Court of Lions

by Jane Johnson

  He and Momo had ridden a dozen sorties from the gates of Granada toward the army camp. They had fought and withdrawn, fought and withdrawn. On one occasion they had even clashed with King Ferdinand himself. “I saw him,” Momo had told me. “I saw the king with his damned standards, all done up in his armour. He had his helm on but his visor up, as if he wanted me to see him, and see he was not frightened of us. I would have ridden at him and challenged him to a duel, but they wheeled away at the last moment, as if mocking me.”

  “And Don Gonzalo, the Great Captain, did you see him too?” I had rather liked the young Castilian officer, with his lion’s hair and open gaze. He had been kind to me. “Would you kill him if you met him on the battlefield?”

  “I would kill any and all of them,” Momo had said angrily. “And rejoice in their deaths.”

  “Then I will kill them all for you,” I had replied loyally, baring my teeth in proper Banu Warith fashion. “Like the savage I am.”

  This had pleased him, as so little else did, these days. “Dear Blessings,” he’d said, cupping my cheek fondly. “I can count on so few people now. I am surrounded by madmen and cowards, warmongers and collaborators, toadies and spies. It’s impossible, sometimes, to see which is which. But you, dear comrade, are a constant in this sea of chaos. I always know where you stand.”

  “At your side, as your Special Guardian.”

  Ah, what a charlatan I had felt when he vouchsafed me these small moments of trust. What a snake in the sand…

  I dragged myself back to the present. Momo was telling the slave to stay where he was. Then he turned his attention to the chieftain of the Banu Serraj.

  “Stand down, Musa, my brave friend. Every time we ride a sortie against them they lose soldiers and we lose soldiers. But our supply of men is limited, while theirs grows every day. Every day I thought we would have reinforcements coming—from North Africa or the Ottomans, or even my uncle. Now we know we fight alone, isolated and surrounded. And the enemy has built a city within sight of our walls and is either going to sit and wait for us to starve, or come against us with their guns, and there will be precious little we can do to stop them. Do I have the measure of the situation, Qasim?”

  Qasim bowed his head. “It does rather seem that way, Majesty.” He took a deep breath. “I do humbly suggest that you make terms with the enemy: offer them handsome tributes, release the Christian captives in all our prisons and swear fealty to these monarchs.”

  Very slowly, very deliberately, Momo reached down, drew off one of his fine jewelled slippers and, with the precision of a man who has honed his skill at casting lance and spear for more than a decade, threw the babouche the ten feet that separated him from the vizier. The flat of its sole struck Qasim sharply on the head with a resounding smack.

  The entire court held its breath. Qasim blinked, slowly as if in shock; then quickly, as if he sought to prevent tears of pain or humiliation from giving away any loss of equanimity. He took a deep breath, recovered the offending item from the floor and with a sweeping bow returned it to Momo’s outstretched hand. The sultan bent and slipped his foot back into the pretty leather, then sat back as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

  Glances were exchanged, but no one spoke: no one dared. Ever since Momo had had the five clerics beheaded people were generally more alert in his presence, realizing perhaps that the olive did not fall too far from the tree and that the young sultan they had considered so pleasant and gentle had in fact inherited a measure of his father’s unpredictability.

  “My lord…” Qasim eyed him warily, in case the other slipper came to hand. “It is my duty to point out to Your Majesty that since the foreign king fired the fields, destroyed the crops and captured the livestock, our food supplies are…limited. We have, it has been estimated, maybe eight months’ food for all the people of this city. And in the meantime King Ferdinand and his vast army will sit outside our gates and wait until the plight of Granada becomes that of Málaga. Why not negotiate terms now, before we are too weak to bargain well?”

  Momo made an impatient gesture. “I know this. Do you think I don’t know this? Why did we risk lives in an attempt to take back Salobreña and Adra? Because we were bored? Because we wanted to test our arms against the infidels? Of course not. We did it because we must find a way of being resupplied from the sea, since all other routes are closed to us. So we tried, and we failed: but by God we tried.” He gazed upward to the seven heavens once more, his face drawn.

  “Might I speak, Majesty?”

  Momo brought his gaze back down to earth, specifically onto the vast beard of Musa Ibn Abu’l Ghrassan. “Speak,” he said. “But I beg you make it brief, for it feels as if my head is splitting.”

  The vizier and I exchanged a look: the illness that had finally carried off Moulay Hasan had begun with headaches. I was seized by a sudden terror then: what if Momo were suddenly struck blind, or fell to the floor in convulsions as his father had done? What if he died? The cloud that dogged me daily descended once more, cold and terrible, and I shivered.

  “Let us work a deception on the enemy,” Musa was saying. “If we leave one or more of the city’s gates open, those their spies would be most likely to see, perhaps we might tempt them to attack. Once inside, we close the gates and ambush them with the troops we’ve stationed there to meet them. Then we shoot the bastards full of arrows.”

  “That doesn’t seem honourable.” Momo frowned. “But they’ve hardly been chivalrous in their dealings with us, and if there’s any way to lessen their number, it must be tried. Now I must take some rest.” He pushed himself to his feet and the court bowed. “Do your worst, Musa. Do your worst.”

  I walked with Momo to his private courtyard and inside, to the great pillowed divan that took up an entire alcove in the stately domed chamber, feeling as I ever did the heavily ornamented ceiling bearing down upon me. “Ask the man to turn the fountain off would you, Blessings? Even the sound of the water hurts my head.”

  I ran to do his bidding. When I came back, he was sitting amid the gorgeously coloured cushions, watching a peacock dip its beak into the now-still waters of the fountain channel. The light struck its feathers, bringing the iridescent blue-green into startling relief against the pale marble. I passed the bird and it cocked its head at me, regarding me with a beady black eye, before continuing to drink as if I were no more bother to it than a passing butterfly.

  “How can I give up all this, Blessings? All this beauty, all this serenity, the decades of craftsmanship and care that have gone into making it the loveliest place on the face of the earth? How can I let this paradise fall into the hands of the unbelievers, those who cannot treasure and comprehend it as I do? Who cannot read its sacred geometries and precious inscriptions, let alone take inspiration from them? But if I do not give it up, we will all die here and it will become forever and always a gravesite, a final testament to the last Muslims who lived in this place and brought it to the peak of civilization. And that’s if our enemies don’t blow it to bits with their terrible lombards.” He turned tragic eyes upon me. “I don’t know what to do, Blessings. But you’re the only one I can say that to. I must appear strong to put heart into our people—to encourage Musa and our soldiers, to reassure the people of Granada that I—their sultan—will safeguard them from all the horrors they’ve heard of elsewhere: the starvation and torture, the burnings and floggings, men used as target practice; women raped, children sold as slaves to God alone knows what monsters are out there in the so-called Christian world. And yet I know I’m not strong—I’m not some iron-willed, thick-skinned hero who will fight and fight till he has carved a path through the enemy ranks and taken on their king in single combat and screamed ‘Y’Allah!’ while he did it. Oh, I know I make a good fist of appearing to do all that: I’ve shown them my warrior face and I’ve taken my battle wounds and flown our banners high. But I hate it. I hate the tearing rage and violence of it all. I hate to see men hacked about, limbs shorn
off, heads caved in; men writhing in agony, waiting for the end to come.

  “Last week when we rode out, I killed three men in a single sortie, and looked into their eyes while I did so. There is nothing in the world, Blessings, so terrible as to see the light dying in another man’s eyes as you take his life. It butchers something in your own soul. It’s a disgusting, inhuman, ungodly thing, taking a life. A life that God himself sent out into the world, whether he was recognized by the bearer of that divine spirit or not.” He paused, thinking, and I saw a single tear leak from his left eye and track its way like a pale pearl down the side of his nose.

  At last he spoke again. “No, there is a worse thing. As we turned back from one of those fights, I saw this horse—a fine black mare—standing shaking amid broken bodies where we had fought. She just stood there, head down, trembling, and I thought she was afraid of the blood—they don’t like the smell, you know. But just as I was about to lean over to pick up her reins and lead her home, she suddenly coughed, and this great gout of black blood came spurting out of her mouth, and I saw there was a fine lance sticking out of her chest. It must have gone right through her rib cage and punctured her lung. She was drowning in her own blood, standing there, not understanding what was happening to her, not understanding anything. She coughed and coughed and struggled for breath, and then she just…fell in a heap. Collapsed on her side and lay there, her ribs heaving. And I could do nothing to help her. The Christians were on our tail: we had to leave to save our own skins. I…I am so ashamed that I left her there, like that…dying in a wasteland of corpses. For nothing…” He put his head in his hands and his shoulders began to shake.

  I comforted him as best I could, which in truth was not at all. He went to Mariam that evening, and still she would not see him. Later that night I heard the screech of women’s voices in the harem above the Court of Lions: it seemed Mariam had found her voice, for her raging cries drowned out even those of Lalla Aysha, Momo’s redoubtable mother: “I will not sleep with him! He betrayed me and he betrayed our children: why should I give him more to sell to the unbelievers?”

  I crept away into the medina to find some strong liquor. I did not have to look hard or for long: I was not the only one drowning my sorrows. Despair reigned in our city: word of the enemy’s resolution to stay for the winter, until we starved or surrendered, had snaked insidiously out through its winding streets. I joined a blacksmith, a butcher, a livestock manager, two merchants and a man who would not speak in downing small cups of some noxiously strong alcohol in a stable block past the mosque baths down near the Gate of Justice. We drank ourselves into a companionable haze into the early hours of the morning and beyond, when at last the mute man stood, nodded to us and left. A few minutes later the first call to prayer drifted out across the city, the singer’s notes warbling uncertainly into the chilly air. The blacksmith caught my eye. “He’s a good hour early.”

  It comes to something when your muezzin is driven to drink.

  Musa tried his ruse. For three nights various gates were left ajar: and for three nights the enemy took no advantage. Our troops grew lax: late on the fourth night it seemed a small contingent of Christian knights managed to slip past the so-called guards, for in the morning we found a crude wooden plaque with the words Ave Maria daubed on it in white paint, nailed to the door of the mosque. After that the gates were kept firmly shut. It seemed a small thing, but it cast Momo further into a pit of gloom. “They mock us. They mock me!” he cried.

  He grabbed his spear and rode out with a band of our best knights, one of whom pinned the plaque beneath the tail of his horse, where the animal obligingly shat on it. I was convinced Momo would not return from this sortie, it seemed so ill-advised, so rash. As I had done at Loja, I gripped the battlements and stared through the dust kicked up by the battle, strained my eyes for a glimpse of him, alive or dead. He came back, though, covered in blood, none of it his own. In the courtyard of the Alcazaba he laid down his lance, likewise besmirched. Beside it he laid his sword. A little dust devil whipped up by the late-afternoon breeze swirled around the words on its hilt: Only God is victorious.

  I made to pick them up to clean them, but he put a restraining hand on my arm. “No, Blessings. I shall not use them again.” Then he turned and made his way toward the hammam, shedding pieces of armour as he went.

  The next day negotiations began in secret for the surrender of Granada.

  ’Twixt us Qasim and I ran a dozen parlays between the Alhambra and Santa Fe, begging audience with the king and queen, and if gaining no access to them, with their secretary, Hernando de Zafra, and sometimes with the Great Captain and the Count of Tendilla, whom Qasim seemed to know well, though I did not remember ever meeting him before. In each meeting we tried to persuade them to leave Granada be, to accept Momo as a vassal-king who would pay tribute as his father had done, and his grandfather before him, and his grandfather’s father too—and his grandfather’s grandfather: all those other Mohammeds and Yusufs down the centuries through so many other times of conflict. They had all paid protection money to the enemy—bribes of coin and released prisoners—so that they and their subjects might be allowed to live without the fear of being attacked and carried off as slaves, their wives and daughters raped, their houses fired, their livestock stolen, their wells poisoned.

  We begged, we bargained, we wheedled; we made concessions large and small. All to little effect: the Catholic Monarchs—as they now termed themselves—held to a hard, unbending line. But one day during this tedious period I saw a man I recognized from his great bush of dark hair, sitting patiently in line with other petitioners awaiting audience with the monarchs. The last time I’d seen him had been in an antechamber in the palace in Córdoba, where we had both been kicking our heels. I remembered that he told me he thought it was possible for a man to sail right around the world without falling off, and that there was a secret way to Jerusalem and he was going to find it. But Jerusalem lies at the end of the Middle Sea, I’d said: something even children knew. He’d shown me charts proving, he thought, that it could be reached from the east, not the west, if he could but find the funds to put together an expedition. And I remembered that I’d shown him my amulet and told him how my people used the stars to navigate the Great Desert.

  Now when he saw me he leapt to his feet. “Don Baraka, isn’t it?”

  “Señor Colón!”

  “Call me Cristoforo Colombo, like they do back home.”

  “My friends call me Blessings.” We clasped forearms.

  His Castilian was halting, for he came from Genoa by way of Portugal, and this made it easier for me to understand him; also, he had a little Arabic because he had picked some up in his trading days, and when studying to improve his charts had worked with a number of Arab scholars and sailors, who used a different system of map making and navigation. He was always avid for new information, as greedy for it as I was greedy for food: I liked that about him.

  “I’m nearly there,” he told me.

  “Nearly where?” I teased. “You’re right here in front of me in a city that is no city called for something that doesn’t exist.”

  He grinned. “Hush, or I’ll be forced to denounce you to the Holy Inquisition. No, I mean, I have nearly persuaded the queen to fund my expedition.”

  “What’s the delay?”

  “She says my expedition will be her next venture, but she can’t afford the extra expenditure until the Granada campaign is completed.”

  “Completed?”

  “Until you lot surrender.”

  “We’re trying, but they won’t accept any of our proposals. In fact, they’re being extremely unreasonable.”

  “Ferdinand scents total victory.”

  “My sultan will never surrender the city unless his people are safeguarded, and their right to live and to worship as they will are guaranteed.”

  He shrugged. “I have the sense they think your sultan will capitulate pretty quickly when famine begins to bi
te.”

  “They underestimate the number and quality of gardens in our city,” I said fiercely. “We have our own water cisterns, and we cultivate every fruit and vegetable you can name and then some you can’t. If that’s what they’re waiting for, they’ll have a very long wait and their resources will be well and truly depleted before our supplies run out.”

  Cristoforo Colombo made a face. “Is that true? If it is, then there’s no chance I’ll get my funding, and I’ll have wasted years of my life. Perhaps I’ll have to go back to England to talk to their wretched King Henry again.” He grimaced. “But he won’t give me what I need: he’ll just try to cheat the charts out of me and send his own mariners.” He looked despairing.

  “Perhaps you could make mention to the queen…about the gardens?” And I regaled him with details of the grounds of the summer palace, where the peaches were so heavy and ripe they broke the branches of the trees on which they grew; of the peas and beans shooting up through the beds of rosemary and poppy; the squashes and melons so huge they could feed an entire family for a week; and everywhere the pomegranates that had become the symbol of the city. “It’s believed our pomegranates trace their ancestry back to God’s own garden. They say there’s not a pomegranate eaten today whose seed did not come straight out of the Garden of Eden.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “She’ll like that, Isabella. But won’t it just make her all the more eager to conquer your city?”

  “It might make her keener to sign an agreement on our terms, rather than have her husband destroy Granada.”

  “It might,” he said, just as the Great Captain appeared and called his name.