Court of Lions

by Jane Johnson

  Momo had been silent for most of the journey, and trotting along at an ever-increasing distance behind him on my mule, I was close to tears. But once we were inside those thick ochre walls our story fired its way around the town and soon everyone was talking about it. I was treated as a hero for my part in Momo’s daring escape and, after feeling very sorry for myself, was so carried away by all the flattery that I was able to put the disaster of the kiss to the back of my mind; I was in severe danger of bursting with pride. The young men of the town gathered around, chattering, praising God, slapping us on the back, delighted that Moulay Hasan and his brother had been outwitted. Some of them smiled at me and touched me lingeringly on the arm, drawing me aside to suggest a sunset walk later along the ramparts, a massage in the steam baths or that we explore the network of grottoes beyond the town walls. I was charmed to be the centre of attention, and a little light-headed from lack of sleep and food, but I suddenly became aware of Momo’s slitted, disapproving glances, and gently turned these invitations aside.

  At last, when we were shown to our quarters and were alone, I summoned my courage. “I’m sorry I’ve offended you.”

  He turned his beautiful, melancholy face to me. “Offended me?”

  I could not look at him. “The kiss.” I shuffled my feet.

  “Oh, that. That was nothing.”

  Nothing? I lifted my eyes. “Then why are you so upset with me?”

  He laughed. “Not everything revolves around you, Blessings, even though the fellows here seem to find you so fascinating.”

  He had noticed, then.

  “I was thinking about Mariam. What will become of her, alone in the palace, without me?”

  Mariam. I had forgotten Mariam. “She’s been without you all these weeks,” I pointed out. “And she has her women.”

  “She’s so young, so defenceless. She’ll be lonely: she doesn’t know anyone. I feel responsible for her. I’m her husband and I just…ran away.”

  “Better to have run away than been beheaded,” I said, already impatient.

  How quickly we take our lives for granted once the right order has been restored.

  When you are in love, time passes in a succession of moments: moments of anticipation, moments of possibility, moments of sweetness…moments of pain. Like beads on a prayer bracelet, each one focused on a small truth of your existence from which you rarely lift your eyes or your thoughts before going the rounds again. I was so caught up in my own feelings in those months that I could not see beyond the next day, let alone to the great and terrible events that lay ahead.

  Some believe that we have no free will, that all we do is determined by qadar, God’s decree. But sometimes there may be a kink in the straight path of fate, and if that is the case in Momo’s tale, that kink was me. Born to a wisewoman who was also a charlatan, I was, you might say, destined to become a trickster, a rock in the desert around which winds poured, disrupting the pattern in the sands; a disturbance in the natural world.

  One day a messenger arrived to relay the news that Moulay Hasan had gathered his army and ridden out to confront the Christians menacing Granada’s border. The man bore letters from Aysha and from Mariam—though I recognized the hand of the vizier in the writing of both. Momo opened Mariam’s first, which surprised me. I watched with a kind of disgust as he scanned the contents—short but clearly affecting—and began to blink.

  Then he unrolled the second scroll, from Aysha. There was a long, concentrated pause as he took in the words. His gaze darted from right to left, then up to the start once more. When he lifted his face, his eyes were bright. He had been so despondent in the months we had been away, a tamped-down, barely there version of the Momo I knew: but now he was back, and his gaze was incandescent.

  “We’re going home!”

  We rode back into the Albayzín, up to the top of the old part of the city on the opposite side of the gorge to the Alhambra, in the early hours of the morning. There Qasim waited, with a group of fierce-looking men in mail and helms, the blades of their halberds catching the last of the moonlight. As we dismounted, the captain, a big man with a vast beard, sank to his knees before Momo and touched his forehead to the ground, the traditional obeisance to a king. All around, his men followed suit, even the vizier, till only Momo and I were left standing. I caught his eye. Even in the darkness I could see astonishment in his gaze, but also a burning pride; then I too bowed.

  Momo bent and took the captain by his arm and bade him rise.

  “I, Musa Ibn Abu’l Ghrassan, pledge to you my sword,” the man said huskily, touched by the courtly gesture. “And I swear we will not rest till you are set on your rightful throne and Moulay Hasan—may God damn him for the murder of my family—is deposed—or better, dead.”

  So these were the surviving relatives of the slaughtered thirty-six, I realized, the Banu Serraj nobles Hasan had butchered in the domed hall all those months ago, whose blood had spilled into the fountain and stained its marble bowl. Gathered, no doubt, by Qasim, who looked proud and pleased to have brought them all together. He was risking his life, I thought, on this throw of the dice.

  “If it please Your Majesty,” Musa went on, as if Momo were already king, “we will enter the city on secret paths. I know the men posted tonight in the Tower of Water, and have ensured they will not raise the alarm. When we’ve secured the royal palace and released the captives, my men and I will deal with the garrison. I don’t believe there will be great bloodshed: there’s more sympathy for you than you might imagine.”

  We crept along animal tracks up the side of the Sabika Hill and entered the grounds via a little-used gate in the Gardens of the Architect and slipped into the medina. Those we encountered between there and the palace laid down without a fight whatever arms they carried: by the time we reached the Tower of the Moon our numbers had swelled so much that it seemed the entire city was with us.

  But the sultan had stationed his personal bodyguards to watch the dungeon rooms and they fought like lions.

  I was not much of a Special Guardian that night. Hampered by my golden foot and my inability to fight, I watched as the violence spilled out into the Courtyard of the Myrtles as the first light dawned and the muezzin’s song rang out over the city; watched as blood darkened the lovely mosaics and sullied the still waters of the pool. It was a brief affair. Before the call to prayer was over, it was finished. Momo held his sword aloft and cried, “For the Banu Serraj! For Aysha! For my mother!”

  The captain and his men ran on toward the Alcazaba to add the garrison to their numbers, and to secure the arsenal and the city’s main gates.

  Freed at last from her months of captivity, the sultana swept out of her prison with all the dignity of an empress. Seeing Momo standing there, bloodied sword in hand, she fell upon him, kissing his shoulders over and over, and for the first time I saw he stood a head taller than his mother.

  I swayed for a moment, my senses assailed by the scent of blood and myrtle, seeing in my mind’s eye two children running in a sunlit orchard. One—smaller and darker—threw an orange at the other, who, laughing, leapt to catch it with the grace of a gazelle, and hurled it back with such force its zest misted the air. Then they were gone into a haze, to be replaced by the vision of a boy shinning down a rope of knotted veils into the arms of his shivering friend. I saw myself—distant, tiny—lean in to kiss him on the mouth, and then he stepped away, becoming larger all the while as if time and perspective were awry; and when I saw him again, he was a man, and not just a man, but a soldier, and a king.

  14

  On the fifth day of Jumada in the year 887, or in the Christian calendar 1482, Momo was proclaimed Sultan Abu Abdullah Moḥammed, the twenty-second Nasrid ruler of Granada. The atmosphere was wildly celebratory, a little crazed, as if everyone knew what had started so abruptly would surely end as fast, and badly. People danced in the streets and musicians played on every corner, the rhythms they rapped out entering bodies as a second heartbeat, thrumming
through rib cages and breastbones. Drums, and dogs barking, and ululating women: they all bled into one. Momo sitting on his throne, clad all in white; Qasim beaming beside him, as if all his plots had come to fruition; while behind the fretted screens of the women’s quarters, Mariam pressed her face to the wood and watched her young husband as if her heart would leap out through her eyes.

  They had at last consummated their union. Momo had confided this to me with shy pride. I had smiled hollowly, faking delight. “You will have fine sons.”

  He threw his arms around me. “Thank you, Blessings. It was all down to you.” When he drew back, I saw how the shadows had gone from around his eyes. She made him happy. That made me miserable.

  Momo had taken his father’s rooms for his own, though I knew he looked upon the chambers with distaste. “If I am to be the sultan, I must be seen to be the sultan,” he said. Mariam was moved into the pretty tower rooms adjacent to his quarters that had once been the sultana’s, giving her more peace and privacy than she had enjoyed in the harem, where the courtesans had been less than welcoming. For her part, Aysha had moved into the Hall of the Two Sisters, closer to the heart of the royal palace. From here, she insisted on running the household, since Mariam was “just a child” and had yet to learn the ways of the palace.

  Zoraya and her boys found themselves imprisoned in the topmost room in the Tower of the Moon: poetic justice, I thought, with the roles reversed.

  And I…I was displaced. As the sultan’s Special Guardian I could have occupied an anteroom off Momo’s quarters, but the small sounds of Mariam’s pleasure in the night drove me to distraction and I took to walking outside in the cool air, letting the tumble of water from the lion fountain wash those noises from my head. At last I could bear it no more and asked permission to take rooms in the Alcazaba with the rest of the garrison. Momo went very still, then nodded slowly. “Of course. You are a faris now. You should be with the other fighting men.” But when I packed my gear into a bundle and took my leave, there was hurt in his expression. I walked with my head down, trying all the way to maintain my asshak.

  A page must have arrived ahead of me, for by the time I checked in with the captain, rooms were already being prepared. I saw servants hurriedly shifting bedding, and suspected my arrival had ousted some other officer: I would likely not be popular.

  Musa himself began to train me in the bearing of arms. He seemed fascinated that someone who had lost a foot could even walk, let alone run and fight; but by the end of that summer I could do both, though awkwardly: he was a hard taskmaster.

  The only time I spent in Momo’s presence was when we ate together, walked the corridors and courtyards of the palace between council meetings or went hunting on the plain, where he showed off his horsemanship and his skills with bow and spear and hawk. The wild boar we killed were left in the woods—it was forbidden to eat the flesh of pigs, and no king could be seen to do so, but he gave it to be understood that a blind eye was to be turned to any others who wished to take the meat. “These are wild animals, not domestic swine: I can’t see the harm.”

  He was equally fair-minded and unfussy in his dealings with the petitioners who queued every day for his attention in the Maswar Hall. Momo pointed out a line of calligraphy to me over the door to the hall, which read: Enter and ask. Do not be afraid to seek justice, for here you will find it. “I mean to be the sultan from whom my people can ask and receive the justice they deserve without fear of reprisal for speaking their mind,” he said. His fervour frightened me: daily, he was becoming more of a king, and less my companion.

  Word spread that the new sultan was approachable and generous: the queues grew ever longer. It seemed no one had cared much for the concerns of ordinary folk for some time. They filed in, round eyed at the sight of the handsome young sultan sitting on his throne with the coloured light filtering from the stained-glass windows in the ceiling casting bright lozenges at his feet, as if he had scattered jewels there for them to take home. To each of them Momo listened attentively, waving away the vizier when he offered to take over. “These are my people,” he said, “and they have been ignored for too long.”

  A smith had not been paid for weapons supplied to Moulay Hasan; a man’s daughters had been abducted. A grain store had been raided for supplies; all of a miller’s flour had been seized to make bread for the army. Young men had been pressed as soldiers. Families starved under the burden of tax debt, their menfolk dead or sick or taken away.

  “Sire, we can’t pay any more of them,” the vizier said at last. “I fear Your Majesty has been too generous. The treasury can give no more.”

  Momo rounded on him. “The treasury can and will recompense these people! These troubles are none of their fault: all they want is peace.”

  Qasim spread his hands. “There can be no peace if the Christians raid our lands.”

  “You’re saying my father was within his rights to treat them so high-handedly?”

  “As the sultan they are his subjects.”

  Momo’s eyes flashed. “I am the sultan now! God knows I never asked for the burden of it, but by his will I shall do my duty. These are my people, to defend and to support.”

  “In moderation, sire. In moderation.” Qasim permitted himself a little laugh, as if they were equals and sharing a joke. I suppose he thought that having engineered Momo’s rise to the throne, he would be recognized and rewarded for it. It was a rare and uncharacteristic error. Momo rounded on him furiously. “If I must give every last coin in the treasury for them to see justice and decency, I shall!”

  The next day the vizier was nowhere to be found. One of his servants said his master’s old mother was sick and he had gone to attend her, but Momo shook his head angrily. “The vizier’s mother died eight years ago: my father made him a gift of three sheep for the funeral feast.”

  The servant paled and said no more. I suspected Qasim thought to teach Momo a lesson by his absence, that he would find he could not do without him. That, or he thought he might do better by going over to Moulay Hasan. Either way, three days later a man rode in, covered in the dust of the road, and prostrated himself before the new sultan. “My lord, Moulay Hasan is returning with his army. He vows to retake the city.”

  From the ramparts we watched as his father’s army came riding across the plain, banners flying, sun glinting off helms and armour, the soldiers’ horses kicking up the dust of a long summer. Momo’s father and Momo’s fearsome uncle, al-Zaghal, rode at the head of their troops, their heads bent together, the two men deep in conversation. Did they know that Momo had seized the throne? I felt my stomach tighten, and my phantom limb began to throb.

  I shot a look at my friend, resplendent in an ochre robe, but with the precautions of a breastplate and mailed coif. That profile! Lit by the sun, he shone. Every time it was like seeing him anew: every time he took my breath away.

  Moulay Hasan’s captain hailed the watchtower, calling for the gates to be opened. There was no answer. The brothers gazed upward, shading their eyes against the sun. “Who dares deny me access to my own castle?” Hasan growled. “Let us in at once or you will pay with your life—and the lives of your wives and children!”

  Musa grinned through his massive beard and leaned over the rampart. “My name is Musa Ibn Abu’l Ghrassan of the Banu Serraj, whose family you slaughtered! We’ve declared your son rightful king of Granada, so be gone, you murdering scum!”

  “Where is this ‘son’ you speak of?” al-Zaghal roared. “You surely cannot mean that chicken-hearted mother’s boy, Abu Abdullah Mohammed!”

  Momo stepped forward. “Here is the chicken-hearted mother’s boy, Uncle. I am more than happy to demonstrate the skills I learned from your sword master any time you wish to test me in the field!” He transferred his attention to Moulay Hasan. “It is just as Sidi Musa says. You’ve been deposed by your own people. I am sultan now.”

  Moulay Hasan glowered at Momo as if he could shrivel him to charcoal, and at this moment Ay
sha chose to make her presence known. “You miserable, fornicating, murdering, whoring worm of a man! Take your black heart away from this place!”

  A look of loathing corrugated Moulay Hasan’s features. “You withered old hag! That’s what all this is about, isn’t it? You seized your chance to take your petty revenge on Zoraya, didn’t you? You just couldn’t bear that I would prefer to dip my cock in her honeypot than in your leathery old purse!”

  Aysha grabbed a dagger from the belt of the nearest soldier and hurled it at the head of her husband. It fell short—but only just—and clattered on the paving stones of the ramp. Hasan’s horse jumped sideways, colliding with his standard-bearer. The boy dropped the banner and the horses trampled its fragile silk beneath their thunderous hoofs.

  “Your standard has fallen. Your tyranny is ended!” Musa Ibn Abu’l Ghrassan yelled. “All hail Sultan Abu Abdullah Mohammed XII! Long live the king!”

  The cry was taken up along the ramparts. It echoed off the rocky sides of the gorge, rang out through the streets of the Albayzín. Moulay Hasan glared as all around him people stood on the terraces of their homes, shouting defiantly, some of them even making obscene gestures.

  Momo raised his hands for quiet and at last the din subsided. “Leave Granada, Father. There’s no support for you here.”

  “I have an army with me, and if I call others to arms across the kingdom, I’ll have a mighty horde!” the deposed sultan yelled back. “What do you have? Runts and rejects and disappointed old men—those who aren’t strong enough to ride to war with our enemies! There are still many loyal to me within these walls—I know it!”

  Momo waved a dozen tall black-skinned men forward. Al-Zaghal said something and his brother cursed. These were Hasan’s royal bodyguards: if even they had gone over to the boy, all was lost.