The Aviary Gate (2 page)

Floating on a cloud of pain, Hassan Aga, Little Nightingale, acknowledged somewhere in his slipping consciousness that the Valide Sultan was near. The whispers of the women were confused, no more than a buzzing in his ears, but the smell of her – the myrrh and ambergris with which she perfumed her inner robes, the skin of her beautiful thighs, her belly and her forbidden sex – he could never mistake that scent, not even now, not even on his deathbed.

He drifted again. The pain that had torn like a demon at his guts and his bowels had subsided, as though his body had been tortured beyond sensation. Drifting, now, drifting. Was he awake or did he simply dream? Pain, he had known pain before. The picture of a boy came before his eyes. A small boy but sturdy, even then, with a furze of close-cropped hair like a black cap pulled down unusually low over his brow. Somewhere in this dream he could hear the sound of a woman's voice screaming, and then a man's voice – his father? But how could this be? Hassan Aga, Chief Black Eunuch, had no parents.
Or perhaps he had once, in that other life long ago, when he was still whole.

As he drifted, still on the edge of consciousness, other pictures came and went, spinning on the outgoing tide of his mind. In front of him now there was a horizon, a wide blue horizon. The boy with the close-cropped hair was walking, a journey that had no end, walking on and on. Sometimes, to keep his spirits up, he sang to himself, but mostly it was just walking and walking, through forests and jungles, across rivers and open plains. Once, in the night, a lion had roared. Another time there had been a flock of birds, bright blue and red, exploding like a burst of fireworks out of the forest depths.

Were there others with him? Yes, many others, most of them children like himself, all of them shackled together at the feet and the neck. They stumbled often, and some were left where they fell. He tried to put a hand to his throat, but there was no longer any sensation in his limbs at all. Where were his arms and legs? Where, after all, was his throat? A distant curiosity came upon him, and then a feeling of dislocation so vast and vertiginous, as if all the different parts of him were spread out, as far away from one another as the moon and the stars.

But he was not afraid. He had had that feeling before somewhere. Sand. Something to do with sand. The walking had stopped and there was a new horizon before him now, relentless and golden. It had made his eyes ache to look at it.

It was night-time when they came for him, and cool. There was a hut, and the men inside had given him something to drink which he had spat out at first, but they persisted. Had he sung for them? He remembered the distant glitter of their eyes as they squatted there beside the fire, and the way his head spun, and the bad taste in his mouth. He was glad when they laid him down beside the fire. Then there was a sound of metal on stone, and a sensation of great heat. A man's hand, quite gentle, had pulled his shift up to above his waist, exposing his genitals. They gave him a piece of wood to bite on, but still he did not understand what was happening to him.

‘There are three ways.' There was a man speaking now who was different from the rest. His head was wound about with a turban of twisted cloth as was the custom of the men from the northern sand-lands. ‘In the first two the testicles can either be crushed or removed completely. The penis remains, but the subject can never be fertile
after this. There is great pain, and some risk of infection, but most survive – especially the young ones.' The third way involves severing all the genitals.' Dimly the boy was aware of the man staring down into his face. ‘There is far greater risk, of course – you may lose your cargo altogether – but the demand for such as these is very great. Especially if they are ugly … and,
hew
!' he laughed softly to himself, ‘this one's as ugly as a hippopotamus.'

‘What are the chances?' The man who had pulled up the boy's shift spoke.

‘If the practitioner is careless, very few survive this third way. If the pain does not craze them, then the fever that comes after kills them. And if the fever does not kill them, then there is a danger that their parts will close up altogether as the wound heals. The practitioner must contrive to keep one tube open, the tube down which the patient's urine can pass. For if this is not well attended to, then there is no hope, and death will surely follow. The worst and most painful death of all. In my case however, for I am very skilled in this art, the odds are good: about half my patients survive. And in this case …' once again the boy was aware of a turbaned face peering down at him, ‘well, he looks strong enough to me. You'll sell him to the harem of the Grand Signor himself, I am sure of it.'

There was some conferring amongst the men around the fire, and then the first one, who seemed to be the chief amongst them, spoke again.

‘Our cargo is valuable. We have come too far – three thousand leagues or more from the forests of the great river itself – and we have already lost too many of our cargo on the journey to take such a risk. In Alexandria, where we are heading, we will easily sell the ones who remain as slaves, and our profit is assured. But it is as you say: a great fortune is to be had for one of this kind. Especially, in these days, for a boy from these lands. Just one good one, they say, will fetch as much again as all the others. The word in the markets, in Alexandria and Cairo, is that the Ottoman lords prefer them now to the white eunuchs who come from the easternmost mountains of the Great Turk's empire. These black eunuchs are affordable only by the very richest harems in the empire. Luxury goods, you might say, like the ostrich feathers, gold dust, saffron and ivory that many of the caravans crossing these sands bring with them. We will take a chance
on just one: let it be this boy, seeing, as you say, he looks strong and likely to survive. We will try your skill, Copt, this once.'

‘The singing boy then. So be it.' The turbaned man nodded his approval. ‘You are a true merchant, Massouf Bhai. I will need boiling oil to cauterise the wound,' he added matter-of-factly. ‘And four of your strongest people to hold the boy down. The pain gives them the strength of ten men.'

Nearly forty years later, in the cool and scented Bosphorous night, the naked body of Hassan Aga stirred slightly, his fingers splaying and fluttering feebly against the cushions on the divan like monstrous moths. Slowly, his mind sank back into the past again.

It was still night. When it was over they had dug a hole, at the Copt's behest, in the sand just behind the hut. It was a narrow hole, but deep; just wide enough for the boy to be buried in it upright up to his neck, so that only his head was visible. Then the men went away and left him there. The boy had no memory of this, only of regaining consciousness some time afterwards with a great cool weight of sand all around him, and the sensation that his arms and legs had been bound as tightly to his body as if he had been trussed up by a giant spider.

How long had they left him, buried alive, in that hole? Five days … a week? The first few days, when the fever took hold of him, as it did almost immediately, he did not notice time passing. Despite the raging heat during the day, with a sun that seemed to make the very blood boil in his eardrums, his teeth chattered and rattled. And between his legs a pain so searing that bitter bile rose in his gorge. But worse than this was his thirst, a terrible, all-consuming thirst that obsessed and tormented him. When he cried out for water his voice, no stronger now than a kitten's, reached the ears of no one.

Once, he woke to find the turbaned man, the one they called the Copt, looking down at him. He had brought with him the chief of the slave masters, a man as black as night in a long, pale blue robe.

‘The fever has broken?'

The Copt nodded. ‘It is as I said: the boy is strong.'

‘Then I can have my cargo?'

‘Patience, Massouf Bhai, the fever has broken, but the wound must
heal, and heal well. If you want your cargo whole, you must allow the sand to do its work. He must not be moved yet.'

‘
Water
…' Had he spoken? The boy's lips were so dry they cracked and bled at the slightest effort at speech. His tongue was so swollen it almost choked him. But the two men had already moved away.

It was that night that the girl came to him for the first time. He did not see her at first, but woke instead from a fitful half-sleep to feel a coolness against his brow and on his lips. At her touch a cry of pain, tinder dry, rose in his swollen gorge. But no sound came. The dampness of the cloth seared him like a knife.

A form, as insubstantial as a ghost, knelt beside him on the sand.

‘
Water
…' with an effort he moved his lips around the word.

‘No, I cannot.' The boy blinked his eyes, and saw the broad smooth face of a small girl. ‘You must not drink, not yet. Heal first, then drink.'

She was not one of the ones from his own journey here, of that he was reasonably sure, but the tones of her voice were familiar, and he thought that she, too, must be from the forests beyond the great river. The boy's eyes pricked, but they were too dry now even for tears.

The girl was now gently working around his face with a cloth. Carefully she brushed the sand from his eyelids, his nostrils, his ears, but when she tried to touch his lips again he drew back from her almost violently, and an inarticulate rasp, like the cawing of a crow, broke from him.

‘Shh!' She held her finger to her lips, and in the darkness he saw the whites of her eyes gleam. Then she pressed her mouth to his ear. ‘I will come back.'

She gathered the thin folds of her shift around her, and the boy watched as her small form disappeared again into the night. Her breath was still warm against his cheek.

When she came back she was carrying a small bottle in one hand. She crouched down beside him, and again put her lips to his ear. ‘They use this oil for cooking. It will not hurt you.'

She dipped a small finger in the oil and dabbed it tentatively on his upper lip. Although the boy flinched, he did not cry out as before.

After that he waited for her every night, and every night she came to wash away the sand from his face with her cool cloth, and to anoint
his lips with oil. Although she steadfastly refused to give him water – saying that if she did so he would not heal – she brought him small slices of gourd and cucumber, hidden in the pockets of her robe. These she managed to slip between his lips, and he was able to hold them there, soothing and softening his swollen tongue. The two children did not speak to one another, but sometimes after she was finished the girl would sit beside him and sing. And since they had robbed him of his own voice, he would listen to her with rapture, looking up at the stars, vast and brilliant, turning above them in the desert sky.

As they had thought, the boy was strong and he survived. They treated him better after they pulled him from the sand. They gave him a new robe, green with a white stripe, and a cloth to wind around his head, and he was made to understand that he would no longer be shackled with the rest, but would ride up behind the slave master on his camel, as befitted the most valuable of their goods. His wound had healed neatly and, although it was very tender still, his tube had not scarred over. The Copt gave him a thin hollow silver quill and showed him how to insert it inside his own body. ‘When you want to piss, you put it in like this, see?'

When the time came to leave, the boy saw another group of merchants assembling their cargo at the little caravanserai. A straggling group of men and women, shackled at the neck and ankles, stood sheltering against a wall, protecting themselves as best they could from the wind that blew across the sands whipping and stinging against their faces. At the end of the line the boy recognised a small figure, the girl who had helped him. ‘What's your name?' he called.

She turned, and he knew that she could see him now, in his new green and white robe, mounted behind the camel master.

‘What's your name?'

‘Li …'

She was calling something back but her words swirled and broke against the whistling wind. With a creaking of leather and a jostling of bells, his caravan was moving now. The girl put her hands to her mouth and cupped them. She was calling to him again. ‘Li …' she called into the wind. ‘Lily.'

Now, as Hassan Aga lingered still on the uncertain shores between memory and death, dawn broke at last over the Golden Horn. On the other side of the waters of the Horn in that part of the city they called Pera – the preserve of foreigners and infidels – John Carew, master cook, sat on the wall of the English ambassador's garden, cracking nuts.

The night had been heavy and warm. Sitting on the wall, which the ambassador had expressly forbidden, Carew had removed his shirt, which was also expressly forbidden, to get the benefit of the slight freshness of the dawn breeze. Below him the ground dropped away, giving him a fair view down over groves of almond and apricot trees. At the water's edge he could see the clustered wooden boathouses of the richer merchants and the foreign emissaries.