by Jane Johnson
Then, one day, the Moor came to find me. His robe was spotted and stained and his hands were black to the wrists, his nails as filthy as my own. I had never before seen him dirty. Even on the muddiest of our travels he had always somehow contrived to remain fastidiously clean, making soaps from riverbank plants, using sand or grit to wash with where there was no water. He smelled sharply of citrus, with a bitter, salty tinge. I wrinkled my nose.
He grinned. “We’ve had to use a cartload of lemons and another of alum, but I think we’ve done it. Come and see.”
The tent was dark after the bright light outside. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the light, but when they did …
“That’s incredible.”
The goldsmith’s boy was beating out a thin sheet of the metal. It gleamed like buttercups. Like liquid sunshine. Like gold …
“It’ll tarnish and blacken as time goes on, so I’ve sent word to the sultan. The Christian envoys will be here in two days.”
“Two days!”
“Sayedi Soufiane here says that will be time enough to do the work, and that we can keep the oxidation at bay long enough for the metal to retain its colour.” He said something rapidly to the goldsmith in their guttural language; the old man nodded vigorously and raised his hands, as if seeking God’s aid.
And I had thought our venture at Glastonbury a chancy business …
“May I?” I gestured towards the artifact.
The goldsmith was reluctant to let me near his work of art, and I couldn’t honestly blame him, but at last he stepped aside. He had been sitting, surrounded by candles at night and with the flaps of the tent up by day, hammering and etching for days with his tiny gold-working tools. What he had achieved in that time was well-nigh miraculous: the back as well as the front of the replica cross was adorned with “jewels”—finely chiselled coloured glass and some real pearls purloined from who knew where—and busy with whorls and bosses and tiny portraits of Christian saints. Some of the latter I’d drawn from scratch: the others I’d recalled from the Lady Chapel. There had been a lot of metal to embellish: we’d had to extemporize. But who, I thought, gazing at this wondrous object, would ever suspect it had been forged by infidels? It was covered with Christian iconography devised by a wild heathen who’d lived as a beast on the moors, and replicated by a man whose religion allowed for no such representations of its sacred imagery.
I picked it up gingerly, expecting it to weigh as heavy as iron. It came away lighter than I’d expected and I almost let it slip. The goldsmith wrestled it away from me and set it back on the table. The look he gave me was not friendly.
“We had to use more wood and less metal in the end,” the Moor said, stepping out of the shadows. “Drawing the golden hue out of the copper proved to be … challenging. We were not left with enough to make all parts solid, like the original. And maybe the wood of the relic became denser with age as it dried and contracted over the centuries. But,” he bent and swept his fingertips lightly over the intricate, glowing surface, “it looks impressive to me … pagan that I am.” He turned and grinned at me, and the gold reflected in the half-moons of his eyes.
For a moment my knees went weak. “You have worked magic,” I told him.
“Jamil.”
Malek turned with a start to find Rosamund behind him. Asfar whickered, annoyed that Malek’s careful grooming had suddenly stopped. “Jamilla,” he corrected. “The feminine form takes an ‘a.’ And yes, she is beautiful my horse, my Asfar.”
“Jamil,” repeated Rosamond cheerfully. She touched Malek on the chest. “You. You look so … grand.” Not knowing the Arabic for this, she puffed her chest out and strutted until he laughed.
He took his helmet off and held it out to her. “See, it is only me, Malek, under all this,” he said in Arabic, and then, “Only a man,” he continued in English, and she almost fell down in shock.
“What? How?”
“Your friend the Moor. He teaches me your language.”
Rosamund’s grin went from ear to ear. “He is matchmaking!” She chuckled, and refused to explain the word to him. Instead, she ran her hand through the chestnut mare’s glossy mane and exclaimed when her fingers came away gleaming with fragrant oil. “She smells better than me!”
“The sultan has asked us not to shame him,” Malek tried to explain. He mimed polishing his helmet, the harness, his boots, while Rosamund made appreciative noises.
“Very handsome,” she said. “Jamil!” and this time he did not correct her. A faint blush coloured his cheeks.
“He cannot be seen to be lacking funds,” he went on quickly in Arabic to cover his embarrassment, “when the envoys come.” This was what Ibrahim had so perceptively remarked first thing that morning: “He will need to buy more time and to instill confidence in them. It is a dangerous and narrow path between two chasms that he has to walk.”
Malek had nodded grimly, thinking of his father and brother, his Uncle Omar and his aunts. He had felt sick then, but now, looking at Rosamund, his heart lifted. Whenever he saw her smile his heart leapt up, and whenever she was with him she smiled. The two things seemed indivisible: a marvellous, miraculous conjunction of events. There was something thrilling about this connection between them. He did not know what it was or what it meant. He did not know where it might lead or how he might be changed by it, but whenever that smile—sometimes shy, sometimes teasing—lit her face, he felt that anything in the world was possible.
I will speak to my father as soon as he is released, he thought. While he is still happy to be alive. It would not be an easy conversation. A foreign woman raised by their enemies, speaking only a little Arabic, with no bridal goods and no one to speak for her and, worst of all, an infidel. For a moment his heart seized at the prospect. But the best things in life never come easy—wasn’t Baltasar himself fond of saying that?
Malek took up his position with the rest of the burning coals on either side of the meeting place. All the best carpets had been gathered from the princes of the camp and laid out over the parched soil—a gorgeous tapestry of crimson and peach and ochre and rose and blue—leading to the canopy. Beneath it the sultan sat in his plain dark-green robe and his plain white turban, under which Malek knew he wore the steel cap he had always worn since the hashshashin had made their last attempt on his life. The scene made a handsome sight. Jamil, he thought, and smiled to himself.
The envoys came riding up the Hill of Carobs with their banners flying. Malek recognized among them the blue silk of the French king and the red-and-gold of the English king, and behind them the great gold crosses on white silk of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Had the great kings themselves come? He craned his neck, intrigued. No, the man whose squire flew the English banner was not al-Inkitar, and the Frenchman also did not look like a king. The third envoy, though, he recognized, barely. Guy de Lusignan: the snake who had started this siege, the man Salah ad-Din had spared after the Battle of Hattin. The intervening four years had not been kind to him. Lank brown hair threaded with grey was bound back from his forehead by a thin golden circlet; deep-set eyes gazed hauntingly from beneath a shelf of bone. They had heard he’d lost his daughters to the plague, and his queen, too; he looked himself like a man on the brink of death.
The envoys dismounted and the sultan rose to welcome them. Refreshments were brought, greetings exchanged. Niceties over, the English envoy waved his men forward. They were burly fellows, chosen for their ability to carry heavy chests. Salah ad-Din waved the men away, as if it was rude to bring business to a head quite so soon in their meeting. Voices were raised, but not enough for Malek to hear exactly what was said. His guts clenched: it was clear that the envoys were unhappy, that their instructions had been to fetch the ransom monies and to return with them without delay. More talking, quieter now. Some prisoners were herded forward and given over to the envoys, followed by four small chests: a down payment on the full ransom.
Even this was not enough to calm tempers. The English en
voy shouted again; the Frenchman joined him. Hands went to sword hilts on either side.
The sultan stood and said something to a man behind him. He gestured for the envoys to take another glass of wine. Then, at a signal, the honour guard parted to allow the passage of a tall man in a white robe. It was the Moor, and he carried before him the relic that had been captured at Hattin, the object the Franj called the True Cross.
Sunlight played over rich gold, sparked a fire in the jewels, caressed the pearls. The Moor’s sleeves fell back to show arm muscles corded with the effort of bearing the heavy cross aloft. A heady scent of roses engulfed the onlookers.
The envoys stared at the relic, Guy de Lusignan through narrowed eyes, the other two with expressions of awe bordering on terror.
Then, one by one, they fell to their knees before it and began to pray.
34
“Hold still, John. You’re as twitchy as a mule plagued by horseflies.”
I tried to still myself beneath his hands and allow myself to luxuriate in the sensation.
“Shaggy as a pony,” he said fondly. Clippings of my black hair floated to the ground, as coarse and curly as a dog’s.
I closed my eyes and tilted my face up to the sun till the insides of my eyelids shone as red as a naranja. “Tell me, were you ever in Lisbon?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
The hands stopped for a moment, then resumed their gentle plucking and measuring and cutting. “Once,” he said softly. There was a smile in his voice.
“I … I thought I saw you there.”
“I was on the road the best part of two years,” he said evasively.
“Where did you go after you left us in Rye?”
“From Paris to Cluny Abbey. I followed the pilgrim route to Compostela. After that …”—snip, snip—“a little while in Cordoba. Do you know there are eight hundred and fifty-six columns in the Great Mosque? It is a building shaped by light,” he said dreamily. “Then I travelled on in search of a special form of arch that will enable us to build our cathedral high, make it light and airy—”
“I have seen these arches!” I could not help but shout it out. People stared, then laughed, thinking the Moor had nicked an ear. I lowered my voice. “In Acre, in the mosque. There were things there I have dreamed of all my life—towering pillars and sharp arches, and a roof all of gold—”
He stopped cutting. “You went into the Friday Mosque?”
I nodded. “While Quicksilver and I were escaping. It was … like a vision.”
The Moor clucked his tongue. “A pair of infidels in a mosque.” He started his snipping again. “I took ship from Lisbon to Amalfi and from there to Monte Cassino, where there are still Muslim masons working. From there I shipped to North Africa to see the Qubbat Barudiyan in Marrakech, and from there to the Qairouan Mosque, and at last to Cairo.”
I turned my head to look at him, and this time the shears really did nick my ear. “Ow! But how did you afford it, having left me all your money?”
“Oh, John.” He sounded amused. “Reginald sent me to visit the sacred sites where I would find these ogival arches that enable a construction so strong it will allow for the opening of great windows in the walls. I was to find masons who understand the principles required to construct his project at Wells. He gave me a good sum of money to carry out the research.”
“Oh. That was very trusting of him.”
He bellowed out a laugh. “It was, wasn’t it? A trickster, a foreigner, a … heathen. I could have taken the money and run. I can’t deny it crossed my mind.”
“And yet here you are. Faking relics for the enemy.”
“God rarely chooses a straight path for us. I was on my way from Beirut to visit the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus when the ship I was on was taken by the Franj.”
“So it was you I saw in the prisoner exchange!” I turned to look at him. His face was so close I could feel his breath on me. A wild upsurge of joy welled deep inside me …
A babble of noise made him straighten up abruptly. I turned to see who was chattering, and found a young lad of twelve or thirteen, tricked out in the garb of the sultan’s servants: dark green with yellow-gold braid, curly slippers on his feet.
The Moor nodded. “Na’am,” he said. “Wachha.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Come on, John, there’s another envoy from the English king. They want me as interpreter. I may need you.”
I trailed him to the sultan’s tent, shedding cut hair as I went.
A squire bearing a lance from which flew the white flag of truce stood awkwardly outside the war tent. Behind him, two big mounted soldiers. I stared at the second one, his face in profile as he looked out over the valley to the city of Acre. It was the big routier, Florian. My heart hammered.. “I know him,” I said. “He mustn’t see me.”
“Stay a pace behind me,” the Moor said, “and keep your head down. You’re swarthy enough to pass as one of us now.” He shot me a grin, enjoying my discomfort.
The guard on the door was Rosamund’s Malek, who, when the Moor explained I was helping translate the envoy’s words, waved me through. Inside, there was a fug of incense, wisps of fragrant smoke spiralling up towards the ceiling. Through them I saw for the first time Sultan Saladin. He was not what I had expected, for he looked neither warlike nor fearsome. Instead he was rather a slight, studious man, his gaunt face set in weary lines, silver threading his neat beard, eyes as dark as spent embers. His attention was trained on his guest—the envoy, I supposed.
The smoke curled and twisted, and then the guest turned to say something to the sultan—a polite acceptance of the glass of sherbet he held in his hands, maybe—and I saw his face full on. It was Savaric de Bohun.
The Moor was ahead of me. All he did was gesture with his right hand. I slipped gratefully into the shadows behind one of the tall censers where the smoke was thickest and watched as the Moor prostrated himself gracefully to the sultan, then straightened up.
Savaric’s eyes went round with shock. “You!”
“The world is smaller than we think it sometimes,” the Moor said smoothly. “It is a pleasure to see you again, and looking so well, effendi.” He put his hand to his heart and bowed in the oriental fashion.
“Well, I suppose this makes my task easier in some ways,” Savaric mused, “and harder in others.” He paused. “Your sultan will not like what I have been sent to tell him.”
The Moor inclined his head, then translated this. The sultan said something quietly and the Moor relayed it. “He says the messenger’s job is never easy, especially when he carries the burden of heavy words. It is best to empty out your sack of rocks and to lighten your load. Nothing you say will be held against you.”
Savaric nodded, his moon-face pensive. Then he said, “King Richard asks, well, actually demands, that all of the agreed monies be paid over right away, the rest of the prisoners released, and the True Cross given up to him at once. Or he will kill all the hostages.”
I felt ice form in my stomach. The Moor’s face became very still. Then he relayed this quietly to the sultan. I watched anger flare in those sunken, dark eyes. Then the sultan composed himself, turned to Savaric and said something smilingly.
The Moor said, “First our prisoners must be released to us, and then King Richard shall have his gold and his cross. The weight of souls is heavier than the weight of gold, and the sultan has a duty of care for our people.”
Savaric shook his head. “The king said the sultan would say that, but I fear he has already discounted this option. Once the prisoners, the money and the True Cross are in his possession, then and only then will the Muslims be released.”
Again the Moor repeated these words in Arabic; again the sultan smothered his anger. Then he spoke at length in a quiet and measured tone.
“Our kingdom is vast and far-flung, and not all of our resources are at hand. The sultan fears that he has had to send to Baghdad and to Cairo for the ransom monies, for his own coffers are empty or already in the
hands of the Christian kings.”
“There was not a great deal in the Acre treasury,” Savaric said. “Richard was highly displeased.” He shot a look at the sultan, then said softly to the Moor, “This is not for you to translate, but I want to know how it is that the True Cross that was supposed to be in the treasury is now here in the sultan’s hands.”
The Moor regarded him dispassionately. He translated something to the sultan and then said, “So if King Richard has already assessed the poor state of our treasury he must know that what we say is true: we do not have the resources here to pay the ransom and must wait until the caliph in Baghdad and the vizier in Cairo send the requisite monies. As to the cross—” He smiled, showing his teeth, an expression I knew well. It was the grin he gave another when lying to his face. “Well, it never was in Acre.”
Savaric’s face fell. “I cannot go back empty-handed. He is not a man to make empty threats, Richard. He is both determined and ruthless.”
I saw the Moor hesitate for a moment. Was “ruthless” a word he knew? But he could not consult me without giving me away.
Again the exchange of words, again the Moor’s smooth voice. “The sultan maintains he has kept his side of the bargain by paying over the first instalment of the ransom money and a goodly quantity of prisoners, but we have been given nothing in exchange, which was not what was agreed. You must go back to your king and remind him of the terms of the accord.”
Savaric looked desperate. “At least let me take the cross. That might mollify him for a while.”
The Moor translated this, and the sultan shook his head. “Tell your king he must show patience, that most kingly of qualities, and he shall be fully rewarded in due course.”
Savaric became very red in the face. Sweat beaded his brow. “None of you know Richard as I do. You have no idea what he is capable of.”