John Masters

by The Rock

  He gave Isa into her arms and disappeared into the gloom of the overhanging cliff. He was gone a long time, and then suddenly he was back. "It's broken," he said. "Two planks smashed and the oars gone." His voice cracked.

  Peter said, "That storm a week ago must have sent the sea up to it. We're lucky it was not swept away altogether, like the oars. Let us see it. Perhaps we can repair it."

  She followed them up the sand slope. She thought that the boat, which she could feel but barely see until her eyes became used to the darkness, would be very small for the three of them and Isa. The holes were not large. A pair of smooth short planks, well nailed down over felt or canvas and caulked with pitch, would make the boat watertight again.

  They stood some time in the end of the rock cave around the boat, not speaking. Then Peter said, "We must have oars...."

  She said quickly, "They might be in this little cove somewhere. We can look by daylight." She knew what Peter was going to say next, and he must be stopped. Two or three hours of the night remained, Isa slept, and Akiba was very tired. Tonight, as soon as Akiba slept, Peter would come to her. There might never be a tomorrow.

  Peter said, "Perhaps ... But we must have planks, nails, canvas or, better still, thick wool, pitch...."

  "Get it tomorrow night," she began."

  She saw the decisive shake of his head. "Now no one knows we have left Carteia. I can find what we need and be back here before dawn. Tomorrow there may be a hunt up for us. Tomorrow they will not be drunk. There will be sentries, guards. No, Rachel, I must go now." He took her quickly in his arms and kissed her. "Stay hidden. Look after them, Akiba."

  She did not weep until the same hour the next night, when he had not come. Then she sat by the boat, folded her arms on her knees, and wept. Akiba muttered, "Perhaps he was seen and driven inland...."

  She had hoped that, too. That was why she had waited until this later hour to weep. Now she knew he would never come back.

  Akiba said, "I'll go tomorrow night if he doesn't come. We only need to mend the hole." She nodded, for they had found both oars as soon as they began to look around the cove by daylight.

  They lay down, but Rachel's eyes never closed. In seven days she had lost three men who had wanted to put their seed in her that children might grow in her womb. She had fled from the Rock and returned. Now what? Who could tell her what she must do?

  At once she knew; and as soon as Akiba slept she climbed the cliff, went to the thicket, and for half an hour knelt in total darkness in her Secret, holding the ivory figurine between her breasts. Then, her questions answered, she returned and fell asleep.

  Next night Akiba left the cave at dusk. Rachel waited till he had gone, then began to gather the collected driftwood close around the fire and cut herbs into the pot with salt and water. She sliced some of the tender lamb they had stolen from Wildigern, and he from the Villa Flaviana. She kept Isa awake running about and playing with some bronze baubles she had found. When his eyelids drooped, she gave him wine from the flagon, laid him down carefully in the high back of the cave, and covered him with Peter's cloak, which he had left behind.

  Akiba returned early, put down his burden, and sat by the fire. His face was taut. "I knew where Simon kept his materials," he said. Then, suddenly, "They have flayed Peter and nailed his skin to the house where Theophilus sits." He shuddered and buried his head in his knees.

  She stroked his hair. "Think not of it, Akiba. It is all done. All gone. Except us."

  Akiba was seventeen and healthy. He sniffed the air. "That is a savory stew, sister. But we must not waste food. It will take me two or three days to make all ready. Then we must await calm weather."

  "There is enough," she said gaily. "Tonight we eat well and drink wine."

  "How can you smile?" he said. "If you had seen him ... Your eyes glitter like stars, Rachel. Have you taken wine?"

  "Not yet. Here. Drink. Again. Forget. But say the blessing, that the Children of Israel may never die from the earth, for surely we are the last."

  He spoke and drank. She watched to see that he took enough to wipe what he had seen from his mind, but not too much. Herself, she ate sparingly and kept the fire burning. As Akiba neared the end of his eating, she began to sing love songs, which the young men sang to the girls on summer nights by the sea. Akiba beat time with one hand, holding the wine flagon with the other. "I wish father were here with his lute," he said.

  His eyes clouded, and Rachel jumped to her feet. "Remember last year's spring festival?" she cried. She danced now as the wild Turdetani of the Ronda hills did when they came down and danced at the festival. She bent her body back, clapped her hands, thrust out her breasts, and stamped her feet. She saw her brother's eyes on her swelling breasts, on her legs, visible under the thin linen. As she danced she raised her arms, slipped free of the dress, and let it slide down her body to the sand. Akiba licked his lips, and she danced closer to him. He pressed back against the wall of the cave. Little Isa lay asleep above, the firelight playing on his face and his fat, dirt-stained cheeks.

  Rachel sank down by Akiba's side, took his arms, and whispered, "Come. Be a man to me!"

  "Rachel!" he cried. "It is a sin, an abornination."

  "We are the only Jews left in the world," she said. She put her hand to him and found him upthrust and hard, against his will.

  "Sister, sister!"

  She spread herself and pulled him down on top of her. As she grasped him with her legs he entered into her, for she was slippery to receive him. She cried out at a sudden pain and held him tight as his body began to move. In a moment it was he who held her, crushed her, rammed into her as though to bury her in the sand. Soon he lay still on her, moaning, "Oh, Lord God, what have I done?"

  She said, "You have preserved our race, even as we are all children of Lot and his daughters."

  He said, "There must be other Jews left alive somewhere in the world."

  "Why?" she said.

  He got up and went out of the cave. She lay back, as though carefully guarding the seed that he had left in her.

  On the evening of the seventh day since her brother had first lain with her, he came up from the little beach and said abruptly, "We are going. Tonight."

  He was always constrained with her now, though he had made love to her every night since the first night and many times by day also. His phallus swelled and stiffened whenever he looked at her, and he took her with evergrowing lust and sureness, so that she too began to look forward to the act for itself ... yet when it was done, he was withdrawn and hostile.

  He had made the boat ready by the third day. She had forced him to stay four more. Her period would not come for another seven, but she could hold him no longer. The old women said that if a woman's husband came to her in the middle of the month, she was the more likely to conceive. She had done her best.

  Now she said, "I am not going. I will keep Isa. Go alone, if you must."

  Again his voice cracked, "Not coming?"

  She said, "The boat is very small, Akiba. When you tested it, the water dashed in even from the little waves here. I do not think it can reach Africa. Stay here, brother. It is our home. Under the shadow of this Rock."

  "What?" he said violently. "As a slave of the Visigoths, who murdered our father? As a louse-ridden outlaw? No, I go to Africa.... I go," he repeated almost happily. She saw what she had not expected, that he wanted to get away from her. "And you to Julius the outlaw, I suppose?" Rachel nodded. There was no purpose in explaining. She watched Akiba put some hard bread into his scrip and drape a blanket on his shoulders. Turning, he pulled her to him, his face blind with the familiar lust. Her loins ached for him, but she said softly, "It is enough, brother. I am sure I am with child."

  The desire dissipated slowly from his face. He went to kiss the sleeping Isa, then held her hand and for the first time since he had taken her maidenhead seemed unconstrained. "God be with you, sister. If I can ever come back, I shall, to look for you."

&n
bsp; He ran down the slope, and in a moment the little boat set out, dimly seen in the twilight. Akiba rowing and the boat rising valiantly to the waves. She watched until the darkness hid them.

  The next morning, when the sun was yet low, Rachel came to the main gate of Carteia, carrying Isa in her arms. A sentry of the Visigoths, lounging against the wall, waved her in before she could speak: No one feared a woman with a child. On the way to her father's house she passed the Lover of God, squatting against a wall, dozing. Peter's skin and mask were pegged out on the wall behind him.

  She went into the house and found Wildigern on the roof. His face registered astonishment, pleasure, anger. He seized her arm and shook her. "You ... where you go? I kill you!"

  She said, "The men forced me."

  His grip softened. "That one, the dead one, your man? Lover of God saw him, gave alarm. My men made double eagle of him. I said no, but Lover of God said yes.... Where is other man?" he asked, again suspicious.

  "My brother? Gone to Africa."

  "And you ... why not you go with?"

  Perhaps these barbarians would stay, perhaps they would move on. Other barbarians might come. But the Rock would remain. She watched a pair of partridges, like those she had seen mating, burst up out of the scrub and fly toward the gray cliffs. Her goats would graze there. Her son would explore the Great Cave high on the west face, which was bigger than the Christian basilica in Carteia. Her daughter, when her first blood of woman came, she would take into the Secret and to her give the ivory woman, the other, eternal Her.

  She raised her chin. "I have come back to bear your children ... if I am allowed."

  "Allowed? Who not allow?" He frowned. "I am Wildigern. This Carteia mine, under Wallia."

  She said, "The Lover of God will have me killed because I am a Jew. You will not be able to save me. You could not save Peter."

  "No, no," Wildigern said. "He do nothing. He priest. I lord."

  Rachel put her hand to her waist and slowly drew the short knife. She held it under her rib cage on the left side, pointing in. She said, "Wildigern, I want the Lover of God's head here, now. I will not belong to a man afraid of a priest."

  Wildigern stared at her with the same fearful wonder that she had seen several times in Akiba's face. Then he seized his great twohanded sword and ran down the ladder.

  BOOK FIVE

  VISIGOTHIC KINGDOM

  The Jewish years 4178-4471

  AUC 1170-1464

  A.D. 417-711

  Rachel may not have been allowed a long domesticity with Wildigern, for the following year the Visigoths were summoned by their nominal masters in Rome to leave Spain and settle in Gaul around Toulouse. Although they were winning their fight against the Vandals, they obeyed and marched north. (Perhaps Wildigern deserted to live with Rachel under the shadow of the Rock.)

  The Vandals stayed in southern Spain only long enough to give it the name by which it has ever since been known—[V]Andalusia. Then, in 429, they succeeded in doing what the Visigoths had failed to: they took ship and crossed to North Africa, where they stayed. The Celtiberian-Romans regained possession of Spain—rather, they shared it with the outlaws and the other barbarians—until 507. In that year the Frankish king Clovis attacked the Visigoths, killed their leader, and expelled them from Gaul. They recrossed the Pyrenees and set up the Visigothic kingdom, which soon held rule over all the Iberian peninsula. (A century later one of their princesses went back north to become a Frankish queen and quite famous in song and story: her name was Brunhilde.)

  Gibraltar remained uninhabited. Carteia's ruin became complete. Over the bay, as over all of Europe, darkness descended.... Yet the Visigoths were not "barbarous" in the modern sense. They were more dangerous than that, both to the world and to themselves. They were savages, advanced and retarded at the same time.

  They came to wear long cloaks, robes of fine wool, and richly worked jewels—but they used neither shoes nor stockings; and while the king's head rested in his mistress's lap, she hunted it for lice. Their laws were usually wiser and more humane than the Roman laws they replaced—but they could not prevent the election of their kings from degenerating into anarchy. They had conquered by the sword—and neglected either to keep it sharp or to replace it with some other form of security (if any such existed in that time). At their core was a cult of personality rather than of organization—and then they failed to produce the personalities. Finally, they were disunited. They already distinguished between themselves and their Roman or Celtiberian fellow citizens; and in 589 King Reccared formally changed the "official" religion from Arian to Roman Christianity, which was, as we have seen, a much less tolerant form. From 617 on king and Church waged an ever more frenzied persecution against the Jews.

  The state went downhill, not violently, except at the upper levels, and not rapidly, but steadily. For over a century Gibraltar was a dinghy tied to a ship whose sails were rotting, whose captain spent his time with wine, women, and worse, and whose multiracial crew of many faiths and of none, near starvation, had no incentive, no knowledge, and no share in the vessel's fate.

  In the normal course of history such a situation worsens until it becomes intolerable; then there is a revolution, and a new leader takes hold—as Charles Martel was to do in Frankish Gaul, for instance. But the Visigoths were not to be given the chance to reshape their own history. Three thousand miles to the east, in Arabia, an obscure caravan conductor began to preach a new religion—that there was one God, Allah; and he, Mohammed, was the Prophet of Allah. In 622 the Prophet was driven from Mecca to Medina, and from this flight, the year of the Hegira, the Muslims soon dated their events, using a lunar calendar. Mohammed died in A.D. 632 (A.H. 11), but by then the new religion was well on the move, and every day the word of Mohammed's successors, the caliphs, Commanders of the Faithful, became law over new lands. Very early in the eighth century the Muslims reached Morocco. In Morocco, across the Strait from Gibraltar, lies Ceuta, the Roman Septa (for its situation on seven hills). The governor of Ceuta at this time was a man called Count Ilian, Julian, or perhaps Olban. Some historians think he was holding Ceuta for the Byzantine Empire, which seems very unlikely; some, that he was a Christian—of Vandal descent, perhaps—who was holding it for his own people; and some, that he was governor on behalf of the Visigothic king Wittica in Spain. His problem, faced with the sudden arrival of the all-conquering Muslims, would not have been much different in any of the three cases, but it is more rewarding to assume the last theory to be the correct one, as upon it has been built a lovely fabric of myth, legend, and history, complete with heroes, villains, high life, sex, and debauchery.

  In 709 one Roderick murdered Wittica and usurped the kingship of Spain. Wittica was dead, but many bitter supporters still lived, including two sons; a brother, Oppas, who was the powerful Archbishop of Seville; and a daughter, Faldrina ... who was the wife of Count Ilian. Their daughter, Florinda, was a maid of honor at Roderick's court.

  Tales of the richness of the Spanish soil and of the dissensions of its rulers crossed the narrow strait and were eagerly heard by the caliph's ambitious and able governor of Africa, Musa-ibn-Nusayr. In 710 he sent a lieutenant, Tarif, over into Spain on a reconnaissance. Tarif landed at Traducta and marched inland. After an extended excursion he returned to Musa with the news that Spain was ripe—overripe, rotten. About the same time Florinda sent a message to her father, Count Ilian; King Roderick had foully seduced her.

  The scene is set for the first known incursion of Gibraltar, as actor rather than spectator, into history. The year is A.D. 711, the ninety-second since the Hegira....

  BROTHER AETHELRED'S STORY

  Translated From The Latin

  In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen. Obeying the command of the Holy Abbot, I set down here all that befell me, Brother Aethelred of Glastonbury, on my journey from Isca to Rome in the year of Our Lord 711.

  Early in that year the Holy Abbot summoned me, I being then in
my twentieth year, and told me that the Bishop of Rome had bidden him send a young man to the city that he might study there for a period of years, and when he had learned all he could, return to Glastonbury. As I was somewhat more intelligent than an ox, the Abbot said, and there was no other young man, he would send me. I set forth at once in a Byzantine vessel, for Gaul was infested with outlaws.

  At sea I suffered from a revulsion of my stomach, so that I became weak as a child, though I was strong and tall in those days, with a beard and tonsure of gold and blue eyes. (I write this not to boast, but that all may be made clear.) After many weeks the vessel came to a narrow place, and the master said these were the Pillars of Hercules. Our sail was set, and a strong wind behind blew us speedily on, bearing close to the northern pillar, when we struck a piece of floating wreckage which ripped a mighty hole in the bow. The master put up the tiller and steered for the point of the headland, but the wind pushed the bow round, a great following wave fell upon us and cast us over, and in a moment we were all in the sea. By the chance of spending my childhood swimming in the river when I should perhaps have been watching my father's swine, I was able to swim out from beneath the sail which threatened to smother me, but I was alone. I swam hard and crawled ashore near the point of the headland. Arrived with difficulty at the top of the cliff, I looked seaward and saw that the vessel was gone, borne to the bottom by the sea and the weight of her cargo. None but I had survived. I wandered and climbed about the rock, and it began to rain. As darkness fell I saw a huge cavern and hurried into it for shelter. It was a place wrought by God, full of marvels of shaped stone, but I was tired and soon fell asleep. Next day I saw a goat girl, who pointed out to me the path off that Rock and showed me where was the nearest castle and village, which she called Torrox. I walked near three hours to Torrox, passing first, on the bay, the ruins of a city such as we have in Wessex and the Holy Abbot says are the work of the pagan Romans. As I reached the gate of Torrox, a red-faced young nobleman in a white tunic with a gold and green mantle rode out, followed by servants. The nobleman reined in, frowning, and spoke sharply to me in his tongue. I told him in Latin who I was and what had befallen me. He answered in Latin, poor but easily to be understood, "God be praised, for my clerk has just been drowned. I am Count Anseric, with my brother lord of all this country. Until all my letters are written and answered, you shall be my clerk.... You are a well-formed man, Aethelred ... and if I cannot persuade you to stay, then I shall arrange your onward passage to Rome." He smiled at me, spoke to a servant, and rode on.