An Evil Eye

52

A single lamp burned low on an inlaid table, and above it a lozenge of incense drifted its heavy scent into the air.

Pembe lay against the pillows quite still, her eyes motionless, her hands folded placidly on her breast.

The girl neither saw the lamplight nor smelled the perfume in her nostrils. Her thoughts wandered down the cramped, dark corridors of her own small past, and into the ruins of her future.

In the past she could see a man in a sheepskin hat. Her father greases his carbine with mutton fat. A woman stoops to drag the stones from a patch of ground: when she straightens she is beautiful; she turns a wisp of her hair in her fingers and tucks it back beneath her kerchief and the hair is streaked with gray.

The girl remembered the first time she saw the sea. A ship. She thought they were both beautiful. The sun glittered on the water as it rose, lighting her path: a road strewn with flashing jewels.

Jewels around her neck; perfume between her breasts, and the tinkling of the bangles that she wore around her ankles. The path had glittered and she had smiled, knowing she was beautiful like the sea. Of course she had been chosen. Unafraid, warming the prince with that smile and the unblemished beauty of her white limbs.

There was to be a boy. His first. Her precious charge. For him she would be the man who oiled a gun, the woman who picked stones: unremitting, watchful, no fool. But she would be the khadin, too, first of them all, with honor and wealth and a world at her command. One day, at the end of the glittering road, valide.

Instead of which, an evil day brought her a girl. Nothing-and worse than nothing. A monster. Freak. A cursed thing, which had lived only a few days.

The door opened slowly and she saw the aga come in.

He tiptoed to the divan. She swayed as his weight settled, but she did not blink or move her hands.

Her mind picked among the pathways: something that stood between her and the light. A dark form. Not a man. Not a beast.

It was a woman, and Pembe’s heart burned with a desire for revenge.

When she spoke, the aga did not recognize her voice. “I know who did this to me.”

Ibou glanced nervously around the room. “It is the will of God, Pembe. It should strengthen you.”

The girl turned her head and spat.

“It happened after she came,” she went on. “When she beheld me with her eye. I felt it on me, but then I was not afraid.”

“Nonsense,” Ibou replied. He patted her hand.

The girl’s lips peeled back. “Talfa.” She spat the name through bared teeth. “She was jealous. Because I was young and beautiful, and was growing with a child. She wished to kill me in her heart.”

“The lady Talfa?” The aga glanced uneasily at the door. “You are alive, by the will of God.”

Her head sank back onto the pillow. “No, aga. No. I am dead already.”