Scramasax (21 page)

One of the mountain men turned to Solveig. ‘Abu Touati,' he said.

Solveig frowned and shook her head.

‘Abu Touati. Abu Touati.'

Then her guides stepped aside and gestured to Solveig to step through the low gap in the wall. In the middle of the courtyard stood a large mulberry tree, and all around it there were blazing flowers: orange and scarlet and vermilion and ochre. Even the blooms of the long-legged blue flowers looked as if they were alight. They were growing in big tubs and little earthen beds, reaching along stone ledges and climbing up the walls.

While Solveig looked around her in delight, a wiry little man walked out on to the porch, then stepped
down to greet her. He bowed and took Solveig's fair hands between his own.

‘Abu Touati,' he said.

‘Abu Touati,' Solveig repeated courteously.

The Saracen looked slightly puzzled, then amused, but he didn't laugh. Lights danced in his eyes.

They're mountain pools, Solveig thought. The ones that are peaty and deep and clear. I could drown in them.

‘Have you come from Norway?' asked the man in perfect Norwegian.

Solveig gasped.

‘Or Sweden? Denmark?'

‘Norway,' Solveig said eagerly.

‘I thought so. Yes, and your name?'

‘Solveig.'

‘Solveig? Are you sure?'

Solveig looked at him uncertainly. ‘What do you mean?'

‘Solveig … Not Abu Touati?' The Saracen's eyes were dancing again.

‘Oh!' she exclaimed loudly, and she laughed at herself. ‘Oh, no! I'm Solveig.'

‘That's a relief,' the Saracen said. ‘One of me is quite enough. Now then, first things first. The day is hot. Would my guest care to quench her thirst?'

‘More than anything,' Solveig replied.

Abu Touati spoke to the mountain men. ‘I was saying,' he explained to Solveig, ‘that you will be safe with me and that their work is done. They are free to go.'

‘Who taught you my language?' Solveig asked. ‘You speak it as well as I do.'

The Saracen simply raised his right hand in a sign that she should be patient, and so Solveig turned to the mountain men. She reached out and embraced each of them and they left only with great reluctance.

‘This will be the first time,' Abu Touati told her, ‘that they've been embraced by any female except their own mothers and wives and daughters. A Viking girl, indeed!'

Solveig remembered how some men had been accompanied by two women to the prayer assembly in the mountain village, and one by three.

‘Do Saracens have more than one wife?' she enquired.

Abu Touati nodded. ‘Some do.'

‘Why?'

But at this moment, a servant stepped down from the porch and proffered a tall glass cup to Solveig.

‘What is it?' she enquired. ‘Yellow as cowslips. Foaming.' And then, when the servant placed it between her hands. ‘Oh! It's so cold! How can it be?'

Abu Touati smiled and stroked his well-trimmed grey beard. ‘You Viking, you should know.'

‘It can't be,' said Solveig. Then she dipped her right thumb and forefinger into the glass and pulled out a small lump. ‘It is! Ice in midsummer!'

She pressed the ice against her forehead, and against her throat and the back of her neck.

‘From the mountains,' Abu Touati told her.

‘They're burning. There's no ice up there.'

The Saracen smiled. ‘We cut it and bring it down in winter.'

‘But …'

‘When the Romans came to Africa, they taught us how to conserve ice in summer. We Muslims know many skills forgotten by Christians.'

I wish my father were here, thought Solveig. This ice would cool his gut.

‘Now!' said Abu Touati. He gestured to Solveig to sit on the bench in the shade of the mulberry tree and then straddled it himself. ‘You've come to Sicily with Georgios Maniakes?'

Solveig shook her head. ‘He's the commander of the Byzantines. Our leader is Harald. Harald Sigurdsson.'

Abu Touati grimaced.

‘I've come with my father. I followed him.'

‘To do – how do you say it? – to do dirty work for Empress Zoe.'

‘She told everyone her cause is a just one.'

‘Leaders always say their cause is just,' Abu Touati replied, ‘and most of them believe themselves. What I say is, each of us can be a leader so long as we're not led by one! Each of us must think for ourselves.'

Solveig raised her glass cup to her lips and swilled another mouthful of the delicious lemony drink around her mouth.

‘What is your faith?' the Saracen asked her. ‘Are you Christian?'

‘I don't know what I am any more,' said Solveig.

Abu Touati shook his head. ‘Impossible,' he exclaimed.

‘I do pray to Odin and Freyja and Eir,' Solveig told him, ‘she's the goddess of healing, but … but I'm Christian too.'

‘We Muslims in Sicily,' said Abu Touati, ‘we allow all the Christians and Jews to worship in their own way. We say they are
dhimmis
.'

‘
Dhimmis
,' repeated Solveig. ‘I heard that word in the mountain village.'

‘Not Muslim,' the Saracen told her, ‘but not pagan. But the Christians in Byzantium, they vow to drive each and every Muslim out of Sicily – or even better, kill them. This is not just. And it is not wise.'

Solveig slowly shook her head. She didn't know what to think. She remembered that in their little dugout, Edwin had said the Vikings were always vengeful and Christians were compassionate; now Abu Touati
was saying the Muslims were compassionate and the Christians brutal.

Abu Touati looked at her kindly. ‘No easy answers,' he said.

‘In the mountain village,' Solveig told him, ‘everyone prayed together. Christians, Muslims, everyone.'

The Saracen pursed his lips and smiled. ‘They are not bedevilled,' he said. ‘Down here, we talk too much and argue too much and know too much, at least we think we do. Here in the plains, traders and emissaries and travellers, they all come and go, armies assemble and fight and win and lose, but up there, war, war …'

‘Is only a murmur,' said Solveig with a wistful smile.

‘Exactly,' said Abu Touati. ‘War is only a murmur. Half forgotten or still to come.'

The Saracen sighed and, without knowing quite why, Solveig reached out to him and laid her fingers on his right wrist, light as a butterfly. For a little while she left them there.

‘Blessed are strangers!' the Saracen said. ‘That's what the Prophet said, and what we all say. Blessed in themselves, because they're strangers, and blessed because they give us back ourselves.'

‘We have many sayings about strangers and how we should welcome them,' Solveig told Abu Touati.

‘I would willingly sit here all day,' Abu Touati said, ‘listening to leaves whisper and your green words. What could be more agreeable?'

‘You were going to tell me,' Solveig said. ‘How did you learn Norwegian?'

‘Be patient,' the Saracen told her.

‘I never am.'

‘I was saying I would willingly sit here all day, but nothing in our lives happens wholly by chance. You have been sent to me in my hour of need.'

‘What do you mean?' Solveig asked him.

‘This,' said the Saracen, and he stood up, still straddling the bench. ‘In this town live Saracens and Greeks and Jews and black-skinned people from the deserts of Africa, and the people who settled on this island before we conquered it. Settlers from all around the Great Sea. Traders come here from beyond the gates of the Great Sea and from east of the Black Sea …'

‘The Black Sea!' Solveig exclaimed. ‘I crossed it on my way to Miklagard.'

‘And here,' continued Abu Touati, ‘we learn from each other and about each other. That's how we live in peace.'

Solveig frowned.

‘On this afternoon each week, six or seven of my friends come to my courtyard. We talk, we argue.'

Then Abu Touati gave Solveig a little bow and led her by the hand up the steps to the chair on his porch.

As soon as his companions had quaffed lemon sherbet and settled themselves around the small courtyard, Abu Touati beckoned Solveig back down to join them.

‘This is my guest,' he explained. ‘My … Viking guest, come from afar. Solveig.'

Solveig looked at the seven men. Not one smile. Not even a nod. Just seven pairs of dark, watchful eyes.

‘Sit here on this bench,' Abu Touati invited Solveig. ‘Next to me.'

One squat man growled something.

‘What did he say?' Solveig asked.

A daddy-long-legs of a man with bolting eyes and protruding cheekbones nodded and jabbed towards Solveig with his right forefinger.

‘Let them spit it out,' Abu Touati calmly advised Solveig.

‘What are they saying?'

‘Battle-mongers! Blood merchants! War wolves!'

‘I'm not,' protested Solveig, and she felt scared.

‘Last week,' Abu Touati told the men … but then he turned to Solveig. ‘I'll translate what I'm saying,' he told her, ‘phrase by phrase. Don't be afraid.'

Solveig avoided the men's angry eyes. She stared at the ground.

‘Last week …' Abu Touati began again, ‘my friend Mansur told us about his pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Today, I'll tell you about how I sailed across the Black Sea and stayed for three months with Viking traders.'

Oh! thought Solveig. That's when you learned to speak our language.

‘The finest people to look at on Allah's earth,' Abu Touati told his companions. ‘They're tall as date palms and their skin is reddish in colour. Their hair is red-gold.'

As Abu Touati described the Vikings' clothing, their boats, and what they had brought with them to sell in Kiev, his companions listened intently.

‘Skins of all kinds – sable and squirrel and ermine, black and white foxes …'

‘And marten and beaver,' added Solveig without looking up. ‘And sealskins.'

‘Yes,' said the Saracen, ‘and wax and birch bark – people use it for writing as we do papyrus. Globs of amber, and honey the colour of amber, and hazelnuts and cattle and horsehides, yes, and slaves.'

Abu Touati grasped Solveig's arm. ‘Look at this girl! She's no warmonger. Of course she's not.'

Solveig felt troubled and near to tears.

‘The Vikings have very different customs to us,' Abu Touati went on. ‘Different manners, a different language, different beliefs. Their women are more free than our women.'

One of his companions, the squat one, angrily shook his head and growled again.

‘Much more free. They can leave their husbands if they choose to. If they don't want to keep their babies, they can drown them like kittens.'

Now several of the Saracens protested, and one spat on the ground.

‘No Viking women wear the hijab or the abaya. No, they darken their eyelids and eyelashes with dyes to make themselves look more beautiful, and flirt with men who are not their husbands.'

‘Viking women,' Abu Touati declared, ‘do not worship Allah or even Jesus Christ and his mother Mary. You know me, all of you, my companions, my friends. I'm no pagan. I'm Muslim. I do not believe in false gods, and Viking customs anger and trouble me.

‘Now the Vikings and Byzantines have travelled here to Sicily and they're trying to win it back with swords and scramasaxes. But do you suppose that when we came to this island, we won it with embraces and kisses?'

He screwed up his face like a walnut and sighed. ‘And so it will go on, on and on. Until we all come to understandings.' He gave Solveig and his companions a lingering smile. ‘Travel,' he said. ‘Why do we do it?'

‘One part of hell!' exclaimed one of his companions, a man wearing a white scarf over his head.

‘Exactly! Travel tires us out – the boat, the beast we're riding, our companions and the flea-beds we have to share with them, the rotten food: they're all uncomfortable, or unpleasant, or anyhow unfamiliar. And there's always some hazard around the next corner.

‘Yes, one part of hell,' Abu Touati repeated. ‘And yet travel's a kind of medicine, isn't it? People who stay at
home for season after season become like stagnant water. They smell sour. They taste sour. Not so the traveller. The traveller finds out. New countries, new people, new beliefs. He finds out about himself. And when at last he –' the Saracen smiled and translated for Solveig – ‘he or she comes home, she values her family and friends all the more dearly.

‘And so, my friends, unless I travel, unless I find out … unless I try to understand … and unless we all come to understandings …'

‘Rest now,' Abu Touati advised Solveig. ‘Then you will be ready.'

Solveig stared at the Saracen. She felt completely worn out.

‘My servants have prepared a room for you.'

That night, Solveig slept deeply, and for most of the next day she sat in the shade of the mulberry tree, sometimes picking a squashy berry and then sucking her stained fingers, sometimes nibbling at figs and dates and apricots, or sipping foaming, icy lemon.

‘The path to healing is understanding,' Abu Touati told her, smiling, ‘but after reaching our destination, the next step on our path is to turn back.'

‘I wish I had a gift for you,' Solveig said.

The Saracen gently shook his grey head. ‘You've already given it to me,' he said. ‘Now, I've asked three guides to ride with you, but I can't pretend they're not fearful. You'll find your companions have moved on since you last saw them. Another town. Another siege.' The Saracen sighed. ‘You'll have to walk the last mile or two on your own.'

Solveig nodded.

Abu Touati gazed at his guest, unblinking. ‘But what can compare with the pleasure of coming home?' he
asked in his firm, calm voice. ‘When at last a traveller returns home … Ah, Solveig! Your own husband. Your own children. Your family and farm. Your friends. May the Prophet protect you. May Allah go with you.'