Kindred

Chapter Five

Note: This fic is in the unfortunate position of being put in the background compared to other fics and fandoms I'm working with, but it does hold a special place in my heart and since I'm just out of hospital and therefore not the most coherent right now bits of this may be a bit garbled. If you notice anything off, please let me know. Also, if you would like to see a particular princess tackled next, do let me know. I have no specific pattern to them at the moment.

…..

For all the lovely things built in her honour and gifted to her as the sultan's only child, Jasmine's favourite place from very early on in her life was the harem. The women there were always delighted to see her, and they fawned and pampered her with a genuine pleasure she could never get from the palace slaves or officials. It didn't even seem odd to her (not until years later, anyway) that she had no idea which of them was her mother.

Officially, the empress consort was her 'mother', being the woman her father married when he began his sultanate. She rarely saw Sultana Fatima, and in any case she was past childbearing age when Jasmine was born. She had her own chambers in the palace and when she did leave them, she was always covered in so many layers of bejeweled cloth that it was hard to see her face. Jasmine knew her less than she knew the lowliest slave in the palace.

Nobody would speak of who the woman who had given birth to her was, and Jasmine would spend long hours trying to puzzle out who was the most likely.

Perhaps it was beautiful Laila, whose long glossy black hair and lithe body made her a favourite of the sultan's.

Perhaps it was sweet Zariah, dark as a panther with a voice as light and melodic as the most prized songbirds.

Or Salma, who was enormously fat but whose sparkling wit made her another of the sultan's favourites.

Or even Aimee, who had been taken from some strange faraway place and who rarely spoke, whose white hair and sapphire-blue eyes made her the most exotic girl in the harem.

Perhaps it was Noor or Saniya, identical sisters who did everything together, including spending time with the sultan.

Even, if it were possible, it was Malak, who had entered the harem when she was a child as the daughter of Zainab, who served the previous sultan. Jasmine supposed she would have been too young to give birth at the age she would have been when Jasmine was born, but who knew? She and Malak did have similar eyes and a mouth in common.

She knew who she wanted it to be; Tasneem, who was full of stories to tell as she braided Jasmine's hair in the most elaborate of ways, who always saved her the best sweets and gave the best advice when it came to women's problems. She was mother to all of the harem girls in this fashion, though at times Jasmine greedily wanted to hog her attention all to herself.

It was curious that with so many beautiful, intelligent, sweet and accomplished women in the harem only one had ever given birth to a living child, and that child a girl to boot. Had any of them given birth to a son, they would have been raised to the position of first royal concubine, a position second only to the empress herself. Jasmine wondered about this often.

"The sultan does his duty," Tasneem would sigh after being asked yet again. "Allah will bring a son if it is meant to happen."

"Would you like to have a son?" Jasmine would ask, just to hear the answer she knew would follow.

"Of course, it would be my honour," Tasneem, or any other harem girl would reply, "but we would dearly love another daughter like you. You bring us such joy, we would not have that with a boy child."

That was the one thing they all had in common, even Aimee who was otherwise so set apart. They adored Jasmine.

Shortly after her thirteenth birthday, she was forbidden to go to the harem, kept in her own chambers for reasons the slaves would not explain. By that evening, the harem would be empty. All of the sultan's favourites had been tied up in sacks and drowned in the river.

One of them, though she never discovered who, had been going to the slave quarters at night to try and conceive a child. If it had not been discovered, and if she had become pregnant with a boy, the throne would have been passed to the child of a slave.

Jasmine supposed she was lucky she wasn't in one of those sacks herself.

…..

The front door clattered open and from her position on the cushions in her chamber, Jasmine could hear light footsteps echoing down the hall. Chuckling to herself, she playfully counted down the seconds until...

"Close the door, for heaven's sake!"

It sounded like Belle; Tiana was the one who spent the most time scolding the others for leaving things lying around or leaving doors open but the voice lacked Tiana's distinct accent.

"They're late tonight," Mulan mused, looking out at the star-filled sky through the chamber window.

"I don't know how they do it," Jasmine chipped in, stroking her teacup. "It's so cold out."

Mulan laughed, rolled her eyes.

"I can't believe you think this is cold," she said. "It would help if you dressed a little warmer..."

"No thank you," Jasmine responded sweetly.

Cold it might have been, but the exposed flesh was a holdover from her days running in and out of the harem. She balked at the idea of draping too much cloth over her body; it reminded her of the old sultana. Even when she died she had been covered so much her face couldn't be seen.

The princesses were, for the most part, too modest and well bred to comment on her body the way the harem women had always done with each other. A blithe comment about someone's hair looking nice or a colour looking well on them was about the extent of it. There were outliers of course; Ariel didn't care much for confining clothes and was more comfortable running around in a nightgown or chemise, Pocahontas left her long limbs exposed as much as Jasmine did (though she was so rarely around she might as well have been covered up) and Merida had a habit of tossing off her clothes at the door if they were stained or torn (as they almost always were.)

Even Tiana, who was otherwise very straitlaced, often finished a long day in the kitchen by popping open the buttons on her blouse and rolling up her skirt until you could see her garters before sinking in front of the fire with a weary sigh. It wasn't much of a thrill for someone who enjoyed looking on a beautiful female body, but it would have to do.

Of all of the girls, only Mulan came close to understanding.

"The emperor has 500 concubines, last time I counted anyway," she confided as they drank tea together in Jasmine's room. "And 100 eunuchs to protect their virtue."

"Virtue?" Jasmine laughed. "I should think virtue is not wanted from a concubine."

"Our emperor is more concerned with intelligence and good family lineage than beauty," Mulan explained. "His last three sons died very young, they were sickly boys. Their mothers were court beauties."

"My father's favourite was so fat she could be rolled into his bedchamber," Jasmine recalled with a sigh. "But she made him laugh."

There was a knock on the door, and when they bid the knocker to enter it was Aurora. Barefoot and fresh from the garden with a basket of fresh strawberries.

"May I join you for tea?" she asked, wiping her damp feet on the rug. "My throat has been scratchy for some time."

"Of course," Mulan agreed, and fetched her a cup.

Jasmine traced what exposed skin she could find on Aurora with her eyes. There was nothing creepy or untoward about it, as others had thought, but an appreciation for her grace and fine features. Aurora always seemed to glide around instead of walking and her easy good humour suffused her form from the inside out. Her neat torso was framed prettily by the loose stomacher and chemise she wore, and the simple grey skirt whispered around her legs as she stepped around the table. She placed her basket in the middle of the table and told them to help themselves.

"What are we talking about today?" she asked after a sip from her cup.

"Concubines," Mulan shrugged. "I don't know how familiar you are..."

"Not at all, I'm afraid," Aurora said. "I know a little from royal correspondence."

"Jasmine was raised in a harem," Mulan told her. "That's why she gives us those looks..."

From anyone else, this would have been a mean-spirited joke on Jasmine's upbringing, but as it were the princesses had gradually learned to accept the looks and the comments and the getting-a-little-too-close as just something Jasmine needed to do. It was a quirk; just like Belle's incessant reading, Ella's mysterious spots that needed cleaning, Tiana's anchoring herself to the kitchen.

"My father practically had a harem himself," Aurora mused. "Of course, he didn't call it that, but even before I knew he was my father I'd heard stories about his bickering mistresses. Eight of them in all, can you imagine?"

"Goodness," Mulan laughed softly. "My poor father only had the one. I must tell him when I see him again how badly he's doing."

"Is your palace big enough to support eight mistresses?" Jasmine asked curiously. What she knew of Aurora's homeland was limited, but she knew the fine ladies, especially compared to Aurora's own humble trousseau, tended to gather a lot of belongings.

"Good lord, no," Aurora said, wrinkling her elegant nose. "Even having von Welser and and Pomischel in one building would be too much...we'd have to lock away every weapon in the palace! Probably some of the cutlery too."

"The emperor's mistresses are kept in their own small palaces," Mulan chipped in. "They're notorious for trying to poison each other and each others sons...they say the emperor's sons were sickly but they were probably poisoned."

"How awful," Aurora said. "The worst Pomischel has ever done was threaten to toss her baby out of the window when Father refused to acknowledge it as his...but we didn't really think she'd do it."

Jasmine sipped her tea and said nothing. To think a woman in their court would be permitted to act in such a way and still keep her head...

With the loss of the harem women, a young Jasmine had developed a terror of men. Her father had decided to dispose of them so easily, with barely more of a thought than he might have given to what fruit he wanted for supper. The knowledge that she would one day take such a man as husband, who would drape her in cloth to cover up her person and fill the harem with women he could get rid of as soon as he tired of them, it was a looming threat.

Gracious Tasneem who had nursed him through countless fevers, dutiful Malak who waited on him even when she was sick or upset, jolly Salma who had made him laugh more than any man ever could, sweet Noor and Saniya who went to him together to aid his concentration, poor Aimee who had a smile and a greeting for him even after her four lost babies made her weep every night, lovely Laila who did not seem to mind being given out as a gift to his friends and visiting foreigners, loyal Zariah who sang him to sleep all night as many nights as he bid her to, all those other women she did not know so well, whose beautiful faces and sweet natures blended into each other in a place so big as the harem...

...he snapped his fingers and they were gone.

She had a small measure of power as the Sultan's only living biological child (supposedly, as that one discovered infidelity had called that into question) and she used it to refuse every single man who came to press his claim on her. Every man she just knew would fill the harem for his own gratification and dispose of it when it suited him. He would not have that chance with her.

The Sultan despaired, and locked her away as much as he was able to prevent her from tainting what was left of his legacy with common blood. She loved him, for he was her father, and she hated him, for what he had done to her mothers.

And then this mysterious prince turned up with promises that sounded good in the ears of a man used to deciding women's lives for them, and he managed to sway her with promises and unbelievable sights...but what was more important was that when she found out he was of common birth, she could easily dissuade him from ever creating a harem of his own. He would become a Sultan with no expectations except a desire to make her happy, and she could impose her will on him to make sure no woman in the palace would suffer as her mothers had.

Still...it left an ache. The harem had been so large and the sultan was only one man, so in order to find physical pleasure and comfort the women had often turned to each other. There was no risk of illicit pregnancy, and quite a few of them preferred their dalliances with women in the first place. Indeed, it had stoked a fire in Jasmine that she would have dearly liked to experience this pleasure for herself, but with no harem it was impossible.

Is it, really?

Mulan accepted her closeness without question, often the two of them ended up in bed together cuddling skin-to-skin (such things were not unheard of in China, although a woman was as always expected to settle down with a man) and she knew the other princesses felt certain urges towards each other. One only had to catch the barely-restrained sigh coming from Elsa when she caught sight of Merida in a state of undress, or see how blatantly Rapunzel and Anna held hands when they thought no-one was watching.

Even Ella, as conservative as she was with her affections, could be seen watching Aurora with what could only be described as longing.

"...she did say Pomischel had done it on purpose, but honestly even a woman as ridiculous as she would know better than to cart smallpox around with her on the remote chance it might infect someone besides herself, but anyway there was a terrific argument, I expect..."

Jasmine tuned in just in time to hear Aurora tell a story of her Father's mistresses' exploits. Mulan laughed and poured more tea. Jasmine settled back on her cushions and admired the graceful lines Aurora's limbs made as she told her story.