Court of Lions

by Jane Johnson

  “They represent the webs the spiders made to protect the Prophet when he was fleeing his enemies on the road to Medina,” Momo went on.

  He liked to educate me in such matters, since he regarded me as a heathen, a wild little savage. Both were pet names for me and I had allowed them to define me.

  “The Prophet, peace be upon him, hid in a cave in the mountains and the spiders worked furiously to spin their webs across the entrance. When the murderers came upon the cave in which he hid, the webs were so thick they passed by, convinced no one could have been there in years.”

  I yawned. I had heard the story before. “Can’t we go outside?” I whined.

  “In a minute. The men who made this zellij were the finest craftsmen in the world. Imagine the care and patience it must take to cut each piece so precisely.” His finger traced the design of the intricately pieced together tiling. There was such awe in his voice. It might seem mad to be jealous of a wall, but I was.

  When they brought me to the Alhambra, it seemed so massive I was scared of it. The ceilings, so high, so heavy with detail in carved and coffered wood; or worse, the lacy plasterwork, cascading like frozen water or giant honeycombs. It all simply terrified me. I was so sure they would fall on me in the night that I could not sleep and would creep out into one of the courtyards and curl up in a niche there. Before I came here, I had only ever slept under a low camel-hide tent or a canopy of stars. It took me months to get used to being indoors. If it hadn’t been for Momo, I would long since have run away.

  He clasped my hand and led me into the next room. “How’s your Arabic coming along? Can you read this inscription yet?” he persisted. The stylized calligraphy ran in a frieze across the fretted plasterwork. I sighed. It would be about God. It was always about God, and in Classical Arabic, which had no connection to my language. Reluctantly, I raised my eyes. The thought of sunshine and oranges, of fountains and wet skin, was calling to me. Working from right to left, I gabbled it off by memory:

  I am a garden adorned by beauty:

  I will know whether you look at my beauty.

  O, Mohammed, my king, I try to be equal to

  the finest thing that has existed or will ever exist.

  A more personal connection with these words suddenly struck me, and I found myself blushing. But Momo did not notice. His intense amber gaze had gone distant.

  “A king. One day I will be sultan. I will sit on the throne of Granada and dispense my kingdom’s laws and defend its people.” His voice was dreamy. He blinked and looked back at me. “What do you think about that?”

  I made a face. “Sounds boring. Who in his right mind would want to be a king?” I grabbed him by the hand and dragged him outside into the light of day.

  The heat had channelled itself into the palace’s hidden courtyards and secluded gardens, driving everyone into the cool interior. On days like this, when our teachers drowsed, Momo and I could escape their strict regime.

  We spent an hour splashing each other with water from the fountains, trying not to shriek or laugh too loudly. We walked only on the blue tiles so none of the djinn could catch us, with Momo’s little brother, Rachid, getting in our way. To avoid having to play with him, for he was a nuisance, we ran faster than he could, through the speckled shade of the vine-covered path over the ravine to the Hill of the Sun, where the gardens were more overgrown and chaotic. Rachid’s wails followed us like the cries of a bird, until they were lost in the hazy air.

  These were the gardens where fruit and vegetables for the palace were grown among a riot of lilac and lavender, white poppy and blue stock. When the pea pods were ripe, we would steal armfuls while the gardeners’ backs were turned, popping the cases and gorging ourselves on the sweet contents. There might be grapes or pears to be filched; apples espaliered along one terracotta wall, apricots along another. Peach trees and pomegranate trees heavy with fruit.

  As we made a careful detour to avoid a pair of gardeners, we heard high-pitched mews coming from the herb beds. Among the parsley and lavender a female tabby lay on her side. Seven forms squirmed against her belly. As we parted the stems, the tabby regarded us with slitted golden eyes but did not seem alarmed. Momo, entranced, dropped to his knees.

  We had no cats in the desert, but the palace ran with them. I did not know what to make of these semi-tame creatures that took food from the hand and slipped away, but I admired their dignity and that no one thought less of them, or tried to punish them, for the coolness of their nature.

  One kitten squirmed with its eyes shut, calling feebly. The way it just lay there, complaining about its plight rather than trying to do something about it, sent a sudden flare of anger through me. It was just like Rachid: so annoying. But Momo scooped it up, his thumb running tenderly over its trembling body. “Poor little thing.” He pushed its nose toward a teat, then sat back on his heels, waiting for it to latch on. I stood up, impatient, but Momo stayed kneeling, his head on one side, his expression tender. Then, as if aware of my eyes on him, he shot a look at me, an anxious glance as if I might tease him for being so soft. That glance—both vulnerable and bold—pierced me through. Then, with a change of heart, he sprang to his feet and tagged me on the arm. “Race you to the orangery!” He sprinted away, as fleet as a gazelle.

  Usually, I would dash after him, but something seemed to have come adrift in me. Where he had touched me, it felt as if my skin had burned away. For a moment I felt dizzy; as though my soul had been expelled from my body, made naked to the world. It took immense effort to summon it back again, to push away the weakness and run after him.

  Later, we sat under the fruit trees with our booty. Too hot after all the running, I had removed my tunic and was wearing only wide-legged cotton pants, thinking nothing of it. But when Momo followed suit, my heart skipped like a stone set skimming over a pool. I applied myself to the oranges. Puffs of fragrant zest scintillated in the sunlit air as we broke into the stolen fruit. I felt the little explosions cool against my hands. We ate like children, to excess, though I had no clear idea of my own age—there had been no one left to tell me. Momo was thirteen and said I must be younger because I was smaller.

  As I bent over to hug my knees, Momo poked my chest, not gently. “You’re getting fat.”

  “I am not.” I was indignant. “It’s just the way I’m sitting. Look.” I unfolded my legs and lay down, the earth scratchy beneath my back. “See?” Stretched out, I was as flat as the page of a book.

  Momo lined himself beside me, hip to hip, and for a moment I felt we might clang together: he was a magnet and I a fragment of metal caught in the thrall of his attraction. But we did not touch: he just looked from my torso to his own and back again. “My skin is much lighter than yours,” he said with quiet satisfaction. “Mother says that’s a mark of pure blood.”

  “Where I come from people are darker. It’s because of the sun.”

  “It’s because you’re Sanhaji.”

  It sounded like an insult. “I am not.”

  “Banu Warith.” He grinned.

  Banu was a tribal designation. Momo’s tribe was the Banu Ahmar, the Red Ones, but our tribes prefixed their names with Kel. Kel Tamasheq—Those Who Speak Tamasheq. Kel Ahaggar—the People of the Hoggar. Kel Adrar—Those from the Mountains. I had no idea what the Warith was, but it sounded bad. I frowned and he laughed.

  “See, you are fierce. Banu Warith, without a doubt.”

  That pleased me. I was fierce. I felt fierce, like a lion, a small brown mountain lion reduced to muscle and sinew and appetite by hard desert living. Except that he thought I was getting fat. It was true that I ate like an animal; everyone said so. I was perpetually ravenous. Perhaps you never get over famine.

  I paused, thinking it over. “Well, I might be Banu Warith,” I conceded at last, wanting to please him. “I don’t know.”

  “Isn’t it strange not knowing your lineage?”

  I had been born after my father died. To never have met your father was regard
ed as bad luck. It was one of the reasons I’d had to leave.

  “Not really. I like it. I can be what I want.”

  He frowned at this, his beautiful face troubled, and I saw how his downcast lashes spread upon his cheek, how the line of his straight nose pointed like an arrow to the ground, how his lips pressed together as he concentrated. I loved that I could say things that made him think this hard; I, a fatherless nomad child; he, the son of a king.

  “You are lucky to have such freedom,” he said, suddenly sombre. “I am bound by duty.”

  As if on cue, the call to prayer trembled through the hot air. Momo pushed himself to his feet and the spell was broken. “Are you coming?” he asked, his voice muffled as he struggled back into his tunic.

  I shook my head. “I’m going to see the sick kitten again.” It was the best temptation I could offer. He wavered for a moment, then headed back along our earlier path, feet dragging with reluctance. When he was out of sight, I lay there, considering this feeling of my heart being pulled on a wire behind him, but within moments I fell asleep.

  By the time I awoke the sky had gone pale lavender and I was cold. It was late, and I scrambled up, uneasy. Something, somewhere, felt wrong.

  Because I knew he would ask me, I went back to look at the runt kitten. The mother cat lay in the last patch of sun, her tabby fur a mystery of light and shade. She blinked at me and then rolled away, making a barrier of her back, leaving one kitten—the runt—exposed. As I looked at it, a fly buzzed lazily out of its open mouth, startlingly blue-black against the pink flesh. It was dead.

  I’d seen enough dead things in the world not to be shocked by one more. But somehow the sight of it, abandoned and rejected, opened a wound I had not been aware of, and my eyes filled with tears. Tears I would never show or shed. I picked up the little body and ran with it back through the gardens toward the palace. Momo would want to bury it, with full ceremony, before the last light went out of the sky. But as if the warmth of my hands awoke some deep spark inside it, the kitten twitched and gave a wheezy cough. I was so surprised I almost dropped it.

  I looked back. I should return it to its mother, except servants were converging on the herb garden, walking the tiled paths with baskets over their arms. That decided it. We could take care of it. The kitten would be our secret, mine and Momo’s. I would make a gift of it to him, an offering of love.

  But as I made my way through the corridors to the private quarters of the palace, something in the quality of the air changed. I was excited about bringing Momo the kitten, worried about how I was going to smuggle it into our apartments, yet it was not just that. Those were minor concerns, thoughts like delicate clouds drifting across the sun: this was the quiet before a thunderstorm, the time when all the birds go silent. In my hands the runt curled tighter, sensing danger.

  I slipped into the palace by a door where the guards knew me well enough not to go through too many annoying formalities, then ran through the labyrinth of arched and decorated passages that brought me at last, panting, out into the pillared arcade surrounding the Court of Lions, which lay at the heart of the palaces. Aromatic shrubs had been planted in profusion here around a great lion-ringed fountain: jasmine and rose and myrtle all gave up their scents to the evening. Around the courtyard the great wooden doors to the royal apartments had been thrown open to allow the passage of this water-cooled, perfumed air. I was about to run out onto the path between the plants, when I heard raised voices: a man and a woman locked in a battle of words. It could only be the sultan and his wife. Something inside me clenched, sorry for my friend. The furious arguments of Momo’s parents drove him to melancholy.

  I supposed this was what happened when people were pushed together without love or choice. Where I came from, women led the men they chose to partner with to their tents and laughed with them through the night. There was no secret about what went on. But they had no kingdoms or walls to defend, nothing but the shifting sands and the salt roads that ran through them. Sometimes there was jealousy and anger, then jeering till there was good humour again. But this was the sultan—Moulay Hasan—and his wife Aysha, and no one could jeer at them, or tell them to behave, or say that if they were going to row, it was best not to do it in public, or in front of children.

  In the shadows of the slender pillars, I decided to wait their argument out. But they raged on, their voices audible even over the tumbling of the water from the seventh of the spouting lions that ringed the central fountain.

  I hazarded a look. The sultana’s neck was thrust out, her veil had fallen off and her hair had sprung loose: I saw her square jaw and those fiery black eyes beneath a single dark eyebrow. Court poets skirted flower images when they wrote songs for her; instead, they spoke of eagles and hunting cats. She was older than the sultan, the widow of a previous king, and claimed descent from the Prophet, thus thought herself better bred than her current husband.

  Moulay Hasan stormed away from her toward me and I fiercely wished myself invisible. When I summoned the courage to glance around, I found him standing not five yards off, with the setting sun catching the jewels in his turban. For a moment he seemed almost magnificent: but in reality he was as wiry and twisted as the root of an olive tree, as if he had been left out in the sun and reduced to his most unpleasant essence. How these two could have produced a son like Momo I had no idea.

  The sultana was shrieking something about a foreign woman and he shouted back. Bad words, designed to wound: her age, her lack of beauty.

  I was not alone in witnessing this shameful scene. Up in the women’s quarters there were flickers of movement behind the fretted windows. On the other side of the court I spied the sultan’s chief minister, the vizier Qasim Abdelmalik, his turban like a gigantic onion. And Momo, ghosting between the pillars in his white mosque-robe.

  The sultan must have said something truly insulting then, for Aysha launched herself at him. He caught her hand just before her nails touched his face, and closed his fist hard over her fingers. The sultana bared her teeth, then spat at him. He let go, shocked; then raised his fist. It connected—not with his wife but with a pale shape that had flown between them. The shape spun across the courtyard and slammed with terrible force into the stone lions around the fountain.

  There was a moment of silence and then women were screaming, men shouting. Even before the thought was fully formed I was running. As I fell to my knees at Momo’s side, by accident I dropped the kitten in the fountain. I tried to turn Momo over, but he was like stone. All around me moved bare feet, sandals, robes, embroidered slippers, marking out the steps of a dance I couldn’t understand. Someone caught me under the arms and pulled me away, and some of the noise went with me and I realized that I was screaming too.

  “Being of royal blood does not improve people’s behaviour,” the vizier, Qasim, observed quietly as Momo was carried inside, his hanging arm as limp as a corpse’s.

  I twisted in his grip. “Is he dead?” I managed to choke out.

  “Let us hope not. A dead heir would give us all a headache.”

  He drew me across the courtyard with him. Slaves with cloths were already scrubbing the patio stones. One picked the sodden kitten out of the fountain and stared at it. “A rat,” he said, holding it away from him. They put it in a bucket and took it away.

  The muzzle of the midnight fountain lion was red, as if it had savaged its prey. I could not stop looking at it. I bent and touched the blood, and suddenly everything in the world seemed red. “If he dies, my world is ended.” My voice hardly sounded like my own as the prophecy passed over my lips. “But if he lives, he will lose everything he loves.”

  4

  No one could have kept me away from him. I was a twist of shadow, a nighttime breeze. Like a change in the air I slipped into the alcove where he had been laid out and hunkered down in a corner, making myself small. No one noticed me. There was much coming and going of servants and doctors, so it seemed he lived still. I comforted myself with the bar
ely perceptible draw of his breath, the smallest movement of his covers.

  When at last everyone went away, I wormed myself into the space between his divan and the wall and stared at him, trying to remember how he had looked, shirtless, in the dappled shade beneath the fruit trees—golden and robust and full of quiet mischief, as if by thinking it hard enough I could restore him.

  The sight of him lying there, his head swathed in a bandage as big as the vizier’s turban, his skin as pale as the cotton, filled me with a sort of frustrated, helpless rage. I wanted to shake him, to shout at him, to make him wake up. Then his breath caught and seemed to stop and the rage left me. Suddenly I was praying, in a way I had never prayed before, not for my mother, not even for myself. Let him live, just let him live. It was all I asked, just that he survive. Not that he would love me or that we would be together always but just that he would live.

  Let him live and you can take anything from me that you wish. My arms, my legs, my eyes. Even my life.

  I did not even know to whom this fervent plea was addressed. I had no real belief in a god or gods. It had been made clear to me that if there was such a higher being, he had no interest in the welfare of children.

  Just before dawn someone entered the room. I thought, in the moment before I hid myself, that it was the sultan. But when he spoke, I knew it was not.

  “So. There you lie. Heir to the throne that should be mine. Look at you, so feeble and girlish. What sort of warrior will you ever be? How will such a worm defend us from the unbelievers? I heard them read the auguries at your birth: they foretold you would lose our kingdom, even though your mother had the astrologers killed before word got out. We are the last bastion of Islam against these kafir, who would see us all killed or driven into the sea. We cannot fail. We cannot!”