Navigator

by Stephen Baxter

  But he steepled his fingers and pressed the tips against his lips. ‘What first? We must discuss the provenance of your various prophecies. But it occurs to me that the time is so short that this Dove of yours, if he exists, must already have been born. The Holy Brotherhood is rather good at finding people. I’ll pass this on; we will find your Dove, if he lives.’

  A young monk came into the room and apologetically whispered in Ferron’s ear.

  Ferron stood. ‘We will continue our business later. For now, please, join me. I asked you to delay our meeting until today because I thought that you, as guests in our city, would like to witness the first triumph of the Inquisition.’

  Grace stood with polite eagerness. ‘And what triumph is that?’

  Ferron smiled. ‘We call it the Act of Faith.’

  Auto-da-fé.

  VII

  That February day, the procession formed up before Seville’s unfinished cathedral. At its head was a company of Dominicans, barefoot, with their heads covered by black and white cowls like Ferron’s. They bore the banner of the Inquisition, a knotted cross flanked by the olive branch of peace and the sword of retribution. Behind the monks walked magistrates, then soldiers carrying wood for the fires.

  And then came the condemned - seven of them, six men and a woman, flanked by soldiers bearing lances to ensure they could not escape. More hooded monks followed, chanting for repentance, and finally drummers who hammered out a heavy, doleful rhythm.

  Ferron led Grace and James to join a gaggle of other notable citizens who trailed the drummers. They passed along narrow streets crowded with people who came to stare at the condemned. Some of them were foreigners, James thought, Portuguese explorers or Italian merchants, ambassadors from an entirely different world, who watched this gruesome parade with sneers of disgust - and yet they watched.

  James himself was horribly fascinated by the faces of the condemned. They wore yellow gowns, carried candles, and had nooses around their necks. They were influential conversos - Jews converted to Christianity, or even the descendants of converts - whose treacherous reversion to Judaism had been rooted out, tried and sentenced. One young man looked frightened, and he continually crossed himself and mumbled prayers; if he was secretly Jewish he didn’t look it now. The others merely looked stunned, or disbelieving.

  The procession snaked out of the city walls to an open field. Here bare wooden stakes had been set up in a row, their purpose blunt and obvious. The condemned were tied to these stakes. One man struggled, another wept, and that younger man crossed himself until his arms were pinned. The rest bore the procedure in stoical silence.

  Ferron pointed out one Dominican, a tall, pale figure with a flattened nose, like a boxer’s. ‘Torquemada,’ he murmured. ‘Your first contact, madam. Not yet an Inquisitor, actually, but his soul yearns for the good work. Ferociously pious and yet a master of organisation. Perhaps every cleansing needs a cool mind like his!’

  The leader of the Dominicans stepped forward, and began to deliver a sermon in windy Spanish, laden with quotations from Revelation.

  Ferron whispered to Grace, ‘He is Friar Vincent Ojeda, of the Monastery of San Pablo. He led the commission which established the Inquisition in the first place, to root out weakness and treachery in our new state. For connoisseurs of apocalyptic preaching, his sermons are collectors’ items,’ he said. ‘But this is a moment for which he has campaigned all his adult life.’

  A portly, intense man, Ojeda was alight with joy in this killing place, James thought. And if James was watching Ojeda, so, he found, Ferron was watching him.

  ‘I wonder what you are thinking, young brother. Your expression is complicated. Are you concerned that the innocent may be wrongly condemned? It is possible; we are human. But remember the words of the Pope’s legate at the time of the Albigensian heresy: “Slay all. God will know His own.”’

  ‘That would be small comfort were I at the stake today.’

  ‘True, but you aren’t at the stake, are you? I’ve known your type before. You are too intelligent to be truly pious. What do you think of us? What do you think of me?’

  James decided to answer honestly. ‘I think you are a man of affairs,’ he said. ‘Of business. Of this world, more than the next. You see this Inquisition as a way for you to achieve your goals, and for your monarchs to build a strong and unified state.’

  Ferron’s head swivelled, sleek. He said to Grace, ‘Your adviser has a mind of his own, I see.’

  Grace sneered at James, effortlessly crushing him; he looked away. ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ she said. ‘He’s one of the brightest of his generation, so his abbot assured me. And he’s an expert on the Engines of God. But he shows an unruly independence of thought.’

  ‘Have you always been “unruly”, boy?’

  ‘My father is a farmer,’ James admitted. ‘We were not rich. As I grew he passed me into the care of the Franciscans. He said I was too intelligent to be of any use behind the plough.’

  Ferron barked laughter. ‘A sensible man. But I’d have strapped you to the damn plough and beaten the brains out of you. However you’re not entirely wrong. One can unite one’s fellows behind a holy banner. And we need uniting, we squabbling Christians, for we face our mortal enemy in Islam in Granada, and our own cities are full of Moors and Jews. We did not cleanse ourselves in the past, as you English did long ago. But once we have been purified by the Inquisition we will be in a position to conclude a Reconquest that has been stalled for far too long.’

  When Ojeda was done thrilling the gathered mob, a notary stepped forward and read out the crimes of each penitent. One had engaged in Jewish rituals; one had mocked the Host which was the body of Christ; one had prepared his lamb meat in accordance with Jewish instruction; and so on. They had all confessed to this when ‘put to the question’.

  Now the penitents were given one final choice. If they made a full admission of guilt, repented their sins, and converted to the faith of Christ, they would be spared the fire through prior strangulation. All but one man submitted, and knelt before the Inquisitors, who brought out their ropes.

  It astonished James how hard it was, even for these practised killers, to crush the life out of a human being; it was long minutes before the last of them succumbed.

  When the others slumped lifeless at their posts, the last man was to be burned. A citizen came forward with a brand to light the pyre. He had been promised indulgences for this holy deed. He looked fearful; the brand quivered in his hand.

  Ferron, coldly excited, murmured to Grace, ‘Look at the faces of the crowd. Look at their pious horror! It all creates an atmosphere. You know, the whole court buzzes with talk of the Anti-Christ, who will be born in Seville.’

  Grace said, ‘All Europe talks of it. I told you, Christendom resounds to news of the victories in Spain. Perhaps, they say, the King is the Hidden One, he who will defeat the Anti-Christ, and smash Islam, and win Jerusalem.’

  ‘Yes. And perhaps Isabel is the Apocalyptic Woman. Perhaps Isabel and Fernando have been sent to cleanse the world in preparation for the Day of Judgement ... Such things are murmured by the court prelates in the ears of the monarchs. And yet, at moments like these, how plausible they seem.’

  James was appalled by such near-blasphemous flattery. But he dared say nothing.

  Now the flames were licking around the feet of the one surviving penitent. He bore it as long as he could without flinching, but at last the screams were forced out of him, and the mob roared in response.

  VIII

  AD 1484

  The great port of Malaga was the Moors’ second city. The city, founded on a huge double fortress that spanned two hills, was built for warfare. And yet ships of many nations clustered in the harbour, including traders from the Christian kingdoms of Spain.

  From the deck of his own vessel Harry’s pulse quickened as he watched the ships scud to and fro, their sails billowing. This was a place bursting with deals to be done. Perhaps he would be
able at least to turn a profit on the trip, once he was done with the murky business that had drawn him here.

  It was already three years since Geoffrey Cotesford had reunited him with his sister Agnes, three years spent mainly on patient research by Geoffrey into Harry’s family’s complicated background - and their scraps of prophecy, principally the Testament of Eadgyth. Harry had been able to get on with his own life, tucking the strange affair away in a corner of his mind. But now that had changed. Geoffrey had unearthed a family of cousins in al-Andalus itself, which was the very eye of the storm the Dove was prophesied to unleash - or so Geoffrey argued from his interpretation of the Testament. Harry had reluctantly agreed to put his own affairs on hold and to come here to resolve this odd business one way or another.

  Malaga’s harbour was wide but not enclosed, and unprotected from the sea and wind; though the Mediterranean was tideless the landing was choppy. But Harry was a hardened sailor by now, and the turbulent sea did not trouble him.

  Once he had disembarked, Harry hired a muleteer and set off for Granada itself.

  The country through which he was led was quite unlike any part of England he had seen. Lumpy volcanic hills rippled down to the coast, and black-winged gulls swooped over broken sheets of dark rock that angled out of the ground. It seemed a place of huge rocky violence to Harry. He made notes of his impressions to pass on to Geoffrey Cotesford.

  The journey was not long, requiring one overnight stop. Harry found a tavern whose keepers accepted his English coins. The muleteer, a small, swarthy Moor, slept with his animals on a blanket under the stars.

  The next day they had to cross the mountain range the Christians called the Sierra Nevada. The muleteer led him through an easy pass without much climbing, and they moved in silence broken only by the complaining snorts of the mules and the soft clank of their bells. Harry looked down over green valleys where farms nestled, replete with figs, oranges and apples, and on the ridges fortresses and watchtowers bristled like the nests of huge birds. On the peaks, even on this bright spring morning, ice gleamed brilliant white. Every element of this landscape reminded Harry he was very far from home. He glimpsed eagles soaring silently.

  By evening they were approaching Granada itself. The city’s cupolas, towers, gilded domes and tiled roofs rose up out of a sea of green fields that seemed to wash right up to the city walls. The Moors, he was told, took pride in the intensive farming of their land - it was a deliberate contrast to the sheep-strewn wasteland that was all the Christians could make of the country they had conquered. In the city itself he made out the dome of the great mosque, and saw how the suqs clustered around it. And at the very heart of the city was the al-qala’at al-hamra, the ‘red palace’, the complex the Christians called the Alhambra. Long and narrow, sprawling over a hill that dominated the city beneath, it was almost like a great stone ship, Harry thought, its walls a sandstone hull, sailing endlessly through the city it dominated and protected.

  Harry had a letter of passage written out in Arabic and Latin. He was here to find his remote cousin, Abdul Ibn Ibrahim, who was on the staff of a vizier, an adviser to the emir. So he was allowed by surly guards to pass through an elaborately arched gateway and into the Alhambra itself, where a slim, young, nervous-looking official in a turban escorted him. He used broken Latin.

  The people wore loose robes of white or pale colours, and elaborate turbans glistening with jewellery. The children had quick feet and flashing eyes. He saw groups of men engaged in negotiations in the shade of orange trees, or walking briskly from one building to another. There was a certain urgency here, he thought. The Christians were on the march; war was not far away.

  And he passed a gaggle of young men who walked with a swagger, giggling. Their faces were painted brightly, and their hair was dyed. Harry had heard Christian rumours of the decadence of the court at Granada. A bachelor himself, he made no judgements on what he saw.

  This was more than a palace, Harry quickly realised. It was a city within a city, surrounded by an oval of walls perhaps eight hundred paces long by two hundred wide. At its western extremity was the oldest part of the complex, a massive and brooding fortress cut from pale red sandstone - a fort without a moat, for to the Moors water was too precious to waste on mere defence. On the Alhambra’s northern wall was a beautiful, oddly delicate palace complex. And to the east was a miniature township, the administrative heart of what was left of al-Andalus, a working community with dwellings, offices, stables, mosques and schools. The gardens were spectacular, lined with the intense green of cypress trees, brilliant with the crimson blossoms of pomegranates, and crowded with roses. Small birds sang everywhere; this island of greenery was a haven for them in a land that was more fit for the buzzards. The air, though, was hot, dense and arid, and Harry found he had to breathe through his nose, or his mouth dried quickly.

  Led by his escort, brandishing his safe-conduct from Abdul, he was taken into the palace buildings. He was hurried past rooms full of light and colour, with arabesque mouldings and gold ornamentation, and moulded spires like stalactites suspended from the ceilings. One quite remarkable courtyard had as its centrepiece an alabaster fountain guarded by stone lions; it was surrounded by slim white pillars that supported arcades of open filigree. The architecture here lacked the brutal ordered simplicity of a Norman castle, say. This was a fluid place, airy, light-filled, so delicate Harry could almost imagine its rooms and arches and patios could be picked up by the wind like thistledown.

  He was brought to a blocky tower that loomed over the palace complex. And, looking up at the tower’s sheer face, he saw what looked like a fishing rod protruding from one window, with a line dangling from it, high in the air.

  He found a broad staircase, and climbed up to an open landing. A man was sitting on a ledge, one leg dangling out over infinity. He was indeed holding a fishing rod. At first he didn’t notice Harry.

  Harry walked to the ledge. He was on the north side of the Alhambra, and below the wall the land fell away. To the north a glen opened up to reveal a river threading through a quilt of terraces, orchards and gardens. The city itself was laid out before him. The sun was setting now, and its light, low and turned red by the dusty air, painted the domes and towers pink. Looking beyond the city to the south he made out the angular peaks of the Sierra Nevada. In the shadows below the icecaps he saw the sparks of fires; he would learn that these were the fires of ice collectors, who travelled up into the mountains with their mules every afternoon, and clambered back down in the night. Thus the ice of the mountains cooled the palace of the emir all summer. A subtle mist rose from that river to the north, and the sounds seemed enhanced, so that Harry could make out a child’s laughter, the chime of bells, a guitar’s gentle music, and, from the heart of the city, the first wail of a muezzin.

  As he stared, wide-eyed as a child, the man on the ledge smiled at him. He was perhaps fifty, with a broad weather-beaten face.

  Harry, a little embarrassed, approached him. ‘You’re fishing,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed I am, with a hook baited with flies. I am angling for swallows. Fishing in the sky,’ said Abdul Ibn Ibrahim, and his grin widened.

  IX

  Abdul’s office was a pretty room with a fine view, cluttered with scrolls and books and charts and heaps of scribbled-on parchment.

  Here Harry and Abdul talked briefly of their lives.

  They had little in common, Harry thought. Nearly twice Harry’s age, Abdul lived alone. For most of his life he had made a living at sea, a career recorded in his leathery face. But he was a navigator, perhaps strictly an astronomer, not a sailor or a trader. He showed Harry a trophy of those days. It was an astrolabe, a kind of map of the sky compressed down onto a sheet of brass, exquisitely made. It was descended from gadgets devised to show the faithful the correct direction for prayer.

  Harry was intrigued to hear that in his youth, some decades ago, Abdul had served on the mysterious Chinese treasure ships that had once plied th
e Indian Ocean and beyond; Moorish and Arab navigators had always been prized by the Chinese.

  Abdul had done well, and by the age of forty-five had been able to retire, ‘to tend my garden’, he said. But when open hostilities had broken out between the emir and the Christian monarchs he had come to the palace to work for the viziers. ‘For this is a struggle for survival,’ he told Harry.