When spring came, the orange groves of the Rampion manor that had stood so long untended bowed heavy with fruit. And it might have gone well for Lamia and her grandchildren, had a boy not been found dead under the orange trees, his tongue blue as from snakebite and a lobe of fruit in his mouth, but no mark upon him. Then the whispers started. Some of the older boys, who had become accustomed to eating from the Rampion trees when the estate stood empty, said Lamia de Rampion had screeched at them and called down devils when she found them filling their pockets with oranges. The drovers told how she walked out alone on nights of great wind and communed with the al-shayatin by the light of a bonfire. The women even took to saying her granddaughter was no blood of hers, but a babe snatched from her mother’s breast and spirited away to give the old woman company. In more savage times, they would have raged to her door with fire and brand, but Ismail Almendrino, who was learned and pious, stayed their hands. Still, the Christians crossed their breasts and spat when Lamia’s servants ventured out to market. And even Almendrino took to hanging blue and white nazar in the trees along the borderline of their lands.
I knew better. I had studied the biology of voles and frogs, mixed black Oriental powder at my tutor’s hands, and understood the forces behind the invisible tug of magnets. Lamia de Rampion was no more a witch than I was a prophet. She was only an old woman who craved solitude and was stingy with her harvest.
I led Anadil down a gentle slope in the riverbank, let out her rein so she could bend her head to drink from the shallows of the slow-moving river, and hitched her to an overhanging branch. I waded across with the thought of gathering fruit from the crude outlying trees to slake my thirst and share with my men. This was the custom in our land—to leave a share of fruit for widows and travelers—and as I say, I paid no heed to this peasant talk of brujería.
But as I pushed myself up onto the opposing bank and stood among the flowering boughs, I heard it. A woman’s voice, arching with the same pure cadence of a vielle, winged over the treetops and fell on my ear. I forgot Anadil and the oranges. It was as if someone had tied a kite string to my heart and now gently wound it in. The song pulled me through the line of trees, nearer the house. The branches parted on a packed dirt courtyard fronting a whitewashed stone manor with a sloped roof. Drought-sick rose bushes needled out from the base of the wall. I stopped below a second-story window, where a thick, ancient olive tree cleaved to the face of the house. A young woman in a fine-cut, blue workaday dress and indigo plackart stiff with silk-embroidered leafy whorls sat at the window with its leaded pane propped open. Lamia’s granddaughter, now grown, near my own age.
Leafy vines overflowed the railed balcony below her. She had put her veil aside and the sun streaked her hair all the subtle golden tones of a shaft of hay. She held a piece of embroidery and a bone needle in her hands, but she stared off over the orchard, toward Córdoba, with its towers and fine domes and minarets hazy in the distance. She sang to herself,
Cuando me vengo al rio
Te pido, te pido, te pido,
Que siempre serás mio,
Y te juro, te juro, te juro,
Que nunca te quitaré.
A peasant song, a simple little love song. But it cracked my heart like a quail’s egg. She frowned to herself, then lifted her embroidery to begin her work again.
I smoothed my silk taqiyah and stepped from the trees so she could see me. “Forgive me, Señorita de Rampion?” I called.
Her needle slipped and jabbed her thumb. “Christ’s blood!” she swore. Her embroidery fell from her hands and whisked itself out the window. She grabbed for it, but it fluttered past her reach and lazed to a stop at my feet.
I bent and picked it up. Stitched vines and blooms arabesqued along the borders of her handiwork. “My apologies, lady,” I said, trying to hide a smile at her curse. “I heard you singing. I was riding by and. . . . ”
She leaned out over the dark wood casement. Her uncovered hair fell forward into the sun. It reached at least twelve hands below the window ledge, thick, loose braids mixed with undressed locks, shining bright as brass against the deep green vines. My breath caught.
“You’d best keep riding, sir,” she said quietly. “My grandmère is taking her rest. If you wake her, she’ll be none too glad of your company. And my brothers don’t feel kindly to the caliph’s men these days.”
I looked around the peaceful garden. “You object to my visiting, lady?”
She checked behind her as if making sure the door to her closet were shut, and turned back, her brow knitted. “Who are you?”
“Ishaq ibn Hisham, of the Umayyads, son of the caliph of al Andalus.” I bowed. “Although I am called al-Hasan, the Handsome, by the women of the court.”
“In that case, I do not object, my lord,” she said. She allowed herself a small smile, but then a frown clouded her features again. “But, please, if you stay, my kinsmen will forget their courtesy.”
“Your company is worth the risk,” I said. “Your voice. . . . ” I fumbled for words, and touched the center of my chest instead.
She blushed and looked at me sideways from under her hair. “My grandmère warned me of men like you. You would win my ear with pretty words.”
“I would win your ear with whatever tender you value.”
She bit her bottom lip. “Do you have any news of the North, then, Ishaq ibn Hisham, son of the Umayyad caliph, sometimes called al-Hasan?”
“The North?” I repeated dumbly. My lessons at the time had been all Aristotle, algebra, and petty diplomacy. The vizier had charge of the larger matters of state, and he assured my father the Northern lords were rabble-rousers and brigands, soon to be crushed beneath the charge of a Moorish cavalry, with him, the son and heir of the great warrior al-Mansur, at its head.
“Yes, my lord,” she said. “They say the Christian lords from Castilla north to the Occitan territories are spoiling for war. I heard my brothers talking of raids on the outskirts of Tulaytulah and a muster north of Madrid. There is even talk of the Northern lords riding into Córdoba to reclaim the bells of Santiago de Compostela. And the vizier raising the call for more mercenaries in turn. Is it true?”
Something shifted in my chest, like to a bone popping into joint. I did not see it then, but a keener and more durable thing than the whim that drew me to her window had put down its roots in me.
I dropped my light manner. “It’s true. There was a raid on Tulaytulah and some of the smaller towns north and west. But trust me, lady, you need not fear. My father and I desire peace as much as any in the caliphate, and the vizier has all the mercenaries he needs.”
She studied me for a long pause. “If you say it,” she said finally.
I looked up at her, her hair hanging like ropes of gold braid beneath the window ledge. “May I know your name?” I asked.
“Oh, the price of that is more news.” She smiled, teasing again. “I’m locked up alone here with nothing but my handwork and a few servants most days. I cannot even ride out without my brothers’ escort. I am parched for news of the outside world.”
“What would you like to know?” I asked. “The fashions of the court at Granada? The latest arguments from Alexandria? Shall I recite an epic from the Greek or tell the tale of Scheherazade?
She laughed. “Only tell me what you’ve seen on your ride today and what brings you so far outside the city.”
“Well.” I pretended to count on my fingers. “I have seen the bridges of Córdoba by the earliest light, three farms, two other manors, a field of sunflowers tall as a man, a very fat merchant fall from his horse, and the most quick-minded woman I have ever met. My mother excepted, of course.”
“Of course.” The lady smiled.
“As to what brings me,” I said, “I can only say the vizier is happier when I keep myself amused away from court, and when he is happy, we all prosper.”
“Have you no duties there?” She raised her eyebrows. “Shouldn’t you be learning the arts of state
at your father’s hand?”
“My father and the vizier agree, there’s no need for me to learn the messy particulars. Not with such an able administrator in our employ.”
“I see,” she said.
“And your name, lady?” I prompted. “Or have I not yet satisfied your thirst?”
“No, my lord, I am perfectly satisfied,” she said. “I am called Sofia de Rampion.”
“Thank you,” I said. “And you must call me Ishaq.”
“Yes, my Lord Ishaq.”
I held up her embroidery. “May I return this to you?”
Her face fell. The levity that had buoyed her so briefly fled. “You cannot enter the house. My grandmère would tell my brothers.”
“Should I leave it here for you?” I asked, looking around at the dusty courtyard below her window.
“Wait,” she said. “I have it.” She disappeared from the window and returned with a little porcelain water pitcher tied to a length of flax string. She pointed to the olive tree below her window. Its upper branches disappeared into the spill of vines. “Climb up.”
I hoisted myself up onto the sturdiest bough, reached out for the pitcher, dangling level with my head, and tucked the delicate piece of embroidery into its neck.
Sofia drew it up. “Thank you, my lord.”
I swung down from the tree. “May I come to you again? I could bring more news, better news next time.”
She traced an invisible design on the windowsill with her finger. “I think not, my lord.” She raised her eyes and I could read regret written all over her face. “I have loved our talk. Truly, it has brought me joy. But my family—”
“—will not object to what they don’t know.” I finished for her and smiled.
She ducked her head to hide a small, mischievous smile aimed back at me. “You live up to your reputation, Ishaq ibn Hisham. And for your part, won’t you boast of me as one of your conquests?”
“Believe me, lady, I am better at keeping confidences than you’ve heard,” I said. “Not even the captain of my guard knows where I’ve come today, and he is my dearest friend.”
She paused and stared at me, taking my measure.
“May I come again?” I asked.
Slowly, so slowly I would never have noticed had I not been watching every movement of her body, she nodded her consent.
“You will not regret it, lady,” I said, walking backward into the trees. “I will bring you news from all over al Andalus, from the halls of Cairo, from Baghdad, from every corner of the known world.” I nearly tripped over a fallen branch and righted myself. “Even from Damascus itself!”
She laughed, and the sound rang so lovely, so light, I thought nothing of the small sliver of darkness between the shutters of the window beneath her room, or how it disappeared as they pulled themselves shut.
Lázaro snorts in his sleep, jarring me out of my reverie. I push aside the thought of leaving his throat slit by his own knife and drag myself up out of the shadow of the stairs by my walking stick. It will take the rest of the night to reach the city’s outer gates at my limping pace, and the good part of early morning to beg a place in Lázaro’s caravan going north to Catalunya. For now that I know where Sofia is, it is as if God has touched His lips to my ear. It does not matter if she remembers me, or that I am blind and will likely die on my way to her. Some of my youth returns to my limbs. I grasp the braid around my neck and the kite string pulls tight once more.
I am coming to you, I swear. I am coming to you.
Adán found me in the library at Madinat al-Zahra late at night the Friday after I first met Sofia. Parchment bearing architectural designs for the Great Mosque lay thick over my lap and on the table before me. A smoking hashish pipe dangled absently from my hand. My father and I had returned from prayers at our private chamber within the mosque earlier in the day, when the sun stood at a right angle over the palace gardens. Kneeling there before God, I remembered Sofia’s fears. It had come to me how this private chamber, the palace, our reliance on the vizier only turned our heads from the trouble around us, though all the while it lapped at our necks. I had come straight to the library and instructed the scribes to bring me all the plans for the mosque from the time it was rebuilt from an old Visigoth church to the most recent additions under my father. I had also asked for the annals of the golden reign of my great-grandfather, Abd al-Rahman III.
By the time Adán came looking for me, daylight had fled the room. He carried an oil lamp. “Night’s full on, brother. Shouldn’t you be sleeping? Or at least visiting that pretty minister’s daughter, what’s her name? Iuliana?” He stopped beside me at the table and lifted the sheaf of papers. “What’s this?”
“Doesn’t your Shabbat keep you from laboring over these questions?” I said, rubbing my palms over my face.
“Don’t tell me you’re thinking of adding to the mosque again, Ishaq,” Adán said, letting the papers fall with a slap. “There are other ways to distinguish your reign when it comes, you know.”
“No,” I said. I was too tired even for our boyish needling. “I was thinking of knocking down walls, not building new ones.”
“What do you mean? Not destroying the mosque?” Adán pulled out a chair and sat beside me. His face pulled back in horror. “You would have a mob at your gates. Do you realize the city is already—”
“No, no.” I laid my hand over his arm to calm him. “Only the walls to the royal enclosure at the head of the mihrab. I dislike this praying separately from the people. I’ve been reading about my forefathers. They were great men, Adán. They never would have let a common warmonger like Sanchuelo. . . . ”
“Hssst,” Adán hissed. He jerked me up by my arm and dragged me after him through one of the library’s horseshoe-arched porticos, out into the night. Past the overlapping arcs of the fountain pool, past the torchlight’s radius, and into the thick of the shoulder-high hedge maze surrounding the gardens. I let him thread us deep into its bends before I pulled my arm from his grasp and stopped in my tracks.
“Are you mad?” Adán checked over his shoulders and leaned in close to my face. “Are you simple?”
“I’m the heir to the Umayyad caliphate, which you seem to have forgotten,” I said, straightening my sleeve.
“Oh, Ishaq.” Adán sounded weary. “You are truly God’s fool.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but Adán cut me off. “You think you will rule the caliphate when your father dies? Have you ever sat down with a minister of state? Helped plot any of the military campaigns? Drafted a mandate for the emirs?”
My face went hot, despite the cool air of the garden. “Of course I—”
“No,” Adán interrupted. “The vizier tolerates you because you fall prey so easily to women and fine horses and smoke. You are a pretty face for minor diplomats and their daughters. You’re no threat to him. But if you start speaking this way. . . . ” He let his words trail away.
I said nothing, my arms locked to my sides, my hands in fists.
“I tell you these things because I’m your friend, Ishaq,” Adán said. “You trust me, don’t you?”
I tried to swallow the ire crushing my windpipe. “Yes,” I said.
“If you want your throne back from Sanchuelo, I’m with you. But wait. Watch. Make allies. Sanchuelo is too strong now.”
I breathed the anger out of my lungs. I nodded.
“Good,” Adán said. “And in the meantime, go see that girl again, whichever one it is you’ve been mooning over all week.”
I stalked to the stables, forgetting my cloak and the book of poetry I had laid by my bedside to take with me when next I returned to Sofia. The wind ripped the taqiyah from my head and turned my hair wild as I rode. I only slowed when the orange groves appeared silhouetted against the bright moonlit sky. I dismounted and walked Anadil down to the river again. She snorted softly, the sound lost in the bubbling of the current. I stroked her muzzle and whispered to her, “Calm, Anadil, easy. I’ll be back.”
“Sofia,” I called softly. “Sofia.”
I paused and listened. Nothing.
“Sofia.” I tried again. “Sof—”
The shutters creaked as Sofia eased them open. “Ishaq?” She wore a linen shawl over the white fabric of her shift and her hair fell in a long braid. Delicate curls haloed her neck and ears, where they had escaped the plait.
“It’s me,” I said.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered. She blinked and touched a hand to her eyes.
“I’ve come with news,” I whispered back, loud as I dared.
“Has something happened?”
“Yes,” I said.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition Page 33
