Court of Lions

by Jane Johnson

  “What do you think we were doing during these weeks away? Sunning ourselves in a pleasure garden?” Moulay Hasan rasped. “We’ve been fighting the infidels back from our borders! If we don’t stand together, all will be lost. Would you hand our kingdom on a silver tray to our enemies, you stupid boy?”

  Momo’s jaw tensed. “It’s time we made our kingdom stronger by giving people the chance to flourish, by treating them with respect and fairness, rather than taxing them to penury for the sake of pointless zealotry!”

  His father’s horse danced in a tight circle, forcing the old man to master it with difficulty. “I’ll lay siege to this damned city!” he shouted. “I’ll blast it to oblivion! I’ll see it consumed by fire before I’ll let you take my crown!”

  Aysha leaned over the ramparts. “Try it and I’ll catapult your whore to her death! But first I’ll cut out her eyes and her tongue and cover her in tar! Then we’ll see how much you desire her! I’ll have her bastard children cooked in a tagine and served to the Banu Serraj!” She pulled a shrouded figure into view and ripped the veil away so that the woman’s long yellow hair rippled in the wind.

  “Is that…is that my Zoraya?”

  I had forgotten how bad his eyesight had become.

  “Save me, my love!” Zoraya shrieked. “Before this she-devil cuts my throat!”

  Aysha laughed mirthlessly. “It’s all I have dreamed of these many years.”

  The old sultan called down all the demons of hell on his first wife. Through it all Aysha regarded him with glee.

  “Release her, Mother,” Momo said softly. “He knows we hold her life in our hands. There’s no need to terrify her anymore.”

  But the scorned woman was relishing this long-awaited moment of triumph: she dug the blade deeper, till her rival squawked like a chicken. “Get off your horse, Hasan!” Aysha howled down. “Get off your horse and grovel in the dirt! Beg my forgiveness for treating me with such disrespect. Do it, or I’ll slit her pretty Christian throat!”

  Hasan knew the strength of Aysha’s will. He slithered from the saddle and fell to his knees, while his brother looked on in disgust and railed at him to get up and be a man, be a king. To no avail. “I’m sorry, so sorry, my dear lady, for any slight I may have done you. I was blinded by lust and stupidity. Now please let her go!”

  “Not good enough.” The knife bit again, and again Zoraya wailed.

  “I call upon the great goodness of your heart, beloved wife, to forgive this weak and foolish man. I am unworthy of you and of the kingdom. I am an ass—nay, a worm.”

  Aysha smiled. “And now declare our son the rightful sultan, swear that you will ride away, disband your troops and never again take up arms against him.”

  His face working grotesquely, Hasan gabbled out his promises. By now al-Zaghal was purple with rage. His black eyes were trained not on Aysha but on his nephew, and the hatred in them made me go cold.

  Aysha was at last persuaded to give up her captive. Zoraya was accompanied to her tower and given some minutes to collect her children, and to select clothing and jewellery to take with her, despite Aysha’s demand that she should be sent out of the gate naked and shameless on a mule so that all might see her for the whore she was.

  The gates opened and out Zoraya rode with her small boys, dressed in her most splendid robes, accompanied by her faithful servant, La Sabia. I saw Momo’s shoulders relax the moment the gate closed behind them. I knew exactly how he felt.

  We watched the army of Granada wend its way back out onto the plain, the dust raised by its horses making it look like a desert mirage, something out of legend. Was it my imagination, or were there considerably fewer soldiers leaving than had ridden in? I wondered if deserters were even now throwing off the colours of the old sultan in dark alleyways in the Albayzín and slipping into the arms of their wives and mothers.

  And somehow, the vizier was back, old Qasim Abdelmalik, who returned as if nothing had ever happened. He brought rich gifts—silks and perfumes—for Mariam, knowing Momo would not accept anything for himself, and the young sultan received them graciously, though the way he looked upon the vizier’s prostrate form with narrowed eyes told me he suspected Qasim had tried his luck with Moulay Hasan and been turned away. And while I realized that although Momo would love to punish the vizier for stealing from the treasury and for his disloyalty, he needed someone by his side who knew how to run a kingdom. Then he told Qasim to get up, and sent him off with a dozen tasks to arrange the shoring up of the defences. “And we will see if my father keeps his promises.”

  Months passed. Fittingly enough, it was pomegranate season—that time of symbolic fertility—when Momo told me his news. We were walking in the orchards so he could inspect the persimmon, mulberry, fig and pomegranate trees. The sun was bakingly hot and I could almost taste the fruit in the air.

  “I’m going to have a son.”

  Sweetness turned to wormwood in my mouth.

  “Mariam is pregnant. The baby is due before year’s end, alhamdulillah.”

  “Praise be to God,” I echoed weakly.

  A son. Momo a father. I remembered the wedding night, the fiasco with the fox’s blood. Mariam’s blushes—deeper than the ripest pomegranate…“Congratulations.” My heart felt the size of a walnut, as hard and as bitter. I should have been glad for him: it was what any man wished for, what every king required. But my vile envy lasted only for a moment: the way his amber eyes scanned my face, seeking my approval, made me ashamed. I grasped his shoulder. “I’m so happy for you…both.”

  He embraced me then with such relief that I felt all the more unworthy.

  Of course it was inevitable that Hasan would not give up his throne so easily, and that his brother would allow the damage done to their pride to go unavenged. We were asleep in our beds one night a few weeks later, when there was a scream from the ramparts, followed by the screech of clashing steel.

  I was up and out of my covers in an instant, my heart beating abnormally fast, as when you wake from a nightmare. It took a minute or two more to strap the false foot on, for I never could sleep comfortably with the thing attached, and by then all was chaos. I hobbled-ran out into the training square. All along the western rampart there was fighting. Hundreds of men skirmished on the ramps and steps, more flooding down into the Alcazaba. I had to get to Momo.

  In the darkness and confusion it was impossible to tell who was who: people were shouting out their allegiances in order to tell friend from foe. A huge man in black robes came flying at me, swinging a sword and roaring, “For the sultan!” This did not help me identify for which side he fought, and “For the sultan!” I cried in response, dodging him and leaving him equally bemused.

  As I neared the palace, the fighting was at its thickest, tangles of men battling fiercely for entry, fought back by erstwhile comrades. I hoed my blade into the hamstrings of a man in front of me—an agricultural stroke. With the dagger in my left hand I disabled another raider, allowing the palace guard who was engaging him to finish him off. In this way I finally made it inside the inner circle of defenders, where I found Momo battling several men at once, his blade flashing in the gloom.

  When practising his swordplay Momo had flowed across the training square like a poem, graceful and elegant. But this was no poem. This was brutal. No space for sweeping sword strokes: he was reduced to hacking, chopping, stabbing. Even so I was transfixed. There was a ruthless economy to his movements, an intense focus. I saw him kill four men in the space of a minute. It was nasty work, but brilliantly done. I felt a sort of awe and hoped al-Zaghal had witnessed his nephew displaying the butcher skills he’d been so keen to teach him. I hoped he’d been on the other end of them.

  I dodged and stabbed my way toward him. The force of one of Momo’s blows made his opponent drop his sword. As he reached for it, I stamped on his hand with my golden foot and heard him scream, and in that second, Momo finished him. Much to my relief the fight was effectively over. But Momo embraced
me as if I were the hero of the hour, tenderly wiping a splash of blood from my face as soon as he had ascertained that it was not my own. Then he sent Musa and his captains radiating out through the medina and the Alcazaba and down into the city, to kill or take prisoner any invaders who remained.

  Reports gave no sighting of Moulay Hasan, though his brother had been in the forefront of the assault, one of the first to scale fortress walls long thought impregnable. But his corpse did not lie among the many that littered the grounds, or the streets of the medina: he must have escaped through one of the city’s thirty gates.

  First thing the next day, Momo sent master masons over the top of the ramparts to mortar up any hand- or footholds the invaders had used in that bold ascent: then he doubled the watch.

  Shortly after the attack, we celebrated the birth of his first son, Ahmed. Mariam laboured long, leaving Momo pale and desperate, striding up and down the corridors outside the chamber with the pent-up energy of a trapped wolf. When at last the baby was presented, the wonder in his father’s face took my knees from under me. Unremarked amid the rejoicing, I sat on the cold stone floor, watching and hurting. Such tenderness in his expression, such a softening of the pure, hard lines of his face.

  He had never looked at me like that. And I knew he never would.

  A bitter, black wave of jealousy washed over me, leaving me shaking and nauseous. It was disgraceful to feel this way about such a joyful event. To be jealous of a tiny scrap of humanity, who had never done anything to me, who was innocent and defenceless, was a wicked thing. I knew this. But it changed nothing.

  Word reached us in the spring that the enemy monarchs of Aragón and Castile, Ferdinand and Isabella, had pledged to devote their effort to driving out every unbeliever from the peninsula, calling it a holy war. Nobles keen to win favours rallied to them. There was a responding call to arms among the Muslims, initiated by al-Zaghal; but Momo did not answer it. “Only a few weeks ago the Christians asked us to pay the usual tribute monies. We’re still negotiating. And if Granada’s treasury can’t afford to pay the tribute, how can it finance a war?”

  At the time it seemed a reasonable question. But there was dissent, not only in the council but out in the city, where a blind old hermit who lived in a cave on the Sacromonte, the great hill to the east of the Albayzín, stirred up the populace by reminding them of the old prophecies surrounding the young sultan’s birth.

  Insulting words were daubed on walls. Pronouncements of loyalty to the old sultan, even to al-Zaghal: the people were as changeable as the weather.

  One day Momo and I were sitting together on a bench in the shade of the Gate of Justice. “I swear he said ‘Baba’! Imagine that—his very first word, father.” Momo’s eyes shone with sentimental pride. I stifled a yawn.

  “Babies make all sorts of nonsense sounds.”

  “No, really, it was very clear. And he was looking right at me when he said it. He’s a prodigy, Blessings. I can’t believe I’ve produced such a thing of beauty.” He gave me the sweetest smile. “It’s because he was conceived here, in this beautiful place, rather than back in grim old Loja. The Alhambra gets into your blood and bones. It’s like a spell, like God’s grace—”

  At this moment a messenger charged up the road to the palace on a sweating horse. Seeing Momo, he hurled himself from his mount and prostrated himself at the sultan’s feet. “News, my lord!” he cried.

  Momo drew him up. “There’s no need for that. What’s your name?”

  The messenger looked so startled he seemed to have forgotten. “Uh, Latif, sire.”

  “Come, Latif. Take some refreshment and then I’ll hear your news.” He led him away as if he were a nobleman of equal rank, leaving me holding the horse’s bridle.

  I shouted, and someone came for the horse. I had to run to catch them up, by which time they were entering the Maswar and the messenger’s eyes were darting left and right, taking in the exquisite stucco and tilework.

  In a small chamber off the hall Momo bade him sit down. Then he turned to me. “Blessings, go bring hot water and towels, and some refreshments.”

  I dragged my feet.

  “Go!” This time his tone was sharp.

  By the time I got back with sherbet and almond biscuits, it was to find Momo dipping a towel in a bowl of scented water brought by a page, cleaning the messenger’s face himself. I almost dropped the tray.

  He heard me approach, waved for me to set the tray down. His eyes gleamed. He seemed rather pleased about something. “My father-in-law is a remarkable old man.”

  I remembered Mariam’s father at Loja—formidable and frightening. “He’s still alive then?”

  Momo chuckled. “Oh yes, very much so.”

  It was all he would say: it seemed I had missed the relaying of the important news, whatever it was. I did not have long to wait to find out. Momo had his council assembled.

  “The Christian army has been defeated,” he announced to shocked silence. “Led by King Ferdinand, it foolishly attacked Loja, thinking to take the town to gain access to the plain and then to march on our city. But they reckoned without Sidi Ali! My valiant ninety-year-old father-in-law lured them into an ambush and, as he says in his message, ‘We gave those strutting caballeros something to remember us by!’”

  There was much amazed laughter.

  “As well as many of their knights, the enemy also lost their baggage train. Sidi Ali sends this cup, marked with the yoke and arrows of Ferdinand and Isabella, as a gift to his grandson Ahmed.” Momo waved a handsome golden goblet in the air. “The remains of the Christian army were driven down the gorge. My father and uncle fell upon them as they retreated into the lowlands. Sidi Ali reports that although King Ferdinand escaped, eight hundred of his knights were killed and fifteen hundred were taken captive. This is a great day for Granada!”

  An enormous cheer echoed around the hall. Then someone cried, “Y’Allah, Moulay Hasan and Moulay Zaghal!” and the cry was taken up.

  The young sultan looked crestfallen. Then he held his hand up and the hall quietened. “We must indeed give thanks to the brave men who have defended our borders—my father-in-law, Sidi Ali, foremost among them. But we must also say a prayer for the souls of those lost in battle.”

  The hush dropped over the council chamber and the prayer was chanted.

  “I heard them.” The sultana’s face was as hard as an axehead. “Shouting out ‘Hasan,’ may God curse them for calling praise on his name.” We had barely been back in the Palace of Lions for a minute, but it seemed the sultana had ears everywhere. “Give me the goblet!” she demanded.

  Momo passed her the golden cup and she examined it gloatingly, running her fingers over the entwined letters of the monarchs of Castile and Aragón. “One day it will be filled with the blood of our foes and Ahmed will drink from it!”

  Mariam cradled the boy to her chest.

  “Mother! I will not have our small son turned into some sort of ghûl. Mariam and I wish for him to have a proper childhood, growing up in peace in this beautiful place. He’s not going to be a game piece in your war against my father!”

  “Ferdinand’s pride will have been stung by this defeat. He’ll be back with five times the army he took against Loja, and if you don’t defend your kingdom and show the people you’re a true leader, they’ll turn on you. They’re as fickle as cats, the Granadans, and as easily swayed as peasants everywhere.”

  “Don’t call them peasants, Mother. They are my subjects. Without them you are nothing. I am nothing.” He flung his arms wide. “Granada is nothing. I do not want my son raised in a war zone, and I do not want my people taken from their fields and pressed into battle, or run ragged with taxes. I will not enter this war.” He beckoned Mariam to follow him, and together they retreated into their private quarters, where even Aysha was forbidden to enter.

  She stared after them, her eyes narrow. “Remember my words, Blessings,” she said without looking at me. “We’ll be at war before the
almonds flower.”

  15

  Kate

  THREE YEARS EARLIER

  The preparations for her wedding went by in a kind of speed-blur. Kate felt at one remove, but James had taken it upon himself to organize everything. He had met with the bishop, bringing with him Ingrid’s death certificate; booked a local church (after charming the vicar with his knowledge of ecclesiastical architecture and mention of his long line of local ancestors); secured a country house for the reception; whittled down the invitation list to a chosen few; booked caterers and a florist; ordered the rings. He was a whirlwind, charged with ever-increasing energy. Whenever she was in his presence, Kate felt oddly docile, powerless and exhausted.

  “I need time to think, and there is no time,” she told Jess. “I spend my whole life assimilating information then coding it, but everything in my life is moving so fast I’m not getting the chance to take it in, and when I ask him to slow down so I can think about it, he gets angry with me.”

  That very morning she had queried some small detail—she couldn’t even remember what it was—only to have him glare at her. Was that rage in his eyes? It was gone as swiftly as it had appeared, like a smothered fire. “Why don’t you organize it, then? I’m more than happy to hand the whole thing over to you: the menu, the wine, the flowers, the cake, the string quartet, the photographer, the lot.” He ticked them off, one by one. “Because I’d love to be able to get some work done, you know. Believe me, I’d love that. I do have a bloody business to run.”

  Kate had felt her eyes fill with tears. But instead of apologizing for his shortness, James had stormed off, leaving her to pour her complaints down the line to her sister.

  “At least James really seems to want to marry you,” Jess snorted. “I got the sense with Evan I was trapping him in a corner and pinning him in place with marquee tent pegs and buttonholes.”