Court of Lions

by Jane Johnson

  I scanned the contents, frowning over one or two unfamiliar terms, then translated it for him, with a cold nausea spreading through me like a deathly sickness:

  “‘By making this union with your uncle you have broken the terms of our treaty. Instead of acting as our vassal, you have now declared yourself an enemy combatant and as such have forfeited any and all right to our protection and forbearance. We have torn up that worthless contract and fed it to the fire, which was its only practical use. All Granada shall be ours: prepare to be attacked.

  “‘Ferdinand, king of Aragón and Castile.’”

  That was three weeks ago now: more than enough time for us to have run away. But Momo had been determined. He’d organized defence work, getting his hands dirty with the rest of them, digging trenches and shoring up the weak points in the fortress walls. I don’t think he’d ever really believed Ferdinand meant what he’d said. Yet here he was outside our walls, the enemy king, with his tents and banners, his cavalry of thousands and host of foot soldiers. And the damned lombards, his famed “wallbreakers.”

  “Ferdinand said he’d support me against my uncle.” Momo glowered at the faithless enemy. “But he has traduced every promise.”

  I gazed out at the horrid scene. “He was just waiting for an excuse to declare the treaty null and void.” All Granada shall be ours. I shivered. “You won’t fight, though, will you?”

  Momo dragged his glower away from the enemy and turned to look at me. Such exhaustion in his eyes. “I will not run,” he said stolidly. “I won’t have them call me coward.”

  I wondered who “them” referred to: the Castilians, or the people of Loja? If the latter, it was already too late, for they said little else, comparing him unfavourably at every turn with their valiant old dead lord. I hadn’t told him this, of course; nor that they wondered where their beloved little Lady Mariam was, or mentioned their conjectures about his relationship with me, since they saw us always together. To my shame, the first time I’d heard someone say it my heart had swelled with something akin to joy.

  “…must choose.”

  Momo was eyeing me. “You weren’t listening, were you, Blessings?”

  I shook my head, ashamed to have been caught with my wits wandering.

  He put his hands on my shoulders. “I said, we have to stop them before they have set up all their lombards, or they’ll batter down our walls. I will ride out with our troops, but I won’t order you to ride with me, as there’s a very good chance you won’t come back. You must choose.”

  “You can’t!” I was aghast. “They outnumber us by—” My imagination failed me: I had never seen so many men together in one place.

  “I know. And I can’t say I’m not afraid. I’ve witnessed men die on a battlefield and it’s not a pretty death. But neither will I meekly give Loja up, especially to this infidel king who clearly thinks I’m so weak that he can break our treaty with impunity.” He paused, considering. “Actually, I’m ordering you not to ride out with me.”

  “But I’m your Special Guardian.” The reminder came out like the bleat of a petulant child. It wasn’t even that I wanted to fight: I knew I wasn’t capable, and had contributed to his capture at Lucena.

  Momo drew me to him fiercely, crushing my head against his collarbone. “You’re a brave soul, Blessings. I know you’d give everything, even your life, for me. But I couldn’t bear to see you hacked about by the enemy. It’s selfish of me to forbid you to ride out. But I do.” And with that he released me and ran off down the stairs, calling for the page and the armourer as he went.

  Left dizzy by this unexpected embrace, I was slow to react. When I tried to chase him down the stairs, I couldn’t catch him, hampered by my false leg and the press of attendants. So, in desperation, I hobbled out to the stables, my stump reminding me with every step why I couldn’t go with him. There was his horse: a proud bay stallion. Not as flashy as the white that had been captured at Lucena, but well enough looking, I supposed. One of the standard-bearers was holding it in readiness. “For the sultan?” I asked, and he smiled and nodded.

  Out of sight of the flag waver, I slid a morsel of paper beneath the saddlecloth, against the spine of the stallion that would bear my beloved into battle without me. It was not much for a Special Guardian to do: especially one who had rather lost his belief in the efficacy of charms.

  I watched Momo ride out at a gallop across the Genil Bridge at the head of his cavalry: proud men on proud horses bearing the red-and-gold banners of the Nasrids and the green-and-gold of Islam. Proud, doomed men. I saw them charge the enemy and catch them unawares—for a minute, no more: then there was just a chaos of men and horses and swords and dust as they came together, and I could barely see a thing. For a moment the dust cleared and I saw one of our banners fall. Then another. I clutched the wall, straining my eyes for a sight of Momo: and there he was, sword rising and falling, the bay no more than a twisting shadow under him, like a djinn, I thought, but one compelled by my command. My charm was working—it was working: I saw one enemy after another tumble beneath his blade. No one could land a blade on him. No one—

  And then I could not see him. The mill of fighting was too fierce, the light making a bright miasma of the dust churned up by hoofs and feet. Where were our banners? Where was our sultan? More of the enemy were joining the fight. I could see them charging down from the gun emplacement on the Albohacen, the light sparking off their helmets and weapons. The air was full of the sounds of men howling in hatred, in fury, in fear; in pain. The noise came at me in waves, but still I could not see him. I stared until my eyeballs hurt, and then the great mass of fighting men parted and a trickle of cavalry poured out of it, like water from a cracked bowl. Two banners still flying—two out of dozens. My heart jumped and stuttered as the survivors clattered back toward the bridge. There he was! I saw him slumped over his horse, his head lolling, pulled along by two of the faris. “Is he dead?” I screamed down with all the force I could muster, but my voice came out tiny and afraid, like your voice in a nightmare when you try to scream for help, and fail.

  No one answered me. I tried again, but no one replied, and I began to wonder if it really was all a dream, a terrible one from which I could not wake. I ran down the stairs, my hands like claws from gripping the battlement so tight for so long, and at the bottom turned the corner and found a chamber stuffed with people running back and forth with water and cloths. The air was thick with groans and the smell of blood, and there he was, sitting half naked on the edge of a divan with a bandage around his head, holding one arm out as they examined his wounds. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground, my cheek smacking the cold stone with an audible thwack. The relief that he was still alive was so great that my knees had given way.

  When I got up again, he raised a wan face to appease me. “Blessings, Blessings, don’t look so aghast—it’s just a scratch.”

  A scratch it was not. Neither was it a graze nor a cut, but a jagged gouge carved wet and red out of livid, bruised flesh. Whatever weapon it was that had done the damage had missed his heart by no more than a finger’s breadth: I could see the glint of bone-cage. The sight made my innards quail: I’d come so close to losing him. “What have they done to you?”

  He waved my concern away. “It was a mace, a lucky strike. They think I broke my collarbone, maybe a rib too.” He winced as the doctor probed the area, pulling fragments of silk undershirt out of the mess. “I’ll heal. I always do.”

  The patching up was making my gorge rise. I thought it likely I would lose my asshak by spewing in front of them all, but the doctor, a small Jewish man with a severe profile and neat grey beard, took me firmly by the shoulders and propelled me outside: “You’re doing no good here, to him, or to anyone else. Let me do my work and he’ll live, though he won’t fight again soon.”

  This pronouncement cheered me somewhat. I hastened down to the kitchen and begged a number of ingredients from the bemused staff, mixed them up in an old pot, then wen
t down to the front gate and scattered the mixture: grains and flour, some stinking, fermented butter, a handful of raisins and some chopped dates. A little cinnamon, some cumin seeds. No salt. Djinn abhor salt. I chanted the words my mother had taught me, and for good measure scratched the protective symbols into the sandy ground there. Then I went to the stables and asked after the sultan’s horse.

  “Over here, my lord.”

  No one ever “my lorded” me. I wondered what he saw when he looked at me, this scruffy stable hand. He was dark skinned, and only a handful of years younger than I, dressed in a thick wool tunic stained and patched and too short at the wrists, while I stood half a head taller and wore a robe trimmed with fine embroidery. Was that all it took to distinguish us? And yet less than a decade before, I had been eking out a desperate living on the streets of Fez, a filthy desert orphan just as dark as this one, before the merchant found me—

  “…not a scratch on him.”

  His words broke into my thoughts and I realized he had guided me to the stallion, which stood in its stall cheerfully munching from a nosebag. Someone—probably the lad beside me—had removed the stallion’s saddle and harness, though the embroidered saddlecloth still lay on the horse’s back. I ran my hand down the animal’s hot neck while he tossed his head and blew noisily, as if I were aggravating him. The charm I had made was still in place and I palmed it, feeling uncharitable thoughts toward the beast as I did. It was not meant for you, I told the stallion in my mind, and as if in riposte, the animal kicked out and barely missed me.

  “Come away, my lord. He’s a bit on edge from the battle. But you can tell the sultan he’s just fine.” The lad adjusted the nosebag and rubbed the beast’s poll with his rough hand and the horse thrust his head against him adoringly.

  “More than can be said for his rider,” I grumbled, and turned to leave.

  “Sir?” The voice was tremulous.

  I turned back. “What is it?” The question came out more curtly than I’d intended.

  “He will save us, won’t he, the sultan? From the unbelievers? I seen them things they’re setting up on the Albohacen. My brother, he was smithing in Ronda when they used them machines to break the walls. Stonework that thick”—he spread his arms wide—”and they smashed it down flat. The noise were so fearsome it still rings in his head. And him used to the sound of iron on stone. Days of it, he said, on and on, like giants stamping on ants. He’s never been the same, hasn’t lifted a hammer since then, can’t stand the sound of it. My big brother, he were a hero to me, and now he just sits at home and stares at nothing. There’s hardly anything left of him now.”

  I spoke not a word, but it didn’t stop him.

  “They won’t do that here, will they? Bash down the walls? I honestly don’t think he could bear it again. And the horses too, sir: noise frightens them something terrible. The young sultan won’t let Loja be smashed up and us all inside it, will he, sir?”

  Momo had ridden out to try to stop the enemy setting up those guns, tried and failed, and from what the doctor had said he would not be riding out again: but how could I tell that to this lad, whose imploring eyes searched mine, as if I held any answers? “I’m sure he won’t,” I said, and left before he could see the lie in my face.

  By the time I got back to the chamber where the wounded were being tended there was much noise and bustle but no sign of Momo. At the back of the room I saw the mounded shapes of men with just their feet protruding from beneath a white sheet and for a sharp moment terror gripped me. I stood there, sweating, staring at the footwear: scuffed riding boots, low brown boots, worn ochre babouches, grey shoes, boots with a curled toe; but no fine, soft red leather boots. Two corpses with yellowing bare feet. None was as finely boned as Momo’s. And life was going on pretty much as normal, in a time of war. I reasoned with my panicking, illogical self that if the sultan had bled to death, or had fallen from a crisis of the heart, I’d have heard the ululations of grief all through the fortress. I found the doctor who had been tending him sawing through the shattered leg of an unconscious man. Transfixed by the vile spectacle of all that blood and bone, I thought: They did that to me. I had meant to ask the doctor where my lord was, but the horrid sight unmanned me completely. Reeling, I threw up in a corner.

  When I finished vomiting, to wash the foul taste from my mouth and restore my asshak I drank some of the wine they were using to clean wounds and went to look for Momo. There was no sign of him in his quarters. On the stairs outside, soldiers ran past me, their armour clanking, their boots loud on the old stonework. I expected someone to order me to fetch my sword and fall in, but no one did.

  In the room the sultan used for conferences with the town elders, I found only a knot of old men hunched over glasses of herb tea, who stared at me with inimical black eyes then looked away, as if I were a ghost.

  Like a ghost, I drifted up to the battlements, where I found a crowd peering over, wailing and praying. I elbowed my way between them, in time to see the tatters of a column fleeing back toward the side gate, not the one from which Momo had issued on his last excursion against the enemy, where I had strewn my offering to the spirits. With my heart in my throat, I gripped the top of the wall and peered and peered. Three horsemen, riding at full gallop, passed beneath us. None of them was Momo. Then two riderless horses, neither of them the mount the stable hand had been tending to—which was surely a good sign, wasn’t it?

  “The sultan?” I clutched at the shoulder of the man beside me, my voice shrill above the racket. “Have you seen the sultan?”

  For answer, he pointed. I followed his finger but saw no red-robed horseman, only some foot soldiers trying to break free of the press while four of our knights attempted to hold the enemy at bay. The soldiers were dragging something between them, straining, determined despite the threat to their lives. The something was red. And I knew. In that second I knew in the pulsing chambers of my heart the very particular shade of that red. Nasrid crimson: worn by the sultan when leading an army so that if he was wounded, the royal blood would not show and discourage his men.

  I think I screamed. I know I ran. Faster than any one-legged thing should ever be able to, I scrambled down those winding stairs, my cries echoing off the walls. I arrived at the hospital room just as they carried him in like a dead weight, he who was so slim and slightly built, so agile and swift, so charged with energy and glowing golden with life. His head lolled, his helm missing. His eyes were closed, and his face—white as the sheet that covered the dead men—was ghastly with blood, which sleeked his neck and blended with the red of the marlota. His sword with Only God is victorious was gone; his fingers curled over emptiness. I could hear the cries of the women in the stairwell, their tongues shuttling relentlessly back and forth. They sounded like the djinn I had tried to banish. He had ridden out without my protection—without his Special Guardian, or the spells that would have kept him safe. The last of my reason fled me. I am told that I ran at the doctor, battered him with my fists until they pulled me off, and still I screeched that it was his fault for sending me away, his fault—anyone’s but my own. I lashed out when they dragged me away, twisting in their grip like a wild animal, and locked me in a cell—for my own good, they said as they slid the lock across. I ran at the door. I kicked it with my false foot, kicked it with my good foot, fell screaming to the floor. And lay there, smashing my head against the flagstones until I died.

  I didn’t die, of course. I wanted to. But the spirits—or whatever rules our lives—wouldn’t let me. I lay there in the hell that was left to me, a grim darkness of rumbles and roars in which the world shook and render powdered down out of the walls and distant cries filled the air, and prayed that I would die. I don’t know how long I existed in this state between the living and the mad, but at some point light came into the room accompanied by a familiar voice—Qasim the vizier, chiding me in the tone he often took with me, impatience tempered with an edge of irony: “I see you’re still with us, Blessings.�
��

  I thought he mocked me. “I don’t want to be ‘with you.’ Leave me to die.” My head throbbed like a pulped hand and when I touched it, I found it horribly crusted, as if I had grown a beetle’s carapace over my face.

  The shadow of Qasim’s gaunt frame leaned itself against the door. I could feel his contemplation of me, like an insect on the skin.

  “Oh, Blessings,” he said, a verbal tut. “Such a mummer you are. They thought you’d gone mad, like a rabid dog, said one. People made the sign of the evil eye against you, said they should put you out for the djinn—and they would have if I hadn’t put you in here. Such a scene! People bitten, kicked, insulted. Eardrums shattered by your screams, I have no doubt. And for what?”

  “Don’t you care that he is dead? Of course you don’t.” I answered my own question bitterly. “I see you are still in the land of the living and that’s all that really matters.”

  That made him laugh. “Dear God, you really are a vicious little creature, aren’t you? It’s not surprising, I suppose. They told me as much when I bought you.”

  That stopped me. “You bought me?”

  He tilted his head toward me. “Who did you think bought you as a companion for the lad in the first place? The merchant in Fez is my cousin. He thought I might be interested in you. Said you were ‘a fine monster’: I thought you might amuse the young prince. It never ceases to amaze me that he hasn’t tumbled to the truth. Or just tumbled you, one way or another. It’s been…entertaining, watching the pair of you dancing around each other: you so needy, he so naive.”

  The wasteland of the real world tumbled down around me once more. What did it matter that Qasim had been the one who bought me for Momo, now that Momo was dead? I sobbed, quietly now, into my hands, for myself: for him.

  He dragged me to my feet. “Just pull yourself together. He’s not dead, you unutterable little fool. God knows he ought to be, but he’s not. An absurd stunt, to ride out like that when he could barely sit a horse, let alone wield a sword. A heroic charge, they’re calling it. Heroic, but completely pointless: he didn’t get anywhere near the guns, as even you could probably tell, given the bombardment this place took before we finally capitulated. And hundreds of good men dead—and women and children too—as a result of his wilfulness. A hundred more taken captive by the Marquis of Cádiz, so those ransoms will cost us a whole heap of money we don’t have.”