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by Baxter, Stephen

  ‘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 military 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—’

  ‘Le
t 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.

  And in this chamber, deep underground, machines brooded, dimly glimpsed. There was a great tube mounted on a carriage. An upright wheel turned, a treadmill, with a man inside it to work it. What looked like the skeletal form of a great bird’s wing gleamed and creaked. Scholars and artisans moved among these creations, murmuring quietly.

  Ibrahim felt deeply uneasy, as if he had descended into a sorcerer’s pit.

  Peter led him briskly forward. ‘This was some kind of water tank,’ he said in a murmur to match the subdued voices around them. ‘Always built big, those Romans, even when it came to their plumbing!’

  ‘I never knew this place was here.’

  ‘Not many do. It’s on no plans; I dare say your emirate doesn’t know it exists. When we needed a place to work in secret your mother, ever resourceful, started asking around among the criminal element.’

  ‘Criminal?’

  ‘Smugglers. Hoarders. Even bandits. They knew of this hole in the ground. It wasn’t hard to take it over, clean it up, extend it a little...’

  ‘Ah, the vizier’s advisor. How good of you to make time in your busy schedule to visit your mother.’

  Ibrahim had not seen his mother for four years. Subh wore a robe, white and pristine despite the dirt, and her hair was piled elaborately on her head, jet black. Unlike Peter she showed not a trace of the passage of time; she was as upright, powerful and magnificent as ever. Peter seemed to cower before her; he was as much in her thrall as ever.

  Ibrahim bent forward to embrace his Mother.

  But she subtly moved back and offered her hand, cold, the palm oily. ‘Let’s keep things formal,’ she said. She showed not a trace of emotion.

  ‘Mother, you haven’t changed.’

  ‘And what of you?’ she asked. ‘You’re clean enough. A smart costume. And well fed, it seems to me.’

  ‘I take only my ration,’ he said stiffly, and it was true, though there were many in the palace who did not.

  She prodded his belly. ‘In that case you’re not getting enough exercise.’

  ‘What are you doing here, Mother?’

  ‘You know very well. Building the war engines that might save Seville. Walk with me. See what we have made...’

  She showed him her marvels. Here was a metal tube that used compressed steam to spit iron balls. Peter called it the ‘thunder-mouth’, for the great roar it would make when it was fired. Around the perimeter of the treadmill he had noticed was a series of crossbows. An archer sat at the axle, and as the wheel turned one bow after another was brought before him.

  ‘The archer only has to aim and fire,’ Peter explained. ‘See, the ingenuity is that the mechanisms of the wheel-engine load each bow for him as it turns. So this enables a much faster rate of fire than a conventional bow, without a loss of accuracy.’

  There were many such gadgets, most only half-finished, betraying ingenuity but fragility.

  Ibrahim refused to be impressed. ‘This is all you’ve achieved, in five years?’

  Subh watched him gravely. ‘Don’t you think anything of our efforts?’

  He walked around the workshop. ‘Your rapid-firing crossbow machine is vulnerable. A stick poked into the mechanism would jam it.’

  Peter said, ‘But a row of these machines, fixed to the city walls when the Christians come—’

  ‘They would still break down. Men would do better.’ He came to the thunder-mouth. ‘This is more promising. More compact than a catapult, perhaps. Faster to reload and reuse. But it does no more than a catapult would.’ He glanced around. ‘I see nothing here which would give one side an overwhelming advantage over the other.’

  Peter sighed. ‘Well, you’re right about that.’

  ‘What we need,’ Subh said, ‘is Incendium Dei.’

  ‘Your mysterious Fire of God.’

  ‘Precisely. The fire that would turn these delicate gadgets into thunderbolts.’

  ‘But you don’t have it,’ Ibrahim said.

  ‘Joan of the Outremer never replied to my letter. And I regret writing to her now, for I told her something of what we have, without learning anything of her. I fear she might become a rival, not an ally.’

  ‘Actually,’ Peter said, ‘it’s not just God’s Fire we need, Ibrahim. For these engines to be realised fully we need the original designs.’

  ‘Ah,’ Ibrahim said. ‘The Codex. The treasure said to be buried under the floor of the great mosque of Seville. Is that why you asked me here? To get me to dig up the mosque?’

  ‘No,’ Peter said. ‘I invited you here, frankly, because I thought you should be reconciled with your mother.’

  ‘But now that you are here,’ Subh said slyly, ‘why not? You have the ear of the vizier. If you dropped a word—’

  Ibrahim shook his head. ‘You have buried yourself in this hole in the ground for too long. Think what the mood is like outside! In this crowded city the faithful wash around the muezzin tower like a sea. If I were to order the mosque floor to be dug up, in the hope of finding plans for super-weapons, I would cause a riot. And besides the imams would never give permission.’

  ‘So you turn your back on us again,’ Subh said, her tone poisonous.

  ‘I regret what has happened,’ he said. ‘Nothing should come between mother and son.’

  Subh said, ‘But you still think I’m wasting my time down here, don’t you? You’re just as headstrong and unimaginative as you were as a boy.’

  ‘Yes. I still believe you’re wasting your time. And so, it seems, am I.’ He turned to leave.

  ‘If you won’t help us,’ his mother called after him, ‘at least don’t betray us. Don’t let the emir put a stop to our work. Trust me
that much.’

  He paused. Then, without looking back, he made for the tunnel that led to the air, and the light.

  XX

  Saladin found London overwhelming, after three years away. When he arrived with Thomas early one morning, the city was blanketed by fog, thick, dense, yellow, stinking. People went around with candles in their hands and bits of moistened cloth held to their faces. Even by the river it was no better, and the ships crept cautiously along, lamps strapped to their prows.

  Thomas Busshe led him to the abbey at Westminster, and they waited in a small room where a nervous young novice served them warmed wine. This was a room used by Roger Bacon, this brilliant monk of Thomas’s, and Saladin leafed idly through a heap of the scholar’s well-read books: a grammar by Donatus, the Consolation of Philosophy by somebody called Boethius, Aristotle’s logics and metaphysics, with commentaries by later authors - even by an Arab. So many books, Saladin thought. Did the world need them all?

  The novice returned and said they had to wait for Bacon.

  ‘For, I’m told,’ said Joan, sweeping into the room, ‘today’s the day for his annual bath, and he’s not about to miss that for a couple of ragged refugees from the Outremer.’ She was dressed smartly, in a long crimson robe and a white wimple.

  Saladin got to his feet and kissed his mother. ‘You don’t look ragged to me, Mother,’ he said.

  ‘Appearance is everything.’ She nodded stiffly. ‘I thank you for the stipend you send me. I spend it well, I hope.’

  ‘Spend it as you like.’

  Her movements as she chose a chair and took her wine were firm and decisive. Her face was still young, he thought, still beautiful; she was only thirty-five years old. She was flushed, though, but not with health. Flushed with an impatience that had been building all the long years of her exile in England, as she saw it. She eyed her son. ‘No wife yet? No grandchildren for me?’

  ‘Not since I last saw you at Christmas,’ he said drily. ‘And no husband for you, Mother?’

  ‘A husband would only get in the way.’

  ‘He might provide you with an income,’ Thomas pointed out.