Raphael (25 page)

Djoura hated it: both the Spanish and the water-laden air, which made her nose run. She despised the whining Northern Arabic of the mariners who warbled and yodeled to each other in the hold, securing their cargo of oranges. She had great contempt for the official Granadan bookkeeper, a sunburned Spaniard who sat on a small date keg by the gangplank, in case the owner of the boat should try to load anything in evasion of the export duties.

Djoura sat behind the gay-striped partitions in the stern of the ship which was to take her across the Mediterranean, and she thought furiously.

It had been a pleasant shock, in the beginning, when the tribesmen burst into the Spanish pig's hot kitchen, scaring his old wife into hysterics and pulling her out of the grease and soot. It had also been fulfilling to see Rashiid babbling apologies—not to her, of course, but to the Berbers he had so grievously offended.

Djoura had not expected these pale Berbers, strange to her, to take such an interest. It was only just—only Berber—that they should, of course, but still, Djoura had lived her life in the real world, and no one else in her five years of slavery looked past her skin color to see that she was of the free people, and that her captivity was an outrage.

And this, besides, was not the manner in which Djoura had planned to regain her freedom. Where did they think they were sending her, anyway? Not a soul had bothered to share with her that information. The black woman knew well she had no living male kin. She had seen her father's headless body, and her single brother— well, if he had lived, he would have found her by now.

Perhaps they would dump her with the first black Berbers to pass through Algiers. Then what would she be? Little more than a slave, again.

As a slave, she had known herself a Berber, and therefore not truly a slave. Now, kinless among her own race, she would be a free but homeless female, and therefore not free at all.

Djoura cursed the pride which had forced Hasiim to “rescue” her —a woman in whom he had no interest, and to whom he had never bothered to speak.

And always Djoura's circle of thought returned to her Pinkie, whom she had groomed for the role of her male “protector” in their escape from Rashiid's household, and who was the unwitting cause of all this upset. How had he suffered for his interference? Surely that greasy swine had not let his loose tongue go unpunished…

Poor Pinkie: How long would he be able to hide his secret among that household—without Djoura? He would be a real eunuch soon enough, and with stripes to boot.

Ah, but maybe that would be just as well. Pinkie was so naive: too childlike even to consider vengeance. And he wasn't much of a man, to look at: pale, beardless, baby-haired. He wouldn't mind as much as some. Assuredly he would not kill himself from the shame of castration, as many men would. Djoura sighed. The wind caused the hangings of her enclosure to flap and billow, reducing it to an unconcealing framework of ropes: a seclusion as ineffective as was this “rescue” from slavery.

Then, between one moment and the next, Djoura knew that she could not leave Pinkie to his fate.

For hadn't she named him her brother? And even as a brother must avenge his sister or die, so must she, Djoura, return for the poor pale singer she had adopted.

Besides, she missed him.

With dignity, the woman rose to her feet. Brass coins jingled sweetly around her ears. A pillar of black, she strode out of her enclosure, ducking under the supporting tent rope.

The bookkeeper with his tally sat on a keg at the head of the gangplank. He looked up with surprise to see the woman standing before him. In faulty Arabic he told her to return to her place.

In response Djoura mumbled something inaudible. She crooked her little finger and whispered again. Rising halfway to his feet, the embarrassed official presented his ear for some petty feminine revelation.

Djoura put one large hand firmly over the man's money pouch and the other firmly against his chest. She heaved.

With a weak cry the bookkeeper fell backward from the keg into the green Mediterranean. Djoura paraded down the plank and into Adra
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Chapter 10

Though heat rises,” the deep, pipe-organ voice beneath them intoned, “the upper regions are colder. This is true over all the earth.”

Gaspare was not satisfied. He shifted his grip on Saara's waist. (He had shifted his grip so many times that she was developing the horse's trick of swelling her middle whenever the girth tightened.)

“I'm more inclined to believe you just haven't gone high enough to find the layer of heat that surrounds the earth.”

There was a short silence from the dragon. “I have never read that there is such a layer,” he replied at last.

“Stands to reason,” attested the youth, kicking the metallic black neck absently.

“I rather think a look at the simple geometry of the situation will explain the phenomenon, youngster.”

“Geometry. Is that a foreign word?” Gaspare mumbled distrustfully.

The dragon sighed at Gaspare's ignorance. Saara sighed also, for she had a headache. She had carried it since waking on the mountain's stony side with Gaspare shaking her. She wondered how the dragon (old as he was) could have recovered so quickly.

When Saara as a child had a headache, her mother had used to roll an egg against her head, until the ache went into the egg. Then she would bury it beneath the snow of the yard: egg and ache together.

She wished now she had an egg. She wished she were home.

Home? Yes, and she didn't mean Lombardy, but the far Fenlands, where her Lappish people dug their houses, pressed felt, and followed the herds of sturdy deer through white winter. For the first time in many, many years, Saara the Fenwoman thought of home without remembering Jekkinan and the faces of her dead babies, strewn across the floor of the hut.

Her children were dead, and Jekkinan too. So, for that matter, was Ruggerio, and her old enemy Delstrego senior. All dead and folded away. (Like egg white in a cake. Like an egg itself buried in the snow.) Soon she, too, would be folded into history: that was the rule ever since the Spirit sang earth into being.

Damiano was right; the summoning made the separation of the living and dead worse. Saara felt renewed pain, for she would have liked so much to have shown Lappland to Damiano. He would have liked it, for he liked anything pretty.

If she lived through this, she told herself, she would return to the Fens and see it again—the red autumn, the white winter, the crying geese in the springtime—for the sake of Damiano Delstrego, and perhaps he would know the beauty through her eyes.

Padding barefoot down an alley wet with offal, Djoura's every movement was regal. The night air might as well have been thick with jasmine as with garlic and piss, for Djoura's free soul was touching the high winds freighted with clouds.

For over a week she had been alone among the rocks in the climbing desert which stretched between the ocean and high Granada. She had bought a mule and then sold it again, prefering her own feet for transport. The customsman's gold had permitted her to eat well. Now she had reached Granada,

For the first time in her grown life Djoura's steps had not been ordained by another. These nights were the first in her life that someone else had not decided where she should sleep. She had slept in haystacks and under upturned wagons. She had slept under the moon.

Tonight Djoura did not sleep at all, but paraded past mud brick and stucco, through the capillaries of a city she did not know, toward the liberation of another besides herself.

The poor were curled dozing in doorways all around her. Good for them—it was certainly better to sleep in a doorway than in the rank holes within doors. Djoura stared down at the sleepers from a great height. Her veil was back and her hair gleamed with a constellation of coins. From within one house—a heavy, feverful pile of mud— came singing. It was bad singing, out of tune and with strictly private rhythm. But Djoura took it in and let it add to her own strength; she swelled with power as she walked.

“I am so tall now,” she whispered to the air, “that there is no chain forged which could span my neck. And should some clever man forge such a shackle, he would find no ladder big enough that he could reach up to put it on.

“And if he DID reach me, I would crush him in this hand, for his trouble,” Djoura continued. Her black hand moved invisibly through the heavy shadow. Eyes, teeth, and coins glimmered. “I grow larger at every moment.

“Like the earth after rain,” she murmured on. “Taller and stronger, stronger and taller.” Her round nostrils flared like those of a high-blooded horse.

“I am Djoura, the black one, the free. The breaker of chains. I am Djoura: my will is a sword!”

And the walls on either hand fell away from her as though she had pushed them down. Djoura stood at a large crossroads, under moonlight. She raised her arms and made the moonlight hers. Her layered clothing cast a terrible shadow on the paving.

Even Djoura herself blinked, surprised at the way the world was acceding to her new-won mastery. The moon touched her face like a rain of white feathers.

Djoura cupped her hands to the moon. She danced (with African straightness, lest she spill the moon from her hands) and laughed, crying, “I am mad, mad with my own strength! Moon keep me up, for if I stumble, I must knock a house down!”

And though the woman was far from stumbling, she did spill moonlight as she spun. Cold light spattered from the coins on her head over every rough cobble, and her wide skirts made a shadow like a spinning black planet.

There was one other sharing Djoura's star-washed stage, though she hadn't noticed him. This was a small man, long nosed, thin, dressed in Bedouin white muslin. He sat waiting on the dry fountainhead that marked the center of the square, and what he was waiting for is of no importance to us.

His legs were neatly crossed. To Djoura (when she at last perceived him) he looked impossibly droll, sitting there so neatly and so still under the savage moonlight, so as she passed him she reached up one long African arm and clenched her hand. “I have caught the moon!” she whispered to him, making her eyes round. “I will hide it in my bosom now, and no one will know who took it but YOU!”

Following her own words, she thrust her hand into her bodice, lifted it out, and shook her fingers in the small man's face. “See! I have hidden it. I don't have it anymore!” She floated away, then, laughing high in her nose.

The man sat without moving. His mouth had gone faintly sour, and his eyes were fixed on the wall opposite him. But after Djoura had passed, fading into another dark alley, he raised his sight to heaven. “There is no God but Allah,” he intoned, “and Mohammad is his Prophet.”

“Yes, a fish,” Raphael admitted. “A fish, or a small bird. This orange tree, too, whispers His name to me, but only after everyone has gone to bed.”

“His name?” whispered the soft voice that came from the shadow.

“The name of my Father, whom they call Allah: the name I can't remember from moment to moment,” Raphael replied. Then he pushed a weight of pale yellow hair from his eyes. “But none of these speaks as clearly to me of Him as one look at your face, Dami.”

Either the ghost laughed, or the wind made a rustle in the tree.

“Thank you, Seraph. Though I have no more face than the green earth and your memory give me, still that is good to hear.”

“The green earth?” Raphael moved closer to the voice of his friend. “I am made of the earth too. This—here—is the earth… See?” He lifted one fair arm and clenched and opened the hand. “It is earth itself my desire is causing to move. Flesh is earth, like wood, like fish scales.

“And it is me.” The deep blue eyes (not angel's eyes any longer but Raphael's eyes nonetheless) shone with particular intensity. “I am growing increasingly… what is the right word… TENDER of this body.”

Brown eyes, created of Raphael's memory, answered his gaze. “You take your exile well,” Damiano commented, his words dusted with soft irony. “But I think you'll get very tired of your body if you sit up every night, talking to ghosts and orange trees.”

Like a child, Raphael drew his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them. He closed his eyes contentedly. His form was obscured in a veil of light and shadow: Damiano covered his teacher with dusky wings. “Take it well? My exile? What else should I do? I am bound to this flesh. It colors everything that happens to me, and time does the rest; time is always around me, with the drip of the water clock—plink, plink, plink. Get up, void, eat, work, play for Rashiid, sleep (or try to). Is it time, flesh, or slavery that rules my life? I think if I were not a slave, with someone to tell me at every moment what to do, time would confuse me utterly.

“I do get tired,” he admitted. “But it is not because of your visits that I get tired, nor yet from talking to the orange tree. It is because my mistress keeps me awake every night.”

There was a moment's meditative silence. “I have heard of men having that problem,” Damiano replied finally, in a careful voice devoid of expression. “I have never heard they were to be pitied, however.”

The man who had been an angel sighed. “I am not really a simpleton, Dami; I know when you're making fun of me. Without cause, I assure you.”

The ghost grinned. Raphael's answering smile was slow.

“It IS a problem. Ama sleeps during the siesta (which is something I'm not given time to do), and she cannot sleep all night as well.

“She wants to play with me then. She wants to sit on my knee while I comb her hair. She wants to complain about her husband, and she wants me to tell her stories.

“What am I to do? I am her servant, and besides, she is very sweet. But sometimes I'm asleep when I should be doing something else. Yesterday I fell asleep during my master's dinner.”