Honour by Elif Shafak

Author:Elif Shafak [Shafak, Elif]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Women's Prize for Fiction - all candidates, Fiction, Women
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2012-04-05T05:00:00+00:00

The Amber Concubine

A Place near the River Euphrates, April 1978

Jamila swirled the pestle inside the mortar, grinding the saffron that was as red as a ruby. These were her last threads, and she didn’t know when she would be able to get the next supply. Some other ingredients were also running low. Marjoram, tarragon, silverweed, devil’s claw. She would have to make several trips to the mountains, including a visit to the smugglers. Yet lately she felt less and less like leaving her house, unless there was an emergency or a delivery, which amounted to the same thing, really.

All morning she had been in the cellar, working, contemplating. This was her sanctuary, her haven: this dim, dank, sixteen-by-fourteen-foot underground room with no windows and only a small trapdoor at the top of a set of steps. The entire place was lined with wooden shelves from floor to ceiling. On each shelf were jars, flasks, and bottles of various sizes and colours. Wild herbs, tree barks, fragrant oils, seeds, spices, minerals, snakeskins, animal horns, dried insects – hundreds of ingredients that she used for her potions and ointments. Four holes at different angles, narrower than the openings to mole tunnels, ventilated the hushed interior. Nonetheless, a distinct, earthy, pungent smell lingered in the air, although Jamila was no longer able to detect it. If a stranger went down there, however, he would become giddy, overwhelmed by the odour. But that wasn’t likely to happen. No one else had ever been there, and no one else would ever be there in the future.

Each day, for the past fifteen years, Jamila had spent at least a good couple of hours in the cellar, preparing the concoctions that might be requested at a moment’s notice with a knock on her door. She was the healer. The Virgin Midwife who spoke the language of birds, reptiles and insects. A granddaughter of the Prophet Suleiman. That’s what the locals called her. That, too, was one reason why she had managed to survive on her own in the wilderness. They respected, feared and despised her. As a result, they left her alone. This woman who was no woman; a witch who paced the tightrope between two worlds.

When Jamila was in the cellar, she stepped outside of her body, becoming a conduit for an arcane energy that coursed through the universe, healing, mending, multiplying. There she gave birth to her own womb, and the womb expanded to cover the whole of the natural world around her, a cavern of warmth and compassion, in which she happily lost all sense of self. She could never tell whether it was night or day. Not that it mattered. She lived outside of the clock in a cycle of her own. Some days she worked there from dawn to dusk, preparing age-old recipes, experimenting with new ones. It never felt dull. Tiring yes, but not boring. Each flower, every mineral, held a divine secret implanted by God. People often missed the clues.

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