Court of Lions

by Jane Johnson

  By the time she was released it was clear that her sister and her baby had bonded, and Kate felt excluded and yet again worthless. Every occasion she held Luke, he wailed. Nothing she could do was right. After enduring two months of this—a terrible, traumatic time—by mutual agreement she had handed her baby over to Jess, and fled to Spain.

  16

  Blessings

  GRANADA

  1483

  Some battles you can’t win. Some should never be fought at all. When it came to pitting himself against his mother’s will, Momo was always going to come off second best.

  “I have no experience in battle.”

  “High time you acquired some, then.”

  “Our forces are divided.”

  Aysha jabbed a finger into her son’s chest. “I keep telling you: you’re the one who should be riding out to do battle with our enemies, claiming the glory, not that bastard and his brute of a brother.”

  “Mariam is pregnant again. She needs me by her side.”

  Aysha threw back her head and laughed. “Men! Your place is not in the birthing room but on the battlefield!”

  “But no one’s attacking us,” Momo said unhappily. “The defeat at Loja stopped them.”

  “All the more reason for you to strike the first blow. What will your people say if you let your ninety-year-old father-in-law take all the glory while you sit on your hands with the harem women, waiting for your wife to deliver? They’ve already risen up once, to place you the throne. Do you think they won’t do so again if they’re disappointed in you?”

  Momo clenched his jaw. “War does not benefit our people: they starve and suffer or are pressed to be soldiers and die for want of training or care, when all they want is to tend their animals and their land, their shops and their families. They need peace in which to thrive. We should renew the treaty with the Castilians and negotiate for a lasting peace.”

  Her hand shot out and clouted him around the head. “You’re a coward!” she screeched. “I’m ashamed of you!”

  Her hand had raised a wide red welt. I wanted to sink my teeth into her throat and rip bloody chunks out of her. I wanted to drag her heart from her chest.

  But Momo was deadly calm. “Call me a coward, then. Call me whatever you want. But know that when I ride to war as you demand, I go unwillingly.”

  Some short weeks later we rode out to war. Unwilling though he was, Momo put a brave face on it. When he walked into the courtyard, my breath caught inside me like a knife, he was so beautiful. His marlota was of brocaded crimson velvet, the colour of the Banu Ahmar, with wide skirts and belled sleeves. A white cloak swirled around his shoulders and there was gold in his turban and on the breastplate he wore over the robe. At his side hung a gold-hilted sword in an extravagantly decorated scabbard. I knew it well: I had polished it for him many times. Among the twining arabesques that decorated it was engraved the motto of the Nasrid dynasty: Only God is victorious. I had always thought it an unfortunate reminder of man’s frailty. Surely if you were riding to war, you should carry a more bombastic weapon.

  Careless of the proprieties, Mariam came running out into the courtyard, her feet bare, her hair loose and wild. “You can’t leave me here alone with her! You will die and I will be a widow!” She caught Momo by the cloak, her fingers like talons.

  Patiently Momo unpicked them and held her hands between his. “My love, you know this isn’t my free choice. I would never willingly leave you and our son.”

  She pulled his hands down to her belly. “Our sons.”

  I watched his face contort as he fought his emotions. Enfolding her in his arms, the great white cloak making a single creature of them, he sobbed into her hair.

  I turned away, ashamed of him. This was not asshak. I limped across the marble, between the flowering jasmine and slender pillars, away from the sounds of sparrows and tumbling water and the cries of a terrified woman, and made my way out to the Alcazaba.

  The barracks had emptied themselves like a holed cistern. Soldiers flowed out into the square below the great towers, milling about in cheerful array. Sunlight sparked off polished helms and lances, off harness and mail: and everywhere a sense of carnival, as if we were off to stage a great parade rather than to fight barbaric men who hated us and everything we stood for and wanted nothing more than to murder us. Months of inaction will do that to soldiers: boredom inures them to the very idea of death, as if their imaginations—running after the seductive dream of glory—stop wilfully short of the sword-blow that shears off a limb, the lance-point that slides beneath a helm, the arrow that pierces the chest.

  I had never been to war, but seeing Mariam and Momo wrapped together was more than enough to make me want to saddle up and ride out. He would be mine again, in a world in which women had no place. I relished the prospect.

  But as we rode out through the city’s gate, Momo’s shining lance, held high as he led his troops to war, hit the arch stone. The gleaming blade shattered, making his great white stallion dance in panic. He caught the cantle of his saddle just in time to prevent an ignominious fall; but even so I could hear the muttering all around us: “A bad omen…” “The djinn…” “Just like the prophecy…” “He is cursed…” I felt the impact as if it were a part of me that broke, and knew in that instant that we rode to our doom.

  It had been a dry winter and the plain beneath the city was as dry as the desert. Stirred by our horses’ hoofs, it rose around us in clouds.

  At Momo’s instigation, I sat backward on my horse, to be his eyes.

  “I mustn’t look back. Tell me, can you see her?”

  “She’s still watching. You make it sound like one of the old tales, as if you’ll be cursed,” I teased him, glancing at him over my shoulder. “Turned to stone?”

  “My heart is like a stone. It must be: I am the commander of the faithful now, and a commander must never look back or he will be lost.”

  I had never heard him talk like this. Never heard him call himself “commander.” Here was a change.

  We rode on.

  “Can you still see her?”

  I could see nothing but dust and sunlight and men and horses now. Even the great promontory on which the Alhambra sprawled was gone from view, erased by our miasma, as if—peaceful and serene—it occupied another world to the one we now entered, one of violence and horror, in which its tranquil courtyards and sky-reflecting pools, its cool pillars and sacred geometries, had no place.

  “She is still watching,” I lied.

  A little way into the hills on the following day, a stab of orange amid the scrub hooked my eye. I peered at it warily, thinking thoughts of ambush, but a few moments later when I caught sight of it again, I was sure it was an animal, and a small one at that. I watched it disappear into the dark vegetation between the boulders in the barranca; then suddenly it was running right in front of us and I saw it was a fox, lithe and fleet, with a sharp muzzle and beady black eyes. Someone made the sign of the evil eye against it, and my heart chilled as I remembered the fox in the kitchens at Loja, expiring painfully from the poison La Sabia had put in the jug of sherbet meant for Momo and his bride.

  “We should turn back,” I said to Momo. “That’s two warnings now, and I doubt we’ll be blessed with a third.”

  He gave me a sharp look. “You’re such a heathen, Blessings.” His dark eyes scanned my face and I saw his expression soften. “You’re afraid. I understand that. But there’s no shame in being afraid of your first foray to war.”

  “I am afraid,” I admitted. “But for you, not myself.”

  “Don’t fear for me: my fate is written.”

  And still we rode on, to his fate.

  Some battles you can never win. Some should never be fought at all. Lucena was one such.

  Did they know we were coming, the Christians? Had their scouts spied our army from afar? Had Ali Attar’s column, joining us from Loja, alerted them to our presence? We saw fires in the hills as we crossed the border: I kno
w now they had been set to pass the message. At dawn, with fog covering the hills and ravines, they caught us in a marshy river valley where our horses got bogged down in the soft ground, churning up the mud so badly the foot soldiers could barely make progress. The enemy came out of the mist like phantoms, so many they were uncountable. “All Andalusia is against us!” cried Momo’s father-in-law. The old man looked frightened, and he was never frightened. “Flee now, my lord—there are too many of them!”

  But Momo would not run. We would stand and fight, and we did, bravely. All might have been well had my mount not got tangled with an oleander. I was dumped in the river, where, unable to stand, my false foot caught up in roots and stones, cold water up over my shoulders, threatening to take me under, I cried out. If I hadn’t, he might have saved himself. But I couldn’t stop myself. “Help me, Momo!”

  Some Special Guardian I was. Bound to protect him, I was the one who placed him in harm’s way. Because, instead of being the commander of the faithful, acting for the good of his army and realm, he came for me.

  “Blessings, stay there—don’t move!”

  He rode his white stallion through the muddy river. It loomed bright against the dark waters, as bright as a star, making the clearest target any infidel could ever wish for. And just as he dismounted to rescue me, a pair of enemy knights appeared, their vast chargers wading through the shallows. One grabbed the stallion’s reins; the other leapt from his saddle and set about Momo. For a brief, heart-stopping time the two of them traded blows. His opponent was a head taller, a giant. He pressed forward, taking advantage of Momo being unable to turn. Momo took a step backward and disappeared suddenly from view where the riverbed shelved. Sword in hand, he came back up spluttering, helmet askew, blade swinging, water arcing off his cloak. The knights laughed at him. The one not holding the horse ran under his sword arm and shoved him backward and he fell again, and this time they were both on him, and I could do nothing but watch helplessly as they pinned him between them and twisted the decorated sword out of his hands.

  Then one of them dealt him a blow with the hilt that knocked him unconscious. I shrank into the embrace of the oleander, smelling its deadly flowers, as they unceremoniously threw him over the saddle of his useless warhorse and led their prizes away.

  Twenty-two Muslim battle flags fell into Christian hands that day. And our sultan, my beloved, was taken to the Torre del Moral in Lucena, in chains.

  Only God is victorious.

  17

  Kate

  NOW

  “Luke! Luke, is that you? It’s Mummy.”

  There was a moment of puzzled silence that made the breath catch in her chest as she waited for him to speak. Did he even remember her? Time moved so slowly when you were a child, so fast as you aged. If he had forgotten her, it was no more than she deserved, abandoning him as she had. No, she corrected herself, not abandoned. Left safely with Jess, her sister; her twin, who loved him dearly.

  Perhaps he was confused. She and Jess were not identical, but they were very similar. Medium height, slim build, dark haired, dark eyed. Perhaps he thought of Jess as his mother now, and her as some distant relation, barely recalled. So long as he felt secure and loved, that was really all that mattered; but, oh, how she missed him! Too many conflicting emotions threatened to choke her as tears began to gather. She swallowed them down, reached for calmness.

  “Mummy?” Luke’s voice was querulous.

  “Are you all right, darling? Where are you?”

  “In the car.” He sounded much surer of this. “Going fast!”

  “Oh.” She had called Jess, so Luke must have picked up her phone. How did a toddler know how to swipe screens and press buttons? “Well, that’s fun. I hope not too fast. Can you ask Auntie Jess to call me when she can? When you get out of the car?”

  “Okay. I saw a—”

  He had moved away from the phone: all she could hear now was the distant rumble of tires on tarmac, and the muted voice of her sister. Then Luke bellowed, “A seal! I seen a seal! In the sea.” Kate’s grin stretched wide. “Did you? See a seal? How brilliant.”

  “He was wimmin.”

  “Swimming?”

  “Wimmin.”

  Solemn and pedantically corrective even when he was in the wrong, just like his father, even the disapproving intonation. It was such a tiny thing, but it struck her hard.

  For a second she remembered her child’s violent conception: then the painful memory was obliterated by a ray of golden light, and in her mind’s eye she saw Abdou, intent on the intricate zellij tiling, as beatific and mystical as an angel in a medieval painting.

  Luke’s excited gabble chased her thoughts away. “Then we went to a plees station.”

  She frowned. “What was that?”

  “Plees. Pleees station.”

  “Police? A police station? Why did you go to the police station? Jess! Can you hear me? Has something happened?”

  No reply. She heard the crunching of tires on gravel. Then Jess’s voice came on the line. “It’s okay—don’t worry—just something I wanted to follow up. Look, I’ll call you when we get back to the cottage, all right? There’s too much to say, and it’s not for small ears.”

  For the next twenty minutes Kate paced the apartment, unable to still her rising panic, unable to do anything useful. She hated herself.

  When her phone rang at last, it seemed startlingly loud, the minimal furnishings of her rented flat doing nothing to dampen the strident ring tone.

  “It was the foot,” Jess said without preamble, throwing Kate completely.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know how he found the farmhouse, but he did, and when I opened the door, he saw it —I was using it, the foot, the one you gave me, as a doorstop.”

  Kate went cold. The wretched Moroccan foot that had come from James’s antiques shop. She had never been able to find a place for it in the cottage, so it had been relegated to the boot of her car, whence Jess had claimed it with gusto. “What a weird and brilliant thing! I love it.” She’d even had Sarah restore it, cleaning it up, painting gold leaf into the carved arabesques that decorated it, till it looked resplendent, more vase than prosthetic.

  “He thought I was you, tried to push his way in—”

  “What?” Kate’s voice rose to a shriek.

  “Calm down—let me finish, okay?”

  Kate took several deep breaths. “Okay. Sorry.”

  “I pretended Evan was still with me. I shouted for him and James backed off, but said he’d return.”

  “My God, my God!”

  “It was pretty unnerving, I’ll admit it, especially when I remembered what he did to you. So I put Luke in the car and drove down to Sarah’s. Kate, you know what you said about his wife, about how she fell off the cliff? I’ve been thinking—what if he pushed her?”

  “You don’t think that didn’t occur to me? I searched online and came up with nothing.”

  “I know, but I wanted to check for myself. So I thought I’d visit the local police here in Cornwall, see if they had anything on record.”

  Kate felt her stomach muscles tighten. “And did they?”

  “Not a thing. That’s quite strange, isn’t it? No missing person report for a woman of her age or description. Not for that whole summer, or the one before or after, in case the dates were fuzzy.”

  “He said the body washed up down the coast and he identified it.”

  “I checked with the local coroner too. No mention anywhere of an Ingrid Foxley. And nothing about a woman falling off a cliff, except for a sixteen-year-old tanked up on cider who fell off rocks near Mousehole and got helicoptered to hospital. That was it.”

  Kate mulled this over. “Okay,” she said at last. “Well, I saw the death certificate he took to the bishop.” She paused. Had she? She remembered the official-looking envelope, but had she seen the actual document? She thought she had, but everything had been a bit of a blur. “I’m just glad you got Luke away,”
she said finally. “But Jess, what are you going to do? He knows where you are now—and he said he’d be back.”

  “Leave it with me. I’m going to do some more digging.”

  It was a slow shift at the bar that night. The few tourists who wandered in occupied their tables quietly and left as soon as they’d eaten. Jimena, bored and bad tempered because of the low turnover yet unable to pick holes in her staff’s performance, said something about going to see her cousin and, armed with two packets of cigarettes and her rose-embroidered shawl, stomped out, banging the door behind her.

  Immediately the atmosphere lightened, as if a stiff wind had pushed a storm front out of range. Juan winked at Kate. “Fancy a beer?” He flicked the top expertly off an Alhambra and held the bottle out to her.

  Kate shook her head. “If she catches you, she’ll kill you.”

  Juan grinned. “She’d have to catch me first.”

  “Oh, go on then,” she said. “Just a swig.”

  Juan quirked an eyebrow and handed the bottle over. “Living dangerously?”

  “Just living.”

  She watched the door nervously, till Juan burst out laughing. “For God’s sake, Anna, get it down you. She’s not a monster. She can’t be in two places at once.”

  “Of course she is, and she can.”

  “She is—you’re right.”

  They laughed nervously. Then Kate took a long swallow, savouring the bitterness as it cold-scalded the back of her throat.

  “Kate?”

  She choked. The light was behind the speaker’s head, casting his face into shadow, but she knew who it was right away. She coughed and caught hold of the bar to steady herself.