The Slave Woman
Slaves should not be sold in the hottest part of the day, they tremble on the block or sometimes faint away and no-one will buy a slave who shows signs of weakness. Besides, the customers grow weary of standing in the heat themselves and are unlikely to buy, growing ill-tempered and tight fisted. The heat today is reaching its zenith and my father is anxious to finish his work for the day and retire for food and drink.
“A fine man! Broad shoulders, calloused hands. Long legs. A good worker sir, he will serve you well.”
There is a pause while my father watches his customer’s face as he inspects the slave. Standing by his side I murmur something and my father pretends to give me water to drink, the better to hear me.
“He is afraid,” I say, speaking directly into my father’s ear. “A slave beat him once.”
My father does not change expression, nor ask how I know. He pats me on the head before speaking loudly. “Be off with you, stop pestering me now, Hela. I have business to attend to.” I move away and become wholly engrossed with a doll, a ragged little thing I have very little interest in. My father’s camel whooshes in my ear and I slap its hairy face and stinking breath away from me.
My father turns back to his customer. “Of course, one must be careful with such an ox of a man that he has also a good temperament,” he says. “One cannot be too careful.” Without warning, he cuffs the slave’s head. The unexpected blow causes him to stagger. He regains his stance looking a little bewildered but shows no sign of anger. I watch the customer’s face relax in relief and know that my father has made a sale.
***
He makes many more sales that morning. A slave girl of unusual good looks to a man filled with lust, a giant of a slave to a man convinced his enemies are trying to kill him, a rounded slave woman suckling a child to a household where the mother needs a wet-nurse. Each time a slave is brought to the block I find some way to draw my father’s attention to the person in the crowd most likely to pay a high price.
I feel them. I feel their desires, their needs, I feel their fears and hopes. I sense what they feel when they gaze at my father’s wares, the silent men and women whose lives hang in the balance, their destinies chosen by me, a child barely ten years’ old.
I feel the slaves as well, if they have feelings. Some of them do not. Their feelings have been buried somewhere so deep I cannot touch them, cannot penetrate beyond the numbness that fills the space where they should be. Sometimes I will feel their shriveled hopes and fulfil them if I can, a frightened and broken woman going to a lonely old mistress rather than a hard master. But I am a child and mostly I think of my father’s profits and the little gifts he will give me if I choose well for him. When a customer pays more than a slave is worth because of their own desires, then my father will nod to me and I know that I will be rewarded. Perhaps with a fine leather belt, a sweetmeat, once even a kitten of my own. My father says that when I am a grown woman, I should marry a slave trader myself, for I will undoubtedly bring him much success in his business. To my mother, when she enquires, he tells her in good humour that I am no trouble to him at all, that I may play nearby when the slave auctions are held and she smiles, thinking him a kindly man for indulging his little daughter’s fondness for being near him. She does remind him, though, that as a girl, my place is with my mother and that one day soon I must learn her trade.
***
My mother is a quiet woman, a skilled woman. A wise woman. Her rooms are silent and cool, nothing like the heat and noise of the slave market. Neat jars line the walls, her pestles and mortars below them, ranked by size and use. Some may be used for more than one purpose, others are set far back and used for only one ingredient, for even their taint could be dangerous.
It is mostly other women who come to my mother. They enter hesitantly, greet her with respect and a little fear, whisper their needs. Sometimes my mother nods and bids them return another time for what they seek and they will disappear. Sometimes, if she can make what they ask for quickly, she will tell them they may wait. They do so, squatting by the door, as far away from her as they can manage. They watch her with hope as she chooses and grinds, mixes and pours. They look about them with awe at the myriad containers and most of all at the books.
My mother can read, a rare skill for a woman. She reads slowly, one arm cradling the heavy tomes, one finger tracing the words. Sometimes I see her struggle to mouth a new name. She spends time looking at the illustrations, nodding to herself at the uses for leaves, stems, roots, flowers and berries, seeds. She can write too, in a careful hand, each stroke laborious. She is careful because her little jars must not be confused one with another.
Sometimes I watch her when she is grinding herbs, but it seems dull work and I flit away soon enough, back to the noise and smells of the market.
***
Now there is only one slave left to sell. My father pursed his lips when he saw her and muttered under his breath. She is twisted, one shoulder higher than the other. Her body is scrawny, no tempting curves here to sate a man’s desire. The few clothes she wears are mere scraps and at her waist she carries some kind of pouched bag, badly made from reddish leather. Where the other slaves stood still and silent behind the block, awaiting their turn to stand on it, their eyes cast down, the woman sits hunched up on the ground, her head twisting this way and that. Occasionally I hear words coming from her but she hails from the Dark Kingdom and I do not understand her. My father glances at me when he sees me looking at her and I shrug. I cannot feel her own desires and so I must think of who might want her, must spot them in the crowd and feel their need for her.
But when she mounts the block there is nothing in the crowd, already fast dwindling. The woman limps when she walks, not a small limp but a strange, whole-body lurching. She would barely be able to carry water without it spilling. She may not sell at all and if she does not my father will be angry, he has no use for slaves who do not make him money. She stands for a moment and then sinks to a low crouch, my father cuffs her but she will not stand again.
My father tries to entice the crowd forwards. “She’s strong enough,” he says. “I’ve had bigger, stronger women die on the journey here, but I never heard a whimper from her. She may be a cripple but that won’t stop her working. Might stop her running off though, eh?” he smiles.
The crowd begins to drift away. My father names a price for her but only receives shaking heads as a reply.
I look about me and spot one of the tannery-masters. I tug at my father’s robe and he nods, climbs down from the block where he has been standing and joins the master, speaks smilingly with him. Anyone who works in the tanneries is likely to die soon enough, their skin scarred and burnt by the foul vats of stinking mess they use to soften and dye animal skins. It’s a hard life, carrying heavy pails of bird droppings, water, lime and ash, your back bent beneath the burning heat of the sun, your legs trembling from the endless stamping down of the skins in the skin-stripping liquid. The tannery master buys plenty of slaves at a knock-down price: the old, the crippled, the mute or stupid and uses up what is left of their broken lives. My father does not usually sell much to them, for he prefers a better quality of stock but on this occasion, he has been let down and he is not about to waste much time on such an unlikely proposition. I see the negotiations going on between them while closer to us the crowd has dispersed entirely.
I’m growing hungry and my father could be a while. If I set off now, I will be home ahead of him to warn our household to prepare a meal. My mouth waters at the thought of fresh hot flatbreads dipped into lablabi, a thick soup of chickpeas and garlic, or perhaps wrapped around slices of spiced sausage. Maybe my mother will have made sweet samsa, nuts and pastry flavoured with rosewater syrup. If she has it is probably still cooling, made for the evening meal but I might beg some from her while it is still warm. I stand up.
“Girl.”
I turn, surprised. The old cripple has spoken in my own language. “You can speak?”
She shakes her head. “Little.” Her voice croaks, as though she has not spoken for a long time or is desperate for water. Either is possible.
I shrug. “You’ll learn. You don’t need many words at the tanneries.”
She makes a slow gesture, a beckoning.
I step closer to her. I am not wary. My father is close by and what harm can she do me?
She is scrabbling about in the red pouch, searching for something among her meagre belongings. At last, she pulls something from its depths and holds it out to me. It is a cup made of a dark carved wood, the carvings rough and not very clear, for the cup looks to have been used for many years, so that what were once sharply etched images are now almost smoothed away by the touch of many hands. It has been stained red at some time, but again the redness has been worn away, leaving it mottled here and there.
I look at her without touching the cup. “Your new master will give you water when you reach your home,” I tell her, miming drinking and pointing to the tannery master, who is now nodding agreement with my father.
But she becomes agitated, perhaps realising she does not have a lot of time left before her new master will claim her. She thrusts the cup towards me and I reach out and take it, one finger brushing her skin as I do so.
The jolt knocks me to the ground. I lie there, clutching the cup to me, rage and an unholy power flowing through me as though I am possessed by a djinn. Above me the woman lurches to her feet and looks down on me over her twisted shoulder. Her eyes fix on mine and I whimper and wriggle away from her, but I do not let go of the cup. I have never sensed such feelings from a slave, nor even from any free-born man or woman. I have felt the uncontrolled rage of small children, stamping their feet at some perceived outrage, I have felt the power emanating from desert warriors but this … this is a rage that would make a grown man kneel in fear, a power that would topple kings. How can a crippled slave woman possess either? I stare up at her and she points at the cup.
“Yours,” she rasps and then she smiles. It is a crippled smile, like her body, a lopsided thing that does not offer comfort.
I have spent the rest of my life wondering about her smile at that moment, whether she saw my abilities and meant to give me a gift or whether the cup was a curse on me for sending her to the tanneries.
I am still not sure.
***
My father rejoins us and does not notice anything amiss. I am upright again and the cup has disappeared into my own bag, a cheerful thing of yellow leather, a previous gift for my services. The slave woman is led away and although I watch her every step she never once looks back as she follows her new master across the square and into the dark souk beyond.
The next time I accompany my father I do not tell him anything useful, nor the time after that. I am wary of the slaves now; I do not trust the numbness that is in them. I am afraid of what they may do to me if I send them towards a bleak destiny and there are not many destinies I could choose that would not be bleak in one way or another. And so I remain silent until finally he tells my mother, not unkindly, that it is time I learnt her trade, he cannot have a half-grown girl loitering near the slave block, it is not proper at my age. I must learn her trade and then I will be married.
My Mother’s Rooms
Even my mother is startled by how fast I learn her skills.
I learn to read at a pace that astonishes her and yet it is her jars that help me. I have only to unstopper one, to smell its contents and look at the label, the shapes marked there coming to mean that smell so that even now, I can read a word and at once inhale its scent from the empty air. My mother teaches me to read as she does everything: with a slow care but when she sees how fast I outstrip her, how I do not need to trace each stroke to know its sound, she allows me to touch her precious books and soon enough it becomes my task to read aloud to her.
She only has to tell me once the properties and uses of a plant and I remember it. She tests me over and over again, uncertain whether I have been lucky in my guesses, whether perhaps I have cheated her in some way but eventually she accepts that my memory does not lie. It takes her a while, however, to notice my other skills.
“Why did you give her that?” I ask.
My mother looks up. Her patient has left us, clutching a small pot to her. “The swelling may be helped by the application.”
“But she is dying,” I say, with all the hard truth of a child’s tongue.
My mother gazes at me for a long time. “Why do you say that?”
“She smells sick,” I say.
My mother’s eyes narrow. “Smells?”
I nod, shrugging. Surely my mother can smell what I smelt? “It made me feel ill,” I say. “It was like honey mixed with rotting meat.”
My mother does not reply. But after each patient visits her, she looks to me and asks, “What did they smell of?”
Sometimes they smell of the food they have been cooking, or of the black olive soap from the hammams, sometimes of the rose perfume that Kairouan is famous for. Sometimes I smell the strange smell again. But I smell other things. I smell fear, happiness, despair. I smell anger, need, desire. Each has its own smell and sometimes it is so strong I cannot stand it and must open the windows in my mother’s room. When I do this, she watches me and then she speaks with more care to her visitors, asks them more questions, until, often, they tell her what I had already scented in the air: their fear of a husband’s fists or his belt, their desire for a person forbidden to them, their desperate need for a child to hold in their arms. They come for minor ailments, but they soon confess to greater wounds.
“You have been given a gift,” says my mother, and she does not say it with smiling praise for her little daughter, she says it with the respect due to a fellow healer and perhaps a little fear at how easily her own skills fade beside me. Perhaps she expects me to show some pride, even arrogance at how easily I learn her skills, but when she says ‘gift’ I think only of the slave woman’s cup, hidden in my room and I fall silent and bow my head.
Now a little room is set aside for me beside my mother’s and here I am made to grind down roots and leaves, to preserve berries and flower petals. I take my place beside my mother when her patients visit and listen to their whispered confessions or groaning complaints. My mother will look to me, to see what I suggest, and I will stand before the tiny jars and choose one and another and my mother will nod, perhaps point to a third, or shake her head a little and suggest another choice. But she does not often have to correct me, as time goes by.
We visit the souk together and wander its narrow mazelike streets to find the stallholders who keep the items we need. Fenugreek, to make a woman’s breasts swell with milk. Argan oil to make blood flow within the body more freely, black cumin to father a child. Sometimes we go to meet traders who have newly arrived in one of Kairouan’s many caravanserai. They bring fresh supplies of ingredients but also powerful amulets and living plants for my mother’s herb garden, which I learn to tend. The courtyard of our home is stacked everywhere with pots of plants that the slave girls are not permitted to touch, for some can bring death. Only my mother and I may care for them.
When I am free of tasks, I pore over my mother’s books. She has only three, but they are huge and beautiful and she treasures them. Sometimes I take up her reed pen and try to draw what I see, the shapes of leaves, the petals curved like so, the tiny roots like hairs, creeping across the page. My mother nods at my efforts and allows me more paper, even though it is costly, as well as ink, although I have to make my own supplies, from the burnt-up wool and horns of sheep.
She allows me to sit in her place, to hear her patients’ stories and they look startled at such a young girl taking on her mother’s work so soon, but she only says, “She has a great talent, greater than mine,” and they hurry to agree, hoping that perhaps there is healing in my hands.
***
When the first headache comes, I think I am going to die. The pain is so great that I cannot stand. I stagger to my room and fall onto my bed, my mother following me.
“My head,” I say, and I can hardly speak above a whisper.
My mother makes the room dark, gives me the correct herbs, holds cooling cloths to my head and murmurs words of prayer. But the pain goes on so long I begin to weep. It feels as though a giant has a hold of my head and is slowly trying to pull it apart, as my father can split a ripe pomegranate in two with his bare hands.
The pain goes on and on. I try to sleep but it is impossible. At last, there is a faint lessening and I cry again, from relief.
***
It is my mother, older and wiser than I, who notices the pattern after a while.
“Do the women’s pains enter you, Hela?” she asks.
“When they are afraid, I feel the fear,” I tell her.
“And all their other feelings?”
I nod.
My mother sighs. “Too much for one body, to sense the feelings of a hundred others,” she says. From that day she tells me to sit further away from the patients and I do not touch them if I can help it. The windows are kept open, no matter the weather. Slowly, the headaches lessen.
I grow taller than my mother. The years pass and my body forms into a woman. I am not beautiful. There is a stockiness about me, not the kind of womanly curves that other girls my age are beginning to flaunt, but a wide-shouldered solidity, like a working beast. My eyes are large but somewhat hooded rather than wide. My hair is good enough, long and dark, but I twist it up and wrap a cloth about it when I work and so its lustre is rarely seen.
***
At fifteen, I begin to build up my own tools and ingredients in my small work room. My mother allows me to go and purchase ingredients alone. When I walk the streets of Kairouan’s souks, the traders nod and smile to me, each trying to court my attention, for if my mother and I purchase from them they can boast of having us as customers. Sometimes I stop to examine their wares, to sniff roots and touch leaves, but mostly I walk onwards, to the trader from whom my mother has been buying ingredients since before I was born. He is an affable man, rotund in body and offers a pleasant smile when he spots me.
“Ah Hela,” he calls out. “I have freshly picked caper buds if you have need of them for stomach pains.”
I nod, looking over the contents of his stall. Ginger, rosemary, saltbush, ruta, pomegranates, cinnamon, cloves and many other ingredients are neatly laid out. I smell a few items and look up to see Moez, the trader’s young son, hovering.
“As-Salaam-Alaikum, peace be unto you,” he says, stumbling a little over his words, though he must say them a hundred times a day.
“Wa-Alaikum-Salaam, and unto you be peace,” I say, my mind elsewhere. “I need anise and lemon balm, if you have them.”
Moez hurries to serve me and I notice his fingers trembling. I meet his gaze and see him blush and half-smile to myself. It is always a little pleasing to a young girl to be desired, though shy Moez is not quite what I dream of when I dream of marriage, he is a little too young and awkward to make much of an impact on me. Still, I smile and nod as I depart, leaving him beaming.
One day I take the now-dusty red cup from where I had left it years ago in an old chest, clean it and place it on a shelf above me. I am not sure why, but it seems to me to be something connected to healing. I wonder if the slave woman was a healer herself and knew that it was my destiny. I do not use it at once. I tell myself it has no special properties and indeed five years ago is a long time now, long enough for me to question whether what I remember of my encounter with the slave woman was true at all. But still, I do not use it. It is only on a day when I am very busy, when the slave girls have not yet cleared away the many bowls and bottles I have been using that a young woman comes to see me. She says that my mother is busy and there are several women waiting but that she is willing to be treated by me, if I have time. She needs to be back home soon, her husband does not know she has come here.
I nod and she sits in front of me. Hesitantly, she confesses that she has been unable to have children, even though she is of fertile stock and young. She is afraid that her husband, whom she loves, will turn away his gaze and bring home another wife if she cannot bear him a child.
It is a common enough complaint and I have barely finished listening to her when I am already collecting the right jars and bottles to mix her a draught which she must take each day. It does not always work but occasionally a woman bears a child after she has seen us and so they all come. My mother shakes her head when we are alone and says that only Allah can grant a child. Still, I grind the ingredients, mix up the concoction until it has the right consistency and bottle most of it. The first draught, she must take now. I look about me for a cup but the only one to hand is the carved cup. I hesitate for a moment but, feeling her questioning gaze, I take it and pour the drink into the cup before passing it to her.
As our hands touch the woman gasps. The cup rocks, neither of us willing to hold it alone until I slowly release my grip and the woman holds it, her eyes wide.
“What did you do?” she asks. “I saw a baby in my arms, I heard it cry and knew it was mine.”
I shake my head. “I do not know,” I say truthfully. “It must be that your desire for a child is very strong.” I improvise. “Drink,” I add.
The woman nods and quickly drinks every drop, clutching at the cup as though she is afraid that the brew’s efficacy will go if she hesitates.
When she has gone, I turn the cup over in my hands and wonder at what has happened. I wash it with care and replace it on the shelf. I do not use it again. I have so many others, I excuse myself.
But the young woman is back when less than two moons have passed and she brings me more silver than I have ever been paid.
“I am with child,” she says. “My husband sent you this. He says he is the happiest man in Kairouan. He smiles all day.”
I take the silver and murmur something in reply, I am not sure what.
“It was the red cup, wasn’t it?” she says, looking eagerly up at it on the shelf, where it has sat unused since her first visit. “It has a special power, does it not?”
I do not look at the cup behind me. “The herbs will have done you good,” I say.
She nods and thanks me again and goes away but she has a busy mouth, for now one and then another woman asks if I will use ‘the red cup’ when I treat them. If I try to dissuade them, saying that one cup is much like another, they insist that they must drink from the cup.
And strange things happen when they do.
Often as I hand them the cup something passes between us, a shock as though a power jumps from one to the other, a pale copy of the jolt I felt from the slave woman so long ago.
One woman recovers even though my mother shook her head when she saw how ill she was and I had already smelt the smell of death upon her.
A child who had not spoken before speaks.
Woman upon woman finds herself with child when they had lost hope. My mother asks me what I give them and I shake my head and say that I give them what we have always given them. My mother frowns and says she has never known it to work so well. She asks about the red cup and I mumble something about it coming from the Dark Kingdom. My mother turns it in her hands but does not seem to feel anything when she does and shrugs, saying that it is my own healing abilities that the women are benefiting from and that their nonsense about a cup is only superstition. To which I do not reply.
By the time I am seventeen I have amassed a sum of silver that would mark me as rich, for a healer. Women give me their jewellery, their husbands send coins, as many as they can spare, for my name is now known across the city of Kairouan. Now it is my mother who grinds ingredients for me, who washes the pots and cups, the pestles and mortars, who tidies the workrooms. I am too busy, there is a never-ending line of people who wait, squatting on the stairs leading to my consulting room. And always, always, I must use the red cup or face their disappointment.