Page 43 of Do Not Awaken Love (The Moroccan Empire #3)

She sits beside me. I do not know if she, too, prays, or whether she only thinks on what has happened.

I try to pray, but the words do not come.

I try to empty my heart and have God’s word fill it, but nothing comes.

There is only an emptiness and below that, so deep below, so far down that I should not acknowledge it even to myself, there is relief and gladness.

I am free. I am safe. The woman I have feared all these years is gone.

The boy I think of as my son is Yusuf’s heir.

And Yusuf… Yusuf is now mine alone, should I wish to claim him.

I rise from my knees. Aisha follows me back to the table, and we sit again in silence.

“What will you do now?” she asks.

I shake my head. “I do not know,” I say.

In the days that follow, my prayers for Zaynab come unbidden.

I try to forgive her sins, though I am not sure that I do so fully, but I pray for her soul and I pray that what she and Yusuf created together, this great empire, may endure without her.

I cannot but acknowledge that she was a great ruler, for all her savage jealousy and the cruelties she inflicted on others.

I know that if I had been by Yusuf’s side, his empire would have failed.

I think of the three of us: of Kella, who gave Yusuf a son but could not withstand Zaynab, of Zaynab herself, a great and terrifying queen who created an empire.

And myself? I have not been a mother, yet I have mothered Ali.

I am nothing to Yusuf and yet I know he is everything to me and that I am held in his heart.

I have played no part in creating this empire, yet I have raised the man who will rule it one day.

I wonder at the strangeness of my life here.

I have saved one abandoned woman and raised a desperate woman’s child, I have loved a man and know I am loved in return, I have made a Jewess and a Muslim my closest friends.

And yet, I am still a virgin untouched, a bride of Christ, my vows are still upheld.

I wonder at God’s ways, at his intentions for me.

I wonder if the whole of my life since touching that red fruit so long ago has been one long punishment or an endless gift.

Was I cast out of the Garden of Eden or sent out on a holy pilgrimage?

I do not know, even after all these years I still cannot tell.

I do not see Zaynab’s body before she is buried.

She had grown old, but her beauty was legendary, it remained undimmed by time.

Servants and slaves cowered away from her, thinking her powerful beyond this world.

They claimed she spoke with djinns and other such nonsense, though I did not believe that.

I believe, instead, that she was a woman who knew how to make others talk, divulging secrets they would not entrust to anyone else.

I think back to the first time I saw her, riding past in the streets of Aghmat, queen to a powerful amir, more beautiful than any woman I had ever seen, loaded down with gemstones and rich silks.

She had everything, and yet her face was that of a truly unhappy woman.

I believe she found a better match in Yusuf, although it burns my heart to think of it.

She was his equal, the right woman to have led his empire with him side-by-side.

However she ensnared him, I must admit that she was a peerless queen for him.

My own feelings for Yusuf are my own sin, my own temptation.

She was free to marry, and she saw in him everything I did and more.

She was right to claim him for her own, even though I have hated her for it all these years and tried to deny what I felt for her: jealousy, pure and simple. I am honest enough to admit it, now.

“I will send you home, should you wish it,” says Yusuf.

I stare at him.

“I have had the documents drawn up,” he says. He pushes paper towards me, and I look down at it, words appearing out of a blur: my own name, the word freedom, his name at the bottom.

I look up at him. Do not speak. My belly feels as though it is weighed down, I sense a rising nausea.

“You are a free woman,” he says. “I have granted you a sum of money, to do with as you please.”

I look back down at the document, see what has been granted to me. It is a vast quantity of gold, a sum for a princess, a queen. I raise my eyes to meet his.

“If you wish to return to the convent,” he says, “I have appointed Imari to take you. He has been paid a goodly sum to carry out this task whenever you should wish to go, be it now or after my death. I have made enquiries; he has maps and all the needed directions to return you to the place you came from. You have only to call on him and it will be done.”

“You are sending me away?” It comes out of my mouth so fast I blink.

For the first time in this conversation, he looks amused. “I would never do that,” he says. “As you know full well. I would rather ask you to be my queen, but I believe the answer would be no.”

I stare at him.

“Well? Will you be my queen?”

Slowly, I shake my head.

“Why?”

“For the same reason as always,” I say, and a tear trickles down my cheek.

He nods. “As I thought. So, given that you will not accept what I would like to offer, I thought I would offer something else. What you long for.”

“I long for you,” I say.

“But what you long for, you will not accept.”

I nod. I no longer deny it.

“So, will you accept my other offer?”

“I cannot leave,” I say. “I cannot.”

“What holds you here?”

“You know what holds me here.”

“I would like to hear it from you.”

“Ali.”

He waits.

“And you.”

“If I were to die?”

“I would go.”

“And Ali?”

“A grown man does not need a mother following him about,” I say.

He nods. “Will you move into the palace with me?”

I shake my head.

He snorts with laughter. “So stubborn.”

“Too weak,” I say, serious.

“Weak?”

“I am not stupid enough to bring temptation so close to me every day,” I say.

“I wish you would,” he says.

There is a short time of peace, of sunlit afternoons when Yusuf visits me and we do not have to be hidden from the world, when Ali sits by us, his face lit up with love for the both of us.

We talk of the small things, as we always did, sometimes we even walk through Murakush’s streets together in the bright dawns and shining twilights.

The city of cloth is long gone now, replaced by the towering minarets and sturdy city walls of an empire’s capital.

Yusuf’s pace is slow now but there is no hurry to be anywhere.

We eat fresh oranges together and I open my mouth to Yusuf as he feeds me dates, their rich sweetness unable to match my happiness. A golden time.

The call I have so long dreaded comes at night.

There is a beating on my gate, and I do not even enquire of the veiled guard why he has come.

I throw a warm wrap over my robe and follow him through the narrow streets until we reach the palace gates, where guards spring apart to let me pass, my status here well known.

The room is lit with dozens of lanterns, their flames flickering around Yusuf’s bed, his guards and senior officers lining the walls, his sons kneeling by him. Ali stands when he sees me, comes to me and kisses my hands. Yusuf’s eyes are closed.

“Is he –” I begin, but already my eyes have seen the rise and fall of his chest and my question is answered.

“It will not be long now, my lady,” says the attending physician. I notice his deference, his knowledge of who I am.

Yusuf’s eyes open, slowly, as though the action costs him an effort. He must already have heard my voice, for his gaze is already on me. “Clear the room,” he says.

“My lord –” begins one of the generals.

“My heir is already named. You have no further need of me,” he says, with a trace of humour. “Clear the room.”

They do so, reluctantly, beginning with the lesser officials and guards, then his sons, even Ali at the end.

I stand at the foot of his bed, the two of us alone.

“Well, I have managed to make you enter my bedchamber,” he says, half smiling. “It has only taken me two decades or so.”

I smile, although the tears are already flowing.

“Oh, come now,” he says. “A slave kept as a concubine must make herself pleasant to her master. You must smile at the very least.”

I swallow. “You forget,” I retort, trying to laugh. “I am no longer a slave. And I was never a concubine, not even to my last master.”

“Indeed, how could I forget? I have never heard of any woman leaping from a window to avoid becoming a concubine.”

“Then taking two decades to enter your bedchamber should hardly be surprising, by comparison.”

He holds out his hand to me and I walk around the side of the bed and sit on a stool beside him. I take his hand in mine. It is surprisingly warm, dry, as wiry as ever.

“Everything is taken care of,” he says. “You know where Imari is, you will be given an army escort if it is required, there will be a ship ready to take you at your command back across the seas. Unless you prefer to travel by land. Al-Andalus is under our command now; you may travel however you wish.”

I say nothing.

“Will you go home?” he asks.

“I am not sure where home is,” I say.

“For a rich woman, home can be wherever she chooses,” he says, smiling.

I nod.

“A woman as rich as you will be made an Abbess,” he says ruefully. “Perhaps those of faith should not be swayed by money, but they usually are.”

“A woman who has lived among Muslims? A woman who has raised a child? Who is rumoured to be the concubine of the heathen warlord who killed El Cid?”

“Gold is a wonderful thing for creating memory loss,” he says. “As a healer you should know that.”

“As a healer I should cure memory loss, not create it,” I say.

“Sometimes forgetting the past is a form of healing,” he says. “You can forget everything that has happened and return to your life in the convent.”