XV
Light appeared at the end of the corridor, a door open to trees in their first green haze of spring. Under the trees, fresh manure on the newly turned beds and the freshly shooting perennials hummed with flies and hornets in the Quince’s herb garden. We turned to the right before leaving the building, and entered the surgery.
The bellies of row upon row of Chinese porcelain, Japanware, and blue Persian jars leaned in upon my little lady and me from the walls of the narrow room. The smells of their contents assailed our noses. Sweet cloves and cinnamon, sharp garlic and bitter gentian. There were the darker odors of moss, clay, and virgins’ blood, as if we’d walked into the very heart of a woman’s pelvis. Animal parts preserved in brine—all slaked with a wash of alcohol and a pervading sense of power.
Gul Ruh’s little fingers shifted nervously in my hand and I pressed them tight to reassure her.
There was another smell, and I remembered the buzz of opium tasted under a piney disguise of mastic gum. For all her skill—or perhaps because of it—I had known the Quince to medicate herself into oblivion since before Gul Ruh was born. And, as is the way of such habits, there was very little chance the poppy had loosened its hold on the midwife during the intervening years.
Indeed, as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I found that the room was not deserted, as I’d first suspected. The old Quince was there, slumped behind her table, snoring quietly. She appeared little more than a heap of shabby olive-green clothes, much slept in.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t wake her,” I suggested to my little charge.
“Yes, we must,” Gul Ruh said firmly. “So she can make Mama not hurt anymore.”
“Madam? Madam?” With no response, I turned to Gul Ruh again. “Perhaps another midwife would do as well.”
“No,” she replied firmly. “Mama says the Quince is the best. She brought me into the world and saved my mama’s life when there was little hope.” Gul Ruh tried her shrill little lungs: “Madam?”
At this point another woman bustled herself into the room. I recognized her as the Quince’s new apprentice, a black African everyone was calling the Fig, “to make a regular fruit basket of the infirmary.” She was as blue-black as a fresh fig—and who knew what seeds her heart contained? A large gap between her front teeth exposed only shadows within, as if even enamel couldn’t quite close over the African in her.
The Quince and her apprentice were rumored to be more than coworkers. I didn’t think it was my business to probe further into such affairs, certainly not among women the Sultan and princes were not likely to claim. Slaves must find comfort where they can.
Other rumors were more disconcerting. I’d heard the Fig had been powerful in her homeland—a priestess. No, more. The incarnation of a deity called Yoruba. Yavrube would come to the call of a drum and possess her. And the aura had been exported with her.
The Fig certainly dressed like a queen. Contrasting richly with her skin were more pearls and golden sequins than all but the most favored odalisque was likely to earn. The Fig’s countrymen, I’d heard, would deposit with her any treasure they might earn—or steal—from their masters against the possible purchase of their freedom. Sick or ill-treated slaves might find refuge, and all this she protected under the brilliantly flowered skirt of her power.
Whatever the truth of all these rumors, I sensed them—and more—in the cypress-shadow chill the woman brought into the room with her. The Quince had chosen her replacement well—or perhaps it was the Fig who had chosen. That thought, too, entered my mind as the African came to stand protectively between me and her still-snoring mentor. Finding comfort in slavehood was one thing, fomenting rebellion—and certainly demonic polytheism in the heart of Islam could be nothing else—was another thing all together.
Still, since I had no proof—more than the distinct feeling, a knot of fear in my stomach, that it was actually Yavrube I addressed—I kept my thoughts to myself and merely stated my errand. Wordlessly, she went about fulfilling the order. I read birch and willow on the jars into which the black hand dipped.
“No opium. We want no opium,” I said, casting a glance at the Quince, exposed in her helplessness again.
The Fig honed her ebony eyes—shooting her demon out to scrutinize me?—but said nothing.
Then, as if opium were the word that conjured, the Quince began slowly, slowly to rouse.
“Madam Quince?” I greeted her politely around the flash of her assistant, whose gold- and pearl-polished movements were gaining velocity. “Peace to you, madam.”
“Hello?” There seemed to be gravel in the older woman’s chest.
“Hello, madam. I’ve come—”
“Who...who are you?”
“Abdullah, madam. From Esmikhan Sultan. I’ve come—”
“Esmikhan?” The Quince bolted upright as if I’d blasphemed. Her old, lined, fuzzy face paled, then grew greener than the scarf around her head. “Esmikhan Sultan,” she breathed. A curse.
I didn’t know what to say. Gul Ruh chirped instead, “My mama has a pain in her belly and wants you—”
“Who?” growled over the gravel. The Quince lifted one knobby finger that tremored out of control. “What child is that?”
The Fig shimmered defensively, catching her mistress and spilling the handkerchief of simples she’d gathered in the process. I stepped, too, trying to get between the threat of that finger and my little lady.
“This is Esmikhan’s daughter, Gul Ruh.” I spoke soothingly. “You remember, madam. You birthed her.”
“Dead!”
A violent jerk flung the old woman out of the Fig’s arms and across her work table. Stacks of books and mortars and pestles in three sizes went flying into a filigree stand that held a small glass bowl over a lamp’s flame. Glass shattered. The flame went out and threw up a pall of acrid smoke.
“That child should be dead. With the rest of them. The rest of them. Dead. Babies. Dead.”
I was
