The Naqib’s Daughter

SAMIA SERAGELDIN

PART I

ONE

The Enemy at the Gates

For only the second time in her forty years of life, Lady Nafisa the White dreaded the dawn. Sleep had eluded her all night, but she lay quietly in order not to disturb her maids in the adjoining room. They would have risen, bleary and heavy-limbed with sleep, and hovered around her bed, offering to bring mint tea, or to massage her feet.

Nafisa knew where her husband was tonight, and wished it were with another woman.

She glanced at the gold-mounted ormolu clock with the rose faience face that she could not make out in the dark. It had been a present from the French consul, Magallon, in happier times. The irony struck her: how the world had changed! But she did not need a clock to tell the time; she could smell the dawn in the air before the first bird stirred, before the muezzin cleared his throat to chant the call for prayers; long before the watchmen unlocked the heavy wooden gates that secured each neighbourhood for the night against robbery and mischief. She knew the exact order in which the gates to the quarters were drawn back: first the Moroccan quarter, then the Jewellers Lane, then the Nasiriya quarter where most of the European merchants lived, then the Ezbekiah Lake and the Alley of the Syrians, and finally the gates to the Citadel. Cairo was her city; she could take its pulse at any moment.

The first time Nafisa had lain sleepless had been her wedding night – her first wedding night, thirty years ago now, to Ali Bey. Her awe of her husband-to-be had been complete. As a child she had seen his image struck on coins: Ali Bey the Great, sole master of Egypt. She had watched from the latticework shutters of the harem windows as he rode past at the head of his army, on one campaign or another, to Syria and the Sudan and the borders of Egypt. When his choice had fallen on her for his second wife, the honour had been overwhelming.

Her hair had been long and thick like a curtain then, the colour of light molasses where it sprung at the roots, grading down to the clearest honey where it slapped against the back of her knees. The first time she had undressed before Ali Bey, she had shaken her hair about her in a shudder of modesty, cloaking herself with her own tresses. He had thrown his head back and laughed, and her dread had begun to melt around the edges.

She had been little more than a child at the time. Over their long years together she had grown from child-bride to trusted consort, consulted and cultivated by the powerful in Egypt and abroad. Until the day Ali Bey had been betrayed and assassinated. Nafisa tensed and held her breath, listening for the clatter of horses’ hooves, for the night watchmen dragging open the heavy wooden gates that closed off her neighbourhood. But it was only her overwrought imagination, and she lay back, winding a thick strand of hair around her palm. When the muezzin called for dawn prayers she would clap her hands and her maids would bring the mint tea she drank first thing every morning to keep her breath sweet all day. Even when she had gone on the pilgrimage to Mecca, two years ago, one of the camels in her caravan had carried nothing but pots of live herbs: mint, but also caraway for digestion, basil to stimulate appetite, and chamomile to rinse her hair. A cow plodded along, ensuring her diet of fresh milk and cheese. The Prince of the Pilgrimage leading the caravan from Egypt that year had made sure her every whim was accommodated.

Nafisa threw off her bedcovers; she was naked but for her fine silk shift. She was still beautiful, and still desirable. Was she not the same age as Khadija had been when she proposed to the Prophet Muhammad, and he a young man fifteen years her junior? Like Khadija, Nafisa had chosen a husband. A widow as young and wealthy as she could not remain without a husband and protector, and so she had opted for Murad, with his curly red bush of a beard heralding his choleric temperament like a banner. Among the senior Mamlukes, Murad had stood out by his ambition, but it was her status as the widow of Ali that raised him to the rank of co-regent of Egypt.

Today, Murad would be tested as no one could have imagined.

Until a week ago, her world had turned steadily on its axis. Her days were spent supervising the trading operations of her wikala, the caravanserai at Bab Zuweila, and overseeing construction of the charitable waterworks she was erecting nearby on Sugar Street. And along with the rest of Cairo she followed avidly reports of the rise of Elfi Bey’s new palace on the Ezbekiah Lake, and gauged the rise of his ambition as warily as the city leaders watched the peaking of the Nilometer before the summer flood.

Then came the news that English warships had dropped anchor off the port of Alexandria, looking for the French fleet. They had left, not finding their prey, but Egypt held its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It had not been long in coming. The French fleet landed at the Bay of Alexandria two days later.

Last night her husband had gone to the judge’s house with old Ibrahim Bey and Elfi and the senior Mamluke commanders to devise a strategy. And Nafisa had lain awake, unable to sleep for only the second time in her life.

Nafisa started at the clatter of horses’ hooves followed by a shouted command and the scramble of the night watchmen to unlock and open the gates to the lane as her husband and his retainers approached. The servants bestirred themselves and fumbled to light torches with the haste bred by dread of their master’s temper. Nafisa’s maids hurried to her and she motioned for her Damascus silk slippers and robe. She slipped from room to room down the narrow, winding stone staircase, her robe sweeping the steps behind her, till she reached the mezzanine gallery with its arcades where, standing behind the wooden latticework mashrabiyya, she could look down on the central hall without being seen.

Murad had not come alone, there were two Mamlukes with him. As the servants scurried about, torches in hand, to fetch cushions for the wooden banquettes, Nafisa recognized Sennari, her husband’s right-hand man, by his great height and his ramrod posture, even before she caught a glimpse of his coffee-brown face with the tribal markings of his native Sudan etched deep into the cheek and chin.

The other Mamluke commander had his back to her, but something about his bearing, arrogant and wary at once, struck a familiar chord. At that instant he glanced over his shoulder and she recognized in his gesture that sixth sense that alerted him that he was being watched. It was Elfi himself.

The first time she had laid eyes on Elfi, Nafisa had been standing in this very spot. All of Cairo had buzzed about the peerless young Mamluke her husband had paid an extraordinary price for; it was said there was none to rival him for beauty or spirit, so wilful he had forced his first master to part with him, although no one knew exactly what he had done. She had waited behind the filigreed mashrabiyya for Murad to arrive with his latest acquisition, and peered down at the handsome blond Circassian. Murad had looked up at her triumphantly, and the blond head had tilted up, following his gaze. The Circassian had shot her a sharp glance from hard blue eyes, then faced forward again, impassive.

Murad had looked into the unflinching eyes of the young Mamluke and seen in him the prize racehorse of his stable; perhaps he had even seen in him his heir-in-arms, the heir he would never have from his own loins. For what Mamluke would wish upon a son of his flesh and blood to live by the sword and to die by the sword? For that they bought Mamlukes and trained them. Was it any wonder if they sometimes grew closer to them than they were to their own kin? Closer, sometimes, than they were to any woman.

Murad had looked into the hard eyes of the young Circassian and seen courage and intelligence. Nafisa had looked and seen a disquieting ambition. She had recognized a kindred spirit, she who had once been, like him, the possession of others, depending on beauty and wits for the favour of those who held her fate in their hands.

Twenty years later, Elfi Bey had earned envy and enemies with his fearsome reputation, his thousand Mamlukes and his half-dozen homes. The latest palace he had just completed on the Ezbekiah Lake was the talk of Cairo, with French chandeliers, an Italian marble fountain in the courtyard, and a library bidding to rival that of the venerable Azhar University itself. Nafisa had been proved right about Elfi’s ambition; she hoped Murad would be proved right about his loyalty.

Murad ushered his guests up the steps to the loggia with its arched colonnades, where the servants were laying out cushions and setting up round brass trays on wooden tripods. The men seemed to be arguing intensely, Murad’s blustery voice rising above Elfi’s deeper tones and Sennari’s laconic interjections.

Nafisa clapped her hands for the chief eunuch, and gave orders for breakfast to be prepared. The big brass pot of Yemeni coffee was to be brewed stronger than usual, as she suspected no one had slept that night. The cook was to begin baking the flaky butter pastry right away; if he had any sense, he would have lit his oven an hour ago. As she gave the eunuch the keys to the larder to bring out the day’s allotment of honey, butter and spices, she asked him, in an offhand tone, as if it were an afterthought, to report to her on the state of household stocks: how many sacks of wheat, rice, barley, lentils; how many jars of oil and clarified butter; how many bags of coffee, tobacco, sugar, nuts, spices; how many days’ worth of fodder for the horses and mules. Later she would send her chief eunuch to check the larder stocks in Murad’s three other houses around the city, and the Giza estate. Discreetly, of course; any rumours of a possible siege of Cairo would set the shopkeepers to hoarding goods and the residents to panicking.

Nafisa rather welcomed these mundane details; they would occupy her restless mind till Murad’s guests were gone and she could find out what course of action had been decided against the French advance.

* * *

Seventeen days. Elfi counted them. Seventeen days since he had occupied his brand-new Ezbekiah palace, and not even as many nights. He walked out on the terrace in the tepid morning breeze and inhaled the sharp scent of lemon trees mingled with the softer perfumes of jasmine and apricot. In a month the Nile would flood, and the parched lake basin before him would rapidly fill with water, and the Ezbekiah would come alive every night with torchlight and music, the boats gliding back and forth, the shopkeepers’ kiosks doing a bustling business in iced syrups and stuffed pancakes. Only seventeen days ago it had given him satisfaction to think that none of the houses around the Ezbekiah could compare, indeed no house in all of Cairo. Not one of the mansions of the great old man, Ibrahim Bey, nor those of Murad Bey, the master of Cairo, and his grand Lady Nafisa with her French friends and fancy furniture.

Elfi turned back to the downstairs hall and slipped off his shirt. He splashed his face repeatedly in the large marble fountain with its brass jets, trying to clear his head. Looking at his reflection in the water he saw a face he had not seen in many years: a boy called Shamil.

Growing up in a stone hut on the side of a mountain in the Caucasus, the boy he had once been could no more have imagined this Ezbekiah mansion than he could have dreamed of the Sultan’s Top Kapi Saray in Istanbul. But tonight, Elfi was blindsided by a stab of homesickness for the sharp, clean mountain air of his native Tcherkessia. He longed for the taste of snow in summer, for the echoing silence, for the horizon that stretched on and on at a dizzying distance. Yet as a boy he had felt hemmed in by the vast emptiness of those mountains, and spent his time peering into the distance for a glimpse of the glittering Black Sea, dreaming of the ship that would one day carry him away.

Then, one summer day, as he watched his mother ladle yogurt into squares of cheesecloth that she hung in the sun to drip into soft balls of cheese, something in him turned. He went into the hut and threw his sheepskin-lined winter cloak over his shoulder, and stood for a moment at the door till his mother raised her worn face, tossed her long blonde plait over her shoulder, and put down her ladle. Then he turned away and jogged down the mountain, never looking back. He was fifteen years old.

The boy Shamil was buried in him now; there was only Muhammad Bey Elfi. Elfi thought of the first master who had bought him in Egypt: the Majnoon – the crazy one – had brought him home to a large, pleasant mansion with running fountains in the courtyard. That very evening he had invited a score of revellers to a lavish banquet. One of the servants had brought perfumed ointment and silk garments for Elfi to wear, and motioned for him to follow the sound of raucous laughter to the central hall where men lounged on cushions smoking long pipes and downing goblets of wine. His entrance had been greeted with a moment of admiring silence, then bawdy remarks in an Egyptian dialect he could not follow. The Majnoon had beckoned him and, removing a finely wrought gold chain from the several around his own neck, had tipped Elfi’s head forward and slipped the chain over his head, patting the links flat against his bare skin with a smile.

That night Elfi had carried his drunken master to his couch, then taken up vigil in front of the window open to the night air. At dawn he heard the muezzin’s chant, followed soon after by the desultory calls of the night watchmen across the city as they dragged open the gates of the neighbourhood alleys. From the stables across the lake there rose the mingled shouts and laughter of young voices, the sounds of horses neighing and rearing, of swords clashing: the young Mamlukes-in-training were engaging in their morning exercises in the horse ring across the way.

Elfi had walked over to the Majnoon’s couch and, coming behind him, had lifted his slack body into a half-sitting position, supporting him against his chest, an arm drawn across the man’s neck. His master had snorted awake, eyes wide with alarm, and Elfi had given him a moment or two to gather his sodden wits before whispering: ‘By law, either the master or the slave has the right to take the other to court to rescind the contract of sale within the first two weeks. I did not become a Mamluke to be the house-pet of a buffoon. Sell me now, or you will wake up one night to find your throat slit.’

The Majnoon had been so terrified he could not sell Elfi fast enough; he had given him to Murad Bey in exchange for a thousand ardabs of wheat – an unprecedented sum – and from that moment on he was known as Elfi, ‘he of the thousand’. Murad Bey had taken him into the greatest Mamluke house of them all, and had trained him well. He had been taught to think of his master as his father, and of Murad’s other young Mamlukes-in-training as his khushdash, his brothers. Recognizing Elfi’s merit, Murad had manumitted him in record time. Elfi had risen rapidly in the ranks from kashif to amir, commander. Today he owned a thousand Mamlukes of his own and commanded forty kashifs under him with a militia of thousands more. He owed much to Murad, and tonight he needed to remind himself of that debt.

Elfi ducked his head under the water and held his breath. As a boy he had trained himself to hold his breath in the cold, pure streams of his mountains, for as long as it took a hawk to circle seven times. From time to time he still practised this skill; he did not know why – only that it might come in handy, one day. He timed himself, counting.

The first house Elfi owned he had bought from the Majnoon, his former master. Then he had built the mansion at Old Cairo opposite the Nilometer, and one between the Gate of Victory and the Damurdash, in addition to the two houses he had bought in Ezbekiah. But this palace he had just completed was the culmination of his heart’s ambition. He had had it built from the ground up, razing the site, and sketching out the plans himself on a large sheet of paper. Day and night, kilns fired stones and churned out lime, and mills turned to crush gypsum, and large stones were quarried and transported by ship down the Nile to be sawn into slabs for floors, stairs and courtyards. Various kinds of woods, of marbles and columns, were imported, as well as the chandeliers and the indoor and outdoor fountains. The French had given him an enormous marble fountain with carved figures of fish that sent out jets of water, and that he had put in the garden, under the long vaulted roof he had built for shade and privacy.

He had installed latticework screens with inlaid coloured glass on the windows overlooking the lake, the gardens and the square, so that his women could enjoy the views in privacy. There were two bath halls with pools, one upstairs and one downstairs. He had the house built on different levels, with courtyards, doors and steps separating his private apartments from the apartments on the outer periphery of the courtyard where his Mamlukes would live.

He thought he had rid his nostrils forever of the sour smell of the goat cheese his mother made in that hut on the side of the mountain. But a hunger still gnawed in him, a hunger he could not satisfy with fine houses or sensuous women or hordes of servants or great power. He had grown up illiterate, but in his prime he discovered in himself a hunger for knowledge. Now he bought every book he could, even in languages he did not speak, and sought out the company of scholars and historians. His pride in the new mansion was the library, stocked with books on history and the sciences, particularly those that fascinated Elfi: astronomy, geometry and astrology. Were it not for the unassailable reputation for hard living he had earned in his youth, he would have lost face among his peers.