A Sultan in Palermo Read online

  The sun had become too strong for Idrisi. He descended the ladder and returned to his cabin. He sighed as he sat down on the soft cushions that had been specially put down to spare his behind the discomfort of the rough wooden bench nailed to the floor. Once again he stared at the voluminous manuscript lying on the table before him. Yes, the book was complete, except for the first sentence. For several weeks during this voyage—he felt instinctively it would be his last—he had agonised over the first few words. Indecision had numbed his brain. He was so convinced it was the beginning that was troubling him that he did not consider the possibility that it might be the end. He had, after all, been working on this manuscript for almost eleven years. It had become a substitute for everything. For his friend Ibn Hamid whose reproaches still echoed in his head; for his wife Zaynab, who had left him alone in Palermo and returned to her family home in Noto with their two daughters and, above all, for his younger and favourite son, Walid, who had boarded a merchant ship destined for China and, without a word of farewell, had disappeared from their world. If a customs guard had not seen him board the vessel they would not even have known where he had gone. That was fifteen years ago. Nothing had been heard of Walid since that day. Zaynab blamed her husband for having neglected the boy. Idrisi sent her away to his estate in the country.

  ‘You spend more time with the Sultan in his palace than with your own family. Perhaps he could find you some rooms in the harem.’

  As a result, the book had become the repository of all his emotions. But it, too, was about to leave him and, though he did not know it, this was the true reason for his melancholy. Not the opening lines. That was simply a pretext to prolong the parting. The sound of the water gently slapping the ship’s hull was calming, but he knew he could delay no longer. They would soon sight the minarets. He took his finely sharpened pen and dipped it in the inkwell.

  If he remained loyal to his intellect, he would break with the old style and suffer in silence the inevitable abuse that would follow. Many of his acquaintances, some of whom he liked, would regard such a choice as a confirmation of their suspicion that he was really a traitor, an apostate who had secretly abandoned the faith and sold himself to the Christian Sultan. He could reply by informing them that his father claimed direct descent from the family of the Prophet. But so did thousands of others, they would reply. Everyone knew the Prophet’s family had not been that large.

  Perhaps he should remain faithful to the old tradition and start in the time-honoured fashion by praising the generosity of Allah, the single-minded devotion of his Prophet, the impartiality and equity of the Sultan and so on. That would please all and free him to start work on another book. But why should he and others like him be condemned to eternal repetition? The answer continued to elude him and he began to pace his cabin, concentrating on his inner turmoil. Perhaps, just this once, he would surprise them all. He would start in the name of Satan, who challenged, defied and was punished. The thought made him smile. The waves below seemed to encourage the heresy. They were whispering, ‘Do it. Do it. Do it’ but when he put his ear to the partition to hear them better they became silent and he reverted to his state of indecision. He was angry with his world and with himself.

  In the past, the simple act of observing the lines of the coast, reproducing them in his notebook and making sure that the map lying pinned to the table was accurate, was enough to distract him. This was his third complete journey around the island. If only he could have mapped the whole world like this instead of relying on merchants and seafarer tales, which often contradicted each other when describing the shape of China or the lower half of India. Strange how often they picked on different kinds of fruit to describe the same region. A tiny island off China became a lychee or an apple, the bottom half of India a mango or a pear.

  There were times when, more than anything else, he wanted to fly, float above the sea like a hawk. Why had Allah not created giant birds that could drag a chariot through the sky? Then he would have gazed on the lands and seas below and refined his maps. It would have been so simple. Or ride a giant hawk as it flew over the continents. Only then could he ensure that his map was a true representation of the world. He knew the contours of this island as well as his own body. Sometimes his imagination bestowed human shapes to the landscape sighted from the sea: occasionally an ancient angry god, but often a woman. Sometimes she watched him, propped on her elbows, and he would smile at her Greek eyes, marvel at her light Damascene hair sparkling with stars and changing colour as it caught the sun. With the movement of the ship came the realisation that she was not really looking at him. Her gaze lay fixed in the direction of Ifriqiya.

  He, too, looked away and wondered how long it would be before he encountered another favourite. If his estimates were correct they would reach the northern tip of the island in a day and a half. Last time the sea had become rough, delaying the journey. Three days later he saw her, a beautiful warrior-woman, erect, angry and threatening, unlike the famed sirens in al-Homa’s poem. ‘I’m not an enemy,’ he would whisper as the ship passed by. ‘I’m a maker of maps. I want to preserve, not to destroy.’ She, too, disdained him and, disappointed, he would turn to the waves and complain. But on this latest journey he had not shown the slightest interest in these old friends. He did not even bother to look at the women as the winds pushed the ship beyond them. He was distracted.

  The older members of the crew, including the cook with greying hair, had travelled with him many times. They knew his moods, understood his passions and respected his obsession to draw a map of the world. They had noticed his sad eyes and distant stare, as if time had lost all meaning. They talked about him to each other. What might be ailing him? Could it be an affair of the heart? The young man with the dark eyes from Noto? Surely he could not still be pining after the houri in Palermo? Not Mayya? They had convinced themselves that only Mayya, the merchant’s daughter could explain the despair in the master’s eyes. Mayya, whom the mapmaker had loved more than any other living creature in this world and wanted to make his wife; Mayya who had betrayed him luxuriously while he was journeying. The Sultan had beckoned and she had followed him willingly first to the royal bedchamber and subsequently to her own set of rooms in the harem of the palace. How the mapmaker had controlled and hidden his grief from the prying eyes of Palermo had become the talk in the coffee shops of the bazaar, but not for long. The bazaar has its own priorities and the broken heart of a young mapmaker did not detain their attention for more than a few hours.

  It was the same Sultan Rujari for whom Muhammad al-Idrisi had written this book. His own title had been simple: ‘Nuz’hat al-mushtaq’ or ‘The Universal Geography’, but Rujari’s old tutor Younis had advised him that since the book would never have been completed without Rujari’s material assistance, a more appropriate title might be ‘al-kitab al-Rujari’ or ‘The Book of Roger’. In the face of such a suggestion from the heart of the palace, what could he do but bow and accept. Idrisi repressed his anger, but the Court eunuchs ensured that every shop-keeper in the Palermo bazaar had news of the title alteration. The bazaar believed, wrongly, that Idrisi had offered the delights of his body to the Sultan. The new title appeared to confirm the slander. And each spiced the story before passing it on to the other and thus the vanity of a ruler became an epic with many layers in which a follower of the Prophet had been deeply humiliated and not for the first time.

  The subject of all this attention began to ask himself whether the trouble he was having with an opening line had now been transcended by the new title. A recurring dream had disturbed his sleep for over a year. It was Sultan Rujari, always in the same multi-coloured satin robe, lying half-naked under a lemon tree weighted down with ripe fruits. Rujari would stand, discard the robe and attempt to seduce a tethered doe, but just at the point when the union between the human and animal worlds was about to be consummated, Muhammad would wake up in a state of complete unrest. He would get out of bed, pace up and down on the cold marb
le floor muttering, ‘You shouldn’t be in my dreams so often’, and then drink some water slowly to calm his fractured nerves. It was always difficult to resume his sleep. Why did the dream only come when he was in Palermo? Never when he was on the sea or when he went to visit his family in Noto or in the house of his close friend, the physician, Ibrahim bin Hiyya of Djirdjent. Once he had tried to discuss the matter but Ibrahim had laughed, disclaiming any interest in the phenomena of dreams.

  More than once, he thought of paying a visit to Ibn Hammud, the richest silk merchant in the qasr, who, in his spare time, interpreted dreams and calmed the fears of worried men. He was much in demand and once Muhammad got as far as the front of the shop, but he did not enter. His caution had become an insurmountable barrier. It was too dangerous. Ibn Hammud would not be able to keep the dream secret. Indeed, an exaggerated version would find its way back to the palace. The eunuchs would giggle as they regaled each other with it and each recounting would become more outrageous. Then these guardians of the harem would tell the concubines and one of them would goad a willing eunuch to whisper it in the Sultan’s ear. The Sultan would be enraged and that could be the end of everything. Everything. Not just the book, but also its author. And if Rujari became really angry he would ensure that the eunuchs, too, came to grief. The risk was not worth the suffering.

  The last ten years of Idrisi’s life had been consumed by the book, but as the vessel approached Palermo, he knew the completion could not be delayed much longer. The Sultan would be angry. He wanted to read the book before he died and his illness had made him anxious. And Allah alone knew what would happen to a poor mapmaker after the death of his patron. Once again he heard the mocking farewell of his best friend the day Ibn Hamid had left the island for ever, boarding a boat destined for Malaka in al-Andalus.

  ‘Come with me, Muhammad,’ the poet had said. ‘Here you will be nothing more than a melancholy beggar in a foreign capital.’

  Why should he feign any longer? Why should he not write what he wanted? With a sense of determination, Muhammad al-Idrisi retired to his cabin, sat down at the table and wrote a single sentence on the first page of his universal geography:

  The earth is round like a sphere, and the waters adhere to it and are maintained on it through natural equilibrium which suffers no variation.

  It was done. This would be the opening of his personal edition of the work. As for the rest, he would praise Allah, the Prophet, the Sultan and anyone else who had to be flattered. A compromise, but it satisfied him.

  He climbed to the deck again and took a deep breath of sea air. Palermo must be very close. He could sense that from the laden breeze, carrying the rich perfumes of herbs and flowers and lemons. He knew these well and had carefully catalogued the plants and trees that produced them. None of his friends accepted that they were different from those of other islands and the cavalier fashion in which these men flaunted their ignorance angered him greatly. He had made extensive notes on the herbs and flowers of the Mediterranean islands and after his years of work and travel he could identify an island in the dark just from its smells. He smiled as he recalled the summer night he had been lying on the deck—the only sounds the tender lapping of the sea against the hard brown wood of the ship—gazing at the stars. Suddenly a breeze arose and a soft aroma assailed his senses. It was a special variety of thyme and he knew immediately they were approaching Sardinia.

  The fragrance of Palermo was like a whiplash. Bittersweet memories of his childhood and youth could still overpower him. His thoughts were interrupted by a boy—he could not have been more than seventeen or eighteen years of age, the colour of bronze, with long golden hair—who came to him with a glass of lemon sherbet and smiled, revealing snow white teeth. How did he keep them so clean? He was glad Simeon was happy again, but that was not enough to assuage his guilt. Hearing his screams one night, he had remained silent, failed to intervene, even though he knew full well his presence would have ended the boy’s torture. The commander of the ship was engaged in a time-honoured rite. Indifferent to Simeon’s pain and fragility, he had violated him mercilessly. Droit ancien de marinier. And then, without warning, tears poured down his face as he realised that he had been thinking of Walid. What if some brutish captain had abused him just like this boy? The absence of his son made him mindful of the agony of the young flautist.

  For a week after the assault, the boy had neither eaten nor played the flute, nor dared look any sailor in the face, even though some had endured the same violent torture themselves, experienced the same insufferable grief and would have been sympathetic to his plight. Others had laughed and teased him and, in time, the boy recovered. The first sign of his return to the rhythms of everyday life came when the anguished sounds of a flute were heard at sundown, bidding farewell to the dying day. Few eyes remained dry. The man who made maps, consumed with guilt, pledged inwardly to find a better place for this boy. Muhammad drank the sherbet, handed back the glass and stroked the young head.

  ‘Have you ever travelled to Baghdad, master? Have you seen the House of Wisdom which has large rooms to observe the sky and many more books than in our Sultan’s library?’ the boy asked. ‘What does the city look like? Is it true what they say, that our city is larger than Baghdad? Could this be so? And Qurtuba? You know that city well, don’t you, master? Will you return there one day?’

  The mapmaker nodded, but before he could elaborate, the minarets of Palermo had been sighted. Suddenly, the deck was crowded with men shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ‘Siqilliya sana-hallahu’ [Sicily, may Allah preserve her!] and preparing for their arrival. A group of tired young men, their burnt bodies and worn-out faces reflecting the exhaustion of a day’s work, brought down the rust-coloured sails and were folding them on the deck. In the twilight the crew began to sing a soft, mournful chant, as they rowed the ship into port. The captain, in search of praise for the discipline of his men, came up to the scholar and bowed, but Idrisi ignored him, still wanting to punish him for abusing the boy. But chiefly the author of the universal geography was preoccupied with the sky, still clear blue, and with the moon, already out and competing for attention with the setting sun. It must be the seventh month of the year, he thought. He had been away for nearly four months. Too long. And then the city was before them.

  As the sailors approached the minarets they chanted ‘al-madina hama-hallahu’ [Allah protect this City]. He smiled as the ship entered the harbour, an expressionless smile, a slight softening of the eyes, nothing more. He was pleased to be back. The gentle breeze stroked his face like the soft touch of Mayya and inadvertently his hand went to his face to savour the memory. Below a boat was waiting to transport him to dry land. Walking past the men, he thanked each of them in turn. He suppressed a sigh as he was gently tied with silken cords to a chair, which was then lowered on to the boat. He would have happily climbed down the rope ladder, but the captain forbade it. As the chair reached its destination the boatmen welcomed him with ‘Wa Salaam ...’

  Nearing the shore, he could see the familiar faces of the courtiers sent to receive him. He knew that underneath their smiles and the exaggerated noises of welcome, they hated him because of the easy access to the palace he enjoyed. And there was the white beard of one of the palace Chamberlains, Abd al-Karim, shouting as loudly as his years permitted.

  ‘Prepare to receive the Master Ibn Muhammad ibn Sharif al-Idrisi returned home from a long journey in search of the roots of knowledge.’

  As was the custom, the others responded to the safe return of the ship and its passenger.

  ‘There is only one Allah and he is Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet. Welcome home.’

  The irritation he felt on these occasions had, in the past, been countered by the presence of his friend Marwan, whose grinning face was the welcome he most enjoyed. But Marwan had left the island. He had abandoned his estates and his peasants in Catania and fled to al-Andalus, to the city of Ishbilia. Here the Sultan al-Mutammid had provided him with bot
h protection and employment. Letters arrived irregularly, always carrying the same message. Muhammad, too, should leave Palermo and return to the House of Islam. He never replied and Marwan stopped writing.

  Now he was alone.

  ‘Will the master be carried or will he ride?’ Abd al-Karim asked.

  ‘Is my horse here?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Then I will ride.’

  ‘The Sultan awaits you tonight. A banquet has been prepared to honour your return.’

  ‘And if a storm had delayed us?’

  Another voice replied. ‘It never has. You always return on the designated day, Ibn Muhammad.’

  The scholar smiled. The voice and the face pleased him. It was the Berber, Jauhar, who had married Marwan’s sister.

  ‘Any news from Marwan?’

  The man shook his head.

  ‘And you? Is your family well? Do you need anything? I have brought some silks for Marwan’s sister. We exchanged them for some food. A merchant ship from Genoa was in some trouble.’

  The man smiled.

  ‘And now I have a favour to ask of you. Go to the palace and apologise to the Sultan on my behalf. Tell him the journey has exhausted me and I would only fall asleep at the banquet. Tomorrow I will attend on him and provide him with the new discoveries he requested. I wish to be alone tonight. I have something to tell the stars.’

  Jauhar looked worried and whispered: ‘It is an unwise decision. The Sultan is ill. It has made him irrational. He might misinterpret your refusal to go to the palace tonight. Monks surround him. Franks and Greeks. Vultures. They whisper lies in the Sultan’s ear. We are being accused of fomenting rebellion.’

  Idrisi shook his head. He would not change his mind. ‘His Exalted Majesty knows I am the most loyal of his servants, but I have travelled for many days without a bath and will not present myself in such a state of unseemliness. I will call on the Sultan after the morning prayers. Make that clear to the Chamberlain.’