Court of Lions

by Jane Johnson

  There were Swedes and French, Germans, Japanese and Danes in tonight; she heard Leena greet the latter group with a cheery “Hej hej.” No English, which was something of a relief. Kate felt herself tense whenever she heard an English accent, no matter how unfamiliar it might be. It was absurd, she knew, but she couldn’t help it.

  Taking a short break at half past eleven, she stepped out into the street to get a better phone signal and called her sister’s landline. There was a long pause before the dial tone kicked in, and then the ringing went on and on and on. For so long, in fact, that she thought she must have keyed in the wrong number. She kept no stored information on the phone—it was a cheap one loaded with a local SIM card that she topped up with cash—and she was tired, so a wrong number was quite possible. Concentrating, she punched the number in again, but still there was no response, not even from the answering machine. Kate’s skin prickled. Probably Jess was out for the evening and had forgotten to set it. But wouldn’t the babysitter have answered in that case? She tried Jess’s mobile; it went to voice mail. Jess must have had an early night, Kate told herself firmly. She would try phoning again in the morning; nothing to worry about.

  Even so, she felt a tug of anxiety for the rest of her shift, despite playing her part with professional smiles and small talk.

  By the time the party of Danes had finished their drinks and finally departed with a promise to return before the end of the week, it was long past one and Kate was suppressing yawns that felt as if she might dislocate her jaw. The youngsters didn’t seem to care at all that it was so late: they just slept in the next day. But Kate had a routine and breaking it made her uncomfortable. She thought: If I hurry, I can get six hours’ sleep. So when Juan approached with a pair of beer bottles swinging between the fingers of one hand, she shook her head. “Actually, I changed my mind, Juan. Not tonight—I’m too tired.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe tomorrow, huh?”

  “Good night, Anna!” Leena kissed her on the cheek. “See you Sunday.” Lucky Leena: two whole days off.

  Kate said her farewells and slipped into the night. She’d arrived in Granada the previous summer, during a particularly sweltering July, but she still couldn’t seem to catch the relaxed local vibe. Her heels rang on the uneven stones of the narrow road down to the Plaza Nueva, the sound echoing off the metal-shuttered shopfronts. As she crossed into the Arab quarter, known as the Albayzín, something shot out of the shadows and scurried through a patch of moonlight and into the obscurity of the undergrowth at the foot of the Sabika Hill. She jumped, startled, and then chided herself—a cat, she thought. Or maybe a fox. Silly to feel so shaken up because of some small creature that was no doubt a lot more scared of her than she should be of it.

  She followed the course of the River Darro along the main road for a while, then turned left up the Calle Zafra and climbed the narrow street steadily, the pebble mosaics underfoot made slippery by centuries of walkers, lethal when it rained. Approaching the Calle Guinea at last, she dug out her key, clutched it in her palm, letting the tang protrude between her fingers as she’d been taught in self-defence classes. It really wasn’t that sort of place, the Albayzín, though it had an edge to it sometimes, but she was always careful. At that moment she saw the bit of paper she’d taken out of the wall that afternoon fluttering to the ground. She’d forgotten to show it around at work to see if anyone recognized the markings on it. Never mind. There was always tomorrow.

  Crouching, she retrieved it and was about to stand again, when someone said her name. Not a shout but a quiet statement.

  “Kate.”

  Here, no one called her Kate. No one. Here, she was Anna. Anna Maria, to be precise. Her surname Moreno. It was a common name, meaning dark haired. A small private joke. Even a clue…

  She sprang upright, heart beating wildly, the key in her hand ready to jab. She thought the voice had come from behind her. Her pulse raced. She interrogated her surroundings at speed. But nothing moved in the darkness.

  Stop it, Kate.

  Forcing herself to ignore her terror, she ran down the alley to her door.

  As she reached for the lock, moonlight picked out the web of tiny, pale scars on her forearm.

  2

  He was nearly on her. She could feel his hot breath on her naked back. Her legs felt like lead as she forced them to run, but he caught her and—

  The bleep of the phone on the bedside table woke Kate just as the hand closed on her shoulder. She lay there, heart thudding, and tried to push through the membrane of the dream, tried to puzzle out why she had been running naked down an alley. The return to reality came slowly, as if the dream were in league with her pursuer. She realized it was still fully dark, not even a hint of light flickering around the edges of her closed curtains. Nervously, she picked up the phone and stared at the text message. From Jess, of course; the only person who had this number:

  At Sarah’s. Just walked up the cliff for signal—none in the house. Will email tomorrow a.m. Love you. Jx

  It was 3:28 a.m. and Jess’s friend Sarah lived in a remote cottage in North Cornwall. What on earth had driven her sister to be walking up a Cornish cliff in the middle of the night to send her a text? She rang back at once, but there was no reply. Beset by anxieties, Kate swung her legs out of the narrow bunk and walked barefoot over the cool tiles to the window. She pushed back the drapes and gazed out across the Darro gorge to where the moon limned the roofs and walls of the ancient fortress. What was she doing here, a thousand miles away from her real life? She leaned her forehead against the window, watched her breath bloom and evaporate upon the cold glass. Breathe in and out, keep breathing. Sometimes it was all she could do.

  Eventually, she got back into bed and lay there, trying to summon sleep, reciting the common names of wildflowers she and Jess used to find in the hedgerows on their walk to school instead of counting sheep:

  Yellow archangel

  Alexanders

  Queen Anne’s lace

  Charlock

  Bird’s-eye speedwell

  Kenilworth ivy

  When this proved ineffective, she started on their botanical names:

  Lamium galeobdolon

  Smyrnium olusatrum

  Anthriscus sylvestris

  Sinapis arvensis

  Veronica chamaedrys

  Cymbalaria muralis

  Her love of plants should have carried her into a career as a botanist. Instead she’d ended up as a data analyst. She used to think that by applying logic she had some control over her choices, but life seemed determined to prove her wrong. For where was she now? No longer a well-respected analyst on a good salary but a waitress living in a foreign country under an assumed name, having lost everything she cared most about in the world.

  Kate woke again to the sound of a phone ringing, but when she grabbed her mobile to answer it, the wretched thing died, its battery flat. She’d forgotten to plug it in overnight, something she did religiously, part of her pre-bed routine. She had been spooked last night.

  She paced the apartment while she waited for the phone to charge, made some coffee, took a cup of it out and sat to drink it in a pool of sunlight on the edge of the terrace wall. She loved this view looking over the undulating terracotta rooftops that had sheltered the houses beneath for hundreds of years in some cases, to the presiding grandeur of the Alhambra on its great platform of rock across the gorge, with its massive tawny walls, its turrets and towers. How extraordinary it must have been to live in such magnificent surroundings. She wondered if anyone raised in a palace could ever be a normal person, could even begin to function as an understandable human being. In her small experience of the world, luxuries spoiled people; made them increasingly less human, less accommodating to others; made them think too highly of themselves. Made them cruel.

  She shuddered, and turned that thought aside.

  The phone had some charge now. She rang Jess’s number, but it went to voice mail and all she could do was to say
she had called, that she hoped Jess and Luke were okay, and that she would call back. She plugged the phone back into its charger. Made another cup of coffee. Drank it. Shook the phone, stared at the message again. Left another voice mail:

  Call me, Jess—I’m really worried now!

  Then she wished she hadn’t. Another ten minutes passed with no response from her sister. This was ridiculous. She couldn’t spend all day waiting for the phone to charge and Jess to call; she had a life to live, even if that did mean such mundanities as dealing with laundry and grocery shopping.

  It was approaching eleven by the time she’d walked up to the Calle Charca to drop her laundry off with Rosita, a cheerful, tubby Spanish woman whose husband made the deliveries to the bodega and who washed three times a week for those with no machines, like Kate. Picking up fresh laundry a day later was one of Kate’s pleasures. Nothing smelled as nice as sheets that had been dried in the Albayzín sun: it seemed to imbue them with a whiff of the incense of ages past, with bitter oranges and spiced brandy. Then it was on to the little supermarket on the Calle Panaderos and the market in the square for beautifully organic fruit and veg. And still Jess hadn’t rung!

  As Kate was making her way back home with her groceries, she thought she heard the muezzin at the mosque, the Mezquita Mayor, just a few streets away, starting to call the Muslim faithful to prayer. She strained her ears toward the fragile sound, but a truck came rattling along the narrow street, making her flatten herself against the rough wall, and by the time its roar had passed, the muezzin had fallen silent. The mosque had been constructed less than twenty years ago, the city finally bowing to the pressure to provide its significant North African population with somewhere to worship other than out of sight in garages and private houses. Catholic Spain might have expelled its Moors at the end of the fifteenth century, but it seemed they had been allowed to return more than half a millennium later, and be woven back into the rich warp and weft of the country they had done so much to civilize. Even if they hadn’t been permitted to give the muezzin a loudspeaker.

  She dropped into the Internet café to send Jess an email. Hicham, not Saïd, was on duty, and he did not meet her eyes when she greeted him, or hold his hand out for the money, but instead waited for her to put the coins down on the counter, as if her touch might contaminate him. The place was usually stuffed with young men, but when Saïd was here, she never felt uncomfortable coming in on her own. The way Hicham treated her, though, made her clumsy. Trying to fiddle her change back into her bag, she dislodged a slip of paper, which spun across the melamine countertop toward him. Hicham stopped its progress with a stab of his finger.

  “Sorry,” she said automatically. Then added, “Perdón.” She reached out to take it back, but he put his hand flat over it. His black eyes challenged her.

  “Why you have this?”

  “What?”

  He repeated the question. Flummoxed, she shrugged. “Sorry, it’s just a bit of rubbish. I should have put it in a bin. But there’s never one around when you need one, is there?” She laughed awkwardly. Had she unleashed some sort of obscure insult: dropping a bit of waste paper in front of a Muslim man? She had no idea.

  “If it just rubbish, why you want it back?”

  There was no answer to this. She watched Hicham pick up the paper to scrutinize it. Then she realized what it was. The scrap of paper that she’d winkled out of the wall in the palace gardens yesterday. “Oh. Please, I do want that back.”

  Hicham’s lip curled. “I don’t think so. It not yours.”

  For a brief, embarrassing moment Kate thought she might burst into tears. What on earth was the matter with her? When had she become so pathetic? He was only a local café worker playing a game with her. A rather nasty, dour little game, exercising a bit of power over a woman: she should recognize that sort of thing by now. And really, did it matter so much? All this fuss over a scrap of rubbish. She rallied herself. “Keep it, then.”

  For a moment he looked confused. Then he shoved the paper back across the counter at her. “You don’t trick me like that.” He turned and made for the back room, his mobile phone already to his ear.

  She slid the scrap back into her bag. Hicham had truly rattled her; how dare he be so rude? Saïd was always so nice, so easy to talk to, even a bit flirty. He had a Spanish girlfriend, though, a handsome woman called Pilar, who worked at a museum. At least, she thought Pilar was his girlfriend. Did men from his culture even have girlfriends, or were they expected to marry to have a relationship? Really, what she knew about Muslim men—indeed, any sort of men—she could fit on the back of that sweet wrapper, or whatever it was.

  She found an unoccupied monitor along the back wall between a group of giggling teenagers and a quiet young man who swiftly angled his body to shield the screen of his monitor from her. As if she cared that he was looking at pornography at midday on a Friday. Except…it seemed she did care. Unwelcome images swam up from the depths of her memory, cutting through dark waters with sharp fins.

  No. She would not think about any of that. She would not. She must find out why Jess had left her a message in the middle of the night, see if the promised email had arrived yet.

  She logged into her anonymous email account, but there was nothing from Jess. A couple of bits of spam from addresses she didn’t recognize. Not opening those. Sighing, she clicked out of her emails and onto a news site, her mind whirling. A terrorist bombing in North Africa. The breaking of a ceasefire in the Middle East. Drone strikes, drowned migrants, a volcano erupting in South America. Death and disaster all around.

  Why hadn’t Jess returned her call? Perhaps it was the signal at Sarah’s. The area was pretty remote: on the north coast of Cornwall, at the tail end of a narrow valley leading down to the sea. Amid the ramsons and nettles on the overgrown path were standing stones of mossy granite covered with ancient carved spirals. Kate and Jess had helped Sarah to move in. Getting the fridge down that track had been a nightmare. In fact, the whole experience had rather freaked her out. She found the place eerie, the only consolation for that being that she had spotted the glowing lights of fireflies darting between the trees on that first night, and on the heathland at the top of the cliff she had climbed, desperate for some sunlight, had come across a Dactylorhiza maculata, a heath spotted orchid, its whorls of lilac and white as intricate as a printed paisley pattern.

  But something was definitely up with Jess. What had made her sister drive all that way without warning? Kate thought of Luke bundled in a blanket in the passenger seat of the ailing Fiat as Jess drove fiercely through the night, all the way to Cornwall, which was pretty much the end of the world.

  Kate felt her stomach clench with anxiety.

  She went back to her emails, checked her phone again. Still nothing. She was about to click out of her session, when she realized one of the spam emails might not be what she’d thought.

  remaker@google.co.uk

  Suddenly she remembered that was the name Sarah used for her refurbishing business. She clicked on the email. It took an age to load, and when it did, the message was in code.

  Kate felt a frisson of terror tinged with excitement. Terror, that Jess had felt the need to obscure her message. Excitement, that there was a puzzle to be solved.

  She burrowed in her bag for a pen and something to write on. There was only the scrap of paper that had come out of the wall. She couldn’t write on that. The symbols taunted her: the inverted triangles and dotted circles, the stick figures and sideways E’s. One symbol looked like a trestle table, another like a wide-armed Y. It was clearly as much of a language as the code she and Jess had devised. And it might be old, and important. No, she couldn’t use the scrap of paper for her workings. Yesterday’s newspaper lay on the floor. She picked it up. On the sports pages was a huge photo of Cristiano Ronaldo. The wide, blank planes of his face offered plenty of room for the code working. After all, the message was not, she was disappointed to see, a long one.

  G3.
E2D4.D5A3B4…

  Kate couldn’t help but smile. It was an easy code—with a twist. She didn’t even have to draw the grid: she could picture it quite easily.

  HE FO—

  By the time Kate had reached the fifth letter her heart was thudding. No. It couldn’t be. He couldn’t— She felt coffee begin to come back up her throat, had to swallow it with a choking gulp that caught even the attention of the teenagers, who turned dark-eyed stares upon her. For a moment she felt light-headed. She gritted her teeth, fought for control.

  When she opened her eyes, she found one of the boys peering at her. Had she chanted aloud? He would think she was a madwoman. Or a penitent, praying. Or a witch, making an incantation. He said something and they all turned to look at her, leering. Then suddenly they were off out the door, shouting and laughing.

  Kate was shaking. She took a deep breath to steady herself and went back to the coded message, praying she had made a mistake.

  She had not.

  HE FOUND US, KATE.

  3

  Blessings

  GRANADA

  1476, OR IN THE HEGIRA SHA’BAN 891

  He stroked the tiled skin of the palace wall, and I wished suddenly, fervently, it were my skin he touched with such tenderness.

  “Look, Blessings,” he said again. “Really look. What do you see?”

  I was bored now. “Patterns,” I said, deliberately obtuse. “Just patterns.”

  Prince Abu Abdullah Mohammed, heir to the throne of Granada, known to me as Momo, sighed. Sometimes he was so patient it made me want to break things. “Spiderwebs—can’t you see them? Hundreds of spiderwebs, thousands of them.”

  They didn’t look much like spiderwebs to me, who had seen real ones stretched between cactuses in the desert, their fragile filaments barely catching the light. These webs were green, and gold, and red, and white. I supposed the craftsmen had used their imagination and jewelled them up. Sultans didn’t want their palaces adorned with real webs: they employed a battalion of slaves to get rid of all such traces of reality.