Song of the Eight Winds - An Epic Tale of Medieval Spain

by Peter Kerr

  Well, the king conceded with a shrug, his story of the little birds wasn’t one that any professor would consider educational, but it was true and meant a lot to him. That said, it might just suggest a trait of weakness in his character to some, so it was essential that Pedrito should keep it to himself himself – on pain of death.

  On that understanding, King Jaume proceeded to relate how, during a long siege of the castle of a renegade noble a few years earlier, it had become necessary to move his camp forward to a more advantageous position. However, in the preceeding days he had watched enthralled as a pair of swallows built their nest in the eaves of his tent. Their unwavering dedication to the task and the limitless energy they put into it had been an inspiration to the king. So, even in the face of well-founded urging from his military advisors, he forbade anyone to move a single guy from that tent until the parent swallows had completed their work, had raised their young and had led them safely to the freedom of the skies. And, as God Himself had witnessed this event, it came to pass that He blessed the king’s army with a successful sacking of the castle, and without any ultimate need for the tent to have been moved in any case.

  Until the king started this story, it had slipped Pedrito’s mind that he’d already heard it being told in the quayside taverns of Salou prior to the fleet’s departure for Mallorca. And, contrary to what the king clearly feared, even the most hardened seafarers and cynical mercenaries had been moved by his compassion and consideration for the welfare of these little creatures. Pedrito gave no hint of this to the king, however. It was better, he decided, to leave him lulled in the security of believing that he was seen by his followers as a monarch of iron will and uncompromising resolve.

  As, one by one, the lanterns of the great armada went out and the waters off Sa Palomera became shrouded in the blanket of night, King Jaume yawned, turned on his side and rested his head in the crook of his arm. Nedi, his dog, was already sound asleep at Pedrito’s feet, little clicking sounds coming from his tongue while he dreamed toothsome dreams of stale bread and pork gristle.

  Pedrito lifted the goatskin and gave it a shake. There was still some wine swilling about in there, but not a lot. The king had enjoyed a nightcap well and truly fit for someone of his regal standing.

  ‘You know, Little Pedro,’ he muttered sleepily, ‘as God has endowed me with the gift of honesty, I have to confess that, in fairness to my wife – and I tell you this in strictest confidence – I initiated proceedings earlier this year to have my marriage to her annulled.’

  Pedrito’s mouth fell open, but, fortunately for him perhaps, no words emerged.

  ‘I was fairly sure the Church would condone it on the grounds of consanguinity,’ said the king, then looked directly at Pedrito through drowsy eyes. ‘Consanguinity – do you know what that means, Little Pedro?’

  ‘In-breeding’ had been the term chosen by The Professor when telling Pedrito about the typical family trees of Christian royalty, but rather than risk the consequences of admitting that, he shook his head.

  ‘It means that the queen and I are actually close relations – and were, even before we married, I mean.’ The king released a pensive little grunt. ‘Sí, I was fairly sure the Church could be persuaded to consider the marriage invalid – particularly when we were both more or less forced into it.’

  This was fascinating stuff – so much so that Pedrito couldn’t contain his curiosity. ‘But wouldn’t such an annulment mean that your baby son will be declared a – a – well, with all due respect, a – ’

  ‘Bastard?’

  Pedrito nodded his head.

  The king shook his. ‘When everything I’ve done for Christendom is weighed at the end of this Reconquista, I’m sure the leaders of the Church will be in a sufficiently obliging frame of mind to allow the purity of my son’s origin to be preserved. As it has in the case of kings, Little Pedro, the Church has the power to make bastards or, in a manner of speaking, make them disappear.’

  Pedrito was learning something every time the king opened his mouth now, and intrigued as he was, he didn’t feel particularly comfortable about it. Why, he wondered, was he being made privy to such sensitive royal thoughts? He put that very question to the king.

  ‘I felt in need of telling someone,’ came the reply, ‘and who better to tell than you?’

  Pedrito felt flattered, but the feeling was to be extremely shortlived.

  ‘After all, even if you did betray my confidence, amic, who would believe such outrageous claims when coming from a humble sailor?’ His eyelids closing, King Jaume swallowed a yawn. ‘And anyway, apart from anything else, I could always have you beheaded for treason.’

  A chortle rumbled in the king’s chest after he’d said this, but Pedrito had no way of telling whether its message was intended to be benign or malignant. He plumped for the latter and gave the king his word that his lips would be tightly and permanently sealed.

  He might as well have saved his breath, however, for while he awaited the king’s response, the sound of snoring told him that his promise had fallen on deaf ears.

  7

  ‘A FORECAST OF THE WIND OF CHANGE’

  THE ISLET OF ES PANTALEU – SUNDAY 9th SEPTEMBER …

  Pedrito was summoned to Es Pantaleu again about noon the following day, but the king’s purpose this time was neither social nor theraputic. This was strictly business. When the skiff that had taken him the short distance from the royal galley rounded the side of the islet, Pedrito noticed a flurry of excitement on the little beach where he had spent the previous evening. The king was in the midst of a group of his men, all of them shouting words of encouragement to someone swimming over the bay towards them from the Mallorcan shore, on which a line of Moorish archers appeared to be doing their level best to discourage the swimmer – permanently. A hail of arrows was splashing down all around him, yet he somehow made it to Es Pantaleu, where he was helped ashore by the same pair of royal guards who had been moved to rush to the king’s aid when he was being ‘savaged’ by his frolicsome dog Nedi the night before.

  King Jaume saw Pedrito coming. ‘Quick, Master Blànes!’ he shouted. ‘We may have a Saracen deserter here, and I’ll need you to translate for me.’

  As Pedrito approached, he could see that the alleged deserter was a slightly-built, doe-eyed youth a few years younger than himself. He was wearing only a loincloth, so it could be presumed from the swarthy colour of his skin that he was indeed a Moor. There was also something vaguely familiar about him.

  ‘What’s your name and why have you come here?’ Pedrito asked him in Arabic.

  The lad told him his name was Ali and that he had been sent by his mother to deliver a message to ‘the great Sultan of the Christians’.

  Accordingly, Pedrito introduced him to King Jaume, whereupon Ali fell to his knees and kissed the monarch’s feet.

  ‘Take him to my tent and give him clothes,’ the king told one of his men. ‘Sí, and let him have a cup of water. No doubt he could do with one.’

  Pedrito relayed the king’s instructions to Ali, who immediately protested that his mission was too important to delay for even a single minute. On being told this, the king motioned Ali sit down on the rock on which he himself had sat the night before, then, with a sweep of his hand, indicated that he should proceed with what he had to say.

  In need of a rest as he may well have been, Ali made it clear that he was unworthy to sit in the presence of a king. Pointing towards the shore, he indicated where, on the brow of a hill behind the Moorish encampment, there was a fortified tower in which his mother lived. He said that, from its ramparts, she would survey the heavens and decipher the writings created by the movements of mysterious, distant stars. He told how her great knowledge of astrology had enabled her to prophesy that King Jaume was destined to rule Mallorca, and she had been so convinced of this that she had risked the life of her son by bidding him carry the message to His Majesty personally.

  ‘So you may be absolutely ce
rtain, Sire,’ he informed the king through Pedrito, ‘that this land will soon be yours to command.’

  As pleased as the king would normally have been to be given such an encouraging prediction, he was yet to be convinced that this young Saracen could be tusted. He was one of the enemy, after all, so his motives might well be subversive. The king said so, and his doubts were endorsed by the members of his train.

  He turned to Pedrito. ‘What say you, Master Blànes? You’re familiar with Moorish guile. Is this bedraggled jove a traitor to his own or a snake in the grass?’

  Pedrito had no hesitation in offering the opinion that, if this young fellow was a spy, he appeared to be a suicidal one. ‘From what I saw, those arrows were hitting the water a bit too close to suggest that the Moors were happy about him reaching here.’ To emphasise the point, he indicated a trickle of blood oozing from a graze on Ali’s shoulder. ‘A hand’s breadth to the left and that one would have been lodged in the middle of his back.’

  ‘A fair enough appraisal,’ the king conceded, ‘which suggests that he must therefore be a traitor to his own. So, Master Blànes, ask him what he is. Is he a defecting soldier? And if so, why?’

  Pedrito did as instructed, and when Ali replied that he was no soldier but the son of the major-domo in the palace of Abû Yahya Háquem, the Moorish King of Mallorca, it finally dawned on Pedrito why he had sensed something familiar about this lad. It all came back to him now: the exalted head steward of the royal household, robes flowing and with several porters in his wake, ambling imperiously along the palm-shaded quayside of the city, where Pedrito and his father would offer their freshly-caught fish for sale in competiton with so many others of equally humble ilk. The king’s major-domo would usually favour them with a more than generous purchase, not because their fish was necessarily better than anyone else’s, but rather because it had become a custom for Pedrito’s father to give the man’s young son, who often accompanied him on these excursions, a few boqueróns as a titbit. It was unusual for a child to like the acidity of the vinegar in which these little anchovies were pickled, but after an involuntary screwing up of his face, young Ali would grin ecstatically and gobble down as many as were offered. It was a gesture that the boy’s father, although a stern-looking and somewhat overbearing man, would acknowledge with an almost imperceptible nod before instructing one of his lackeys to pick up and pay for whatever specimens of the day’s catch had caught his eye.

  When Pedrito reminded Ali of this, the young Moor didn’t go quite so far as to kiss his feet, but his uninhibited show of delight at meeting up again in such unlikely and potentially hazardous circumstances caused Pedrito considerable embarrassment. He was well aware that the king and his attendants would have been more than a little perplexed at the sight of an ex-galley slave being treated like royalty – or almost so.

  How he’d grown, Ali told Pedrito as he felt his biceps and looked him up and down approvingly. He’d only been a skinny kid when they’d last met, but look at him now! Tall as a house and with the muscles of a bear-wrestler. And that thick, dark stubble on his face! No wonder he hadn’t recognised him at first. Allah be praised, Pedrito was a real man now!

  After Ali had finished hugging him again, Pedrito thought it sensible to advise the king and his company that, contrary to what they might have heard about the deviant habits of some Arab males, Ali’s display of affection was quite normal for a member of a race who harboured no inhibitions when showing emotion of any kind.

  That was all very well, the king said with evident impatience, but of no immediate consequence. What he wanted to know was why this young Saracen had decided to throw in his lot with the Christian invaders when he was the son of someone with a responsible and respected position in the Moorish king’s household. Wasn’t this change of allegiance an insult to his own father?

  Without the slightest compunction, Ali related how his mother had originally been his father’s favourite wife, but on being replaced by another had chosen to retire to the seclusion of the tower yonder, the occupancy of which King Abû Yahya, in his infinite bounteousness and as a token of his regard for Ali’s father, had assigned to her for the rest of her days. This arrangement made no difference to Ali’s relationship with either of his parents. It was the way of things in his society, and he remained equally close to both his mother and his father.

  Again, this was all very well, the king declared, but hadn’t it been foolhardy of Ali to court death by a hundred arrows for the sole purpose of relaying the omen of a hermit soothsayer to the enemy?

  Pedrito was careful not to use the potentially demeaning terms ‘omen’, ‘hermit’ and ‘soothsayer’ when translating the king’s question. Ali seemed sincere enough to him, so why risk insulting his mother? In any case, Ali’s reply was that he had total faith in the unfailing reliability of his mother’s reading of the stars, and swimming out to convey her word to the man who would be the future ruler of Mallorca was also intended as an act of homage on his own part. This done, Ali deduced, Allah in his mercy would surely make certain that he and his parents would be treated well by their new Christian overlord.

  On being told this, King Jaume smirked knowingly and muttered under his breath that this seemed very reminiscent of what his gambling father might have called betting your shirt on the favourite in a two-horse race. Then, adopting a more authoritarian manner, he said to Pedrito, ‘Tell him that nothing he’s said so far convinces me that he may not be an infiltrator. Ask him to give me one good reason why I shouldn’t have him put to the sword right now.’

  Ali responded to Pedrito’s translation with the a wry smile, saying that he believed the great Christian king was not just a compassionate man but a prudent one as well. For why would he have offered him clothes a few minutes ago, if his ultimate intention was to have them soiled by Moorish blood?

  Arching his brows in acknowledgement of this subtle piece of reasoning, the king nudged Pedrito and said out of the corner of his mouth, ‘So, Little Pedro, the sea has delivered me yet another unlikely philosopher, eh?’ He then raised his voice for all to hear. ‘But he still hasn’t told us what he is. Is he a soldier? Can he prove his newfound allegiance to me by supplying some inside information about the Saracen forces on Mallorca, for example – or, perchance, where their king is at present?’

  Ali was both keen and quick to oblige. He disclosed that he was no soldier, but a servant in the king’s palace, an assistant to his father, the major-domo. As such, he was in a position to catch wind of anything significant that was happening in the city, and even if elements of such news turned out to be based on rumour, there was usually a fair amount of truth involved as well. ‘As the great Christian king himself will know,’ he said as an aside to Pedrito, ‘the walls of royal palaces have a thousand ears, and all of them endowed with very sharp hearing.’

  Pedrito thought it wise to skip the translation of that unintentionally disconcerting observation.

  Ali duly continued with his revelations. King Abû Yahya, he divulged, was in the capital city of Medîna Mayûrqa with some forty-two thousand troops, five thousand of those mounted, and all of them well-armed and ready for battle. They were determined to relinquish not one single footprint of the island and would do everything they could to prevent a Christian landing – anywhere.

  Ali looked at the king and said, ‘I can tell you, Sire, that reinforcements have been summoned from Africa, and it is only because of an act of betrayal by one of the king’s own family that those forces are not already here. As you may have guessed, your invasion has been anticipated for some time, and the plan was to have your fleet intercepted by Morrocan ships long before you reached here.’ Ali shrugged his shoulders. ‘However, the treachery which has foiled King Abú may yet work in your favour – but only if you act quickly and attack the city before support arrives from Africa.’

  The king had now been joined by the principal general of his forces, his cousin En Nunyo Sans. He put Ali’s suggestion to him, where
upon En Nunyo reminded the king that, during the previous day’s tactical discussions with the two Muntcadas and the other senior barons, it had been agreed unanimously that a landing would be attempted at the earliest opportunity following the present day of rest. Now, in the light of this latest information, if indeed it was true, it would be En Nunyo’s recommendation that all commanding nobles and ship masters be instructed to make ready to depart for Santa Ponça at dawn the very next day.

  ‘And where would the element of surprise be in that?’ the king casually enquired.

  En Nunyo was visibly taken aback. ‘Surprise?’ He gestured towards the Moorish camp. ‘Surprise? Surely there can be no element of surprise with all those eyes watching our every move, so I’m at a loss as to you what you mean.’

  ‘What I mean is that to wait until dawn before making our move would be to play into the enemy’s hands.’

  En Nunyo’s face was a picture of disbelief. He drew the king aside and said in a hoarse whisper, ‘You can’t be suggesting that we go into battle today, on the sabbath?’

  ‘You know very well that I’ve more respect for our Lord’s day than to do that.’

  En Nunyo shook his head in exasperation. ‘In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve always been straight with me, so why are you being so difficult now?’

  The king canted his head to one side. ‘Difficult?’

  ‘Yes! You question my decision to undertake a landing tomorrow, yet you admit it would be wrong to launch one today. If that isn’t being difficult, I don’t know what is!’

  King Jaume gave a mischievous little laugh. ‘When I appointed you senior commander of my forces, I expected you to at least be able to work out what lies between one day and the next.’

  Nunyo Sans looked at him in total disbelief. ‘Don’t tell me you want to attempt a seaborne assault on the island at night!’