by Jane Johnson
“Yes, sire.” He turned to go. “Blessings, perhaps you could go to the stables?”
“Blessings will stay to help me with my turban,” Momo said firmly, dismissing him.
Qasim flicked another look at me before closing the door behind him with a whisper. He did creep around so: he might not trust me, but I knew not to trust him.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” I said. “Official visitors don’t come in the middle of the night. They find some place to camp and arrive at a proper hour.”
By way of answer, Momo turned from me and shrugged off his robe. It shimmered into a heap at his feet, leaving me gazing helplessly at the way his long back tapered into the narrow waist then burgeoned into pale brown buttocks, their perfect roundness dented where the muscles clenched as he walked to where the samite robe and cotton leggings lay discarded on the bed. I forced myself to look away as he stepped into them, then waited for him to summon me to help with the turban, a tricky job: as a man claiming to be the true sultan his turban should be magnificent, and that involved acres of fabric and minutes of careful winding.
Noises outside. Horses’ hooves and shouts. It seemed the visitors had arrived and someone was unhappy about something. Maybe the stable master yelling for his lazy staff— Then someone screamed.
The sound went right through me, as grating as steel on stone. I ran to the window. Dark shapes milled about in the courtyard below; then the clouds parted before the moon and I saw clearly men fighting, swords raised, horsemen hacking down palace guards. The fighting ceased as suddenly as it had started and the horsemen rode out of view to the right, leaving dead men in their wake.
“We’re under attack!” I cried.
Momo ran to my side and stared down, and at that moment a riderless horse appeared, trailing harness and some black thing, and stood there, trembling in the moonlit square.
“I know that horse,” Momo said. I eyed him, disbelieving. “Not everyone is like you, Blessings, who can’t tell a horse from a cow.”
This was an old joke, though now was not the time for it. On our way to his wedding in Loja I had pointed at some beast pastured in a distant field and claimed it would make a better mount than the wretched animal I was riding. Momo had laughed for three leagues, and had never let me forget it.
“That one comes from the stables in Málaga. I started him under saddle for the first time. You don’t forget a horse you have that sort of bond with.”
Málaga? Al-Zaghal’s capital. The old bastard…
Momo grabbed his sword, propped casually in the corner alongside his cherished whetstone all the way from some place called the Ardennes. That was another thing he did up here on his own: you could hear the rhythmic scrape scrape scrape of the blade on the stone at all hours of the day and night when he was in a particularly dark mood. “Here!” He tossed me a dagger, and I snatched it out of the air. “And another!” It came sailing toward me. “You can never have too many!”
In two more strides he was at the door. But there he stopped, listening.
Another cry; then boot heels on the stairs.
Shit.
“Bar the door!” I howled. I scampered across the room and grabbed the turban cloth out of his cedarwood chest, then secured one end of it around the stanchion of the window and cast the other end out. “Remember the Tower of the Moon?”
“How could I ever forget?” He slung the sword around his back, hitched up his robe and looked down. The end of the turban cloth had not reached the ground, but it was the best that could be done.
Banging on the door, followed by shouts of “Come out, traitor!”
“Go!” I screamed at him. “Just get out of here!”
He straddled the windowsill. “You’ll be right behind me, yes?”
“Yes,” I lied. I couldn’t climb with just one good leg and my feeble arms, and I knew it. But if I could buy him a few seconds, I would. Without him, there was nothing to live for anyway. His head disappeared from view and I took up a fighting stance, a dagger in each hand.
The noise at the door was terrifying now: crashes and bangs—sword hilts and boots. Little puffs of dust were coming out of the wood; then a big iron nail tore loose and went rattling to the flagstone floor as a panel cracked.
“Blessings!” His hissed call could have been heard by anyone.
The wood splintered and I saw the gleam of a mad eye on the other side, and I knew there would be nothing I could do to hold up men like the owner of that eye. And my loyal friend would not go without me. Sheathing the daggers, I ran to the window.
Momo was on the stray horse, which was turning nervous little circles below the window. Whatever it had been trailing was gone, and he now wore a dark burnoose over the white robe. “Get a move on, Blessings!”
For a moment I wavered, half in, half out of the window. Then I got hold of the turban cloth, wrapped my one good leg around it and threw myself down.
27
He caught me. Of course he did. Then we were off at a gallop—not for the postern gate but in the opposite direction.
I held on to him, my arms around his waist, my chin thumping against his back. “Where…are…you…going?” It was hard to get the words out.
“Armoury,” he said shortly, and seconds later he pulled the horse up and leapt down. “Just hold it there,” he told me, as if I had any idea what to do with a nervous horse.
Luckily, he knew his way around the weapons store: moments later he was back with a short recurved bow and a quiver of arrows, a pair of scimitars and some throwing knives. “Here.”
I took the bandolier of knives and stared at it stupidly. Did he not remember how poor my aim was? He’d be at greater risk than any enemy.
Momo vaulted back up behind me and, grasping the reins, held me in a strange embrace as he kicked the horse to life again. I could smell his sweat—sweet and salty at once—and felt drunk with the combination of it and my fear, drunk and delirious, so that I only came back to myself at the sound of a woman’s scream.
Outside the royal private quarters, a group of people had been gathered inside a tight circle of horsemen. On every side lay bodies in palace uniform. The guards of the Almería alcazaba, unused to active duty, had proven no match for al-Zaghal and his battle-hardened assassins.
“Mariam!” Momo’s cry was lost in the general pandemonium.
I watched as one of the horsemen dismounted to advance upon the group, which shrank from him in terror. Even at a distance, I could see that it was al-Zaghal himself: that hawk nose and jutting beard were unmistakable.
“Where is the traitor Abu Abdullah Mohammed? Where is the spineless little shit who signed away our sovereignty to the enemy?”
A woman broke from the group. She was dressed for bed in a billow of fabric and her hair floated free in a nimbus of silver-grey. Any ethereality lent by the moon was soon dispelled by a voice that bellowed like a bull’s. “Get away from here, you old vulture! Go and join your poisonous toad of a brother where he squats in my palace! What sort of man are you to come here murdering innocent men and frightening women and children? A coward, that’s what! My son is the rightful sultan of Granada and you are not good enough to lick his boots!”
Al-Zaghal took a step toward her, sword raised. Momo pushed me unceremoniously from the saddle and rode toward him, holding the horse between his knees as he nocked an arrow to the bowstring and let it loose. The missile glanced off his uncle’s shoulder, spinning him round so that he lost his footing.
“Get up off your knees, Uncle!” Momo cried. “Fight me like a man, rather than terrorizing women. Or perhaps you remember the last time we fought and I put you on the ground.”
Aysha ran toward him. “Don’t be such a fool. You think this bastard will fight you with honour? Move any closer and they’ll hack you to pieces and feed your parts to the crows! Don’t give them what they came for. Your best service to your country and your family is to escape this damned plot and live to rule the kingdom whe
n your father dies, which, insha’allah, will surely be soon.”
“Shut up, you damned witch!”
Al-Zaghal had got himself to his knees. I saw Momo’s gaze travel from his mother to his uncle and knew he was considering rushing in and risking all. But Aysha was not finished: she turned away from Momo, ran at al-Zaghal and spat at him.
I thought then she was sacrificing herself to save her son, that no man could withstand such an insult without reacting violently to the one who’d made it. But I had reckoned without al-Zaghal’s cold fanaticism, and his sharp eye. He pushed himself upright, staggered into the group of women and emerged dragging one by the hair. His sword rose and fell in a flash, and the headless body dropped to the ground, spewing gouts of blood that spattered the hysterical onlookers.
How could a man who lived by the word of the Quran stoop to the unholy crime of murdering a defenceless woman? Mariam’s eyelids fluttered and she crumpled where she stood.
Al-Zaghal calmly displayed the dripping head by its long black hair. Moonlight caught the dangling glass earrings. With a chill of shock I realized it was Momo’s brother, Rachid.
“One less rat in the basket!” al-Zaghal shouted. “And you’ll be next.”
For a terrifying moment I thought Momo was going to ride him down, then die horribly at the mercy of the dozen Málaga horsemen who stood watching and wary. But he had decided to survive to fight another day, for he hauled his mount around and grabbed me up as he galloped past, and we thundered out of the fortress’s gates, past the bodies of the bribed guards who had let these enemies into our midst—and had won eternal silence rather than gold for their act of treachery.
I don’t know how we got away, but we did. Put it this way: the horse died under us a day later, keeling over without warning, hitting the ground so hard it broke the short bow in two. “I am sorry, old friend,” Momo said over and over. For a moment I thought it was me he was talking to, but when I turned around, I saw him sitting with the horse’s head in his lap, stroking its neck, tears streaming down his face in the pre-dawn gloom.
“We can’t stop here in the open,” I said hard-heartedly, scanning the hills for signs of the pursuit.
Wearily, he got to his feet. “He slaughtered my brother before my very eyes, and I let him do it. My wife wouldn’t even look at me I disgust her so much. And now I’ve driven this poor animal to its death. What use am I? I should let them kill me and have done.”
It was exhaustion talking, exhaustion and sorrow. I told him so and, taking him by the arm, dragged him into the cover of the trees. But no riders appeared on our trail then, or till the sun came up: al-Zaghal had given up the chase, knowing, no doubt, that all he had to do was put the word out and some poor peasant would happily lop off the young sultan’s head for a fat bag of gold.
And so, in fear of being seen by anyone, we kept to unfrequented goat tracks as we followed at a distance the course of the River Andarax and made our way into the foothills of the mountains, sleeping by day and walking by night, drinking out of streams and eating whatever we could find along the way, which meant not a lot. How I regretted the breaking of the bow by the fall of our horse. By the third day we were starving and thorn scratched, and my poor stump was aflame. Coming down through the trees in a rocky barranca, we heard the unmistakable sound of a muezzin’s plaintive cry shimmering through the greying air, and a few minutes later, where the pines parted as we met a wider path, saw a settlement ahead: a few dusty-looking houses in the lee of the cliffs. “I’ll go and beg for food,” I told Momo. “If they beat me for being a stranger, it’s no large thing. And maybe I can discover if your uncle’s men have made it this far and whether there’s a bounty on your head.”
He hugged me so hard I could feel his ribs. He had always been lean, but now he was worn to the bone, and when he held me away from him to say goodbye, I saw the hollows beneath his eyes and cheekbones. “I’ll be back soon,” I promised fiercely. I left him my sword, but tucked one dagger into the folds of my robe and another into the side of my false foot under its hem, and limped down through the scrub.
It was an hour or so after sun-up and already the village was astir. I could smell bread baking: my stomach roiled. A woman come outside to empty slops gave me a hard, black stare as I approached. I bobbed my head at her, but she gave no indication of acknowledgement so I kept walking, feeling her eyes on my back as I went.
In the small square before the mosque, men were appearing, having made their prayers. “As-salaam aleikum,” I greeted the first of them, and “Wa-aleikum salaam,” they responded in chorus.
“Lost your flock?” one joked.
I must have looked like some raggedy shepherd’s boy. I managed a grin. “Just a poor traveller.”
“Lost your mule, then,” said another.
I nodded. “The poor beast died under me some leagues back.”
The third man stared at my false foot, protruding from the hem of my robe. “Fancy boot.”
My heart skipped. Was I about to be killed for my golden leg? That really would be a cruel jape by the universe. “Lost the other in a game of cards. There’s some bugger chasing me to match the pair. You haven’t seen him, have you?”
That made them laugh. “You’re the first stranger through in weeks, but we’ll keep our eyes open!” Which answered one of my questions, at least. The tallest of them clapped me around the shoulders. “You look in need of a good meal.”
I admitted to this, and the other two wished me well and walked on, leaving me with Brahim, the tall man. I told him my name in Arabic, and he smiled. “It won’t be anything fancy, just porridge and a bit of bread.” It sounded like a feast to me, and I said so, making him beam.
His house was of crumbling pisé, with a low roof and a hole for a chimney. Dark smoke curled up out of it, bearing with it a delicious odour. He called out as we ducked to enter, “Mina, I bring good luck with me! This lad is called Baraka.”
His wife was small and dark, very pretty, and hugely pregnant. She covered her hair quickly at the sight of me, took my hand, raised it quickly to her lips, then released it and touched her hand to her heart. A lovely greeting, and unexpected. I was so touched by it that tears sprang to my eyes. I mumbled out my thanks for her hospitality and hoped she hadn’t noticed.
The porridge was nothing special—a thick and largely tasteless gruel—but I ate two bowls of it before drawing breath, and when I looked up from my bowl, they were both staring at me. I apologized hastily for my greed.
“What are you running from, Baraka?” Brahim asked.
I stopped with the spoon halfway to my mouth.
“It’s clear from the state of you,” Mina said. “Those rips in your clothing are fresh and there are some brambles left in the cloth, which is of good quality, better than anything we could afford. You’ve been walking at night, without a light—and no one does that in this hard terrain except out of dire necessity.”
I let the spoon fall into the near-empty bowl and gazed helplessly at her.
“Are you really travelling alone?” Brahim asked quietly.
I wanted to lie. It was never usually a problem to me. But—maybe unmanned by their kindness and the sudden shock of food to my aching stomach—somehow I found I couldn’t. “No. My…friend is waiting for me in the barranca.”
“Have you or he committed some crime?” he pressed.
“No. We’re fleeing from people who want to kill him.”
Husband and wife exchanged a glance. Then Mina leaned forward and took my empty hand between both of hers. “You poor thing. You must love him very much that you choose to share his fate.”
I almost fainted; then the tears came springing out. Brahim stared at her, then at me. So this was all it took to break down all the defences I had built up all these years—three days’ hunger and lack of sleep and a little kindness. “No one who knew him could fail to love him,” I sobbed.
“Does he know?”
I shook my head, wordless
.
“You poor thing. Love unspoken is the heaviest burden.”
And that just made me cry all the harder.
Brahim got up and silently left. A few minutes later he was back with a bulging sack and two gerbas, goatskin bags, full of water. “Give Baraka the bread, Mina,” he said.
Mina wrapped two hot loaves in a scarf of fine white cotton and pushed them into my arms, where they burned like little suns. “Go with God. I hope he’s worth your love.”
“Tanmirt, shokran.” I dipped my head. “I am not worthy of his,” I whispered, truly miserable now.
Outside was a hobbled mule. “When you reach Abla, ask for a man called Tahar the Tall and tell him Little Brahim sent you. He’s my brother. Give him the mule and say if he’ll exchange it for a good horse, I’ll pay him the difference. And if you meet shepherds along the way, tell them Mina sends her greetings. It’ll be a rare herdsman between here and Abla who isn’t a cousin. And be careful: you are running a great risk to take on such a disguise.”
When I returned with the mule, the waterskins, the still-hot bread and the sack, which turned out to contain handfuls of dates, goat’s cheese and strings of dried tomatoes and figs from the kind couple’s cold-store, Momo’s eyes became as round as plates. “You’ve really lived up to your name, Blessings.”
After this, we met kindness after kindness as we went, as if the journey—despite the awful circumstances in which it had begun—was Granada’s gift to its young sultan. And everywhere we went the story was the same: poor people struggling to survive, scratching a hard living out of the thin soil and bare pickings of an earth baked hard and dry by drought, from communities decimated by years of privation and war. Over and again—around campfires on mountains where goats baaed in the night from their makeshift enclosures, in valleys where the Andarax flowed out of the eastern Sierra Nevada, in scant woodlands in which no birds sang—we heard the same story: how the young men had gone away to war with the unbelievers and never returned. How wives were left widows and mothers bereaved; how there were none but old men for the young girls to marry; how families no longer had enough money to buy seed or fodder, let alone to pay taxes; how children were growing up wild and fatherless.