Bloodstone

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The Alhambra, Granada, 22 Safar 770 (5 October 1368)

The three men climbed in silence. Looking up, Sinan saw bastions and battlements leaping skyward through the forenoon light. The road rose, and he realized that the towers sprang from a ruddy cliff of wall that seemed to have no end. He thought of the storytellers back home across the Strait, and of their fabled City of Brass. This was no less fabulous: a citadel of iron, bearing down on the brow of the hill like a rusted crown. He wondered what lay inside.

‘Master,’ Sinan whispered at last to the small man by his side, ‘will your friend make you a vizier?’ He looked at the figure lumbering ahead of them, just out of earshot.

‘He’d better,’ Abu Abdallah replied under his breath. ‘By God’s grace, you know as well as I do, Sinan, how bad things are.’ The lines on his gallnut face creased into a frown. ‘Short of stumbling across a crock of Gothic gold, a vizier’s salary is our only hope of ever paying off the debts.’

And, Abu Abdallah thought, peering beadily up at the fortress-palace like a squirrel surveying an unharvested wood, there were the other perks of high office: titles, robes, estates, embassies to far lands . . . social heights his modest Moroccan forebears could never have dreamed of climbing. Abu Abdallah’s name already appeared, grafted on by marriage, in the dynastic family trees of Coromandel and the Maldives. In the old globetrotting days, before his luck deserted him, he had married royal wives, and divorced them; he had played chess with sultans, and beaten them; he had dabbled in the more dangerous games of coup and counter-coup, and kept his head while all around him were losing theirs. A vizierate at Granada– a seat in the Sultan’s ministerial cabinet–wouldn’t just pay off his debts. It would be the resurrection of his career, his life and, almost literally, of his body . . . It had quite slipped his mind, until he’d turned up unannounced the day before and seen the shock on his old friend’s face, that he was, after all, not meant to be here. Or indeed anywhere on earth.

Yes: I will rise again, Abu Abdallah said to himself with a smile. And the image brought to mind one of the other perks of the high life . . . a stream of women flowed across his memory – Greeks, Turks, Mongols, Tamils, Marathas, fair, dusky, cool, musky, slave-concubines of so many remembered beds. Strange, he thought: I was born just across the Strait, in sight of Spain, and I’ve never had a Spanish girl. Everything but.

‘And, master,’ Sinan said, breaking into his reflections, ‘when you do become a vizier, you will remember your promise, won’t you?’

‘What? Oh, that . . . Sinan, who else but you could be my Secret Secretary?’

Who else indeed? Sinan might have been Abu Abdallah’s slave, but it was he who was the real master of the old man’s life; he who had saved that life, back in the bloody chaos of Fez in ’sixty-two . . .

They followed their host round another bend in the road and were confronted by a great gateway. Sinan stared up at it, and a shock ran down his spine.

At first sight it might have been part of the architecture, a decorative cresting on the summit of the gate. But no; they were heads. Human heads. And they were attached not to bodies, but to poles.

Lisan al-Din, Grand Vizier of Granada, looked up at them and cleared his throat. ‘May God Almighty damn this skull,’ he intoned,

‘that Satan’s skill

Inspired with every form of foul skulduggery!

May it inspire within the mouths and minds of men

No mite of mercy, and no mote of memory!’

He folded his arms, resplendent in embroidered sleeves, over a brocade-hung paunch. The words hung heavy in the forenoon air. ‘Though I say so myself, that second couplet in particular is rather good, is it not.’

It was not a question. Abu Abdallah, much smaller and less splendid in his hooded travelling burnous, said nothing. He carried on squinting up at the row of heads. Their long-dead grins added a frivolous note to the severe stonework of the Alhambra’s main gate. One of the heads had fallen askew; it seemed to be c*****g a snook at the world of the living.

‘I composed the verses apropos of the head in the middle,’ Lisan al-Din said. ‘The head of . . . El Bermejo.’ Silently, Sinan mouthed the alien syllables: El Bermejo. ‘It’s way past its best, I admit,’ the Grand Vizier continued. ‘Been up there more than six years, pecked by the ravens and tanned by the elements. But it still does the job. Puts the rebels off.’

‘May I ask a question, sir?’

Lisan al-Din turned in surprise at the sound of the words, uttered in beautiful Arabic, as if wondering where they had come from. It was the third member of the group who had spoken. The slave. But slaves didn’t speak . . . The Grand Vizier’s eyes, hooded and shadowed by chronic insomnia, opened wider than they had for a long time.

Sinan took this as a sign of permission. ‘Was he a Christian, sir? I mean, the former owner of the middle head? I can see some traces of a red beard. And his name sounds Spanish: El Bermejo.’

Lisan al-Din studied the slave. Like his master, the young man was still dressed in a traveller’s burnous. If he had noticed anything else about him, it was only the disturbing fact – uncommon, almost unknown, in Granada since the events of fourteen years before – that he was black. Now he saw a face.

He had seen plenty of Blacks during his years of exile in Morocco; must have seen this one, if he was in his friend Abu Abdallah’s household that far back. But he had never actually looked at a Black. What he saw here took him aback: the features were as surprising, as perfect, as beautiful, as the man’s Arabic. Planes of complex darkness, framed by darker beard that softened hard diagonals of cheekbone. Skin cool as jasper, warm as Egyptian velvet. And the eyes – liquid shot with light and dark. The slave might have been half his age, if that; but the eyes seemed to regard him from a distance of time as vast and unknowable as that continent of his across the Strait, beyond the desert. For a moment Lisan al-Din, Grand Vizier of Granada, literary prodigy of the age, was lost.

The call of a guard up on the battlements brought him back. ‘Sharp eyes he’s got, this boy of yours,’ he said to Abu Abdallah.

Abu Abdallah grinned. ‘Sharp eyes, sharp brain. Sharp name, too, ha ha!’

‘My name is Sinan, sir,’ the slave said. ‘Spearhead . . . sorry, sir. You of all people need no explanation.’ Abu Abdallah twinkled and nodded, as one would to a clever son who has said the right thing. ‘But if I’m not mistaken,’ Sinan went on, looking back at the head on the gate, ‘the redness of the beard is unnatural. It is the result of dyeing with henna. Which suggests that, despite his foreign name, its owner was probably a Muslim.’

‘Goodness,’ Lisan al-Din exclaimed. ‘I see what you mean. Amazing perspicacity, especially for a Black. Where did you pick him up?’

‘On a bend in the Niger, past Timbuktu,’ Abu Abdallah said. ‘He was knee-high to a locust at the time, weren’t you Sinan? A hospitality gift, he was, from the viceroy of the Mansa, or Emperor, of Mali.’

‘Only you, my old friend, only you . . . ’ the Grand Vizier said, shaking his heavy head. ‘Most people would have said in the slave market in Fez.’

‘Yes,’ said Abu Abdallah, suddenly solemn. ‘Only me.’

Again, Lisan al-Din was lost for words. In the seven years since he’d last seen him, he’d forgotten the extent of his friend’s magnificent singularity. And has it really been seven years? he asked himself. Abu Abdallah doesn’t look a day older . . . ‘Hmm. Well. In response to Master Sinan’s hypothesis, I can inform him that the . . . thing up on the gate was indeed a Muslim. Or rather, in theory a Muslim, but in deed a worshipper of the devil. I cannot bring myself to utter his real name, so I refer to him by the name the Christians gave him – El Bermejo, the Red One, so called from the inordinate use of henna which you remarked upon, Sinan. You may also be surprised to learn that he was, for a time, the usurping self-styled Sultan of this blessed land.’

‘The Sultan? How . . . how come, sir?’ Sinan said. Abu Abdallah was pleased his slave had asked. He knew the beginning of the story well: he had heard it from Lisan al-Din’s own mouth during the Grand Vizier’s exile in Morocco. But of its ending, no more than rumours had reached that godforsaken Moroccan province where he himself had spent the last years in virtual exile.

‘Oh, the usual reason,’ Lisan al-Din said. ‘Greed. For money. For power. For all the glittering baubles power and money bring.’ The noon prayer call sounded, at first distant from the plain below, then closer, from the walls above. Sinan looked up at the mighty citadel. ‘Yes, Master Sinan. Greed. For titles, robes . . . concubines.’ He glanced at Abu Abdallah, who was fiddling with the tassel of his burnous. ‘Perhaps, above all, greed for a stone: the Great Ruby.’

A question began to form on Sinan’s lips, but the Grand Vizier turned away and led them onward up the road, towards the gate’s dark mouth.

‘When I was serving the Sultan of Delhi as Malikite judge of his capital,’ Abu Abdallah said as they approached the gaping portal, ‘he used to have a whole avenue of corpses, hung, drawn, quartered, halved, filleted, whatever cut you wanted, lining the entrance to his palace. Uggh. They used to spook the horses.’

‘So you have told me,’ Lisan al-Din replied over his shoulder. ‘On several occasions. You have also told me how you nearly became one of those corpses yourself.’ The Grand Vizier smiled one of his rare and gloomy smiles as he pictured Abu Abdallah’s scrawny body dangling in the Indian sun, the grin twinkling even in death . . . His own smile vanished. That image of his friend, dead, had reminded him of the extraordinary question he had to ask. For Abu Abdallah, who had made a career out of wheedling favours, had now, it seemed, wheedled the greatest favour of them all – from Time itself.

But for now the question would have to keep, until they reached somewhere private; somewhere more congenial to the imparting of shocks. And shocks there would be . . . Lisan al-Din glanced warily at his friend; Abu Abdallah grinned back, a skeleton on the loose from his own cupboard. They crossed the shadow-line of the gate, into the dark.