, the mouth relaxed and the head turned. David’s breath whispered one final, tremulous sound.

  It was over.

  Seven

  The funeral took place the next morning, early, before the heat grew oppressive.

  The Pasha himself carried the small, richly decorated bier. The cortege wound down from the Citadel, engulfed in a solid wall of sound.

  The ragged, scrawny Yemenees, most of whom were blind, paced two by two crying over and over: “There is but One God and Mohammed is His prophet.” A hundred schoolboys carried Korans, shrilling the soorat el-kahf, the eighteenth chapter of that sacred book. Flags shook in time to the dervishes’ loud chanting. Camel bells clattered as drivers prodded the fifty beasts laden with bread and meat to be given as alms. The Pasha’s staff, some carrying lighted tapers, others sprinkling rosewater, howled discordant prayers.

  To fill any possible lapses in this formidable uproar, hired mourners shrieked, “Wulla woo, wulla woo, wulla woo,” never ceasing their lamentation. Lullah Zuleika had paid them. She didn’t want David’s last journey marred in any fashion, and she devoutly believed that a supernatural force would halt the procession the moment the noise stopped.

  I barely heard the earsplitting cacophony.

  Astride the saddle of a donkey, I followed the Pasha, and after me came the other kadines. Our clothing, even our underwear and face veils, was dyed the deep indigo that is the Egyptian color of mourning.

  The Southern Cemetery was jammed with as many people as had been at the Nile Festival. My little blond son had been greatly loved. The mournful crowd made a path to an imposing tomb. Stout black marble pillars upheld a massive black marble cupola, and storks nested in the four black spires.

  The stone had been rolled aside, and as we halted the Imam himself stepped from the vault to take the small corpse from the Pasha. This signaled the prayers be shrieked yet louder. Disturbed, the storks flapped into the hard blue sky, hovering overhead, their vast wingspan motionless.

  An embroidered red shawl wrapped David. To prevent this fine garment from tempting tomb desecraters, the Pasha rent it with his curved dagger. Then the Imam carried David down the steps to the vault, laying the small body on an obsidian bench to face Mecca. The Pasha gently set a handful of dirt on our son. The two emerged. Sextons rolled the entry stone back in place.

  David, who had run as fast as his short legs could carry him; David, whose delight had been to trot on Almanack; David, who had adored being taken far places perched on his father’s saddle; David, who had wanted to be outside all the sunlit hours of his brief life—my David was being shut into a dark vault.

  The Pasha, his pale, ordinary face glinting with tears, walked slowly to the long line of camels where he and his remaining sons would oversee the distribution of food. The harem started home.

  The sun was high overhead, and the air had become furnace-hot. I had barely slept the past ten nights. Unshed, unsheddable tears ached behind my eyes. In the shade of a voluminous indigo umbrella, I jounced dizzily along on my surefooted donkey. I didn’t look up until we were climbing the cuts in the honey-colored rocks below the Citadel.

  At first the coco
on-like white splotches on the massive gate towers didn’t seem real. I couldn’t quite comprehend what I was seeing. On my infrequent outings, I had noticed a series of great iron hooks, and assumed these were used on feast days to hang decorative flags. But these hooks served quite another purpose.

  From them dangled men in torn, filthy robes. The six Bedouins were hanging in chains.

  A feeble nausea rose in my throat. I’d read about this punishment. No bodily damage is done to the criminal. Rather, he dangles suspended outdoors until exposure, starvation and—above all—thirst cause death.

  One of the Bedouins squirmed, his limbs jerking in spasms, his head lolling forward. A still-living puppet. Death’s toy.

  Vertigo engulfed me. I heard my own thin, whimpering cry as I slid from the saddle.

  I regained consciousness in my own apartment in the harem. The Greek eunuch physician gave me a poppy infusion. I didn’t sleep, though. Instead, I lay, heavy as lead in my silk cushions, unable to move, or to weep. I wanted to think of the brief years of David’s life, but somehow the drug had turned my grief inside out and I kept seeing the tormented splotches on the Citadel gate towers.

  From time to time muted voices and sobs came from the antechamber. Women from other harems had come to console me, but Uisha, believing me asleep, wordlessly turned them away.

  At dusk, the door opened to admit the Pasha. He bent over me, kissing my forehead. His face was moist with sweat. He had spent this long, hot day handing out funeral foods.

  “Naksh,” he said, sitting on the edge of the divan. “My poor Naksh.”

  After a minute, I said, “So you captured the plotters.”

  “Not the ringleader,” he said.

  “I saw them on the gate tower,” I said dully.

  His sharp profile was silhouetted against the purple twilight. There was a slackness under his chin that hadn’t been there before. “And you disapprove?” he asked.

  A sigh was my answer.

  “Hanging in chains is the legal punishment for harming the Pasha’s kin,” he said. “Even in your enlightened land don’t men pay with their lives for murder?”

  “Yes. But our situation forbids cruel and unusual punishment. Can’t they be taken down?”

  He took my hand. “In this heat they won’t last long.” He drew a sharp breath. “I’ll confess that had it not been for the law, I would have killed them more slowly.”

  “Would that have eased your pain?” I asked without emotion.

  “It would have tormented me the more,” he said. “Nothing can ease the pain of losing David, except—” He stopped abruptly.

  I looked up. “Except what?”

  In the dim light he searched my face. His shoulders slumped and he said, “Never mind. Naksh.”

  The sound of voices raised in lamentation drifted in on the night breeze.

  The Pasha sighed. “If I hadn’t been so proud of his brave little spirit, I never would have let him ride that damn pony. Because of my pride, he’s dead.”

  The Pasha’s grieving guilt reached through my numbness. “The plot was against me,” I said. And then, wanting to comfort him, I added, “Pasha, he adored you. He always wanted to be with you and to act like you. He looked at you as if you shone.”

  Instead of consoling him, I had touched off his sorrow.

  With a groaning sob, he buried his face between my breasts, clutching at me with a hard embrace that should have hurt, but did not. “Even though you think so little of me, Naksh,” he said in a rough, muffled voice, “I still have you.”

  And what did I have? Absently stroking the Pasha’s heaving shoulders, I wondered if I was going to survive, imprisoned behind cream-colored walls, cut off from all I held dear, captive wife to this grieving and contradictory monarch.

  Eight

  I clambered over the fallen column.

  The ruined temple lay buried to its shoulders in rust-colored sand. Panting through my face veil, I paused in the shade cast by remnants of the portico roof, looking back in the direction I had come.

  The Nile curved, and beyond its green fringes of cultivation, that lush and fertile green, was reddish desert that stretched endlessly in barren mounds and desolate wadis. Long ago Herodotus had called Egypt the gift of the Nile, and his description still held true. Ninety-eight percent of the country’s population lives along the narrow green band.

  We were about a hundred miles south of Cairo. The blazing afternoon was so clear that even from a goodly distance I could make out the emerald flags hanging limp on the Pasha’s state barge, which was docked in front of our encampment. Men moved between smaller black tents and the vast, domed green pavilion—it was the same elegant tent that the Pasha had used six months earlier, at the Nile Festival.

  Sighing unhappily, I turned away. Just above my eye level on the ruined portico was a cartouche, a loop that contained several hieroglyphs. A bird, a zigzag, a snake.

  I opened my book, which was Champollion’s work. Champollion, the brilliant French scholar I once had hoped to enlist in proving Father’s theory. Champollion, who had spent most of his career attempting to decipher the ancient Egyptian writings. Without success. In this slim volume he hypothesized interpretations of the mysterious symbols. I flipped through pages. His sketches showed no cartouche like the one above me. I called to Uisha, who was my only companion, and she climbed up the sandy slope with my writing box.

  Resting the inkhorn on the fallen column next to me, I held the sketch pad on my knees and began copying.

  After David’s death, the Pasha, fearing an attempt on my life, had tripled the harem guard. Ten eunuchs, fiercely armed, had paced outside my apartment night and day these past six months. The assassins never had materialized. And the Pasha had accepted that I was more likely to be destroyed by my own anguished grief. I’d sunk into what the harem doctors diagnosed as melancholia. The air had seemed like heavy glue, making the least motion an impossibility, my mind had refused to function, I’d slept little and eaten less.

  The Pasha, knowing my interest in ancient Egypt, had tried to rouse me by bringing me with him on this governmental tour. We stopped often and each night we camped luxuriously, making our slow way toward the Valley of the Kings, where the Pharaohs are entombed.

  The Emerald Embrace, the Cairo antiquarian had told the Pasha, came from the Valley of the Kings. A story I had never believed. Father, his European colleagues and most local scholars accepted that every tomb in the Valley had been despoiled millennia ago. Any jewelry recovered there should have been battered by tens of centuries. My necklace was like new.

  As we sailed closer to the final resting place of the Pharaohs, however, I had begun to accept the antiquarian’s tale. I ignored the most exquisite temples of long-ago Greek and Roman conquerors. The Egyptian relics, no matter how small or humble, called to me. It went beyond the compulsion from my old life to seek out validation for Father’s theory that ancient Egyptians journeyed far beyond the Mediterranean. I explored the ruins with a hunger not truly my own, as if I were coming home.

  Finishing my sketch of the cartouche, I pushed aside my face veil, blowing a handful of sand to blot the ink. Uisha stowed my reed pen and the heavy glazed paper. I looked at the desert.

  A cloud of rusty sand hovered above two men riding toward our campsite. Though the second rider wore the loose robes and the knotted head covering of a desert dweller, he didn’t slump in the manner of one accustomed to the rolling gait of a camel. Sitting erect as one does a horse, he jounced cruelly. He was a European, I decided.

  But what was a European doing here?

  Ahmed had told me that Westerners were now welcome in Egypt, gravely thanking me on behalf of the Enlightened Ones. Travelers, however, generally stayed in the Frank quarter of either Alexandria or Cairo. Why would a European venture this far? With a puzzled frown, I watched the riders move toward the row of tents that housed the scholars from El Azhar, a group accompanying us to oversee any excavations that the Pasha might
order. That’s it, I decided. The European was a scholar.

  The shadows were long when Uisha and I returned to camp. Over the tents hung savory smoke of roasting game birds and frying moonfish. Kitchen servants bustled to and from the green pavilion. Tonight, as every night on the trip, the Pasha received guests from nearby towns and villages, dignitaries and common folk alike, and already three shopkeepers were waiting on their haunches. They glanced at our veiled presence, then hastily averted their eyes.

  In the tumbled ruin I had felt alive, a thinking, sentient human being. These furtive glances reminded me that I was an Eastern woman, a hidden, carefully guarded possession. I walked quicker and my depression returned.

  After my bath, Uisha massaged me with oil. She helped me into a pink gauze bodice, pink and white striped satin trousers; she rested the web of diamonds over my freshly shampooed blond curls, brought out my bracelets, anklets, bangles, rings and finally settled the Emerald Embrace around my shoulders. My depression worsened. I felt like one of those china dolls intended only to display the newest modes.

  The Pasha, who slept with me in this tent, came by on his way to the banquet.

  “So you survived,” he said in his usual dry tone. “Someday I’ll understand why it’s so essential for you to scramble about alone.”

  “Uisha’s with me.”

  “You should have a proper escort.”

  “I can’t bear being watched and guarded all the time.” And to change the subject, I asked, “What did you do?”

  He took a pistachio, cracking the fragile shell between his strong teeth. “Another ‘archaeologist,’ as these diggers call themselves, showed up.”

  “I saw them ride in.”

  “They requested to attach themselves to our party.”

  “Are they European?” I asked without any real interest. This afternoon I’d been curious, but now I was numb. I sat on a cushion.

  “Neither of them is,” the Pasha replied, looking down at me, his eyes snapping with amusement. “What made you ask?”

  “One rode his camel badly.”