'Go on.'
'First I was called into the vizier's presence. He had Muzna at his side. She was crying. She stood with him.'
Robert saw it. 'She was his daughter – the vizier's.'
'Yes. He had manipulated her; he had had her seduce me; he used his own daughter to unlock my weakness. I protested that love between a Christian and a Muslim was not unknown. Indeed there was some such love in Muzna's mother's ancestry. But times are changing. As the Christian armies roll down the peninsula like a great smothering carpet, in some taifas the seduction of a Muslim woman by a Christian can be punishable by death – an execution by stoning.' He shuddered. 'And besides, as the vizier pointed out, I am a priest. He could ruin my ecclesiastical career with a word. I could even be excommunicated.'
'But this was all kept just between the three of you,' Orm said.
'Yes. For, of course, the vizier's purpose was not to destroy me but to own me. That was why he used his own daughter. And it worked.
'After that he insisted I showed him all my work. He even asked for a tithe, a share of the income I made from my Arabic Bibles!' He grinned. 'I survived. It just made it harder to conceal my other projects from him. But of course I was never allowed to be alone with Muzna again. Our love had served its purpose, for him.'
'So,' Orm said, 'the first of your three calamities was to learn that Muzna was the vizier's daughter. And the second?'
'To learn she was pregnant.'
It was an accident. The Moorish doctors were as expert in contraception as in so many other fields of medicine, but no method was foolproof.
Sihtric's eyes were bright now. 'Of course she could have got rid of it. Her father's doctors could have helped her with that too. But she wouldn't allow it. She hid away, until the baby was born.'
Robert said, 'Why would she do that?'
'I can only guess. We were never allowed to talk. I believe she wanted the baby as something of her own. She was a good woman, and intelligent. She was sickened at being used by her father. It wasn't much of a plan, but at the very least the baby would make her less useful as a pawn in a marital alliance of lineages – or, worse, a whore.'
Robert said, 'She may have loved you. She may have wanted to keep the baby because it was yours.'
Sihtric bowed his head. 'I can never allow myself to believe that.'
Orm said grimly, 'And your third calamity?'
'She died in childbirth. The baby survived. Not my Muzna.' He said bitterly, 'Again we were let down by the glories of Moorish medicine. The doctors can save a fool of a boy who throws himself at a waterwheel, but not my Muzna!'
Robert said, 'And the child?'
'Was Moraima. My daughter. And the granddaughter of the vizier.'
Robert sat back, shocked.
'So that's why the vizier cares so much about her,' said Orm. 'And why he reacted so strongly when a young Christian buck like Robert came sniffing around.'
Sihtric said, 'And I, I who had found love and comfort, had it snatched away from me. Oh, God is cruel if He is defied!'
Robert, on impulse, touched his shoulder. 'To despair of God is a sin.'
Sihtric looked up, his face full of anguish. 'Yes. But the trouble is, I think He has despaired of me. Well. Now you know it all.'
'Not quite all.' The vizier walked into the room, making the guard step aside.
Robert saw that Moraima waited outside, a flower in the sunlight. Her face was blotchy, as if she had been crying. But she saw him, and smiled weakly.
The vizier walked steadily, apparently sober, but he was pale, drained. 'You haven't told the whole truth, Sihtric,' he said in Latin. 'I know enough English by now to understand that. Isn't a lie by omission still a lie?'
Orm said, 'What whole truth?'
The vizier faced Sihtric. 'The truth of how he took his revenge.'
XVII
They were brought out of their battered cell, and returned to an audience room with the vizier. Ibn Tufayl sat on a couch, and sipped a steaming potion. Orm and his party were offered no refreshment.
Moraima stood beside her father, her slim beauty somehow highlighted by the cool abstraction of the patterns on the tiled wall behind her. Robert couldn't take his eyes off her.
'So,' Orm said. 'Let us speak of revenge.'
The vizier glanced around the room, at attendants and soldiers, a doctor who fussed at his elbow. He dismissed them all with a gesture. The soldiers left reluctantly, and Robert saw they took station just outside the room. Ibn Tufayl said, 'Tell them, Sihtric. It's the story of your cunning, after all. And it worked so well!'
So Sihtric, reluctantly, began. He said that after Muzna's death, the two men were locked together in grief and in blood, through Moraima, daughter of one, granddaughter of the other.
'He sent Moraima off to an aunt in Seville,' Sihtric said. 'He promised me he intended nothing but the best for her, but that wasn't good enough for me. I wanted Moraima in my life – she was my daughter, a child for a man who had never expected such a blessing. She was all I had left of Muzna. And besides I didn't trust him. Moraima inherited her mother's beauty – you can testify to that, Robert! I didn't like the idea that in twelve or fifteen or twenty years Ibn Tufayl might use her as he once used her mother.'
The vizier said languidly, 'Don't pretend it was for Moraima or Muzna. It was all for you. Is revenge-taking a sin in your church? It should be.'
'Tell us what you did,' said Orm.
With Muzna dead and Moraima gone, the two men continued to work on their shared project, Aethelmaer's designs.
'I used the opportunity of my time alone with the vizier,' Sihtric said. 'I interested him in the work. I tried to become his friend. And I began to bring him gifts.'
'What gifts?'
'Wine,' said the vizier bluntly.
Wine, forbidden under Muslim custom and law but manufactured in the Christian monasteries still permitted within al-Andalus, and smuggled into Madinat az-Zahra by Sihtric.
'I was a Muslim savouring communion wine – the blood of your Christ! Ironic, isn't it? But it was more than a taste that Sihtric cultivated in me. You are a good judge of men, priest. If I saw a weakness in you, you saw one in me, one I didn't know I possessed.'
'You became a drunk,' Orm said.
'The priest was the only route through which I could obtain the wine I needed. Thus I gave him power over me.'
'But,' Robert said, 'what did you want, Sihtric?'
'Moraima,' Sihtric said.
The two men struck a deal. Moraima would be brought back to Cordoba and raised as Sihtric's daughter. She would be a good Muslim, though: the vizier would not tolerate his granddaughter being raised a Christian.
'The girl would be known as my daughter,' Sihtric said. 'But her descent from the vizier was to be kept a secret. Ibn Tufayl let my reputation suffer rather than his. The Christian community was scandalised.'
'So,' Orm said. 'You, Sihtric, armed with your control of the vizier through his drunkenness. And the vizier knowing that you fathered a child by a Muslim girl. The two of you locked together in your weakness, mutually dependent, mutually loathing. I should have known I would find you in a situation like this, priest. It's just the sort of mess which always gathers around you.'
'It's almost a work of art, isn't it?' Sihtric said bitterly.
'I don't want to hear any more of this.' Moraima stepped forward, anger bringing colour to her cheeks. 'I don't want to be discussed as if I were just another barrel of wine, a business deal between two weak old men.'
The vizier said, 'Now, Moraima-'
'Oh, let her go,' Sihtric said. 'Why should she hear this painful old rubbish hashed over once again? Go, child; find yourself something more pleasant to do.'
'And me,' Robert said impulsively. 'Let me walk with her.'
Ibn Tufayl studied him. 'You must be even more stupid than you look.'
Robert blurted, thinking as he spoke, 'I can never have Moraima, and she can't have me. How we feel
doesn't matter. It's over – indeed, it never was. Just let us walk together for an hour. Let us say goodbye.'
Orm said, 'Vizier, I take it you've no plans to punish the boy over Ghalib.'
'For what? He behaved nobly enough.' Ibn Tufayl's raging temper had vanished with his intoxication. 'Besides, the fault is ours, mine and Sihtric's, for allowing such situations to develop. That is what we must discuss. For as Moraima grows older-'
'Yes,' Sihtric said. 'We need to work out a way to manage her heart.'
'But for now,' Orm said, 'let them go.'
Ibn Tufayl clapped his hands to summon in his guards. 'Very well. Go, you two. Be aware you will be watched, every step of the way.'
Robert, hugely relieved to be getting away from Sihtric and the vizier and all their murky compromises, followed Moraima to the door.
But as he passed his father, Orm whispered, 'Just be careful.'
XVIII
Outside the light of the low afternoon sun seemed dazzling bright. The guard stood just a pace away, his arms folded, glaring.
Robert faced the girl. 'Moraima, I-'
'Hush. Don't talk. Not here.'
They walked across the palace compound. They soon reached ruins, for only a fraction of Madinat az-Zahra had been restored to habitability by the vizier's workmen. But Moraima knew the way, and led Robert further. Following rubble-strewn paths they came to a complex of high walls and fallen roofs, where tiles and broken stucco littered a weed-cracked floor. 'Once a harem,' Moraima whispered. 'Complicated place. Easy to get lost. Come on.' She took his hand, and they ran, turning left then right and doubled back, hurrying between high walls and across empty, broken floors. Robert soon became lost himself, even though the afternoon sun hung as a constant beacon in the sky.
And before long the vizier's guard had been completely left behind.
She brought him to a ruined patio. Weeds clogged ponds long since stagnant, wiry little bushes pushed through cracks in the paving stones, and palms had outgrown the gardeners' neat configurations and gone wild. The walls of the rooms here were burned out and open to the sky. But some of the arches still stood, still serving as doorways to this secret garden.
For Robert, walking into this place with Moraima at his side was a fulfilment of the overheated, fragmentary fantasies he had had since he first arrived in Cordoba.
They found a stone bench and sat. A small bird fluttered away, disturbed. Somewhere a guitar played, and a thin voice sang a plaintive song.
'I like it here,' Moraima said. 'Even though nobody has touched it for fifty years. I like the idea that a place can be beautiful even when the people have vanished, that things will go on when all our fussing and fighting is over. If this is all we leave behind when we've gone, a pretty place where the birds can nest, perhaps that's enough.'
He took her hand. In fact it felt like a bird in his palm, the bones thin, fragile, the flesh warm. 'That's a melancholy thought.'
She smiled, enigmatic. 'But you've seen how I live. They say they love me, the two of them.'
'Sihtric and Ibn Tufayl.'
'Father and grandfather. I sometimes think that all they do is use me to hurt each other. And sometimes, it's awful, sometimes I think they don't love me at all. That they blame me for killing my mother, who they both loved more than they love me.'
He wanted to comfort her, to reassure her that couldn't be true. But the priest and the vizier were complicated, ugly creatures, locked together, feeding off each other's weakness and pain. How could he say if they loved her well or not? No wonder she dreamed of a world without humans.
'Moraima, I've heard what they want. But what do you want? What kind of life?'
'I don't know,' she said honestly. 'I can't imagine it. Things are too complicated. But…'
'Yes?'
'It doesn't feel complicated when I'm with you.'
His heart hammered. 'If it wasn't for the others – my father, yours, the vizier – if things were different-'
'If Jesus and Muhammad had never existed? What's the good of talking like that? Things are as they are; you can't change the past.'
But her father, he thought, seemed to believe that the past could be changed. 'But even so. If it was only a question of the two of us, could we make a life together?'
She said firmly, 'We can never know. Because it isn't going to happen, is it? All we have is this moment.' Her face was before his, softened by nearness, her eyes huge, the colours of the wild garden reflected in her smooth skin. 'That's all anybody has.'
'Then we should grasp it.'
Their lips closed together. Her breath was like the breeze off the desert. 'I don't even mind,' she whispered into his mouth, 'that you smell so bad.'
They kissed again, and he felt as if he was passing through another arched gateway into a still more wonderful place yet.
XIX
Orm and Sihtric sat on floor cushions inside the priest's study, as he called it, in a corner of the palace complex. It was a nest of shelves heaped with books and parchments, and there was a lingering smell of lamp oil and candle soot. The room was in poor condition, the ceiling blackened by some ancient fire, the wall hangings musty and frayed; this part of the ruined palace was only poorly restored. But the room was far from the bustle of the vizier's court, and Sihtric said he liked it this way.
'For I have secrets in this room,' said Sihtric. 'Secrets I've shared with no one – certainly not the vizier. You want to know why I stay here, why I live among Moors who speak of Allah, and Christians who speak no Latin? Why I have let myself become locked into a damaging relationship with a snake like the vizier…' He glanced upwards to the darkened ceiling, as if challenging God. 'You see, Orm, I've found a rent in the tapestry of time. Another one, a third or a fourth, to add to the ripping-open of the Menologium of Isolde, and the Codex, and your poor wife's Testament. And through that rent I have glimpsed horror. But from that horror I have conceived an ambition as big as the world, Orm. It is nothing less than the final defeat of Islam, and the preservation of Christendom into the far future. What higher goal can there be than that? Is a man justified in giving up his very soul to achieve such an aim?'
A month had passed since the incident of Ghalib and the waterwheel. A month in which Orm had continued to learn uncomfortable details of Sihtric's murky career in Cordoba. And now, he said, Sihtric was going to tell him the whole truth. Orm wasn't sure he wanted to hear it. He shivered, obscurely frightened. 'You always did talk in riddles, priest.'
'Well, the whole business is a riddle, isn't it? But then it always was.'
Sihtric got to his feet and crossed to the wall. He pulled away a crate stacked with books, then hauled aside a shabby hanging to expose tiles with geometric patterns, a kind of trefoil in black and white that, repeated, covered the wall area. Sihtric dug his fingers into the edge of a tile and with some effort picked it away from the wall. 'I have a habit of biting my nails,' he said. 'Makes this tricky.' A hatch, concealed by tiles, now hinged down to reveal an iron door. Sihtric extracted a key from his robe, unlocked the door, and it swung back to reveal a compartment inside the wall. Sihtric began to rummage in the dark space, which Orm saw was full of books, scrolls, heaps of parchment and vellum. There was a musty smell, of rot and age.
Sihtric drew a flat wooden box from the wall compartment. He placed this on a table, unpicked ties of copper wire, and opened up the box like the covers of a book. Leather hinges creaked slightly, and a smell like stale meat flooded the room.
Inside the box was a wooden frame over which was stretched a sheet of what looked like vellum. Orm peered closely. Words had been marked onto the vellum, pricked in some black ink. The small, closely spaced letters were lined up in neat rows, but had been distorted by the stretching of the vellum, and in places the skin was pocked and broken, crudely stitched. There was nothing else in the box.
With faint dread Orm reached out and touched the vellum. It was dry, rough. 'What is this, calfskin?'
Sih
tric would not say. 'When I found this object it was rolled up inside a wooden cylinder, for it had been preserved as a holy relic. It is old, three centuries or more.'
'So you stretched it on this frame.'
'With infinite care, yes. But I couldn't help a little distortion of the letters.'
Orm looked closely at the first few lines. 'Is this Latin? "My name is al-Hafredi, as the scribes tell it, and Alfred, as my family knew me. That liveth, was dead, evermore…" I don't understand. A riddle? The name, though. Al-Hafredi is a Moorish name. But Alfred-'
'English, of course. The name of our greatest king.'
'Here is a man who lived under the Moors, then,' Orm said. 'His name, Alfred, was rendered in a Moorish way. Just as our guide Ibn Hafsun's name was a corruption of the old family name of Alfonso.'
'You should have been a scholar.'
'Don't mock me,' Orm said mildly. 'However my scholarship doesn't extend to puzzling out the rest. "That liveth, was dead, evermore." It's not even a sentence. What does it mean?'
'There lies the cunning. The manuscript isn't in any kind of code. But it does contain fragments like this. They puzzled me too, until I saw that the intention of this man, a Christian living under the Moors, was to speak clearly to other Christians, in a way that his Moorish masters would not understand. So, pagan, what piece of literature do all Christians share?'
'The Bible.'
'Correct. And I realised that what we have in this line is a fragment of the Bible, a quotation, compressed and embedded.'
'What quotation?'
'From the Book of the Revelation of Saint John.' He closed his eyes. '"I am he that liveth, and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore." Liveth, dead, evermore. You see?'
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