“No.” Khanchla picked up another handful. “It is heavier here. And there is a little more heat in it. Slightly bigger pieces. Tomorrow we will find water.”
“You have ridden through here before,” said Yosef.
Bagay and Khanchla looked at him, odd smiles on their faces. “No,” said Bagay. “We haven’t.”
Yosef stared at the two brothers. “You mean we rode into this without knowing if we would make it to the other side?”
“Others have crossed it before us. And I made the journey once.”
“When?”
Khanchla grinned, a sudden flash of white teeth that lifted Yosef’s spirits more than even the promise of water. “As a baby, riding in a basket on the side of a camel.”
Yosef shook his head. “We could have died.”
The smile faded from Khanchla’s face. “People die every day,” he said, softly. “But how many of them die amongst the great dunes? If a man must die, then let it be here.”
Yosef felt the sweetness of the date in his mouth. Above him, the cold stars glittered so brightly it was as if he could feel them on his face.
“I am glad we did not die,” he said quietly.
Khanchla grinned again. “I also,” he said.
“Can you teach me what you know?” Yosef looked between his friends.
Bagay shrugged. “You learn with every footstep,” he said.
“The next dune sea,” said Khanchla, “you will lead us.”
Before the next dune sea, though, they reached the trading centre of Agadès and faced the great wasteland of rock and plain through which Hausa merchants drove a long, swaying salt caravan, over a hundred camels strong, to the oasis at Bilma.
“We are late in the season and must go now or wait until after the summer. It is too dangerous for us to wait,” said Khanchla. They were eating a warm stew of millet and goat’s meat. After the long, hard silence of the dunes, Yosef thought nothing had ever tasted so rich. He savoured every bite.
“If we arrived at a coastal port from the west, we would immediately be identified as Dahiya’s people, the same ‘barbarians’ who have beaten back the Arab forces and cost them many lives. We would be taken for slaves, or worse. Amongst the Hausa we will become invisible, part of a tribe none notice. Men see what they expect to. When we arrive at the coast, men will no longer see what we are but what they expect us to be.”
“Which is worse?” Yosef asked, grinning.
Khanchla did not smile. “You are a Jew,” he said. “And you travel in secret, with no family or goods, accompanied by tribesmen rebelling against both the Greek occupiers and the Arab invaders. Beyond Africa, where none know or care for our troubles, we are merely travelling merchants, just like the Hausa with their salt goods. But to those with an interest in Africa’s affairs, we are more easily killed than questioned. We have taken a long route, it is true. But if it makes us invisible, as our mother intended, it is a route worth taking.”
Bagay looked curiously at Yosef. “What is it you carry that is so valuable you must be invisible?”
Yosef coloured and looked down at the plate from which they ate with their hands. “I cannot explain it,” he said quietly.
Khanchla gave his brother a quelling stare. “And you were told not to ask,” he said. He looked at Yosef. “It is none of our concern what business you have,” he said gently. “We follow our mother’s orders – and Dahiya told us to take you as far as Damascus, further if we must.” He smiled ruefully. “And that is still a long way, brothers. A very, very long way.”
The salt caravan travelled at a different pace than they were used to. At first it seemed slow and meandering, the deep-voiced Hausa allowing their camels to stop often to graze. The frequent pauses chafed at Yosef.
“We graze whilst we can,” said one of the men, his eyes roaming the horizon restlessly. “When there is no more grass, we must move quickly.” He was right. One day the grass dwindled into nothing, and the pace picked up.
The Hausa drove their camels at speed for nearly a full turn of the moon. Yosef and the brothers dismounted and ran with the others alongside the caravan, feet pounding the earth. Within days, Yosef’s thin sandals had worn away and dropped off. Then he ran barefoot with the others. It was agony at first. His feet bled and blistered, and he winced at every stone underfoot, often falling far behind the caravan, limping into camp to the jeers of the others, long after dinner had been eaten. But after ten days he learned to place his feet carefully and to ignore the sharp edges that cut the soles. By the end of the Ténéré he ran as fast and silently as the salt carriers, his feet tough and leathery.
The heat grew to become an overwhelming hell. The hotter it became, the faster they moved, running through the cooler hours of night to ensure they did not become stranded in the great wastes, the flat ground allowing them to move at the hard pace.
The running became hypnotic, the great expanse clearing his mind, allowing thoughts to enter it that Yosef had carefully suppressed until now.
What is it you carry that is so valuable? Bagay’s words ran through his head, over and over.
Occasionally Yosef touched the scrolls sewn into the hem of the white desert robes he wore, his cloak bundled on the camel. Always, you will carry these on your body. He heard Shukra’s voice in his mind. They are more valuable than anything. More valuable than your life. If your life is in danger, they must be destroyed – or carried to one of your own blood, by one you can trust. But months later, after losing his father and his home, after watching men die as they battled for their homeland, and now, traversing the great sands, Yosef dared to ask himself the question his younger self had never thought to, bound as he was by ties of blood and duty.
What, he thought, was the true point in this journey?
The letters were written in tongues he did not understand to people he had no idea how to find. In the madness and grief of losing his father, he had known nothing but the orders of Laurentius and Shukra, the smuggling of goods to the Jews of Septem. Those goods, though rich indeed, were nothing out of the ordinary – oil, wine, grain, cloth. Their sale in Septem, and the taxes paid to Ilyan to ensure his protection and silence, had bought him the means to travel the vast distance to Serica – and to purchase what must be bought there.
His family’s trade was cloth. Material had surrounded Yosef his whole life: linen and cotton, dyed wools, and embroidered silk from afar. Once, the lands between Garnata and Illiberis, upon which flax grew in such abundance, had been owned by his father’s family, and many of the people of Garnata were employed by the house of Radhan. But now, and for many years, such manufacturing had been forbidden to Spania’s Jews. Garnata had become dependent on the Illiberis latifundium, the Count of Illiberis now owning those same lands and masking the skills and expertise of the Garnata merchants under his own title. It was for the secrets of cloth that Yosef had been told this journey was necessary, to forge new relationships, partnerships of mutual benefit that would stand his house in good stead for years to come.
Here, amidst the Hausa merchants of the Ténéré, he was surrounded by a veritable wealth of goods from the salt pillars they carried as their main trade to other, lesser but not unimportant, goods: ivory and gold, frankincense, and ink and parchment, both of which, to his surprise, had been much in demand here in the midst of the sands. Yosef had done his duty and negotiated terms of trade, drawing up yet another letter of agreement signed by both parties. The letter defined the terms on which goods would pass through the hands of the Hausa and what portion they would take as their share. It gave Yosef a sense of satisfaction to know that the terms he negotiated would be taken as law by those involved in the passage of goods for some years to come, all being well.
But even this did not help with the feeling that his journey had no true purpose. The negotiation of trade terms seemed to him something that could have been done by a third party. It was the reason behind the scrolls that held the purpose to his leaving his homeland: t
he discovery of the means and method of making silk. Thus far, Yosef had no idea, still, what that secret was. It had begun to feel, of late, that he was simply moving through time and space for the sake of moving – that both he and his journey had no real purpose at all.
The land of Serica, where he was meant to discover those answers, felt distant, mythical even. He remembered his father speaking of Serica and the family he must find there. But long before he would reach Serica, he must pass through the lands of the Arabs. He must make allies of them, these same Arabs against whom his friends wielded steel, who even now threatened the lands and lives of those he had come to love. The same Arabs who threatened his own shores, even if Spania did not realise it.
Yosef ran, feeling lost and confused, asking himself the question he had dodged since leaving Septem: when he reached the palace of the caliph, what, exactly, would he do?
It had been his destination for so long – the first port of call, so to speak, on the way to the land his father called Serica. He had but the vaguest notion of Serica and its whereabouts. He knew it was the place from which silk came. He was aware that in recent years, as the Christian persecution of Jews had increased across the lands of the Greeks and Romans, trade in the products of Serica had become difficult. On the surface of it, this journey was a mission to create a new trade route.
But here he was. Alone in the Ténéré amidst a caravan of camels carrying salt, on his way to yet another oasis, thinking only of how to best place his feet amongst the stones. Serica was as far away as it had ever been and Yosef, so far as he could tell, had yet done nothing at all to advance his cause. He had done nothing but follow the lead of other men and be guided where he was told to go. He understood nothing of how he was to achieve this goal others seemed to believe he could. He thought of the trust placed in him by his father, by Laurentius, by Shukra; he thought of the help of Ilyan and the great Dahiya, whom he respected more than anyone he had ever met; he thought of Theo, the raw, livid scars on his friend’s face, the way he had nearly died so that Yosef himself might finish this journey.
And he felt nothing but terrified and inadequate. As he ran through the Ténéré wastes, Yosef realised, with a terrible clarity, that he had no idea what exactly he was meant to do.
Even worse, whatever the task was, Yosef felt certain he was the last person qualified to complete it.
At night beneath the vast, glittering sky, the hot desert wind restless on his skin, his mind touched on the memory of Sarah, the girl he had last seen bleeding and crying after being raped at the hands of one of Oppa’s men. She hovered at the edge of his dreams, a soft presence he both longed to touch and turned from in shame. In his dreams it seemed she was cocooned from him, swathed in a protective cloak that seemed to hide something of great importance that he, Yosef, was not part of. He felt a sense of both wonder and sadness. Often when he woke it was to find tears on his cheeks and a bittersweet ache in his heart. He knew it unlikely he would ever see Sarah again. Even if she was by some miracle still unmarried when he returned, she would never wish to lay eyes again on the man who had witnessed the horrors done her and been powerless to save her. Still, the dreams became his secret solace, the place he disappeared to and emerged from renewed. In the absence of Sarah’s presence, the fantasy of it – for Yosef knew his dreams could be no more than that, no matter what he knew in them – was a secret comfort from which he derived more solace than anything else.
Yosef ben Arun Radhan ran beside his camels toward the lands of his ancestors, toward Bethlehem, his dreams his only comfort on a journey he no longer believed in. The only thing Yosef knew for certain was that he was unworthy, unknowing, and, above all, doomed to fail all those who had invested their hopes in him, just as he had once failed the girl he loved.
Oppa
July, AD 690
Mare Ibericum
Mediterranean Sea near Spania
“My father intercepted your letter to me.” Oppa fingered the thick coils of his whip as he stared coldly at Giscila. Behind him the sea was slick and glassy, the rugged coastline of Spania hovering above the sea haze like a mirage. “Fortunately for you, his discovery of your news had a positive outcome.”
“Then you will follow the fleet, as I suggested?” Giscila spat over the side of the dromon. His scarred face was narrow and pinched with the long years of exile, his once-hard body stooped. Oppa looked at him disdainfully. His own form was lean and supple, his robes, as always, impeccably pressed, the dark, pointed features smoothly shaven. The stolid figure of Nicalo, son of Vitulo and Oppa’s ever-present shadow, stood silently behind him, far enough that he was out of earshot, close enough if he were needed. Oppa did not trust Nicalo, but he kept him close. Nicalo knew too much to be left alone in Spania.
“We will follow the fleet. Not because you suggested it, but because my father, the king, has ordered me to do so.” His emphasis on the word “king” was unmistakable.
Giscila’s face darkened. He opened his mouth as if he would speak. Oppa’s fingers caressed the coils of the whip again. Giscila closed his mouth sullenly.
“Yes,” said Oppa softly. “The coin that funds our ventures may have come from my father’s coffers, but he has entrusted it to me, in the knowledge that when I return, it will be with a fortune far greater than his original investment. Do not confuse to whom you answer, Uncle. My father might be king in Spania. But upon these waters, it is I who give the orders.”
He nodded over Giscila’s shoulder to where the rocky point of Septem jutted into the sea. “I cannot return to Ilyan’s port. The man is no friend to our family. We will head for Carthage. You wrote in your letter that it was there you saw Theudemir of Aurariola and had news of the Jew he helps.”
“The fleet has long since left Carthage. It is far east of here now, if you wish to pursue it.”
“If I wish?” Oppa frowned. “Have I not told you that is what I plan?”
Giscila inclined his head. “You have. But perhaps you are not aware of what – or who – currently enjoys Ilyan’s hospitality in Septem.”
Oppa’s eyes narrowed. “Go on.”
“A shipment of Illiberis horse landed there several weeks past. Disguised amongst the tribesmen accompanying them was Lælia.” When Oppa did not react, Giscila went on: “The Count of Illiberis’s granddaughter. The one betrothed to Theudemir of Aurariola –”
“I know who she is.”
The savagery in Oppa’s voice silenced the older man. Water lapped flatly at the dromon. The sun beat down, still fierce with the last of summer’s heat. Insects hung over the still surface in a dull cloud, men slapping them away and scratching irritably at the small red bites they made.
Oppa ignored them. He was thinking. Why would Paulus send his granddaughter to Ilyan? Oppa’s tidy mind dismissed the question almost immediately. That was a mystery he must unravel. The greater mystery, and of far greater interest to Oppa, was the fact that his father had not known of it.
Turning away from Giscila, Oppa stared out across the metallic surface to the distant smudge of Septem on the horizon. Unseen by his uncle, he gripped the edge of the dromon so hard his knuckles turned white. The memory of Lælia’s voice in the Toletum court taunted him: You will find, I believe, that it is customary to not only wait the full twelvemonth before declaring a man dead but to also have witnesses who will verify his death … And aside from you, Fráuja Oppa, are there any here who can claim to be witness to the death of Theudemir of Aurariola?
He willed the memory from his mind as he had done every day since he had stood in court before all the Toletum nobility and suffered the open humiliation of being ruled against by his father’s own archbishop.
An archbishop who now rots in hell, he thought savagely, but the thought gave him no satisfaction. Nothing, Oppa knew, would truly satisfy him until he had Lælia of Illiberis on her knees before him, and the bastard from Aurariola watching as he took her.
He hardened at the mental image. His mind bega
n to clear.
He returned to his original thought, uncaring of his uncle waiting behind him for a response. If my father had known of this, I would also know. This much Oppa was certain of. He had travelled in the company of his father’s men until here. He had stocked his dromons in eastern ports where messengers arrived regularly from court. If Lælia had arrived in Septem weeks ago, his father should have known – and he didn’t.
Not for the first time in recent weeks, Oppa pondered what else his father might not know. The Arabs are godless savages, Egica had bluntly stated, as are the barbarians of Africa. They will never launch an attack on Mater Spania – they know they could never prevail. Oppa had recollected those words almost as frequently as he had relived his humiliation at court. Accustomed to automatically granting Egica ultimate superiority in all matters, it had never before occurred to Oppa that he himself might have knowledge his father did not. In the matter of the Arabic threat, however, Oppa had realised he had the greater understanding. Now it seemed that, once more, he was in possession of knowledge his father was not. The question was: how to use it?
“Does Theudemir of Aurariola know his little bride is come to Africa?”
He asked the question without turning around. Oppa did not wish Giscila to see the savagery he knew was still raw on his face.
“It is impossible,” said Giscila flatly. “I learned of it myself only yesterday, and I took the liberty of killing the priest who brought the news. He came directly to me, believing I would pay the highest price for his information, something I have made certain men in every port understand. I am certain no other knows what he did.” He smiled unpleasantly. “Had he lied, he would have told me. By the time I was finished, his tongue was the only part of his body that still worked.”
The King's Coin: Ambition is the only faith (Visigoths of Spain Book 2) Page 5