People of the Book

A White Hair Seville, 1480

WE DO NOT FEEL the sun here. Even after the passage of years, that is still the hardest thing for me. At home, I lived in brightness. Heat baked the yellow earth and dried the roof thatch until it crackled.

Here, the stone and tile are cool always, even at midday. Light steals in among us like an enemy, fingering its narrow way through the lattices or falling from the few high panes in dulled fragments of emerald and ruby.

It is hard to do my work in such light. I must be always moving the page to get a small square of adequate brightness, and this constant fidgeting breaks my concentration. I set down my brush and stretch my hands. The boy beside me rises unbidden and goes to fetch the sherbet girl. She is new here, in the house of Netanel ha-Levi, and I wonder how he came by her. Perhaps, like me, she was the gift of some grateful patient. If so, a generous one. She is a skilled servant, gliding across the tiles silent as silk. I nod, and she kneels, pouring a rust-colored liquid that I do not recognize. “It is pomegranate,” she says, in an unfamiliar tribal accent. She has green eyes, like the sea, but her skin gleams with the tones of some southern land. As she bends over the goblet, the cloth at her throat falls away and I note that her neck is the golden brown of a bruised peach. I puzzle on what hues I would combine to render this. The sherbet is good; she has mixed it so that the tartness of the fruit still tells beneath the syrup.

“God bless your hands,” I say as she rises.

“May the blessings be abundant as rain upon your own,’’ she murmurs. Then I see her eyes widen as they fall upon my work. As she turns, her lips begin to move, and though her accent makes it difficult to be sure, I think that the prayer she whispers is of a different import entirely. I look down at my tablet then and try to see my work as it must appear to her. The doctor gazes back at me, his head tilted and his hand raised, fingering the curl of his beard as he does when he considers some matter that interests him. I have him, there is no doubt of it. It is an excellent likeness. One might say he lives.

No wonder the girl looked startled. It puts me in mind of my own astonishment when Hooman first showed me the likenesses in the paintings that had enraged the iconoclasts. But it is Hooman who would be astonished if he could see me now: me, a Muslim, in the service of a Jew. He did not think he was training me for such a fate. For myself, I have grown accustomed to it. At first, when I came here, I felt ashamed to be enslaved to a Jew. But now my shame is only that I am a slave. And it is the Jew, himself, who has taught me to feel this.

I was fourteen when my world changed. The valued child of an important man, I never thought to find myself sold into bondage. The day the traders brought me to Hooman, it seemed that we passed by the workshops of every trade in the known world. They had a sack over my head so that I would not try to escape, but even through the jute, smells and sounds told which guilds we walked among. I remember the stench rising from the tanners, the sudden sweet tang of the esparto grass in the street of the espadrille makers, the clang of the armorers, the dull beat of the carpet looms, and the stray, discordant notes of the instrument makers testing their wares.

Finally, we came to the pavilion of the book. The guard pulled off my blindfold then, and I saw that the calligraphers’ studio occupied the highest ground and faced south, enjoying the best light. The painters’ studio was set beneath. As the trader led me through the rows of seated figures, not one raised his head from his work to steal a glance at me. The assistants in Hooman’s workshop knew he demanded complete concentration, and how harshly he could punish failure.

A pair of cats lay sleeping, curled together on a corner of his silk carpet. With a wave of his hand, he shooed them off, and signaled me to kneel in their place. He spoke coldly to my guard, and the man bent to slash the filthy rope that bound my wrists. Hooman reached out, lifted my hands and turned them over, examining the places where the twine had cut deep. He barked harshly at the guard before dismissing him. Then he turned to me.

“So, you claim you are a mussawir.” His voice, as he said this last, was a whisper, the swish of brush across polished paper.

“I have painted since I was a child,” I answered.

“So long as that?” he said. The lines around his eyes tightened with amusement.

“I will be fifteen before the end of Ramadan.”

“Is that so?” He reached out and ran a long-fingered hand over my beardless chin. I flinched from him, and he raised his arm sharply, as if to strike me for it. But then he let it fall instead to his side and reached into the pocket of his robe. He said nothing, just looked at me until I felt the heat in my face and dropped my head. To fill the silence, I blurted, “Plants, especially, I am skilled at.”

He withdrew his hand then, and I saw that there was a small bag of embroidered silk pinched between his thumb and forefinger. From it, he drew a grain of rice of the elongated staple such as Persians prize. He handed it to me. “Tell me, ya mussawir, what do you see?”

I stared at the grain, and I suppose my mouth fell slack, like a simpleton’s. Upon it was painted a polo match—one player galloping, his horse’s tail flying as he bore down upon finely wrought goal-posts, another sitting his mount as a servant handed him his stick. You could count the braids in the mount’s mane and feel the texture of the rider’s brocade jacket. As if this were not astonishing enough, there was an inscription also:

He took back the grain then, and placed into my palm a second one. This was plain—a rice grain such as any. “Since you are ‘especially skilled’ at plants, you shall give me here a garden. I will have in it such foliage and flowers as you think best reveal your abilities. You have two days. Take your place over there, among the others.”

He turned from me then, and picked up his brush. He had only to glance across the room and a boy leaped up, the scarlet he had mixed bright as fire, licking the sides of the bowl he cradled between careful hands.

I do not think it will come as any great surprise when I say I failed his test. I had spent my days, before my capture, making drawings of plants known to my father for their medicinal virtues. Thus, healers separated from him by many miles, and even many languages, might know precisely which plant was meant, no matter by what name they might be used to call it. I had thought it exacting work, and had taken pride that my father thought me fit to do it.

My father, Ibrahim al-Tarek, was already an old man when I was born. I arrived into a house so crowded with offspring that I never expected to win any notice from him. Muhammad, the eldest of my six brothers, was more of an age to have been my father; indeed, he had a son born two years before me who proved, for a while, the chief tormentor of my childhood.

My father was a tall man, even with his slight stoop; handsome, even though the flesh of his face was sunken and scoured with lines. After evening prayers, he would come to the courtyard and sit on the woven mats set beneath the tamarisk, listening to the women’s accounts of their day, admiring their weaving, and asking gentle questions about us—the youngest ones—and how we did. When my mother was alive, he sat longest of all with her, and I took secret pleasure in my half-formed understanding of her special place with him. We quieted our voices when he came, and while our games did not stop, they lost intensity. Somehow, we would find ourselves playing nearer and nearer to the place where he sat, ignoring our mothers’ meaning frowns and shooing hands. Finally, he would reach out a long arm and clasp one of us to him, and set that lucky one beside him on the mat for a gentle word. Other times, if we played at hide-and-seek, he would let one or other of us use the long folds of his robe as a hiding place, and laugh at our squeals when we were discovered there.

His rooms—the plain cell where he slept, the library dense with books and scrolls, and the workroom crowded with delicate beakers and jars—these we were never to enter. And I would not have dared to do so, if the lizard who had become my secret companion had not escaped my pocket one afternoon and scurried off along the beaten-earth floor, always just out of reach of my pursuit. I was seven at the time, and my mother had been dead for almost a year. The other women had been kind to me, especially Muhammad’s wife, who was nearer to my mother’s age than my father’s other wives. But despite their care, longing for her ate at my heart, and I suppose the little lizard was one of the many ways I tried to fill the hollow places.

I was just outside the library when I finally caught up with him. My hand hovered over his lacquered skin. His tiny heart beat hard. I lowered my hand, and in an instant he poured like liquid through my fingers and, shrinking himself somehow flat as a riyal, vanished under the library door. My father was out, or so I thought, and so I hesitated for just a moment before pushing the door and entering.

He was an orderly man, in general, but that order did not extend to his books. Later, when I worked beside him, I came to know very well the cause of the chaos that greeted me in his library that afternoon. His scrolls lay along one wall of the room, pressed close, floor to ceiling, so that the circular ends of them were forced a little flat, like the cells of a honeycomb. Somehow, there was an order in which he had laid them, and this he held in his head, for he would pull out a scroll without hesitation, open it on his workbench, and then lean down with his forearms across it. He would stay so, for many minutes or very few, then straighten suddenly so that the scroll snapped closed. He would push it aside then and pace to the other wall, where he kept some score or so of bound volumes. Choosing one, he would leaf through its pages, grunt, pace some more, sweep it, also, to one side and grope for his writing stuffs, scrawl some lines on a parchment, fling down his brush, and then repeat the whole again. By the end of it, there would be as many items on the floor as on the bench.

My lizard had chosen an excellent place to elude me, I thought, as I crawled under the bench, pushing aside papers and fallen volumes. I was down there when my father’s sandaled feet appeared. I abandoned pursuit of my lizard then, and stayed as still as I could, hoping he had come in search of a single scroll and that he would leave again and allow me to slip away undiscovered.

But he did not leave. He had a branch of some glossy green plant in his hand. He set this down and embarked upon the restless ritual I have described. A half hour passed so, then an hour. I grew stiff. My foot, on which my weight rested, fizzed and prickled beneath me. But I did not dare move. As my father worked on, pages of his writing, started and then pushed aside, fell from the bench, along with the branch he had carried in. When one of his pens landed by me, I had grown bored and daring enough to reach for it. I studied a leaf from the branch. I liked the way the blade was divided by ribs into a pattern that seemed as regular and purposeful as the mosaics that lined the walls in the room where my father and my older brothers received their guests. On a corner of my father’s discarded page, I began to draw that leaf. The brush was a marvel to me—a few fine hairs set into the shaft of a feather. With it, if I steadied my hand and concentrated my thought, I could capture exactly the delicacy of the thing I drew. When the ink dried, I replenished it from the spots that fell liberally onto the floor from my father’s impatient scratchings.

Perhaps my movement caught his eye. His large hand reached out and grabbed my wrist. My heart fluttered. He drew me out and stood me before him. I did not take my eyes from the floor, so fearful was I of finding anger in that beloved face. He said my name then, softly and without rancor.

“You know you are not permitted to be here.”

In a trembling voice, I told him of my lizard, and begged his pardon, “but I thought he might perhaps be eaten by one of the cats.”

His grip eased as I spoke. He enfolded my hand in his larger one, and patted it gently. “Well, the lizard has his own fate, as do we all,” he said. “But what is this?” He lifted my other hand then, where I still clutched the page on which I’d made my drawing. He studied it for a moment and said nothing. Then he shooed me out of the room.

In the courtyard that evening, I hung back and did not seek his notice, hoping that he might not think to mention my transgression. Later, when I went, unpunished, to my mat with the others, I congratulated myself on the success of this plan.

The next day, after he led the household in morning prayer, my father called me to his side. My stomach heaved. I thought that I was to be punished after all. But instead my father had brought a fine pen, some ink, and an old scroll only partly scribbled over with his jottings. “I want you to practice,” he said. “Your skill, if it is developed, could be of much help to me.”

I worked hard on those drawings. Every morning, after I set aside the wooden plank on which I learned to write the verses of the Holy Koran—my father insisted that every one of his children attend these lessons—I did not join the games or the chores of the others, but took out my parchment and drew till my hand grew stiff. I relished my father’s notice and wished above anything to be of use to him. By the time I was twelve, I had developed some competence. Almost every day after that, I spent some part of my time in his company, helping him to make the books that mended the health of strangers across a score of countries.

By late afternoon of that first day in Hooman’s studio, I felt as if those sweet years and all their learning had deserted me entirely. As the daylight waned and my hand trembled from the strain of strokes so minute that an observer could not see that any movement had been made, I lay down on my mat in a corner of the workshop and felt both worthless and afraid. Tears stung my tired eyes, and a sob must have escaped me, for the man settling himself upon a mat nearby whispered gruffly that I mustn’t mind. “Be glad that you were not sent instead to the bindery,” he said. “There, the apprentices must learn to draw out a strand of gold so fine it may thread through a hole in a poppy seed.”

“But Hooman will not keep me if I cannot do this work, and yet it is the only skill I have.” On the journey here, after my capture, I had seen other foreign youths my age, clinging terrified to the ship’s rigging in a wild sea, breaking rock in the white-hot glare of the quarries, or coming, hunched and filthy, from the dark mouths of the mines.

“You will not be the first to fail, believe me. He will find some task for you.”

And so he did. He barely glanced at my rice grain before casting it aside. He sent me off to work with the “preparers of the ground”—those painters and calligraphers whose sight had weakened or hands lost their steadiness. All day I sat with those bitter men, rubbing each parchment with mother-of-pearl, perhaps a thousand times, until the page was polished smooth. After a few days of this, the flesh of my fingers puckered and peeled away in shreds. Soon, I could not hold a paintbrush. That was when I gave way to the despair that I had held back since my capture.

I had not allowed myself to think of home, or how we had left it, in celebration, my father’s wives ululating with joy as the hajj caravan departed to the sound of drums and cymbals. I had not allowed myself to think of my father as I saw him last. But now I could not gainsay the images of him, his silvered hair stained with blood and pale gray tissue, a bubble of crimsoned spittle forming on his lips as he tried to mouth the words of his last prayer. His eyes, his desperate eyes, searching my face as the Berber held me, the arm across my throat hard and wide as a tree branch. Somehow, I struggled free of that grip just long enough to shout the words for my father, the words that he no longer had the breath to say: “God is most great! There is no God but God!” I felt a blow and fell to my knees, still crying out for him: “I rely on God!”

There was another, harder blow then. When I came to consciousness, my mouth tasted of iron. I was sprawled facedown in a cart, among our looted goods, moving northward. Painfully, I raised my pounding head to peer through the slatted sides. My father lay there, in the distance, a bundle of rags stirring in the hot desert wind: indigo rags, and atop them, the glossy black feathers of the first vulture.

I lived three months with the preparers of the ground. And now, when I can look back at that time without the fear that attended it—that I would spend my entire life in the tedium of pounding and rubbing and bitter reminiscence—I can accept that I learned a great deal there, especially from Faris. Faris, like me, had been born across the sea in Ifriqiya. Unlike me, he had traveled here voluntarily, to practice his art in the rump state that remained of the once-mighty nation al-Andalus. Unlike the others, he did not boast all the time of the great skill he had once possessed. Nor did he engage in the constant nagging and bickering, as ceaseless as the drone of blowflies.

Faris’s eyes were cloudy as a winter sky. Disease had claimed his sight when he was still quite young. Finally, after I had come to know him, I asked why he had not gone to one of the great doctors of the city. I knew there was an operation that sometimes restored the sight of clouded eyes. I had not seen it myself. My father healed with plants rather than probes, but he had shown me once a fine series of drawings on how such a thing might be done by one who had the skill: a delicate slicing into the eyeball, pushing open the clouded window and tipping it backward into the space behind.

“I had this cutting,” Faris said. “Twice it was tried on me by the emir’s own surgeon. But as you see, the effect was not successful.”

“God put him in the fog and keeps him there in penance for the paintings he made.” The quavering voice came from old Hakim, who had been a calligrapher. He boasted that he had copied twenty Korans in his career, and that the holy words were etched on his heart. If so, they had not softened it. The only gentle words that came from his pursed mouth were his prayers. The rest of his speech was a relentless stream of bile. Now, he rose from his mat, where he had been dozing, shirking his share of toil. Leaning on his stick, he came hobbling to where we sat at our work. He raised the staff and poked it at Faris. “You wanted to create as God creates, and God has punished you for it.”

I touched Faris gently on the arm, questioning, but he shook his head. “Ignorance and superstition,” he muttered. “To celebrate God’s creation is not the same as competing with the Creator.”

The old man raised his voice. “The makers of figured pictures are the worst of men,” he intoned, his speech slipping into the ornamented Arabic of prayer. “Are you so arrogant that you doubt the word of the Prophet?”

“May peace be upon him, I could never doubt his word.” Faris sighed. He had clearly had this argument too many times. “I doubt those who claim that saying as a true one. The Koran, which is beyond all doubt, is silent on such matters.”

“It is not silent!” The old man was shrieking now, hunched over, his yellowed beard almost resting on Faris’s bowed head. “Does not the Koran use the word sawwara to describe how God forms man from a clot? Therefore, God is a mussawir. To call yourself one is usurping him who formed us all!”

“Enough!” Faris had raised his voice now. “Why don’t you tell the boy the truth of why you are here? There is no tremor in his hand, and he sees as well as a falcon. He was dismissed for defacing the art of painters.”

“Dismissed for doing God’s work!” the old man cried. “I cut their throats! Beheaded them all! Murdered them to save the soul of the emir!” He was cackling, as if at some private joke.

I was confused. I looked at Faris, but his whole person was trembling. Sweat had formed on his brow. A bead of it dripped onto the polished paper before him, spoiling the hard effort of a morning. When I placed my hand on his arm, he shook it off. Tossing his piece of pearl shell aside, he rose to his feet and pushed the old man harshly out of his way.

Hooman sent for me two days after. I walked through the studio, noticing things that fear had blurred the first time: the bright shards of lapis lazuli waiting to be ground into blue pigment, the flare of light on wafers of silver, and the old man in a screened alcove, shielded from the slightest breeze, as he picked shimmering patches of color from a pile of butterfly wings. Hooman signaled me to kneel where I had knelt before, on a corner of his carpet. He had one of the cats resting across his arms. He lifted it up to his chin and buried his face in the dense fur for a moment, then, unexpectedly, he held it out to me.

“Take her!” he said. “You’re not afraid of cats, are you?” I shook my head and reached for her. My hands—work ravaged and hardened now with calluses—sank into her softness. The cat appeared large, but was in fact a tiny thing encased in a cloud of fur. She mewled once, like an infant, then curled herself on my lap. Hooman held out a sharp knife, hilt toward me. I winced. Surely he didn’t want me to kill his cat? My face registered my dismay. The lines around his eyes tightened for a moment.

“And where did you think we got the fine hairs for our brushes?” he asked. “The cats are kind enough to supply them.” He lifted the second cat into his own lap and stroked under her chin until she rolled over and stretched her neck. He pinched no more than five or six of the long throat hairs and slid the knife under them.

When he looked at me again, the cat in my lap had stretched herself, pulling back my sleeve so that one white paw lay along my forearm.

“Your skin,” said Hooman softly. He stared at me. I tried to pull the sleeve of my robe down over my wrists, but he put out his hand and stopped me. He continued to stare without seeing me. I knew the look. It was the way my father had studied a tumor, forgetting as he examined it that there was a person to whose body the thing attached. When Hooman spoke again, it was to himself and not to me. “It is the color of blue smoke…no…it is like a ripening plum, with the pale down still dusting it.” I fidgeted, misliking this close attention. “Be still!” he ordered. “I must paint this color.”

And so I sat there until the light failed. When that happened, he dismissed me abruptly, and I went to a vacant pallet in a corner of the studio, not knowing why I had been summoned.

The next day, Hooman handed me the new brushes he had ordered to be made, the cat’s hairs secured in a feather shaft. There were brushes of various sizes. A few contained just a single hair, for the making of the very finest of lines. He gave me, also, a piece of polished parchment. “Give me a portrait,” he said. “You may choose for a subject anyone in the studio.”

I chose the boy who assisted the gold beaters, thinking that his smooth, almond-eyed face best resembled the ideal youths pictured in so many of the finest books. Hooman tossed the page aside after barely looking at it. He stood, abruptly, and signed for me to follow him.

Hooman’s private quarters were set at a little distance from the studio, down a high-vaulted passageway. The room was large, the divan covered in brocade and piled with cushions. In a corner stood a set of small coffers, boxes for the keeping of books. Hooman knelt before the finest of them and opened its carved lid. He lifted the little book inside with great reverence and placed it on the reading stand. “This is the work of my master, the pearl of the world, Maulana of the delicate brush,” he said. He opened the book.

The image shimmered. I had never seen a painting like it. Within the bounds of a small page, the painter had made a world of life and movement. The script, in Persian, I could not read, but the illumination was eloquent enough. The scene depicted a princely wedding. There were hundreds of figures, yet no two of them were alike: every turban was of a different fabric, variously tied. Every robe was of a diverse design, embroidered or appliquéd with a hundred kinds of arabesques. Looking at the painting, you could hear the rustle of silk and the swish of damask as the crowd swirled around the royal bridegroom. I had been used to see the people in pictures depicted face-on or in profile, but this painter had not restricted himself so. The heads he drew were caught in every aspect—some three-quarter profile, some tilted downward, others chin raised. One man’s head was turned completely from the painter, so that all we saw was the back of an ear. But more striking still: every face was unique, as in life. There was such expression in the eyes that I felt as though I could read the thoughts of these men. One beamed, prideful at his inclusion at the feast. Another smirked, perhaps contemptuous of the ostentatious display. A third gazed awestruck at his prince. A fourth grimaced slightly, as though his new sash pinched him.

“You see, now, what makes a master?” Hooman said at last.

I nodded, unable to take my eyes from the image. “I feel…that is, it seems…” I gulped a nervous breath and tried to collect my thoughts. “That which he paints has mass to it, as in life. It is as if any of these men could walk off the page and live.”

Hooman drew his own breath sharply. “Exactly,” he said. “And now I will show you why I have this book, and why it is not any longer the treasured property of the prince for whom it was made.”

He reached down then and turned the page. The next picture was just as dazzling, just as vivid. It depicted the procession bringing the bridegroom to the house of the bride. But this time my gasp of appreciation turned to one of dismay. The difference between this image and the last was that every one of the revelers had a rough red line slashed across his neck.

“Those who did this call themselves iconoclasts—smashers of idols—and they believe they do the work of God.” He closed the book, unable to bear looking at the desecration. “They paint the red line to symbolize the cutting of the throat, you see. The images, thus robbed of life, no longer compete with God’s living creation. Five years ago, a band of these fanatics sacked the pavilion of the book and destroyed many notable works. It is for that reason that you see no portraits produced here. But now a request has come that may not be refused. I want you to try your hand again at this.” He dropped his voice then. “I seek a likeness. Do you understand?”

Determined not to fail this second test, I scanned the faces in the studio. In the end, I chose the old man at work with the butterfly wings. There was an intensity to his expression that I thought I might be able to capture. As well, his composure, and the economy of his movements, would be a help to me.

It took me three days. I had stared at the old man, trying to see him as I had learned to see an unfamiliar plant, emptying my mind not just of all other plants I had painted before, but of all my assumptions about what a plant is—that it has a stem, that leaves come off at such and so an angle, that leaves, in fact, are green. Just so, I looked at the face of the butterfly man. I tried to see it as a pattern of light and dark, void and solid. I made a grid on the page in my mind and divided up his face as if each square of the grid was a separate thing, containing its unique information.

I had to ask for several more pages before I found the way to something that looked alive. My hand shook as I passed my work to Hooman. He said nothing, and his expression did not change, but he did not cast the work aside. When he looked up at me, he scanned my face, and then ran his hand across my chin, as he had at our first meeting.

“An unexpected opportunity has presented itself, and I believe you may be suitable. The emir wishes to appoint a mussawir to the harem. Since such a person must, of course, be cut, it is better if he is a youth not yet come to manhood, just such as yourself.”

I felt the blood run out of my face. I had been too nervous to eat more than a bite or two since my return to the pavilion. Now there was a sound like surf in my head. From far away I could hear Hooman’s voice: “…a life of utmost ease and who knows what ultimate influence…a small price, in the long run…future uncertain otherwise…many others here who paint at least as well as you will ever do…”

I must have tried to stand; perhaps I got to my feet. In any case, just before I fell, I saw my own arm sweeping across Hooman’s table, bowls tipping, and a tide of lapis blue flowing across the floor.

When I awoke, they had laid me on the brocaded divan in Hooman’s private quarters. Hooman stood over me, the lines around his eyes crinkled like crushed vellum. “It seems we will not have to trouble the eunuch maker after all,” he said. “How fortunate, how very fortunate we are, to have been so deceived by you.”

My mouth was dry. When I tried to speak, no words came out of it. Hooman handed me a goblet. There was wine in it. I drained the cup.

“Steady, child. Surely the Muslim daughters of Ifriqiya do not quaff their wine so thirstily. Or are you deceiving us as to your faith, also?”

“There is no God but God and Muhammad is his messenger,” I whispered. “I have not tasted wine until this day. I drink it now because I have read that it gives courage.”

“I do not think that you are lacking in this thing. It has taken courage enough, surely, to live this lie among us as you have done. How came you here, in the jellaba of a boy?”

Hooman knew well enough that I had been sold into his service by the Banu Marin, who kidnapped me from the hajj caravan. “It was my father’s wish that I disguise myself after we left our city,” I said. “He believed I would be more comfortable making the desert crossing if I could ride beside him, rather than stay confined all day to an airless litter. He said also that I would be safer in the guise of a boy, and events proved him right….” At that, the memories pressed on me, and the wine, on my empty stomach, made my head spin. Hooman placed a hand on my shoulder and pressed me gently back against the cushions on his divan. He stared at me and shook his head. “I have always thought myself the most observant of men. Now that I know the truth, it seems impossible to have not known it. I must be getting old, indeed.”

He reached out and ran his hand once again over my face, but this time, he used a touch light as mist. He sank down onto the divan beside me. My clothing had already been loosened, and his hand easily found my breast.

Much later, when I could think about it clearly, I consoled myself that there were many worse ways in which I might have been raped. I had been waiting for it, in truth, from the moment the Berber raiders appeared at the top of the dunes. Hooman’s famous hands did not leave a mark on me. When I struggled and thrashed and tried to get free of him, he subdued me with a skillful grip that pinned me helpless without hurt. Even when he came into me, there was no roughness in it. The shock of it was greater than the pain. I believe I suffered less, in truth, than many brides upon their wedding bed. And yet, when he finally let me rise, and I felt the wetness dribble down my thigh, my legs folded up under me and I knelt by his divan and vomited sour wine on his fine carpet until there was nothing more in me. He gave a great sigh then, adjusted his robes, and went out.

Alone in his quarters, I wept for a long time, composing the list of my life’s losses, from my mother’s death to my father’s murder to my own enslavement. And now, the new, darker place in which I found myself, robbed of my body in the most fundamental way. For an instant, there was a consoling thought; that my father, dead, could not know of this dishonor. But then I realized he must have died imagining just this. I retched again, but there was nothing left.

The eunuch Hooman sent to me was very young. The sight of him reminded me that there were others who suffered losses worse even than mine. The floodtide of my self-pity began to abate. He was a Persian boy who spoke no Arabic. I expect Hooman had considered that, in choosing whom to send. He removed the fouled carpet with an efficient discretion, and then returned with a silver ewer and basin of warmed rosewater. He gestured that he would help me bathe, but I dismissed him. The thought of another’s touch was repulsive to me. He had brought a robe for me to wear, and he took my old garments, holding them far in front of him as if they smelled. Which I suppose they may have done.

I did not sleep for most of that night. But as the sky lightened toward dawn, I realized with relief that Hooman would not return, and fell into an exhausted, dream-racked doze, in which I sat again on the straw mats, listening as my mother hummed at her loom. But when I tugged on her robe to seek her attention, the face that turned to me wasn’t her smiling, patient one, but the ravaged face of a corpse, whose pitiless gaze passed right through me.

The boy woke me, arriving with a new set of clothes. I had not known what to expect. Was I to be got up as an odalisque, since I was destined for the harem? But the clothes he brought were noblewoman’s dress: a simple gown of rose-pink silk, which looked very well against the color of my skin. There were some lengths of Tunisian chiffon in a darker rose, the fabric so fine that I had to double it to wind a veil that would cover my hair. Last of all, there was a blue-black haik in the lightest merino that fell from the crown of my head to the tip of my toes.

When I had dressed, I sat on the divan, feeling despair welling once again inside me. The voice of Hooman interrupted my weeping. He stood outside, asking my permission to enter. Astonished by this, I did not answer. He asked again, in a louder tone. I could not school my voice, so I said nothing.

“Prepare yourself,” he said, and pushed aside the curtain. I felt panic rise in me, and I backed away from him.

“Be at peace. After this meeting, it is unlikely that we will ever see each other again. If you have questions regarding your work, matters of material or technique, you are to write to me of these things—I am right, I think, to recall that you are lettered? Most strange, in a girl—another reason we were deceived—and you are to send me, from time to time, samples of your work for review. I will reply and instruct you as best I can, and if I see areas that require improvement, I shall write of them to you. Although you are far from attaining the rank of master, you are to assume a position that normally would fall to one of such a standing. No matter your feelings toward me, do not discredit my skills, or your own. The work that we do here will live longer than any of us. Remember that. It is of far greater importance than any…personal sentiments.”

A sob escaped me. He winced, and spoke to me coldly.

“Do you think you are the only one brought here bound and humbled? The emira herself walked through the gates of this city in chains, driven at spear point before the warhorse of the man who became her husband.”

He did not need to tell me this: the scandal of the emir’s beautiful captive had been the subject of salacious gossip among the preparers of the ground. Listless as I had been during those months, this story had captured my interest, for it touched on certain aspects of my own history. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion on the matter.

Early in his rule, the emir had famously refused to pay the city’s customary tribute to the Castilians. From now on, he said, “the royal mint makes nothing but sword blades.” Constant skirmishes had been the result. In one of these engagements, the emir had ridden into a Christian hamlet and carried off the daughter of its tax collector. No one had thought anything about the emir taking spoils of war; the Prophet Muhammad himself had taken wives from among both Jews and Christians when his forces had defeated them. It was understood that captives joined the harem from time to time, and rape was briefly legalized as marriage. What had shocked the city was the emir’s elevation of this captive over the emira, a Sevillian noblewoman, the emir’s cousin and the mother of his heir. She had been banished from the palace to her own house outside the walls from where, it was said, she schemed constantly, elicting support from the Abu Siraj, whose ferocity in matters of faith was notorious. The rift had passed far beyond the walls of the harem, and even beyond the city, and rumors now said that the crown of Castile was looking for a way to exploit it.

The Persian eunuch entered then, with goblets of sherbet. Hooman signaled me to take one. “The emir has charged me with his orders in this, and I tell these to you now so that there will be no misunderstanding. The emir is, as you know, very often gone from the city on campaign. He has confided that at such times he misses the sight of the emira, and desires likenesses to which he can turn at such times.

“You will be painting, therefore, for an audience of one. The images will be seen only by the emir, only when he is alone. Your work will be safe, therefore, from the iconoclasts, and you need not fear charges of heresy.”

I had been looking at my hands, wrapped around the goblet, for most of his speech, unable to bear the sight of his face. But now I looked up sharply. He stared back at me, as if challenging me to speak. When I said nothing, he lifted the haik and handed it to me.

“Put this on now. It is time for me to take you to the palace.”

My mother had taught me to walk in my veil as if I had no feet, gliding over the ground as gracefully as a waterbird slides upon liquid. But after so many months living as a boy, I had lost the art. I stumbled several times as we made our way through the crowded alleys of the medina. In their summer attire, the merchants in the courtyard of the caravansary looked as colorful as a field of flowers: there were men in striped Persian linens, Ifriqiyans in jellabas of saffron and indigo, and here and there, moving circumspectly, yellow-breeched Jews, their heads bare of turbans as the law required, even under the punishing sun of noonday.

The sun was blinding as we finally reached the approach to the palace. The walls had been white once, a hundred years ago, but the iron-rich earth had bled through the stucco and warmed them to a rosy madder. With my one uncovered eye, I looked up and saw the inscriptions carved on the great arched doorway, countless numbers of them, as if the voices of a thousand believers had been caught in the swirling stonework, trapped on their way up to the heavens: There is no victor but God.

I entered the huge wooden doors of that place knowing that I might never leave it. An old woman, her face cracked like a dry wadi, received me into the women’s quarters.

“So this is al-Mora?” said the crone. The Moorish woman. In this new life, I was not even to have a name.

“Yes,” Hooman replied. “May she give good service.” And so I was passed off with no more thought than a hand tool. I parted from Hooman without returning his farewell. Yet as the old woman drew the door closed beside me, I had a sudden urge to turn and run through it, to clutch even his despised arm and beg him to deliver me from the palace, whose walls loomed suddenly like a prison.

Since my capture, my mind had fed on every kind of fear. I had pictured myself performing crushing toil in the foulest places—beaten, exhausted, abused. Now, the old woman held out a hand for the haik, which she passed to a beautiful boy, I judged not more than seven or eight years old, who hovered behind her. She signed for me to take off my sandals. A pair of embroidered slippers lay ready for me inside the door. She beckoned me to follow her, and we passed from the portico into rooms whose magnificence has stolen the words from the mouths of the poets.

At first, it seemed as if the walls themselves were in motion, the ceiling swooping down toward me. I raised a hand as if to steady myself, and closed my eyes against the dazzle. When I opened them, I forced myself to look at one small area of the room only, at tiles glazed and colored in blue-green and brown, black and lilac, so cunningly laid that they seemed to be spinning in pinwheels around the lower third of the wall. When I could look up, I saw that the swooping ceiling was in fact a lofty dome, from which descended an upside-down forest of plaster, each shape an echo and a harmony of its neighbor.

We walked, it seemed, through an endless series of chambers as lovely as they were various. Once or twice, a serving girl slid by, nodding deferentially to the older woman and shooting a swift, curious glance at me. In the soft slippers we passed silently through mazes of slender pillars and beside long pools, still as mirrors, reflecting the numberless entwined inscriptions above.

Eventually, we began to climb stone steps into an elevated section of the palace that narrowed as it rose. When we reached the top, the old woman, breathing hard, leaned against the wall and groped in the folds of her garments for a large brass key. She fitted it into the lock and opened the door. The room was round, its white walls bare of decoration except for some remarkable carved and painted stone spandrels around a pair of arched windows set high into the far wall. There was little furniture: a small silk prayer rug, Persian and very fine; a slim divan covered in bright cushions; a low table inlaid with mother-of-pearl; a book stand; and a carved sandalwood chest. I walked to the windows, stood on tiptoe, put my hands to the sill, and hoisted myself up so I could glimpse the outside. The view was of gardens thick with fruit-bearing trees. I recognized fig, peach, almond, quince, and sour cherry, their boughs so laden with fruit that you could not glimpse the ground below them.

“It will do for you?” The old woman spoke for the first time, her voice cracked with age, but cultured. I dropped down from the sill and turned, embarrassed. “They told me of your task, and it seemed good to find you a room alone for the peace and privacy of your work. This one has not been used since the last emira left the palace.”

“It will do very well,” I said.

“A girl will bring refreshment. You must tell her if you require anything particular. You will find that most needs can be met here.”

The old woman turned to go, signaling for the page to follow her. “Please,” I said swiftly, my head full of questions. “Please, if it is permitted to ask, why are there so few people in the women’s quarters?”

The old woman sighed and pressed the heel of her hand to her temple. “May I sit?” she said, already easing her frail body down onto the divan. “I do not think you have been long in the city.”

It was a statement more than a question.

“You come here at a troubled time. The emir presently has but two thoughts in his mind: the war with Castile and his appetite for the girl he now calls Nura.” Her eyes, buried in that lined face like a pair of bright pebbles, scrutinized me closely. “In his folly, he has sent away his cousin Sahar and all her household. The emir trusts no one. He knows his cousin and her taste for conspiracy. He also has sent away the concubines—handed them off hastily to his favorite officers, lest any one of them became a tool of vengeance for Sahar and her son, Abu Abd Allah, who keenly feels his mother’s insult.

“Nura, of course, came here with nothing but the torn robe she stood up in. She has a small retinue to serve her; myself and a handful of half-trained tribal girls who have no allegiances in the city.”

I was too astonished by her frankness to say anything. I glanced with concern at the turbaned boy standing by the wall. “Do not worry about him,” she said. “He is Nura’s brother. He was to be taken for a catamite but, as a favor to his sister, the emir forbears for now from having him used so. I am to train him for a page.” She sighed again, but a hint of a smile lit her eyes.

“You think me irreverent? It is natural to lose your reverence of princes when you’ve seen them limp-membered and panting like dogs. I was concubine to this emir’s grandfather. The old goat’s flesh already stank of death when he took me to his bed. This one,” she said, inclining her head in the direction of the throne room, “I suckled, and I’ve watched him ever since. A brat born and a bloody tyrant grown. He had the head struck off every high-bred youth in the city who might have challenged for the throne. And now he has it, and he throws it all away and puts the very city at risk, simply to scratch an itch in his crotch.”

She tossed her head then and cackled. “I have shocked you! Do not mind my rough old tongue. I have grown too bent with age for any further bowing.” She stood, rising with an ease that belied all her talk of infirmity. “You will see how it is, soon enough. You are to attend the emira tomorrow. I will send a girl to fetch you.”

I wanted to thank her for her openness, but as I began to speak, I realized that I had no idea how to address her. “Please, what is your name?”

She smiled then, and gave another cackle. “My name? I have had so many names I hardly know which one to give you. Muna, I was called when the old man wished his withered cock was hard enough to have me every night. ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,’ eh?” The cackle died, and her face folded in on itself. “Then I was Umm Harb for the strong son I bore—just one of the brave youths who died at the point of his half brother’s sword. It seems that name sticks in throats now. So they call me just Kebira.”

The old one. So she was the old one, and I was the Moorish woman, and neither of us a person beyond the withering of our flesh or the blackness of our skin. I had a sudden glimpse of my own future here in this gorgeous prison, bitter and nameless and worn out in the service of the contemptible. The pain of the thought must have shown in my face, for she took a sudden step toward me and wrapped me in a swift, bony embrace. “Be careful, my daughter,” she whispered, and then she slipped away, the boy following like a shadow.

I woke the next morning to a scent of roses that thickened as a sun whose heat I could not feel beat down on the massive outer walls. It is a perfume that even today brings back a memory of despair. I dragged myself from the divan, washed, dressed, performed my prayers, and waited. A girl came with warm water for my toilet and another with a tray containing apricot juice, steaming rounds of flat bread, a dish of creamy yogurt, and a half dozen ripe figs. I ate what I could, then waited again. I feared to leave the room lest the summons to the emira come while I was absent.

But the noon prayer came and went, then the evening prayer, and finally the night, and I rose from my prostrations and went to bed. No summons came that day, or the one after. Finally, on the afternoon of the third day, it was Kebira and the page who came to fetch me, and Kebira’s old face was drawn and grave. She closed the door and leaned against it. “The emir has taken leave of his reason,” she said, speaking quickly and in a cracked whisper, even though in that empty palace it was hard to know whom she thought could overhear. “He rode in last night, late, and was with the emira until after dawn prayers, when he had a meeting with the nobles. Well, he conducted his business with them and then demanded that they stay and join him in the courtyard for some entertainment. This,” she said, and her lips thinned as she hissed the words, “turned out to be watching his wife take her bath.”

“Implore the pardon of God!” I could not credit her words. For a man to glimpse another’s wife unveiled was a matter for blows. To deliberately display a wife’s body to others was an unthinkable dishonor. “What manner of Muslim could do such a thing?”

“What manner of man could do such a thing? A man grown coarse and arrogant,” Kebira said. “The nobles are appalled—most of them suspected it was some pretext of the emir’s to have them executed; they left here fingering their necks. And as for the emira, well…You will see for yourself how she is. The emir has heard that you are here, and he demands an image to take with him when he rides out again tomorrow after dawn prayer.”

“But that is impossible!” I cried.

“Impossible or not, you are commanded to do it. He was furious that none had yet been made. So come quickly with me now.” Outside the door, the beautiful page waited, carrying the box of pigments that Hooman had sent to me.

When we reached the salon, Kebira knocked upon the door and said, “I have brought her.”

A serving girl opened the door and slid out, so swift to exit that she almost knocked me over. One side of her face was red, as if from a recent blow. Kebira pushed me forward with a hand to the small of my back. The boy glided in behind me, set down the box, and slid back out again. I realized that Kebira herself had not entered the room, and I felt a moment of panic when I realized that she did not plan to present me, or to in any manner ease this first encounter. I heard the door gently pulled closed behind me.

The emira stood with her back to me, a tall woman in an embroidered gown that fell heavily from her shoulders and spilled across the tiles at her feet. Her hair, still slightly damp, hung freely down her back. Its colors were remarkable, for it was not one hue only, but many: dull gold entwined with warm, gleaming umber, lit from beneath with streaks as red as sudden tongues of flame. Despite my nerves, I was already thinking how to render it. Then she turned, and the look on her face drove all such thought from my mind.

Her eyes, too, were a remarkable color: a dark gold like honey. She had been weeping, the redness around her eyes and the uneven mottle of her pale skin testified to that. However, she wept no longer. The look upon her face was not grief, but rage. She held herself rigid, as if she were braced with an iron flagstaff. Even so, or perhaps because of the effort her regal posture was costing her, she shook all over with a barely discernible tremor.

I made my salaam, wondering whether she expected some kind of bow or prostration. She said nothing in reply, but stared at me, and then she raised a long hand with a disdainful gesture. “You have your commands. Get to work.”

“But perhaps you would like to sit, ya emira? For this will take some time….”

“I will stand!” she said, and the eyes brimmed suddenly. And stand she did, for the rest of that entire, interminable afternoon. My hands shook under her fierce, wounded gaze as I opened my box and arranged the materials. It took all my will to empty my mind of noisy thought, and even more to raise my gaze to her, and study her as I had to do.

I do not need to tell of her beauty, for it has been celebrated in many famous poems and songs. I worked without a break, and she did not move or take her eyes from me. When the muezzin’s call for salat sounded, faint and plaintive through the thick walls, I asked her if she wished to stop and pray, but she just shook that heavy mane of hair and glared at me. Finally, when it was about to become necessary to call for the lamps, I realized I had a likeness. The decorations I could complete in my own chamber. These would be, perforce, simple, but if what the emir craved was an image of his wife—her beautiful face and her queenly bearing, then he had it here.

I rose to show her my work, and she regarded it with that same unfliching, angry stare. If her expression changed at all, it was in the brief flicker of a fleeting triumph. She stood there still, even as I packed my implements. Only when the young page entered did she stir. “Pedro,” she said, calling him to her. She leaned to him, caressing his brow with a swift, tender kiss. Then, she turned her back on us and did not acknowledge our going.

After making my delayed prayers, and taking some food and drink, I looked again at the parchment with fresher eyes and mind. Then I saw clearly what she had accomplished. She had stood to show that she was unbowed by whatever mad acts of violation the emir had committed. The image he would carry away with him was of a queen unconquered, a rock he could not break. And I realized something else, as I studied the portrait. There was no hint in it of the tears or the trembling that revealed the struggle behind her show of strength. I knew that she did not want to display these to him, and in their concealment I had become her accomplice.

I worked through the night to complete that first work for my new lord. Just before the dawn prayer, Kebira scraped on my door, and I handed it to her, too exhausted to care what her reaction might be. But I might have known that she would let me have her view, whether sought or not.

“‘The angels enter not into a house where there is a dog or a likeness’—are those not the words of our Prophet? If the emir seeks to displease God, he has found the right instrument in you. But I wonder if even the emir wished for so faithful a rendering.” She smiled, a bitter little smile of satisfaction, and left me. Too tired to fathom whether I had been insulted or complimented, I made my prayers without waiting for the call, then fell onto my divan and into a long, deep sleep.

In the weeks that followed, it sometimes seemed as if I never fully awakened. I had thought that there would be other calls to the emira’s chamber, chances to make portraits more carefully composed and thoroughly realized than that first fevered effort. But no summons came, day following day.

The emir had ridden out not to some skirmish, but on a long besiegement of a Christian hilltown that commanded some of the city’s key supply roads. For the first weeks of his absence, I dedicated myself to learning what lay within my new world, exploring the precincts of the women’s palace and making drawings of its tiles, fountains, and carved inscriptions. But even with this pleasant distraction, many hours remained unfilled by either occupation or companionship.

As I wandered aimlessly from one beautiful, silent chamber to another, I longed for meaningful tasks such as I had done for my father, and pined for the bustle of our mud-walled house. There were times I sighed even for the abrasive banter of the preparers of the ground. In those months, at least, I had had too much toil to taste the poison of idleness. Some days, I kept entirely to my room, breathing the stultifying scent of the roses until the light failed and I fell upon my divan in an exhaustion that I had not even earned.

After many weeks of this, I sent a sherbet girl to seek out Kebira. I begged her to ask the emira to let me paint her, but the request met with curt rejection.

“Well, can I not paint you, or the young page?” I asked the old woman. The boy, Pedro, had followed one day and stood behind me as I drew an inscribed spandrel, watching my hand for hours with his strange, unchildlike stillness. But Kebira would neither sit for me nor allow the boy to do so.

“It is one thing for the emir to condone the sin of image making, but I will not willingly further such work,” she said. She was not harsh about this, merely resolute. I wondered at the strength of her faith, that had withstood so many years of battering. I wondered how she felt now, in the service of a rayah.

She laughed at me gently when I asked this. “As far as the world is concerned, she is not any longer a rayah. The emir put it out that she had embraced Islam, praise be to the Almighty. But I know it is not so. I hear her pray her infidel prayers, call on her Jesus and her Santiago…. Neither of them seem to hear her, though….” And she cackled again, and left me.

That night, I lay on my pallet thinking how little I knew of infidels’ religions and wondering why Christians and Jews were too stiff-necked to recognize the Seal of the Prophets. I wondered from what manner of home the emira had been snatched, and if she missed the familiar rites of her childhood.

The scent of the roses had waned, and their petals had fallen when the emir returned to the palace, riding to the gate by night so that the people would not see him, bloodied from a battle injury. When Kebira came to fetch me in the morning, she told me that he had taken a cut to the brow from an arrowhead that must have been dipped in foulness, for the wound, which had gashed his eyelid, stank and festered. Nevertheless, he had gone straight to Nura without troubling to have the cut seen to, or even removing his rank battle dress. Kebira’s wrinkled face folded as she told me this, as if the stench of him lingered in her nostrils.

Like a fool, I welcomed the summons to the emira’s rooms, so hungry was I for something to do. I hurried through the salons and up the stone stairs, eager for the challenge of work. The minute I saw her I realized my folly. The woman I faced seemed lit from within by a rage that burned her like a torch. Her hair was elaborately dressed with strings of pearls and bright jewels that seemed to catch the glow of its red strands, but she wore only a plain haik draped loosely around her. The servant who had brought my box slipped out silently, and I looked down, trying to escape the dreadful wrath of her gaze. She shrugged the haik from her shoulders. It fell to her feet, and when I looked up, she stood there before me, naked.

I looked away again, deeply shamed.

“This”—the word was a hiss such as a snake might make—“is what my lord wills you to paint today. Get to your work!”

I knelt and reached for my pen. But it was no use. The tremor in my hand and the grief in my heart would not allow me to grasp it. The words of the Koran were seared in my mind. Tell the believing women to lower their gaze and be modest, and to show of their adornment only that which is apparent, and to throw their veils over their bosoms. How then could I make an image of a naked woman? To do so was to defile her.

“I said get to your work!” Her voice was louder now.

“No,” I whispered.

“No?” she hissed.

“No.”

“What do you mean, you insolent black slut?” Her voice was a high, thin whine, such a cry as a cornered fox makes.

“No,” I said again, my own voice breaking. “I can’t do this. I know what it is to be raped. You can’t ask me to assist your rapist.”

She advanced on me, picking up the heavy lid of my box. I felt a wind whistle past my ear as she raised it. I did not even lift a hand to defend myself, but waited for the crack of it against my skull. She threw the lid, and it splintered against the stone floor. Then she picked up a jar of pigment and hurled that. The worm scarlet splattered against the tile and oozed down the wall. She was crazed, looking around for the next object to fling. I stood, and grasped her by the wrists. She was far taller than I was, and stronger, but as I touched her, she sagged against me. I bent for her haik and covered her. I folded my arms around her, and we fell together onto her divan and lay there, soaking the cushions with our grief.

From that morning, we spent our days and nights together, and I made many beautiful images of her. I made them for her, and for myself, for the pleasure of doing it. Oh, I made the emir a picture to take back with him to his failing siege, but it was not a picture of his wife. I painted a figure reclining so that the face was not recognizable; a lewd arrangement of thighs and breasts that were nothing like Nura’s. They say the fool was pleased with it.

Her voice, in the darkness. “You were crying out in your sleep.” She laid a long hand gently on my breast. “Your heart is pounding so.”

“I dreamed of my father—the vulture tearing at—No, I cannot speak of it….”

She held me close and sang to me softly in a low hum that recalled the soft voice of my mother.

Another night. I woke and turned to her. The moonlight glinted on her eyes, which were open, staring into the darkness. I touched her hand gently, and she turned to me. Her eyes caught the light. They were wet with unspilled tears. Slowly, she began to speak.

They had impaled her father on the iron gatepost of his home. They killed her mother in front of him as he writhed in his helpless agony. She had to listen to his screams of pain and grief as she hid with her sister and brother in a space under the floorboards of the house. Then they set the house on fire. She had run out, clutching her brother by the hand, and slipped in her mother’s blood. Her sister had kept running; her brother stayed to help her. She saw a knight snatch up her sister and drag her up onto his horse. What became of her, she was never able to discover.

She tried to run with her brother, but in her confusion they fled right into the path of a great war stallion. “I thought the hoofs would mash us to pieces,” she said. But the rider wheeled his mount. “I looked up and saw his eyes, peering down at me through the slits in his visor. He unhooked his mantle and threw it down to cover me.”

The other knights recognized that their lord had made his claim. When someone tried to drag away her brother, she had clung to the boy and pleaded with the emir to save him.

“He granted me that, and in return, God forgive me, I feigned desire for him. To this day, he has no idea how my gorge rises and my inner parts shrivel when he comes near me. When he is inside me, all I can feel is the agony of my father, skewered like a beast….”

I placed my hand on her lips then. “No more,” I whispered. I stroked her skin as gently as I could. In the dark, I could not see my own dark hand, just the shadow of it as it passed across her pale flesh. I tried to make my touch as soft as a shadow. After a very long while, she reached for my hand and kissed it. “After he…after I lay with him, I never thought I would be able to take pleasure in another human’s touch,” she said. She turned, and raised herself on one elbow, gazing at me. I think it was at that moment that I let myself forget I was a slave. It was a mistake to do so; I recognize that now.

Within the month, rumors began to reach us from elsewhere in the palace of urgent meetings and bitter debates. The enemy had broken the emir’s siege and retaken control of the hill. Our forces had been pushed back to the surrounding plain, where they were scrambling to retain control of the main supply road. It was crucial that they not fall back any farther, especially at this time, for if they lost the road before the fruits of the harvest were brought in, it would be a hungry winter for the city.

The swollen rose hips were ripening around the high window, and the emira reclined on a divan beneath it as I painted her, trying to match the glow of the reddening fruits to the lights in her hair. Her face was serene, although still heavy with sadness. She fingered the pearl at her throat.

“Your craft, it makes you fortunate, I think. You at least will have something to offer to a conquerer, if the city should fall.”

I dropped my brush. It fell on the tile, smearing the pale glaze with a saffron slash.

“Do not look so astonished,” she chided me. “These walls are thick, but even the thickest walls can be breached by treachery.”

“Do you have reason to fear it?” I could barely speak.

She tossed her head and gave a small laugh. “Oh yes, I have reason. The emir’s son, Abu Abd Allah, comes and goes from the palace, his faction growing with his father’s waning fortunes.”

She was tall, as I have said, and could easily reach up to the high windowsill. She stood up then and grasped the spray of rose hips resting there. As she reached out, the roundness of her belly revealed itself. She, too, was ripening. But of this, she had not spoken. And so therefore neither had I. Was the child as repulsive to her as the act by which she had gotten it? Until I could fathom her feelings on the matter I thought it best to keep my peace.

She turned the rose hips in her hands. “I do not rely upon seeing these roses budding here again in the springtime,” she said. Her voice was neither sad nor frightened, simply matter-of-fact. But the expression on my face must have been dreadful, for she came to me then and folded me in her arms. “We cannot know the future, nor can we change it,” she whispered gently. “It is best to be realistic about such things. But we have the time we have been given. So let us treasure it while we can.”

And so I tried to do so. And there were hours, sometimes even days, when I pushed aside my fear. I had dreaded growing old in this palace. Now, that was all I hoped for.

The nights grew cold. I woke, shivering, at dawn. I was alone on the bed. She was kneeling by the window, praying in a language that was not Arabic. She had a small book in her hands.

“Nura?”

She twitched in surprise and motioned as if to hide the book. Her face as she turned to me was severe.

“Do not call me that!” Her tone was harsh, and I flinched. She softened. “It recalls to me the stink of the emir.”

“What name should I call you?”

“Before, I was Isabella. It is my Christian name.”

“Isabella…” I said, tasting the unfamiliar sounds on my tongue. I held out my arms. She came to me. I asked if I might see the book, having glimpsed a flash of color as she closed the pages. Together, we looked at it, a beautiful little volume, filled with luminous illustrations. The paintings were neither aiming to exactly copy nature nor were they an idealized, formal representation, but some interesting melding of the two. The saint or the angel in one picture might be indistinguishable from that in the next, but there would be details, such as a little dog, or a wooden table, or a sheaf of grain, that the artist had represented just as if from life.

“It is called a Book of Hours,” she said. “Just as you have prayers such as fajr at dawn and maghrib at sunset, and so on, Christians, too, have prayers for morning, which are called matins, and vespers, for evening, and others, so that the day may be marked by devotion.”

“This artist is very skilled,” I said. “Can you read the words?”

“No,” she said. “I cannot read Latin. But I know most of the prayers by heart, and the pictures help me in my devotions. The doctor brought me this book. It was very kind of him.”

“But the doctor…surely he is a Jew?”

“Yes, of course. Netanel ha-Levi is a devout Jew. But he respects all faiths, and people of all faiths seek his care. Otherwise how would he work for the emir? This book was given to him by the family of a Christian patient who had died.”

“But isn’t it dangerous, that he knows you pray to the Christians’ God?”

“I trust him,” she said. “He is the only one I really can trust. Except for you.”

The golden eyes looked into mine. Her hand touched me lightly on the side of my face. She smiled one of her rare, bright smiles. I turned my head against her shoulder, hoping to catch some of her warmth, while it lasted.

There were horsemen. They had breached the outer walls and now they trampled the myrtle court. Their hooves rang on the stone. There was the clang of metal, and shouting.

Her hand was cool on my hot shoulder. “You were crying out in your sleep,” she whispered. “Were you dreaming of your father again?”

“No,” I said. “Not this time.”

We lay silent for a while in the dark.

“I think I know what was in your dream,” she said at last. “I, too, am consumed by thoughts of it. The time for silence is past. We must make plans. I have been thinking about what would be best.”

“Allahu akbar,” I murmured. “‘What is, is. What will be, will be.’”

She turned to me then and took my hands in hers.

“No!” she said, her tone firm and urgent. “I cannot trust my life to God’s will as you do. I must make provision for my survival, and my brother’s, and that which I carry.” She placed a hand on her swollen belly. At last, she had acknowledged it. “I stand in need of protection. If it seems as if we will lose the city, Abu Abd Allah will have me killed, I am certain of it. He will use the chaos of battle to cover his deed. He does not want to see this child born.”

She rose, restless, and paced the chamber. “If it were not for Pedro…There was a convent near our house. The nuns there were very kind to me. I used to think how fortunate they were, those women, shut away together. Safe. Not married off in girlhood, facing childbed after childbed till fever or bleeding claimed them. I always wanted to join them.” Her lovely head drooped then. “I was going to be a bride of Christ, and instead—” She cradled her belly protectively. “I think the nuns would still take us, in spite of everything. We would be safe there; the sisters have the ear of the Castilian monarchs.”

I sat up and looked at her in disbelief. I could not bear to spend my life locked up in the prison of an infidel convent. How could she propose it?

“They would not let us be together. Not as we are now,” I said.

“No. I know that,” she said. “But we would see each other. And we would be alive.”

But what kind of life? Lying about a faith I did not profess. Forced to worship idols. Living without true prayer, without my art, without human touch. But all I said was, “Your brother could not come.”

“No,” she said. “Pedro could not come.”

When the emir learned of his wife’s pregnancy, he sent the doctor directly to her. Even in Ifriqiya, I had heard of this man, Netanel ha-Levi. His healing skills were as renowned as his poetry, which he wrote in a most beautiful Arabic. I had not thought a Jew could master our poetry, the language of the Holy Koran. But it seemed that in al-Andalus, where Jews and Arabs worked side by side, such a thing was not unheard of. I had picked up some verses of his and scanned them with a skeptical eye, and at the end of it, that same eye brimmed with tears from the beauty of his words and the emotion he conveyed through them. Ha-Levi’s counsels to the court went well beyond medical matters, and Kebira said that if it were not for the doctor’s wisdom and his ability to sometimes temper the emir’s crueler impulses, our ruler might have slipped off his throne long since.

I was working on the last touches to a likeness of Pedro when the doctor came. The emira had asked me, of late, to give her a rest from posing. I thought it because she was uneasy at the change in her appearance as the child grew within her. To me, her rounder face, her heavy breasts were very beautiful. But she insisted that I give her a respite. One day, she swept the dates off the large polished silver serving dish and propped it up against the wall. She made me stand before it and stare at my reflection. “Make a portrait of yourself. I want you to see what it is like, this relentless business of being looked at.” She laughed. But she was serious, and kept at me, despite my hesitation. She disliked my first attempt. “You must look more kindly at yourself. Look with tenderness,” she said. “I want the portrait I would paint of you, had I your skills.” So I stared at my face and tried not to see the lines that had been etched there by loss and anxiety. I painted the girl I had been in Infriqiya, the protected, cherished daughter who had not known fear and exile, who had never been a slave. That portrait, she approved of. “I like this girl. I shall name her Muna al-Emira, the emira’s desire. What do you think?’’

I gave a strained smile and tried to look flattered. Just at that moment a flock of swallows swooped past the high window, blocking the sun. I felt a sudden coldness. At the time, I did not know why. But later I realized. Kebira had told me, that first day, which seemed so very distant, but really was not so, that Muna had once been her name. The wishes and desires of the powerful can be fickle things. I knew this. But I knew it in that deep place where one hides knowledge that is inconvenient, or too painful to admit, even to oneself.

Usually, I withdrew when the doctor came, but this day he motioned me to stay as I made to take my work away. He walked over to look at the portrait of Pedro, and complimented it, and asked a question about my training. I told him I had been in the service of Hooman, and he looked astonished at that, considering my gender. Without going into detail I explained that I had passed myself off as a youth for a time, because it had seemed safer. He did not press this, but neither did he let me be. “No,” he said. “It is not court training. I see something more in your work. Something…less practiced. Less sophisticated, perhaps. Or perhaps I should say, more honest?” So I told him then of my father, and the pride I had taken in learning to illustrate his medical texts.

“Then I know your work,” he said, his voice full of surprise. “I admire it. The herbals of Ibrahim al-Tarek have no peer.” I flushed with pride. “But what befell your father? How came you here?”

I related to him the story, in brief. He bowed his head when I told him of my father’s ignominious end, unburied and abandoned. He cast a hand over his eyes and murmured a prayer. “He was a very great man. His work saved many lives. I mourn his untimely death.” He looked at me then, a physician’s evaluating look. There was great compassion in his gaze, and I understood why his patients admired him so. “He was lucky, to raise a child such as you, who could assist him so ably. I have only one child, and he…” He did not finish that sentence. “Well, I wish I had someone as skilled as you to work with me.”

The emira spoke then, and her words almost stopped the blood in my veins.

“Then you must take her, ya doctur. Al-Mora will be my gift to you for the great care you have bestowed on me. Kebira will see to it. You may take her today, if you like.”

I looked at Nura, my eyes imploring, but her face was very calm. Only a slight pulse in the vein at her temple revealed that she felt anything at all, even as she threw me off like a used robe.

“Go now and gather your things,” she said. “You may take your box of pigments, and the books of gold and silver leaf. I want the doctor to have the very best.” And then, as if it were an afterthought, “Ya doctur, I will send my brother, Pedro, with al-Mora, if you will take him. He can serve as her apprentice, as she is, as you say, very skilled.” She turned to me then, and there was just the slightest catch in her voice. “Teach him well for me.”

So that was it. Once again, I was just a tool, a thing to be used and then passed along into other hands. This time, it seemed, I was a shield for the protection of her brother. She had turned away, listening to the doctor, who was expressing his thanks most effusively. I was, in his words, “a most generous gift.” The great doctor, so noted for his compassion. Where was his compassion for the feelings of a slave?

I was standing there, shaking, as they discussed me. The emira did not even turn to look at me directly. She waved her hand at me, as if I were a blowfly to be shooed away.

“Go,” she said. “Go now. I have dismissed you.”

Still I stood there.

“Go now. If you want to live.”

She thought she was saving my life. My life, and the life of her beloved brother. She had calculated it, lying there in the dark. Worked it all out—When? How long ago?—without consulting me. She knew that with the Jew, we would survive whatever befell the city, because Abd Allah and his faction also leaned heavily on ha-Levi’s skills, and would seek his counsel. My hands shook as I gathered up my things. I had the portrait I had been working on in my hand when she strode across the room and snatched it from me. “This, I will keep. And take care to leave behind the other also—the portrait of Muna.” Her eyes, as she said this, glistened.

I wanted to say, Not this way. I wanted to say, Give me more days, more nights with you. But she had turned away from me, and I knew the strength of her will. She would not turn back.

So, that was how I came here, and here I have been, living and working, for almost two years. Perhaps she was right to send me away like that, but I will never feel so in my heart. What she feared came to pass: when the emir’s wound turned poison, Abd Allah took the chance to overthrow him. Nura had made her provisions by then, and went straight to the protection of the nuns. In due season, the doctor delivered her there of a healthy girl, whose existence causes Abd Allah no anxiety. Not that he will likely reign long enough to need a successor: the breath of the Castilians blows ever hotter. And of what will come to any of us then, who knows. The doctor does not speak of it, and there are no signs of any preparations under way if we need to quit this place. I think that he has come to believe himself indispensable, whomever is in power. But I am not sure the Castilians will have the wit to value his skills.

For myself, for now, I have little of which to complain. Here, I am called al-Mora no longer. When I came to live in the doctor’s palace, he asked me my name, so that he might present me to his wife. When I said al-Mora, he shook his head. “No. The name given to you by your father.”

“Zahra,” I said, and realized that the last time I heard my own name was from the lips of my father, as he cried out to warn me that the raiders were upon us. “Zahra bint Ibrahim al-Tarek.”

The doctor has restored much to me, in addition to my name. The work I do for him is important work, and I feel connected by it to my father. Every plant, every diagram I make, I offer to the glory of Allah in my father’s memory. The doctor, although a very devout Jew, respects my faith and allows for the prayers and the fasts. When he saw me making prostrations on the bare floor of his library, he sent me a prayer rug even finer than the one I left behind at the palace. His wife, too, is very kindly and commands her large staff with gentle discipline that breeds a calm and peaceful house.

In the spring, on the full moon, she invited me to join the family at table for one of their feasts. Although the invitation surprised me, I did so, out of respect, although I did not drink the wine that has a very large part in their ritual. The rite was performed in Hebrew, which I did not, of course, understand. But the doctor took great pains to explain to me what was meant by the various things that were said and done. It is a very moving feast, celebrating the delivery of the Hebrews from slavery in a land called Mizraim.

He confided in me, at one point, that he felt great sadness, because tradition commands that a father must teach his son this ritual, in all its particulars, and the doctor’s only son, Benjamin, is a deaf-mute and cannot understand. He is a sweet boy, not at all simple. He likes to spend time with Pedro, who has become Benjamin’s body servant, in fact, and my apprentice in little but name. It has been good for Pedro, taking care of this needy youngster. It has given him purpose more than he was able to find in his work with me, for which he had, in truth, little aptitude. I think he has grown to love the boy, and that helps him when he misses his sister. I try to fill her place with him as best I can, but we, each of us, know that nothing can make up for such a loss as ours.

I have taken it upon myself to make, in secret, a set of drawings for Benjamin that together will tell the story of the world as the Jews believe it to have come to be. The doctor has many books about his faith, but they have words only, not pictures such as the Christians use to help them understand their prayers. The Jews, it seems, are as reluctant to make images as we Muslims are. But as I considered Benjamin, in his silence, shut out of understanding the beautiful and moving ceremonies of his faith, I remembered Isabella’s prayer book, and the figures in it, and how she said it helped her to pray. The idea came to me that such drawings would be of like help to Benjamin. I cannot think the doctor or his God will be offended by my pictures.

I ask the doctor or his wife from time to time, and they are always pleased to explain to me, how Jews conceive of this or that. I reflect on what they say, and try to devise a way to illustrate it so that a young boy can understand. What struck me is how much of it I already know, for the Jews’ account of God’s creation differs only slightly from the correct version given in our Holy Koran.

I have made images that show God’s separation of light from dark, the making of land and water. I have drawn the earth he created as if it were a sphere. My father held this to be so, and I lately had a conversation with the doctor on this subject. While difficult to grasp such a thing, he said, it was a fact that the calculations of our Muslim astronomers are far more advanced than any others. He said if he had to choose between the opinion of a Muslim astronomer and the dogma of a Catholic priest, he would not choose the priest. And anyway, I prefer compositions using circles and curves. They are harmonious, and interesting to draw. I want these drawings to be pleasing, so the boy will want to look at them. To that end, I have filled the garden of paradise with the animals of my childhood, spotted pards and fierce-jawed lions. I hope he will enjoy them.

I am using the last of Hooman’s fine pigments to make this present for the Jew, and I wonder what he would think of that. Soon, I will have to send to the market for more pigments, but the works the doctor needs, for his texts, require only simple inks, not lapis or saffron and surely not gold. So I am taking pleasure in the use of these for what may be the last time in my life. I still have one or two of the brushes made from the fine white hair of Hooman’s cat, but these, too, are wearing out and beginning to shed.

Sometimes, when I ask the doctor about his faith, I find myself swept up in the narrative of his stiff-necked people, so often punished by their disappointed God. I have painted the story of Nuh’s flood, and Lut’s city of fire, and his woman turned to a hill of salt. I have struggled hard to devise pictures that make clear all the elements of the spring festival story, which is, at times, quite terrible. How to show, for example, why the king of Mizraim yielded at last to Musa? How to show the horror in the tale, the terror of the plagues, or the deaths of the firstborn? I want Benjamin to understand that the children in my picture all are dead, but in my first attempt they might just as well have been asleep. Yesterday, an idea came to me. I thought of the iconoclasts and how they had slashed red lines across the throats of the human likenesses in the books they had defaced. So I painted dark shapes over each sleeping child’s mouth, to represent the dark force of the angel of death, stealing away the breath of life. The image I have made is exceedingly disturbing. I wonder if Benjamin will understand it?

My plan is to present these pictures to the doctor at the next occasion of this feast, which is soon. I am working now on a picture of the feast itself. I have set the doctor at the head of the table with Benjamin beside him, and his wife, finely dressed, and her sisters, who share this house. Then it came into my head to add myself to the gathering. I have given myself a gown of saffron, ever my favorite color, and in doing so have used the very last I have of that pigment. I am pleased with this picture, above all those that I have done. It seemed good to me to sign it with my name, which the doctor has returned to me. I used the last of my fine brushes to do it, the last of those with but a single hair.

I have set my head at an attentive angle, and imagine myself listening as the doctor tells of Musa, who defied the king of Mizraim, and used his enchanted staff to win his people’s freedom from their bondage.

If only there could be another such staff, to free me from my bondage. Freedom, indeed, is the main part of what I lack now in this place where I have honorable work, and comfort enough. Yet it is not my own country. Freedom and a country. The two things the Jews craved, and which their God delivered to them through the staff of Musa.

I set down the cat-hair brush and imagine how it might be to have such a staff. I see myself, walking to the coast. The great sea would part, and I would cross it, and make my way, in slow stages, down all the dusty roads that lead toward home.