That shocked even Sihtric to silence. Everybody stood still. Moraima covered her face.
Orm said darkly, ‘Is this true, Robert?’
Robert looked at the girl. ‘We’ve had no time to talk, no time alone - but, yes, father. I think it’s true.’ And now he understood why the vizier hated him.
Moraima said to the vizier, ‘How did you know, grandfather? I’ve been to no doctor.’
‘But you told one of your friends, who told her friend, who told the boy Ghalib, who, hating Robert, told me.’
Robert grunted. ‘Ghalib will never forgive me for saving his life.’
The vizier shrieked, ‘And I will not forgive you, or spare you, for you have defiled her, as this fat priest defiled her mother, my daughter.’
Robert boldly took Moraima’s hand and drew her behind his back.
Orm said, ‘Is that what this is all about? Are you really hungry to conquer the world for Islam, vizier? Or are you simply enraged that your granddaughter, like your daughter, loves a Christian? Is that what is driving you insane?’
The vizier stood tall, his mouth drawn wide, the muscles in his neck spasming. So deep was his rage, so toxic the drink swilling in his body, that for a heartbeat he seemed unable to act, even to speak. The guards fingered their scimitars uneasily.
But Sihtric was not frozen. He turned to Moraima. ‘Goodbye, my lovely girl, my darling. All my life I have chased such grand ambitions. And yet in the end, if all I leave behind is you, perhaps it’s enough.’
Moraima asked, bewildered, ‘Father? What do you mean?’
‘I will not see Christendom threatened - not through my own foolishness and arrogance. You say that everything I’ve achieved is gathered in this room, vizier. Then it must end, here in this room.’
And Sihtric jumped up at the wall, grabbed an oil lamp, and hurled himself on the heap of manuscripts in the corner of the room. The lamp broke under him, and fire blossomed around him, licking eagerly over the stacked scrolls and books, and Sihtric’s robe. Ibn Tufayl let out a bellow of drunken despair, and threw himself at the fire. Orm grabbed him, whether to hold him back or to wrestle him Robert couldn’t tell. But in a moment the two of them had toppled into the blaze on top of the squirming priest.
It had only taken a heartbeat. The room filled with smoke. The screams of the three men were high and terrible. Moraima lunged forward, but Robert held her.
The guards ran into the room. Some of them tried to drag the bodies from the pyre, only to be burned themselves and driven back, and others, with more presence of mind, ripped hangings off the walls and hurled them on the fire. The smoke was dense now, and, his lungs seared, Robert began to cough.
‘Robert. Hsst. Robert!’ The voice carried to Robert through the roaring of the blaze, the panicky shouts of the Berber guards. Ibn Hafsun the
muwallad
stood in an archway, only dimly visible through the billowing smoke. ‘Let’s get out of here. Bring the girl. Move, while you have a chance. Come on!’
Dragging an inert Moraima, Robert hurried that way. The guards were too occupied with the blaze, and the smoke too thick, for them to be seen and stopped.
But as he reached the arch the little serving girl stopped him. ‘Please,’ she said in heavily accented Latin. ‘Please!’
Robert, anxious, tried to get past. But, her face soot-streaked, a burn livid on her right arm, she held up a scorched scroll, wrapped in an animal skin. She pointed at the blaze. ‘Priest, priest!’
Robert grabbed the scroll and ran out, dragging Moraima, following Ibn Hafsun.
XXIV
Ibn Hafsun, Robert and Moraima slipped out of Cordoba. They rode down the Guadalquivir towards Seville, a bigger city where, Ibn Hafsun said, it would be easier for them to lose themselves, while the fuss died down.
Ibn Hafsun was vague about why he had saved them. ‘I brought you across Spain, Robert, for a fee. I suppose I’ve always felt responsible for you. I didn’t mean to lead you into such peril - and nor did I mean to play a part in the deaths of Sihtric and Orm.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Robert said.
‘Perhaps not. But I’m a
muwallad,
Robert. A Muslim, but with a healthy dose of ancestral Christian guilt left in my bloodstream.’
As they journeyed along the course of the great river, Robert was distracted by the changing landscape. Al-Andalus might have declined since the end of the great days of the caliphate and the
fitnah,
but there was prosperity here. Huge ships sailed the length of the river, laden with goods. Near Seville the land was heavily farmed. Plantations of sugar cane sprawled amid ranches and stud farms where tremendous herds of horses flowed.
As they travelled, each morning Moraima was ill.
The two of them spoke little. Moraima was immersed in her loss and the churning of the new life inside her body. And Robert, brooding on Orm’s death, his head full of the stern strength of his new faith, found he had nothing to say to her. In the evenings, in taverns or camped out in the open, Ibn Hafsun watched them sitting apart in silence, and sighed, and rolled over in his blanket to sleep.
Seville itself was bustling, prosperous under the Abbadids, the ruling family. Ibn Hafsun said that the river was navigable from the sea to this point, making Seville a natural port. There was a fortress here, built centuries ago by Cordoban governors. Now it was being extended by the Abbadids into a palace to be called al-Murawak - ‘the Blessed’. If Cordoba’s great days were over, it appeared that Seville’s still lay ahead.
They came to a place a little way to the north and west of the fortress walls, where a small mosque stood. Ibn Hafsun said, ‘You say Sihtric spoke of a great mosque to be built in Seville. If it is to be built anywhere, I judge it will be just here, for the position, close to the palace, is ideal.’ He glanced around at the somewhat shabby mosque, the tangled streets. ‘It’s unprepossessing now. But it would be fascinating to come back in a century or two, and see what time has made of this place.’
Robert glanced at Moraima. ‘We should make plans,’ he said. ‘Ibn Hafsun has brought us this far. Now it’s up to us.’
‘I have family in the city, on my mother’s side,’ Moraima said. ‘The aunt who would have raised me. We could stay with her. She wouldn’t betray us. She never liked grandfather much.’
‘Or—’
‘Yes?’
‘Or we could take a ship for England.’
They eyed each other. Moraima’s face was full of her loss, of her father and grandfather. A loss that, perhaps, she blamed him for, in some indirect way.
And Robert saw her from a distance, as if through a window of stained glass.
He was fourteen years old, and was battered by contradictory experiences. In a few days he had lost his father, but he had found a core of true Christian faith. When he had first travelled across al-Andalus his soul had opened up to its light and its beauty. But now he imagined a day when this country would be studded with solid churches and cathedrals, and the folk working these rich fields would all be good Christians. He imagined that future, and dreamed inchoately of playing a part in bringing it about.
And in the world as he saw it now, with a new clear vision and orderly head, he found little room for a Muslim girl and her half-Muslim baby.
She saw this in his face. She turned away.
He dug the scroll out of his pack. Badly scorched, it was crumbling. ‘We must decide what to do with this.’
Ibn Hafsun glanced at it, interested. ‘What is it?’
‘It was saved from the fire. I think Sihtric thrust it out to a serving girl, who passed it to me ... I have told you of his visions, the engines. These are the original sketches, I think, taken from the English monk.’
Ibn Hafsun touched the battered scroll. ‘The Codex! And nearly complete. Marvellous, marvellous. And it is wrapped in this bit of skin - is it tattooed somehow?’
Robert took the bit of skin, fingering it curiously. It was damaged by an arrow wound.
‘But they are useless,’ Moraima said. ‘These designs. My father always said they needed the
Incendium Dei,
which his alchemists could never puzzle out.’
‘Useless?’ Ibn Hafsun laughed coldly. ‘I wouldn’t have said so. How many have already died as a result of this Codex?’
‘It is useless,’ Robert said. ‘And my mother’s vision even more so.’ In the end, as far as he knew, Sihtric and Orm had never even discussed properly the ‘Testament’ that had brought Orm all this way in the first place. It had all been folly - a dreadful waste of life.
‘Well,’ Ibn Hafsun said, ‘if you two aren’t to stay together, what will you do with the Codex?’
‘It’s a Christian relic,’ Robert said. ‘I won’t see it in Muslim hands. Perhaps we should destroy it.’
‘It belonged to my father,’ Moraima snapped. ‘I won’t see it destroyed.’
‘That
would
seem a crime,’ Ibn Hafsun said. ‘It is a unique artefact... Can I suggest a compromise? Let me take it. I will put it in safekeeping for you - or for your children, perhaps.’
‘Safekeeping?’ Moraima asked. ‘Where?’
Ibn Hafsun thought it over, and had an inspiration. ‘Right here. I’ll put it in a box, and have it interred, under our feet. One day a great mosque will rise up here on this very spot. Surely it will be undisturbed there. And if you or your descendants ever want to retrieve it - well, you know where to look.’
‘Are you an honest man, Ibn Hafsun?’ Robert asked. ‘You won’t take it and exploit it for yourself?’
‘Not I,’ said Ibn Hafsun. ‘I don’t have the imagination for such things - or the stomach. After all I am caught between two worlds; who would I attack, my Muslim brothers or my Christian cousins? You can trust me, Robert Egilsson. I hope you know that of me by now.’
Robert and Moraima eyed each other. ‘Agreed,’ said Robert.
She nodded.
‘And for you two,’ Ibn Hafsun said sadly. ‘Is there no hope?’
‘No hope,’ Robert said.
Moraima asked coldly, ‘What of the baby?’
Robert shrugged. ‘Have it born. Have it scooped out of you by your clever Islamic doctors. I don’t care. It is your responsibility, only my shame.’ And he turned to walk away.
‘A shame that will haunt you, Robert,’ she called after him. ‘Haunt you!’
He kept walking, faster through the narrow streets, until he could no longer hear her voice.
As he approached the river he dug into his pack, checking his money.
And he found al-Hafredi’s bit of tattooed wrapping skin, and scraps of the fire-damaged Codex, torn off. These fragments had been left behind when he had pulled out the scroll. He picked out the largest bit of the Codex, held it up in the bright Spanish sun, and studied it curiously. The words
Incendium
Dei had been ripped through, leaving incomplete letters, D, I, V, M. And there was a string of garbled lettering:
BMQVK XESEF EBZKM BMHSM ...
Perhaps he should discard these bits of grisly, enigmatic rubbish. But that felt wrong. After all men had died for this - his own father had.
He thrust the scrap back into his pack, with the bit of human skin. He could decide later. Then he walked along the river front, looking for a ship to England.
II
CRUCESIGNATI
AD 1242-1248
I
AD 1242
‘On the day he left Seville Robert was only fourteen years old,’ Joan said. ‘A year younger than you are now, Saladin. He grew to become strong and pious - but a savage warrior, a driven man, it was always said. He took the Cross, and won Jerusalem. And he died on Temple Mount, far from home. This Christian country was his enduring achievement. Since then six generations of his children, six generations of
us,
have lived and died here. But Robert, that confused boy, has vanished into time, his life transient as a breath...’
Saladin sat with his mother on a blanket spread over the dusty ground of the Mount of Joy. On the hill a goat bleated, and their tethered horses grazed peacefully. The sun was high, the last of the morning’s cloud was shredded, and a
sharav,
a desert wind, hot and dry and scented like spice, stretched the skin of Saladin’s face tight as a drum.
All of Jerusalem was spread out before him, the domes of its mosques and churches and the swarming of its many bazaars and suqs all crowded within the wreckage of the old walls. Faint voices called the Muslim faithful to prayer, and somewhere the bell of a Christian church tolled. To the east he could see the Dead Sea and the Jordan. To the west the Mediterranean gleamed. It was hard to believe that any of this would ever change, that he himself would ever grow old. And he felt uncomfortable with his mother’s talk of a long-dead boy.
‘I don’t like it when you say things like that,’ he said.
‘Like what?’
‘Like a poet. “Transient as a breath.” What does that
mean?’
Joan sat wrapped in a loose white robe, with a scarf over her head to deflect the sunlight. While Saladin was dusky she was pale, her eyes blue, and the sun burned her easily. Saladin had heard it said that
he
looked as if he belonged here, but she did not, though the line of her ancestors since Robert the Wolf spanned a century and a half.
She was only thirty, he reminded himself. Her husband, his father, had died young, and she had worn herself out raising Saladin, and defending the family’s wealth and position in Jerusalem. He knew all that. But her earnestness made him impatient. He felt like a slab of muscle, restless and confined.
She sighed. ‘I’m trying to waken your soul, Saladin. Trying to give you a sense of the history in which we’re all embedded.’
‘Who cares about history? You can’t change history, you’re stuck with it. The future is all that matters.’
‘Dear Saladin. You’re just like your father, you know. His brain-pan was as hard as iron too. And he cared nothing for history either. But history shapes all our lives. The great currents of time have brought us here, you and I, to this hill over Jerusalem, far from the birthplaces of our ancestors - of Robert.