Sultan's Wife Read Free Page B

safely, and applaud myself for averting disaster. I wonder how Sidi Kabour has procured so many human eyeballs, but then realize the pupils are vertical slots, like those of the eyes of cats, or goats.
    I must make my way straight back to the palace to attend Moulay Ismail, and explain to Zidana that her requests are being fulfilled and that I will return for them later that day and hope that luck is still running with me. It is the only sensible thing to do. I turn decisively; too quickly … catch my foot on some obstacle on the floor behind me, and lose my balance.
    I am usually agile, but the eyeballs have unsettled me – or possibly even caused my fall, just as I was congratulating myself on evading their evil influence – and the next thing I know I am on my back with my head jammed up against a pile of baskets, which now totter and come tumbling down, covering me in porcupine spines, dried scorpions and – I pick something off and hold it out with distaste – a veritable plague of dead frogs. In some agitation I spring to my feet, brushing the vile things off me. The spines and scorpions’ claws caught in the wool of my burnous are hanging on for grim life. I pluck them off one by one, then catch up the back of my cloak to examine it and see that I have also managed to knock over a container of cochineal, which is creeping upwards through the white wool in a greedy red tide.
    All composure deserts me: the cloak, a fine piece, finer than any I could ever afford to buy for myself, was one of Ismail’s own, and now it is ruined. Usually when you are given a gift you can do with it as you will, but the sultan has an acute memory and an unfortunate way of asking why you are not wearing whichever item he has grandly presented to you: I have seen more than one man lose a limb, or his life, over an unsatisfactory answer.
    Snatching up the corner, I begin to wring the red liquid out of it, only to find it thicker and darker than cochineal and sticky on my palms; and now a bitter tang fills my mouth and nose, a smell that has nothing to do with crushed beetles, or incense or anything beautiful or sacred.
    Looking down in some dread now, I find that the obstacle over which I stumbled is indeed the corpse of Sidi Kabour. Someone has slit his throat for him as neatly as a sheep’s at Eid. His handsome white beard has been severed too and lies on his chest in a great clot of gore. And in the moment of his death his bowels have voided, which is the filthy smell that underlies the iron: the incense brazier must have been laden with whatever came to hand in an attempt to mask the stink.
    A great sadness fills me. Muslims teach that death is an obligation upon us, a task to be completed and never shirked; that it is neither a punishment nor a tragedy, and not to be feared. But somehow that gentle philosophy does not encompass the brutality of this death. Sidi Kabour was a fastidious man in life: that he should have been butchered so and left to lie in a sea of his own blood and filth with his eyes gazing unseeing into the gloom is repulsive. I bend to close those poor, staring eyes, and find something protruding from his grey lips. I prise it away.
    Even before I examine it I know with a dull certainty what it is. A chewed corner of the list I made of Zidana’s demands: clearly the old man tried to prevent its being taken by eating it. That, or someone has forced it into his mouth. The rest is gone, but whether into Sidi Kabour’s gullet or the hands of his murderer I do not know. Nor can I stay to find out: for another terrible thought strikes me; then another.
    The first is that I am covered in blood and will be clearly marked out as the assassin. The second is the memory of laying the priceless Qur’an down at my feet when righting the shelf on which the jar of eyeballs rests.
    Feeling bile rise into my throat, I turn around, only to have my worst fears confirmed. The once-spotless