by Jane Johnson
The power struggles for Granada’s throne were of little concern to these people. No one spoke of sultans or kings, of battles or honour. Too far from the cities to care who was in charge of them, they talked of simple things: of sick babies and the price of flour, a broken plow or the merits of a fine bull.
Momo listened to everything, his eyes gleaming with a sort of sympathetic fanaticism, devouring it all as if to feed his starved soul. When we were alone, he said to me, “You see? I have always said it. It doesn’t matter who is in control of the country, as long as there is peace. They have nothing these people, nothing but scraps. All they want is to be left alone, to love and marry and raise their children and their herds and crops, to go to mosque and make a Friday couscous: without the threat of war.”
We made the promised exchange of mule for horse. As we left, Tahar the Tall came running after us with a fresh mule. “If my brother gave you a mule, how could I do less?” A prosperous man in comparison with his sibling, he added fresh clothes and some coin, despite our protests.
We headed ever north and west and I managed at long last to master the art of the throwing knives by skewering an unlucky rabbit that crossed out path: we dined like kings that night. A day later we arrived at a crossroads in open country I vaguely recognized, and here Momo halted his horse for a long moment, gazing west. He said nothing, but his eyes were misty; then we rode on. It was only later I realized it was the road to Granada, the one we had ridden years ago after Momo’s escape from the Tower of the Moon.
We skirted Guadix, the town that had welcomed us in after that moonlight flit via the hills to its south, but we did not dare approach it. So many of those who had once supported the young sultan now paid homage to the old one. None of the nobles would welcome him with open arms now, except to capture him and send his head to his father or uncle and claim their reward.
And so, at last, we crossed the border, secretly, by night, close to where we had re-entered Granada after Momo’s imprisonment by the Castilians. A boy was paid to carry a message; a token was returned.
The next day, the Great Captain, Gonzalo Fernández, rode out to accompany us into Córdoba.
We were given plush quarters in the royal palace. Yes, back there again: another capitulation, but there was no choice. Don Gonzalo requested an audience for Momo with Queen Isabella. She was polite and smiled often during their interview, but her eyes throughout were flinty. It was clear to me that we were captives in all but name and that no matter how well we were treated her attitude to any man, woman or child who did not truly espouse the Catholic Church remained unbending. Momo asked to see his son: it was one of the reasons he had voluntarily returned to this city.
“Alfonso is making great progress in his studies. It would be…” She fiddled with one of her pearl earrings as she sought the word. “Counterproductive to interrupt them.” It was all I could do to translate without weeping as I watched Momo’s expression change to one of utter despair. But worse was to come. The queen said something I did not catch, except for the word infantil: but how could I ask her to repeat it?
“What?” Momo asked. “What did she say?”
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly, trying to keep my face immobile. “I didn’t understand.” Our audience with the queen ended shortly thereafter, and I went in search of more information.
The baby had died: unable to keep down the milk of the wet nurse, it had vomited itself into oblivion without even making it as far as Córdoba. The queen had been furious, storming around the palace, cursing all Moors and swearing she would have Momo’s head. There were whispers that the wet nurse had been turned over to the Inquisition and burned as some sort of witch. I went outside into one of the tranquil little courtyards and could not choke back the tears. My soul was well and truly damned.
It was there that Don Gonzalo came upon me. “What is it, Blessings? What’s the matter?”
He held my upper arms and turned his wide, golden gaze on me. I told him and he nodded. “Yes, I know. It’s very hard when a child dies. I’m very sorry for it.”
“I can’t tell him,” I sobbed. “It’s my fault and I…can’t. All the palace servants were questioned. They never found the ‘girl’ who stole the child. He had men scouring the countryside when it was snatched. He has no idea it was given to…to…”
“The enemy?”
I nodded dumbly.
He shrugged. “Well, it can’t be helped. He’ll have others. And at least the boy is thriving and the queen has settled for just the one child.”
“She won’t let him see…Alfonso.”
Gonzalo sighed. “He has to understand the lad is a hostage now, not a guest.”
“Like us?”
That made him uncomfortable. “It’s different. Still…” He brightened. “At least he’s safe here, eh?”
Ironic, that the only place Momo could be truly safe was in the hands of his enemies. I pondered this often over the next months. Letters came periodically from Qasim Abdelmalik. They came unsealed, as he knew our captors would read the contents before allowing Momo to have sight of them, and sometimes parts of them were missing, as if they had been censored. He assured us that Aysha and Mariam remained “in health,” but did not elaborate. We heard from other sources that sixty men had lost their lives in al-Zaghal’s treacherous assault on Almería. He gave us news of enemy attacks on the towns of Álora and Setenil and told us that Christian troops had marched across the plain below the Alhambra, close enough to be seen by the lookouts in the towers. Apparently, Moulay Hasan—now reportedly fully blind, rising seldom from his bed—had sent out messengers bearing gifts to King Ferdinand and an offer to resume tribute and to honour treaty terms. All had been sent back with a terse refusal.
“The king scents victory,” Momo said gloomily. “Now that he can smell it he’ll accept nothing less.”
In the spring, the enemy besieged the strategically important town of Ronda in the taifa of Málaga. The fortress, perched above a dramatic gorge, controlled the roads to the south. No army could move on the crucial ports of Marbella or Málaga without first taking control of it. The siege was short: we heard nothing of it till the action was over.
“‘My liege,’” I read aloud from the latest letter from Qasim. “‘It pains my heart to report that Ronda has fallen to the forces of King Ferdinand of the united kingdoms of Aragón and Castile after a thorough bombardment by their lombard guns, which reduced the outer walls to rubble, and brought ruination upon much of the populace.’”
Momo interrupted me. He was grey in the face. “Those walls were as thick as a man is tall. How in God’s name could they be shattered? What necromancy is this lombard gun?”
“They call them ‘the wallbreakers,’” I told him. I’d heard this around the palace.
“How could they destroy a city and the people within from a distance? What honour lies in such warfare, when a man does not face his enemy and fight him hand to hand but kills without even seeing the damage he does? Where’s the chivalry in that?”
This, I could not answer. I continued to read from the missive: “‘The elders of the city offered their surrender, promising to be loyal vassals to the Crown of Castile, to pay taxes and tributes and to release all their Christian captives. In return, the king has promised that those who wish to leave may travel in peace, while those who choose to remain may do so, and that the town may preserve the law of Mohammed.’” Here, I paused. “What does that mean?” I asked. “About preserving the law of Mohammed?”
He looked weary. “That they may continue to worship as they please and that the legal tribunals continue to hold sway. It’s the least that could be promised in the circumstances. But it is something. I believe Ferdinand to be a man of his word: now we’ll see if I am correct in that belief.”
I scanned the rest of the letter. None of it was good news. But I read it out anyway: “‘From Ronda, the enemy’s army advanced southeast toward Marbella. Having heard the fate of Ronda, the
caids, elders and citizens contacted the king, requesting the same terms as those applied there: that those who wished to stay be allowed to do so as subjects of Castile, the remainder given safe conduct to leave.’”
Momo listened with his eyes closed. After a long minute of silence he stood up and paced to the window, rested his hands on the sill as he gazed out over the rooftops that once had been the houses of Muslims, Jews and Christians living together in relative tolerance and peace. “Next they’ll march on Málaga,” he said grimly. “They must take it if they’re to stop reinforcements coming in from North Africa. But my uncle will never give up Málaga till every soul within its walls is dead. I must go back and rally my forces. I am the only one who can broker a true peace and prevent complete disaster.”
But the campaign had taken a heavy toll on the king’s resources, for the next month Ferdinand returned with the army to Córdoba to regroup and, I heard, to prepare to march again with his men and stores replenished in the spring. At once, Momo sought audience with him, asking that he be allowed to return to Granada. “I can be of greater service to you there than here,” he told the king. “Wherever I reign, I can maintain our treaty and keep the peace.”
It seemed to me that Ferdinand was not much interested in keeping the peace. He laughed and clapped Momo on the back, false hearty and impatient. “I’ll give you an escort back to your kingdom,” he promised.
It was only when we made our departure that we found out where our destination was to be. “Huéscar?” Momo could hardly believe it. I had not even heard of the place. “Huéscar?”
The captain of the guards assigned to escorting us was not best pleased by the task. “That’s the better part of a month,” he grumbled.
“It’s in Murcia, not on the moon,” Momo said shortly, but I could tell he was hardly any more pleased.
“It’s the arse end of nowhere,” the captain said.
By the time we arrived in Huéscar, I could not help but agree. I had thought Almería a backwater: this was little more than a village. I supposed Ferdinand had decided Momo to be a nuisance and wished to get him as far out of the way as possible, where he could do no damage and rally no troops. The people who came out to watch our strange parade into their town looked bemused, as well they might. There was no fortress here, no castle, just a lonely tower, a dilapidated mosque, two once-grand villas that had fallen into semi-ruin, broken capitals and pillars from some Roman site, a scatter of humble dwellings, an Arabic cemetery and an old plague-hospital. We did our best with the tower.
A few days after we’d settled in, Qasim Abdelmalik arrived. He looked grave and exhausted, and for a moment I thought it must be something terrible that had caused him to ride so hard he had almost killed himself—the news of Mariam’s death. Or Aysha’s. But it was a more momentous death altogether that he’d come to report.
Momo helped him down from his horse. The vizier grunted as he dismounted: he was not getting any younger and long hours in the saddle had made his hips ache. When he went down on one knee, I thought they had given way; but he bowed his head in formal homage. “Sire, accept my condolences, and my continued service to your throne.”
I didn’t fully understand what was happening until Momo raised him up. “When did he die?”
“A week past. I rode as fast as I could.” Qasim sounded defensive.
“I thought he’d leave the kingdom to my uncle.”
Momo looked alert and intent in a way I had not seen for months. Years.
“He did: before he died, he invited al-Zaghal to take the throne, and the old bastard marched into the city at the head of a cavalry column, their saddles garnished with the heads of a hundred Christians they ambushed on the way. He sent your father packing and the old man took himself off to Salobreña with Zoraya and their children and whatever treasure they could haul with them. But on his deathbed Moulay Hasan recanted and changed his testament. You are once more and without question the rightful sultan of Granada.”
28
Loja
We stared over the battlements at the massed ranks of enemy troops down in the Genil Valley, and the large contingent on the Heights of Albohacen. Momo’s mouth was set in a long, hard line. There was grime on his forehead, seamed into the furrows. He seemed to have aged a decade in the past short weeks and suddenly I could see his father in him. Which was not a welcome thought.
“What are those things they are setting up?” I inquired, but I had a nasty idea I knew. Whatever they were, hauling them up the road they had cut out of the hill opposite appeared to have required an entire battalion of men, a mile of rope, half a hundred horses and mules and the determination of an enemy hell-bent on our destruction.
“Our doom,” Momo said shortly, and turned away.
His moment of triumph following the death of his father had been all too brief. Before he could make the journey all the way back west from Huéscar to reunite with his family, re-enter the Alhambra and take up the reins of power, more news arrived. Violent fighting had broken out in the Albayzín and elsewhere in the kingdom between his supporters and those of his uncle, who contested the will of Moulay Hasan, claiming that his brother had not been in his right mind when rescinding the previous testament. As a result, a council of elders had, in these rare and dangerous circumstances, convened to declare that the realm be divided in two, with al-Zaghal taking control of the major cities of the centre and south of the country—Granada, Málaga, Velez-Málaga, Almería and Almuñécar—and Momo only the smaller northern region, centred here, in Loja.
Momo had stared at the rolled message in disbelief, rereading it over and again, examining the veracity of the seals. “They can’t mean it. Surely they can’t!”
But Qasim Abdelmalik just shook his head sadly. “They’re cowards, sire. They’ve given in to pressure from your uncle to create a buffer zone between him and the enemy, with you in the middle. It’s clever.”
“This is wrong! The throne is mine: my father left it to me.”
And all that was true, but as the vizier calmly and patiently explained, Momo had no choice but to bow his head and sign this miserable agreement. The council had spoken, and in any case he had neither the troops nor the finances to wage a war on his uncle, who had the men and resources of the richest cities in Granada behind him.
Momo took his fury out on the missive, grinding its wax seals to powder beneath his boot. He had come so near, but he was now further from his dream than ever before. “My uncle will fight till there is nothing and no one left to rule over. He’ll drive the kingdom into the ground and every city will suffer the same cruel fate as poor Ronda, smashed to ruin.”
His words looked to be prophetic.
On the day we rode through the gates of Granada, up the hill into the Alhambra, no birds sang where usually there were linnets and chaffinches, blackbirds and wood pigeons calling and cooing, as if they knew this was no occasion for celebration, and that Sultan Mohammed XII had come not to claim his throne but to sign the largest part of the kingdom over to the man who most wished to see him dead. But it seemed no one had told the famed roses not to bloom: their scent hung hot and heady over us as we dismounted and walked, in the midst of a heavily armed guard, into the Court of Myrtles and thence into the council chamber, where, with his anger simmering dull and quiet, he signed the wretched agreement, then declined to stay another minute in al-Zaghal’s presence.
The silent reflections in the beautiful pools, the elegant stone forests of pillars, the tawny towers and pantiled roofs, all seemed to mock us as we strode out, boot heels ringing on ancient stone.
“This place is poisoned for me forever,” Momo said to me as we remounted, and his eyes glittered.
As we rode out of the city, set to retrace the route we had taken all those years ago when he had gone to claim Mariam as his bride, we came upon a small throng, and at its centre the threadbare prophet from the Sacromonte. Seeing Momo, the old monster cried out, and everyone turned to stare. “Look,
there he goes, the Unlucky One! Keep the faith, young Mohammed: have no further relations with the infidel, for all they do is mine the ground beneath your very feet! Now you must choose: be a king or a slave, for you can’t be both!”
Cheers and catcalls greeted this insulting pronouncement: I wanted to ride in among the rabble and sever the old greybeard’s noisy head from his shoulders, but Momo held me back. “Why punish a man for speaking the truth? I really am what he calls me, the Unlucky One.”
After that he didn’t speak again in the two long days it took us to reach the fortress of Loja, where he and Mariam had been married, where La Sabia’s poison had nearly done for me. Since the death of its lord, Mariam’s father, old Ali Attar, at Lucena, where Momo had been taken captive, the people of Loja had increasingly blamed the young sultan for all the ills that had befallen the kingdom. As he rode in to make the citadel his capital, there were hisses and insults. Momo claimed not to have heard them, but I did.
I put on women’s clothes and mingled with the staff to ascertain what threat there might be to him in this grim place. Many complained about the upheaval, others of having their jobs taken by newcomers. More worried that his arrival would bring the enemy down upon them, and that the wily old al-Zaghal had sent him up here to draw their sting, to be the idiot encouraged to put his hand in the hornets’ nest. As once I had done for my mother, as all these years I had done for Qasim, I carried the whispers back to my lord, who put his head in his hands.
“The worst of it is, I suspect they are right, Blessings.” And he handed me a letter that had arrived by courier from Córdoba.