Navigator

by Stephen Baxter

  And in the world as he saw it now, with a new clear vision and orderly head, he found little room for a Muslim girl and her half-Muslim baby.

  She saw this in his face. She turned away.

  He dug the scroll out of his pack. Badly scorched, it was crumbling. ‘We must decide what to do with this.’

  Ibn Hafsun glanced at it, interested. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It was saved from the fire. I think Sihtric thrust it out to a serving girl, who passed it to me ... I have told you of his visions, the engines. These are the original sketches, I think, taken from the English monk.’

  Ibn Hafsun touched the battered scroll. ‘The Codex! And nearly complete. Marvellous, marvellous. And it is wrapped in this bit of skin - is it tattooed somehow?’

  Robert took the bit of skin, fingering it curiously. It was damaged by an arrow wound.

  ‘But they are useless,’ Moraima said. ‘These designs. My father always said they needed the Incendium Dei, which his alchemists could never puzzle out.’

  ‘Useless?’ Ibn Hafsun laughed coldly. ‘I wouldn’t have said so. How many have already died as a result of this Codex?’

  ‘It is useless,’ Robert said. ‘And my mother’s vision even more so.’ In the end, as far as he knew, Sihtric and Orm had never even discussed properly the ‘Testament’ that had brought Orm all this way in the first place. It had all been folly - a dreadful waste of life.

  ‘Well,’ Ibn Hafsun said, ‘if you two aren’t to stay together, what will you do with the Codex?’

  ‘It’s a Christian relic,’ Robert said. ‘I won’t see it in Muslim hands. Perhaps we should destroy it.’

  ‘It belonged to my father,’ Moraima snapped. ‘I won’t see it destroyed.’

  ‘That would seem a crime,’ Ibn Hafsun said. ‘It is a unique artefact... Can I suggest a compromise? Let me take it. I will put it in safekeeping for you - or for your children, perhaps.’

  ‘Safekeeping?’ Moraima asked. ‘Where?’

  Ibn Hafsun thought it over, and had an inspiration. ‘Right here. I’ll put it in a box, and have it interred, under our feet. One day a great mosque will rise up here on this very spot. Surely it will be undisturbed there. And if you or your descendants ever want to retrieve it - well, you know where to look.’

  ‘Are you an honest man, Ibn Hafsun?’ Robert asked. ‘You won’t take it and exploit it for yourself?’

  ‘Not I,’ said Ibn Hafsun. ‘I don’t have the imagination for such things - or the stomach. After all I am caught between two worlds; who would I attack, my Muslim brothers or my Christian cousins? You can trust me, Robert Egilsson. I hope you know that of me by now.’

  Robert and Moraima eyed each other. ‘Agreed,’ said Robert.

  She nodded.

  ‘And for you two,’ Ibn Hafsun said sadly. ‘Is there no hope?’

  ‘No hope,’ Robert said.

  Moraima asked coldly, ‘What of the baby?’

  Robert shrugged. ‘Have it born. Have it scooped out of you by your clever Islamic doctors. I don’t care. It is your responsibility, only my shame.’ And he turned to walk away.

  ‘A shame that will haunt you, Robert,’ she called after him. ‘Haunt you!’

  He kept walking, faster through the narrow streets, until he could no longer hear her voice.

  As he approached the river he dug into his pack, checking his money.

  And he found al-Hafredi’s bit of tattooed wrapping skin, and scraps of the fire-damaged Codex, torn off. These fragments had been left behind when he had pulled out the scroll. He picked out the largest bit of the Codex, held it up in the bright Spanish sun, and studied it curiously. The words Incendium Dei had been ripped through, leaving incomplete letters, D, I, V, M. And there was a string of garbled lettering:

  BMQVK XESEF EBZKM BMHSM ...

  Perhaps he should discard these bits of grisly, enigmatic rubbish. But that felt wrong. After all men had died for this - his own father had.

  He thrust the scrap back into his pack, with the bit of human skin. He could decide later. Then he walked along the river front, looking for a ship to England.

  II

  CRUCESIGNATI AD 1242-1248

  I

  AD 1242

  ‘On the day he left Seville Robert was only fourteen years old,’ Joan said. ‘A year younger than you are now, Saladin. He grew to become strong and pious - but a savage warrior, a driven man, it was always said. He took the Cross, and won Jerusalem. And he died on Temple Mount, far from home. This Christian country was his enduring achievement. Since then six generations of his children, six generations of us, have lived and died here. But Robert, that confused boy, has vanished into time, his life transient as a breath...’

  Saladin sat with his mother on a blanket spread over the dusty ground of the Mount of Joy. On the hill a goat bleated, and their tethered horses grazed peacefully. The sun was high, the last of the morning’s cloud was shredded, and a sharav, a desert wind, hot and dry and scented like spice, stretched the skin of Saladin’s face tight as a drum.

  All of Jerusalem was spread out before him, the domes of its mosques and churches and the swarming of its many bazaars and suqs all crowded within the wreckage of the old walls. Faint voices called the Muslim faithful to prayer, and somewhere the bell of a Christian church tolled. To the east he could see the Dead Sea and the Jordan. To the west the Mediterranean gleamed. It was hard to believe that any of this would ever change, that he himself would ever grow old. And he felt uncomfortable with his mother’s talk of a long-dead boy.

  ‘I don’t like it when you say things like that,’ he said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like a poet. “Transient as a breath.” What does that mean?’

  Joan sat wrapped in a loose white robe, with a scarf over her head to deflect the sunlight. While Saladin was dusky she was pale, her eyes blue, and the sun burned her easily. Saladin had heard it said that he looked as if he belonged here, but she did not, though the line of her ancestors since Robert the Wolf spanned a century and a half.

  She was only thirty, he reminded himself. Her husband, his father, had died young, and she had worn herself out raising Saladin, and defending the family’s wealth and position in Jerusalem. He knew all that. But her earnestness made him impatient. He felt like a slab of muscle, restless and confined.

  She sighed. ‘I’m trying to waken your soul, Saladin. Trying to give you a sense of the history in which we’re all embedded.’

  ‘Who cares about history? You can’t change history, you’re stuck with it. The future is all that matters.’

  ‘Dear Saladin. You’re just like your father, you know. His brain-pan was as hard as iron too. And he cared nothing for history either. But history shapes all our lives. The great currents of time have brought us here, you and I, to this hill over Jerusalem, far from the birthplaces of our ancestors - of Robert.

  ‘And what’s more it wasn’t until your father died, and I had to take responsibility for his business affairs, that I learned that all our family’s fortune is based on history - or rather our family’s strange knowledge of it, and of the future. Your father kept that from me. Soon you will need to learn the truth. Saladin understood history, and his place in it, you know,’ she said. ‘I mean the first Saladin the Saracen, your namesake. That was why he spared the Christian population when he took Jerusalem. It was a gesture which will cast a shadow across centuries.’

  Saladin didn’t always appreciate bearing the name of a Saracen, even the greatest and most honourable. ‘Can we go back to the city now? You know how hot you get.’

  ‘Not just yet. There’s something I need to tell you. We are to receive a visitor. From England.’

  Saladin was thrilled. To him, England, birthplace of Robert, and of Richard the Lionheart, the greatest Christian warrior of all, was as remote and exotic as the moon. ‘Who? A knight, a prince?’

  She laughed softly. ‘Somebody much more useful. He is a man called Thomas Busshe. He is a
monk, a friar in a Franciscan monastery near Colchester. But he also lectures on theology and philosophy in Oxford.’

  Saladin’s disappointment was crushing. ‘A monk,’ he said with disgust. ‘A scholar. I don’t even know where Colchester is.’

  ‘It’s an old city, north of London.’

  But Saladin had no clear idea where London was either. ‘So why is this fat old scholar hauling his backside from one end of the world to the other?’

  She laughed again. ‘Actually he has two purposes. He wants to speak of the Mongols, and our family’s business. And he means to deliver me a letter. It was sent to his monastery, but it is intended for us. It comes from Cordoba.’

  He frowned, thinking through his mish-mash geography. ‘Cordoba? The city of the Moors in Spain?’

  ‘Who would write to us from Cordoba, do you imagine?’

  ‘Family? A Christian warrior?’

  ‘No,’ she said carefully. ‘Quite the opposite. Our correspondents are Moors, Saladin. Muslims. And yet they are cousins. And yet they are descended from Robert the Wolf, just as we are...’

  II

  The letter had come about because of a visit by an English scholar called Peter to his sponsor, Subh, a lady of Cordoba - and Joan’s distant cousin.

  It wasn’t difficult for Peter to find his way through the dense heart of Cordoba. Though born in England, he had spent years in Toledo, and was used to tangled Moorish streets. But Cordoba had its own intricate beauty. As he walked, he came across little squares where the prospect would unexpectedly open up, and he found himself looking down sloping cobbled streets and under arches to silent crowds of rooftops beyond. It was May, and baskets of flowers added splashes of colour everywhere.

  But the city seemed half empty. There were fewer people than flower baskets, it seemed, ragged children throwing stones into dry fountains, a firewood seller leading his donkey through deserted streets. Some of the grandest houses were abandoned, the gardens weed-strewn, the vines out of control, the ponds clogged.

  He found his way to the River Guadalquivir, in whose embrace Cordoba nestled. The old bridge still stood proud, the labour of the Romans enduring centuries. From here he took his bearings. To the north-west was the Jewish quarter, to the east the Christian, and between them the Moorish quarter.

  And there was the great mosque, with the cross of Christ fluttering on banners above its gates. There could not have been a clearer symbol of the Reconquest. Just six years earlier Cordoba itself had at last submitted to the armies of the Castilian king Fernando III, and the most beautiful mosque in al-Andalus had been reconsecrated as a Christian church.

  Peter walked out of the centre of the city, looking for the home of Subh, the sponsor of his scholarship.

  The house was well appointed in the old style, a remnant of the Moorish past. The gate was open, and he walked through an elaborate archway into a small but neat patio, where vines clung to slim pillars, and pot plants stood like soldiers around a pond where fish swam and a small fountain bubbled. Peter, in his woollen tunic and with his pack on his back, dusty from the road, felt shabby.

  A woman came striding out of a doorway. A small crowd of men followed her, perhaps a dozen, mostly younger than her. They were nervous, agitated, and they chattered in dense Arabic. With his bright blond hair and blue eyes, Peter felt even more out of place.

  When the woman saw Peter she stopped dead. ‘Who are you?’

  She was taller than Peter, and aged perhaps forty, judging from the lines that gathered around her full mouth. But her hair was as dark as her eyes, her cheeks were high and her nose strong, and there was a sway to her ample hips that was almost animal. Peter was twenty-two years old and a virgin. He was overwhelmed by her primitive force.

  He bowed hastily, but in the process his pack tumbled over his shoulder and clouted him on the head. Some of the younger men sniggered. ‘I am Peter,’ he said nervously. ‘A scholar from Toledo. We have been corresponding.’

  ‘We’ve been more than just corresponding, Peter of Toledo,’ she said. ‘I’ve been paying your wages for the last year, and I’ve kept you alive from the look of your scrawny frame. Well, you evidently know who I am.’

  ‘You are the lady Subh, who—’

  ‘Oh, straighten up, man, I can’t abide bowing and scraping.’

  There was an amused glint in her eye that told him she knew exactly the effect she was having on him. He said, even more confused, ‘I have brought the fruits of my studies into the history of your family—’

  ‘I should hope you have or there’d be little point you coming all this way, would there? Look, young man, I’m afraid I don’t have time for you just now. We have something of a family crisis going on.’ She waved a hand at the men behind her. ‘Look at this lot. All my relatives, nephews, cousins, even a few uncles. All flocking around me, the way they came huddling around my husband when he was alive, may he rest in the peace of Allah. I won’t bother introducing you because they’re not worth a clipped crown, the lot of them. All save this one, perhaps. Peter of Toledo, meet my son, Ibrahim.’

  Ibrahim was about Peter’s age, perhaps a bit younger. He wore a tunic and leggings of a severe black cloth. He bowed to Peter. He was handsome, but his eyes, startling blue, were cold. ‘What are you, Peter of Toledo? French?’

  ‘English.’

  Ibrahim grunted, uninterested. ‘All Christians are the same.’ He turned away.

  ‘Ibrahim is as strong as his father,’ Subh said, ‘but ten times as difficult. Follows the teaching of the Almohads. Allah be thanked for sending me such a devout son.’

  ‘Your mockery is inappropriate,’ Ibrahim said sternly.

  ‘Yes, yes. Well, we don’t have time for this. Come.’ And without another word she swept out of the courtyard and into the street beyond. The relatives followed her like baby geese.

  Peter stood for a heartbeat. Then he dropped his pack in a shady corner and ran after the little mob, for he had no idea what else to do.

  He found himself striding alongside Ibrahim. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To the mosque. Zawi is in trouble with the Christians.’

  ‘Who is Zawi?’

  ‘A cousin. Another one of the hapless flock who huddle under my mother’s wing, and look for her protection when their foolishness and impiety leads them into trouble.’

  He sounded stern and contemptuous, as only a very young man can be, Peter thought, aware of his own youth. ‘You don’t sound as if you have much respect for your family.’

  ‘When the Christian armies came, my cousins did not fight for Cordoba as men. Now they cluster around a woman for protection. They are less than men.’

  ‘And,’ Peter asked carefully, ‘did you fight?’

  ‘I was too young,’ Ibrahim said quickly.

  Which Peter, versed in interpretation, understood to mean that his formidable mother had not let him fight. ‘I would be interested to learn of your culture,’ he said now. ‘The principles of the Almohads, who see the whole world as a unity “plunged in God”. A fascinating concept.’

  Ibrahim glared at him with stony contempt. ‘You know nothing of our culture. No Christian does.’

  ‘That remark only shows that you know little of Christians yourself. I am a student, and a translator. I speak and write Arabic, pure Latin, and the dialects of the Castilians and the Aragonese, as well as Greek, French, English and other tongues. In Toledo I have translated works of Arab scholars into Latin, and Latin into Arabic, and—’