The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories [Anthology]

by Edited By Ian Watson

  Yet when Mahmoud rushed forward, a wail of paid loyalty on his lips, the strength gushed back into Hisdai’s body. He stood straight as a poplar and sharply motioned Mahmoud away. “Unworthy servant, where are your manners? Our honoured guest will think himself to be still among his own barbarous people. Go, fetch scented water and soft towels! Bread and salt! My finest wine! Why are you gawking? You’ll gape less when one of King Ferdinand’s men drives a pike through your gizzard. Go, I say!”

  Mahmoud did not wait for further instructions. He had more than enough meat for meditation, and the other servants would treat him royally for it. Any diversion not connected with the infernal siege was worth its weight in gold, especially to folk who lacked anything more precious than copper.

  Hisdai ibn Ezra watched Mahmoud scamper off, listening until he judged his servant’s pattering footsteps had retreated a sufficient distance for his liking. Then and only then did he turn to give his visitor a proper welcome.

  “You idiot!” He snatched the man’s hat from his hands and flung it out the window into the courtyard below.

  The visitor flew after his hat, but wisely halted his own flight short of the abyss. Leaning over the tiled sill, he remarked, “I see that you’ve kept the false awning in place down there. I thought that since you retired, you wouldn’t need to maintain such emergency measures in case of dissatisfied royal customers.”

  “I may not deal with Sultan Muhammad any more, nor need to provide for the possibility of - ahem! - expeditious departures, but only a fool dreams any peace is permanent,” Hisdai growled. “Most definitely not in these times.”

  His guest was unmoved by the old man’s peevishness. He was still admiring Hisdai’s escape stratagem, with which he seemed to be disconcertingly familiar. “To be able to jump from this height and land safely - ! Ah, one day I must try it, just to see how it feels. Unfortunately my hat missed the awning and the cushions under it and landed right in the fishpond. Was that necessary? I was rather attached to that hat.”

  “Would that your brain were as attached to the inside of your skull. Do you realize what you risked, coming here in the teeth of the siege like this?”

  “Unless I misremember,” Hisdai’s guest drawled, “it was not ten months ago that I found you entertaining a certain Genoese in this very room. When I asked you how Master Columbus had managed to breach the siege, you only smiled and said, ‘I have my ways. One key opens many gates, if that key be made of gold.’” He winked at Hisdai. “For once, I recalled your wisdom and used it well, particularly now that I have more of your precious keys than any locksmith.”

  “What is this blather of keys?” Hisdai snorted. “When Mahmoud informed me that there was a Castilian come calling - all Christians are Castilians to him - I expected to greet a common seaman bringing word from the admiral. That Genoese is no fool. He has more sense than to venture his neck for nothing!”

  The young man murmured into his beard, “There you speak a greater truth than you know.”

  His words went unheard. As suddenly as it had erupted, Hisdai’s burst of sour temper vanished altogether. He rushed to fling the silken wings of his sleeves around the “Castilian”.

  “Ah, Daud! Daud, my son, it is I who am the fool! If you are back, what else matters? My Daud - shall I call you by that abominable Castilian name you bestowed upon yourself?”

  Daud pretended to take umbrage. “I thought it a very good alias, and most handy for getting past the more officious of the Catholic Monarchs’ sentries. Stop a man named for Don Pelayo, he who began the reconquest of this land from the Moors? Most ill-omened at this juncture.” He shook his head solemnly. “Now that Ferdinand and Isabella are about to retake the last Iberian foothold of our Moorish rulers, that would be most ill-omened indeed.”

  Hisdai beamed over his son’s resourcefulness. “Still the clever rogue, my pride! Blessed be the lord, the God of Israel, for bringing me to this season. My heart, my child, I never thought to see your face again.”

  The young man laughed out of a face that was a less-wrinkled version of his sire’s. His beard was somewhat shorter, the hair on his head summer midnight to Hisdai’s winter dawn, but the eyes held the same fire.

  “Indeed, my father, there were moments in the voyage when I myself questioned whether the next face I saw would be yours or Elijah’s!” He sighed. “May Heaven witness, our valiant admiral suffered celestial visions enough for us all. There must be truth in what they say, that madness is but a divinely given spark of genius that burns with the most peculiar flame. That man has a sufficiency of such embers to burn all al-Andalus to ashes.” Laughter departed his lips as he added, “As he may yet do.”

  “What is this you say, my son?” Hisdai clapped his hands to his eldest’s shoulders. “Do you mean that the voyage was - a failure? The homeland we seek, the refuge for our people once these accursed Catholic Monarchs destroy Granada, is only another of the admiral’s insane fancies?”

  Daud’s travel-tattered moustache twisted itself into a wry expression. “O my father if I hear you call the admiral mad, you’ll have me thinking there’s some truth to Mother’s allegations. Why else would you commend me to a madman’s care?”

  Hisdai waved off his son’s words impatiently. “Your mother, foremost of my wives, is a virtuous woman. As such, her price is above rubies, even if her love of gossip is beneath contempt. You are my heir, Daud! Would I entrust a diamond of untold price to a lunatic? But if the diamond is yet rough, I would select with utmost care the jeweller into whose hands I place it for proper cutting, polishing, setting, until the every refinement of his art had perfected it as it deserves to be.”

  “In other words, you sent me to fall off the edge of the earth for my own good,” Daud concluded.

  “Also to get you away from that Egyptian dancing-girl your worthless friend Barak spends all his money on,” Hisdai grumbled under his breath.

  Daud heard, and did his best not to choke on laughter. “Fear not, O my father! We encountered no such temptresses in the court of the Great Khan. As is well known, the almighty monarch of Cathay surrounds himself exclusively with the fairest daughters of Israel, the flowers of Judaea, the untouched virgins of Jerusalem-in-exile, the—”

  “Is it so much for an old man to want his son wed to a nice Jewish girl?” Hisdai sulked into his beard.

  “Ah, Father, you would not be satisfied until I wed a veritable princess!”

  “And is that such a bad ambition?” Hisdai demanded.

  “Not at all, not at all.” Daud gazed at his father with real affection. “So it was my taste for forbidden delights that counted as one more rough spot for your Genoese jeweller to strike off? And here I thought it was the dream of establishing a new homeland for our people that drove you to pour my patrimony into those three rachitic ships you bought him.”

  Hisdai ibn Ezra was in no joking mood. “Daud, I see that at least one of my dreams has been in vain. You return as much the mocker as you departed.”

  “Oh no, my father.” Daud dropped all pretence of jest. “Believe me, I return to your house a changed man. If I banter with you now, it is only to keep my heart from crumbling beneath the full weight of what I have to tell you.”

  Fear and consternation showed themselves boldly in the old Jew’s eyes. “What news, then? Tell me! Not that the voyage failed, no, or else you could not be here, solid flesh beneath my hands. What then? The Great Khan denied our petition, rejected my gifts? Once there were many Jews in Cathay, respected, honoured, permitted to dwell in peace, to follow the ways of our fathers. Did you remind the Great Khan of the prosperity we brought the land?”

  Daud nodded. “I tried. Our translator did, at any rate. Moshe ibn Ahijah is a wonderful scholar. No one was more surprised than he when the Great Khan did not know Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Castilian, Greek, or Latin.”

  “But surely you managed to communicate? By signs? By a show of gifts? In my day, when I accompanied the caravans, I always managed to m
ake my intents clear—”

  “We, too, managed. The gifts you sent to the Great Khan,” Daud replied, “were very eloquent. Entertaining, I should say. They made him laugh.”

  “Laugh! At masterpieces of the goldsmith’s art? Gems that were the finest I could call in from our people here in al-Andalus, in Castilla, in France, in Italy, even across the water in Mamlakah al-Maghribiyah—!” Hisdai began to pace the room.

  “When word first reached me of this man Columbus, I thought it to be the answer to my wildest prayers. Any half-educated man knows that the ancients proved the world to be round - that much of the Genoese’s fancies needed no confirmation -but to apply that knowledge to the establishment of a westerly trade route—!” He smacked a fist into his palm. “That was the prize I desired. A way for us, for all Jews, to reach the haven of the East safely, there to live unmolested by the periodic excesses of zeal that afflict our Christian neighbours. Once there, we would prosper as never before.”

  “So you said, my father.” Daud remained glum.

  “So I said, and so it would be! The East has ever favoured us, and with new trade routes opened we would thrive. Oh, Daud, you will never know how fervently I thanked the Lord when those purblind Catholic Monarchs rejected Columbus’s plan and sent him packing! You cannot begin to imagine all I did, or how speedily, to bring him here so that I might finance his scheme, and our future!”

  “I recall it well. I did not spend all my time mooning over Barak’s dancing-girl.”

  In his distracted state Hisdai disregarded Daud’s mordant comments. “My son, the treasure I sent with you was to be the ransom of the Jews, our payment for refuge in the lands of the distant East once that vainglorious Genoese proved a safe sea route there possible. And you say the Great Khan laughed?”

  In silence Daud reached into the large leather pouch at his side. His fist emerged overflowing with the glitter of pure gold and priceless jewels. Chains and pendants, adornments for ears, breast, wrist, and ankle, gorgeous enhancements for body parts beyond the old man’s imagining all spilled over the blue-and-green carpet.

  While Hisdai gaped, Daud simply plunged his hand back into the pouch and followed the first handful of gold with a second, then a third, then a fourth, each scattered with the disinterested prodigality of a rich man tossing crumbs to the birds.

  “You see now why he laughed? Because next to the treasure hoard the Great Khan already commands, our gifts were regarded as no better than the pinched clay figurine one of his children might make him for a present: charming, but hardly to be taken seriously. What you behold is merely my share of the first gift the Great Khan made to us. The first, mark me. It was a reward.”

  “A - reward?” Hisdai managed to wrench his gaze away from the heap of wealth strewn so casually at his feet. “What for?”

  “For making the admiral shut up about Christ.” Daud shrugged. “His harangues were putting the Great Khan’s priests off their stride, and they had such a lot of people to - to serve that day.” An unpleasant memory appeared to grip him. Fine sweat stood out on his forehead.

  “Christ?” Hisdai echoed, overlooking his son’s discomfort. “But I thought he was over all that.”

  “My father, one does not get over one’s faith as one does a fever,” Daud commented tartly.

  “Bah! Christianity was never truly the admiral’s faith. It was a - a convenience, the path that seemed to him smoothest for getting on in the world, particularly as he desired royal backing for this unheard-of voyage of his.” Hisdai spoke as one who knows such things too surely to debate them.

  “You may be right,” Daud admitted. “In all our time on board the Tziporah, I often thought that the admiral gave his prayers to God but his worship to himself.”

  “Of course I am right!” Hisdai snapped. “Christian just for show he was, and to gain the ear of the powerful. Much good it did him! He had so many royal doors slammed in his face that he had the arms of Castilla, Leon, y Aragon impressed on his forehead.”

  He began to pace the floor; kicking aside the golden baubles. “He came to me fresh from long and profitless waiting upon Ferdinand and Isabella. In my presence he no longer needed to play the pious Catholic. He told me that his own folk back in Genoa were our kindred - as if I had not already secured that knowledge before sending for him! -exiles from the Christian kingdoms of Spain. I did not have to tell him what our fate would be if Granada falls. Ah, my son, if you could have but heard how wistfully he spoke of the faith of his ancestors!”

  “Was this before or after you offered him the money for his expedition?” Daud’s question was dust-dry.

  “Now you say he preached Christ in the Great Khan’s court?” Hisdai ibn Ezra wrung his hands. ‘Alas, what was he thinking of?”

  “Probably the same thing he is acting on even now.” Without warning, Daud seized Hisdai by the shoulders, fixing him with a terrible, burning glance. “Father; cease your wailing and pay heed. Your Genoese friend may be a visionary, but he could give the Evil One lessons in opportunism. Christopher Columbus has returned with two of your three ships intact. The Tziporah he ran aground off the coast of Cathay before we began our homeward sail. The Bat-sheba we brought safely to harbour in Tangier, where its - ah - cargo is presently being sent after me by our family connections in Mamlakah al-Maghribiyah, and as for the third—”

  “Cargo?” Hisdai interrupted, the keen professional interest of a seasoned merchant lighting up his eyes.

  “Listen to me, I said!” Daud came dangerously close to shaking his father soundly. “As for the third ship, the Hadassah ha-Malkah, as soon as we came within sight of Tangier, your precious admiral ordered it to veer away north. Yes - do not stare - I said north; north to the ports of the Catholic Monarchs! North with a hold filled with the later gifts of the Great Khan, beside which what you see upon the carpet here is nothing. And even now, as we speak he has gone to present himself before Ferdinand and Isabella at their battle camp at Santa Fe. Don’t you see? Now he has proof that will command the attention of royalty in a manner they cannot ignore. The paltry gold of Granada’s Jews was insufficient to buy us refuge from the Castilian troops, or safety for the last city where our Moorish masters allowed us to follow our faith in peace. The endless gold of Cathay will buy your pet Genoese what he has always hungered for - a noble title, royal patronage, and his place as the honoured favorite of our enemies!” His face was a mask of scorn as he added, “Once a snob, always a snob.”

  “But we must stop him!” Hisdai grabbed his son’s arms in a grip that was the equal of the younger man’s.

  “Do you think we did not try, O my father? Too late. By the time we realized what he was about, he had gained too much time. After the wreck of the Tziporah, he made certain to crew the Hadassah ha-Malkah with men who would go along with his treachery.”

  “Impossible.” Hisdai shook his head like one suddenly weary. “Everyone aboard those ships was of our own people. They knew our great purpose! How could they—?”

  “Present promises of a greater share in a hold full of treasure weighs more with some men than dreams of a distant Jewish homeland,” Daud said with neither pride nor shame.

  Hisdai slumped in his son’s grasp. “Even so. How can I blame them? The siege has lasted almost a year and a half. Granada is all that remains to our sultan.” With faltering steps he turned from Daud and went to the window. “In the streets he is no longer called Abu Abd Allah Muhammad, but al-zogoybi, and in truth he is a poor devil. He will go down, and we shall fall with him. The taking of Granada is the death of our people’s last truly safe haven. In the dark times to come many will fancy gold a better rock to cling to than Torah.”

  So rapt was Hisdai by his burden of hopelessness, he hardly noticed that when his son’s shadow crept up behind him, a second shadow - then a third, then a fourth - glided silently into the room and joined it. He only half-heard Daud say, “O my father, you are wise to have kept faith.”

  “Faith?” Hisdai’s
laugh was brittle and hollow. He continued to gaze up at the steel-bright sky above Granada. “Of what use is faith? I have squandered our wealth to back the vision of a renegade! We need soldiers, Daud - not scholars, not visionaries - and soldiers will not fight for faith alone.”

  “Yet I hear these Catholic Monarchs call this battle for Granada a new Crusade.”

  “That shows all you know of Crusades, my son. If Granada were a poor mud-hut village, these Catholic Monarchs and their minions would not care if we worshipped the birds of the air or the snakes that crawl over the face of the earth, but because we have wealth—”

  “Father,” Daud cautioned. “Father, it would be wiser not to speak with mockery of snakes and birds.”