Page 33 of None Such as She (The Moroccan Empire #2)

I grab at his hand and pull him into my tent where he gazes in awe at the surroundings, so different from his own family’s humble tent, a ragged affair of worn colours and many mouths to feed.

“Speak quietly,” I hiss at him. “What do you have to tell me?”

“She is here.”

“Now?” No, not today, please not today. Let me have one night, one night where I am Yusuf’s only wife, his only love.

He nods, eyes bright. He knows that this information is what I had asked him for, that coins will slip now from my hand to his and that his family’s fortunes will change because of his quick feet and sharp eyes.

I struggle to smile, for no-one must gossip of how I looked when this woman arrived.

“She is my sister,” I say, forcing a kindly tone. “And I have longed for her embrace.”

“Allah be praised!” says the boy, aiming to please. “She is here for your wedding feast!”

My teeth clench so tightly together I think he will hear them grinding. I feel for coins and press them into his hand. He gapes at them, he will never even have seen some of these coins.

“How long?” I ask as he bows to me and makes for the door.

“An hour, no more, lady!” he assures me with a smile.

***

Hela shakes her head.

“You knew this moment would come,” she says stubbornly.

“Yes,” I hiss at her “But I did not know it would come on my wedding night.”

She shrugs.

“You have been working on him for three months now,” she says. “If he is not yours now, he never will be.”

“His first wife is about to arrive,” I say. “And if he goes to her tonight, my wedding night, I will die.”

Hela is not impressed with my dramatic words. “You will not die,” she says. “Besides, what kind of a man goes to his first wife on the wedding night of the second?”

“A man who has not seen his first wife for more than two years!”

“You will have to share him, Zaynab.”

“Perhaps,” I say. “But not tonight, Hela.”

She sighs and gets out her mortar and pestle.

“Make it strong,” I say.

She looks up, challenging me. “How strong?”

I look into her dark steady eyes. “Strong,” I say. “Strong.”

She hesitates, then opens a chest and pulls out the red cup.

***

I am shaking. My tent is too large. I long for a small place that will hold me in its warm embrace, not this mighty structure, which commands me to stand tall when all I want is to crouch, to curl up and brace myself for the unknown threat to come.

I know that even now she is walking towards my tent.

I sent Yusuf to prayers before our wedding feast knowing that while he prayed she would come to me.

I pray harder than any man or woman as the call to prayer echoes through the camp.

My piety, though, is all for me. Let her be ugly, I pray.

Let her be old. Let her be barren forever.

Let her be stooped, stupid and too stunned by her new surroundings to take her rightful place in my world.

Let me take Yusuf for myself over her reaching hands.

In the midst of my prayers a man’s voice calls my name and I know that she has arrived.

I think of the light in Yusuf’s eyes, how it shines now when he looks at me, how his hand was hot on mine when we stood together to be married.

I think of his growing desire and how tonight at last he will be mine.

I stand tall and I walk to the door of my tent.

Unseen to those outside Hela holds back the folds and I emerge.

In front of me is one of the guards sent to escort her here.

He is following orders as he should, he has brought her here quickly and without taking her to Yusuf first as she no doubt will have begged him to do.

She has already been betrayed. My eyes slide past his anxious face and at last I see Yusuf’s first wife. Kella.

I keep my face still although I want to grimace.

She is not old, as I had hoped. She is nowhere near Yusuf’s age, indeed I would say she is younger than I, although she is weary with fear and travelling.

She must have been almost a child when he married her, no older than when I married my first husband.

Is this what Yusuf wants from a bride? A child-girl, barely rising past my shoulder?

She should be rounded and pleasing to the eye but she is haggard with lack of food and water.

She must have ridden day and night to come here so quickly and it has taken its toll on her.

But underneath the worry and the exhaustion, the weight dropped too quickly from her breasts and face, she is pretty.

A sweet face, a slender body but well formed.

Bright robes, though dust-covered, wrap round her body.

A young, pretty wife, heartbroken at the sight of me.

I have waited a heartbeat too long in silence. I know without looking that the escort is worried. I should have spoken by now. There is only one thing I can say in front of this man. I hold out my hands and smile at the child-wife.

“Sister,” I say, and my heart shudders for the times I have spoken this word, the times it has brought me nothing but sorrow and another failed marriage.

She holds out her small travel-dirtied hands to me and dutifully repeats that untruthful word back to me.

Her voice trembles as though on the brink of tears.

I can only pray this means she is weak, that she will be easily swept aside so that nothing can stand between me and my last chance to be loved.

So begins my fourth wedding night.