The Tale-Teller (9 page)

***

“YOU AND I MUST play chess one of these days, Esther,” interrupted Beauharnois. “Although somehow I feel the match has already begun.”

“Governor General,” Hocquart sputtered. “You asked the girl to finish her story. Please allow her to proceed uninterrupted or we shall be here all night.”

“What can you possibly have at home that is so pressing you must leave early?” his rival replied. “Taxes to levy? Ships to build? Given that His Majesty is weary of supporting your fruitless schemes, my dear Intendant, you might as well stay here and enjoy the party.”

In the momentary silence that followed Beauharnois's jibe, all eyes turned to Esther, hoping that she would end the impasse. She in turn looked at Hocquart, who nodded grimly, resolving to ignore Beauharnois's insults. It would not profit him to quarrel with the fellow in front of his cronies. She sighed and resumed her tale, glancing wistfully at the
franchipane
, a dense sweet tart made from ground almonds, sitting uneaten before her.

***

ONCE ABOARD
LE LYS
, we sailed away from exile. Our first stop was Madagascar, to load up on provisions and give the crew a rest. The men spoke of it as a most enchanting place and were looking forward to shore leave with the greatest anticipation. You can imagine our horror when, at the entrance to the harbour, we were greeted by the decaying bodies of Captain Fergus and his first mate swinging on a gallows tree, a grim warning to any other pirates in the vicinity.

It turned out that shortly after we were marooned, Captain Fergus encountered a convoy of merchant marines returning from India. His crew tried to persuade him to flee, for it had a heavily armed guard, but being a deserter from the British navy, he had a score to settle with his former masters. Fate had pursued him across two oceans, he said, and it would be cowardly not to face it. Face it he did, with the result that time and distance were compressed into the span of the hangman's noose.

We learned the story from our old friend the cook, who had found a position at one of the taverns the crew of
Le Lys
visited on their leave. As soon as he saw Esteban, the cook ran to him, flung his arms around his neck, and told him how he was very lucky to have been marooned, as so many of the pirates had died in battle. When Esteban retorted that his own survival had never been assured, the cook insisted that he had known rescue would eventually come because the doctor was with the girl from the sea, who was a lucky charm.

Fourget was slow on the uptake, having drunk a whole bottle of wine and, luckily for me, he didn't understand the significance of what he had heard. Esteban quickly insisted they leave the establishment. As they walked, he told his befuddled companion an amazing story about his own early life, hoping to distract him before he figured out who the girl from the sea was.

Now I will share that story with you.

Esteban's father was an army officer stationed in the port city of Ceuta on the northern coast of Morocco. Ceuta was one of the last Spanish strongholds in the country and therefore under constant siege from the armies of the notorious tyrant, Sultan Moulay Ismail. Because it was considered a dangerous posting, they had a beautiful house and many servants. Despite this relative luxury, Esteban's mother was terribly homesick. She missed her mother and sisters and hated being stuck in a miserable heathen outpost with her young husband and little boy. Seeking consolation, she frequently left Esteban at home with his nurse, Edza, while she went out shopping in the bazaar or drank tea with the other officers' wives. For this reason, the boy gradually became more attached to Edza than to his own mother.

One day, while they were playing marbles in the courtyard, a Berber tribesman came to the door selling carpets. Edza tried to send him away but the man pushed past her through the gate and quickly unrolled a beautiful carpet, singing its praises in a loud voice. According to the Moorish fashion, the courtyard was covered with tiles of azure and white upon which the carpet floated like a treasure island, all gold and crimson. The sweet murmur of water from the fountain accompanied the boy as he danced around happily, while Edza yelled at him to stop, for if he got the Berber's property dirty she would be compelled to buy it.

Eventually she succeeded in grabbing Esteban and called loudly for somebody to come expel the intruder. But no one came to her assistance. Instead, three large men with scimitars burst through the doorway and grabbed the child and his nurse, rolled them up in the carpet, and carried them on their shoulders out to a waiting donkey cart. The frightened prisoners were flung into the back of the cart, wrapped together as tightly as cheese and spinach inside those tasty pastries Moroccan Jews call
bourekas
. On the one hand, they felt like they were suffocating and their faces were as scratched and sore as if they had been dragged across the desert sands, but on the other, the carpet protected them as they left the city for a long bumpy ride through the Rif mountains to the south.

They stopped for the night at the home of the carpet-weaver, a miserable clay hut in the middle of nowhere. His wife and three daughters waited on them hand and foot as though they were honoured guests and not prisoners, washing their feet and apologizing for the uncomfortable journey, feeding them until they could eat no more. After supper, the women of the family were sent out of the room and the men started asking questions. They were especially anxious to know if the Europeans feared the armies of the great Sultan Moulay Ismail, whose very name seemed to fill them with terror, so that they looked over their shoulders to see if any spy lurked in the shadowy corners of the hovel or under the stunted olive trees outside its door. They could not believe that their prisoners were unfamiliar with this prodigy but in the course of their questioning they found out why. To their dismay, they discovered that Edza was an Arab servant and not the wife of an important Spanish official. They assumed that Esteban was her boy; an easy mistake to make given that he clung to Edza as if she were his real mother, burying his head in her shawl and refusing to look at the men who had captured them.

This moved the Berber, who began to cry as he explained the situation. His only son, the light of his life and the hope of his old age, was being tortured in the sultan's notorious underground prison in Meknes. To secure the boy's release, he had been ordered to kidnap some important Spanish officials. He had succeeded in bribing the servants to abandon the place that afternoon, but had not calculated on their mistress being away from home. Despite the mix-up, he still felt he had no choice but to turn Edza and Esteban over to the sultan. Even if they were not infidels themselves, they belonged to a Spanish household. Surely kidnapping them would inspire terror in the invading Europeans? Perhaps it might even provide some sort of ransom, though undoubtedly nothing as generous as what might have been expected had they been more important people.

When he finished his explanation, Edza threw herself at his feet, praying to Allah for mercy. She had no care for herself, she said, but surely the Berber understood her fears for her only son, the light of her life and the hope of her old age. How could he condemn this innocent child to a life of slavery, torn from his mother's arms? Ultimately, the men were moved by Edza's piety to a compromise. They agreed to let her disguise Esteban as a girl so that he could stay with her in the harem to which she would doubtless also be confined. Moulay Ismail, prodigious in all his appetites, was famous for having more than five hundred concubines. Perhaps amidst such a crowd Edza and her child would not be noticed. Moreover, it was well known that the sultan's tastes ran more to European than to Moroccan women. He had even asked the French king, Louis XIV, for his daughter's hand in marriage. And though he had been refused, he continued to model both himself on the Sun King, and his spectacular palace of Meknes upon Versailles.

That was where the prisoners were headed: to the vast walled city the sultan was building with slave labour. According to the Berber, he worked them to death building his palaces, prisons, barracks, warehouses, stables, and aqueducts. It was claimed that when they grew weak, his slaves were beheaded by the sultan personally and mixed into the building materials on the spot, to reinforce the mortar with their blood and bones. The more Edza heard of the sultan's cruelty, the more willing she became to pretend Esteban was a girl and hide him in the harem. It took five days to reach Meknes by donkey cart; they had plenty of time to perfect his disguise. En route, the boy acquired a simple peasant dress, a shawl to cover his short hair, and dainty embroidered slippers, which he admired greatly. Edza outlined his eyes with kohl and, despite his protests, pierced his ears with a sharp needle and hung her own gold earrings in them. The earrings made all the difference. Wearing them, he became a very convincing girl.

The travellers smelled Meknes before they reached it, because of the sultan's habit of impaling the heads of his enemies on spikes topping the city walls. It was odd that someone so dedicated to sensual beauty could be so impervious to the stench of rotting flesh. The carpet-weaver, accustomed to the fresh air of the mountains, was disgusted, and stopped the donkey cart by a stream to pick some fragrant mint. Esteban clutched a few leaves to his nose and closed his eyes tight as they entered the main gate of the city, expecting to see signs of cruelty everywhere. But there was only the ordinary bustle of people on an ordinary day: barbers and shoemakers, fruit sellers and fishmongers, wandering scribes and musicians, and more donkeys, carts, camels, people, and buildings than he had ever seen before. Excited by the busy scene, he momentarily forgot that he had been kidnapped and was about to be sold into slavery.

After asking for directions from soldiers patrolling the crowds, the Berber led his prisoners down winding streets to a building guarded by yet more soldiers, with whom he conferred for a long time. They tied the cart to a gate where the exhausted donkey immediately fell into a profound meditation. On foot they traversed a labyrinth of courtyards and tunnels and staircases, arriving at last at a grand hall where some very tall Africans in splendidly coloured robes were in conference. This was the infamous Black Guard, or “Abid,” the best fighting force in North Africa. Originally slaves themselves, they were now among the most important people in the empire and entirely in the sultan's confidence. The commanding officer took one look at the three travellers, laughed a mirthless laugh, and slapped the carpet-weaver across the face. He fell to the ground and then lay full length, his clasped hands in prayer position above his turbaned head. In a voice barely above a whisper the poor man asked for forgiveness for his error and begged for the life of his beloved son. The abid merely laughed again, kicked him hard in the ribs, and sent him on his way like a beaten dog.

Edza entreated the abid to let her and her innocent daughter go, since he had clearly recognized that they were not the intended hostages. But he retorted that Meknes never released prisoners except to the grave. He did agree, however, not to separate her from the girl and sent them both off to the harem to await the sultan's pleasure. And that is where they stayed for more than a year, cloistered away from the world.

The boy's parents were making efforts to find him, but even had they succeeded in retracing his steps, the whole city was an armed fortress and there would have been no way of securing his release. Esteban himself was quite content. He missed his parents from time to time, but living among beautiful ladies was not bad. Living in the harem was not so different from the life he had led in Ceuta, busy all day with Edza, except that now he was forced to dress like a girl. His dangling robes frustrated any attempt at energetic play, and it was impossible to run in the dainty slippers of which he had been so proud.

Those shoes taught Esteban something interesting. Like many spoiled boys, he had dismissed girls as inferior because they were not as brave or strong as men, but now he realized that what renders them weak is custom, not nature. How could girls become strong when they were unable to move freely? When he begged Edza to let him resume masculine attire, she reminded him how dangerous such a transformation would be. But even she was forced to concede that he could not stay in the women's quarters forever. He was growing like a weed. Soon enough his shoulders would broaden and he would sprout down on his upper lip, and then someone would recognize that he was not the girl they had been calling “Aziza.” Inevitably both of them would be punished; probably killed.

Using her only wealth — the gold earrings Esteban had been wearing — Edza was able to bribe a peddler who came to the harem every week with a cartload of fresh melons. He agreed to smuggle the boy out of the city with him and get him back to Ceuta. Edza cut off Esteban's hair, which had grown down to his shoulders, and outfitted him with boys' clothes which she had acquired. All the peddler had to do was carry the boy out of the harem in the large straw basket he wore strapped to his shoulders, and then off they went together, Esteban sitting boldly in his cart, an inconspicuous country lad, trotting through the city and home to freedom.

His parents had remained in the same house in Ceuta, hoping someday their only son would find his way home. They were speechless with joy when he returned unharmed, and Esteban was ashamed to realize how little he had missed them. His mother insisted that they return to Spain immediately, where he would receive a proper education and take up manly pursuits — fencing and drinking and the practice of medicine.

***

THE ROOM WAS HUSHED, the company lost in a collective dream of girls dressed as boys and boys dressed as girls, colourful pirates and remote tropical islands, golden carpets floating on blue tiles, a cruel sultan building a city of human bones and keeping hundreds of women in his harem, when Beauharnois's voice cut into the silence, declaring that Esther was not only a liar but an unimaginative one.

“This nonsense about an escape from the seraglio,” he sneered. “Not only have we all heard this story — or one just like it — a thousand times before, it is not even about you.”

“I enjoyed the girl's tales very much, Governor General,” Madame Lévesque protested.

“Esther has done exactly what you asked of her, despite feeling ill,” Hocquart added. “So I think it is time we took our leave.”

“My, my, Hocquart. Apparently your inability to find yourself a wife has not kept you from becoming a doting father.”

The two men stared at each other with frank hostility. Then Hocquart gestured to Esther, who stood up, curtsied to the assembly, and said to Beauharnois, “Thank you, Mon Seigneur, for a delicious dinner.” Hocquart took her by the arm and led her out of the great room, down the hall past two bowing footmen, and into the sudden chill of the night and the dazzle of countless stars.

The pine-scented air was sharp and clean after the aromas of rich food and perfumed and pomaded dinner guests. Side by side they stood on the terrace, staring down at the quiet river rippling far below. Esther had never been to the top of Cap Diamant before and could only imagine the view when the sun was shining. It must go on forever. In the moonlight, the rigging of ships moored in the harbour trembled like spider webs. It seemed impossible that such dainty structures carried people and freight across the oceans of the world. A world made all the bigger and more mysterious by the stories she had been telling.

Fiddle music floated up from a party somewhere. They could also hear the barking of dogs, voices raised in anger, laughter, a baby crying. The busy world carried on, making them both feel lonely, suspended outside of ordinary life. Hocquart sighed, looking across the river to Lévis, where twinkling firelight suggested happy families warm and snug inside their houses. The lights of the village of Lorette still burned to the north. Turning, Hocquart let his eyes follow the course of the river down to Trois-Rivières and Montreal, cities he rarely visited but where Beauharnois went often for both work and pleasure.

“Why must he always insult me?” Hocquart murmured, more to himself than to his companion.

“He is jealous, Monsieur Hocquart,” Esther replied, shivering a little, not unpleasantly, in the cold.

“Why? He has a title and crowds of followers. He has the ear of His Majesty and private audiences with Queen Marie.”

“Nonetheless, you are happy and he is not.”

“In what way do I seem happy?”

“You love your work and you enjoy your own company. Compared to you, the Governor General cares far too much about what others think of him. People like him can never be content.”

“Like your stories, Esther, your interpretations of things around you may not always be true. But I do find them interesting.”

And together they watched as a meteor streaked across the sky on a journey from an unknown origin to an unknown destination.