by Jane Johnson
She stood at the threshold of the room at the top of the house that her parents had shared for so long, remembering. It was here she had first seen the twins, tiny creatures curled at Nima’s breast, fast asleep, as pink and hairless as baby mice. She must have been, what? Less than three? Amazing how the mind retained such images with such clarity: she could recall how the light had slanted through the shutters, falling in lozenges on the coloured blanket over the bed. The room had seemed huge to her then; it looked so small now. Small and empty.
Then she went to check on the child in her mother’s old sickroom. Little Nima, engaged in some secret game of her own in which she talked to each object in a peremptory, chiding voice, had scattered the toys about with cheerful abandon. Zohra retrieved a rag-ball that had crept half under the low table and caught a flash of yellow as she did so. Bending down, she pulled out the yellow silk cushion she had used to prop her mother up when feeding her. She stared at it for a long moment, then hugged it with a groan. She had never been able to bring herself to throw it away: to do so was somehow to admit that Kamal had hastened her death with it.
“Oh, Ummi. I’m so sorry,” she whispered to the empty air.
Nima stared at her. “Who are you talking to?”
“No one, sweetheart. No one at all.”
When, some while later, she caught out of the corner of her eye a movement at the threshold of the room, she cried out, but it was Nathanael, returned from the qadi’s office. He looked morose, but forced a smile when Nima solemnly offered him the little wooden camel she had been playing with.
“Your hand is dirty!” she chided him as he reached to take it. She snatched the camel back and cradled it to her chest.
Nat gave a small snort of laughter. “That’s not dirt, little bird. It’s ink.” He held his palm up. In the middle of it was stamped a large black cross.
Zohra’s heart began to beat wildly. “What’s that?” She hardly dared ask.
“I have official permission to leave the city.”
“There’s someone asking for you, Malek.”
His head came sharply up out of the doze. Such a sweet dream had been interrupted, he hardly wanted to be disturbed. “Who? Who is it?”
“Malek, oh, Malek!”
One moment he had been daydreaming about a woman’s embrace, the next minute it was happening in life. The woman in the dream had been small but sturdy; the one in his arms felt like a bag of bones. Disoriented, he held her away from him, in doubt as to which world he was in: the dream or the real.
“Alhemdulillah! A thousand thanks are due! Thank God you are safe!”
“Cousin Jamilla,” he managed at last. When he’d heard that all those not being kept as hostages in the city had been told to leave, on account of there not being enough food to feed them, he had thought Zohra would come to him here. “Thank merciful God you are alive,” he said, trying to sound sincere when all he truly felt was disappointment and the edge of a fear he did not wish to dwell on. Surely Zohra had not opted to stay as a hostage? With Tariq working at the citadel it suddenly seemed all too possible.
“You look well,” he said. It was a blatant untruth: she looked more like a walking skeleton, something barely resurrected, her good arm as thin now as the withered one, her grin making a death’s head of her face. “And the rest of the family?” he asked in the usual polite formula, knowing not to expect the usual polite answer.
She fought back tears. “Baba and Ummi have stayed behind as hostages. I offered but they would not let me.” She gazed at him, trying to frame the words. “But they took your father, and Sorgan, too!”
He took this in silently. At least they were still alive. For now. “And Zohra?”
Jamilla looked uncomfortable. “She is well.”
“Where is she? And Tariq?”
Her fingers fastened on his arm like claws. “What? You did not know? I’m sorry to be the bearer of sad news.”
Malek felt his heart stop. What had happened? “My sister?”
When she shook her head, his relief was so intense he could hardly take in the rest of what she said. “Rachid died of a fever during the rains, and Tariq …” Her eyes scanned his face. “We all thought Tariq had come to the sultan’s camp. He disappeared one night from the city.” She sighed. “Well, he must have been caught by the Christians. He must be part of the prisoner exchange.”
“Insh’allah. Poor Zohra. How has she managed on her own?”
“She’s not on her own,” Jamilla said.
Malek’s face darkened. “The Jewish doctor.”
“Life has been very … difficult in Akka these past months. People have been forced into all sorts of odd … arrangements.”
“War will do that,” he said quietly. “To all of us.”
And so when Zohra trailed into camp later that day with a pale, stooped Jewish man and a small chattering child, he greeted her with relief and asked no questions.
Soon the camp began to fill with refugees. Everywhere you looked there were sights to break your heart. Children as insubstantial as djinns, women so thin it looked as if a puff of breeze would carry them away over the horizon like chaff. Hollow-eyed, sunken-cheeked, sometimes missing limbs, hopping on crutches, swathed in bandages, carried slung between staggering folk in barely better condition they came. Those who could walk came toiling up the hill with their heads high, in their best clothes, with all the possessions they could carry—which, in their state of weakness, was not much—on their backs. It was horribly sobering. Yes, the army had suffered losses in the battles and skirmishes, but that was the soldier’s lot. There had been sickness, but there was always sickness in an army camp in summer, and some privation; it was as nothing compared to what the citizens of Akka had suffered.
He and Ibo and the rest of their comrades had given up their tent to his sister and cousin and some other women and children, and now, off duty, they walked through the camp, taking in the sights and listening to snippets of the conversations around the many cook-fires.
“I tried to persuade her but she would not come …”
“My father said the same: he’s too old to go anywhere else and start again …”
“… makes me sick to see the Templars in the central square again …”
“… they will pollute the mosque.”
“I heard they beat the imam and burned the minbar …”
“Franj soldiers rampaged through my cousin’s house, smashing furniture, shitting on carpets …”
“I cannot find my brother …”
“I have lost my husband …”
“What will happen to my sons?”
Back at their own campfire, Ibo shook his head. “It is shameful that it should come to this after so much effort. After such resistance.”
Malek grimaced. “They could not go on for ever. At least those who live will be saved.”
“I heard we do not have the ransom money.”
Malek had heard the same. The coffers were empty. The sultan had called upon all the provinces to send whatever they could, had written again to the caliph in Baghdad, not for the war effort this time but to save the lives of his subjects.
“He has not coughed up before,” was all the big African said. “I doubt he will this time.”
Malek was quiet for a long time.
33
The Moor came to sit with me as I worked. He looked through the pieces of paper I had discarded and pursed his lips. Then he stood behind me and watched as I smudged out a detail. He sharpened a new reed-quill for me. “Try this.”
I did. It was satisfying to see the fine line I could manage now. “Much better.” I dotted the bosses I remembered around one of the gem settings and sat back. “I don’t know whether the pattern is replicated across the whole piece,” I said uncertainly. “Or on the back.”
“It will have been made to be seen at all angles. Don’t forget, the old Bishop of Acre carried it into battle with him.”
“He must’ve bee
n a strong man,” I said, thinking of the weight of the fragment I’d carried through the city.
“He was a valiant man. He went down fighting,” the Moor said. “But let’s concentrate on getting the front right for now.”
I worked in silence for a time. Then he said, “Do you know the legend of the True Cross, John?”
“Of course,” I said. “Christ was crucified on it, alongside two thieves.”
“They weren’t really thieves,” the Moor explained. “At least one of them wasn’t. More of a trickster. But that’s not exactly what I meant. Do you know whence came the wood for the cross?”
“Off some tree?” I suggested facetiously.
He smiled. “Some say it came from three trees grown from seed from the Tree of Mercy, seeds collected by Seth, the son of Adam, which he then planted in the mouth of his father’s corpse.”
“Seems an odd place to plant a tree.”
“The logic of ancient myths is not necessarily our logic, John. But there’s another tale, more detailed than that one. Do you want to hear it?”
“Can I escape it?” I bent my head to draw the opening in the gold through which the wood could be seen, and no doubt touched by the devout.
“I won’t tell you if you don’t want to hear. But maybe the telling of the story will be imbued in the drawing you make, and thence into the making of the object. Perhaps it will be the better for it.”
I looked up at him. “That sounds like magic and miracles to me. And we all know about the truth of those.”
“Such a cynic. Has not life taught you that there are ever more possibilities than those you first guessed at?”
“Maybe.” I felt uncomfortable with the turn the conversation was taking. “Just tell me the story, then.”
He paused for so long I thought I had offended him, but finally he said, “It is told in other traditions that a cutting from the Tree of Knowledge was planted on Adam’s grave, where it grew and flourished until the time of Suleiman the Great.”
“I don’t know that name,” I said, moving the reed scratchily across the paper.
“You will know him as Solomon the King.”
I grinned to myself. “Oh, the one who cut the baby in half!”
He chuckled. “You jest. Unless you really didn’t pay attention to your teachers at the priory.”
“I don’t tend to take in lessons if they are accompanied by the strike of a stick.”
“It is a poor way to teach,” he said, “that much is true. Well, it is said that the great tree was cut down in Solomon’s time in order to construct the bridge over which the Queen of Sheba—or, as the Arabs call her, Bilqis—passed on her way to meet with the great king. She was less than halfway across it when she was struck by an extraordinary vision. She fell to her knees in the middle of the bridge, shaking and crying out.”
I stopped what I was doing and looked at him. “She suffered fits like me?”
He regarded me steadily. “When did you last fall down, John?”
I could not remember the last time I had suffered a full fit, falling and frothing and speaking in tongues of arches and pillars and angels’ wings. Not since … well, not since he had left me. “I can’t remember.”
“That is good, then. It worked.”
I gave him a hard stare. “What worked?”
The Moor gave a secretive smile, shook his head a little. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Tell me.”
He ruffled my hair, sending a warmth down my spine that gathered in my tailbone like a small fire. “On with our story, my Savage. In her vision, Bilqis foresaw some extraordinary role for the simple bridge. She babbled about the coming of a new order, the replacement of God’s covenant with the Jews, a terrible act of sacrifice. In terror, Solomon had the bridge ripped up and buried deep where none would ever find it. But centuries later the remnants of the bridge were found and dug up and used by Zerubbabel to construct the Temple in Jerusalem, as is told in the Book of Ezra.
“Many generations later, King Herod decided to replace the old temple with a more magnificent edifice, a project attended by sacrificial rituals and the spilling of much blood. It was during this reconstruction that the wood was discarded once more, except this time the pieces were used for a different and crueller purpose—as the crosses upon which Isa Christ and the two men condemned to die beside him were crucified.”
“I thought the Muslims didn’t believe in Jesus Christ.”
“He is revered as a prophet—a great prophet—in Islam,” the Moor corrected me gently. “It is only the story of the risen Christ that is disputed.”
I laughed. “Dead men do not rise?”
He spread his hands. “Who am I to deny it?”
Salah ad-Din bent his head over the piece of paper, but from where he was, Malek could see nothing of what it contained. Something was going on, something to do with the ransom terms—that was as much as he knew—and it all seemed very secret. Everyone but al-Adil, Ahmad al-Rammah, the coppersmith’s son from Damascus, the tall, dark man they called the Moor and Baha ad-Din had been sent from the war tent. He watched out of the corner of his eye as the sultan turned the paper on its side, scrutinized it and turned it back again. He met the Moor’s regard solemnly. “I am no expert at interpreting such things,” he said.
He passed the drawing to his brother, who frowned and perused it for several long moments. Then he, too, shook his head. “It is a piece of paper,” he said. “The distance from this to the object itself is too great a leap of imagination for a plain soldier like me.”
“You have some experience in these matters,” the sultan said to the Moor. “Do you think it will pass muster?”
“That rather depends on the quality of the casing, of the metal and its workmanship,” the Moor said.
“And this … mountain copper, what do you call it?” He turned to the Damascene.
“Orichalcum, my lord.”
“You can make it look enough like gold to pass scrutiny by the Franj envoys?”
“I believe so, sire.”
“Are you able to get hold of enough of the substance for the purpose?” Baha ad-Din asked. “If this metal will pass for gold on even a cursory inspection, I don’t imagine that it will come cheap.”
“My family have been working a seam of it for generations,” Ahmad said. “It would be our honour to supply the material for the salvation of the people of Akka and the glory of God. We will accept no payment for it.”
The sultan looked humbled. He raised his hands to Heaven and called a blessing upon the boy and his family. Then he smiled. “It is just as well, for I have nothing left with which to pay you.” He turned to Baha ad-Din. “And the gems?”
“That too is in hand, sire. Leave that with me.”
The sultan looked back at the Moor. “If this stratagem succeeds, we shall all be much in your debt, sayedi.”
The tall foreigner bowed. “In matters such as these there can be no debt, my lord.”
For the best part of a fortnight, the Moor and his artisans worked on the relic—the wide-eyed young man called Ahmad from Damascus who was in charge of the smelting process, two dark-robed alchemists, a goldsmith and his boy. The smelter, the Moor informed me, had been responsible for creating the Greek fire that had destroyed the ship Quickfinger, Hammer and I were on. So valued was he by the sultan, the Moor explained, that he had been smuggled out of the city on the very night we had found our way in.
I looked at the Moor now in the dim light of the work tent, narrowing my eyes at him. “Was that what all that green smoke was about?”
He looked at me askance. “That did not work quite as planned. In one way it was more successful than I ever hoped. In another, not so much.”
“Don’t be so cryptic! Tell me what you mean.”
“What did you see, John?”
I thought back, suppressing a shudder at how close to death I had come that day. I remembered the view from the basket of the trebuchet, the green
cloud full of spectral horsemen, hundreds of them, all in green cloaks, the crescent banners of Islam flying from their lances. I told him what I thought I’d seen and watched as he gave a rueful smile
“The martyrs of Islam, garbed in the Prophet’s own colour!” Ahmad said. “I couldn’t have asked for a better diversion.”
“It was a good illusion, wasn’t it?” The Moor was pleased.
“It saved my life,” I said.
He gave me a long, languorous look that made the blood rise in my face. “It did, didn’t it?” Behind him, the artificer laughed silently and returned to his task.
I wondered how so young and cheerful a man as Ahmad could be responsible for dealing so much death. But now, I supposed, he was working to save lives. Maybe there was some kind of invisible balance at work in the world after all.
Our work tent was set up at some distance from the rest of the army camp, partly because of the noxious fumes we were producing, and partly because of the need for secrecy. There were many times during that week that I thought our task impossible. The bubbling metal in the cauldron was a dull brown colour, bursting into bubbles of red and giving out sulphurous farts and gulps. On the first attempt it emerged almost black, and no amount of alum or scraping made much difference.
The Moor was unfazed, however. “It’s a matter of trial and error,” he’d said after consulting Ahmad and the alchemists. “Once we hit the right heat to anneal it, the impurities will emerge and can be removed. That will brighten the colour.”
I simply couldn’t imagine how the dull mixture in that cauldron could ever come to resemble the gleaming relic we’d stolen from the treasury in Acre. In the end, for fear my lack of conviction would somehow magically spoil the process further, I left them to it.
I did not see the Moor for several days, spending my time instead with Rosamund as she recuperated from her wound. Sometimes we were joined by the tall Muslim soldier, and I would watch how his dour, narrow face lit up when she smiled at him, and how her cheeks glowed as she mimed something she could not yet phrase in his language, and I wondered how such tenderness could possibly flower out of the bloody roots of this war.
