Navigator tt-3

by Stephen Baxter

  'I sense he has a good heart.'

  'And a strong soul,' she said. 'He'll do what's right.' She glanced again at her letter from Cordoba. 'Although I pray we will all find the way to do that.'

  IX

  Heading south-west along the bank of the Guadalquivir, Subh's caravan slowly moved out of the hinterland of Cordoba, with its sprawling farms and market gardens and groves of orange trees. The country broadened to an immense plain, the horizon obscured by a ghostly heat shimmer. It was an arid, open, severe land, littered with ruined forts like the hulks of wrecked ships.

  Peter imagined it must be easy enough to get lost out here, on a land as vast and flat and featureless as an ocean. But not long after leaving the city they passed another mule train going the other way. The muleteers greeted each other noisily. In this sea of sand the muleteers were the navigators and the captains, stitching together the country with their endless journeying. And the muleteers sang, wailing muezzin-like melodies with earthy words in a rough Arabic. The songs were not so much long as open-ended, as one driver after another added a verse to an already complicated saga. So compelling were the choruses, so simple the melodies, that it was impossible not to join in, and the steady rhythm of the songs chimed with the pounding of the mules' hooves.

  Peter, fanciful, found himself admiring the stoical simplicity of such a life. He envied the muleteers their sinewy strength, their obvious comfort on the rolling backs of their mules. To be bound into such a monkish routine, to learn to be able to do at least one thing exceptionally well, would itself be a kind of devotion. But he knew he could not bear such an elemental existence, not when there were cities full of books waiting to be read, a universe of philosophies to be contemplated.

  And he was not so naive as to idealise the muleteers' life. They were all heavily armed, with knives, swords and cudgels, and none of the caravans was small enough to be vulnerable to attack by the pirates of this desert sea. The shifting frontier line between Christendom and Islam made this a dangerous country to travel, and it was well known that refugees from the lost Moorish cities, always streaming south, were easy targets for killers, rapists and thieves. Subh had taken care to plan against such a calamity for her party.

  On the second day Subh's son Ibrahim rode alongside Peter for a while. On his handsome charger he looked down on Peter, who thudded along on the back of his reluctant old mule. Ibrahim was provocative from the off. 'You are the only Christian in this caravan of Muslims. Even the muleteers are Muslim. Only you, out of place, and far from home. It is a certain kind of weakness, I believe, that drives a man to seek out the company of strangers. Why are you here, Christian Peter?'

  'For the scholarship.'

  Ibrahim hawked and spat. 'You could have enjoyed your scholarship without leaving London. Do you have a wife in London? A woman you love?'

  'No wife or lover.'

  'A boy-'

  'I have no interest in boys, Ibrahim.'

  'Then what are you fleeing from?'

  'I'm fleeing nothing. I'm travelling in hope. I am following a loose thread in a tapestry, letting it lead me where it may. Your mother understands, I think.' Peter grew impatient with his pressing. 'Why should Christian and Muslim not share the adventure of life together? In Toledo, Christian and Muslim scholars meet and work together every day.'

  'Under the banners of a Christian king.'

  'Perhaps. But in the days of the caliphate Christian scholars similarly flocked to Muslim Cordoba.'

  Ibrahim said, 'But there was no assimilation. Five centuries ago the Moorish armies marched north. The whole of Spain became a Muslim country, and Christians lived in a Moorish land. Now the Christians are scouring their way back down from the north, and Muslims will have to survive in a Christian country, as my family survived in Cordoba. No matter how long they cohabit, Muslim and Christian will not mix, any more than water and oil, whether there is more of the oil or more of the water.'

  Peter considered arguing against this. But the evidence for it stood all around him, the bristling relics of warfare sticking out of the ground like broken teeth. 'All right. But here we are, Ibrahim, riding side by side. We don't have to fight, do we?'

  Ibrahim eyed him, his eyes as bright as the sky. 'Perhaps not. But keep your gaze fixed to the backside of that mule in front of you, and off my mother's.' And he galloped away to rejoin his friends.

  X

  In the morning Thomas woke early, barely able to believe that he was really here. But even before he left his bed the wail of the muezzin calls told him that this holiest of cities was not Christian, not entirely.

  Saladin came to find him. 'We should take that walk while the day is young. I don't imagine you will enjoy the noon heat.'

  So Thomas ate his breakfast and hurried through his prayers, and followed Saladin out into the city.

  Jerusalem was extraordinary, overwhelming, baffling, a warren of streets, a stew of history. On the Temple Mount, the gold cap of the Dome of the Rock gleamed like the sun brought down to earth, and beside it the silvery al-Aqsa mosque was light, airy, a dream in stone. The Muslims called the Mount al-Haram ash-Sharif: the Noble Holy Place. The Muslims were relative newcomers to Jerusalem, compared to the Jews and the Christians, but even they had already been here centuries.

  The city was full of churches, of course. Some of them, built by the crusader kings of Jerusalem, were quite modern, with ribbed vaults and pointed arches, and would have graced any city of western Christendom. Others were older, more squat and monumental. These were Roman, many of them built during the long centuries after the legions had left Britain. Thomas poked around these buildings, fascinated.

  But as he talked and analysed and speculated, Saladin hardly spoke. To him, Thomas thought, history meant little. Jerusalem was nothing but an arena for the warfare he expected to dominate his life, as it had the lives of his ancestors since Robert, who had come here with the First Crusade that had swept through the Holy Land like a fiery wind.

  The Christian states the crusaders planted here had survived three generations, until fortune threw up a great Muslim commander: a former vizier from Egypt, al-Malik al-Nasir Salah ed-Din Yusuf, known to the Christians as Saladin, who marched on Jerusalem. Even Richard the Lionheart was not strong enough to take back the holy city. Today Jerusalem was ruled under an agreement negotiated by the German emperor Frederick II, the nominal king of Jerusalem. The city had been left unfortified, and Muslims were allowed to remain; it was a shabby deal. Still, some of the old Christian families, like Joan's, had crept back into the city which they had regarded as their home for generations.

  So much for warfare. But, Thomas asked himself, what kind of people were these folk of the Outremer?

  The boy Saladin was an ardent Christian, that was certain; here on the front line of Christendom you would expect a sharpening of the faith. But he looked more Saracen than English, with his flowing robes, his dark skin, and Thomas had heard him jabber Arabic phrases as easily as he spoke his stilted English. Thomas guessed that there had been a few infusions of Saracen blood into his line over the generations. Saladin's deepest ancestry was English, but transplanted to the soil of Palestine for generations his kind had become something different, neither English nor Palestinian, something new in the world since the time of Robert.

  And these new people of the Outremer were isolated, in a way that the Norman invaders of England, say, were not. King William's sons had taken English wives; after nearly two centuries their assimilation was complete. But Normans and English were both Christians. In the Outremer the remnants of the crusader kingdoms were islands of Christianity in a sea of Islam. This was Saladin's home, but his family would always be out of place here. And Thomas sensed that Saladin knew it in some deep part of his soul.

  The day grew warmer, and the old city became a stone bowl full of hot, dry air. Thomas was grateful when Saladin took pity on him and led him back to the relative shade of Joan's house.

  XI

 
As they rode steadily south-west and closed on Seville, the caravan entered Muslim lands.

  Before the city they came upon an extensive Moorish army camp. It was a town of tents, men, horses, mules and camels, planted near the river bank; flags bearing the crescent hung limply in the heavy air. Weapons were piled up in huge mounds, shields and crossbows and spears supplied by the factories of Seville. Peter could hear the pounding of war drums, not coordinated but still a chilling sound, like distant thunder.

  A party of troops rode out to meet the caravan, an officer and a small escort of hard-eyed desert horsemen. The officer wore a coat of quilted felt over mail armour, while the horsemen wore white robes and turbans; they carried spears and shields shaped like hearts. Subh had a letter, a conduct of safe-keeping from the emir in Seville. After an exchange of gifts – a bag of gold from Subh, some water carriers from the soldiers – the troops rode off back to their camp.

  The muleteers made a wide detour away from the river to avoid the soldiers, and Peter was relieved, for everybody knew that the best-controlled soldiers were always liable to a little plunder, robbery and rapine. But he studied the camp, fascinated at the sight of a genuine Moorish army. It was odd that there were no wheeled vehicles to be seen, but along with mules the horses were gathered in great herds – imported from the Balearic islands, said Ibrahim, only the best for the army. And out of the ranks of the horses and mules rose the necks of haughty camels, brought over from Africa.

  The core of the army was made up of levies raised on the provinces of al-Andalus, or what was left of it – cavalry from Granada, for instance. Ibrahim pointed to groups of soldiers with dark faces, 'the silent soldiers' he called them dismissively, many of them Berbers who spoke no Arabic. But the most ardent fighters of all, said Ibrahim, were the volunteers who came here from across the Islamic world to 'the land of the jihad', as many Muslims called Spain. It was just as the crusading armies were made up of volunteers from across Christendom. Peter was awed to imagine the energies of two continent-spanning civilisations focused here on this place, this point in space and time.

  The caravan was allowed to enter Seville without incident.

  The city was more of a sprawl than Cordoba, and had long eclipsed its illustrious rival, becoming the capital of the Almohad rulers of al-Andalus. And, though Cordoba had fallen, this remained a Muslim city, not a Christian one; the crescent flew high over the domes and minarets, not the cross, and there was nothing plaintive about the muezzins' calls to prayer.

  But there was evidence of the Christian Reconquest even here. Where Cordoba had seemed depopulated Seville struck Peter as very crowded. The towns and cities of the south had had to absorb the floods of refugees from the grinding advance of the Christian armies, and Subh said that she believed the population of the city might have doubled since the fall of Cordoba.

  And it was a city under threat. Seville had the natural advantage that the Guadalquivir was navigable from the sea as far as this point, but that brought a certain vulnerability. So, near the heart of the city, two squat towers faced each other across the river. A massive chain stretched between them, that could be winched up to span the river to block the passage of threatening ships. Peter was taken by the brutal simplicity of the device.

  As they threaded through the city Peter glimpsed the courtyard of the great mosque, crowded with fakirs and imams, and with the faithful who performed their ritual ablutions in the many fountains. It scarcely seemed conceivable that beneath the feet of those swarming faithful could be ancient plans for deadly weapons, plans lost and buried for more than a century, while this shining mosque had mushroomed over them.

  Despite the overcrowding Subh had been able to secure a house, smaller than the one she had had to abandon in Cordoba but with a decent patio and fair-sized rooms, and not far from the great mosque. Here, once she had paid off her muleteers, she lodged herself, with Ibrahim and a few of her many family members.

  And she gave a room to Peter. He peeled off his travel clothes with relief. He imagined he had sweated away half his body's weight into the fur of his wretched, patient mule. That night, in an airy room and on a soft pallet, out of the iron stink of the desert, he slept more deeply than he had since he was a child.

  XII

  Joan's smoky English hall was scarcely less tolerable in the evening's cool than in the heat of the day.

  And here Saladin was told the strange truth about his family.

  'It's a tangled story,' Thomas said, studying Saladin, trying to gauge what he understood. 'A story of prophecies – not one, but three of them, a whole sheaf.'

  Joan told Saladin, sketching in brisk, efficient strokes, the story of how over a hundred and fifty years ago Robert the Wolf had travelled to Moorish Spain with his father, Orm the Viking, in search of a rogue priest.

  Thomas said, 'Sihtric had come into the possession of plans for marvellous weapons. These plans were called the Codex of Aethelmaer, the weapons the Engines of God. But the Codex was compressed and enigmatic, and contained words nobody could read. So Sihtric went to Moorish Spain-'

  'What? Why?' Saladin sounded outraged. 'To hand these weapons over to the caliphs?'

  'The caliphs had gone by then,' Thomas said patiently. 'But, no, it was not Sihtric's intention to give his weapons to the Moors. He hoped to use the Moors' greater scholarship to help him understand the Codex and develop the weapons. And then, so his scheme seems to have gone, he would turn the weapons on his Moorish hosts.

  'While he worked on these plans, as he researched the past, he came upon the second of the three prophecies – a sort of sketch of the future left by a wizard called al-Hafredi. More of that later.

  'And then Robert and his father, Orm, turned up. Now Orm had a vision of his own – the third prophecy. He called it the Testament of Eadgyth.' And he repeated Eadgyth's legend of the Dove, who must be turned to the west.

  'Lots of prophecies, then,' Saladin said, confused.

  'Orm believed his Testament of Eadgyth warned against the use of the Engines of God. That is why, armed with the Testament, a troubled Orm travelled with his son to the distant land where Sihtric was developing his weapons.'

  'And in the middle of all this,' Joan said drily, 'our ancestor Robert found time to fall in love, and implant his seed in the loins of a Moorish girl, Moraima.'

  Saladin was intrigued despite himself. 'So what happened to them all?'

  'It all went predictably wrong,' Thomas said, and he sighed over the foolishness of the long dead. 'There was a fire. The result of some struggle, probably. Orm and Sihtric were both killed. The prophecies and plans were lost, or so it was believed…'

  Robert came home, seemingly full of disgust at what he had experienced of Moorish Spain. He became a warrior of God, eagerly taking the Cross when the Pope called the First Crusade.

  Thomas said, 'But he never forgot his strange experiences, the tale of the magical engines, his father's prophecy, the future visions of al-Hafredi. In the end, driven by some sense of guilt perhaps – he may have felt it a betrayal of his father to just abandon it all – he told his own eldest son the whole story. And that son, mercifully for history and your family's fortune, was more bookish than his father, and wrote it all down for us.

  'Now, by chance, not all of the Codex itself was lost. In the final struggle a scrap of it was torn away and ended up in Robert's possession. It bore strange words…' Thomas rummaged through scrolls on a low table before him for his copy of the fragment. 'Ah, here we are.' He ran his finger along a line of text. BMQVK XESEF EBZKM BMHSM BGNSD DYEED OSMEM HPTVZ HESZS ZHVH

  'There were letters nearby too, preserved on the fragment, but ripped through. AD, perhaps, a V and an M – nothing else could be made out.'

  Saladin read this over. 'It's in no language I ever saw.'

  'Reading isn't your strong suit anyhow, son,' Joan said, mocking him.

  'This is no known language,' Thomas confirmed. 'I believe this is a cipher – a code, perhaps of the type
Caesar once used. There may be some key, which is lost. At any rate it was preserved, thanks to the transcription of the bookish son.'

  'Now,' said Joan. 'Here's the most important thing for us, Saladin. Another of the three prophecies, the Testament of al-Hafredi, also fell by chance into Robert's hands.'

  'Written on a bit of human skin,' Thomas said with a certain morbid relish.

  'And this al-Hafredi has become our family's own oracle.'

  'An oracle?'

  'I mean that literally, Saladin. One of Robert's grandsons gave the material to Brother Thomas's house to study and interpret it for us, and so they have, in the centuries since.'

  Thomas said, 'Al-Hafredi told of events to come – very broad-brush, but reliable none the less. And in particular he spoke of the advance of the Mongols. This followed the Islamic conquest of Europe, and he described it step by step.'

  Saladin was trying to work this out, his face twisting. 'The Muslims have never conquered Europe.'

  'True, but we can believe that the Mongols' advance would have occurred as al-Hafredi described it, whether Islam conquered or not.'

  Now Saladin seemed utterly baffled. 'And Robert lived and died long before anybody had heard of the Mongols!'

  'He did indeed,' Joan said. 'It wouldn't be much of a prophecy if it was the other way around, would it?'

  'But how can this be? Who but God can know the future?'

  'Ah,' said Thomas. 'An interesting question.'

  'Which,' Joan said hastily, 'we can explore at our leisure another time. For now, Saladin, the important point is that this information has proved useful.'

  Saladin nodded. 'If you know the Mongols are coming you can arm against them.'

  'We tried that,' Joan said. 'But nobody wants to believe in the coming of the Mongols until they are on the doorstep.

  'What we could anticipate was the plight of the refugees – those poor folks driven ahead of the Mongols' advance, in Asia, Persia, Europe. So we set up caravan stops. We supplied food and water, blankets. We even hired Saracen doctors. And we bought up the land to which they had to flee.'