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We move into the harem as the easiest and most convenient rooms for
my three sisters and me, and the harem servants light the braziers in
the cool evenings and scatter the scented herbs as if we were the
sultanas who lived secluded behind the screens for so long. We have
always worn Moorish dress at home and sometimes at great state
occasions, so still there is the whisper of silks and the slap of
slippers on marble floors, as if nothing has changed. Now we study where
the slave girls read, we walk in the gardens that were planted to
delight the favorites of the sultan. We eat their fruits, we love the
taste of their sherbets, we tie their flowers into garlands for our own
heads, and we run down their allèes where the heavy scent of roses and
honeysuckle is sweet in the cool of the morning.
We bathe in the hammam, standing stock-still while the servants
lather us all over with a rich soap that smells of flowers. Then they
pour golden ewer after golden ewer of hot water over us, splashing from
head to toe, to wash us clean. We are soothed with rose oil, wrapped in
fine sheets and lie, half drunk with sensual pleasure, on the warm
marble table that dominates the entire room, under the golden ceiling
where the star-shaped openings admit dazzling rays of sunlight into the
shadowy peace of the place. One girl manicures our toes while another
works on our hands, shaping the nails and painting delicate patterns of
henna. We let the old woman pluck our eyebrows, paint our eyelashes. We
are served as if we are sultanas, with all the riches of Spain and all
the luxury of the East, and we surrender utterly to the delight of the
palace. It captivates us, we swoon into submission, the so-called
victors.
Even Isabel, grieving for the loss of her husband, starts to smile
again. Even Juana, who is usually so moody and so sulky, is at peace.
And I become the pet of the court, the favorite of the gardeners, who
let me pick my own peaches from the trees, the darling of the harem,
where I am taught to play and dance and sing, and the favorite of the
kitchen where they let me watch them preparing the sweet pastries and
dishes of honey and almonds of Arabia.
My father meets with foreign emissaries in the Hall of the
Ambassadors, he takes them to the bathhouse for talks, like any
leisurely sultan. My mother sits cross-legged on the throne of the
Nasrids who have ruled here for generations, her bare feet in soft
leather slippers, the drapery of her kamiz falling around her.
She listens to the emissaries of the Pope himself, in a chamber that is
walled with colored tiles and dancing with pagan light. It feels like
home to her: she was raised in the Alcázar in Seville, another Moorish
palace. We walk in their gardens, we bathe in their hammam, we step into
their scented leather slippers, and we live a life that is more refined
and more luxurious than they could dream of in Paris or London or Rome.
We live graciously. We live, as we have always aspired to do, like
Moors. Our fellow Christians herd goats in the mountains, pray at
roadside cairns to the Madonna, are terrified by superstition and lousy
with disease, live dirty and die young. We learn from Moslem scholars,
we are attended by their doctors, study the stars in the sky which they
have named, count with their numbers which start at the magical zero,
eat of their sweetest fruits and delight in the waters which run through
their aqueducts. Their architecture pleases us: at every turn of every
corner we know that we are living inside beauty. Their power now keeps
us safe: the Alcazaba is, indeed, invulnerable to attack once more. We
learn their poetry, we laugh at their games, we delight in their
gardens, in their fruits, we bathe in the waters they have made flow. We
are the victors, but they have taught us how to rule. Sometimes I think
that we are the barbarians, like those who came after the Romans or the
Greeks, who could invade the palaces and capture the aqueducts and then
sit like monkeys on a throne, playing with beauty but not understanding
it.
Copyright © 2005 by Philippa Gregory Limited. Reproduced by permission of Simon & Schuster Publishing.
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