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