Court of Lions

by Jane Johnson

  Between them they worked out that this equated to “minx” in English, and Kate felt an absurd rush of relief, but it was short-lived. Didn’t cousins marry in many other cultures? Anyway, why did it matter? This man was nothing to her: she’d only just met him. But he inhabited her dreams by day and by night. And she felt the aftershock of his electric touch still.

  “She lives here, your cousin?”

  A lazy smile. “She lives here. The whole family lives here.” He let the moments stretch annoyingly. “Except me, of course.”

  Kate felt her shoulders drop. “Oh. You live somewhere else?”

  He lounged back on the cushions, so that the candlelight gilded his cheek and the tendons of his neck. The gesture was brazenly sexual: it offered his body up to her view, and he knew it—she knew he knew it. Then he tilted his head toward her. “Would you like to see where I live?”

  If Kate’s groin could talk, it would have shouted yes. But her mouth said quietly, “I hardly know you.”

  She was saved by the reappearance of Khadija. “You two look deep in conversation,” she said. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

  Abdou gathered his knees to his chest and sat up. “Not at all, Mother. In fact, we’ve been meaning to share something with you. I just didn’t want to do it with curious eyes around.”

  Kate stared at him nervously, but when he drew out the wallet and extracted from it the folded card the same way he had the night before in the Nest of Storks, she understood. He laid the two fragments side by side on the white cloth and looked at his mother. “I found one of these in the wall we were repairing in the Tower of the Captive, and Kate found the other.”

  “You should have brought them to me immediately!” Khadija said, shocked. “Or to one of the other conservators. They could be important!”

  “I know,” Abdou said. “But when I found the first one, it looked like nothing at all, just a scrap of paper with faint markings on it. On the day we found the second, in the Tower of the Captive, I was…distracted.” He slid a look at Kate that made her heart stutter. “It was only when Kate showed me the one she’d found that I realized they must be linked. I took them to Córdoba to show them to Dr. Hamza.”

  “Without telling me?”

  He shrugged. “I didn’t want to tell you in case they were nothing. But look, here they are.”

  Khadija bent her head over the scraps of paper. Silence fell as she studied the inscribed lines.

  “They resemble Viking runes,” Kate said. “Or even Greek.”

  Khadija looked up at her son, astonished. “It’s Tamazight!”

  “That’s what he said. No one’s ever found anything like it before in Granada.”

  For a minute or more the two of them chattered like magpies, till Kate felt like screaming.

  At last—very patiently, she thought—she said, “Would you mind speaking English?”

  They both turned and stared at her. Khadija apologized. “It’s just that this is an extraordinary find. These fragments are written in a dialect of Berber, or rather, a very old form of it, from the south, out of the desert. There are scholars who claim that Tamazight is one of the most ancient languages in the world, that it has links to Punic and Old Phoenician, and so was at the root of Greek, and thus all Western languages, so you weren’t too wide of the mark.” Her eyes were gleaming. “It started as an inscribed language. Carved into stone. That’s why it has so many straight lines.”

  “Can you read them?” her son asked. “Dr. Hamza could make out only a word here and there. But he says it’s definitely the Tifinagh, probably a Saharan form.”

  “Tifinagh?” Kate asked.

  “That’s our alphabet,” Abdou said. “I recognize some of the symbols. Here—” he traced the shape of what resembled a sideways W “—and this—” a backward E. “But,” he looked up at Kate again “I can’t even write my own name in my own language.”

  Khadija picked up the first fragment and frowned over it. “Our language was suppressed for centuries, first by the Romans, then when the Arabs first conquered North Africa in the eighth century. Even as recently as the 1990s people were getting imprisoned for using it in Morocco, including my own father. It was thought that by making our language illegal they could force our people to their way of thinking, destroy our identity, render us subservient. It had quite the opposite effect.”

  “The Imazighen fought them hard,” Abdou said. “We have a long history of rebellion, whether we were in the mountains, in the desert margins or the alleys of the Albayzín. And all that time we kept our language alive by speaking it in secret. Even now, two thousand years later, we carry it with us wherever we go, this pride in our identity, this resistant spirit, no matter how others treat us. We carry it in our hearts. Not that it does us much good. See this here? This is the sign of the Free People.” On the paper he pointed to a symbol like opposed brackets, the lower one facing down, the upper one with arms raised, a vertical line making the body.

  “I’ve seen that graffitied on walls,” Kate said thoughtfully. She had also seen it at the Nest of Storks. Did that mean it was a place where rebellion brewed? Wasn’t there one right outside the house? She wondered what that might mean. “So there are people around who can write in Tamazight then?”

  Khadija smiled. “There are some academics studying it now. And a simplified form of it was reintroduced to schools in Morocco in 2003. But for the truly old version of the language you’ll need a Kel Tamasheq woman from the Sahara Desert.”

  “Kel Tamasheq?” Kate queried; those were not words with which she was familiar.

  “Westerners call them the Tuareg.”

  Kate frowned.

  “The nomadic peoples of the Sahara.”

  A vague image emerged from Kate’s memory. “Really? The women in blue, with the veils, on camels?”

  “Those are the men—they’re even called the Blue Men, because of the staining of the indigo dye from the veils on their skin.” Khadija laughed. “The women of the tribes don’t veil. But they’re the ones who carry the tradition, passing it down to their daughters. It’s said they use the Tifinagh for spells and love charms.”

  20

  Blessings

  1483

  I learned the Tifinagh at my mother’s knee, in the privacy of her tent. Among the tribes everything belongs to the women—the tents, the rugs, the silver, the lineage, the language. The men have their camels, their salt and their trade money. They come and they go, the men. Mainly go, leaving the women to run things, and to raise the children and teach us their secrets.

  I don’t know why there was only me in the tent, no brothers or sisters. Maybe something happened during my birth that meant that my mother couldn’t have other children. Or perhaps she chose not to: after all, she was a wisewoman; she knew about such things—what herbs to use, what spells to cast, which djinn to summon. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have lovers—men were always coming by her tent, bringing her gifts of food and cloth and coins, and I would be shooed away with a laugh and a bauble to play with. Then, I thought how nice it was that she was loved. Now I know it was how we got by after my father left.

  “See this set of symbols?” she asked me one day, not long before she died. “This will bind a man’s soul to you.”

  I was puzzled. “Why would you want to do that?” I asked her. “Is it like binding a djinn to do your bidding?”

  She laughed at that, but in a strange, solemn manner. “It’s really very like that,” she said. “In many ways it’s just the same thing. Love has its dark side.”

  I didn’t know what she meant by that. Then.

  “Memorize the symbols, their shape and their relationship to one another. How they flow from line to line.”

  There were three lines—the top one long, the middle one shorter, the third just two words long: “to me” by name. This much I knew. When she erased the writing with a sweep of the hand and then patted the sand flat and smooth for me to prove the lesson, I wrot
e it out, quick and sharp. Three lines, from left to right in the normal way, blunt symbols and unfussy strokes, not like the writing of the Arabs, with its curls and flourishes and its strange right-side start. The Arabs came, sometimes alone on horseback to do business at the camp, to buy sheeny indigo cloth from the south, cones of salt from Taodenni; sometimes with slaves. Their horses were neat-hoofed and shiny, quieter, smaller and more elegant than the camels. But their shit smelled much the same. Thinking this, I had inscribed the word for shit in the sand and then sniggered at my own boldness. My mother rewarded this levity with a painful flick of my ear. “Never mock writing, child,” my mother told me severely. “Letters are sacred things, full of power.”

  At that age I couldn’t understand how scribblings could possibly contain anything much, but I don’t claim to have been the brightest student.

  Now I framed the words with a cartouche, to prevent their power from leaking. Often we would write such spells on a bit of thin parchment and confine the parchment within a silver amulet, for the same reason: to contain its power and keep it secret. I wore several such pinned to my clothes. “To protect you,” my mother said. Even our goats wore them, on their collars. But it didn’t do them much good when my mother died. Or me either.

  Even so, I wore them now. Superstition is strong, especially in dire circumstances, and these were the direst of circumstances. I had charms sewn into the hem of my robe, in an amulet beneath my shirt, on the lining of my cap. From head to toe I was wreathed with enchantments, invoking every wild spirit of the desert of my youth, every djinn and minor goddess whose name I could summon. I was taking no chances, for I was about to enter the lair of the enemy. I was about to place myself, voluntarily, in the hands of the very infidel. Love can make you do mad things.

  After the knights had captured Momo I had waited there in the stream, frozen in misery and fear. It had taken some time to disentangle myself from the oleander, mainly as I couldn’t see for tears. I had followed my lord as the enemy moved him from town to town and tower to tower, until at last we came to the place I knew as Bulkuna, which the Castilians called Porcuna. Here, on a promontory overlooking the Guadalquivir valley, lay an old fortress. And in its greatest tower Momo was held prisoner. It loomed above me, its massive walls broken only by arrow-slits and small arched, lobed windows high, high up. The stonework was new and solidly mortared, leaving little in the way of holds: I could not climb so high; nor was this a prison from which Momo could escape by tying a few veils together. So, cunning it would have to be.

  Listening to the chatter in the market, where I read palms for a few days, I found out that the men charged with the care of my lord were the Count of Cabra, Don Diego Fernández of Córdoba, and a man called “the Great Captain.” After gleaning as much information as I could in the town beneath the fortress, I changed out of the fortune-telling garb I’d purloined from various washing lines back into the fine costume in which I had so foolishly gone to battle, long since washed of blood and the slime of the river below Lucena, and made myself known to the guards at the postern gate as a scribe, recruited into the service of the Count of Cabra.

  They searched me roughly for weapons before passing me into the hands of the men who stood guard at the castle proper. These guards took greater liberties, as if knowing themselves more powerful than those farther from the castle’s heart. They were free with their words, freer still with their hands. I hoped my spells would protect me and steeled myself not to react.

  “Hey, what’s this?”

  The guard with a wart on his nose had reached my false foot. He tapped it with a finger, puzzled, then with the butt of his dagger, and it gave back a solid thonk, nothing like the sound of live flesh encased in leather. He tried the same with my other leg, causing me to yelp, which made him grin.

  “See him dance. He’s a lively one, eh?” He grinned up at me, his teeth showing through the stained hair of his moustache.

  I gave him back a look that should have seen him dead many times over.

  “Oho,” chuckled Wart-nose. “I don’t think he likes me.”

  “Who does?” said his companion quietly.

  But Wart-nose was now too busy prying the gold leaf off my false foot to pay attention to the insult. I watched with some annoyance as a good-sized piece was peeled away: the guards at the gate had taken the few coins I possessed and the gold leaf was all I had of any value for bribes or paying for horses.

  “It’s cursed, that gold,” I said in decent Castilian.

  Wart-nose fell back on his arse, the gold falling from his fingers as if it burned.

  The other guard laughed. “Perhaps the lad isn’t a Moor after all.”

  “Quite right, I am not,” I said, which was true.

  Wart-nose swore again. “Well, what in God’s name is he doing sneaking into Porcuna with a gold-plated leg and such outlandish gear?” He heaved himself to his feet.

  “I’ve come to render service to the Count of Cabra,” I told him.

  “What service?” Wart-nose sneered.

  “I am a scribe and a scholar,” I said, which clearly didn’t impress them. “And I can tell fortunes from the lines God has inscribed on every man’s palm.”

  “Fortunes? The count doesn’t need his fortune told. Not while he’s working for the blessed Isabella.”

  “Tell mine,” said the other, thrusting a gnarly hand at me. “And make sure it includes owning a vineyard and a brothel.”

  I made a deal of scanning the lines between the dirt and calluses. “A vineyard, a brothel and the auto da fe,” I said, and watched as he paled. “Shall I tell yours?” I asked Wart-nose. “Perhaps it will end better than your colleague’s.”

  “Perhaps I should lob you over the wall.”

  “Lob who over the wall?” asked a man with a lion’s mane of yellow-brown hair, who was suddenly rounding the far corner of the corridor. His voice held authority.

  I took in the details I had learned to note of during my begging days. Plain clothing, but of good quality: not much embroidery, but what was there was expensive and laced with silver thread. Not gold, then: second son? Scuffed boots bespoke a contempt for both fashion and any court pecking order, which probably meant he was further up it than he might appear: hence the sudden nervous attention of the guards. As he came closer, I also noted he was trim, wore no perfume and could be no older than thirty. Not the Count of Cabra either: I knew from my eavesdropping that that gentleman was portly and middle-aged.

  “Captain.” The second guard walked on ahead and saluted him smartly.

  Shielded by his companion, Wart-nose handed the bit of gold back to me. “Not a word about this,” he said quietly, and grabbed me painfully by the upper arm to drag me before the newcomer. “Don Gonzalo.” He bowed. “We’ve checked this fellow thoroughly for weapons. He’s come here to, er, ‘render service.’”

  “As a scholar,” I said. “And a translator. I know you hold an important prisoner.”

  Don Gonzalo turned his attention to me and for a long moment we regarded each other. His broad face had lines radiating from his mouth and the corners of his eyes and spoke of decency and humour. He looked as if he’d spent considerable time outdoors, for when his face fell into repose, as it did now, those lines showed white against the darker sunburn. What he saw I could not tell: except that I was small and dark, slight and maybe a bit puzzling. Then he took the fabric of my sleeve between his finger and thumb. “No pauper,” he said, as if to himself. Assessing me just as I had assessed him. Raising his voice, he asked my name.

  “Baraka,” I said, giving the Arabic form of my name. “And indeed I am no pauper. Among my own people I’m a type of prince.”

  “A type of prince, eh?” He grinned, showing sharp incisors. “And who might your people be?” he asked in a tone of teasing disbelief.

  “There are many names for us. But I doubt you’ll know them.”

  “Try me. I’m quite well travelled. Soldiering will do that for you,
scholar.”

  “The name we give ourselves is Kel Tamasheq: Those Who Speak Tamasheq.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “That, I admit, is not a name, or a language, I know.”

  “Some call us the Blue Men.”

  “The desert dwellers who conceal their faces behind blue veils?”

  “Indigo,” I corrected him. “And we call our veil a tagelmust. The mineral that gives the blue colour protects us from djinn and dyes our skins as we cross the desert.”

  “And yet, you do not have a blue skin.”

  I inclined my head. “I left my people at an early age.”

  “Sounds like a tall tale, but one I’d like to hear. Doing guard duty in a castle is dull work. Come.” He beckoned me to follow him. As we passed the guards, they snapped to attention. “Are there other names by which your people are known?” Don Gonzalo asked as we started up some stone stairs. He took them two at a time with his long stride; I could barely keep up with him.

  “Our enemies call us the Tuareg, Those Abandoned by God,” I said a little breathlessly as I hobbled after him.

  The stairs circled upon themselves like a sleeping snake. He was so far ahead of me now he hardly had to turn his head to regard me. “Don’t let the Inquisition hear that or you’ll be put to the question.”

  His tone was solemn; my heart knocked against my ribs. On the road between Lucena and Porcuna I had heard stories of the Inquisition—the religious zealots appointed by Queen Isabella to drive the kingdom back to her God. Mostly they were spoken of with fear; but there were a few voices that claimed the Inquisition courts were fairer than those that had preceded them, for they accepted no bribes. I had even seen two of their men striding through the streets here—black-robed with gaunt faces, whose dark-ringed eyes suggested they did not sleep well after witnessing the rackings, the red-hot pincers, the extraction of teeth and nails, the breaking of fingers and limbs; as if the stench of the auto da fe haunted their unpillowed, lonely beds.

  I hoped, with a sudden cold sensation, that they were not here for Momo.