The Jewel Of Medina (10 page)

“You defended nothing,” she said. “You have enraged Qutailah. Now she will punish me for your attack.”

“Punish you? Why? I’m the one who threatened her, not you.”

“
Yaa
A’isha, do you know nothing after all this time sequestered here?” She wiped her tears with her sleeve and sighed. “Qutailah has hated me since the day I arrived in this
harim
. She hates me because your father
loves me. Her only desire is to cause me misery.” Her shoulders sagged as she turned to leave.

“
Yaa ummi,
” I said weakly. “Isn’t there anything I can do for you?”

Her smile hung crooked, like a broken wing. “The best thing you can do, A’isha, is remember what you saw today—and to make certain you never let it happen to you.”

Outside our home the
umma
grew, but our food supplies did not. People came to Medina to escape the Qurayshi, yet they soon began to ask one another if this new religion was worth starvation. In my father’s
majlis
Muhammad and his Companions wondered how to feed all the converts, while I hid outside the arched entryway and listened, as still and quiet as a lizard on a rock.

Spellbound, I listened to Ali propose caravan raids as a way to enrich the
umma
. My father spoke against it, saying we were merchants, not Bedouins.

“We are not farmers, either, yet Medina has nothing but crops and livestock,” Umar said. “With whom will we trade in this backward town? The sheep?”

“
Yaa
cousin, Quraysh forced us to leave our homes and our livelihoods,” Ali said. “Should we not demand payment from them, at least?”

Muhammad laughed. “Abu Sufyan, willingly parting with a single
dirham?
Even after his death he would come back to guard his loot.”

“Then we must force him to pay,” Umar said. “All of Hijaz will scorn us for our weakness if we do not.”

Ali and Umar’s arguments were irresistible. Muhammad ordered his mighty uncle, Hamza, to organize a raid on the next Qurayshi caravan that passed our way. A few weeks later, a furious Abu Sufyan vowed to retaliate for his lost goods by killing every Believer in Hijaz.

“Let them try to fight against us,” Ali boasted, brandishing his sword and flexing his arms. “Those soft-bellied merchants will faint at the sight of their own blood.”

In my twelfth year, our scouts warned Muhammad that Abu Sufyan was on his way to Medina with an army of nine hundred men.

Uthman’s voice shook as he repeated the news. “How can we defeat so many men, when we have so few?”

“With Ali on your side?” I heard the
swish
of Ali’s blade. “Do not fear, old man. I and Hamza will kill them all.”

Umar grunted in response. No one else spoke for a long moment. Then I heard my father speak words as calming as a cool breeze.

“
Yaa
Muhammad, I am grateful to have Ali on my side, and also Hamza. But most of all, I am glad that al-Lah fights on our behalf. I agree with Ali. Let us go to meet Abu Sufyan and show him whose god is to be feared.”

The day our tiny army left Medina, Qutailah clung to my father, weeping, while my mother stood stolidly beside him, not blinking or speaking a word. Asma, also, cried until her eyes looked like raw meat, but I grasped
abi’s
beard and kissed his cheek and told him I would pray for his safe return. I stood at my window and watched, my heart a brimming vessel, as he mounted his horse and rode away, the picture of valor in his chain-mail vest and leather helmet and shield. How I longed for the day I could go along to provide water on the battlefield, as women did in those times! I’d bring my sword and join the fight at the first opportunity.

In only a few days, our scouts returned to Medina with the news: The
umma’s
army had won the battle at Badr! Not only that, but they had slaughtered so many Qurayshi men that the Red Sea’s color had deepened with their blood.

Inside our house, Qutailah and my mother actually hugged each other, and Asma and I danced in the courtyard, giddy with laughter. Outside, the men who had not gone to Badr filled the streets with shouts as jubilant as if they had played a part in the victory. We ululated with pride for our army and in thanksgiving to al-Lah. Some shed tears over their Qurayshi kin who had died in the battle, but not me. I rejoiced to be free from the fear Abu Sufyan had caused us for so long. After such a defeat, he would surely leave us alone from now on.

A few months later, when my blood began to flow, I felt light enough to dance again. At last Muhammad would come for me, and I’d be able to leave this tomb! Yet as my mother washed my legs and fastened a cloth between them, I stared without blinking to force the water to my eyes. According to custom, I was supposed to cry when I left my parents’ home.

“By al-Lah, what are you sniffling about?” my mother said, waving her hands as if to sweep away my tears. “You are a woman now, A’isha. You should be rejoicing, not acting like a child.”

Yet, what woman played with toys? My wooden horses still gave me hours of pleasure. My soft dolls and cloth animals knew all my secrets. But
ummi
shook her head when she saw me pulling them off my bedroom shelves and placing them in a goatskin bag.

“Leave those here,” she said. “You will be busy at the mosque. Muhammad does not keep slaves or hire servants. Sawdah does the work, and you will help her.” I shrugged and continued packing my dolls, but she snatched the bag out of my hand. “No daughter of Abu Bakr’s will enter her bridal chamber with arms full of toys! You are the Prophet’s wife—not his daughter.”

When I had finished packing, she turned to leave the room. I grabbed my favorite doll, Layla, from my bed and stuffed her inside my robe. Then I followed my
ummi
into the living room, where Muhammad greeted me with a smile as warm and bright as the sun. He looked much younger than his fifty-five years that day, standing in my parents’ cool, whitewashed room with legs apart and his hands planted on his hips. His white tunic and skirt hung loose over his compact body, and his dark curls sprang, unruly, from beneath his white turban.

His eyes like honey flowed sweet glances over my face and body, lingering appreciation over my red-and-white striped wedding gown as though he’d never seen it before.

“Today,” he said, “I am the most fortunate man in all Hijaz.”

“Today and every day, from now on,” I flirted back.

“Yes, very fortunate,” he said, nodding, “to be married to such a modest young woman.”

“If it’s modesty you treasure, you should have married al-Qaswa. I have never heard that camel brag about anything.”

Muhammad’s laugh was like a lion’s roar. My father laughed, too, and even my mother, whose eyes seemed to dance like candlelight whenever she looked at Muhammad. “You see what you are contending with, Prophet,” she said. “I hope you will not change your mind.”

“And forgo the opportunity to wake up laughing every morning?” Muhammad said.

The image of us in bed together flashed like a bolt of lightning through my mind, and I heard nothing else anyone said. I don’t remember whether my mother kissed me good-bye or cried a single tear; I don’t know what my father murmured as he pressed into my hand a leather pouch containing five silver
dirhams
. All I could think about was that old, hairy-bottomed Hamal astride his small young wife. Fazia-turned-Jamila had been only a year or two older that day than I was now.

Red tinged the morning sky as Muhammad and I rode together on al-Qaswa, his pure white camel, away from my parents’ house and across the meadow separating us from the city proper. Clouds shifted uneasily before the sun. Palm fronds waved as if welcoming us. Purple lavender flecked the pale, scrubby grass, scenting the breeze. Sheep billowed past, bleating like crying babies. I gripped the bridle in my hands and wondered if I would ever visit my father’s house again.

Then we were in the shit-stinking city. I never saw more flies anywhere than in Medina in those days. They feasted on the manure that sheep, goats, and dogs dropped in the streets, then came to sip from the corners of our eyes. I forgot, for a moment, about the marriage bed as I flailed my arms to shoo them away.

“The flies love whatever is sweet,” Muhammad teased. “See how they are leaving me alone?”

Their attack subsided as we neared the mosque. I blinked and beheld the city for the first time since I’d entered it two years ago. Straight-backed women walked to and from the pond where water was collected, balancing clay jugs or laundry baskets on their heads. Men in coarse, pale clothing led donkeys with their carts past rude houses of dried mud and grass. Al-Qaswa stopped, halted by a tall, thin man with a wandering eye and a shorter man with a long, drooping mustache. Both of them bowed to Muhammad and ogled me. I pulled my wrapper about my neck.

“
Yaa
Muhammad, is your young bride ripe at last?” the shorter man said with a dirty grin. “I hope you will not scream too loudly tonight, little girl. It would be cruel to torment those of us who sleep alone.”

My face filled with heat. Behind me, Muhammad’s body stiffened.

“Do you sleep by yourself? You poor, lonely man,” I said, and wrinkled my nose. “But, by al-Lah, from the smell of you I can guess why.” The
man’s face reddened as the people around him—including his tall friend—filled the street with laughter.

“Well spoken, Little Red,” Muhammad said as we continued our ride. “Those are Ibn Ubayy’s men. A few more embarrassments like that one, and they may learn their manners.”

“I’ve never known an ass to learn anything,” I said.

He laughed and squeezed my arm. “I’m going to have to practice my retorts to keep up with you.” But he didn’t remark on the wedding night, or what it held for me. I recalled the whisperings of Asma, who was married now and lived with her husband.
Hands like scorpions scuttling across your skin,
she’d breathed in my ear last night as she brushed my hair.
And then—the sting of his tail between your legs!

My jaw dropped when Muhammad pointed out the mosque. This hovel was the home of God’s Messenger? I had expected a palace, not this low, squat building of mud bricks. It didn’t even have a door! Al-Qaswa kneeled at the entryway and Muhammad stepped down from her hump, then helped me to the ground. A man with a black face as shiny as his bald head stood before us: Bilal. He, too, wore a white tunic and skirt, but with a necklace of pale shells and dark bone plus pieces of ivory in his ears. This was the man whose voice I had heard gonging from atop the mosque five times a day, summoning the Believers to prayer:
Al-Lahu akbar!
Even at a normal volume, his voice seemed to chime. His smile was generous, full of teeth as white as bleached bones. His kind gaze calmed my churning stomach. If he was imagining my upcoming night with Muhammad—as everyone else seemed to be—he did not reveal it.

Muhammad held my hand and led me into the mosque, a large, plain, oblong room colored in varying shades of brown from the floor strewn with pebbles and sand to the dried mud walls. Date-palm fronds slanted across the ceiling, forming a loosely woven roof that allowed the sun to filter through in tiny pinpoints, as though it were raining light. In each stream of diaphanous gold, fine dust swirled as he walked me around with his arm about my shoulder, pointing out the date-palm trunks he and his helpers had cut with long knives and placed through the room as columns to support the roof—“a design of my own devising.”

He boosted me up to stand on a tree stump so large it could hold my entire family. Here was where he led the Friday afternoon prayer services.
He cupped his hands to catch the water trickling from the sacred spout on the room’s north end, then offered me a drink. As I sipped, he told how he and Umar had built the spout from copper tubes to extend through the wall from a nearby well, bringing in water for cleansing the hands and feet before worship. I marveled at the humble contrast this building made to my parents’ home, and decided to talk to Sawdah about adding furniture and colorful cushions to this dreary room.

We walked through another arched doorway on the east side of the mosque and into the courtyard, a large, circular area tufted with long strands of gray-green grass and shaded by a variety of trees: scrubby acacias; a date-palm rising as if to touch the heavens, its leaves shooting outward from its crown like the rays of a green sun; ghaza’a trees with their feather-leafed branches bending as if in prayer. A hut of unbaked brick huddled on the north side of the courtyard, next to a huge tent covered with long camel’s hair, which served as insulation against the heat. Muhammad led me around the corner of the mosque where, outside the northern wall, a well-trodden path led to a stone well and, beside it, a garden flourished in glittering display: pomegranate trees bearing orange, bell-shaped blossoms; elegant lime trees; indigo plants flowering the deepest blue; lacy flax plants not yet in flower. This was his daughter Fatima’s garden, Muhammad told me. She still tended it daily, but being married to Ali now she had outgrown the swing hanging from a thorn-tree.