Court of Lions

by Jane Johnson

  As I left Granada for the ride back to Porcuna, Qasim placed a hand on my shoulder. Muslims believe that we all carry an angel on each shoulder: a good one on our right, to guide us through the mire of life; a bad one on the left, to tempt us into wickedness. The vizier’s hand weighed heavily upon my left shoulder. “Work your wiles, Blessings,” was all he said as he sent me away to break my beloved’s heart.

  I went straight to the Count of Cabra with the sultana’s offer. He bade me remain in the corridor outside while he discussed it with his nephew and cousin. (Of course I listened.) They would not let me see Momo. At last the Great Captain came out and told me to prepare myself for a ride to Córdoba.

  In a dark antechamber in the enemy’s palace I kicked my heels, waiting for the call to aid in the presentation of Aysha’s offer. I half dreaded the audience, half wished for it. The sooner it could be done, the sooner I would be out of this place, and the sooner I would see Momo after all these weeks. But if our proposal won approval, I would have to break the awful terms to him. For a moment I could not help but hope it would be rejected. But that would condemn him to certain death…

  “Cheer up, youngster. The heavens have not yet fallen!”

  I turned the best glare I could muster upon this speaker, giving him the evil eye. He seemed entirely oblivious to my ill-will but clapped me upon the shoulder. You’d have thought from his exclamation that he would be advanced in years, but I judged him to be around thirty, with his bluff, smiling face and unruly bush of curly dark hair. His shirt was stained, a cuff ragged; his shoes scuffed; and he held a bundle of ungovernable, ever-unspringing scrolls under his arm: a beggar-ruffian down on his luck, come to beg money for some mad scheme. I dismissed him and turned away to wallow in my miserable thoughts.

  “My name’s Cristóbal, what’s yours?”

  I ignored him.

  “Of course, that’s not what I was christened, but you know these people, they hate foreigners, so I always use the local version. Cristoforo is what they call me back in Genoa. I’m here to see the king and queen.”

  Given that we were in the antechamber to the royal audience room, this hardly needed saying. I sighed and wished him elsewhere. I needed to summon every iota of my eloquence and calm if I was to save my friend.

  “That’s an interesting necklace,” he said, determined to worm his way into my attention.

  “It’s an amulet,” I replied curtly; but my tone did not stop him.

  “I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and I’ve travelled widely.”

  “Not as far as the Sahara, then.”

  He conceded this. “I hear the Great Desert is a sea of sand. Perhaps I should visit it—seas are my speciality.”

  I hated it when people said this of the desert. The dunes were hot and full of life, their curves and angles resembling those of a human body, while the sea was cold and grey and hideous. “My people use such amulets to navigate themselves by the stars across the great emptiness.” I thought that might shut him up.

  I could not have chosen words more likely to invigorate him if I’d tried. He prattled on and on about different forms of navigation—about sunstones and lodestones and some Arab instrument called the qarib, which he wanted to learn more about. “The stars are the navigator’s friend,” he said, and then recited by heart an excerpt of a long poem by a Greek in which some woman called Calypso told a man whose name I failed to grasp that he must sail keeping the Great Bear on his left while at the same time observing the position of the seven-starred constellation known as the Pleiades.

  Against my best instincts, I found myself drawn in by this. “The Great Bear? That must be Dubhe. And we call the constellation the Seven Daughters.”

  Soon he had his charts down on the floor and I was showing him how the sharpest angle of the amulet was lined up on the North Star, with the circle that represented the Earth pointing down, and the painful wait evaporated into a magical mist of travellers’ tales and grand schemes. When the Great Captain appeared, he had to call my name twice before he could get my attention, so thoroughly were the navigator and I engrossed.

  I had been looking forward, with a macabre curiosity, to laying eyes on the foreign monarchs, but it seemed I was not to be accorded that honour. The deal for Momo’s freedom—such as it was—was done over a candlelit table with dark-robed men with the pale faces and pinched eyes of court scribes who rarely saw daylight. It involved an immense sum of money, the release of all the Christian captives held by the Banu Serraj and the special seal to the bargain of which I could not bear to speak. Don Gonzalo took over when my voice dried to a whisper, and the scribes bent their heads over the table, dipped their quills in their ink and scratched out the terrible words.

  Back at Porcuna, after an absence of two months, I raced up the stairs as fast someone with one good leg could manage. Although I was caught between yearning to see Momo and the exquisite dread of telling him of the terrible proposition, I knew I had to get to him before his captors. “I’m back!” I flung open the door, panting.

  Momo sprang up from his chair, in its usual position by the window that showed him the world but would not open, nor even allow him to breathe the air beyond its diamond panes. His embrace was fierce, and how I savoured it. Then he held me away from him and I felt my heart unravel like a fast-blossoming flower under his regard. How pale he looked, I thought. And thin too. “Are you not eating?” I asked, at the same time as he said, “And how is my Mariam?”

  My heart fell into my stump.

  “Was she well? Is her pregnancy weighing her down? Is my mother taking proper care of her?”

  “Her father died in the battle, and she’s finding it hard to endure living under Lalla Aysha’s rule in the family house, now that your father has taken back the Alhambra. So she’s sad, and missing you. Though she’s eating a lot to comfort herself and her unborn child: she’s got quite fat.” Such unnecessary spite. To make small amends I added quickly, “My sultan.”

  Momo sighed. “I miss her so.” He rested his head against the stone window frame. “Sultans come and go as they please. They ride and hunt and walk in their gardens. They fly their hawks and go among their people. They play with their children and lie with their wives. They aren’t locked in a tiny room, denied their freedom.”

  For a prison cell the room was huge, but I knew better than to quibble. Beyond him the view showed sun-seared grass browning on the hilltops. There had been no rain since we’d lost the battle at Lucena. In the Moorish villages I’d heard them speak of “the little king” as a talismanic figure: they believed that their crops were failing because of his imprisonment, and that only when he was released would the world right itself once more.

  Momo turned back to me, his eyes burning. “Does my son flourish? I can’t bear that Ahmed can’t play in the Alhambra gardens and watch the sun shimmering in the pools; or run through the orchards, gathering fruit, as you and I did at his age.”

  I didn’t correct him. Ahmed was barely three; I hadn’t arrived at the palace till I was gone ten. Inside me, my heart shrivelled like the sere grass.

  “Does he speak of me? Does he miss me as much as I miss him?”

  Like a dog he had unerringly gone to the meat. Stupid Blessings, get on with it: tell him what you must tell him. I had just opened my mouth to frame the awful words, when the door flew open to admit the Count of Cabra’s nephew (also Diego) and Don Gonzalo, the Great Captain. I recognized the nephew as one of the two huge knights who had battled Momo in the river at Lucena, but Momo greeted him warmly, and the young man responded in halting Arabic. It seemed while I had been gone he’d acquired a new friend.

  “Am I to be released?” Momo asked eagerly.

  “Things are moving in that direction,” Don Gonzalo replied. “The sultana’s offer appears to have swayed our queen’s judgment toward that end.”

  I mumbled my way through the translation and watched Momo’s face soften. “My wife’s letter must have touched her h
eart.”

  So he really did think he was still the sultan and Mariam his sultana.

  “The offer came from your mother,” I corrected gently. “But you must acquiesce to the terms and sign the contract before matters can move on.”

  “Thank you, thank you,” Momo said over and over in Castilian. “Just bring me the contract and I’ll sign it straight away.”

  “Be calm, my lord,” I begged him. “Please. You must listen to the terms.”

  “I am to be released!” He was almost dancing with delight, there was so much restless energy coursing through his pent-up frame. “I’ll be with Mariam before the birth of our new son.”

  “Amghrar,” I said quickly in Tamasheq. My chief. I had spent these last months teaching him to speak and to read the language, for times when we needed to communicate in a way that no other could understand. I watched his face go still.

  “What you mean?” He didn’t speak it well.

  “Don’t betray in any way that I’m telling you something shocking.”

  He was staring at me now. “My God, tell me now or I die.”

  “Smile,” I told him.

  The smile he gave me was ghastly with anxiety.

  “Your mother has offered your son as part of the agreement. As a hostage. To be held by the foreign monarchs against your good behaviour.”

  The smile became a rictus. Tears welled, and I was embarrassed for him, that he should so lose his asshak as to show his emotions in front of these strangers. “Smile!” I ordered him ruthlessly. “You mustn’t show them your weakness: don’t hand them more power over you than they already have.”

  “Stop this! I pay you to translate, not to chatter.” The count’s brown gaze had become as hard as glass. “As for you, sir,” he said, addressing Momo, “I expect you to behave as befits a noble captive and not to conspire in front of my eyes.”

  The Great Captain intervened now, his golden gaze curious. “What’s this secret language you speak together? I don’t recognize it.”

  I braced myself, but it was Momo who replied, channelling his sorrow into cold anger. “It is the language spoken by the original conqueror of this land, Tariq bin Ziyad, the tongue of the mountains and the deserts, of those who stand against oppression, of those who came this place with philosophers and poets, men who made engines and men who read stars, who brought bathhouses and running water when your kings smelled like rats and could not even write their own names.”

  I translated this into Castilian as fast as I could and watched as the lords’ expressions changed. They had thought Momo weak and pliable, a pawn on the chessboard they could move where they wished to gain the best advantage. They’d come to bring him the terms of a truce that suited them well, and had expected him to roll over like a dog for it.

  “Don’t think me a child you can make plots around! Don’t smile and pretend to be my friend, then treat me like a slave! I come from a long, proud line of kings, and I am no fool. If you want to talk cold, hard business, you had best present your terms.”

  When I translated this, the Count of Cabra nodded. “In that case, sire, we’ll sit down like civilized men and I’ll lead you through the treaty that has been drafted.”

  They assumed their places at the octagonal table, with the Great Captain and young Diego standing behind the count, and me at Momo’s left shoulder. The Count of Cabra explained the proposition Aysha had made, taking his time to spell out the sums of money involved in both the gold doblas of al-Andalus and the maravedis of Castile. Tribute would be paid annually, as it had in the time of Momo’s father (till he stopped) and grandfather. All this Momo agreed to: there were no surprises here, although the sums were huge. “War is more expensive than peace,” he said, “and if I must sell the sovereignty of the last Muslim kingdom in the peninsula to gain the safety of my people, I will. I do not wish to see my towns besieged and my people starved into submission while their wells are poisoned and their crops burned, or preside over a land full of weeping women and fatherless children. If I must humble myself by presenting myself as a vassal to your king, then so be it.”

  As I translated, the count nodded, and made a note in the margin. “You will be a vassal to both our monarchs, not just to King Ferdinand,” he said mildly. “Queen Isabella has had as much to do with this agreement as her husband and holds at least equal power in the conjoined kingdoms. And so we pass to the matter of those Christian prisoners your allies hold captive.”

  Momo inclined his head. “We will give her plenty of souls back, which will no doubt assuage the lady’s tender heart.”

  The Great Captain smothered a smile.

  “I don’t think the Castilian queen is that sort of woman,” I said quietly.

  For a long time Momo and the count dickered over the exact number of prisoners to be released, and at last fixed upon four hundred captives up front to be followed by seventy each year. I was surprised at how hard Momo bargained over these terms. I supposed he was showing his mettle, knowing what was to come.

  “In addition, the emira has offered one more provision, which Queen Isabella is particularly happy to accept.” The count had the grace to flush as he read out the hard words, and I felt rather than saw the way Momo gritted his teeth as his son’s fate was spelled out to him.

  “This is a bitter draught to swallow,” he said at last, and I was proud at how he mastered himself. “He is my firstborn, my one and only child.”

  “The queen recognizes the generosity of the offer and makes an offer in her turn: young Ahmed will be raised in the royal court as if he were her own son, alongside her own children, who are of much the same age. He will want for nothing.”

  When I translated this, Momo turned his face to me, and his eyes blazed. “Want for nothing? What about the love of a mother and father? What about the most beautiful home in this world? What about his birthright and the faith of his ancestors?”

  I relayed this to the count.

  “I understand your qualms, sire: it is surely a hard clause to accept. But it’s key to the whole agreement. Our queen adores children: your son will be greatly cosseted.”

  “But he’s a son of the Nasrid line: how can he be raised by Christians? How will he know the word of Allah in a court of heathens?”

  I must admit I did in some small ways reword this furious question.

  “Be reassured he’ll be well taught,” the count said. “He’ll learn all he must of statecraft and kingship.”

  “And when he’s of an age, will she turn him over to the Inquisition?”

  He was being mulish now: he knew there was no way around it. “Be calm, my lord,” I said softly. “You can have other sons.”

  “I can’t believe Mariam agreed to this.”

  I knew she had not. I said nothing, imagining how this new blow would fall upon his poor young wife, who was already so distressed.

  The look he gave me was so agonized that I felt as if he had stuck me with a lance. I deserved his anger, and more.

  At last he nodded. “I agree,” he said hoarsely, then laid his head on his arms and refused to speak again.

  22

  In the dog days of summer we were summoned to Córdoba.

  I went racing up the tower steps with a smart new robe for Momo to wear, but he seemed uninterested in either the news or the finery. “Please, my lord, take cheer! Just think, soon you will see Mariam again.” It hurt me to say it, but his expression hurt even more: he dreaded going back to Granada as much as he wished for it.

  Qasim had arrived with a battalion of armed guards from Granada, along with the first payment of tribute. The soldiers were equipped in full Moorish fashion, with pointed helms and shining weaponry, their Barbary horses brightly tricked out with colourful caparisons and tasselled harness. They were a brave sight, but after greeting the vizier quietly Momo barely registered them.

  Córdoba held little mystery for me: it brought back memories of interminable waiting in rooms stuffed with heavy dark furniture a
nd ugly wall hangings that devoured the light, as if the business of the royal court was best done in semi-darkness. But Momo had never seen the city that had once been the seat of learning throughout the world in the golden heyday of al-Andalus, the centre of the Moorish empire, and as we crossed the magnificent Roman bridge spanning the Guadalquivir River, he could not help but look around in interest.

  “Do you know, Blessings, that before the Christians reconquered Córdoba two hundred and fifty years ago there were three thousand mosques here, eight hundred bathhouses and a library containing more than four hundred thousand books?”

  These were unimaginable numbers, and of things of no great meaning to me, but I tried to look interested if only to keep him talking in this animated way, showing a flash of the old Momo I so loved.

  “This was once the greatest city in all the world, greater even than Fez. Oh, how I wish I could have seen it then, with its observatories and palaces, its souks and its great university. Scholars from every country and the three great faiths—Jewish, Muslim and Christian—all came here to share their knowledge for the betterment of mankind. It was the fount of science and the heart of faith. Philosophers and poets, alchemists and mathematicians, musicians and doctors—they all brought their bright minds and ideas. There were even women poets, lutenists, calligraphers and teachers, can you imagine?”

  “Were there really?” I gave him a wry smile. “Remarkable.”

  “And merchants came, bearing goods from the farthest reaches of the world, and a hundred thousand of the finest artisans and architects, to create wonders in pisé and tadelakt, copper, brass and silk; wood carvers and stucco carvers, zellij workers, leather crafters and silk weavers.” He stopped to draw breath as we passed into the city streets, and his face fell. “Oh.”