Navigator

by Stephen Baxter

  They passed an arched gateway in a wall, lobed, delicately shaped of soft stone and covered with intricate carvings. Robert’s gaze was led through the arch from the shadow of the street into a sunlit courtyard, where a fountain bubbled in a square garden of tiles and green plants. There was nothing like this in Robert’s England, a place of gloomy fortified towns and brooding Norman keeps, nothing like this garden full of water and sunlight. It was like looking through a hole in the wall of the world, a glimpse of paradise.

  ‘This is how we do things here,’ Moraima said, watching him. ‘Our gardens are the hearts of our homes. Our wealth, poured into beauty for those whom we love to enjoy. Is it different where you live?’

  He saw the light of the secret garden reflected in her deep eyes, as if they too were doorways he might enter.

  Ibn Hafsun nudged Orm and sniggered, and the girl laughed, and the moment was lost.

  VI

  They spent a day resting.

  Robert, unable to sleep late for the heat, was up at dawn. He went walking at random.

  The city was awake before he was, the streets bustling, the markets and mosques busy in the blue-grey light, the muleteers driving their beasts out of the city gates. As he walked he gradually got used to the layout of streets. Moorish houses were knots of buildings gathered around a courtyard, to be reached by narrowing paths that budded off wider highways. There was a logic to it, but it wasn’t the straight-line logic of a Roman city like London; here the streets branched like the limbs of a tree, leading to endless dead-ends. The people weren’t like English people either. They were a mixed-up sort, the result of generations of intermarriage between the invaders and the old Gothic peoples. Not everybody was Muslim either; there were Christians here, and many Jews.

  The city nestled within the circling safety of its old Roman walls, which ran down to a river where waterwheels turned languidly, and which was still spanned by a stout Roman bridge. The city’s heart was full of grand buildings, finely tiled, intricately adorned with carved stone and moulded plaster. The greatest building of all was a vast mosque that sprawled in its own compound close to the river: a temple to a god who was not God, a firm Islamic statement planted proudly in a Roman city. There was a sense of wealth here, Robert thought, of care, of intensive labour over every detail. And yet it was an architecture born of war. The buildings had stout fortress-like walls and towers and gateways, but these warlike structures were made elegant by their proportions, and the fine embellishment of fretwork and stucco and inscription.

  As the day wore on he learned the cycle of the city. Because of the heat and the light the very rhythm of life here was quite different from any English city. As noon approached the people retreated to the shade of their homes, windows closed and shutters drawn. Even the animals grew quiet, as if the whole city slept beneath a shroud of dense, dusty orange air. But as evening approached and the first whispers of coolness arrived, the city began to stir once more. The street lights were lit, and the city came alive as a firmament of light and movement, of music and laughter.

  Robert was entranced.

  On the second morning they made their way to Sihtric’s small town house. Robert’s heart quickened when Moraima joined them.

  Sihtric served them watered wine, and announced that later in the day he would introduce Orm to his sponsor, one Ahmed Ibn Tufayl, a vizier of the emir of the taifa which now owned Cordoba. ‘When he heard you were coming, Orm, the vizier demanded I bring you to him. The caliphs always saw off the Vikings; this wasn’t Alfred’s England, weak, backward and divided, and there are few Vikings here. So you’re an object of curiosity!’

  ‘I hope I don’t disappoint,’ Orm growled ungraciously. In the bright Spanish sunlight he was massive, heavy, somehow dark, Robert thought. He wasn’t comfortable here. And his head probably hurt from the monkish wine he and Sihtric had consumed the night before. Orm said to Robert, ‘Don’t you notice anything different about me today?’

  ‘By God’s eyes. You cut your hair.’

  He stroked his chin. ‘Look, a good shave too. And I had a bath.’

  Robert was genuinely shocked. ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘I went to one of those bathhouses the Moors have. Quite pleasant it was, if you can put up with smelling like an East Roman whore.’

  Ibn Hafsun smiled. ‘You have to make yourself presentable to meet a Muslim ruler. Clean clothes, a wash. The envoys of the Christian kings, even of the Pope, have always known this. Of course Christians aren’t quite as in awe of the Moors as they were in my father’s day.’

  Moraima, serving more wine, passed Robert. ‘I’m glad you haven’t bathed. I quite like the way Christians smell.’ And with a fleeting, luring smile, she turned away.

  Sihtric lectured them about Cordoba’s magnificence. ‘At its peak, only a generation ago, it was the greatest city in the west. Why, its population even matched Constantinople. Five hundred mosques. Three hundred bathhouses. Fifty hospitals. Do you even know what a “hospital” is, young Robert?

  ‘And the greatest library in all the world, it is said, flourished here in Cordoba, under the caliphs. It all started when the East Roman emperor sent the caliph a copy of a pharmacology text by Dioscorides - have you heard of him? It was like dropping a bit of hot iron into a pan of water. Scholarship boiled in al-Andalus ...’

  The caliphs, rich and at peace, embraced learning as an emblem of power and sophistication. And they were much better placed to do so than western Christendom, for they had access to the surviving works of antiquity. Employing legions of copyists and translators, the Moorish scholars merged Greek and Roman learning with what their cousins in Damascus and Baghdad had acquired from the Persians, and they built on what they learned. The result was a flowering in astronomy and physics, medicine and philosophy.

  Sihtric said, ‘The library itself grew to four hundred thousand books. The catalogue alone ran to forty-four volumes! This was at a time when the kings of England were entirely illiterate. But when the caliphate fell the library was broken up. How I wish I had been born a generation earlier. But there are still books milling around the city, as if released into the wild. It is my skill at tracking the books down as much as my learning that makes me so useful to Ibn Tufayl, I think ...’

  Sihtric was a man of contradictions. For all his admiration of Cordoba’s Moorish achievements, he was keen to play up its deeper Roman origins.

  ‘All of western Europe is the same. All of us dwelling in the vast ruins of the empire, four centuries after some German brute pushed aside the last boy-emperor from his throne. Did you know that the philosopher Seneca came from this very town? And the Emperor Hadrian himself, who made his mark on Britain as you know very well, Orm, came from the Spanish city the Roman called Italica, which is now the capital of our local taifa, Ishbiliya, or Seville ...’

  As he droned on, Moraima, without warning, grabbed Robert’s hand, held her finger to her lips and hauled him out of the room. ‘Come on. By the time they notice we’ve gone we’ll be far away.’

  Robert was thrilled to be off on an illicit adventure with Moraima - to be alone with her at last, with no fathers or lusty camel-drivers in the way. But a lingering sense of duty prompted him to say, ‘We have to see this vizier—’

  ‘I’ll get you to the palace in time. I thought you were a warrior - you’ re very timid. Come on.’

  So they set off, holding hands, giggling and half-running like children.

  She led him to a market, crowded and noisy, where stalls were piled high with tiles and bowls, with fine velvets and felts and silks. Moraima said that Cordoban shoes and carpets and paper were famous throughout the Muslim world. There were exotic imports to be found too: the fur of walrus and polar bears from Scandinavia, carved ivory and gold trinkets from Africa, silk, spices and jewellery from the east, even fine wool from England. One stall had a pile of fruit that Moraima had to name for him, save for the oranges: lemons, limes, bananas, pomegranates, watermelons, artichokes.
Not even the Norman kings, Robert imagined, ate such exotic stuff as this.

  Moraima said, ‘They say Cordoba is more like Africa than Europe. That Paris is not like this, or London.’

  ‘Africa starts at the Pyrenees,’ Robert said, echoing his father.

  ‘I’ve never travelled beyond the Pyrenees. I’d love to see London. Or York.’

  ‘I’ve seen those places, and more.’

  ‘You’re lucky.’

  He shrugged. ‘My mother died when I was small. I go where my father goes. He’s a soldier. Somebody’s always rebelling, and he goes to sort it out.’

  ‘And London—’

  ‘Big. Dirty. Crowded. A cathedral like a big black pile. The Normans are building an immense fort in the corner of the old Roman walls. And York is a midden. It never recovered from the Normans’ harrying twenty years ago.’

  “‘Harrying”? What does that mean?’

  ‘Ask my father. He was there.’

  But that wounded country seemed far from this light-filled city, very far and somehow unreal. ‘You know, you aren’t much like your father,’ he said.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘You seem full of ...’ He sought the right word. ‘Joy. Your father doesn’t seem joyful at all.’

  Moraima shrugged. ‘He admires the city, the Moors’ accomplishments. He relishes the learning. But he despises it at the same time. I think he has to despise it, for it is not Christian.’

  ‘And yet he stays here,’ said Robert. ‘Why? For you?’

  ‘Yes, for me.’ But she said this without emotion. ‘And he has his projects. Something to do with the library, the books. History.’

  ‘All for the vizier?’

  ‘Paid for by the vizier, yes, but not all for him.’

  ‘What projects, then?’

  ‘He doesn’t tell me.’ That seemed to embarrass her, and she said, ‘What about your father? Why is he here?’

  Robert sighed. ‘Something to do with your father, and what he’s up to. Though how a bit of book-reading in faraway Spain can affect him I don’t know.’ He looked at her. ‘Moraima - we keep talking about them.’

  She said coyly, ‘So what do you want to talk about?’

  He dared to say, ‘We could start with the way your eyes match the blue of the sky.’

  She gasped, and he saw he’d pleased her. ‘You’d like our poetry,’ she said, recovering quickly. ‘It’s full of lines like that. Eyes like stars and breasts like billowing clouds—’

  ‘Maybe I should read you some,’ he said.

  But she wasn’t to be snared so easily. ‘Well, how about the colour of the vizier’s eyes when we turn up at his palace late? Come on!’ And she turned and ran through the market crowds.

  Utterly lost in the heart of the city, he had no choice but to follow.

  VII

  Robert and Moraima found their fathers at the gate in the city walls. Ibn Hafsun the muwallad stood by with horses.

  Sihtric was impatient, fretting. ‘Where have you been? You do not keep the vizier of an emir waiting.’

  ‘Ibn Tufayl will understand,’ Moraima said, unconcerned.

  Sihtric fumed, but his anxiety to be away got the better of him. They mounted their horses and rode out into the dust of the country.

  They headed west, following a road that climbed away from the city by its river. Buildings trailed along this road, some grand residences; evidently it was a road often travelled by the wealthy. But many of the houses looked abandoned, their pretty patios overgrown.

  They came to what Robert thought was another town, smaller than Cordoba but still extensive. They paused on a ridge, looking out over this place. Surrounded by a complicated double-wall system, it was largely ruined, buildings burned out, ponds and canals choked with weeds, the wild greenery taking back the gardens.

  ‘This was no town,’ Sihtric said. ‘It was a palace. Its name is Madinat az-Zahra. Built a hundred and fifty years ago by the caliph, so that he could rule the most prosperous and best-governed land in the west in a manner befitting its grandeur. The whole civil service was moved out here. There were mosques, baths, workshops, stables, gardens, houses.’

  ‘And,’ Ibn Hafsun said, faintly mocking as always, ‘there was a menagerie stocked with exotic animals from Africa and Asia, and an aviary, and fishponds like lakes.’

  Orm said, ‘So if it was all so magnificent, what happened?’

  Ibn Hafsun said, ‘The Berbers smashed the palace up. Those black-eyed savages of the desert.’

  ‘I blame al-Mansur, who brought the Berbers here from Africa in the first place,’ said Sihtric.

  ‘He who stole the bell of Saint James,’ Robert said.

  ‘Yes. A vizier who, under a negligent caliph, built a private army, gorged on wealth, and attacked the Christians. And in doing so he fatally undermined the caliphate itself. Al-Mansur! What greed! What arrogance! What folly! What suffering he caused!’

  ‘The people loved him, of course,’ Ibn Hafsun said drily.

  Moraima said to Robert, ‘It is said that the fish in the ponds needed twelve thousand loaves of bread every day to feed them. Maybe they should have employed your Jesus as a baker, just as when He fed the five thousand!’ She laughed gaily.

  Robert grew hot. ‘That’s blasphemy.’

  Sihtric said, ‘Yes, well, the Pope’s a long way away. Come now, we’re keeping the vizier waiting.’

  They rode on.

  One part of the ruined palace compound had been roughly walled off. They left their horses here and were met by a servant, a shaven-headed man of perhaps forty, who led them further on foot. The servant said nothing, but treated the Christians to withering looks of contempt. Robert grew angry, but Orm whispered, ‘Smooth as snot, isn’t he?’ That made Robert laugh.

  Some effort had been made to restore the buildings in this part of the compound. The paths and patios had been cleared, and the ponds scraped clean of rubble. But there was no water, save that brought in pots by servants from the river. The Berbers, in their gleeful orgy of destruction, had wrecked the aqueducts that had once fed the clogged fountains.

  They were brought through a series of rooms which were more or less intact. They were box-shaped, almost cubes, with open archways connecting one to the other, so that for Robert it was like wandering through a puzzle. The walls were covered with fine tiles up to about shoulder height, and above that the surface was rich with filigree and intricate plaster mouldings. The arches especially, some of them double or triple, were very finely made. All the rooms gave onto a patio or a garden, and the bright light reflected through the arches, filling the rooms with a golden glow. It struck Robert that there was not one human image to be seen in the decoration, not one face or figure. But the Prophet’s words were etched in long stripes around the walls and over the curves of the arches, so each room was like a page from a vast book. It was a written building.

  These rooms weren’t perfect. In all of them there was scarring, the scorch of fires, damage to the tiling, holes in the ceilings. But still the maze of beautiful rooms somehow drew out Robert’s spirit.

  And the soft, indirect light washed over the smooth perfection of Moraima’s skin. He smiled, and she smiled back.

  VIII

  So they were brought into the presence of the vizier Ahmed Ibn Tufayl. This was the best room of all, Robert thought. Hangings of Damascus silk covered the upper walls, lamps of silver and crystal gave out a pure light, and an ornate ceiling sparkled with what looked like stars, studs of coloured glass embedded in polished wood.