She moved a hand from forehead to chest to shoulders in the sign of the cross. “Oh, Christ. Is it the Northern armies or the vizier? Which is it?”
“Neither,” I said.
“What, then?”
“I came to tell you I’m going to be caliph.”
She stared at me with a look that said she was considering hurling her chamberpot at my head. “Are you drunk?”
“No.” I hoisted myself up into the olive tree and scaled the branches until I was only an arm’s length from her window. I kept my face still and serious and looked up into her eyes, wide and dark in the night. “I’m not drunk. I’m going to take back the caliphate from Sanchuelo.”
Her lips parted and she moved her hand as if to reach for me, then drew back. “I’m going for a light.”
She returned a moment later with a lamp. She laid it on her sewing table beside the window and reached her hand down to me. “Climb up,” she said. “We’ll wake Grandmère if we keep talking this way.”
“I’ll hurt you.” I eyed the thin circumference of her wrist.
“You won’t,” she said. “Climb.”
I fixed my boot tip between the cracks in the wall, took firm hold of the ivy with one hand, gripped her hand with my other, and heaved myself up into the window.
“Ugh,” Sofia said. “You’re heavy.”
The white walls of her room stood close together, leaving barely enough space for the dark wood furniture that hugged them. I swung my legs over the casement and touched my feet to the floor.
“No, my lord.” Sofia shook her head and looked pointedly at my boots. She sat on her narrow bed. “You’ll stay in the window. And I won’t have you talking sweet, or the next thing I know, you’ll be trying to talk your way into my bed.”
“Only news then.” I leaned against the casement and doubled up my knees so I would fit within the frame.
“Only news,” she agreed.
We sat in silence, staring at each other over the soft, bobbing light of the lamp’s flame. I looked down at her sewing table. Dried wildflowers—foxglove, Jerusalem sage, asphodels, the rampion flower from which her family took its name—littered her desk, along with a book of parchment where someone had reproduced every panicled stem and anther in sepia ink. I touched a cluster of rampion petals lightly.
“I copy them for Grandmère. For her books,” Sofia said. She blushed and looked away. “And for my embroidery.”
“Your grandmother keeps books?” I knew it. This did not match the peasants’ stories of black cockerels slaughtered to tempt the al-shayatin and futures read in their entrails.
“Yes.” Sofia flipped closed the cover of the book. Pharmakopia, it read, gold-etched in the leather.
“I think I would like to meet her.” I traced the letters, bringing my fingertips close to Sofia’s own.
Sofia looked up. “No,” she said sharply. “You would not.”
The force of her words surprised me. I pulled back. “Of . . . of course. Forgive me.”
Silence swallowed us up again.
“You came here to tell me something?” Sofia turned the book facedown and pushed it to the far end of the table.
“Do you think. . . . ” I stopped and adjusted myself in the window frame. My legs dangled. “Can I ask, do you think God ordains what we do? What becomes of us?”
She sat on the bed. At first she didn’t answer, and I was afraid I had overwhelmed her with my abruptness, or worse, angered her. But then she spoke, slowly, as if choosing each word as it came into her mouth. “I think He can . . . I mean, maybe He does move His hand in our matters. But mostly I think He speaks His will to men’s hearts, and if they are righteous, they listen.” She blushed and looked up. “I don’t know, Ishaq. I’m from a family of country knights, not scholars.”
“No, no, speak,” I said, leaning forward.
“Why do you come to me in the night with these questions?” She tilted her head and brushed a stray curl from her face. Her braid lay heavy over her shoulder, sloping down over the curve of her breast and coiling in her lap. Smaller braids twined in the whole.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Ever since you spoke to me from your window. Our imams have always talked of how my family ruled the caliphate because God willed it. And I thought because God willed it, I would only have to wait, and everything I deserved would come to me, would simply appear like a bowl of pomegranates on my dressing table.”
Sofia nodded carefully.
I stood and paced the small distance between her wardrobe and her sewing bench. “But then I thought, Fruit doesn’t appear. Someone cultivates it. Someone harvests it. Someone carries it to my rooms and places it on my dressing table.”
I turned to her. My heart raced with the revelation unfolding in my chest. “The Prophet calls the common men of my faith to care for the widowed and the poor, but what God asks from a leader of such men is even greater.” I knelt in front of her so I could look into her face. “I have to earn the caliphate. And when I have it, I must do works worthy of it.”
Sofia dropped to her knees and kissed me. It was so sudden, so sweet, my body reacted before my mind did. I pulled her against me, her braid trapped between us, my hand at the small of her back, and leaned into her kiss with an open mouth. The smell of her, of warm flesh and salt and woman, nearly drowned me. Her hands were in my hair and mine in hers, her breasts lush and pressed close.
And then my mind caught up to our bodies. “I’m sorry.” I broke away and backed to the window. I looked down into the yard at the bare, thorned rosebushes. “I don’t want you to think you’re some conquest. I don’t want anyone to think that of you.”
Sofia followed me. She touched my arm and turned me from the window so I faced her, then worked her hands into my hair and pulled my lips down to her mouth again. She took up my hand and placed it on her breast. “My brothers want to marry me to someone in my uncle’s court in Catalunya.” Her lips brushed mine as she spoke.
My heart pulsed wildly and my head swung between the twin concepts of her small, round breast in my palm and the thought that she was being sent to the North. “When?” I asked.
“Summer’s end,” she said. “They want me to leave then so I’ll arrive before the first storms in the Pyrenees.”
I cast about for something to say, but the feel of her flesh beneath the thin shift tugged my mind away from anything else. “You’ll be far from the front if war breaks out,” I finally said.
She took my other hand and guided it to her waist. “I would rather stay. I’m not afraid.”
I forgot to breathe for a moment, and when I remembered again, my breath came harsh. “Sofia. . . . ”
She stepped closer so she pressed against the length of my body. “Ishaq,” she said. Her eyes flicked up to mine. “Come.”
I kissed her again and she led me to her bed. I laid her down among the bedclothes.
“Gently,” she said. She circled me with her arms, lifted her legs around me, pulled me tight against her skin. Her hair came undone in my hands. I rolled her over me and it fell around us in a curtain, brushing my skin like feathered silk. And when it became too much and I thought I might cry out, she brought her lips up to mine again and I moaned into her mouth.
When it was over, we lay together in her bed, slick with sweat. She nestled the bridge of her nose against my neck and kissed my chest.
“Sofia.” I traced my fingers over her jaw and repositioned my head on the pillows to look at her. “Why?”
She opened her eyes. “My brothers want to barter me away. But this isn’t theirs to barter.”
She rolled over so her back rested against my chest and curled into me. My nose was in her hair. The smell of bread, sweat, sweet oil, and something indefinable and warm rolled over me as I buried my face in her tresses and tumbled into sleep.
The first crack of blue daylight woke me. I sat up in bed, remembering Anadil still tethered by the riverside, and felt a small ache of guilt. The open
window looked out over acres of orange groves and a shining slip of the tributary winding east. Sofia sighed in her sleep.
I rose and dressed. Her grandmother’s book, still facedown on Sofia’s sewing table, caught my eye as I stooped for my boots. I paused with my outer robe unlaced and the boots beneath my arm. Would she object? I glanced back at her. Her hair spilled over the pillow and down to the floor. The early light picked out the copper filaments in her waves and made them glitter like gold dust along the silted bottom of a creek bed. It was too tempting not to look, not to spy in on a small piece of Sofia’s world. I flipped the book open with a soft thud.
The drawings were Sofia’s, that much was clear. On the page I opened, she had rendered a poppy, all clean lines put down in deep brown ink. Her neat, looping script accompanied it:
The seeds of the common poppy (Papaver somniferum) make a most marvelous defense against pain when crushed and burned, or when prepared in a tea. They render unto the drinker a state of profound sleep. Let the reader know, this same solution also may be used in the calling of Visions that, coupled by a Guide, can tell the truth of things.
I stole another look at Sofia. An uneducated man would call this proof of witchery. Was she merely taking down her grandmother’s words or had she written this of her own accord? Either way, this was a dangerous book to have.
I thumbed the page over. This time large, craggy letters in blue-black ink filled the page, alongside Sophia’s drawing of a starry-whorled oleander blossom. But the words were not in Sofia’s hand. Lamia’s, then? I wondered. My eyes came to rest on a snarl of words:
. . . a most potent draught, but pains must be taken to disguise the taste . . .
My heart juddered. I knew this plant. One of Adán’s men had a horse that died after nibbling its sweet blossoms. This was a recipe for poison. I flipped the page again. Nightshade. Monkshood. Bleeding heart. Laburnum. Jerusalem cherry. All fatal.
Sofia stirred. She blinked her eyes at the daylight and sat up. “You’re going?”
“Yes.” I regarded her warily, my hand still resting on the open pages of the book.
She frowned. “What’s wrong? What are you. . . . ” She followed the line of my arm down to the table and snapped awake. “You’ve been reading Grandmère’s book?”
“I have,” I said. She had looked so innocent and vulnerable by the morning light, half-naked with her hair mussed, but awake she was a keener thing. Did she know her grandmother was using her hand to lay out the properties of poisons? How could she not?
“Ishaq, it isn’t what you think—”
“I know well what it is,” I cut in.
She sat straight and stared into me. “Will you call us witches now, too, then?”
“Sofia—”
“There’s nothing unnatural in what we do,” she said, suddenly fierce. “What sin is there in recording the earth’s uses?”
“None, but—”
“How is it different from an apothecary’s art?”
“Sofia.” I knelt by the bed and took her hand. “Sofia, I don’t think you’re a witch.”
She blinked at me and softened. “No?”
“No, or your grandmother either.” I glanced over my shoulder at the volume. “But you must know what that book contains.”
“Medicines,” Sofia said. “Curatives.”
“Poisons,” I said.
“One and the same sometimes,” Sofia said quietly. She looked away, and then turned back with wide eyes. “But she would never turn them to their darker ends. Nor I. You must believe me.”
I combed my fingers through a section of her hair. “I trust your word,” I said.
“We have many books. This is but one.”
“I trust you,” I repeated. I kissed her brow and rested my head against hers. The rising sun stung bright in the corner of my eye, and my heart went heavy. “I must go, but will you let me come again?”
She let out a breath. “You want to?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“What you’ve seen here.” Sofia tilted her head back to the ceiling, not looking at me. “What I’ve heard of you.”
I rubbed my thumb over the smooth ovals of her fingernails, unsure how to answer. I looked up. “And what they say of me, that’s all there is?”
Sofia looked at me. Her lashes were wet. “No, I suppose not.” She brushed a hand beneath her eye and tried to smile. “I would you didn’t have to go.”
“Nor I.” I twined one of her smaller braids around my thumb. “May I. . . . ” I started to ask.
“Only if you let me . . . ,” she said, and reached down to the woven sewing basket at her bedside to retrieve a pair of silver shears. She cut the thin braid from her hair and wrapped it around my palm, then folded my fingers over it and reached up to cut a lock from my head as well.
She kissed the thick black curl. “Come soon,” she said.
I lowered my feet from the window, steadied myself on the vines, and found the highest tree limb. I looked back up at her. “I promise.”
“I trust your word.” Sofia echoed me.
I dropped to the ground and then I was off, walking quickly through the orchard, turning back every few feet to catch a last glimpse of her, until finally the branches closed off my view.
I find a place in Lázaro’s caravan with a Jewish mapmaker called Miguel ben Yaakov and his wife, Mencia, traveling north as far as a little town at the foot of the Pyrenees. They promise me a share of their bread and a seat on their wagon tail if I will water and brush down their horses at the end of each day. We ride in the middle of the line, behind the dull thunder of Lázaro’s horses and the armed men guarding them, behind the merchants, who have bought a place near the guards, but before an imam and a cluster of students on horseback.
Dark mutterings surround our campfires at night, talk of unrest in the city we’ve left behind, stories of women raped, a Berber soldier beaten and left for dead by a mob, and the hanging of a student. We douse our fires and huddle in the darkness when hoofbeats roar close along the road.
By day, Mencia dotes on her horses, who she calls Limón and Pulga, and it is not long until she is hovering over me with extra shares of cured beef and sour bread, shaking out an old horse blanket for me at night. When the men in Lázaro’s band help kill a young bull that’s slipped its pen and tried to gore one of the students, she makes sure I have a strip of the meat. Her husband keeps a wary distance. He doesn’t say a word to me, even as his wife turns in the wagon to chatter about everything she sees as we make our way north through the rolling emptiness of La Mancha.
“Look, the city!” she cries when they finally sight Tulaytulah, her warm, firm hand clutching my forearm. She laughs in delight. Mencia reminds me of my mother in the days of my childhood, before the fear and isolated luxury surrounding our family smothered her to nothing, an empty veil, a dried flower between the pages of a book. For Mencia’s sake, I try to remember the city as I saw it when I was a boy of fifteen, its gray battlements cresting a green hill, all the common houses scattered below like so many windfall apples.
I don’t know how I will make it north to Roussillon, once the mapmaker and his wife are gone, or what will become of me once I’m there, but I have miles and miles to mull it over as the cart lumbers north along the old Roman road. I hold Sofia’s braid to my lips and pray for God to pass my message along. I am coming to you, I am coming to you.
On the last day I saw her, I came alone in the gloaming. Adán had grown suspicious of my late-night rides, but I chose a Shabbat evening so he would be forced to stay behind at the palace, not follow me as he had tried the week before. On my way to the house, I snapped a cluster of almond blossoms from a tree for Sophia. The air was heady with oranges, and she sat in her window, singing to herself as she strummed a quitara. Her voice rose lovely over the instrument’s steady thrum, dipping and weaving like a bird in flight. Her brothers had gone to the city for the week and her grandmother was off on one of her rambles, s
o she let me sing with her as she played.
We made love in the soft, last light of day. After, curled together in her bed, her head resting against my shoulder, I asked what I had been mulling over since the day she pulled me through her bedroom window.
“Sofia?”
“Hmm?” she replied.
“Would you come to court at Madinat al-Zahra? With me, I mean?”
She sat up in bed. “Truly?”
I reached out and fixed a piece of wayward hair behind her ear. “I’ve been thinking, if I were to marry a Christian lady, it might appease the Northern lords and restrain the vizier. It could stop the skirmishes at the border. And it would keep you here.”
“Ishaq, are you asking for my hand in marriage?” She prodded me playfully in the chest.
I kept my face solemn. “I am.”
“You aren’t asking very properly.” She put on a mock-stern face.
I reached over and pulled her on top of me, my hands on her hips. “My Lady Sofia de Rampion, will you consent to be my wife?”
“I will,” she said. She ran her fingers through the hair of my chest absentmindedly. “But Grandmère. . . . And my brothers won’t be so easily swayed.”
“How could they object to their sister becoming a princess of al Andalus?” I asked, and pulled her close to kiss her. She leaned down to press her mouth to mine.
A scrape sounded outside the door. We froze, her bare thighs around me, my hand on her back. The latch clicked and the door slammed open with a sound like Oriental powder igniting. A dark-haired man in his late twenties, with the same dark eyes as Sofia, pushed his way into her room, followed by a younger, fair-haired man. My eyes flew wide. Leandro and Telo, Sofia’s brothers. I recognized them from the portraits hanging in the manor halls. Leandro, her eldest brother, pulled Sofia from me and pushed her against the wall. I scrambled up, but Telo was on me in the same moment. He hit me hard across the jaw, and I fell back against the bedpost.
“Déjenlo, por favor, déjenlo!” Sofia screamed.
But I was up again, my back to the wall, and Leandro had drawn his longknife.
“Brothers—” I started, my hands raised to show I was unarmed.
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