Court of Lions

by Jane Johnson

  Don Gonzalo seemed surprised to see the two of us—a Genoese adventurer and a desert prince-cum-translator—in conversation. “Here again, Don Baraka? She will not see you, the queen, you know.”

  I smiled back at him. “I know.”

  They moved away toward the royal quarters; then Cristoforo turned around and whispered loudly, “Wish me luck, Blessings: I go into battle for both of us!”

  The agreement was signed on the twenty-second day of the moon of Muharram, or by the calculations of the infidel, on the twenty-fifth of November. If we received no relief by the end of the year, Granada would be surrendered, with all swearing allegiance to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Our Christian prisoners were to be released, with five hundred of them to be returned to the queen on signature of the document, along with hostages from the noblest families at court. No tribute would be paid for three years. The citizens of Granada and its outlying lands were permitted to stay in their houses and to retain their property; soldiers might keep their horses and weapons. All people had the right to worship as they chose, with no fear of the Inquisition: sanctity of the mosques was guaranteed, and there was to be no prohibition on what people wore or spoke or how they practised their usual customs. Sharia law would continue to pertain throughout the province. And Momo was to be given lands in the valleys of the beautiful Alpujarras in which to live; last, his son Ahmed would be returned safely to his care.

  As surrender terms went, these were the most generous that could be imagined. I blessed Cristoforo Colombo, who appeared to have achieved with his silver tongue what Qasim and I had been unable to. But of course, it was still surrender, and that was painful. There were scenes in the throne room, and some hysteria. Musa Ibn Abu’l Ghrassan unsheathed his sword—which itself counted as treason in the presence of the sultan—and declared, “I’d rather have a grave beneath the walls of Granada, on the spot I died to defend, than the richest couch in some other palace, earned by surrendering to the infidel!”

  Momo could have had his head for that, especially at the end of a long and trying day; but he was making an effort to remain as calm as possible, and in the end Musa put on his armour and rode out alone. What became of him I don’t know. Some say he rode right through the enemy army, taking heads as he went, and kept on riding all the way to Guadix. Some tell that, set upon by Christian knights, he leapt from his horse into the river and was carried to the gates of heaven. All I can tell you is that Aysha, the sultan’s mother, howled almost as loudly at hearing he had left as at the fact her son had surrendered Granada. Then she stormed around the harem, smashing vases and fretted screens and the beautiful bone-inlaid tables that had been created by artisans many centuries ago; and made a pile for burning of the precious carpets and wall hangings that could not be carried with us, shrieking that the infidel queen should not lay hands on them, that she would never again give up any treasure she owned to a Christian woman. By contrast, Mariam smiled for the first time in years at the news that surrender terms had finally been agreed upon, and laid out her prayer rug—also for the first time in years, I believe—to give thanks for the imminent return of her son.

  At dawn on the fourth day of the moon Rabi al-awwal in the Hijri year 897, which the Christians reckon as the second day of January 1492, we took our leave of paradise, with all the portable treasures of the Alhambra packed into wagons.

  “Ah, woe!” cried Aysha. “That it should be in the month of the Prophet’s own birth that we deliver the keys to paradise into the hands of the unbelievers!”

  “Hush, Mother,” Momo said. He seemed very calm, almost serene, though his face was paler than usual, and he had eaten no breakfast. After morning prayers, I had helped him dress in the ceremonial clothes he had deliberated over long and hard. These consisted of a long silk shirt and cotton breeches under a figured velvet marlota in the crimson of the Banu Ahmar; a shining silver helm with a great piece of white silk wound about it, one long tail fluttering down across his shoulder. Riding boots, of course, but of calf leather as soft as butter. A jewelled baldric and the sword he had abandoned those months back, now carefully edged and burnished to a fine sheen. Only God is victorious. “I will give it into King Ferdinand’s hand,” he said, with a glimmer of humour. “Perhaps it will make him more humble.” Over the robe, a burnoose of heavy silk, its hems all gold embroidery; rings on every finger and a fine line of kohl around his eyes to ward off the evil spirits attracted by the view of so many. I had applied this last myself for him, and he had had to steady my hand.

  “Come on, Blessings, you’re shaking. If anyone should be anxious today it’s me, for I’ll be the one going down in history as the sultan who gave up the last part of a kingdom that’s stood for almost eight hundred years.” He looked around, and his chin trembled, just for a moment. “Farewell to this perfect little paradise, to the palace of my ancestors. Farewell to al-Andalus.”

  At this, I admit, I had burst into noisy tears, and he took me in his arms, and I stained his fine robe where my face was buried against his shoulder. That embrace was pure delight and at the same time pure torment to me: but all I could do was to sob and shake until he gentled me as he might gentle a nervous horse, with quiet caresses and soft words.

  We were sitting just inside the great carved doors of the sultan’s hall, looking out onto the Court of Lions, where the fifth lion was spouting to denote the sixth hour. Swifts flitted here and there, catching the early-morning insects, as if today was a day like any other. The light was not the best, for the sultan’s hall faces west, to make the most of the sunset rather than the sunrise, and it took everything I had in me to draw those lines of kohl straight and unblotched. “Now I dare not show my feelings,” Momo said when I finished. “For fear of your kohl running down my face.”

  He stood up and walked to the courtyard lions, laid a hand on the nearest and sighed deeply. Then he called for the fountain master and told him to turn the water off and dismantle the device that controlled the timing of the flow.

  When the sound of the falling water ceased and all lay still, he took a pebble and dropped it into the centre of the fountain’s bowl, and we stood there for a long silent time, watching the ripples radiating out in wider and ever-degrading rings.

  History tells that the young sultan wept: but I was at his side and I tell you he did not. Not when he handed his sword into the hands of the foreign king, sitting foursquare and triumphant in front of all his nobles, knights and cardinals on his big bay horse; not when he gave up the keys to the city to Queen Isabella, with her plump, catlike face, her small eyes burning with a fierce, sharp pleasure as the rose light of morning woke an answering red in the walls and towers of the fortress city she had just taken without further bloodshed. Not when he gave his ring of office into the hands of the Count of Tendilla, who was to be the new governor of Granada. Not when the cries of “¡Santiago, Santiago, Santiago!” and “¡Castile, Castile, Castile!” rang out through the clear air. He came close to it, though, when young Ahmed was brought forward between the Great Captain and Cristoforo Colombo, wearing a smart brocade suit and cap in the style of the foreign court (although I noticed his cloak was pinned at the shoulder with the amulet I had given his mother). The lad had shot up in the almost nine years he had been in the Christian court: he stood near as high as the adventurer.

  “Ahmed, my son!” Momo cried, riding forward to greet him. “I am so happy to see you, I could burst with pride at what a fine young man you’ve grown into.”

  And at this moment Mariam, in defiance of all protocol, leapt out of the litter in which she had been travelling, hidden behind its curtains with the ladies of the harem, and, casting her veil aside, ran toward her son with her arms stretched wide to embrace him.

  The boy stared first at the young sultan, then at his mother, in what seemed to me a sort of disgust. Then he turned back to Queen Isabella. “Do I have to go with these people?” he asked in flawless, unaccented Castilian.

  “I am sorry, Alfon
so, you must. They are your parents.”

  His disdain was horribly apparent. “But they are heathens.”

  The queen rummaged in her furs (it was a cold morning) and brought out a small black book. “Here. May the Word of God go with you always.”

  The boy accepted the book wordlessly, kissing first the queen’s hand, which he held for a long time while she stroked his head, then the book. Then, stone-faced, he walked to his father, bowed stiffly and allowed himself to be led by a page to a waiting pony, which was far too small for his tall frame. He made an undignified exit from the city, his feet dangling on either side of the overburdened animal.

  The mountains of the Sierra Nevada made a beautiful, snow-capped barrier between us and the past. The valleys of the Alpujarras region that had been given over to Momo and his family were lush with meltwater, the red-earthed hills dotted with evergreen shrubs and wildflowers, so that the place reminded me with a fleeting, strange, fierce nostalgia of Morocco. The hand of Castile had not reached into this place: it was as if it had been largely untouched since the Creation, for the people here lived lightly on the land, eking out some meagre sustenance from small plots arranged around flat-roofed, clay-walled dwellings that merged into the landscape like natural outcroppings. I took to walking for miles, seeing on my excursions only the odd skittering lizard, foraging herds of sheep and goats; a great-eared mountain hare, startled to paralysis by my approach, that so much resembled the ones I’d watched as a child dancing on our desert hills that I stood there gazing at it for a long minute till our connection was broken by the tears welling in my eyes.

  To me, it seemed a great freedom to be able ramble at will like this, sometimes even staying out overnight with the stars spread overhead like a jewelled canopy, and the howling of the jackals in the valleys like the cries of wild muezzins, instead of being caged in by the careful beauty of the Nasrid palaces; or the current quarters of the royal court. Sometimes I thought of running away and living my life out in such a place: anything seemed preferable to the miserable atmosphere in our new home. The return of Ahmed should have reunited his fractured family, brought back some degree of harmony between husband and wife; between father, mother and son; but it had quite the opposite effect.

  Ahmed refused utterly to speak to his parents except, through an intermediary, in Castilian: to all intents and purposes, that meant me. And so, much against my will, I was dragged into their disputes, forced to witness Mariam’s growing distress, and Momo’s bewilderment at this strange young foreigner come back to us, who acted as more of an effete Castilian noble than any I had encountered even in the Córdoban court. He would not speak Arabic, eat spiced food or wear the flowing robes his father offered him from his own chests; he threw the leather babouches his mother had lovingly embroidered in gold thread for him in her face, raising a welt, and when Momo chastised him for it, he sneered. “Who are you, anyway? They said my father was a king, but you are no king—look at you! And her, sewing like some peasant. Look at this place: it’s a pigsty, and you are all pigs!”

  I hardly dared translate: when I did, all the blood drained from Momo’s face, and Mariam collapsed in a sobbing heap. The Lady Aysha had to be restrained she was so furious. “I’ll put him over my knee and beat some respect into him!” she snarled. I’d have let her, given half a chance: the boy had come back to us a brat. All he could talk about was Queen Isabella—so wise and beautiful and brilliant and well read and devout—and King Ferdinand—so handsome and soldierly, so cunning and clever at chess; about the noble children with whom he learned grammar and archery, poetry and horse riding. And of course religious studies: he could recite whole passages from the Bible without prompting, fell to his knees morning and night to give up his prayers to the Christian God, refused absolutely to set foot in the mosque.

  It was this as much as anything that broke Mariam: her faith had become her bedrock in life. While her husband was imprisoned by the enemy, she had devoted herself to learning to read the Quran. She knew each verse by heart. All her energy went into charitable work through the imams of the local mosques. She prayed five times a day and had brought in a renowned religious scholar to establish the precise qibla in her chamber so that her prayer rug could be exactly aligned toward Mecca.

  When Ahmed—who insisted on being called Alfonso—refused to go with his father to Friday prayers, Mariam’s wails tore through the house: at night they had to dose her with poppy juice, to make her stop and allow her, and everyone else, to get some sleep. Day by day it got worse: the boy’s views were entrenched, he was determined to escape back to his “real parents.” Momo cloistered himself in his own rooms or went riding with his hawks to avoid the weeping of his wife, the railing of his mother, the insults of his son.

  To be honest, none of the signs for the future were good. Death had travelled with us: for rather than allow the remains of his Nasrid ancestors to fall into the hands of the enemy, Momo had ordered that their bones be dug up and brought with us, wrapped in new white silk shrouds, transported in baskets by mules that sensed the presence of the spectres of past kings, or the djinn they attracted, and kicked their heels and rolled their eyes.

  Perhaps it was the proximity of the dead, or their djinn, that brought us such bad luck: perhaps something more corrosive, or contagious. In less than a year Mariam sickened and died, devoured by her own melancholy.

  That was the only time I saw Momo weep in public: but surely there is no shame in a man’s tears at his own wife’s funeral. The men of our tribe pray to die before their wives, rather than bear the pain of their loss.

  “I will never take another wife,” Momo told me. “Mariam broke my heart as I broke hers. Why add to the sum of pain in the world?”

  Perhaps this would have been the time to declare my love for him, to disclose my long-held, long-cherished secret. I look back now and wish I had. What did I have to lose? Except everything. But I lost that anyway.

  For so long I had feared that if I told Momo, he would spurn me. For ours is not a culture that embraces difference.

  There was a reason my mother named me Blessings. For among some of the people of the Kel Tamasheq, people like me, who come along rarely but not so infrequently that we are unknown, are regarded as specially blessed by the spirits. Doubly blessed: with both male and female parts. I have breasts—small, to be sure, but breasts all the same, with nipples that stiffen when brushed by a gentle hand. Still, there are men the world over with breasts, especially fat men. I have curbed my appetite over the years to keep them as flat as possible. It’s not easy, when you have known famine, to rein in the hunger that eats away at you even when you are full, but I have learned to do so. And then I bound them flat. And never bathed in the hammam with the others. We keep a certain modesty in our bathhouses, so my lower parts could be hidden; but my chest was more problematic.

  And the rest? I have a cock of reasonable size that rises sometimes full of blood: it is an annoyingly intemperate addition. At its root two little hairy balls. And behind this boastful masculine trio lies a petalled slit as pink and complex as an Alhambra rose. I do not know if it leads to a chamber that will make children: I never found that out, or wished to know. I had rather not go into the details of that night in Fez, but suffice it to say the slave merchant took me as a man takes another male—or a child of ten or eleven, as I was then. It was the worst pain I have ever experienced. And then, after keeping me for a while to have his pleasure of me, he sold me as a “special monster”; to Qasim Abdelkarim, who made a gift of me to the young prince, and kept me as a spy. His little sparrow, his eye in the sultan’s private quarters. His go-between in “discussions” with the Castilians. It makes me sick to admit the fear that drove me to allow him to use me so. Fear of losing Momo, of being discovered as the monster I am, and, discovered, being expelled from Eden. How much easier it would all have been had I not had the heart of a woman and lost myself in love.

  So much for Blessings, bearer of the world’s least
fitting name.

  After Mariam died, I never saw a man so sad. When Ahmed was taken by a fever, before he’d even relearned enough Arabic to bid his father farewell, it really felt as if the fates were determined to lay the last sultan of Granada as low as any man could go. Two months later we packed those things we could carry across the sea with us, including the coffins of his dynasty, and sailed to Morocco. There we were taken in by the sultan in Fez, Mohamed al-Shaykh, who had tried (he said) and failed to reinforce our forces: he gave my lord and his mother a small palace on a hill above the centre of that great city, set in wide and weed-strewn grounds. And there Momo devoted himself to recreating in as perfect detail as he could afford his beloved Alhambra.

  And me? Fez was not for me. I hated the place: it held terrible memories, and now it was making for a terrible existence. Momo had become possessed by his need to replicate the palace in which he had grown to manhood, to the point of going without sleep and food. Even the death of his mother, shortly after we arrived, had seemed no more to him than an inconvenient bump in the road, something to be negotiated swiftly and matter-of-factly so that he could continue with his journey. Every iota of his spirit went into the place, into overseeing the plaster makers and carvers, the carpenters and zellij men; the gardeners and the fountain engineers.

  One morning I tried to exorcise my misery by writing it down. I wrote it in my own blood and in my own language, to imbue the words with all the power I could muster, making an inkwell of my left hand into which I dipped my pen. When I had finished, I sat there with the blood drying in my palm, and looked at the poem I had made. It was the saddest thing I ever wrote, and I lost my asshak completely. What was the use of staying here beside the man I had loved all these long years if I was not honest with him, did not open my dark secrets up to the light, make him look at who I really was, make him acknowledge my love and my suffering? How could I ever say I had given him a chance to return my love if I did not at last declare it?