trying to remember something with her fingertips. “Are you hungry, my lord?”
“I am famished for you,” he replied.
“Are you thirsty, my lord?”
“I thirst for you as a traveller thirsts for the waterhole when he has been hunting seven days in the desert under the relentless sun.”
“Come,” she whispered, and took his hand. She led him into the inner room. Their angareb stood in the centre of the floor and he saw that the linen upon it had been washed, bleached and smoothed with a hot iron, until it shone like the salt pan of Shokra. She knelt before him and removed his uniform. When he stood naked she rose and stepped back to admire him. “You bring me vast treasure, lord.” She reached out and touched him. “An ivory sceptre, tipped with the ruby of your manhood.”
“If this is treasure, then show me what you bring in exchange.”
Naked, her body was moon pale, and her breasts bulged weightily, the nipples as large as ripe grapes, wine dark and swollen. She wore only a slim gold chain round her waist, and her belly was rounded and smooth as polished granite from the quarries above the first cataract.
Her hands and feet were decorated with fine acanthus-wreath patterns of henna.
She shook out the dark tresses of her hair, and came to lie beside him on their mattress. He gloated over her with his eyes and fingertips, and she moved softly as his hands dictated, raising her hips and twisting her shoulders so that her bosom changed shape and no secret part of her body was hidden from him.
“Your quimmy is so beautiful, so precious, that Allah should have set it in the forehead of a ravening lion. Then only the valiant and the worthy might dare to possess it.” There was wonder in his voice. “It is like a ripe fig, warmed in the sun, splitting open and running with sweet juices.”
“Feast to your heart’s content upon the fig of my love, dear lord,” she whispered huskily.
Afterwards they slept entwined and their own sweat cooled them. At last old Liala brought them a bowl of dates and pomegranates, and a jug of lemon sherbet. They sat cross-legged on the angareb facing each other and Bakhita made her report to him. There was much for her to relate, great and dire news from the south, from Nubia and beyond. The Arab tribes were all in a state of flux and change, new alliances forged and century-old ties broken. At the centre of all this turmoil sat the Mahdi and his khalifa, two venomous spiders at the centre of their web.
Bakhita was older than Penrod by three years. She had been the first wife of a prosperous grain merchant, but she was unable to bear him a child. Her husband had taken a younger woman to wife, a dull-witted creature with broad, childbearing hips. Within ten months she had given birth to a son. From this positron of marital power she had importuned her husband. He had tried to resist her, for Bakhita was clever and loyal and with her business acumen he had doubled his fortune in five short years. However, in the end the mother of his son had prevailed. Sorrowfully he had spoken the dread words: lTalaq! Talaq! Talaq! I divorce thee!” Thus Bakhita had been cast into that terrible limbo of the Islamic world inhabited only by widows and divorced women.
The only paths that seemed open to her were to find an old husband with many wives who needed a slave without having to pay the head price or to sell herself as a plaything to passing men. But she had honed the wiles of a merchant while serving her husband. With the few coins she had saved she bought shards of ceramics and chipped, damaged images of the ancient gods from the Bedouin and from the orphans who scratched in the ruins, the dry riverbeds and nullahs of the desert, then sold them to the white tourists who came up the river on the steamers from the delta.
She paid a fair price, took a modest profit and kept her word, so soon the diggers and grave-robbers brought her porcelain and ceramics, V religious statuettes, amulets and scarabs that, after four thousand years, 5 were miraculously perfect. She learnt to decipher the hieroglyphics of the ancient priests on these relics, and the writings of the Greeks and Romans who came long after them; Alexander and the Ptolemy dynasty, ; Julius Caesar and Octavian who was also Augustus. In time her reputation spread wide. Men came to her little garden to trade and to talk. Some had travelled down the great river from as far afield as Equatoria and Suakin. With them they brought news and tidings that were almost as precious as the trade goods and the relics. Often the men talked more than they should have for she was very beautiful and they wanted her. But they could not have her: she trusted no man after what the man she had once trusted had done to her.
Bakhita learnt what was happening in every village along the course of the great river, and in the deserts that surrounded it. She knew when the sheikh of the Jaalin Arabs raided the Bishareen, and how many camels he stole. She knew how many slaves Zubeir Pasha sent down to Khartoum in his dhows, and the taxes and bribes he paid to the Egyptian governor in the city. She followed intimately the intrigues of the court of Emperor John in high Abyssinia, and the trade manifests in the ports of Suakin and Aden.
Then one day a small ragged urchin came to her with a coin wrapped in a filthy rag that was like no coin she had seen before or since. It filled the palm of her hand with the weight of fine gold. On the obverse was the portrait of a crowned woman, and on the reverse a charioteer wearing a laurel wreath. The surfaces were so pristine that they seemed to have been struck the previous day. She was able to read the legend below each portrait readily. The couple on the coin were Cleopatra Thea Philopator and Marcus Antonius. She kept the coin and showed it to no one, until one day a man came into her shop. He was a Frank and for a while she was speechless, for in profile he was the image of the Anthony on her coin. When she recovered her tongue, they talked for a while with Bakhita veiled and old Liala sitting in close attendance as chaperone. The stranger spoke beautiful poetic Arabic, and soon he did not seem to be a stranger. Without knowing it she began to trust him a little.
“I have heard that you are wise and virtuous, and that you may have items to sell that are beautiful and rare,” he asked at last.
She sent Liala away on some pretext, and when she poured another thimble of thick black coffee for her guest she contrived to let her veil slip so that he could glimpse her face. He started, and stared at her until she readjusted it. They went on speaking but something hung in the air, like the promise of thunder before the first winds of the khamsin.
Bakhita was gradually overtaken by an overpowering urge to show him the coin. When she placed it in his hand he studied the portraits gravely, then said, “This is our coin. Yours and mine.” She bowed her head in silence and he said, “Forgive me, I have offended you.”
She looked up at him and removed the veil so he could look into her eyes. “You do not offend me, Effendi,” she whispered.
“Then why do your eyes fill with tears?” ?,
“I weep because what you said is true. And I weep with joy.”
“You wish me to leave now?”
“No, I wish you to stay as long as your heart desires.”
“That may be a long time.”
“If it is God’s will,” she agreed.
In the years that followed that first meeting she had given him everything that was in her power to give, but in exchange had asked from him nothing that he would not give freely. She knew that one day he would leave her, for he was young and came from a world where she could never follow him. He had made her no promise. At their first meeting he had said, “That may be a long time,” but he had never said, ‘always’. So she did not try to exact a pact from him. The certainty of the ending added a poignancy to her love that was sweet as honey and bitter as the wild melon of the desert.
This day she sat with him and told him all she had learnt since they had last spoken twenty-six days before. He listened and asked questions, then wrote it all out on five pages from his despatch notebook. He did not need to consult a cipher for he had learnt by heart the code that Sir Evelyn Baring had given him.
Old Liala covered her head with her widow’s cloak and slipped out into the alley carrying the despatch tucked into her intimate undergarments. The sergeant of the guard at the British military base knew her as a regular visitor. He was under strict orders from the base intelligence officer, so he personally escorted her to the headquarters building. Within the hour the message was buzzing down the telegraph line to Cairo. The following morning it had been deciphered by the signals clerk at the consulate and the en clair text was on the consul general’s silver tray when he came in from breakfast.
Once she had sent Liala to the base with the report, Bakhita came back to Penrod. She knelt beside his stool and began to trim his sideburns and moustache. She worked quickly and, with the expertise of long practice, had soon reduced his fashionable whiskers to the ragged shape of a poor Arab fellah. Then she turned to his dense
