Hart, Mallory Dorn

by Jasmine on the Wind

  "Agreed, but we must try, for we do not have the strength remaining to back up our threats at this time. That is why we have thrown into the pot the huge bribe of vassalage title to the Barony of Andarraxa with its revenues of four million maravedis." Ferdinand tossed the stone on the table with a clatter. "No matter what, we must keep him so occupied with us that he has no mind to consider overthrowing Boabdil, for should he and the other rebellious warriors come to power again in the capital city their united opposition to us would be violent. Weary years might be added to our crusade before victory came into our hands."

  Isabella leaned forward, contemplating Tendilla with her clear blue eyes, her embroidery frame abandoned on her lap. "Up to the present, via our own sources and yours, we were aware of every palace rumble or mumble or chicanery behind Boabdil's throne, besides knowing to a man the strength of his garrisons and the state of his supplies. And now your own well has dried up. That worries us. We seem to be in the position of a hunter who can neither hear nor see, my lord Count."

  "Not quite, Your Majesty. Only a very temporary condition, soon remedied. Perhaps by early spring. You have my assurances on this."

  Finally. The waiting was over.

  Ferdinand smiled, pushed his chair back, and propped his leg up on the table. "Ah, good. I knew Tendilla would not be found lacking a trick up his sleeve."

  Tendilla offered his dry smile back. His features showed little of the excitement that ran through him at the vindication of his farsighted, detailed, and patient planning. "No one enjoys deafness less than I, Sire. I have kept in reserve an excellent, absolutely trustworthy agent specially prepared for just such emergency and will immediately put him into operation. Of course, at this late hour, his becomes the most difficult of missions and the element of chance may hinder his success no matter how thoughtfully we have prepared. Whether he can insinuate himself into the Granadan court remains to be seen. We will need patience."

  "If you vouch for him, Don Iñigo, we are satisfied of his worth. Is it someone of whom we have knowledge?"

  "No, Sire, this man is new."

  Ferdinand nodded and pushed no further. Tendilla's sources were his own affair, and they had always proved worthwhile.

  "Our own informants have been decimated and scattered by the civil riots that keep convulsing Granada. We are now wholly reliant upon your good offices, Don Iñigo," Isabella said. "And we shall have to be patient in any case, for this brave camp has totally drained us."

  Ferdinand changed his position again, sitting up straighter, fatigue keeping him from comfort. "You remained fairly silent at the council meeting this morning, señor. What think you of Cadiz's plan to make use of this great army while we have it and help El Zagal to his decision by looming over him before he has time to think, or to realize how empty of real force might be our gesture?"

  "It is a good plan, Sire; I had little to add beside what Medina-Sidonia already noted, that in this season it will be a most difficult and dangerous march. We will pay for such defiance of winter."

  "We will pay, sir," Ferdinand agreed with a weary shrug, "but not Don Alvaro Suarez de Figueroa, whom we leave here to govern this city, nor you and your lieutenants. It is our decision, my lord Count, to give into your hands the command of the entire frontier about Granada. It will put you close to your informants, and your prior experience and vigilance in maintaining the dangerous outpost of Alcala recommends you to us."

  Mendoza bowed deeply. "Your Most Gracious Majesties, I am honored by your trust."

  "You have a free hand, my lord. Cidi Yahye and his delegation depart this day for Cadiz to present our terms to El Zagal in return for the surrender of all the cities and territories he holds. In a short while we will know our road." Ferdinand's shrewd expression softened, turned reflective. He smiled, hooded eyes crinkling again. "We have come a long, long way since Zahara, eh, Don Iñigo?"

  "A long way, my King. The eyes of all Christian Europe are upon us. With astonishment."

  "And those of Moslem Egypt and the Caliphates of Barbary with ire." Ferdinand chuckled. "Ah well, we shall have to spread some honey upon their unleavened bread this winter. But keep our gains in Granada safe from encroachment, my lord, and God will guide our hand in the rest."

  Tendilla nodded. "My pledge on it, Sire."

  Chapter 13

  Abu Abdullah, the Grand Sultan Boabdil, sat with glazed eyes, staring through his arched window at the majestic reach of the purple, snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains in the distance. He thought of nothing. He willed his mind to be empty, empty and clear, aware only of the plaintive, unusually loud music performed by two turbaned musicians squatting in a corner across the rug-scattered mosaic floor, one fingering a haunting pipe, the other plucking at the horizontal strings of a twanging instrument.

  The Sultan's body didn't appreciate the large, soft divan heaped with silk and velvet pillows upon which he was propped. His senses didn't rejoice in the perfect, perfumed day. His hand didn't notice the golden tassel it unraveled. He was using the music to shut out most of the sounds from the first plaza below, where seven of his courtiers were being executed.

  The Sultan withdrew like this often. When the thousand cares and fears hidden in the crevices of his brain threatened invasion of his consciousness all at once, he just withdrew his attention and outwitted them. He would not think. It was a trick carried over from his persecuted childhood, taught to him by a slave, a strange holy man from Asia. It was only a temporary respite for he was not too good at it, but when finally he refocused his eyes he sometimes felt strong enough to cope with the problem threatening him. Such as now.

  His Grand Vizier, Comixa, had argued him into ordering the death of seven aristocrats whose support of El Zagal had only been suspected and whom he would rather have spared and won to him with generous gifts. But: "O Sultan, do you sit upon the throne to rule or coddle? You must show your people you are strong, that they may be loyal to you above all others. Reward the treachery of these traitors with little measures and you reward yourself with little power!"

  And already the tip of the executioner's huge blade had rung thrice upon the courtyard's flags. Boabdil refused to hear it. If think he must, he would think about the glorious past of his people, as he often did, and keep his ears stoppered to the present.

  The Sultan dreamed with his eyes open, dreamed of warriors that had swarmed seven centuries earlier across the narrow strait from Africa to Iberia, a ferocious host of Eastern Arabs, North African Berbers, and Christian Copts from the desert, led by Tarik, a forceful general, whose name was given to the great mountain of rock standing between the two continents, Jebal Tarik. It took but seven short years for the clamoring warriors of the Prophet to overpower the native Visigoths and swallow up the whole of the peninsula, except for a stubborn knot of the followers of Christ who hid themselves in the grim northern mountains of Asturias.

  But the conquered land became the conqueror, and Iberia absorbed the Arabs, as she had the Celt, the Semite, the Greek, the Latin. Those who came fiercely thirsting for water, for dark soil, for the luxuriant verdure of Andalusia, soon gentled under the spell of the land. The harsh, unbending spirit of the Arab, born of the hot desert, crumbled away in the fragrant gardens of southern Spain. The Moslems of Iberia became a different people from those of Baghdad and Damascus and Egypt. The stern rigor of their Faith relaxed, and Islam, whose name was war, desired peace.

  As the centuries passed Moslem, Christian, and Jew mingled as one people in pleasant Andalusia. A golden civilization bloomed, far outstripping the rest of Europe in culture, in sophistication, in science. From all over the world travelers and seekers came to Andalusia, a mecca of knowledge and learning, wealth and refinement, and, especially, tolerance.

  But to the bitter northern Christians backed into their tiny mountain kingdom of Asturias there remained only the desire for vengeance, which they sullenly nurtured and strengthened over the centuries. At last, having gathered strength, four centuries
after they had lost their land, they came swooping down from their rugged and barren mountain strongholds and fell with astonishing success upon the gentled Moslems. Relentlessly, taking the role of barbarian attacker, century by century, the Cross pushed back and conquered the Crescent, retaking Burgos, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Toledo, Valencia; inching farther and farther south to at last strike at Andalusia itself, reconquering Seville and the glittering Caliphate and university city of Cordoba as well.

  By the early fifteenth century, as reckoned by the Christian calendar, there remained to the Moors only the lush southern toehold of Granada, a kingdom over two hundred leagues long and sixty deep, with its decadent cities governed by unruly princes who often refused the orders of the Grand Sultan in Granada, the capital city. At this point in their history, however, the Christian Kings of Castile and of Aragon were embroiled in shoring up their own territories and required of the remaining Arabs on their peninsula only oaths of fealty and money tributes as the price for peace. The Arab princes, resentful, but caring only to enjoy their existence in this last bit of Allah's garden, complied.

  There was peace in the years before Boabdil's birth, and for many years subjects of the various Iberian kingdoms came and went with impunity over each other's borders, students, merchants, farmers, artists, pilgrims, cavaliers, and aristocrats of both faiths. Even though the Granadan chieftains continued to harass each other, for most Moslems and Christians it was a glorious time of shared tranquility.

  Boabdil's face darkened as the familiar scroll which he could cause to unroll behind his eyes came to the marriage of the Princess Isabella of Castile to Ferdinand of Aragon, the event which finally united most of Spain and brought political ease to the Christians. The covetous eyes of ambitious Spaniards had the freedom now to turn southward again, toward the tempting, green, and fertile vale still in the hands of the Prophet.

  The Sultan stirred uneasily. To this point his thoughts had rolled over the familiar history smooth as water in a marble course, but now, as he came to his father, there was the usual emotional jar; he hated his father's very memory, for the man was instigator of all the woes that now beset the son.

  The Sultan Muley Abul Hassan had ascended the throne of Granada in the year of the Hegira 869, or 1465 reckoned by Christ, coming to power in an era which had enjoyed a long peace at home and with the Christians. But Allah had imbued Abul Hassan with the ancient belligerence, and after several years of ruling he suddenly refused to pay the degrading tributes which had been exacted for a century by the Christian kings.

  Abul Hassan had two wives whom he had raised to the rank of Sultana. The eldest, Ayaxa, held undisputed sway for many years. She produced two sons for her husband, the elder being Abu Abdullah, or Boabdil, but at the birth of this heir the astrologers, despairing over their charts, lamented, "Allah akbar! This child will one day oversee the downfall of our kingdom. It is in the hands of God."

  From that day forward the Sultan regarded his eldest child with great aversion, and the boy grew up safely only because of the strong protection of his stubborn and determined mother.

  When Ayaxa's youth and beauty faded the Sultan found another exquisite charmer in his harem. She had been born Isabella de Solis, the daughter of a Spanish noble, but she had been captured in childhood, raised and educated in the Moorish faith, and given the name Zoraya, Morning Star. The Sultana Zoraya also bore two sons, and these the aging Abul Hassan favored above all other of his children. There was, most naturally, a terrible rivalry between the two Sultanas and a mighty vying of ambitions for their offspring.

  The nobility of the Court, siding with one Queen or the other, widened the rift with their jealous intrigues and dissensions. The Sultan himself, and his brother, the warlike prince called El Zagal, favored the beauteous Zoraya. The great, noble families of the Abencerrages and the Zegris, although feuding between themselves, distrusted Zoraya's Christian lineage enough to set them firmly in Ayaxa's camp. There was betrayal and plotting and cold-blooded murder, and the populace, nervous before these shudderings in high places, threatened riot.

  Raging, feeling impotent to avert the disaster which these female feuds threatened to bring on his head, Abul Hassan looked for an outlet for his ire and decided on the fateful, terrible step of swinging his scimitar at the Christian city and fortress of Zahara, only feebly garrisoned because of the prevailing peace. Leading his troops at night in a sneak attack he exacted a terrible, unnecessary toll of lives, mercilessly slaughtering women and children in their beds and allowing his army to reduce the helpless city to charred rubble.

  But when the triumphant Sultan returned to Granada, driving before him like animals pitiful lines of haggard humanity, his own people shook their fists with outrage and with the fear of what was to come. The terrible voice of an ancient, holy dervish, whose age had withered his body but not quenched the fire in his eye, daily harangued the people: "Woe, woe! Woe to Granada. Its hour of desolation approaches. The ruins of Zahara will fall upon our heads. The peace is broken and the sword shall inherit us!"

  A rash of conspiracies broke out among the nobles to place a more reasonable man on the throne. In response, the Sultan clapped Ayaxa and her son Boabdil in a tower and ordered the executions of a number of their Abencerrages cavaliers. But nevertheless the royal refuges were freed in a daring rescue and carried away to a hiding place in the Alpuxarras mountains.

  Desperately stoppering up his ears with the music to drown the clang of the giant scimitar on the flagstones below, Boabdil willed his scroll to move faster before his eyes, for he did not care to dwell on the homeless and often frightening years of his youth. The attack on Zahara was avenged by a Christian attack on the city of Alhama, where the Spanish repaid the Moorish atrocities by atrocities of their own, ravaging and plundering and enslaving any inhabitants whom they had not murdered. The two catastrophes of Zahara and Alhama were all the spark Their Catholic Majesties needed to ignite their crusade to free Spain of these ancient interlopers, Ferdinand craftily sub- merging his crass territorial ambitions beneath the loftier religious zeal of Isabella.

  The horrors at Alhama so incensed the Moors that Allah removed his hand from their hearts; the old ferocity reclaimed them, and they sprang to arms with all the fervor of their ancestors. And so commenced, in 1478, the long and bloody wars for the last Moslem territory in Europe, the Kingdom of Granada—slow moving at first but gaining in momentum and captured territories for the Spaniards with each summer's campaign.

  Sultan Abul Hassan held the west of the Kingdom of Granada, and his brother, El Zagal, held the east, including the rich cities of Gaudix and Almeria. Both of these headstrong men were feared by disgruntled nobility, who favored the more manageable son of the Sultana Ayaxa, the prince whom the people called Boabdil the Unlucky.

  Boabdil, pushed by his mother and the vengeful Abencerrages, finally rode at the head of a great, flashing army to join forces with the veteran marauder Prince Ali Atar of Loxa and then led the whole Moorish host in an attack on Lucena. He had no love for war or talent for strategy, but Boabdil knew no one could fault his personal courage once engaged, and his pride stirred to remember how he had led his men to such feats of bravery that Lucena was almost won—when down from the hills surged a relief of Christian forces including the infamous Donzeles, Ferdinand's elite corps of seasoned and fiery caballeros.

  Boabdil the Unlucky was captured and for months languished in captivity, albeit a luxurious captivity, for the Catholic monarchs were chivalrous. Abul Hassan made overtures to ransom his oldest son, but Isabella was neither stupid nor heartless enough to give over her royal captive to a sure execution. Besides, as Boabdil realized later, the Spanish rulers had political reasons for wanting him alive, for he formed a center of contention which could pull Granada apart from the inside while the Christians gnawed at the outside.

  Finally ransomed by Ayaxa, but forced to swear fealty and payment of annual tribute to Spain, and to offer his small son as hostage, Boabdil wa
s released.

  He was despised for the pledge he had made to the Christians. But when Abul Hassan died, some said from being poisoned, the young heir was helped by Ferdinand to soundly defeat his rival, the vicious El Zagal, in a bloody battle, and the populace of Granada welcomed him. Long live the Sultan Boabdil!

  Boabdil shook his head to remember how his inconsistent people had cheered him, having forgotten for that moment his ordinarily passive nature and the oath of vassalage to Spain which he had taken and which he had hoped to observe. El Zagal retreated to Gaudix to lick his wounds, taking many discomforted nobles with him, but leaving enough at court to continue the plots and schemes against his nephew.

  As Sultan, Boabdil had neither sent help to the besieged and prostrate city of Malaga several years before, nor now to Cidi Yahye suffering a siege at Baza, for he was terrified to reduce his forces and be attacked from Gaudix by his Uncle El Zagal. He hated the Christians; the unwelcome friendliness of Ferdinand and Isabella had become an albatross around his neck, for it offended his people. But, and with greater passion, he loathed and feared his uncle.

  Boabdil brought his eyes and his attention back into the room. With a sharp gesture he silenced the musicians, tilting his head to listen. From below came only the sound of marching feet and the barked commands of the officer in charge of disposing of the bodies. But—rising from the city proper in the valley below the Alhambra palace came other sounds, the distant voices of the gathered populace, crying out and cheering. The words were not distinguishable but the excitement was wafted to him, high up on the hill. The Sultan cocked his head, listening to the noise of acclaim borne on the breeze, and it was gratifying music to his ears.

  A bitter smile flitted across his face. He knew why he was a hero today. His Grand Vizier Yusef Comixa, an aging relic from his father's reign but a shrewd administrator whom he trusted with power second only to his, had probably ordered the bloody heads of the unproven traitors to be mounted on spears over the city gates, and for this sign of severity the citizens of Granada now applauded their Sultan. They still distrusted him as conciliatory. Even so small a showing as this seven-headed defiance of El Zagal made them happy, believing that Boabdil the Unlucky had become Boabdil the Lion. Ah well. The Grand Vizier had been right, as usual. Not merciful, but at least right.