“You,” she said, tears dragging across the words like flesh over a rusty knife. “By Allah, Betula, you pushed me! Oh, Allah, I am shamed forever. Abd ar-Rahman! I want to die. And it’s your fault!”
“It was meant in fun,” Betula said in weak self-defense. But every eye on the Mufti’s daughter felt that her dowsing with orchid root juice was but easy punishment for what, it now seemed obvious, she had caused.
We quickly bundled my lady first in her veil (which for the first time in her life didn’t seem heavy enough) and then in numerous quilts to try and keep her warm. We packed her under the canopy on the boat with the curtains drawn as tightly as possible to hold in the warmth of the day. Then we prepared to sail at once. The sharp wind that often comes up at sunset and was the delightful close of many an outing-—teasing the curls and tossing up a wild salt spray to carry on one’s face into the harem again—this wind must now be avoided at all costs.
I had hustled the last of our slave girls on board and was about to follow them myself when I saw Umm Kulthum approaching. In one hand she held my lady’s bedraggled cap and veil which her son, she explained, had found further downstream. She took the opportunity to apologize for the accident.
“Accident!” I repeated. I was very angry. More than pride was hurt. Gul Ruh was young, but I wondered it either of us would recover from the events of that day. “This was no accident. Your daughter did it on purpose. She must have plotted it at least as long ago as their first exchange of dresses.” Then I quite forgot myself and flared, “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were in on the plot. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this whole outing was planned with no other purpose in mind than to humiliate my lady.”
“Not to humiliate her, no,” Umm Kulthum said.
To my surprise, that was as far as her refutation went. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I’d felt ready to apologize for the attack, but now I was glad I’d spoken as I had.
“I only want to see that my dear husband—may Allah favor him—has his last wish fulfilled. I only want to see that Gul Ruh does become my dear, sweet daughter-in-law at last. She shall be the joy of my old age, if only Allah will.”
“But Abd ar-Rahman? Now that he—”
“But that’s the problem we had to overcome, you see. Every time I bring the question up, he says, ‘Oh, Mother. There are a thousand other girls in the Realm of Islam I could marry. Who wants to get mixed up with the royal house when there is a choice? As the old sage Ahnaf bin Qays once said, “Rulers have no friends.” Choose, if you must. Mother, though I’m convinced a wife is only a stumbling block to study. And if you must choose, do not choose a Sultan’s daughter.’
“Well,” Umm Kulthum continued, “as long as he thought like this, he would not ask his brothers to go beg for her hand from her uncle, the Shadow of Allah. And if they would not go, what is the use of me going to her mother? Anyway, his eldest brother is now hatching plans to marry Abd ar-Rahman to the daughter of the present Mufti. Oh, what a scheming, grabbing son my firstborn is, Allah save him! He wants the connection. But the girl? A dull, lifeless thing.
“He’s already sent me to interview her mother, and when I saw the girl, I couldn’t bring myself to broach the subject. I told him the daughter wants time to consider, for she is but young. Young? She’s older than Abd ar-Rahman, Allah shield him. But what my son doesn’t know, hidden in the harem, need not come out in the open. Even five fewer years would not make her better favored. Such an ugly dish clout with a voice like the clang of cheap copper vessels. And dull-witted!
“Now your Gul Ruh, Allah bless her, is a scholar. But this girl? You’re lucky to get her through her prayers once a day. What would my son and she talk about, I ask you? Betula has had more contact with her and wishes she had less, so my daughter came in on this plot with me rather than see that Mufti’s girl brought into our home. If there’s anything that would turn Abd ar-Rahman, Allah forbid, into a tedious old scholar with holes in his brain where joy and connubial bliss ought to be—all before he’s twenty-five—it would be to marry such a girl.
“He’s my favorite, my baby. Can you understand? Though he’s foolishly ignorant of the fact, having never seen her until today, Gul Ruh is the only woman who can make him happy and I want him to be happy.”
“Lady, I am indeed sorry for you,” I said with biting sarcasm. “To be so ignorant of your son, though you say he is your favorite. Abd ar-Rahman is a young man of fierce piety. He would have to be a gypsy or a pagan before he could find shame such as we were forced to display today attractive.”
I turned to go with an angry flourish, but I saw that my words had no effect on her. She bade us farewell, her pretty plump shoulders and eyebrows rising in a shrug that did nothing to erase her self-satisfied grin.
LVII
One week to the day later, the palace harem was entertaining Umm Kulthum, the Mufti’s widow, again. But
