Cold bugger, Nicholas can hear Cathal Connell saying. Eyes like a peregrine’s. Not the sort of Moor you’d care to cross.
‘Did he know who I was?’
‘Of course. The governor of Safi sends a message ahead.’
‘And the key?’
‘His Excellency says I am to take you to the same house the sultan gives to my friend Sy-kess. I am to see you well lodged there. Then, when the sultan wishes to see the letters you bring from the England queen, he will send word for you. That is good, yes?’
‘How long do you think I’ll have to wait?’
Hadir shrugs. ‘His Excellency al-Annuri does not tell Hadir. Hadir is less than the dust on his sandal. He will send word when the sultan is ready.’
‘In that case, once I’ve had the opportunity to sleep a while, I would ask a favour of you, Hadir.’
‘You have but to name it, Sayidi Nich-less, and it will be done – inshā Allāh.’
‘I would like to visit Master Sykes’s grave. Is that possible?’
A happy grin, but a hesitation nonetheless. Slight, but noticeable. ‘Is easy, Sayidi Nich-less. Is in the Aduana quarter: in the Christian cemetery. I take you there later.’
‘And then I’d like to see the place where he had–’ Nicholas pauses. How much does Hadir suspect about Sykes’s death? he wonders. Is there perhaps the possibility that the new, self-appointed factor for the Barbary Company knows more than he has so far admitted? ‘I’d like to see where Adolfo Sykes met with his unfortunate accident.’
‘Why does Sayidi Nich-less wish these things? He was not your friend.’
Nicholas puts on the smile he keeps for distrusting patients. ‘Master Sykes died here in the service of my country. The least I can do is to mark his passing.’
Hadir contemplates Nicholas’s answer for a moment. ‘It shall be done as you ask,’ he says, nodding wisely. ‘But first we go to your lodgings. Sharif al-Annuri says I must stay close with you always – like a shadow.’
And to help Hadir in this important task, Nicholas notices, the imposing Muhammed al-Annuri has thoughtfully left behind two taciturn young men of fighting age, clad in white robes, a scimitar at the belt and a threatening aloofness about the eyes. The sort of men you’d employ if you wanted to protect a precious possession.
Or to guard a valuable prisoner.
As they step out from the shade of a winding lane and into the merciless glare of the sun, Hadir announces they have almost reached the house on the Street of the Weavers. Shading his eyes, Nicholas looks ahead.
He is standing at the rim of an open, circular space. It is large enough to stage a decent May Day fair – fire-eaters, jugglers and performing bears included. But there is no scene of bucolic entertainment to meet his eyes, no courting couples sneaking off into the woods while their parents watch a morality play, no archery contests, no one dressed up as Queen Elizabeth smiting the village clod-pate, disguised as Philip of Spain. Some other purpose is being enacted in this open furnace. It takes Nicholas a while to comprehend what he is seeing.
It is a market. But the merchandise on sale is human. Small clusters of people – some naked, almost all with shaven heads – stand cowering as though they’ve been caught in a storm and have nowhere to shelter, no alternative but to brace themselves for the downpour. The stink of confined human bodies hangs in the air like a hot fog.
As his eyes adjust to the light, he sees that many are Blackamoors, but not enough to make the scene uniform. There are numerous white faces, too. Prospective buyers walk amongst the huddled groups, inspecting the wares for breadth of back and conformation, while the merchants beat their stock into pleasing postures with lengths of cane.
How does a human soul not break when it finds itself in such a place as this? Nicholas wonders. What hopes and plans did these people have, what ambitions, before ill fortune tore them to pieces? Surely, he thinks, when God created people, He never intended that they should be of no more value than a stool in a bedchamber, or a cart in a barn – just another possession. He remembers the despair that had engulfed him when his own life had been ruptured by the deaths of Eleanor and the child she was carrying. If it had not been for Bianca, he would have given in. Perished. What possible hope of redemption can these poor souls have?
Thinking of her brings an overwhelming loneliness flooding over him. He pictures her at her bench in her apothecary shop, mixing her cures with one hand while she pushes those heavy, dark tresses back from her forehead with the other. He sees her in the Jackdaw, herding the errant Rose, the girl she likes to call Mistress Moonbeam; hears her putting Walter Pemmel in his place, her voice gentle but implacable. In his mind, he even can smell her: the rosewater she likes to splash on her neck, and which is one of her few extravagances. And he wonders if she has forgiven him yet for leaving her.
‘Are there no slaves in England?’ asks Hadir, seeing the expression on Nicholas’s face.
He is about to reply with an emphatic No. To protest. To insist that all Englishmen are freeborn. But then he remembers the English indentured servants who are tied through contract to their masters, the day-labourers who carry like mules for pennies, the Bankside doxies who sell their bodies in the stews, and the vagrants and vagabonds forced onto the road through destitution. So he confines his answer to a bland, ‘Where have they come from, Hadir?’
‘Everywhere,’ Hadir tells him. ‘Some come across the desert from Arabia. Some from Africa. Some are captured at sea by our corsairs. Some are captured in battle. Some are sold by their own families. An important man is judged by the slaves he can count. Hadir shall find you many slaves.’ A conspiratorial dip of the eyes. ‘Women, too, for concubines. Tomorrow Hadir will take you to the market so you may choose your own slaves. I tell you which dealer to trust. You must have cook and washerman. And a fellow to carry a sun canopy for you.’ He places a hand over his head to illustrate the necessity.
‘I’d rather you find me willing servants I can pay,’ Nicholas says.
‘Sayidi Sy-kess was the same,’ Hadir laments, rolling his eyes at the strangeness of the infidel mind. ‘This is what comes of having a woman sultan!’
From the outside, the house on the Street of the Weavers resembles a squat, defensive tower raised to guard some wild and disputed borderland. The plain walls are made of compacted mud and pierced by nothing that could ever claim to be a window. With the key al-Annuri gave him, Hadir opens a door carved with intricate arabesque designs. Nicholas follows him inside. Ducking under a low lintel, his sun-soaked eyes register little but darkness. He smells cedar, cinnamon and hot plaster.
And then he steps out from a cloister of graceful arches into an inner garden bathed in sunlight. There are olive trees in the garden, and a fountain set upon a mosaic plinth. There are strange shrubs with spikes instead of leaves. There are tiled paths that quarter the flowerbeds. Looking up, he sees the cloister has an upper gallery where little windows peer down in approval of his captivation, and sparrows sing beneath a square of brilliant blue sky.
‘Sultan al-Mansur is a generous man,’ Nicholas says admiringly under his breath to no one in particular as he looks around his temporary new home.
Hadir leads him back into the cloister and up an enclosed staircase. They emerge onto a roof terrace that runs around all four sides of the house, affording a magnificent view over the city. On one side he can see the tower of the Koutoubia mosque rising into the sky, on another the vast walls of what he takes to be Sultan al-Mansur’s palace. He lets his gaze expand out beyond the city, across distant groves of date palms to the hazy horizon and the snow-capped curtain of the High Atlas.