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by Stephen Baxter

  But there was evidence of the Christian Reconquest even here. Where Cordoba had seemed depopulated Seville struck Peter as very crowded. The towns and cities of the south had had to absorb the floods of refugees from the grinding advance of the Christian armies, and Subh said that she believed the population of the city might have doubled since the fall of Cordoba.

  And it was a city under threat. Seville had the natural advantage that the Guadalquivir was navigable from the sea as far as this point, but that brought a certain vulnerability. So, near the heart of the city, two squat towers faced each other across the river. A massive chain stretched between them, that could be winched up to span the river to block the passage of threatening ships. Peter was taken by the brutal simplicity of the device.

  As they threaded through the city Peter glimpsed the courtyard of the great mosque, crowded with fakirs and imams, and with the faithful who performed their ritual ablutions in the many fountains. It scarcely seemed conceivable that beneath the feet of those swarming faithful could be ancient plans for deadly weapons, plans lost and buried for more than a century, while this shining mosque had mushroomed over them.

  Despite the overcrowding Subh had been able to secure a house, smaller than the one she had had to abandon in Cordoba but with a decent patio and fair-sized rooms, and not far from the great mosque. Here, once she had paid off her muleteers, she lodged herself, with Ibrahim and a few of her many family members.

  And she gave a room to Peter. He peeled off his travel clothes with relief. He imagined he had sweated away half his body’s weight into the fur of his wretched, patient mule. That night, in an airy room and on a soft pallet, out of the iron stink of the desert, he slept more deeply than he had since he was a child.

  XII

  Joan’s smoky English hall was scarcely less tolerable in the evening’s cool than in the heat of the day.

  And here Saladin was told the strange truth about his family.

  ‘It’s a tangled story,’ Thomas said, studying Saladin, trying to gauge what he understood. ‘A story of prophecies - not one, but three of them, a whole sheaf.’

  Joan told Saladin, sketching in brisk, efficient strokes, the story of how over a hundred and fifty years ago Robert the Wolf had travelled to Moorish Spain with his father, Orm the Viking, in search of a rogue priest.

  Thomas said, ‘Sihtric had come into the possession of plans for marvellous weapons. These plans were called the Codex of Aethelmaer, the weapons the Engines of God. But the Codex was compressed and enigmatic, and contained words nobody could read. So Sihtric went to Moorish Spain—’

  ‘What? Why?’ Saladin sounded outraged. ‘To hand these weapons over to the caliphs?’

  ‘The caliphs had gone by then,’ Thomas said patiently. ‘But, no, it was not Sihtric’s intention to give his weapons to the Moors. He hoped to use the Moors’ greater scholarship to help him understand the Codex and develop the weapons. And then, so his scheme seems to have gone, he would turn the weapons on his Moorish hosts.

  ‘While he worked on these plans, as he researched the past, he came upon the second of the three prophecies - a sort of sketch of the future left by a wizard called al-Hafredi. More of that later.

  ‘And then Robert and his father, Orm, turned up. Now Orm had a vision of his own - the third prophecy. He called it the Testament of Eadgyth.’ And he repeated Eadgyth’s legend of the Dove, who must be turned to the west.

  ‘Lots of prophecies, then,’ Saladin said, confused.

  ‘Orm believed his Testament of Eadgyth warned against the use of the Engines of God. That is why, armed with the Testament, a troubled Orm travelled with his son to the distant land where Sihtric was developing his weapons.’

  ‘And in the middle of all this,’ Joan said drily, ‘our ancestor Robert found time to fall in love, and implant his seed in the loins of a Moorish girl, Moraima.’

  Saladin was intrigued despite himself. ‘So what happened to them all?’

  ‘It all went predictably wrong,’ Thomas said, and he sighed over the foolishness of the long dead. ‘There was a fire. The result of some struggle, probably. Orm and Sihtric were both killed. The prophecies and plans were lost, or so it was believed...’

  Robert came home, seemingly full of disgust at what he had experienced of Moorish Spain. He became a warrior of God, eagerly taking the Cross when the Pope called the First Crusade.

  Thomas said, ‘But he never forgot his strange experiences, the tale of the magical engines, his father’s prophecy, the future visions of al-Hafredi. In the end, driven by some sense of guilt perhaps - he may have felt it a betrayal of his father to just abandon it all - he told his own eldest son the whole story. And that son, mercifully for history and your family’s fortune, was more bookish than his father, and wrote it all down for us.

  ‘Now, by chance, not all of the Codex itself was lost. In the final struggle a scrap of it was torn away and ended up in Robert’s possession. It bore strange words ...’ Thomas rummaged through scrolls on a low table before him for his copy of the fragment. ‘Ah, here we are.’ He ran his finger along a line of text.

  BMQVK XESEF EBZKM BMHSM BGNSD DYEED OSMEM HPTVZ

  HESZS ZHVH

  ‘There were letters nearby too, preserved on the fragment, but ripped through. AD, perhaps, a V and an M - nothing else could be made out.’

  Saladin read this over. ‘It’s in no language I ever saw.’

  ‘Reading isn’t your strong suit anyhow, son,’ Joan said, mocking him.

  ‘This is no known language,’ Thomas confirmed. ‘I believe this is a cipher - a code, perhaps of the type Caesar once used. There may be some key, which is lost. At any rate it was preserved, thanks to the transcription of the bookish son.’

  ‘Now,’ said Joan. ‘Here’s the most important thing for us, Saladin. Another of the three prophecies, the Testament of al-Hafredi, also fell by chance into Robert’s hands.’

  ‘Written on a bit of human skin,’ Thomas said with a certain morbid relish.

  ‘And this al-Hafredi has become our family’s own oracle.’

  ‘An oracle?’

  ‘I mean that literally, Saladin. One of Robert’s grandsons gave the material to Brother Thomas’s house to study and interpret it for us, and so they have, in the centuries since.’

  Thomas said, ‘Al-Hafredi told of events to come - very broad-brush, but reliable none the less. And in particular he spoke of the advance of the Mongols. This followed the Islamic conquest of Europe, and he described it step by step.’

  Saladin was trying to work this out, his face twisting. ‘The Muslims have never conquered Europe.’

  ‘True, but we can believe that the Mongols’ advance would have occurred as al-Hafredi described it, whether Islam conquered or not.’

  Now Saladin seemed utterly baffled. ‘And Robert lived and died long before anybody had heard of the Mongols!’

  ‘He did indeed,’ Joan said. ‘It wouldn’t be much of a prophecy if it was the other way around, would it?’

  ‘But how can this be? Who but God can know the future?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Thomas. ‘An interesting question.’

  ‘Which,’ Joan said hastily, ‘we can explore at our leisure another time. For now, Saladin, the important point is that this information has proved useful.’

  Saladin nodded. ‘If you know the Mongols are coming you can arm against them.’

  ‘We tried that,’ Joan said. ‘But nobody wants to believe in the coming of the Mongols until they are on the doorstep.

  ‘What we could anticipate was the plight of the refugees - those poor folks driven ahead of the Mongols’ advance, in Asia, Persia, Europe. So we set up caravan stops. We supplied food and water, blankets. We even hired Saracen doctors. And we bought up the land to which they had to flee.’

  ‘We made money out of the terrified,’ Saladin said. He seemed faintly disgusted.

  ‘We saved lives,’ Joan said sternly. ‘There are far more ignoble ways of making
a living, Saladin. And if we had not, our family could not have survived here.’

  ‘Think of it as a miracle,’ Thomas said to Saladin. ‘Everyone knows that the First Crusade’s dazzling successes all depended on miracles. Perhaps God has miraculously assisted your family, for purposes yet to be revealed. Think of it that way.’

  ‘But now,’ Joan said, ‘things have changed.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘For one thing,’ Thomas said, ‘the Mongols have turned back. We must discuss the meaning of this in due course.’

  Joan said, ‘And then there is this letter from Subh the Moor, our distant cousin. She drops a hint that the Codex, Sihtric’s engine designs, may not be lost after all ...’ Subh had said that a copy of the lost plans might have been buried under the floor of the mosque in Seville. ‘If Robert ever knew this,’ Joan said, ‘he did not tell his son, or at any rate it was not written down.’

  Now Saladin’s face was full of a boyish wonder, pleasing to Thomas’s dry heart. ‘Buried under a mosque! What a story!’

  ‘It may be just that,’ Thomas warned. ‘A story. But Subh has taken it seriously enough to write to you.’

  Joan said, ‘Subh believes that all these fragments of prophecy, in her possession and ours, may be put back together into a whole, the prophetic lore reassembled for the first time since the age of Sihtric himself.’

  ‘And so that’s why she wrote to you?’ Saladin asked. ‘But what does she want? We are Christian, she is Muslim. The Christians are destroying her country. Perhaps she intends to trick us, as that old priest Sihtric intended to trick the Moors.’

  Thomas said, ‘Even if that is her intention it need not be fulfilled. If we could get hold of these designs, if we could build the Engines of God, we could strike a devastating blow against Islam.’

  Saladin studied him, curious. ‘That sounds a very military ambition for a monk.’

  ‘Not military. Evangelical.’ He told them of Saint Francis of Assisi, founder of his order, whom Thomas himself had, thrillingly, met as a novice. ‘The first rule Francis wrote for our order was a command for a global mission to “all peoples, races, tribes, and tongues, all nations and all men of all countries, who are and who shall be”. Perhaps these Engines will enable my brothers to advance their most holy mission - even if not a life is taken with them.’

  Joan said, ‘So we share common goals, my family and your order.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘So what do you think we should do about this, Thomas?’

  ‘You could write to this cousin in Cordoba, or travel there. Or you could come to England - perhaps we could bring her there.’

  Joan frowned. ‘The Muslims would have us out of Jerusalem for good. It’s not the best time to leave, chasing a dream. And I’m not sure if writing back to my Moorish cousin about this matter is advisable. For now, let us study the matter further. Subh can wait.’ But she frowned again at her letter. ‘You know, there are so many puzzles here. Thomas, what of this phrase, Incendium Dei?’

  Thomas said, ‘Something Subh’s own ancestress, Moraima, evidently remembers of the lost Codex.’

  “‘The Fire of God.”’

  ‘More than “fire”,’ Thomas said. ‘It is a word with passion. It means conflagration. Ruin. Perhaps it is a phrase associated with the bit of the manuscript from which Robert tore his corner...’

  A thought occurred to him. He pawed through his notes once more, looking for the transcription of the ripped-through phrase with the coded words. All those incomplete letters, I, V, M - was it possible that Subh’s Latin phrase would complete that puzzle?

  But he was exhausted by the heat. With apologies to Joan, promising to discuss all this further, he gathered up his documents and made his way to bed, his head buzzing with the enigma of the Incendium Dei, the Fire of God.

  XIII

  Among Subh’s many admirable qualities was an antipathy to wasting time. And so, on only his second day in Seville, Peter was to meet Moorish scholars who would inspect the fragmentary weapons plans he had retrieved from the wreckage of the schemes of long-dead Sihtric.

  He was in no state for this, with his hair and skin caked with dust and his clothes stiff with stale sweat. At Subh’s suggestion, or perhaps it was an order, he took a bath, Moorish style. For the price of an English penny he had the dirt scraped and sweated out of his skin, he was shaved and his hair chopped back, and he had the ache of the mule ride kneaded out of his back by a masseur, a huge Moor with biceps like a bull’s thighs.

  When he got back to Subh’s house he found his own clothes had been taken away for mending and cleaning, to be replaced by a set of clean, crisp white robes that would have suited any Moor. There was even a turban.

  ‘My,’ Subh said, when she met him at the gate. ‘Has your skin been oiled? You even smell civilised.’

  His head full of her perfume, he could only reply, ‘Lady, I’ll take that as a compliment.’ He offered her his arm.

  They walked the short distance to Seville’s royal palace, which the Moors called the al-qasr al-Mubarak, the Blessed Palace. Somehow it didn’t surprise Peter at all that Subh was held in high enough esteem by the emir to have been granted the use of rooms in his palace to meet her scholars.

  They were met by one of the emir’s staff, a sleek chamberlain with a scalp shaved smooth and polished oak-brown. He led them on a gentle walk through the rooms of the palace, which led from one to the other in the indirect Moorish style, filled with water-reflected light from patios and gardens. In some of the rooms they glimpsed people at leisure, wives and princes perhaps, and palace staff who worked on the business of running the emirate.

  ‘I’m impressed you organised this so quickly,’ he said.

  ‘We may need to be hasty, if the rumours I’ve been hearing about the Christians’ plans are true. We have a few years at best before Seville is besieged the way Cordoba was. So we must get on with it. But tell me - do you despair of the quality of our scholars in these latter days? After all the great age of the caliphate is long gone.’

  ‘Not at all. I have studied Ibn Rushd, for instance, whom we know as Averroes. An astronomer, physician, philosopher, who is generally believed to have produced the best commentary on Aristotle since antiquity, and stirred up some trouble with it. Ibn Bajjah, a teacher of medicine, and tutor of Ibn Rushd. Al-Jayyani, who wrote commentaries on Euclid. Al-Maghribi, famous for trigonometry. Al-Zarqali, the foremost astronomer-’

  ‘Enough. You have convinced me. You know,’ she mused, ‘these scholars are heroes to you. But my son’s heroes are men like Tariq and Saladin. Warriors. Makes you think.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something else about Muslim learning. Many Arabic words have no Latin equivalents, because the scholarship is so much more advanced. So when the work of Ibn Rushd, for instance, is translated into Latin, the Arabic words are copied over as they are. Alkali. Camphor. Borax. Elixir. Algebra. Azure. Zenith. Nadir. Zero. Cipher—’

  ‘Enough of your lists, boy!’

  ‘Do you think that people in England and Germany will end up speaking Arabic without even knowing it?’

  ‘Now that,’ she said, ‘is a delicious thought.’

  They arrived at last at a patio with an elaborate sunken garden surrounded by graceful arches. Peter heard laughter, and in the shadowed spaces beyond he saw lithe running figures. At the western side of the patio they were brought through an elaborate horseshoe-arched doorway into a hall called the turayya. This grand hall was the emir’s throne room; beneath a domed roof pillars of fine marble supported complex arcades. The chamberlain said it was named for the star system called in the west the Pleiades. It was so called because the rooms around this central hall were set out like those stars in the sky.