Navigator

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘And then what? Get on with it, man!’

  ‘And then,’ Peter said, ‘a man called Orm Egilsson, English or possibly a Dane, came to Cordoba in search of Sihtric. He brought with him his son, called Robert. Orm had a head full of a prophecy of his own, a “Testament of Eadgyth”, or Edith, something to do with a mysterious figure called the Dove. And he seems to have been determined to put a stop to Sihtric’s work.’

  ‘Why? No, don’t answer that. Prophecies and visions! Sometimes I think the whole world is gripped by pious madness. Did he stop Sihtric?’

  ‘In a way. Orm’s arrival upset everything - in particular the relationship between Sihtric and Ibn Tufayl.’

  ‘So it all went wrong. Then what?’

  ‘Ibn Tufayl tried to destroy the machines Sihtric had made, and to eliminate the scholars who had worked with him. He wanted it all for himself. He dreamed of being more than a vizier, lady.’

  Subh nodded, matter-of-fact. ‘He wouldn’t have been the first. I take it he didn’t achieve his ambition?’

  ‘No. As they fought he burned himself to death, along with Sihtric and Orm, and the plans for the machines. All this took place in the palace of Madinat az-Zahra.’

  Subh looked at him shrewdly. ‘Not all the plans were lost. Or you would not be telling me about this now.’

  ‘You’re perceptive,’ he said. ‘No, not all of them. Ibn Tufayl doesn’t seem to have been very competent. There are hints of personal weaknesses in the records - I suppose that doesn’t matter. He was certainly not efficient in his elimination of Sihtric’s work. I was able to find traces in the archives. For instance, one young clerk survived the vizier’s cull, and, in bitterness, wrote down all he remembered to thwart the vizier’s purpose. There are similar relics. It’s all very fragmentary - most of it is just the point of view of one junior clerk - but—’

  ‘You have these fragments?’

  ‘Some of them. And, more than this - the blaze did not destroy everything. Moraima and Robert escaped. Between them they took away the Codex of the Engines of God - the original designs brought by Sihtric to Spain.’

  ‘And what did they do with them?’

  ‘The two of them fell out. They could not agree. The plans were buried - but what was buried was fire-damaged and not complete. One comer had been torn away by Robert, perhaps intentionally, perhaps not. This fragment contained the secret of God’s Fire. Possibly - it is said. And it may be that Robert took away another treasure, another prophecy entirely, called the “Testament of al-Hafredi”. I know little about that. But as for the rest of the engine designs, a man called Ibn Hafsun buried them for Moraima.’ He thought it over. ‘I suppose he may have been an ancestor of your Alonso the Fat.’

  ‘How ironic that would be,’ Subh said drily. ‘And where did he bury the plans?’

  Peter hesitated. ‘Under the floor of the great mosque in Seville. In fact I have seen a fragment of memoir by Ibn Hafsun, in which he specifies exactly where the Codex can be found.’

  Subh laughed. ‘Now you’re being absurd. Peter of Toledo, you must know that in a country where war has washed back and forth ever since Tariq crossed the strait, there are legends of buried treasure under every rock.’

  ‘But it may be worth looking,’ Peter said softly.

  ‘You have an adventurous soul, for a scholar. And these sketches, the fragmentary plans you say you already have—’

  ‘I’m no engineer. But I believe they could be developed into workable designs.’ He said this with pride, and a certain longing, for it was a project he would find fascinating to pursue if he got the chance.

  She clapped her hands, almost girlish. ‘Oh, how marvellous. But you’re telling me that even if I could get to Seville, even if we manage to dig up the mosque and find these plans - even if! - they will remain incomplete.’

  ‘Because of the fragment taken by Robert, yes. But I have some news about that too. I was able to trace this Robert, son of Orm, and the family who followed him.’

  She studied him. ‘You are resourceful, aren’t you? How?’

  ‘It wasn’t hard. He became known as Robert the Wolf.’

  She sat back. ‘Ah. One of the most notorious of the crusaders.’

  ‘He settled in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which he helped to found. His family live there still. Perhaps they know something of this Fire of God.’

  ‘What do you suggest, Peter of Toledo?’

  He shrugged. ‘Write to the head of the family in the Outremer. She is called Joan. Tell how you may be able to help each other. I have a contact in a monastery in Colchester who could put us in touch.’

  She scoffed. ‘A mudejar of Cordoba writing to a Christian family in the Outremer? You really are a dreamer, aren’t you, Peter?’

  ‘Why not? You have two pieces of a puzzle, it seems to me, you and this Joan of the Outremer. And if you put them together it might be mutually beneficial.’

  ‘And you, Christian Peter, would put these marvellous weapons in the hands of a Muslim? Would you have us make these weapons and slaughter each other?’

  ‘The weapons may make war too dangerous to wage. Or the engines could be turned on the common enemy.’

  ‘The Mongols,’ Subh said. ‘Now there’s a thought. Well, don’t worry, little Archimedes. I do sense an opportunity in these engines. But I’m no al-Mansur; business is what I know. All I want is to protect my family and my own. But if I can make a little money out of this I’ll do it.’ She smiled at him. ‘You’ve done far more than I asked of you, Peter of Toledo. You’ve earned your fee.’ But he kept his face serious, and, watching him, she grew grave. ‘Ah. But you said you had something I would not wish to hear.’

  ‘I do.’ And, having witnessed a near-stoning that day, Peter knew how painful it was for her to learn that her ancestress Moraima was not just the daughter of a Christian, Sihtric, but the consort of another, Robert.

  Subh was devastated. ‘By Allah. But that means that Moraima’s child, my distant grandfather, was three-quarters Christian. And by a brute of a crusader like Robert! No, no, it couldn’t be worse. And to think I mocked that fool Alonso for the impurity of his blood!’

  Peter said, ‘All this was generations ago.’

  She got up and paced, her movements hard, full of anger. ‘You don’t understand what it’s like here, where Christianity rubs up against Islam. We are polarised. I have pinned my entire identity on my descent from the vizier. Nobody has heard of Sihtric, nobody cared about him. But if the vizier’s granddaughter bore the bastard child of a notorious crusader, I am ruined in this city.’

  ‘No one need know,’ Peter said helplessly.

  She laughed at him. ‘Alonso will learn. He can afford better scholars than you, Peter. So that’s that. I must flee Cordoba after all - and we may get a chance to explore Seville sooner than you expected.’ She glanced at the angle of the sun. ‘I have much to do. Scholar, find yourself a servant. Any of them will do. Have a room made up. We should still write to this Joan of the Outremer. Draft something for me, will you? Now you must excuse me. Ashmet? Ashmet!’

  She stalked indoors, leaving Peter on the patio with the orange drink, and the dried fruit, and his pack with his notes.

  VI

  It was a deep shock to Saladin of Jerusalem to learn, from what Brother Thomas related of Peter’s letter to Colchester, that Robert the Wolf, hero of the First Crusade, his family’s saintly forebear, should be tainted by a liaison with Moraima, a Moorish girl.

  ‘Now maybe you see what he had to run away from,’ Joan said. ‘All the way to the Holy Land—’

  ‘Don’t talk like that. Robert took the Cross. He didn’t run anywhere.’ Saladin got up, dusted off his leggings, and walked down the hill to the horses.

  ‘I knew you’d react like this. You really are such a pious prig! But you don’t need to worry,’ his mother said, as she got up more stiffly. ‘He tupped this girl, then left her in al-Andalus. He married your distant ancestress later, and she w
as a respectable Christian; there can be no blood of Muslim ancestry in you.’ And she added, so softly he wasn’t sure if she had spoken at all, ‘Not from Moraima, anyway... Come. We must prepare for the arrival of Brother Thomas.’

  VII

  So Subh, descendant of a vizier, abandoned Cordoba, once the capital of a caliphate.

  When Peter crossed the city on the day of her departure, the air was already hot, the sun intense, even so early in the morning. It had been late spring when Peter had arrived in Cordoba, with his mixture of hope and devastating bad news for Subh. Now it was midsummer and the fresh greenness had burned away, leaving the city parched and dusty, the blossom fallen, the patio gardens weary.

  At the house Subh had already flung open the gates. Goods were heaped up in the narrow road: bags and packs and rolled-up carpets and wall hangings, even pot plants from the patio. Subh’s household, with the usual gaggle of relatives, milled around. It was a day of defeat for Subh, of course. But she seemed as serene as always as she glided through the crowd, resolving disputes, solving problems, managing this last project in Cordoba as efficiently as she had handled all the other details of her life.

  And as Subh supervised the abandonment of her home, Alfonso ‘the Fat’ and his ratty little granddaughter stood and watched. Alfonso didn’t try to hide the look of triumph on his face.

  The fleecing of departing Moorish refugees had become something of an industry in the conquered city. There seemed to be endless tithes to pay before you could get one mule-load of goods outside the walls. And Christians, never Muslims, were encouraged to buy up abandoned businesses and properties, usually at prices ruinous to the Muslim owners.

  Even so Peter had been surprised when Subh sold her property to Alfonso, her rival.

  But she had told Peter she was glad to do it. ‘Alfonso was so determined to push my face into the dirt that he outbid everybody else and paid too much. Not as much as I’d have made if I’d sold up ten or fifteen years ago, before the siege, but far more than I expected. So let him have his victory; let him watch me walk away, no doubt fiddling with himself under that ugly cloak in his excitement. I’ll take the fat fool’s money.’

  Muleteers drove their animals into the street to join the chaos, and gradually the backs of the patient beasts were loaded up. Peter, in his travelling clothes and carrying his pack, tried to master the mule he had to ride. It was a surly, truculent slab of muscle with sharp bristly fur and a stink of dried dung, and it was resolutely uninterested in Peter’s plans for it.

  Subh said to him, ‘You don’t have to come, you know. After all we are travelling out of the Christian territories. You could return to Toledo, and burrow back into your libraries like a worm into a book. If you decide to come with us you will leave behind everything you know, everything that is familiar.’

  ‘I don’t really make decisions,’ he confessed. ‘Not in that way. I do things step by step, depending on what seems right at the time. I left my birthplace near Bath to go to Oxford to study, and then on to London. And then I travelled to Toledo, where every scholar in Christendom wants to be for its translation schools. Then, when under your sponsorship I unearthed the story of your family’s past, I felt I had to travel to Cordoba to meet you in person. And so on.’

  She waved a hand. ‘This is how the young plot their lives. You think you will live for ever; you think the future is full of endless possibility. So you follow impulses. You aren’t old enough yet to understand that each choice you make in life in fact shuts as many doors for you as it opens.’

  He felt put down by that; he had expected more gratitude, perhaps, for his loyalty. ‘Well, lady, I have come across a trail of unanswered questions that I feel it’s my duty to follow, regardless of where it may lead. That is not impulse, it’s scholarship. And it is my instinct too,’ he said boldly, ‘to be at your side in the coming adventure.’

  She looked him over. ‘So sweet,’ she murmured. And she cupped his cheek.

  His flesh burned where she had touched it. But she had patted him like a child, not a lover. He turned to his mule, which seemed to look at him with sympathy, though it still resisted Peter’s every attempt to climb on its back.

  The caravan set off. There wasn’t a single wheeled vehicle; everything and everybody was loaded on the back of a mule or a horse or a camel - even the magnificent Subh, who rode a delicate palfrey as if she had been born in the saddle.

  They bumped their way out of Cordoba, met up with more mules and their drivers, and the caravan formed up for its passage along the banks of the Guadalquivir south-west to Seville - Ishbiliya - for the great river passed through both cities. The muleteers took over now, weather-beaten men with ragged clothes and faces like leather. They walked beside their lead mules, and the chiming of the bells around the animals’ necks rose up into the dense, still air.

  Peter looked back at the city as it receded, wondering if he would come this way again. Its walls were battered after the long months of siege, and the flags of Christ fluttered over its gates. But still the Roman bridge arched handsomely over the glimmering river, and when the muezzin calls sounded all the party paused to turn to the east and pray, all save Peter himself, who contented himself with the devotions of his childhood.

  VIII

  The maps which Thomas Busshe had studied in the monastery all showed the Holy Land as the centre of the world. But he felt as if his extraordinary journey took him, not to the centre, but to the very edge of reality.

  Even to cross the water to France was gruelling for a man who had sailed nothing more ambitious than a leather-stitched rowboat across the Thames. Then came the slog through the splintered kingdoms of France to embark again at Marseilles, and a sea journey ever further eastward across a hot, flat Mediterranean which he knew to be largely a Muslim lake. He followed his maps as he passed along the coastline owned by the East Romans, Christians who did not bow to the Pope, and whose ancient city of Constantinople was now, shamefully, in the hands of the crusaders who had sacked it. But as he ploughed ever further east there was only the huge mass of the Sultanate of Rum to the north, under the Turks who had taken Asia Minor from the East Romans, and the Fatimid Caliphate to the south, where the crescent of Muhammad fluttered over the cities of the Nile. Great sprawls on the map these were, like enormous Muslim hands ready to crush his frail ship like a fly.

  In Palestine, true, there was the Outremer, his destination, the remnants of the Christian kingdoms planted bravely by the soldiers of the First Crusade. But these domains were shrunken now, split up and reduced to fragments by the dramatic conquests of Saladin half a century before. Even Jerusalem itself was only nominally in the hands of Christians. Seeing these little islands of the faithful on his maps served only to convince Thomas Busshe that despite the Pope’s ardent preaching, echoed in every pulpit in western Christendom, two centuries of crusading had resulted in little solid achievement, indeed perhaps the very opposite.

  But that could all change.

  Thomas, over fifty years old, was no warrior himself. But he had formulated for himself a mission that he believed might yet reverse the fortunes of Christendom, a mission inspired by a relic of the past that had come swimming fortuitously to him out of the dark, like the finger-bone of a saint emerging from the muck of a drained pond. A gift that, if he used his intellect well, might yet win the epochal war of civilisations for Christ.

  And so he drove on, determined, clinging to the ship’s rail and trying not to vomit.

  The climax of his extraordinary journey was at its very end. He landed at Jaffa, once more a Muslim city, and submitted himself to the ordeal of a trek across the dusty land to Jerusalem. And he met Joan and her son Saladin before the walls of the city itself.

  The light was extraordinary in this holy country, thick and dense, crushing. It seemed to oppress the old city with its broken walls and shining domes, rather than illuminate it. Thomas, utterly exhausted, felt close to collapse. But here he was before Jerusalem itself,
standing in the footprints of Christ. Overwhelmed, he brushed the dirt from his robes and scraped the sweat from his brow, and dropped to his knees to pray.