Bloodstone

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Across the valley from the Alhambra, the noon call to prayer sounded through the alleyways of al-Bayyazin. Its thin spirals of sound wound into the deepest corners of the hillside suburb. Ali the Alchemist did not hear it. For him, it was a sort of involuntary noise that the city emitted at regular intervals. It had been many years since he had answered that call.

But he heard the knock on his street door. It sounded through his courtyard, waking for a moment the long grey tabby cat that dozed in a patch of autumn sun, and it sounded in the rooms that opened off the yard. In one of these Ali sat hunched over his work, flecked by dusty light from the lattice that looked on to the street and surrounded by cauldrons and braziers, crucibles and mortars, alembics and albarellos. The knock sounded right inside his head. ‘Damn,’ he murmured. ‘Who is it now?’

Then he remembered that he had invited a few old friends to lunch – a lunch he knew would turn into an all-afternoon booze-up. They drank like drains, this lot. How many jars of Malaga wine would they empty this time? And then – damn again! – the coppersmith was due with the new apparatus, after the afternoon prayer. He needed paying. They hadn’t settled on a price, but Ali knew it would be high. ‘It’s a one-off, your honour,’ the man had said, slowly shaking his head. ‘Never made anything like it in my life.’ He certainly hadn’t. Thank God Layth would come tonight with more funds.

Layth. He rolled the name round his mouth, like a shot of arsenic. He loathed Layth, loathed the sight of those green zealot’s eyes, that beard that didn’t look quite real on a face that had stayed too pretty too long. At least he knew Layth loathed him too. And, thank Heaven, he hardly ever came; apart from anything else, that made it all much safer. When he did come, it was always under cover of night. I’ve never seen Layth by daylight, Ali suddenly thought; maybe he’s a ghoul, not a son of Adam. And he would never come further than the lobby. To Layth’s sanctimonious nostrils Ali’s house stank of scandal and of wine, the mother of mortal sins, and he always fled it like a r***d nun.

And yet neither could do without the other. Layth needed Ali’s brains. Ali needed Layth’s cash.

He heard loud drinkers’ voices going through the courtyard to the guest room. Oh, they were OK. They were fun. They kept the mental flab of middle age in trim . . . carefully, he added the last measure of white powder to the liquid in the beaker . . . He’d go and join them, have a bite and a few cups – not too many, not with the work he was doing – then leave his guests in Lubna’s capable hands.

Lubna could cope with anything. They still talked about the sparring match she’d had with the blind poet of al-Mudawwar. He’d tried to grope her, pretending to feel his way, and she’d hit back with words: ‘Filthy old man! But what can you expect from someone brought up in al-Mudawwar with the billy-goats, where they think that piss is perfume and s**t is sugar-candy?’

‘What woman’s voice is this?’ the blind man had asked, feigning surprise.

‘The voice of an old hag – like your mother,’ Lubna hit back.

He’d turned his verses on her, but she’d repaid him in kind – and got the better of him. How did it go, Lubna’s famous response?

‘You goad me with your virile rhetoric,

Because I’m of the s*x that’s fair and tender.

Beware, blind one, my poems have a prick,

For unlike me they’re masculine in gender!’

Off the top of her head, it was. For a while, all Granada was quoting the brilliant riposte of Ali the Alchemist’s singing-girl.

It was, therefore, no surprise that Ali’s boozing, versifying friends were under Lubna’s spell – and not only the spell of her words. She must have been all of thirty by now; but she had borne Ali no children, and her body was still firm and taut from the girlhood years of herding on the high sierras, before her capture. Her voice, too, still had the rough and sexy edges of her Spanish mother-tongue . . . here it was, calling him now . . . Yes, they were all under Lubna’s spell; yet Ali felt no jealousy. Lubna was his slave, his qaynah, his singing-girl, but the possession was mutual. She was his, in legal terms. He was hers in every other sense of possession, every sense that was meant by love.

She loved him fiercely back, this girl stolen from a mountainside. But the fierceness was shot through with sadness. Sadness that she had given him no children. And the darker sadness that haunted the happiest slave.

‘ . . . Ali! Come at once and deal with this bunch of ne’er-do-wells! Skulking in that stinking den of yours . . . ’ She was almost at the door. At the last moment, he remembered the couscous sieve – the latest in a series that he had ‘borrowed’ from the kitchen and gone on to ruin with his new process – and tried to hide it.

Too late. Lubna stood there, light and dark. Dark from the shadowed doorway; dark eyebrows and dark peak of hairline framing a frown. But the darkness could not veil the light in her face, her voice. Ali drank her in, sight and sound, with a thirst that he knew would never be sated. Lubna. White-as-milk. And that was only the half of her.

She saw him try to hide the sieve and smiled through her frown. Dark lips, bright teeth – Like silver, the song went, at the bottom of a well.