Raphael (19 page)

Raphael's face lit softly. He held a pebble in his hand. “No. I meant someone I have known a while. His name is Damiano.”

This was new. Djoura blinked at the news before replying, “And where is Damiano? Where was he, that he was not there to help you when all the sense was beaten out of you and you were sold to a crab louse like Perfecto? I don't call that much of a friend who—”

For the first time, Raphael interrupted Djoura. “He does not live anywhere. He is with Allah. And yet he is a great help to me.

“He gave me this.” Raphael proffered the pebble reluctantly, as though afraid she would dash it out of his hand.

Djoura, examining the thing in the half-light which came in through the irregular window, recognized it as the pebble Pinkie had refused to take out of his mouth that first morning in the hills, and had carried all that day locked in his battered hand.

Carefully, she gave it back to him. “Not much of a gift,” she said gruffly, but despite her words she was touched. She let out her breath in what was intended to be a snort, but turned out a rather wistful sigh.

“Who whipped you like that, Pinkie? Your old master?”

He shook his head. “It was my brother who commanded it done. We are old enemies.” And after a moment's quiet reflection, Raphael added, “I don't think it is over between us: my brother and I.”

“Ah?” This was interesting. It opened up new images of Pinkie. Poor men had less reason to attack their brothers than did great ones. If he were not such a good musician, Djoura might suspect her pale friend of being wellborn. “Your brother betrayed you? Then you had no master, before?”

Raphael's smile was private and gentle. It called out an answering one from her. “None save Allah.”

Djoura giggled and placed her head close to his. “‘There IS no master save Allah…' We understand that, you and I!”

“So!” The deep voice from the doorway startled them both. “You would teach our boy the
sa'lad:
the statement of faith?”

It was Rashiid himself, and he did not look particularly happy at the words he had half heard. He glowered down at Raphael's head. “Ama tells me your name is actually not Pinkie but Raphael.”

The blond rose smoothly. “Yes, that is true.”

Djoura blinked in surprise. Having once decided to call her charge Pinkie, it had never occurred to her to ask if he had another name.

Rashiid did not like the response. He felt patronized, and obscurely threatened. In fact, there was something about Raphael that had begun to bother Rashiid: the unclean smoothness of his cheek, perhaps, or the fact that his pretty face stood at man's height and stared at him with mannish directness. Rashiid—or rather Paolo, son of Pablo—was not used to eunuchs, and he did not like standing too close to this ambiguous creature. But it was up to Rashiid to set an example here, in the presence of the girl, so his hand flicked out. “You say, ‘Yes, MASTER. It is true, MASTER.'“

Raphael's tongue touched a bleeding Up. “Yes, master. It is true, master.”

“And I want you to remember, boy: you are no battle captive, you are Saqalibah. You can say the sa'lad until you are hoarse and you will still be Saqalibah.”

“Yes, master,” said Raphael very mildly, but his eyes were as unafraid as those of a cat. Those eyes made Rashiid shift from foot to foot.

“You could bow to me, also,” the householder growled sullenly. “Never hurts.”

Then Rashiid cleared his throat. “I came to tell you that I'm giving a dinner tonight for some very important people. The highest quality, from Tunis, so bring the ud, not the lute.

“And—” Rashiid looked from side to side. He didn't know quite what he wanted to say. How did you ask a slave to be cooperative without showing weakness? He hated to show weakness.

“And don't make me ashamed of you,” he concluded lamely.

“I will try not to, master,” replied Raphael, and he bowed. Rashiid paraded out.

Djoura touched Raphael's damaged lip. “Raphael? That is your true name?” He nodded.

“That's a silly name, especially for a pink fellow like you.” The black's hand was gentle, but her face was as hard as a carving in onyx. “Once we are free,” she whispered as she dabbed at his cut with her sleeve, “we will come back and kill that one.”

“Now THAT is silly,” returned Raphael.

The sea was Hakiim's hope; once he reached the water, temperatures would be temperate and the air moist. But the sea was a very long way away, many days by muleback. Heat had crumpled the airs of Granada so that no line could be discerned between earth and sky, and the air itself smelled like ashes. The Moor had one hand on his mule's girth strap, and was peering into the high distance when Perfecto addressed him.

“You think I'm crazy, no doubt,” grunted the round-faced Spaniard. “You must think I'm crazy, after the way I acted with the eunuch.”

But Hakiim glanced at his partner's expression, and for the first time in weeks he tended to believe that the man was NOT crazy, for this hangdog attitude was every inch the old Perfecto. The black glint was gone from his small eyes and his fat-shrouded jaw no longer clenched and unclenched.

“I never thought you were crazy,” answered Hakiim, with more regard for the amenities than for the truth. “I merely thought you… ill-advised.”

Silence fell, impossible for the Moor to endure. “It seemed that first you wanted too much for the eunuch, and then, as soon as he was found to be of value, too little. That's all.

“But it is done, and no great loss.” He raised his foot to the round wooden stirrup.

Perfecto put one hand on Hakiim's shoulder. “Old friend, I can explain.”

Hakiim smiled uncertainly. He no longer wanted explanations, but to be out in the clean air, away from Perfecto and Granada both. “I am to meet a troop of
fursan
outside the Alhambra at noon. They will let me ride with them all the way down to the sea, but I must not be late.”

Hakiim's sleek and restive mule pawed the desiccated earth with his hoof. In reply Perfecto thrust one finger at heaven, swaggered behind the house, and returned with his own beast, already bitted and saddled. “I will ride with you to the Alhambra,” he said. “That will give us time.”

Hakiim was not happy, but he was one of that sort who, while not especially kindly, has a great deal of difficulty being rude. He allowed Perfecto to mount beside him.

The mules danced their first few steps, finding their balance under saddle. The Spaniard coughed and cleared his phlegmy throat. “It has to do”—he chewed his Up silently for a moment—”with a promise I made once. That I would do something for someone. If it needed doing.”

Hakiim frowned. He suspected Perfecto of talking nonsense. Like a child. Like a Spaniard. “To do what, and for whom?” He led his animal along a street so narrow that pedestrians darted into doorways to allow them to pass.

Perfecto's animal followed. The Spaniard's reply was inaudible and so Hakiim turned and asked him to repeat it.

“It does not matter to whom I gave the promise, does it? It was a promise and I was therefore honor bound.”

Hakiim, as a dealer, thought this attitude was so much dung of the mule. What was more, he was certain that Perfecto had no more illusions than he himself. But as he turned to say something of this nature, they rounded a hump in the road, and a white donkey, carrying a man and two sacks of wood, rammed nose-to-nose into his mount.

There was a great thrashing and hawing, and Perfecto's innocent mule received a kick in the chest from Hakiim's. When the incident had resolved itself (the donkey rider backing his animal along the alley and into a cul-de-sac) Perfecto pointed urgently along a cross street that led out of the gates of Granada.

“Here. You will arrive at the fortress at the same time as if you had cut through the city. AND, we will be able to hear ourselves talk.”

“I don't want to be able to hear ourselves talk,” whispered Hakiim to himself, but he turned the mule's head.

“As to what the bargain—or rather the promise—was, well, that was to depend on circumstance. As it happened, it was necessary that I sell this man in Granada.”

It was cooler outside the wall, and undeniably fresher, but Hakiim's mood was unimproved. “Not man, Perfecto, but boy. And how can you…”

Quite calmly the Spaniard corrected his partner. “Not boy, Hakiim, but man. The blond was never a eunuch.”

Hakiim let the reins slide down his mule's neck. For some moments his tongue forgot speech. “And you knew it?”

“From the beginning. But I knew that you would be very unhappy with the idea of selling an entire, so I thought it better to pretend.”

Perfecto, jogging along on the mouse-gray back, looked more complacent than ashamed.

Hakiim thought furiously.

“I should have suspected something when the Berber woman refused to be sold without him.”

Now it was Perfecto's turn to raise his eyebrows. “Berber woman? Djoura?”

Hakiim made a negatory wave. “She… always claimed to be a Berber. Pay it no mind.”

But Perfecto's little eyes squinted littler. “Are there, then, black Berbers?”

“A few,” Hakiim admitted. “In the west and south. But that doesn't mean that she is one…”

Perfecto gave a heavy sigh. “It would be a dangerous thing, to sell a woman of Berber tribe as a slave, in a land where the Berbers have the sharpest swords,” he said.

“You are referring to Tunis?” Hakiim mumbled nervously.

“I am referring to Granada,” answered the Spaniard.

The wall of the city rose to their left, gray but gleaming like milk in the sun. Below was a bank of shale that crumbled down to a series of turtle-backed hills. The sprawling fortress called the Alhambra, red walled and white towered, gleamed from half a mile away. Hakiim took a deep breath of sage-dry air and listened to the cicadas in the dust.

But for Perfecto, now, he'd have solitude.

‘There is a world of difference between selling a Nubian who CALLS herself a Berber and is not, and selling a man YOU call a eunuch, and who is not. What will happen when Rashiid finds out he has been tricked?”

Perfecto urged his animal close beside. “Tricked? It was not I who told him Pinkie was a boy, but Djoura herself.”

Djoura. Hakiim's brow knotted. “Yes! Our black lily must have known. Was she in this business with you?”

Perfecto spat off to the side. “No. Djoura is only perverse.

“And Rashiid can have no complaint to us, since Pinkie did not cost him one shaved copper!”

Hearing an unmistakable jingle, Hakiim turned his head. Perfecto had taken out his moneybag and was shaking it in his hand for emphasis. Hakiim's own profits were kept in a discreet bag-belt which wrapped his body beneath his shirt. It was a heavy belt, but not so full as this moneybag.

A sudden guess made Hakiim blurt, “So you were paid for taking the eu—the blond.”

Perfecto laughed, and at this moment Hakiim's mule stopped dead and pawed the black shale with his foot three times.

“A bad omen,” grunted the Spaniard. “When a mule does that. Take a good look before stepping onto the ship you engage, old friend!”

Then he added quickly, “No, I was not paid for taking the Saqalibah, or at least not in gold. I told you I did it for someone to whom I owe a number of favors.”

Hakiim was getting tired of being told that. “Which makes me suspect the fellow was no more a legal slave than a physical eunuch,” he replied. “Tell me, Perfecto. Who puts you under such strange obligations?”

“I will do better than tell you,” the Spaniard proclaimed. “I will introduce you.”

This was too much. As though Hakiim had any desire to meet Perfecto's low European friends… “No time,” the Moor said shortly.

“All the time in the world,” replied Perfecto, and he laughed.

“Go meet the devil, you damned paynim!” the Spaniard bellowed, swinging his moneybag (heavier than gold), down on the back of Hakiim's neck.

These visitors were so fancy that not only Fatima and Ama had to be hidden but the furniture as well. The normally concealed household bedding, however, was subject to a good deal of attention, as the dining room was strewn with pillows and the spread long ago embroidered by Rashiid ben Rashiid's mother hung dimpled from the ceiling. (This use of her handiwork would have surprised Lucrezza, wife of Pablo, very much.)

Ama found this all very hard, as she perched on a heavy oak table in her hidey-hole at the corner of the house. Since all the floor was taken, she was forced to crawl along the tops of the piled European furniture. Like a cat. And there were no cushions to make her position softer.

Better to be an old drudge like Fatima and supervise the cooking in the kitchen house than be locked up like this, in stifling heat with nary a toy or amusement all evening. Djoura was scrubbing pots, and even Raphael had been taken from the little wife of Rashiid, for he was to play for the guests.

Ama felt a stab of resentment. Wasn't it she who had sensed the value of the musician, when Rashiid hadn't wanted him for free?

And for that matter, wasn't the blond a mere European? Why did Raphael get to attend the party, while her pure Moorish bottom rested on the hard wooden furniture her people despised?

Ama would turn the tables on all of them, she promised herself. Big tables, like the one she sat on.

Hasiim Alfard, lean and dry-faced Berber of Morocco, looked to go the night without cracking a smile. His two lieutenants, Masoud and Mustapha, sat like dusty shadows at his feet, and unbent no more than their
qa'id.

Rashiid's reaction to this was a grin like that carved on a turnip-face. He knew such an ingratiating and constant smile displayed a certain feeling of weakness before his powerful guests, and so he wiped the expression from his face again and again.