The Last Emir

by S. J. A. Turney

  Arnau dutifully sank to the seat, grateful to rest his legs for a while, and sighed with relief, though he was instantly jealous of those men inside in the shade. The place was packed within, but there were still seats available. Out here in the searing sun, the tables were empty. It came to Arnau in that moment why they were outside: comparative privacy.

  After a long pause, the old knight reappeared carrying two cups which he placed on the table, sliding one across to Arnau.

  ‘It would appear,’ Balthesar said suddenly in Spanish, ‘that we might be best advised to use our native tongue right now.’

  Arnau’s eyes widened. This was unexpected. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because while we might draw attention in doing so, it will mostly be idle curiosity, and the simple fact is that hardly anyone in the city will speak this tongue. It is entirely possible, in fact, that the majority will not even recognise what it is. The Jews here speak Hebrew, but the Christians all speak Arabic. And outside, in this heat, we will not meet too many prying folk. Additionally, several things I noticed upon our walk through the city allayed the worst of my fears and convinced me that tolerance and ease still prevail in Madina. I do not fear as much for our safety.’

  Arnau sighed. He couldn’t imagine what the old man had spotted that Arnau had not, but he was grateful nonetheless. ‘Thank the Lord,’ he said, ‘I was becoming tired of the silence again.’

  ‘I can imagine. Get as many of your inanities as you must out of the way now, since this may just be temporary. There are things I want to discuss that I would rather passers-by could not understand.’

  ‘First, though,’ Arnau replied, ‘what is this?’ He indicated the cup.

  ‘Tea. It is the main drink here.’

  ‘It smells like sweetened feet.’

  ‘Tastes a little like them too, but you’ll not get beer or wine here. Well, probably not. Some places will serve a very thick, sweet wine made from dates, but to be honest if you think the tea tastes like sweet feet, you had probably best avoid the wine altogether.’

  ‘They make wine? I thought it was illegal?’

  Balthesar shrugged. ‘This is not the Almohad caliphate, but an old-fashioned taifa. Here, even the Moors follow differing versions of their beliefs. Some hold that all alcohol is forbidden by their holy book. Some tolerate certain concoctions, citing the ingredients of the drink as to whether it is forbidden or not. Some recognise alcohol as sinful, but just choose to ignore that and drink anyway.’ He chuckled. ‘Back in Valencia in the old days, you’d be surprised just how many very pious and faithful Moorish soldiers could be found in certain dens throwing back thick date wine until they wouldn’t know their mother from a camel. That is the beauty of tolerance, Arnau. That is why the taifas were and are important, and that is why the Almohads are wicked. They remove all choice from their own people.’

  ‘I saw Jews back there arguing with an official,’ Arnau said, taking a sip of the tea and wincing before privately admitting to himself that it wasn’t at all bad, really.

  ‘Jews and Christians,’ Balthesar replied, ‘though you’d not have realised they were Christians, for they were speaking Arabic. I saw the same scene and it was one of those that reassured me we were still on relatively safe ground. The man was a tax official, a wazir. The authorities don’t hold court like that, so I suspect he was on his way somewhere when he was spotted by unhappy taxpayers. It is a sign, as far as I am concerned, that the lands of Mayūrqa are still tolerant and just, that this is allowed to happen. If the Christians in Qurṭuba in the south of Iberia accosted an official in that manner, they would likely be peeled and left out for the scavengers.’

  Arnau shivered, glad suddenly that Balthesar had chosen these islands and not some other place for his quest.

  ‘On the whole, Christians have always been tolerated and even respected here. I am not sure how well those who speak the tongue of the mainland will be received, though, and I doubt it will garner a neutral response. We will be welcomed or shunned, and it is a gamble right now as to which. If those Almohad warriors are here by popular choice, then we will be very unpopular ourselves. If they are here uninvited, it is possible that we will actually be more welcome. It’s a simple matter of who is less reviled, us or them.’

  ‘So this is something of a brutal test of opinion? Speaking Aragonese openly?’

  Balthesar smiled. ‘If people start to glare at us, we might have to reconsider our position.’

  ‘I’m just grateful to be able to talk again.’

  They paused at the sound of footsteps and a man in a turban appeared from inside, bearing a tray. He placed his burden down and removed from it a plate for each of the visitors, placing it before them along with a spoon.

  ‘Šukran,’ Arnau said with a slight bow of the head, earning a delighted smile from Balthesar, who followed suit, similarly thanking the man. When he had disappeared back inside with his tray, the old knight nodded. ‘Well said. Your accent needs work, for you sound like a Syrian. But it was good.’

  Arnau looked into the plate. Brown lumps sat next to a pile of rice and mixed vegetables. ‘What is this?’

  ‘Lemon mutton. Try it. You’ll enjoy it.’

  Arnau did. And he did. He took another sip of the cooling tea and smiled. This all felt rather civilised after days on that mountain path.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘now that we are here, how do we follow up on your somewhat ethereal breadcrumb?’

  Balthesar smiled. ‘What we do is a matter of the utmost simplicity. It is how we do it that will be the complicated part. We need to look for records of what happened to the relic.’

  ‘Records?’

  ‘Yes. The Moors are more of a slave to record keeping even than the Church. There will be little that has happened since the conquest of the island that has not been kept documented in their records office. The office – the diwān – will have everything we need. And if we cannot find it, then the kātibūn – the secretaries who work there – will.’

  Arnau’s eyes narrowed. ‘How we do it is the problem, you say?’

  Balthesar nodded. ‘I did not select this tavern at random. Those fortifications before us are the walls of the Al-Mudaina. Somewhere inside there will be a small collection of diwāns, one of which will be the one that contains the records we seek.’

  Arnau’s eyes widened. He thrust out his hand, rice falling from his spoon onto the table, pointing the implement at the walls across the gardens. ‘There? The office is in there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But that’s a fortress.’

  ‘No,’ Balthesar smiled. ‘That is a palace.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Al-Mudaina is the palace of the Emir of Mayūrqa. Naturally, his government and bureaucracy share the same complex.’

  Arnau stared. ‘You want to walk into the emir’s palace and ask to look at some old records?’

  ‘Something like that. Are you sure you won’t try some date wine now?’

  Arnau stared at the walls. What lunacy would the old knight suggest next?

  They passed another half-hour at the tavern eating the rest of their meal and drinking another cup of the tea, though all calm had gone from Arnau now as he sat and pondered the fortified palace before them. Breaking in was clearly out of the question. Sneaking in might be possible, but would be extremely difficult, and the price of failure would likely be very high. That left only trickery and bluff or open invitation. The latter seemed somewhat unlikely.

  He watched intently. There were four guards on the wall top facing them, and they had a regular pattern of patrol, but not one in which Arnau could identify any weak spot. Whenever the small door opened or closed to admit or release a servant or official or soldier, Arnau could see at least two guards within, manning the door, though at this distance he could make out little more than their outlines. If only the tavern were closer to that gate.

  ‘It’s well protected.’

  ‘That it is,’ Balthesar agreed. ‘Fort
unately we do not seek to use force in any way, so that need not concern us. What we need is to be asked inside, or at least to have someone there who is amenable to our presence. We could, conceivably, simply request admittance, although whether we would be welcome in the current climate I cannot say. We must gain access to that records office.’

  ‘How would you suggest we do it, then?’ Arnau asked bitterly, sipping the last of his tea.

  ‘Very simply,’ the old knight smiled. ‘I intend to use the truth.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I may have spent my youth in Moorish lands, Arnau, but I have been a boy, then a carpenter and then a mercenary. I was never a scribe and I have never set foot inside a records office. I would not know where to start looking, and I cannot imagine that you have any more of a clue. So even if there were a way to sneak inside we would likely come up against immediate problems. We would have to find the office itself before we could find records within it. We would be as likely to bump into one of the emir’s wives as one of the records offices. No, the only truly feasible solution is to speak the truth and seek the help of one who works there.’

  ‘So we’re going to go up and knock on the door and ask to see records?’

  ‘Basically, yes.’

  ‘We’ve spent days sneaking around the island, pretending to be Moors and with my lips glued shut, and now that we’re in the heart of the place, we’re going to drop all pretence?’

  Balthesar shook his head. ‘Not quite. Our true identity I think should remain a secret. We cannot be certain about attitudes to the order. But we can be relatively open, yes. I would not have suggested as much before, until I was comfortable that we would not be instantly seen as enemies.’

  ‘I’ve been mute round half of Mayūrqa,’ Arnau reminded him with more than a little frustration in his tone.

  ‘I know. But we did not know we would be coming here, and I could not have anticipated these circumstances. Be grateful that Madina is still a place where we can do this. Now come on.’

  Arnau, still irritated that he had held his tongue for so long in case of discovery only to now walk up and announce himself to the local soldiers, rose from his seat and grasped his bag, following Balthesar across the gardens towards the gate.

  The old knight’s gaze kept slipping this way and that, attracted by a variety of scenes and folk, but Arnau, trying to fight back his irritation and see this new approach as a boon, kept his own eyes on their goal. From that small door, which had opened several times while they sat at their table, had issued forth occasional servants, a noble and a guard or two, but they had always seen them from a distance. Now, as the two knights moved through the garden and closed on it, the door to the Al-Mudaina opened once more and Arnau was treated to a much clearer view. What he saw stopped him dead in his tracks.

  Another servant had left the complex through the door, but as this one emerged from the darkness within he was angry, his face a storm of ire, and he wagged a finger at someone as he left, stomping off down the street with a document of some sort under his arm. But it was neither the man nor his anger that had struck Arnau. It was what he caught sight of in the shadowy interior, in the blink of an eye before the door closed, that shocked him.

  A figure in black and white.

  It happened so quickly that he almost believed he’d imagined it, but a glance at the angry clerk storming off down the street reassured him. He had seen the man.

  ‘This way,’ he said suddenly, tapping Balthesar on the shoulder and veering off their course, angling away from that door and more in the direction of the angry servant. The older knight looked around in surprise, but without argument turned and hurried after him.

  ‘What is it?’ he breathed quietly.

  ‘That man ahead in the green and white with the red hat left the palace all but spitting feathers in anger a moment ago, and I swear that as that door closed behind him, the man he had been arguing with was wearing black and white.’

  Balthesar gave him a blank look.

  ‘The Almohad soldiers,’ Arnau reasoned. ‘The Lion’s guardsmen. They wore black and white. It was one of them, I would stake my life on it, and he’s riled one of the emir’s clerks. Suddenly I didn’t know what to do, but I felt certain that knocking on the door and coming face to face with one of the Lion of Alarcos’s soldiers would not be a good idea’

  The old brother frowned deeply. ‘That’s fairly vague,’ he said. ‘Not much to go on. You saw a brief flash of black and white and leaped to the assumption it was an Almohad soldier. We don’t even know there are Almohads in Madina Mayūrqa.’

  Arnau shook his head. ‘I beg to differ. Most people favour colours, and I think I’ve only seen the Almohads in black and white. Think back to that fight in Al-Bulānsa. There were enough Almohads at the top of that street to ride us down and kill us three times over, and yet they didn’t. It wasn’t fear. It was the presence of the emir’s guards at the bridge. The emir’s men shouted something angrily at the Almohads and they didn’t chase us. I reckon the Lion was there to meet someone, and that someone was part of the emir’s guards or his retinue. The Lion came from Mahón and crossed to the larger island, and they were heading this way. While we were moving slowly through the mountains and hunting signs of Father Lucas’s passage, they could just ride along the main road. To my mind they seem to have been destined for this place, and they may have been here for three days already. Plenty of time to start getting in the way and annoying the palace functionaries.’

  Balthesar stared at his young companion for a while, then broke out into a smile. ‘And just like that, after weeks of complaints and doubt, suddenly you entirely justify my having brought you along. Very astute, young sergeant. Good. Let us assume, then, that these Almohads and their master Abd al-Azīz are in the Al-Mudaina and that they are interfering and irritating the emir’s staff. We still need to secure access to the records office. How do you recommend we approach this?’

  Arnau blinked. ‘Me? What do I recommend?’

  ‘You have proved that you have a thinking head on today. I need that mind working for us. How do we approach the palace now?’

  ‘We…’ Arnau took a deep breath. ‘We lie in wait, we use the angry clerk, and we still tell the truth.’

  ‘We do?’

  The young sergeant wavered, doubting himself now, without the immediate confirmation of the old man. ‘Well, yes. I can see three reasons. Firstly, we will need his help to find the office and possibly the records in the office even once we’re inside, and the truth will make it far easier to do so.’

  ‘True. A very plausible point,’ Balthesar replied.

  ‘Secondly, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. You have spent all our journey teaching me the distinction between this taifa and the Almohads. I cannot imagine the emir is in any way enamoured with these men who want to dominate his island, and therefore the same should hold true of his court. If they dislike and distrust the Almohads, then we, as representatives of the only other great power that opposes the Almohads, might just have an advantage.’

  ‘You stretch reason there, Arnau,’ the old man warned. ‘Because the emir will have no love for them does not mean his court do not. It is a staple of all ancient court stories that the man who serves closest often wields the assassin’s knife. It could be that there are men in that palace who would see the Almohads as a path to personal power and riches at the expense of their lord.’

  Arnau nodded. ‘Agreed, and I take the point. But a mere clerk is probably too lowly to hope for such a thing. And the anger of the man at his departure suggests that he hates them. Perhaps he hates them enough to support us? To help us?’

  Balthesar grinned. ‘I like this new Vallbona. He is a machine of reason. Quite right. You have sold me on your thoughts.’

  ‘And there’s the third thing.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That at least I don’t have to play the stupid mute and I can be a useful part of it all.’

 
That brought a laugh from the grey-bearded knight. ‘Most true of all, and if I have learned one thing in the past five minutes it is that you are more valuable with your tongue wagging than silent.’

  They had reached the edge of those well-tended gardens now, and there they paused, Arnau watching ‘Red-hat’ disappearing off into the city with a hint of regret. ‘If we follow him now to secure his aid,’ Balthesar pointed out, ‘then it will look very odd and suspicious, as though we targeted him. It needs to seem like a chance meeting.’

  ‘As he returns from whatever trip he’s on now,’ Arnau added.

  ‘Perhaps a touch more tea and a pastry or two is in order?’ The old knight smiled, and Arnau, flooding with relief for several reasons, joined him. The two men returned to the tavern and Balthesar, as promised, secured more tea and several sweet, pleasant pastries. They sat for some time, keeping themselves busy, all the time watching both the door of the palace for any sign of a black-and-white-clad zealot, and that road down which the clerk had gone for a red-capped, angry servant.

  As they waited, and in order to give them something to do that did not require their eyes and distract them from their observation, Balthesar continued his linguistic training. Arnau struggled with two of the three new phrases, but the old knight’s contentment over the level of tolerance in Madina seemed well founded when the innkeeper came out to see if they wanted anything else and went away with not just an order for more drinks, but having corrected Arnau’s pronunciation with a friendly smile.

  It was long after noon when it happened, and both men had become so used to sitting at the table discussing the Arabic tongue that they almost missed the arrival of the very man for whom they were watching.

  Red-hat appeared from that same street, making for the palace doorway. The only thing that bought them adequate time was that the man moved slowly, dawdling often, seemingly reluctant to return to the palace, probably still angry. Arnau and Balthesar, having paid for their fare, simply abandoned what was left and grabbed their packs, running across the street and through the gardens, attracting only that level of interest that men running in a city generally do: a brief glance, quickly forgotten.