“Ah! Of course you are. A real Circassian concubine! You’re a very long way from your homeland.”
“I’ve never been there. I was born here, in the palace. My mother was pregnant when she was sold to the sultan. That’s what they tell me, anyway.”
“Born into concubinage,” said Luz, tilting her head back like a cat. “In the North, we have a hundred naughty songs about women like you. You’re supposed to be a naked, immoral, ignorant creature, yet here I find you speaking three languages and completely clothed. And a little spoiled, if you don’t mind me teasing you about it.”
Fatima did mind. “An immoral, ignorant creature would be a poor match for a sultan,” she said, and then paused with Luz’s hair between her fingers. “But I was naked enough just before you arrived.”
Luz burst into laughter, her face an improbable shade of red. Fatima didn’t see what was so funny. It was a statement of fact.
“Shut up—you shut your mouth.” Catalina was suddenly talkative. Her voice was sonorous and fat. “Don’t you have any shame at all? How dare you speak about your sin with her own lovely hair in your hands?”
Fatima was on her feet before she knew it, brandishing the comb. Luz caught her by the arm.
“Quiet, Catalina,” she said sharply. “Keep your own mouth shut if you can’t say anything useful. She doesn’t know any better. Sit, please, Fatima—please. I apologize for Catalina. She knows nothing about your ways.” She let go of Fatima’s arm.
The anger that welled up in Fatima had nowhere to go; she stood for a moment longer, forcing herself to ease her grip on the comb, the teeth of which dug into her flesh like thorns.
“He’s my king,” she said when she trusted herself to speak. “Why should I be ashamed to serve my king?”
“You’re not married to him,” muttered Catalina. She began unpacking the leather traveling trunk with great energy. “That’s a sin, is all I’m saying.”
“Do you think your king goes to bed every night with his own wife?” snapped Fatima.
“That’s enough,” said Luz. Her voice was gentle, but there was a chilly authority in it. “Everyone is tired. It’s time to sleep.”
Fatima set the comb on the hammered brass tray near the bed that served as a nightstand. Once upon a time, the nightstand of a lady guest would be crammed with ivory-handled brushes and silver kohl pots and stoppered bottles of perfume, but these had all been sold off or appropriated by the palace women as their own supplies grew scarce. The serving woman had strewn the empty tray with dried rose petals instead. It seemed everyone thought they could disguise the palace’s insolvency with handfuls of flowers. Soon enough, they would all be naked and pathetic, just as in Luz’s naughty songs, and then they would need nosegays as big as washing buckets to satisfy their offended honor.
“Is there anything else you need?” Fatima asked. “Before I return to my sin?”
Luz had been knotting her braided hair with a leather thong, and now she shook her head and sighed.
“No,” she said, “only come here and kiss me before you go. I won’t sleep if we part with bad feelings.”
“I’m only a slave,” said Fatima. “You don’t need to kiss me goodnight.”
Luz gave her a measuring look.
“I’m not sure how to treat you,” she admitted. “Slave means something different among your people from what it does among mine. You’re more like a beloved mistress, or a trusted lady-in-waiting, than what we would call a slave in my own country.”
Fatima leaned against the doorframe, communing with the dying moon as it fell beyond the walls of the harem. She knew little about the laws in the North, but Lady Aisha had once told her that when it came to the rights of slaves, the prophet of the Catholics had been silent.
“You should go to Egypt,” she said. “The sultan there is a slave, and so are all his viziers and generals. The state could sell them, but they are the state, so they are both slaves and masters. My own master hates them—they’re your allies, or they might as well be. They just sent us a shipment of grain, but it was really meant for you, wasn’t it? They must have known it would be stopped at the blockade. This siege is all anyone ever talks about.”
She had said more than she meant to say. Anger had made the temptation too great. The first and greatest lesson Lady Aisha had ever taught her was never to disclose what the sultan might confide in bed. She worried for a moment that her slip might lead to real trouble, but Luz had a canny look about her, one that promised conspiratorial silence.
“You’re quite a puzzle, Fatima of Alhambra,” was all she said. “Quite a puzzle.”
It was a dismissal. Fatima touched her lips and her forehead in the gesture of peace and slipped out of the room, crossing the darkened, empty courtyard toward Lady Aisha’s room. The air was fresh: dew would fall soon, beading up on the yellow rose hips in the garden, the low bushes and little trees, the sun-faded cushions scattered on the ground. A few more weeks would bring the light frosts that presaged winter. Fatima paused at the threshold of Lady Aisha’s room, unbalanced by the sudden silence. She was alone in a borrowed dress after a long evening: for Nessma, in better years, such a moment would be the end of some triumph, a wedding in which she had shone to perfection, a feast for a large party of guests she had hosted impeccably. For Fatima, it signified nothing. No one had gone to bed wondering where she was, giddily waiting to discuss the night’s events with her. She had practiced being alone, and she had grown adept.
Fatima tugged irritably at the cuff of the dress, resisting the urge to pull it off, ball it up, and throw it into a corner. She hissed when her nail grazed the underside of her wrist, leaving a stinging line. Did she also want to strip off her skin? When she was a child, everyone in the palace wanted to touch her, from cooks to kings: they all marveled at the profound color of her eyes, the evenness of her complexion, yet they joked with each other about taming her hair and her temper. It rendered all their praise suspect: even compliments were infuriating. When Fatima caught sight of herself in the polished brass of a lantern or the still water of the reflecting pool in the Court of Myrtles, her beauty was indivisible from her anger. Fatima raised her wrist to her mouth and sucked on the scratch until the sting subsided. She would change nothing about herself. It was lucky, she thought, lucky she had learned so early that there was no solid ground.
A soft cry of surprise came from the far side of the courtyard, breaking the silence. Fatima squinted across the garden. Luz stood at the threshold of her room in a loose linen nightdress, her feet bare. She was staring at something dark and boxy a short distance away. It was the dog. It was standing perfectly still, looking up at Luz with its unblinking sulfuric eyes. Fatima caught her breath in alarm. The animal was not precisely tame, and might even be dangerous to someone unfamiliar—for all Fatima knew, it had scabies, or the spittle sickness, or the plague. Yet she didn’t dare call out, worried that any sudden sound would frighten the dog into lunging or snapping.