Court of Lions

by Jane Johnson

  The smell of excrement and urine was stifling in the heat: clouds of bluebottles drew away from the bloated corpse of a donkey and buzzed about us. We rounded a corner and had to detour around the side of a fallen building. There was a brawl ahead that had to be broken up by the guards so we could pass: the brawlers, bloodied and bruised, stared at us as if we’d just fallen from the moon. I suppose we made quite a sight—fifty Moorish cavalry in full battle dress and an even greater number of Castilian nobles and jineta shouldering silver-headed halberds, guarding a foreign prince wearing a vast white turban pinned with a big ruby, and with jewels glittering in the hilt of his sword.

  In front of the great tawny walls of the Alcázar there was another disturbance. A crowd had gathered and someone in its midst was shouting, raising a chorus of cheers and boos. When the crowd parted for us, it revealed a scrawny old greybeard yelling in some language I could not understand. It seemed I was not the only one. A man shouted, “Speak Castilian, you lunatic!” The old man looked our way. His eyes were sunk so deep under his eyebrows it seemed as if the sockets were filled only with shadows. I felt a shiver run down my spine.

  Coming to within a few paces of Momo, he described an elaborate bow. “Woe to the world!” he cried out in a form of Castilian this time. “The Lord has spoken: Iberia, the nursemaid of Mahometan depravity, will be torn apart. Each kingdom will battle against another.”

  “Out of the way!” shouted the Great Captain, riding forward.

  But the old man stood his ground. “When the young ox has lived three times seven years, the consuming fire will be multiplied until the Great Bat, who is our saviour, will devour the mosquitoes of Africa and, trampling on the head of the beast, bring the world under his rule!”

  “He’s like the mad old hermit who lived on the Sacromonte.” Momo turned to me, his face ashen. “Is it the same man? Has he come all the way from Granada to torment me?”

  Qasim and the Great Captain had ridden up beside us. “Madmen abound, Majesty. Pay him no attention,” said the vizier.

  “This is no simple madman,” Don Gonzalo said, “no matter how odd his appearance or how curious his words. I’ve heard this prophecy among the Catalans, whose word for mosque is much the same as for mosquito—mezquita—a silly wordplay, but people like that sort of thing. They say the Great Bat is Ferdinand, and Ferdinand’s almost come to believe the prophecy himself: he strides around like a conqueror in all but name.”

  It seemed the Great Captain was less enamoured of his king than of his queen. But who wanted to be likened to a bat? Lions, yes—even bulls or cats—were suitably heroic creatures, but bats? They were ugly black things, flittery and repulsive.

  With an inward grimace, I translated this for Momo, who nodded. “So we’re to be eaten up by this Aragonese king and his son-stealing queen. We’re just flies to them, buzzing around a dead donkey.” He closed his eyes. “I don’t think I can sign this treaty.”

  My innards became cold and heavy. “If you don’t, they’ll keep you prisoner forever. Or kill you. And how will that help Granada? You’ll leave the kingdom in the hands of your uncle and he’ll drive the population to war till there’s no one left standing. And what of Mariam, and your unborn child? What use is a lost husband, a lost father?” I could see him wavering. “What use to me?” I whispered.

  After a very long time he sighed. “Very well. I’ll play my part. But I feel that whatever I do, I am damned.”

  As we passed inside the palace walls, Qasim leaned over his horse to say quietly, “That was well done, Blessings.”

  We were received in the cavernous main hall, its elegant Moorish pillars, arched windows and scrolling ribbons of Arabic calligraphy incongruous above the heads of the crowd of overdressed Christian nobles, who stared at us no less avidly than the plain folk outside the palace walls.

  “I feel their eyes on me like a touch,” Momo complained quietly as we passed through their ranks.

  “It’s as if they expect us to have extra limbs or a second head,” I said.

  “And yet we are all men.” I glanced across at him as he said this and saw on his face a wistful expression I did not recognize. He had aged, I thought. It was as if he had gone from twenty to middle age in the space of these past few months. I did not know him anymore. He had changed, and I was losing him.

  Abruptly, the crowd parted and we found ourselves before two great thrones set upon a dais. The light fell from behind, forming sinister silhouettes of the seated figures: I could make out no more than the glint of golden crowns and the gleam of chains and jewels, as if two shadow-creatures sat the thrones and gazed down upon the mortal world with a scant interest bordering on scorn.

  “Pray silence for their royal selves, the Catholic monarchs of the conjoined realm of Castile and Aragón!” cried a master of ceremonies, and at once a dozen trumpets sounded, their notes harshly grating to our ears.

  “Tell your lord to fall to his knees,” the Great Captain whispered to me.

  I turned to him, shocked. “Kings don’t kneel before other kings.”

  “Your sovereign is a prisoner and mine are his captors,” he said dryly. “It will go better for him if he plays his part.”

  I relayed this to Momo, my voice shaking as I did so, but he was unperturbed. “What must be done must be done.” And he cast himself to the ground in the full body-to-the-ground obeisance the peasants gave him when they came to make petition.

  At this, one of the shadow-figures sprang to life, leaping from his throne and jumping down from the dais to raise him up. “We are kings, my good Boabdil: kings do not bow to kings. Pray rise, and welcome to our city of Córdoba.”

  The speaker had stepped into the illumination of a great tree of candles: I scrutinized him with as much curiosity as we had been accorded by his nobles, searching for signs of his batness. A jowled face with a sharp nose and shining dark eyes. A neck corded with the muscle gained, I guessed, from wielding a broadsword, for his reputation as a soldier went before him. Of middle height and sturdy leg; giving a general impression of vast energy packed into a small space. So this was Ferdinand of Aragón. I had heard he was handsome, and perhaps he was to the infidels’ taste, but to me he seemed stocky and unremarkable, though some of that might have been the cut of his brocaded doublet, with its bumptious great collar of fur, and some that he was so different to the aquiline beauty of my own king. He looked not much like a Great Bat.

  Momo took his hand and rose gracefully. He was a good head taller than the Aragonese, and perhaps that was why the latter retook his seat on the high dais.

  “I am honoured to be welcomed into this fine city, the city that once gleamed like a jewel, that drew all the brightest and the best, where the greatest scholars and scribes once gathered to record and share the wisdom of the ages—”

  I translated as Momo began to speak, but King Ferdinand waved his hands to cut my words short. “Enough of these pleasantries! There’s one further proviso I have added to the document before we all can sign it, which is that my soldiers must be granted safe and free passage through his territories during the time of this truce.”

  I relayed this to Momo and watched as he took this new demand in and mulled it over. There was only one good reason for such a clause: to grant tacit permission for an attack on his uncle in Málaga. Al-Zaghal wanted the entire kingdom for himself and would stop at nothing to have it: but if Momo signed this treaty, his uncle’s hands would be kept full defending his city, which was said to be impregnable. At last Momo nodded. “I accept.”

  King Ferdinand smiled and leaned back in his throne, his job done. Now the other figure leaned forward so that she was illuminated by the candlelight and I sucked in my breath. Surely this was not the fearsome queen who had established the Inquisition, who was so famously pious that she spent most days on her knees in prayer. This woman looked barely thirty; her pale skin and reddish hair glowed with good health, and there was a lively light of what might under other circumstances h
ave been mischief in her brown eyes.

  “The wording of the treaty has been witnessed by our good servants Don Diego Fernández, the Count of Cabra, and Don Gonzalo Fernández, our most loyal captain.” She nodded to them in turn, then tilted her head and regarded Momo warmly. “I thank you for coming to terms with us in such a generous and reasonable manner. I understand, as a mother, how very hard it must have been for you and your good wife to make such a great sacrifice. But be assured, your young son Ahmed”—she pronounced the child’s name in such a fashion that Momo did not appear to have discerned in it her foreign discourse, for he betrayed it by no flicker of movement or expression—”shall be raised by us as if he were one of our own, here in this court, beside our own children.”

  There was more of this—much more—but I curtailed it in my translation. In the end, all he could do was nod and lay the palm of his right hand to his breast and bow his head over it. I watched as he fought his emotions, but a single tear rolled off the end of his nose and fell, lit by the dancing candles, like a drop of molten gold onto the flagstones.

  Queen Isabella was speaking again, her voice sharper now. “Of course, we cannot raise him as an unbeliever in this most Christian of royal courts. He shall be blessed and baptized by the hand of Father Torquemada himself and be welcomed forever into the embrace of Holy Mother Church. We shall grant him the name of Alfonso, after my beloved brother whom the Lord has seen fit to take before his time.”

  Only now, as I took in this terrible pronouncement and wondered how on earth I could soften it, did I see the signs of her austere fervour. A pucker between the hawk’s-wing eyebrows, a pinch to the nostrils, an upper lip that was a mere line, a jut to the chin that told of iron will and fierce pride…

  For fear that Momo might lose his composure entirely, I’m afraid I mistranslated somewhat, telling him that the boy would receive tutoring on all subjects from geometry to poetry from the finest teachers in the civilized world. But I could tell he wasn’t taken in: over the months he too had picked up a little Castilian.

  “Ask the queen the name of the imam she will appoint to teach my boy to read and recite the Quran and each hadith. Ask her where she will find such a paragon in a kingdom in which Jews and Moors who have been raised in al-Andalus all their lives, who come from families who have dwelt here peacefully for generations, are being burned alive for the sins of washing the bodies of their dead in hot water or swaddling them in new shrouds; for refusing to eat the flesh of pigs or dressing their food with olive oil instead of lard.”

  I hesitated.

  “Go on, ask her!” He spoke softly, but his eyes burned.

  “My lord, you know I can’t ask her this, for she will have no answer.”

  The ferocious light faded. “I know you can’t, Blessings. I know. Tell the king and queen to show me the treaty, then, and I will sign it.” His shoulders slumped.

  “There was just one other thing, sire…” I hadn’t told him it was not only Ahmed who was to be a hostage but eleven other boys, the sons of his closest allies. Ah well: it was a shared sacrifice; and what could make him sadder than he already was?

  He waved my words away. “No more now. Just hand me the pen.”

  The monarchs all signed the parchment and there was a great deal of business over hot wax and the royal seal; then the queen made a signal and a fanfare sounded. To the left of the royal dais the courtiers parted to allow a small procession to enter the hall, a procession headed by a girl of thirteen or fourteen in a white gown, with long red hair and features very like the queen’s. Behind her trailed other children, maybe twenty or so, of varying age and height. The girl at the front led by the hand on one side another red-haired girl, attired like her in all details; and on the other side, a toddler of two or three, wearing a miniature version of the Castilian nobles’ costume: a cap, a fur-trimmed velvet tunic and a silver amulet.

  I stared at the amulet. It was of Tuareg design and achingly familiar. In a rush, I realized it must have been taken from my mother’s necklace, the one I had given to Mariam on the eve of her wedding, on that fateful night in Loja. Then I stared at the boy. So this was why they had kept us waiting so long at Porcuna after Momo had agreed to the terms: so that they could take Ahmed into their hands for this small moment of cruel drama and triumph, and confirm the utter emotional capitulation of our king. I glared at Qasim—for surely it was he who had done this—but he would not meet my eye.

  Momo sobbed out a single word. “Ahmed!”

  The child startled. I saw him scan the richly garbed figures and fix upon the tallest. He pulled away, but the girl in white held on tight. “Baba!” he cried. “Baba! Baba!”

  Even I felt a lump rise in my throat.

  “Let him go,” Isabella told her daughter, and Ahmed ran with a toddler’s wild drunkard’s stagger into the arms of his father.

  I couldn’t bear to watch their farewell: instead, I turned my eyes to the queen. With her plump cheeks and small, satisfied smile she looked like a cat that held her prey between her paws.

  As if to prolong the agony, or perhaps to make sure we left, King Ferdinand accompanied us to the city limits, extolling the beauties of Córdoba as we moved through cheering crowds, as if nothing world shattering had just occurred. Momo did his best to respond, but I could see the dark thoughts churning in his head behind those bare, polite answers. It was a relief when we reached the Roman bridge and the Aragonese and his retinue turned back.

  “Are you all right, my lord?” It was a foolish question and deserved an angry reply, but he managed a wan smile.

  “Always you think only of me, Blessings. I don’t deserve you as a friend. Best you go talk to someone else for a while. You shouldn’t have to suffer my black mood.”

  I went quiet. There was no pleasure to be had among the company of guards. Some of them I knew from the Alhambra, but most I did not. Some were likely to be remnants of the Banu Serraj, men who thought they could suffer no more loss than they already had. Now, if their sons had been taken along with Ahmed, they were discovering that was not the case.

  Instead, I regarded the people we passed, noting a preponderance of darker skins the farther from the centre of Córdoba we went: or perhaps those folk knew they would catch sight of the young sultan and had stayed out on the streets to watch us leave, for there were some who dared call out greetings and baraka upon him. I wondered how they managed their lives under the increasingly intolerant Catholic rule and if they lived in a state of permanent anxiety, practising their beliefs covertly and in fear of being turned in to the authorities by their neighbours, or even members of their own families.

  “I never got the chance to see the Great Mosque,” Momo said wistfully, breaking the long silence. “They say it has eight hundred pillars and in the right light the trees in its courtyard are a perfect reflection of the pillars within. If you stand in the precise centre between the two, they say a broken heart will be healed. I would have been able to test that belief.”

  It took me a long moment to master my emotions. “It’s a place of Christian worship now,” I told him at last. “I heard that they installed bells in the minaret and the prayer hall.”

  He shook his head sadly. “Such disrespect. I pray such sacrilege is never enacted upon Granada. Insha’allah.” God willing.

  But his God did not seem to care overmuch for the protection of his people. This was no wonder to me, who had travelled farther than my lord and seen how large the world is. How could any one god oversee so much? Better to pray, I thought, to the small deities—the ones who kept the wind in check and brought rain to fill the oases; the ones who made babies ripen and the tribe healthy; the ones who stopped camels straying and brought mountain hares out for the hunters’ hawks. To try to force an entire populace, with all manner of conflicting backgrounds and loyalties, to worship in precisely the same way on pain of torture and death seemed to me violently wrong, perversely cruel. But I knew if I said any of this to Momo, he would frown and c
all me a heathen. Which I supposed I was.

  We rode on through the dusty squares and thinning crowds till we came to the edge of the outer city, and it was here that the Great Captain who had led us thus far at the head of his contingent of guards rode back to us and clasped Momo’s outstretched hand. “Go with God, my friend,” he said in good Arabic

  Without missing a beat, “Vaya con Dios, amigo,” Momo replied.

  For a moment Don Gonzalo’s face went very still. “I see you’ve learned a little Castilian in your time with us, sire.”

  “A little, but it seems not enough,” Momo said stiffly, holding his gaze.

  The Great Captain nodded slowly. “I’m sorry to have been a part of this hard bargain,” he said. “But you must understand the necessity.”

  “Children have no part to play in the wars of men.”

  The Great Captain grimaced. “I fear children play a part in all wars.”

  “And then grow up to be angry young men.”

  Gonzalo inclined his head. “I fear so. I pray I may never meet you or yours in any future battle. When we meet again, may it be in peace. That’s the best either of us can hope for.”

  And so we parted and Abu Abdullah Mohammed left Córdoba, ostensibly as a free man, though one encumbered by heavy chains of guilt and sorrow.

  Qasim Abdelmalik’s grey mare ghosted up on Momo’s left side. “I fear, my lord, this will not be a leisurely ride. We must cross the border under the cover of darkness, for your father’s troops will be on the lookout for you. He’s laid a large price on your head, you know, and while many will be on your side in their hearts, they’ll be tempted by the money, or fear incurring his wrath. All the northern towns have gone over to him in these months; even Granada itself is torn in two.”

  Momo nodded coolly. “I know all this, but the situation will be reversed as soon as I arrive back in my kingdom, believe me.”