The Jewel Of Medina (7 page)

I listened in silence, crouching outside the
majlis
curtain, while the men devised their plan. Since the assassins would strike tonight, they’d have to work quickly. Muhammad needed to get out of Mecca as soon as possible, and he’d have to stay away a long time—forever, perhaps.

“Al-Lah has made His intentions clear,” Muhammad said to
abi
. “I will leave for Yathrib as soon as it is safe.”

“And I will escort you,” my father said. “Not a single hair on your head will be harmed, al-Lah willing.”

“
Yaa
Abu Bakr, I am more capable of protecting him than you are,” Ali said. “Wouldn’t it be better, cousin, if I escorted you to Yathrib?”

“God has other work in mind for you, Ali,” Muhammad said.

My father borrowed some clothing from one of his servants and cloaked Muhammad in it, disguising him, then hurried him away to a cave outside town. Meanwhile, Ali wrapped himself in Muhammad’s red robe and lay on his bed, pretending to sleep. I, Asma, and my mother and her sister-wives went to Muhammad’s home—me bouncing in my saddle all the way across town, thrilling at the adventure and the fresh air. We climbed the stairs to a bedroom and watched from the windows as a gang of men crept toward the house. When they banged on the door, we stuck our heads outside as Muhammad had told us to.

“Come back tomorrow,” Muhammad’s wife Sawdah called in a calm voice, although she gripped her Evil-Eye amulet as though it held her rooted to the earth. “The Prophet is sleeping. He will be ready enough to see you in the morning.”

Unwilling to force their way inside and kill Muhammad while women were in the house, they waited outside the door, murmuring and watching him sleep—or so they thought. In the morning, when
abi
and Muhammad had had plenty of time to get away, Ali stepped outside, dropped the robe, and whipped out his sword, scattering the sons of Quraysh like so many flies. When the assassins were gone, we women went home and packed our belongings. The time had come for us to leave Mecca.

We fled on a moonless night, cloaked by a darkness as close as the grave. Tears choked our whispered good-byes to our motherland, the city of our ancestors, the home of our births and our blessed temple, the Ka’ba. We carried almost nothing with us, just food and water and a few clothes. Leaving our dirty dishes behind. Tossing our family histories into the fire. What good had our relatives done for us? We had the
umma—
the Believers—and Muhammad. Our caravan included me; Muhammad’s daughters Fatima and Umm Kulthum; his wife, Sawdah; my mother and Qutailah; my brother Abd al-Rahman, and my sister. We left behind my
father’s wife Alia, who refused our God. She pressed her idol Manat between her palms as she watched us slip away. She would pray for us, she said, that we would realize our error before it was too late.

“You’d better pray for yourself,” I muttered, but my mother wept and clung to her until Qutailah pulled them apart.

I would have cried, also, except for my resolve to become a warrior. Mecca was the only home I had ever known, and even in my
purdah
I’d dreamt of her colorful market, her craggy mountains, her enormous, cube-shaped Ka’ba crowded inside and out with scary, beautiful carved gods. Would I ever see my beloved city again? Would I ever see my friend Nadida, who could turn her long face and wide mouth into likenesses of the Ka’ba’s idols, making us laugh so hard our sides ached? Would Safwan’s family join us, or would they remain in Mecca and marry him to someone else? I looked back at the city as we rode away, yearning for a glimpse of my friends, but it was late and the houses of Mecca slept as if assassins had never roamed her streets.

We rode north to Yathrib, the Jewish town, where the Arabic tribes living there—Aws and Khazraj—had agreed to offer refuge to Muhammad and his followers. The journey was long, through desert sands so deep we had to place blankets before our camels’ feet so they wouldn’t sink to their knees. Over vast, desolate plains of jagged black rock and desert wilderness where a single misstep could break a bone. Through forests of palms so dense we had to shout to keep from losing one another. Beside the foreboding ridge of Mount Subh rising like a massive
djinni
between us and the Red Sea. Onward we pressed, to our Prophet and my father and a new life, free, we hoped, of fear.

At the break of our twelfth day we arrived, me weeping and rubbing my eyes against the onslaught of green. Green glowed in bawdy profusion over the daisy-strewn fields, the hills blaring with lushness and lavender, the promenade of grasses and shrubs and trees. It dripped from delicate green limbs dangling unripe pomegranates, from gnarled and woody acacias, and, in whispers, from pale-leafed olives dappling the terrain with dabs of blue and gray like shade, relieving the eyes from the emerald glare. Against the ring of rust-red hills surrounding the town on three sides, green leapt up as if alive. From my camel’s hump I could feel the leaf-kissed air moving like a cool moist cloth across my brow as I
inhaled the fresh clean scents of petal and blade and springs gilding the morning.

This was Yathrib. Or, as Muhammad called it, al-Medina, “The City.” Some city! As we entered the humble arched gate of stone and mud, a different aroma greeted us along with the bleats and moans of sheep and cattle. I gasped and covered my nose against the tang of manure, sharp as a slap, rank enough to sting my eyes. Flies whirled like sandstorms in constant frenzy, clustering in the corners of our eyes, blocking my view of the homes in all their mud-bricked squalor and the rotted grins of farmers in grimy clothes. My
ummi’s
eyes brimmed with tears as we rode down the single, sorry street.

In only a few days my mother was fretting: Why had we ever moved? Mecca had its problems these days, but compared to Medina it was Paradise. Where, in this town, was the bustling market offering everything we could ever want? Where were the shops and the colorful caravans? Where were the crowds of people from faraway lands in their strange costumes, speaking in tongues like music? We missed our majestic Mount Hira, stony and black as a thunderhead, and our families and friends.

We didn’t, however, miss Abu Sufyan. He made sure of that.

We’d ridden eleven days to get to Medina, but it wasn’t far enough. The Quraysh threatened us still. For them, idol worshipping and money were as tightly intertwined an orb weaver’s web. To disrupt one, they thought, would destroy the other. So they tried to destroy our
umma
instead. Every week we heard about another assassin sent by Abu Sufyan to kill Muhammad. Fear filled our mouths like the Meccan dust in our new oasis home. Muhammad urged us to enjoy the moist green grass and shade here, but his worry showed in the constant click of his prayer beads through his fingers. Alone in our new home, I played with my stick-sword in the courtyard, pretending I fought off murderers, protecting our Prophet. In all the excitement, I almost forgot about the engagement announcement that my parents were too busy to make. But I didn’t forget to watch for Safwan.

His family would have to make the
hijra
to Medina soon. We heard more terrible stories every day. Abu Sufyan was enraged over Muhammad’s escape. His men had begun snatching Believers in the daylight and cutting
their throats in Mecca’s streets. Ali and Zayd helped hundreds flee. No Believer could remain in Mecca and hope to live.

When Safwan arrived, would he be able to find me? The houses stood apart from one another here. The people of Medina made their living growing crops, mostly date-palm trees and barley, and raising animals. I could see more sheep and goats from my window than people. Not that I looked out my window all that often: The stink of manure blew into my room with the slightest breeze. So I played instead on the long swing my father hung for me under the sheltering date-palm tree in our courtyard. I learned to swing so high and so far, I could see over the edge of the house and into the valley below. Every time I glimpsed the rolling land and horizon, I looked for Safwan.

Perhaps his parents had delayed their emigration because of the troubles we’d suffered here. Many of us caught a horrible fever, from the flies and mosquitoes, my mother said. My father almost died from it. I lay in bed for days, delirious. My hair snarled on my pillow in a web of tangles my
ummi
had to chop out with a knife. When she finished, I looked more like a son than a daughter.

“It will grow back,” she said. I looked in the mirror and saw my boyish self, hair splayed like an open hand and eyes gleaming, and hoped she was wrong.

When I’d fully recovered from my illness, my father invited me into the courtyard for a cup of galangal water and a “talk.” In my room, my hand jittered as I combed my hair for the event, and I had to force my breath to slow down. My parents had never made this kind of invitation to me before. I could easily imagine what they wanted to discuss.

Please, al-Lah, oh please let them say my husband will be Safwan. Don’t let them marry me to Muhammad. I know he’s Your Messenger, but he’s an old man—and I want to ride free with the Bedouins.

But al-Lah didn’t hear my prayer. As I sat across from my beaming parents and sipped the delicate spicy water, their words clashed with my desires like metal bars against the whirring wings of a bird.

Muhammad, they said, was to be my husband. It had all been arranged on the day I began my
purdah.

I set down my drink so violently it sloshed over the lip of the bowl. “But what about Safwan?”

My mother
hmphed.
“That boy? He will never be more than a foot soldier in the
umma’s
army. But you, my daughter, will be married to the Supreme Commander.”

“
Yaa
A’isha, Muhammad is very fond of you,” my father said. “We have planned a wedding for next week.”

Next week? The wings in my chest flapped wildly. My parents’ faces seemed to spin before me. “But I’m not a woman yet,” I squeaked. Our tradition was to wait until a girl’s menarche occurred before wedding her to a man.

“That is what I said.” My mother turned sharp eyes on my father. “But your father wants to have the ceremony now, before Ali marries the Prophet’s daughter Fatima.”

“Ali thinks we are in a contest for Muhammad’s love,”
abi
said, shrugging. “I only want to make certain Muhammad does not forget which of us is his closest Companion.”

As they spoke, the wings in that cage drowned out their voices, beating harder and harder like the slap of the fat Hamal against his frail young wife. In only one week, I would lie under Muhammad while he pinned me down with his body, imprisoning me, hurting me. Would he hear my cries of pain? Or would he only pound into me harder and faster, as Hamal had done to Fazia-turned-Jamila?

“A’isha.
Yaa
A’isha!” My mother’s shout startled me out of my terrible vision. I stared at her, wondering how she could let this happen. Was she my mother, with a woman’s heart and a woman’s knowledge of the marriage bed?

“What is wrong with you?”
ummi
said, narrowing her eyes. “Those do not look like tears of happiness.”

“I—,” I hesitated, fearing her tongue as sharp as any sword. But then I thought again of marrying Muhammad and sharing his bed, and my mother’s fury seemed less forbidding. “I want to marry Safwan,” I said in a tiny voice.

My father wrinkled his forehead and stroked his beard, as if puzzling out a problem. My mother, on the other hand, exploded in a high, harsh laugh.

“Did you think your father invited you out here to ask what you want?” she said, piercing me with her eyes. “You foolish girl. When are you ever going to learn?”

Marriage was a charging horse, bearing down on me fast. My days in my parents’ home, always excruciatingly slow, now sped past in a blur of tears. I forgot my vow to become a warrior, but dreamt instead of Safwan’s rescue. Disappointment tinged each sunrise as I awakened to another day of dread. My mother tried to cheer me by showing me the wedding gown she’d bought for me—
Red and white silk, A’isha, all the way from Yemen!—
but I burst into sobs at the sight of it, making her
tsk
with annoyance. Tears filled my mouth, my nose, my stomach, churning with the food I managed to choke down and bringing it back up again.

All around me the household bustled in preparation for the wedding while I hid in my room, waiting for a miracle. My mother came to my bedroom curtain every day, hissing that Muhammad was here and wanted to see me, but I sat silent, with my back to her.
She is suddenly shy since we told her the news
, I heard her say to him. In truth, the idea of seeing Muhammad made my stomach lurch like the hump of a moving camel, and I knew if he looked on my face he would see my revulsion. I couldn’t help the way I felt, but I didn’t want to cause him pain. Muhammad had always been kind to me.

What would marriage to him be like? Would he forbid me to play with my dolls and toy horses, as Qutailah had done to Asma when she’d begun her menarche?
You are a woman now, with no time for childishness
. Would he change my name? Would he lock me away as Umar did his wives and daughters? I couldn’t be his
hatun,
since he already had a first-wife in Sawdah; I’d be the
durra,
the parrot, serving her every whim. Would Sawdah make me her slave, giving me the basest of chores? My head ached more with each question, as if my worries were fists pounding against my skull.