The vizier himself lay on a couch. ‘Sihtric, my friend and colleague. Welcome.’ He was a thin, elegant man of perhaps fifty, with a pale colouring, though his nose and cheeks were blotched red. Servants, or guards, stood to either side, scimitars showing at their waists.
Led by Sihtric, the party approached the vizier one by one. Sihtric bowed before him and kissed his hand. Ibn Hafsun followed suit, and then Orm. Robert saw, though, that his father treated the two guards to a challenging stare. Orm was here as an equal, not a supplicant.
The vizier greeted Moraima more tenderly, patting her hair and cupping her cheek. Moraima submitted passively. Robert felt a stab of jealousy, but the vizier’s attention was more affectionate than lustful - like a relative, not a lover.
At last it was Robert’s turn. Ibn Tufayl’s eyes were watchful but bloodshot. When Robert bowed to kiss his hand, on the vizier’s fingers he smelled spices and perfumes, but an underlying stink of piss. And Robert was faintly shocked to smell wine on the vizier’s breath.
Ibn Tufayl waved a hand. ‘Sit, please.’
There were no seats, only couches, and a scattering of cushions on the floor. Sihtric and Moraima and Ibn Hafsun sat cross-legged with the ease of long practice. Orm and Robert followed their example, Orm stiffly. Servants circulated with drinks and sweetmeats, the juices of crushed fruit, and dried figs and grapes.
When Ibn Tufayl spoke, in clear Latin, Robert was surprised it was to him. ‘So you’re the Christian soldier I’ve heard so much of from Sihtric. Mother a mystic, father a Viking warrior - yes? A potent mix in young blood.’
‘Now, you mustn’t tease him, Ibn Tufayl,’ Sihtric said. ‘His faith is strong. He’s probably the purest Christian here - purer even than me.’
Ibn Tufayl arched an eyebrow. ‘Well, that isn’t hard, Sihtric old friend, as you and I both know. But you don’t know much about us infidels, do you, boy? I can tell from your round eyes.’
‘I’ve never seen a place like this before,’ Robert blurted.
‘Of course you haven’t. Beautiful, isn’t it? And of course it was far more so before the fitnah. By which I mean the turbulence, the fall of the caliphate. I am determined to restore what I can, before the memory of it is lost.
‘This is not like your architecture, boy, that you inherited from the Romans, or that your ancestors brought with them from the German bogs. My ancestors were people of the east, of the sun, of the desert. They came to Spain only a century after the death of the Prophet. They had been nomads; they lived in tents! And their architecture reflects that. Think of this room as a fine tent of stone. To do business we sit on the floor, or lean on the walls - which is why they are tiled to your shoulders. The arches let the light and warmth of the world seep in. And in the patios water played, cherished, for in the desert water is the most precious substance of all.’ He sighed. ‘Some day it will be restored as it was, but perhaps not in my lifetime.’
Orm said mildly, ‘But the Christians are strong now.’
Ibn Tufayl was dismissive. ‘Let me tell you the truth about Christians in al-Andalus. Have you heard of the Martyrs of Cordoba? Christians have always been tolerated here, as you are dhimmis, People of the Book, like the Jews. But these “martyrs”, fifty or so, began to challenge the authorities, and to insult Islam. In the end they got what they wanted: a glorious public death. Such self-sacrificing idealists are trained in the Christian monasteries, which we continue to tolerate in our territory. Hotbeds of violence and rogue clerics and the extreme preaching of hate. Thus it goes when an inferior civilisation, yours, meets a higher one, ours. Your only weapon is your own petty lives. But these attacks are pinpricks. Nothing.’
Orm said, ‘I don’t think I would call the loss of Toledo a pinprick.’
Ibn Tufayl smiled. ‘It is a setback. Nothing more. There is talk of summoning help from across the strait. In the Maghrib there is a new movement called the Almoravids. Fierce, strong Muslim warriors. It won’t be long before the old city is in the hands of an emir, and the muezzin rings out across the rooftops once more.’
‘We’ll see,’ Robert said, and he glared at the vizier, who laughed at him.
After more talk of this sort, with Ibn Tufayl pressing Orm over details of what he called Viking ways of life and of making war, the little meeting broke up. They were all dismissed, save for Sihtric, who said he had business to discuss with the vizier.
‘I’d like to know what kind of “business”,’ Orm muttered to Robert.
‘I don’t think I’d trust that vizier,’ Robert said. ‘He had wine on his breath. Muslims don’t drink.’
‘No, they don’t. Or aren’t supposed to. There’s more to the vizier than meets the eye. And I’d like to know more about the relationship he has with Sihtric. What hold does Sihtric have over him?’ Orm sighed. ‘I suppose it was foolish to think there would be anything simple about all this. Sihtric is a complicated man, and this is a complicated place.’
‘But you’re going to try to resolve your business with Sihtric even so?’
‘I think I have to. I’m going to wait here for Sihtric. What will you do?’
Robert grinned. ‘Go back to the city with Moraima.’
Orm nodded. ‘I thought so. Just be careful.’
‘My arm is strong.’
‘But your heart isn’t, no stronger than mine ever was. Be wary, son.’
IX
‘Take your boots off,’ Moraima whispered.
They stood in the walled courtyard of Cordoba’s great mosque - the Court of the Orange Trees, Moraima called it. It was crowded with the faithful, who washed in the fountains before entering the mosque.
Robert peered nervously through a narrow door into an interior of shadows and columns. ‘Are you sure about this? This is a mosque - I’m a Christian—’
‘But Jesus is revered in our theology. He was a great prophet. Of course a Christian may enter a mosque.’
‘Besides, the mosque is the greatest religious glory of all al-Andalus,’ said a boy, approaching them. ‘You must see it before you come to conquer us, Christian.’
And a second boy said, ‘Just don’t go shouting out “Jesus Christ the King” in the Mihrab and you’ll be fine.’
These two were about Moraima’s age, perhaps a year or two older than Robert. They were slim, dark, dressed in brightly coloured clothes. Healthy, loose-limbed, they were not especially handsome, but they seemed intelligent, good-humoured, confident. Even their Latin was fluent. And they had the air of wealth, of easy riches. Before them Robert felt dull, cloddish, like a lump of earth.
‘These are my friends,’ Moraima said. ‘Ghalib. Hisham.’ Robert wouldn’t have remembered which was which, save that Ghalib wore a bright red turban. They were sons of courtiers who served Ibn Tufayl, she said.
‘I didn’t know we’d have company,’ Robert said, and he struggled to keep the disappointment out of his voice.
The boys noticed, and they grinned. But what had he expected? Of course Moraima had friends here; of course she had a life of her own, that had nothing to do with him.
Moraima said, ‘Oh, come on, Robert. I thought you’d like to meet new people. And they’ve been eager to meet you. Hisham is studying philosophy, and Ghalib’s training to be an astronomer, like his father.’
Ghalib said the word slowly and heavily. ‘Astronomer. I don’t suppose you have many of those in England, do you?’
‘You’d better write it down for him,’ said Hisham. ‘Oh, I forgot. You don’t read in England either, do you? So what do you do, English Robert?’
Ghalib said, ‘There are only two jobs in England. Farmers and whores.’
Robert said tightly, ‘Watch your mouth, pretty boy. My mother was English.’
‘So what kind of plough did she drive?’
Moraima stood between them hastily. ‘That’s enough. You’re like children - like all men! Come on. Let’s go into the mosque, and be respectful with it.’
So Robert entered t
he great mosque, with Moraima at his side, the stone floor cold under his bare feet, and the two boys sniggering at his back.
But in the mosque’s calm spaces, he soon forgot all about the boys.
It was like walking into a forest of slim pillars, linked by arches as delicate as the fronds of palm trees. Moraima said there were more than a thousand pillars in this one building. There were people walking everywhere, respectful, barefoot. Not a priest, or rather an imam, to be seen. The building was full of light, coming from windows and arched doorways, a light turned golden by reflection from the stone. Every way he looked the lines of pillars led his gaze away, deeper and deeper, until he saw walls adorned with inscriptions in beautiful Kufic script, words he could not read but which exhorted the faithful to raise their hearts to Allah.
He was grateful when Moraima’s hand slipped into his, for he felt he would soon be lost.
‘What are you thinking?’ Moraima asked softly.
‘That it’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘And that I don’t understand it. Of course I could say the same about you.’
She ignored the clumsy compliment. ‘It isn’t so hard. There is a central axis leading to the Mihrab. That points the way to Mecca; there the imam calls the faithful to Friday prayer. But you may pray wherever you like. The priests don’t get in the way here. My father says it’s a “different geometry of worship” from the Christian.’
‘This is nothing like a Christian church.’
‘Well, no. Christians build their churches as Romans once built their basilicas. That’s what my father says. The first emirs of al-Andalus started with nothing. They borrowed ideas - the round arches of the Romans, for instance. They even reused what the Romans and the Goths had left behind.’ And she showed him how many of the columns, of jasper and marble, were subtly different, in their proportions, their capitals; they were Roman and Gothic relics.
‘The arches are meant to look like the branches of palms,’ Moraima said. ‘It is an oasis in stone.’
‘Yet it’s centuries since your people came from the desert.’
‘Yes. We were thrown down here and changed. Isn’t it funny? Now we are not African any more, but not European - just us, something different in the world ...’
They walked further, and Robert learned to read the history of al-Andalus in the slim columns of stone.
At first the Muslim conquerors had been in a minority, a few hundred thousand in a Christian population of millions. But that proportion grew quickly, thanks to massive immigration across the straits from Africa. And though tolerance of religion was practised, Islam was the religion of the state, and conversion was a useful step on the road to power. Ibn Hafsun’s family had been one Gothic dynasty who had abandoned the cross for the crescent. And as the numbers of Muslim worshippers in Cordoba grew, so the great mosque was extended several times to accommodate them - most recently by al-Mansur, the overreaching vizier who had brought the calamity of the fitnah upon al-Andalus.
They walked still deeper into the mosque. In places there were multiple arches, arches built on top of others like children standing on each others’ shoulders, all exquisitely carved. And the Mihrab, another arch adorned with gold leaf, was like a gateway to paradise. Its materials were a gift to al-Andalus from Constantinople, said Moraima.
Lost in the mosque’s cool spaces, Robert realised he hadn’t been aware of the two boys, Ghalib and Hisham, for some time.
‘Oh, they got bored long ago,’ said Moraima when he mentioned them. ‘Come. Let’s get some air.’
X
When Sihtric was done with the vizier, he had suggested to Orm that the two of them should take a ride, further out into the country.
Orm mounted his horse suspiciously. ‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll see. Go ahead, boy ... So, what of Robert? He seems drawn by the Moorish world.’
‘He’s his mother’s son, may God help him. He’s a confused young man - more confused than he knows. But it’s the fact that he’s drawn to your daughter that concerns me more. No good will come of it,’ muttered Orm.
‘He’s his father’s son too. You were just as young and foolish once, Orm.’
‘Yes,’ Orm snapped. ‘And it led to tragedy.’
Sihtric said testily, ‘But if we ban them from seeing each other they will just ignore us. We’ll have to find a way of coping with things as they unfold.’
‘So what do we do in the meantime?’
‘I suggest we pursue the business for which you came all this way.’ He grinned. ‘I think you are going to enjoy this.’
They topped a small rise, and Sihtric reined in his horse. He pointed. ‘There. What do you see, among those olive trees?’
Orm stared. There was much activity going on in the olive grove. The centre of it seemed to be a kind of machine that nestled among the trees, a long cart that rested on three sets of widely spaced wheels. A large wooden crescent-shape dominated one end, and its upper surface was meshed by ropes and gleaming metal. The whole was obscured by a kind of scaffolding, through which a boy clambered, fixing ropes.
The machine was the product of a kind of open-air workshop, Orm saw now. Men and boys moved between furnaces, lathes, piles of timber, and tables heaped with gleaming metal components, and scholars came and went between rows of tents among the olive trees.
‘Quite a sight,’ he said, non-committal.
‘It is, isn’t it? What are we building, do you think?’
Orm shrugged. ‘Some kind of wagon?’
‘Come, Orm, stretch your limited imagination. Just look at it. Never mind the scale: tell me what you see.’
The shaft, the bow, the ropes. ‘It looks like an arbalest,’ Orm said. ‘Which the English call a crossbow ...’ But an arbalest was a gadget small enough for a man to hold in his arms. This machine sprawled across a field, and had a boy actually walking along its back. Orm muttered prayers to the pagan gods of his childhood. ‘By all that’s holy—’
‘Oh, there’s nothing holy about it.’
‘Aethelmaer?’
‘Aethelmaer. Come, let’s ride down.’
Orm remembered Aethelmaer.
In the last days of the reign of King Edward the Confessor, Sihtric had attached himself to the court of Harold, Earl of Wessex, as a priest-confessor - and as a prophet of sorts. He believed he was in the possession of a prophecy already four centuries old, a calendar-like vision called the Menologium of Isolde, whose sole purpose was to ensure an English victory over the Normans in the year of the great comet - the year of Our Lord 1066. Not that it had done much good. Harold, who had refused to take all the prophecy’s advice, had fallen to defeat by the Normans.
But during his career as a court Sibyl, Sihtric had learned of the existence of a rival.
‘Aethelmaer! A fat, crippled monk from Wiltshire,’ he said with some bitterness. ‘Who had also been uttering prophecies about the comet. I’ve since found his very words, among his papers.’ He quoted from memory: “‘You’ve come, have you, O comet? You’ve come, you source of tears to many mothers. It is long since I saw you; but as I see you now you are much more terrible, for I see you brandishing the downfall of my country...”’
‘And you summoned him to Westminster.’
‘Yes. You were there, Orm, you remember.’
His useless legs stinking of rot and unguent, the monk had wheezed his way through an account of his prophecy - which turned out not to have been his at all, but gabbled out by a young man called Aethelred, who had been abandoned as a child, taken in by the monastery at Malmesbury, and then had his short, unhappy life curtailed by debauched brothers.
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