‘Why? What’s so important?’
‘Joan has had a letter,’ the monk said. ‘From Roger Bacon.’ And he produced a parchment.
It was more than a year since Bacon had successfully decoded the
Incendium
Dei scrap. Since then he had thrown himself into a vast and secretive project of experimental research, spending his time and energy and all the money he could get hold of on books and instruments and tables, hiring assistants and instructing savants.
‘He has been puffed up by his own success in cracking the code.’
‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ Saladin said.
‘And now he’s looking for engines that can deliver God’s fire.’
‘But the Codex is buried under the mosque.’
‘True. But he’s scoured Christendom and beyond for ideas on what
might
be possible. Look at what he speaks of - wagons that move without horses by means of a miraculous force, like the reaping chariots of the ancients, and machines for flight, and so on. He even says there is no doubt that such instruments were built in ancient times and are still being built today. He says he knows of a scholar who tried to build the flying machine ...’
‘He speaks of this Aethelmaer of the legend.’
‘Perhaps. Or he may mean Ibn Firnas of Cordoba, who also built a flying machine some centuries ago.’
Saladin smiled thinly. ‘In Jerusalem I knew a man who sold flying carpets making much the same sort of promises. Well, Bacon is undoubtedly eager to keep our money flowing. Is it possible the ancients really did have such machines, Thomas? In a way it makes the Sihtric designs more plausible, if they are memories of the past, rather than dreams of the future.’
‘Well, Aristotle proposes that time is like a great wheel, going around and around endlessly, so that the past is the future, and there’s no difference. But such speculations don’t help us in any practical way. What we need is to get our hands on the Codex, and get it to Bacon, and then see what he can do with it-’
There was a spark of light. It came from one of the towers that bristled on the walls of the city, there and gone in a flash, like the sun reflecting from a bit of armour. Saladin stood up to see better. A tiny cloud of white smoke rose from the tower.
All around the camp, men were standing, pointing. In the flat light they looked skinny, skeletal, dead men besieging a city of the dead.
Long heartbeats after the flash of light, a muffled crump reached Saladin’s ears, like thunder from a distant storm.
‘What,’ Thomas asked, ‘was
that?’
‘I think we’d better go and find out,’ Saladin said.
‘I’ll get your mule for you, friar,’ Michael said. ‘If it isn’t in somebody’s pot by now.’
XXVII
The thunder-mouth had been set up on a look-out platform on top of a tower set in the city walls. Peter and Subh had led Ibrahim up there to see.
The thunder-mouth was a copper tube, shining in the sun. Its muzzle protruded over the battlements, pointing at the Christians’ scattered camp. A brazier enclosed the rear of the tube, and when Ibrahim got there a fire was already burning hotly, so intense that it had turned that part of the cylinder red-hot. The brazier was being tended by two of Peter’s scholars, who poked at the fire nervously.
Subh looked on with a complacent pride.
Ibrahim walked around the thunder-mouth cautiously. ‘Quite a job to haul this thing up here,’ he said.
‘Oh, yes,’ said his mother. ‘That alone was a marvel.’
‘Well, I hope it’s worth the effort.’ But, looking at the device now, he doubted it. In the glimmering shadows of the old Roman water tank Peter’s machines had looked mysterious, potent, even magical. But here the slim copper tube and the brazier looked absurd, a toy beside the massive stone reality of the walls. ‘Does the emir know about this?’
‘You’re his eyes and ears,’ Subh murmured. ‘When it all goes to plan, when Christian soldiers are scattered like wheat stalks in a storm, then you can tell him what we have done.’
Ibrahim looked at Peter. This mention of the slaughter of Christians didn’t evoke any reaction in him. Obsessed with his machines and his ambitions, in the thrall of Subh, the man was quite without conscience, Ibrahim saw; he was a lost soul.
Peter nodded at the scholars. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
The two of them approached the thunder-mouth carrying a heavy pail of water between them. Ibrahim saw they were going to tip the water into a kind of funnel mounted over the brazier.
‘All that water is coming out of somebody’s ration,’ Ibrahim said weakly.
‘This will put an end to rationing,’ Subh said.
Peter pointed. ‘The water, poured in here, goes straight down into the hot barrel. It immediately flashes to steam. And steam, as you know, requires more space than water. The steam will roar up the tube and shoot the iron lump out over the walls, as a man spits out a pea, propelling it with his breath, spit it away and into the Christian lines. I am confident of the range. We have tested smaller models; the arithmetic is simple.’
‘It will seem a miracle,’ Subh said. ‘The explosion of the steam, the roar of it as it gushes out of the thunder-mouth - and the iron ball itself, a mass heavier than a man, flying miles through the air. A mouth of thunder indeed.’
‘But you haven’t tested it,’ Ibrahim said.
‘Only smaller models. What else could we do, in the conditions of the siege?’
‘And what better way to prove it,’ Subh said silkily, ‘than against live Christians?’
Peter stood straight. ‘Do it,’ he said to the scholars.
The cowering scholars tipped their great bucket. The water gurgled into the funnel, and through a length of copper pipe that fed it straight through the brazier’s coals and into the cylinder. The thunder-mouth shuddered. And in that last heartbeat Ibrahim snatched his mother’s arm and pulled her back, putting his body between her and the engine.
Ibrahim was slammed in the back as if by an immense hot fist, and he was thrown forward. An enormous noise crashed painfully into his head. Steam washed over him in a moment, scorching, gone.
He found himself sprawled over his mother. He pushed himself up. His back was tight and sore, burned. His mother seemed unharmed. Lying on the floor, looking up at him, her lips moved. But he could not hear a word she said.
In fact, he realised, he couldn’t hear anything at all. He noticed blood trickling from his mother’s ears and pooling in her throat. When he touched the sides of his own face, his fingers came away sticky with blood. He felt shocked. He had never heard such a noise, never in his life.
He stood up and turned around.
The thunder-mouth was destroyed, ripped open. The brazier was shattered, its hot coals scattered smoking on the platform. The two scholars lay on their backs, unmoving. He saw with wonder that misshapen bits of copper were embedded in the stone wall.
And Peter writhed on the floor. Blood pumped from a dozen wounds punched into body. His face was all but gone, Ibrahim saw, horrified, the skin scorched away, though some awful chance had left his eyeballs intact, staring terrified from lidless sockets.
The thunder-mouth tipped up silently. Ibrahim saw the tube nod down over the battlements, and an iron ball rolled harmlessly out to fall straight down the wall to the ground below.
XXVIII
Saladin and Thomas were not permitted to go with the scouting party to the foot of the walls beneath the strange explosion. But they were able to inspect what was recovered: some twisted bits of metal, and an immense ball of iron.
‘An engine,’ Thomas said darkly. ‘Or the remains of one that failed.’
‘Subh,’ Saladin said. ‘My mother’s cousin. She is in there. This proves it.’ He glanced at the city walls, and wondered if this remote relative whom he had never met was looking back at him now. ‘She must have the engine plans. She must have dug them up from the mosque-’
‘Not necessarily. Fernando has the city riddled with his spies. If that were going on we’d have heard about it. Subh’s letter to your mother hinted of other designs, sketches developed by Sihtric and his co-workers from the originals - sketches that were not entirely lost when Sihtric died. Perhaps that’s what we’re seeing here.’ He grunted, poking tentatively at a bit of torn copper sheet. ‘It would certainly explain why it failed. We may yet not be too late to get to those originals first.’
‘I hope so. Or mother will be furious.’
XXIX
Word came from the vizier’s office that King Fernando was prepared to accept the surrender of the city on the twenty-third of November. Three days before that cut-off the emir’s ministers were to meet with representatives of the King and the Pope, where Fernando’s terms would be presented.
Ibrahim was dulled by the months of siege. But Ibn Shaprut counselled him to be hopeful. Perhaps in this moment of surrender the Christians might discover in themselves the mercy of Jesus of which they boasted so loudly.
On the morning of the meeting, Ibrahim woke from a restless night, soon after dawn. He could hear rain hissing down.
Ibrahim left the palace and walked the streets of the city, hoping to clear his head. The rain on his upturned face was light and fresh. The people were coming out of their houses, men and women with scrawny arms protruding from grimy sleeves. They put out pots and bowls and cups to catch the rain. This was the first significant rainfall of the winter, and Ibrahim imagined it cleaning the air, washing away the last of the heat and stench of the filthy summer of siege. The world was being kind to Seville, then, at last.
But it had come too late. The bodies bundled into doorways or heaped in alleyways told him that: the night’s dead, dumped by those too weak or apathetic to dispose of them properly. Ibrahim made a mental note of where the corpses lay, so he could brief the day’s working parties. But he supposed that in a few more days such problems would be the concern of some Christian soldier, and he, at last, could rest.
He walked down to the river, where no ships sailed this morning, and the waterwheels stood idle. It struck him how very quiet the city was now. There were few animals around; in a starving city the dogs and cats had gone into the pot before the rats. Even the songbirds had been netted, plucked and consumed. Few children too, and fewer old people. Ibn Shaprut the doctor had told him how hunger and disease and drought always took away the very old and the very young, always the most vulnerable.
He tired quickly as he walked, and his burned back still ached sometimes, and the cold of the rain cut into his flesh. After months of rationing there were times he felt so light and flimsy, so detached from reality, that it was as if he had become a ghost, haunting the streets of the city he had tried to help save.
He had wandered far enough. He turned back.
Inside the emir’s palace Christian troopers gawped at the tiles and the frescoes, and leered at the Muslim women. The Christians wore chain-mail and steel helmets, and had bright red crosses emblazoned on their shoulders. These were
crucesignati,
crusaders, holy warriors, infused by piety and blessed by the Pope. But they were nearly as ragged and half-starved as the surviving population of the city itself.
Ibrahim walked across the patio outside the
turayya,
the hall at the centre of the suite of rooms called the Pleiades, and the grandest in the palace complex. The patio was a lovely rectangular space encompassed by a gallery of delicate trefoil arches. One Christian soldier had taken his boots off and was soothing his filthy, blistered feet in the rainwater trapped in the fish pond. His mate saw Ibrahim pass by and kicked the bather, speaking in rough Latin.
‘Get up, Michael, you arse, you’re showing us up.’
‘Oh, leave me be, Saladin. Arse yourself. This isn’t so bad, is it? Not so bad for soldiering...’
Ibrahim was surprised by that famous Saracen name, Saladin, given to a Christian soldier. But Fernando’s army was international, drawn from all across Christendom. ‘Saladin’ could have come from anywhere.
He walked on into the
turayya
itself, where he found that the discussions had already started. The Christian party had lined up against one wall, and glared at the emir’s representatives, led by the vizier, who clustered opposite. Hapless servants, trembling with fear, scurried between the parties with trays of sweetmeats and wine. The Christian leaders were warriors and clerics, knights and princes, envoys of the Pope. Some were both military and pious; Ibrahim saw a man in a tonsure with a chain-mail vest over his monk’s habit. And they all wore the shoulder-cross of crusade.
There was only one woman in the Christian party. She was still young, in her thirties perhaps, and quite pretty, with a face like an almond. A fat elderly monk accompanied her. Pretty or not she glared at her Muslim opponents as severely as any of the men.
As for the Moorish party, Ibrahim spotted Ibn Shaprut at its heart - and, he was shocked to see, his own mother stood close by.
He walked up. ‘Mother. What are you doing here? It’s hardly safe.’
Dressed in a robe as white and clean as mountain snow, her face shining with expensive oils and her hair drawn back under her veil, Subh looked magnificent. Magnificent, but furious. ‘Safe? Where is safe? None of us is safe, Ibrahim. Well, none of us save for
him.’
She pointed.
Ibrahim glanced across the room. There was the almond-faced woman, and beside her, talking animatedly to her and her monk companion, was a flabby, sleek, sweating Moor.
‘Ali Gurdu,’ Ibrahim said with disgust. ‘That grafter. I should have cut off his hands and feet while I had the chance.’
‘What’s done is done,’ Ibn Shaprut said. ‘You can’t blame him for trying to save himself. And he might even help, though he doesn’t mean to, if he makes the Christian passage into the city a little easier.’