Navigator

by Stephen Baxter

  XVII

  The palace was as crowded as the rest of the city; anybody who could find shelter with the emir did so. But Ibrahim found an empty room where he arranged for Peter’s wounds to be treated by a doctor, and ordered a girl to take him to the baths, and he called for a new set of clothes to replace those ruined by the mob.

  By the time Ibrahim came to find him, late that afternoon, Peter was transformed. Sitting on a heap of floor cushions, he gazed out of the arched doorway into the light. His hair had been cut, his stubble shaved, and his skin cleansed of blood. He showed no trace of the beating he had received, save for the sheen of salve applied to his bruises and broken lips, and a little neat stitching in the wound on his forehead. But he had aged since Ibrahim had last seen him; now in his late twenties, he was a little thicker around the neck, his skin of his face less fresh, a little peppering of grey in that golden hair.

  The battered bit of parchment, with its images of ships, rested on a low table.

  Ibrahim sat down, and Peter offered him orange tea. ‘I should thank you,’ he began. ‘I owe you my life.’

  ‘I’d have done it for anybody. It’s my job.’

  ‘Which you do very well, everybody says so—’

  ‘If you’d gone home to England you wouldn’t have been in peril in the first place.’

  ‘Why would I want to do that? It’s much more interesting here. You know, I believe it’s been four years since we last met. It took you a year to fall out with your mother, as I recall,’ he said drily.

  ‘And you’re still working on this nonsense, after all this time.’ Ibrahim reached forward and took the parchment. ‘The Engines of God.’

  ‘Four years isn’t long,’ Peter said. ‘Not for a project like this. You have no idea how much ground must be laid before you can take a single step.’

  ‘Why a fish?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Why build a boat shaped like a fish?’

  ‘Because that’s what the sketches say. We are still working from the Sihtric designs.’ He meant the sketches he had been able to recover from the records of Sihtric’s clerk. It had been a long time since Ibrahim had heard the archaic name of that long-dead priest. Peter went on, ‘Oh, I can make deeper guesses about why. A fish is comfortable in the water, isn’t it? Its smooth shape simply glides through that mysterious substance. Well, then, it stands to reason that if you make a boat with the same profile, it will be similarly advantaged. That’s just my guess, though. I don’t know.

  ‘Progress is slow, Ibrahim. Well, you saw that, before you flounced out of the project. The sketches are partial, incomplete. Many of them are scribbles that would mean far more to the clerk who made them than to us, for whom they were never intended. We have to guess at so much - sizes, weights, materials, gearing. Very often we ask the impossible of our artisans: steel cogs of unimaginable fineness and accuracy, wooden wheels of a seamless perfection. Sometimes we simply don’t have the correct materials at all. And, what’s still more difficult, we have to make guesses as to the machines’ purposes in the first place.’

  Ibrahim looked at the designs again. ‘It looks as if these stick men are totally enclosed in their fish-boat.’

  ‘So they are. Can you see, they operate their oars and paddles through seals in the skin of the ship, which appears to be a fine metal shell. We are using beaten copper. Some of us speculate that the ship might be sealed so that it can travel not just on the surface of the water, but beneath it.’

  ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘Do you really want the details? Look, there are bladders here which, if filled with water, might cause the craft to sink, and if pumped out could make it float. It would certainly make sense of the fish shape, wouldn’t it? And think of the advantage, Ibrahim. A boat that could float under your enemy’s fleet, all unseen, and attack from below.’

  Ibrahim tossed aside the bit of parchment. ‘This is such a waste of time. It always was.’

  ‘The emir may not think so when we demonstrate our weapons to him.’

  ‘And when will that be?’

  Peter shifted, uncomfortable. ‘We have a number of designs, partially realised ... We aren’t ready yet.’

  ‘Allah preserve us, but the Christian armies are close. Surely even a bookworm like you is aware of that.’

  ‘Of course I am. We’re all working as hard as we can, and as fast.’

  ‘What of your conscience, Peter? Are you happy as a Christian to be arming Muslims?’

  ‘I think of myself as a scholar before I’m a Christian. And this is a scholarly project, whatever else it is. I’m curious, Ibrahim. Anyway, perhaps our weapons, if they deter Fernando, will prevent war, rather than provoke it. Have you thought of that? In a way we’re alike, aren’t we, Ibrahim? Both striving to save people from harm, in our different ways.’

  Ibrahim thought this was all artifice, and he said nothing. The thoughtful young man he had met five years ago was being eroded away by ambition and a certain flavour of greed - not greed for wealth, but for accomplishment and recognition. He had seen it in scholars before, in his time at the court. Such men would do anything to stand out from their peers.

  Peter was watching him. ‘You know, we do miss you, Ibrahim. When I first met you I took you for a bone-headed dolt. A slab of righteous muscle.’

  ‘I wasn’t twenty years old!’

  ‘Now you’re five years older, and your true qualities are emerging. You’re no soldier, for all you wear that scimitar at your waist. You’re far more than that. You have a set of skills your mother could put to good use - organisation, leadership. You should make your peace with Subh. She misses you.’

  ‘My relationship with my mother is not a matter for you, but for my conscience. And I believe I put my skills to good use here. There is an emergency in the city. Again, even you must be aware of that...’

  Seville’s crisis had now lasted nearly a decade, since Cordoba’s fall. The city was flooded with refugees from the lost cities to the north. There was a perennial shortage of food, because of the abandonment of the city’s hinterland and the disruption to river trade. Every so often the poor sanitation would cause an outbreak of cholera or typhoid or some other hideous disease. Rumours that Fernando’s armies had been glimpsed in the heat-haze of the horizon periodically swept the fearful city, causing panic and rioting.

  When he had turned up at the vizier’s office in the emir’s palace, offering to help in any way he could, Ibrahim had found plenty to do. He found he was capable, unexpectedly good at finding solutions to novel problems, and implementing them. Perhaps he had inherited something of his formidable mother’s qualities. He rose rapidly in authority, and in the scale of the problems he was given to solve.

  Something about the work satisfied a deep spiritual need inside him. He still adhered to the teachings of the Almohads, named for Almuwahhidum, the Oneness of God. In his patient work he felt he was healing damaged lives; it was a work that served God’s unity better than any amount of killing, he thought.

  ‘But,’ Peter said, ‘how long can this continue, Ibrahim? This is a city under stress. King Fernando doesn’t even need to attack; the steady pressure he is applying is slowly winning the battle for him. All you are doing here is managing the city’s decline.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Of course necessarily; that’s the truth. But if your mother’s weapons designs were to pay off - if even one of them came to fruition - then the whole situation could be transformed.’

  Ibrahim snorted. ‘If a miracle happens? If Saladin came back to life and led us to victory?’

  ‘We don’t need a miracle. Your mother’s engines are taking shape, Ibrahim, manifested in steel and leather and wood, only a short walk from this very room. Don’t you think it’s your duty to come and see what we have - your duty as an officer of the emirate, and a son?’

  Ibrahim stared at him. In the far distance he heard angry shouts, the crash of smashing glass, harsh mili
tary orders: the sounds of a disintegrating civilisation. He felt his determination wavering.

  XVIII

  Thomas Busshe sought out Saladin in northern England, where he had gone to ground three years after he had arrived in Britain. Saladin soon learned that Thomas was coming to tell him that his mother needed him, and he must come back to London.

  The monk stayed a single night in the manse itself. It was the home of Saladin’s employer, a petty knight called Percival. The next morning, very early, Saladin found Thomas walking in the village. Thomas was showing his age, Saladin thought. His eyes were shadowed, and he looked stiff after his hours on the mead bench with Percival. But here he was, up and about. ‘It’s the relentless rhythm of a monk’s life,’ he said. ‘You can’t get it out of your blood.’

  They walked around the village. It was a mean place, a street of long sod-built huts surrounded by a sprawl of plough land. The manse was a small robust house of decently cut stone, which Saladin told Thomas was made of stones robbed from Hadrian’s Wall. Thomas seemed to think that was an enchanting idea, the labours of long-dead centurions transformed into the houses of the living.

  They came across a group of men setting off for the day’s work. They nodded to Saladin, not warmly, but civilly enough. They were skinny men with sallow faces. Hunched against the slight chill of the dewy air, some limping slightly, they were wood-cutters, and they bore adzes and axes and saws. They wore grimy, colourless clothes, breeches, hoses, shirts, kirtles - Saladin knew that these were the only clothes that most of them owned. As they plodded along they sang a song so filthy that Saladin hoped their strong Northumbrian accents, heavily laced with Danish words, would make it incomprehensible to Thomas.

  ‘Many of them are blond,’ Thomas said, surprised.

  ‘That’s the Viking blood in them. A lot of it about in this area.’

  ‘Do you get on with them?’

  Saladin grinned. ‘They call me the Saracen, or the Moor, or Muhammad. Ironic, that. But they’ve never seen anybody like me before.’ He grunted. ‘In fact most of them have never seen anybody from beyond that hill over there.’

  ‘And all our cathedrals and all our palaces and all our wars rest on the foundation of the toil of the country people, like these.’

  ‘Makes you think,’ Saladin said.

  ‘It does indeed. And you found work here.’

  ‘I accompany Percival’s bailiff when there’s trouble with the tithes,’ Saladin said. ‘I’m a hired muscle. Every so often we ride to a borough, to Newcastle or Morpeth, so the lord can pay his own tithes, and for the market. I go along to put off the robbers. I enjoy the market. I can buy stuff that reminds me of home, a little. Raisins, cinnamon, figs.’

  ‘The fruit of sunnier lands. And are you happy, Saladin?’

  Saladin shrugged. ‘Ask those wood-cutters if they’re happy. You’ve got what you’ve got and you have to put up with it. That or starve. It wasn’t easy for me when we first came here to England - how long ago?’

  ‘Three years already.’

  ‘I needed the work. My mother and I had no money left. But I had no close family, nowhere to go.’

  ‘And a face that didn’t fit.’

  ‘Yes. I’m grateful to you for finding me that first bit of employment with Umfraville.’ A lord with extensive holdings here in the north country, who had made himself rich from a king’s commission to protect the main droving routes to the north from the marauding Scots. The Umfravilles’ castle at Harbottle on the Coquet was grand. But Saladin didn’t have the stomach for the subdued, spiteful, slow-burning sort of war that consumed this border country - subdued but unending, for the nobles who waged it on both sides of the border grew rich from it. He had been glad to move to the pettier house of Percival.

  Happy? Happiness was irrelevant in this life, he thought. Content? Yes, perhaps that was the word. Percival was a man of no brain, it seemed to Saladin, and too drunken to formulate any serious ambition. He was happy just to take his villagers’ tithe and piss it away into the soak-holes behind his hall. But Saladin had no desire to risk his life supporting the petty ambitions of a more restless lord.

  ‘This will suit me for now,’ Saladin said. ‘Until something better shows up.’ He eyed Thomas. ‘But my mother isn’t so content, is she?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘I send her my money, you know. Just about all of it, keeping only a little for myself to buy a bit of pepper in Newcastle. I have few needs here; I eat with the lord, sleep in his house, ride his horses. What use is money?’

  ‘She’d be lost without your contribution.’

  ‘You wouldn’t let her starve,’ Saladin said.

  ‘Well, true. We remember our benefactors. But she’s a proud woman, Saladin. She doesn’t want charity from a “gaggle of monks”, as she calls us.’ Thomas sighed. ‘But she has ambition enough for a hundred English lords.’

  ‘Jerusalem remains in Saracen hands.’

  ‘So it does. But things have changed, Saladin. You and your mother arrived here without wealth, but with one treasure.’

  Saladin said reluctantly, ‘Robert’s cipher.’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps you remember I found a scholar to study it - another Franciscan, a man called Roger Bacon. Remarkable chap. It’s taken him some time—’

  ‘Let me guess. He’s worked it out.’

  ‘So he claims. We’ll have to judge his results.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Your mother wants you with her, Saladin. In London, when the truth of the Incendium Dei code is revealed.’

  Saladin said, ‘I always hated that old nonsense about prophecies and codes, Thomas. Maybe it made our family rich in the past. But it never helped us in the Outremer, or since we have come to England. And I never thought it was real.’ He waved a hand. ‘Not compared to this. Land, toil, iron, blood, war - that’s the real stuff of life. But my mother wants me with her in case this cracked code reveals secrets that will revive our fortune, and fulfil her life.’

  ‘Yes. And I want you with her,’ Thomas said severely, ‘in the much more likely case that it does not.’

  Mulling over Thomas’s words, Saladin led him back to the manse.

  XIX

  Ibrahim and Peter slipped out of Seville.

  They came to a hole in the ground just beyond the city walls. It looked like the outlet of a broken sewer or drain. Peter said, ‘This is older than the Moorish city - Roman, we think, part of their sewage system. Of course the settlement here was a lot smaller then. The main Roman town, Italica, was some distance away. It’s a bit mucky down here—’

  ‘Just get on with it.’

  The hole in the ground turned out to be a shaft, deeper than Ibrahim was tall, down which he had to drop. He found himself in a stone-clad tunnel, too low for him to stand up straight. He could see no further than a few paces. There was a smell of damp and rot, but nothing foetid; the sewer was long disused.

  Peter used a flint to light a candle. His eyes were pits of shadow. ‘Are you all right? Not everybody is fond of the dark.’

  Ibrahim took a deep breath. ‘I have no love of being buried alive. But it’s my mother I’m more frightened of.’

  Peter laughed, and clapped him on the back. ‘Come. Let’s face our nightmares.’

  It turned out to be only a short walk, though a clumsy and difficult one, through the low tunnel. Ibrahim stumbled over a broken Roman tile. Then the tunnel opened out, and Ibrahim found himself walking into a big boxy room. Steps cut into the earth led down to a floor some distance beneath him. The walls were stone-clad, the ceiling timbered, and lamps glimmered in alcoves.