The Sword Of Medina (2 page)

“Muhammad is dead,” she said. Her face seemed to slide downward before she pressed her hands against her cheeks. “He was . . . the greatest of men . . . and he is gone from us. Gone! By al-Lah, how can you argue over the
khalifa
when we will not see his smile in this world again?”

Her accusation silenced us. Umm Salama folded her arms around the sobbing Zaynab and led her back to her hut while the sister-wives hung their heads in shame—except for me. I watched Zaynab walk away with a yearning to join her, to bury my face in my hands and succumb to the anguish of losing Muhammad. By al-Lah, wasn’t my grief greater than hers? Hadn’t Muhammad loved me best of all his wives? He’d known me all my life, married me when I was only nine, and raised me as a father—at first. Then, later, I opened his eyes to the woman I’d become, and his love had changed, deepened, until our hearts had beat as one.

Soon, I hoped, I’d be able to rest and grieve for my
habib,
my beloved. It seemed there would be no
jihad,
no struggle, for me to worry about. Ali and al-Abbas’s treacherous attempt to stop my father had failed. Abu Bakr was the
khalifa
now, and they could only accept it.

Before any of us could speak again, the thumps and slaps of one thousand men and women prostrating themselves arose from the mosque like the sound of a great beating heart. We sister-wives stepped into the cramped, square room and dropped to our knees. The pungent tang of unwashed bodies mingled with the perfumes used to mask their odors, sandalwood and myrrh and clove and sweat.

“Hail,
khalifat rasul al-Lah
,” the crowd proclaimed, naming my father “successor to the Prophet of God.” My heart panged as I noted the sadness creasing
abi
’s face, making him appear as old as the tree stump under his feet. This was not the way he’d wanted to pass the hours after the death of his bosom friend.

Ali, I suspected, was even more unhappy. He and al-Abbas had hoped Ali would be in my father’s place right now. Instead, they had to kneel in the dirt with the rest of Medina to pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr, Ali’s longtime rival, the man the Believers had chosen. Eager to see Ali humiliated, I looked around me, peered into every corner, scanned every bent head. The crude little mosque was dark, with its mud-brick walls and date-palm-frond roof dappling light. Men and women crammed the room as full as sheep in a pen. Even so, I would have seen Ali. I would
have known his hair the color of wheat, his tunic cut low at the back of his neck, his narrow face with the upper lip that seemed always to curl as if he smelled something rotten. As the service ended, I scrutinized every face, disbelieving. Ali wasn’t here! But Umar was—and he, for one, was not surprised.

“Ali’s arrogance knows no bounds, as usual,” the severe, pock-faced Umar grumbled to my father as I approached the tree stump where he and
abi
stood. “By al-Lah! I will humble him this day.” Umar yanked his sword from the sheath under his arm and leapt to the floor, landing beside me but pretending, as usual, that I wasn’t there.

Behind us the crowd was beginning to disperse, women and children wandering out into the street, heading for home. Others, mostly men, clustered near the doorway, talking and glancing at us.

“Take care,
yaa
Umar,” my father said. “Shedding Ali’s blood would only enrage his supporters against us, and divide
islam.
”

“The sword is the only language Ali understands.” Umar turned toward the front door.

“That may be so,” my father said in his calm voice, “but I cannot allow you to confront him with that weapon. Muhammad loved Ali. They were cousins, and Muhammad raised him as a son. He married Ali to his daughter. He would not like to see us threatening him now.”

“
Abi
speaks truly,
yaa
Umar,” I said. “Besides, we don’t want Ali to say we forced him to pledge his allegiance. He’d use it as an excuse to oppose my father.”

Umar glowered at me, enraged to hear a woman contradicting him—in spite of the fact that Muhammad had turned to me for advice many times. My father smiled and held out his hand to pull me up onto the stump. There we stood, side by side, with Umar spluttering at our feet.

“I agree with A’isha,”
abi
said. “If you want to deal with Ali, please do so. But do not carry weapons to his home.”

“But—Ali will slice me in two!” Umar said.

My cousin Talha ran in, his handsome face flushed under his red-brown beard. “
Yaa
Abu Bakr, your son-in-law al-Zubayr is shouting from the window of Ali’s home that you have stolen the
khalifa
.”

“Stolen?”
Abi’s
bushy eyebrows flew upward.

Wanting to reassure him—my father was a sensitive man—I nudged
abi
with my elbow. “How could you steal the
khalifa
when it was given to you?” I said to him. “Al-Zubayr is only jealous.”

“Does he want the position for himself?” My father shook his head. “Al-Zubayr is an ambitious man, but—to follow in Muhammad’s footsteps?”

Talha grinned. “Al-Zubayr doesn’t want the
khalifa
. He wants his cousin, Ali, in the position.”

My laugh rang harsh. “Ali doesn’t quit, does he?”

“Al-Zubayr and Ali say they’ll die before they pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr,” Talha said.

Umar hoisted his sword. “By al-Lah! I will be the one to fulfill their prophecy.”

“Take heed, Umar,” my father said. “I forbid you to carry a blade to the home of Ali.”

The arm carrying Umar’s sword fell limply to his side. He shook his head, mumbling. I held my breath, wondering if Umar would defy my father and undo everything the two of them had accomplished. Then, to my relief, Umar sheathed his blade.

“Hearing is obeying,
yaa khalifa
.” With a gleam in his eye, he pulled a bullwhip from his belt.

“By al-Lah, here is all I need to do my work.” His laugh cracked as he snapped the whip in my direction, making me flinch. “With this, I will have no trouble beating any rebels into submission—or strangling the defiance from their misguided throats.”

♦

As Umar, Talha, and a growing mob from the mosque tramped down the street to Ali’s house, I fled through winding alleys to my sister Asma’s home—and found it empty. One of her sister-wives, a small woman with a frightened expression, shook her head when I asked where they’d gone. “Al-Zubayr dragged her away, and the boy Abdallah also. Al-Zubayr was shouting, ‘I don’t care if Abu Bakr is your father! You will not pledge allegiance to that traitor.’” I left her in a hurry, worry and fear clashing like swords about my head.

Asma and little Abdallah taken to Ali’s! Al-Zubayr was using my sister. My father would never allow anyone to attack the house if he knew his eldest daughter and his only grandson were inside. Yet I’d heard Umar
mention setting Ali’s house on fire as he’d stormed away. Foreboding seized my chest as I fled back down the twisting path to the main road, thanking God for my father’s ban on swords and daggers.
Please, al-Lah, keep my sister and nephew safe from harm.

The crowd of men in front of Ali’s home was as dense as if they were still hemmed in by the walls of the mosque. Shouts and threats punctured the air like the barks of dogs, and despite
abi’s
prohibition I spied flashes of blade in the mid-morning sun. Wanting to avoid being seen by Umar—who would order me back to the mosque—I clambered over the courtyard wall and spied Asma through a rear window. She was huddled on the floor with Abdallah in her arms, holding him fast while he squirmed and protested that he wanted to join his
abi.

Hearing my hiss, Asma leapt up and greeted me at the back door while Abdallah threw his arms around my knees. She beckoned me inside, then kissed my cheeks as I stepped into Ali’s home. Looking around me, I felt my first twinges of compassion for the man I detested above all others.

His was a dark, barren house, more like a dwelling for hyenas than for humans. The kitchen, where I’d entered, offered one small window in a cramped room of mud brick whose walls needed whitewashing. A yeasty baby-smell tanged the air. A few tattered pillows of camel’s hide lay on the dirt floor, which had no rug but only a crude woven mat of straw near the flat stone in one corner for grinding barley. There was no oven; Ali’s wife, Fatima, baked her bread at the mosque. Often she and Ali would eat their daily meal with us there, Fatima joining the
harim
of sister-wives to gaze like a smitten puppy at Umm Salama and laugh wickedly when Zaynab insulted me. Fatima had always been jealous of Muhammad’s love for me. How many times had I wondered why she didn’t dine at home? Now, eyeing the squalid conditions here, I understood. We sister-wives lived ascetic lives, for Muhammad had always given all his possessions to the poor, but at least we had color and cheer—and windows—in our home.

We in the
harim
had time for weaving and dyeing cloth, and sewing cushions and curtains. There were eleven of us wives and concubines and only a few children, now adults, from previous marriages. Fatima, on the other hand, had three babies to care for. To feed her boys and infant girl, she worked as a laundress, a grueling job that stooped her back and left her hands red and raw. Where would she have found the time or energy
for decorating? Ali had been so busy these past years fighting Quraysh and trying to sabotage my marriage that he probably didn’t even notice the squalor.

As I embraced my sister and her sweet, hind-eyed little boy, a gurgling sound tugged at my ear. I peered in the dim lamplight and discovered Fatima in the shadows, sitting on the floor and shaking with sobs, uttering
abi, abi
. Mourning for Muhammad. She’d been his favorite daughter, the youngest of four and the very likeness, some said, of her mother, Khadija, Muhammad’s only wife for twenty-five years. Fatima’s baby girl, Zaynab, slept on the floor beside her. Her little boys, Ali al-Hassan and al-Hussein, patted her hair and back but she pushed them away. Once again, I felt the urge to abandon myself to grief—but my brother-in-law crashed into the room just then, drying my gathering tears with the force of his bluster.

When he saw me, his eyes widened and his nostrils flared.

“Praise al-Lah, my prayers are answered!” Al-Zubayr clamped his hand around my hair and dragged me into an adjoining room. My sister’s shrieks, my shouts of outrage, Fatima’s sobs, and her baby’s cries filled the room. Anyone listening would have thought we’d hired the most dramatic wailing women in Hijaz.

Pain like one thousand and one needle pricks shot through my scalp each time al-Zubayr yanked my hair, stinging my eyes and making me too distraught to remember the dagger I’d sheathed under my left arm. Asma ran after us and leaped onto her husband’s back. “Let my sister go,” she cried, pummeling his back and arms. He released his hold on me and flung Asma to the floor, then kicked her in the stomach. As she doubled over, gasping for breath, I lunged toward al-Zubayr with a snarl, just as a sword whipped the air. I stopped mid-lunge to face a stern Ali.

“One should not interfere between a husband and his wife,
yaa
A’isha,” he said. “As you told me many times during your marriage to Muhammad.”

“How dare you speak Muhammad’s name with the dirt from his illegitimate grave still under your fingernails?” I spat into his face. My spittle landed in his beard and stuck there.

With the back of his free hand, he wiped away my insult. “By al-Lah, it is not I who blasphemes the Prophet’s memory, but your father. By seizing
the
khalifa,
Abu Bakr mocks everything Muhammad achieved, and all he would have wanted.”

“My father seized nothing.” I lifted my chin. “He was chosen by the people.”

“By the elites,” al-Zubayr said. He lunged for me again but I whirled out of his reach.

“Al-Zubayr speaks the truth.” For the first time I noticed al-Abbas, who sat behind me on a ragged cushion and cleaned his teeth with a
miswak
stick. He shook his head, sighing as if I were some poor, ignorant girl who needed to have the simplest of concepts explained. “The people never had a choice of
khalifa
. Abu Bakr and his rich Qurayshi friends snatched up the position before Muhammad’s body had yet cooled. Ali was not even consulted.”

“The people love Abu Bakr.” I blinked back tears at the mention of Muhammad’s body.
He is dead.
“They chose
abi
fairly and freely.”

“Abu Bakr stole the
khalifa
in the night, like a thief!” al-Zubayr shouted through the window to the men outside. “And now, until he relinquishes his post and agrees to a fair election, his daughters will remain here.
Yaa
Talha! I have your beloved A’isha. Do you remember her? The girl you once wanted to marry? You will not see her again until Abu Bakr resigns.”

His bragging didn’t frighten me. As I knelt beside Asma, I looked up at al-Zubayr and saw not a fearsome warrior, as he had proved himself so many times, but a
majnun
, a crazed man. There was an emptiness in his eyes. I reminded myself to
think only, and cast aside your feelings
, as Muhammad had urged during my sword-fighting lessons. Al-Zubayr was not as clever as I. I had barely slept for three days, yet I still held the advantage.

“
Yaa
al-Zubayr, would you hide from Umar? That is most surprising.” I smirked, stoking his rage.

“Al-Zubayr hides from no one!” he yelled, turning his head toward the window to be heard by Umar, Talha, and the rest. We could hear them talking again about setting fire to Ali’s house.

“Making them burn you out would be an ignominious end to this rebellion,” I said. “If I were you, I’d rush outside and run my sword through Umar’s fat belly. He’s one of those ‘elites’ you hate so much, isn’t he?”

“Be quiet,” Ali said to me. “Al-Zubayr, do not listen to her.”

Al-Zubayr glared at me. “I will not fall for your trickery.”

I shrugged. “Believe me, I wouldn’t shed a tear if Umar met his end today.”
I’ve never cared for men who beat their wives,
I could have added.