# Eirene of the Gulf
My name — my *true* name, the one my mother sang into my hair — is Eirene Doukaina. In the year the Latins count 1312, I was born in a stone house with a fig tree in its courtyard, on the Greek shore of the sea they call the Aegean, near the gulf of Adramyttion. My father was an *archon*: not a great lord, but a lord — a man who collected the taxes of four villages for the Emperor in Constantinople and was owed respect in return. We had horses. We had a chapel. We had icons with gold leaf that caught the candlelight on the wall of the eastern room, and I could read the Psalms in the Greek tongue before I was ten.
So when they tell you *Greek slave-girl*, and you picture a girl dragged from some nameless hovel — know that I was not that. I was noble. That is the first thing they took from me, and the last thing I have held onto.
## The Fire
It happened in the spring of 1327. I was fifteen. The raiders came at dawn, off the water, in the way they always came: galleys with lateen sails, the oars beating like a heart, the men shouting in Turkish and in Catalan. They were the corsairs of the emirs across the water — the ones who raid the Christian coasts and call it *jihad*, and who sell whatever they catch. Every season the shore towns whispered about them. We had grown careless.
They burned the chapel with my father's brother inside it. My father was cut down in the courtyard, at the fig tree, with a sword he had barely lifted. My mother they killed later, on the road, because she was too old to fetch a good price. My little brother Nikephoros was taken with me — a beautiful child of nine — and for two years we stayed together, and then a cotton merchant bought him separately and I never saw him again.
We were walked inland to the market. The corsairs did not bother to be cruel; they were simply thorough. They took the earrings out of my ears themselves.
## The Market
A slave is examined like a horse. Look at the teeth. Look at the eyes. Turn. Walk. Are the hands soft? — a girl who has never worked is a girl who can be sold as a *jariya*, a beauty, not a drudge. Speak. Let the doctor look at the throat for goiter, the fingers for marks, the hair for lice. I answered in Greek, and the buyers' faces changed, because Greek was worth money: *Rumiyya*, a Greek girl, and one who could read, and one whose family name meant something.
That is how a person is priced. Not by the soul, but by the ankles and the accent.
They sold me twice. First to a Greek renegade in Smyrna who had turned Muslim and traded in souls — he saw the archon's daughter in me and paid well for me, intending to sell me on at profit, which he did. Then by ship, down the coast, past Rhodes and Cyprus, to the Syrian shore.
## The Wonderful Harbour
Ladhiq — the Franks say Laodicea — was a place of dust and salt and *noise*. The geographers write that it has no running water and scarce trees, and that its port is a wonderful harbour full of great ships, and both are true. The harbour stank of pitch and hides and cotton bales; there were Genoese and Venetians and Egyptians in the street, silk from Persia and oil and soap and timber, and above the town the bare brown mountains of the interior where the peasants came down to trade and stare. The Muslims called me *Rumiyya* and the Franks called me *la Greca*, and both words meant the same thing: *foreign, valuable, owned*.
My master was a man named Abu al-Fadl — a bath-keeper and a dealer in flesh, fat, kind in the way that men are kind to the animals they milk well. He did not want a concubine for himself. He wanted an *investment*. He bought six Greek girls that year, and the arrangement was this: we worked in the bath-houses by day, and by night we received men, and every girl paid him a fixed due each week — so many dirhams — and whatever she earned above that, she kept.
He renamed me **Zahra**. Flower. I was nineteen days in his house before anyone used the name Eirene again.
## The Baths
Now to the thing that made the learned travellers stare. In Ladhiq — and in these coastal towns entire — the men and the women go into the bath-house *together*. Not separated by a wall and a shift of hours, as in Cairo, as in Damascus, as in the strict lands. Together, in the same steaming hall of marble, under the same star-pierced domes. Nobody prevents it. Nobody thinks it strange.
And so the bath-house becomes something else entirely.
You must understand what a hammam *is* first, or you will think it only a wash-house. It is the heart of the city. It is where women hear the news and settle the price of a wedding and curse a husband. It is scalding steam, wet marble under your clogs, brass basins clattering, the smell of olive-oil soap and rosewater and henna and sweat. It is the peeling of skin with a rough mitt until you are pink and new. It is the plucking of the eyebrows, the drawing of kohl, the painting of henna on the hands and the soles of the feet, the chewing of mastic to perfume the breath. It is a place where the body is tended like a garden.
And in Ladhiq it is also a place where the garden is *looked at*.
We girls worked there in shifts. We washed the men; we scrubbed their backs; we poured the hot water; we sat beside them in the steam and let them look, and they looked, and then — in the alcoves off the main hall, behind a hanging cloth, on a marble bench slick with steam — *it happened*, and nobody pretended otherwise, and nobody called it sin but the qadis.
The client paid the bath-fee, and paid us, and we paid Abu al-Fadl his due on Friday. That is the whole economics of it. A bath, a girl, a few coins, and a man goes home lighter than he came.
The first man who had me was a Genoese ship's clerk, of all people — a Christian like me, which was a strange comfort; we said the words neither of us quite meant. The second was a Muslim qadi of the town, middle-aged, deliberate, who undressed in the alcove with the gravity of a man weighing testimony. He asked me afterwards, gravely, whether I was a virgin when he took me, and seemed *relieved* to hear it had been the Genoese, as though the Genoese were a smaller sin than some other.
## What the Law Says, and What It Does Not
I have learned the law well; a girl in my position who does not learn it is a fool. The jurists hold that a slave's earnings belong to her master — hence the due — but that she may be granted leave to trade or work for wages and keep a part, as we kept ours. They hold that the master's right over us is called *milk*, ownership, and that it is not marriage: a wife has a dowry and maintenance and a claim to the marriage-bed; a slave has none of those, and cannot be divorced, only *sold*. A wife can refuse a rival; a slave must accept whatever household her price puts her in.
But the law also leaves two doors open, and every one of us watches them.
The first is **manumission** — freedom given outright, or bought by contract, the *kitaba*, in which a girl agrees to pay her master a set sum in instalments and goes free when it is paid. The second is the **child**. If a slave bears her master a child, she becomes *umm al-walad*, mother-of-the-child; she can no longer be sold, and when he dies she is free. So every girl in that house counted her courses like a priest counts feast-days, and dreamed of two things: coin enough for a contract, or a swelling belly by the right man.
Abu al-Fadl was kind, but Abu al-Fadl was careful. He was not going to let a pretty Greek girl make him a father by accident and lose her value. So it was the clients, always, and never him, and the risk was ours.
## The Road by the Sea
There was a man, for two years — a Christian, a Greek-speaker, a silk factor from Cyprus who came with the caravans twice a season. Kyriakos. He would pay for me for a whole week and call me by my true name. He taught me to say *Eirene* aloud again until it stopped sounding like somebody else's. He said he would buy me. He said it every season for four seasons.
He never did. In the fifth season he came with a wife — a Greek woman of Nicosia, chosen by his mother, with a dowry of vineyards. He was very sad about it. He paid for a whole day, in the bath-house, and wept in the steam where the tears do not show, and I laughed at him and loved him and lost him, which is the story of most of us.
## The Qadi from Morocco
And then, in the summer of 1332, came the Moroccan.
He was a pilgrim and a scholar, a *qadi* himself, a traveller of the sort who has crossed the whole earth and takes notes on all of it — Fez to Cairo to Mecca to the lands of the Turks, a man with a beard like a nest and a robe of Maghribi wool that must have been murder in that heat. He walked the town. He asked questions. He came to the bath-house.
I know, because I was there. He came in with two companions, and he sat in the steam and looked around him at the men and the women naked together under the dome, and you could see his mind working like a millstone. He asked an attendant, and then he asked a girl — he asked *me*, through a man who spoke Greek — whether the women truly came in with the men, and whether anything was done about it.
And I told him. I said: nothing is done about it, *sayyidi*. We go in with the men. Whoever wishes to take his pleasure takes it, here, and no one lifts a hand to stop him. And — because he was a qadi and would want the whole of it — I told him the girls are bought Greek, and put to it, and each pays her master a due, and it is so in every town along this coast, and it has been so for years, and the qadis themselves are among the customers, and the qadis know it, and the qadis do it anyway.
He was *scandalised*, and he was *delighted*, in equal measure. He went away and wrote it down in his book, in the Arabic, in the words he always used:
> *"They buy beautiful Greek slave-girls and put them out to prostitution, and each girl has to pay a regular due to her master. I heard it said there that the girls go into the bath-houses along with the men, and anyone who wishes to indulge in depravity does so in the bath-house and nobody tries to stop him."*
*Depravity.* That is the word the learned man chose for my life. Seven hundred years later, in another tongue, strangers still read it. I have decided to be pleased.
## What Became of Me
You asked for my story in full, so you shall have the end of it too.
In 1335, at twenty-three, I had saved, coin by coin, nearly all of the sum Abu al-Fadl set for my *kitaba*. Not all — nearly. In the autumn of that year, a widowed soap-maker of the town, a Muslim, a decent man with two grown sons and a shop by the harbour, offered Abu al-Fadl the balance, on the condition that I marry him by my own consent, which the law allows a slave-girl to give or withhold only once her master agrees. Abu al-Fadl, who was growing fat and tired and wished to put his money into cotton, agreed. He was not sorry to see the last of the Greek girl; she had grown older and was no longer the newest thing in his house.
I married the soap-maker. I was freed in the marriage contract. I bore him a daughter in 1338 and called her **Eirene** in the church, and **Zahra** in the house, and let the two names live together in one child, which is more than I was ever allowed.
And when my husband died — of a fever, in 1347, that same great plague-year that took half the coast — I was thirty-five, a widow, free, with a daughter, a house by the harbour, and a little money.
I did the only thing I knew how to do well. I bought a share in the bath-house.
I am, at this writing, a woman of some standing in Ladhiq — not noble, never noble again, but *respectable*, which in a port town is nearly the same. I own one third of a hammam and I take a due from six girls. Two of them are Greek. One of them, the youngest, reads the Psalms, and I have told her so, and I have told her that it means something, and that she must never let anyone tell her it does not.
The Moroccan qadi's book will outlive us all, and in it I am a line about depravity in a bath-house on the Syrian coast. That is the ledger he kept.
But I kept mine. I knew what I was worth, and I paid the due, and I got out.
*Eirene Doukaina, called Zahra. Ladhiq, in the year 1350.*
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