The hour being late, and all of us quite hungry, the Sultan clapped his hands and servants immediately brought in food and drink. The dinner was unremarkable: mujadara, a roast goat, water, coffee. But the food encouraged the Sultan in his native good humor and in his, I had often hoped, sincere friendliness toward me. He asked me to talk of the Thames or of Paris, but I, continuing with my new plan, talked only of the streets in London that bordered the Thames, and of the bridges over it, not of the course of the river itself below or above London. The Sultan laughed at my descriptions of London’s crowded streets and of the noise of the wagons at night, though he thought the making of such noise when men should be sleeping uncivilized. “But perhaps you Christians do not sleep at night?” he asked. “Or rather, you do not let your women sleep?” I told him that Christian women do not let their men sleep, and the Sultan laughed.
But suddenly he stopped laughing. He leaned toward me and whispered that he would show me his wives. This sudden intimacy and confidence surprised me. I thought it prudent to encourage him and told him how honored I would be. I imagined the Sultan meant to introduce me to his wives, that he would call them into the room, but instead he led me down a long, narrow corridor to a low door, and beyond the door a black room. The Sultan promptly entered that room and I followed, knocking my knee against a bench, which I sat on, and I saw before me a row of three peepholes. The Sultan was looking through one of them. It shocked me to realize that he wanted me to observe his wives while they slept, but when I looked through the peephole I saw to my further surprise that the women in the room beyond us were not sleeping, but rather bathing in a small, tiled pool.
There were three of them, none particularly lovely, though at that late hour, with their long day ended and apparently unaware of our presence, even the most plain among them displayed a weary, comely peace. I wondered which had aroused Ibn Faleiha’s opposition.
They splashed about their pool, and their soft laughter and the sight of them bathing by candlelight aroused me, though I was careful to hide my feelings. I did not know what reaction the Sultan expected from me. To appear too interested in his bathing wives was an obvious danger: these women were above temptation if I valued my life.
The Sultan seemed impatient. He leaned over to me. “One of my wives is very special,” he whispered, “a kind of woman you will have never seen in your Christian England.”
“Which one?” I whispered back, thinking that even the working women of my country compared favorably with any of these, but the Sultan did not refer to one of the women in the pool.
“She sits in the doorway on the far side of the room, waiting her turn at the water,” he said.
I looked again through the peephole and indeed saw a woman crouched in the shadows of the doorway, still fully clothed in her veil and robes.
“Watch her,” the Sultan said.
I wondered why the woman the Sultan regarded with such esteem waited to bathe until all had others finished, but I could think of no reason except, perhaps, disease. The Sultan grew more and more impatient with the time his three other wives took in the pool. I began to think that he would presently shout through the peephole for them to be gone, but he said nothing, and presently they left. We watched them wrap themselves in robes and leave the room. Each of them, when she passed the woman kneeling in the doorway, would not approach her, but attempted to pass her by with as much distance between them as possible. No one spoke to her.
When the last of the three had hurried past, the woman in the doorway stood and approached a bench situated on the far side of the pool, which she faced, keeping her back to us, and she began to disrobe. I started to feel our voyeurism perverted, but I dared not question the Sultan’s scruples, feeling that I could not risk his apparent trust in me, arguably worth a great deal toward the eventual salvation of my life, and of Abdullah’s. So I joined the Sultan in watching.
First off came a jeweled bracelet, then the veil, revealing—to my astonishment—fair skin and long braids of blond hair, which she untied and shook out and which fell halfway between her shoulders and her waist, her back being exceptionally long. The blond hair particularly surprised me, mine being the only blond hair I had supposed to exist in all the regions of Africa I had visited. I wondered about the woman before me, and her origins, as she untied her robes and let them fall about her feet. What I saw then will remain forever etched in my memory. A raised ridge of bone ran down her back where the spine would be. She turned and stepped into the pool, holding her arms out from her to balance her steps, and where her breasts should have been were two more arms, tiny, folded together. When her chest touched the water the second set of arms opened to swirl the water before her. Her mouth emitted a soft clacking sound, and she sighed as leathery wings lifted up behind her, wings originally hidden in folds of flesh along the bony spine. I saw then that her lips were stiff, that the chin remained strangely immobile while she made the clacking sounds.
I looked away, horrified, and saw that the Sultan was watching me. “Is she not fine?” he whispered.
I could say nothing in reply.
“Look at her,” he whispered. “Certainly your kings in England do not have wives like her.”
I looked back through the peephole and saw that the “woman,” if indeed that is what she were, was preening her wings with a long tongue distended from her immobile mouth, a tongue that reminded me at once of the proboscis of butterflies.
“You are correct, Sultan,” I whispered. “In England there are no women like her.”
We were quiet for a time, watching. I felt certain it was the Sultan’s marriage to this creature that Ibn Faleiha had opposed. “Where is she from?” I asked.
The Sultan drew away from me at once, and I realized I had asked something amiss.
“Come,” he said. “I must keep my little secrets, too.”
He motioned me out of the room and softly closed the door behind us. I was glad to be spared another sight of his special wife.