The Last Crusaders: Blood Red Sea (8 page)

‘They are all Mohammedans.’

‘Every man has his own religion. You think those thugs who drive these people out of Spain are the finest Christians?’

Hodge said nothing.

Down the alley behind them came more Moriscos, driven loosely along like cattle.

‘
Allah ma’ak
,’ muttered Nicholas as they passed by. God go with you.

The father of the family stared at him, this Christian who spoke the forbidden language of Arabic. In his eyes was nothing but suspicion, as if the blessing itself were a trap. He looked him up and down, as if trying to identify who he was, where he came from. Then he raised his arm and pointed at him very deliberately, looking hard towards an upper window above. Nicholas glanced up too, puzzled, and thought he glimpsed a figure move behind the wooden grille. When he looked back the father had moved on.

They ventured out into the square.

A wealthy Morisco merchant carried a fine bundle of silks on his shoulder, moving forward plump bellied but dignified, refusing to be hurried. A militiaman with a pike shouted out, ‘Hold!’

The Morisco merchant stopped.

‘Hand me those,’ the militiaman demanded.

‘They are not mine to give you,’ said the merchant. ‘They are promised in payment for our passage to Morocco.’

‘Hand ’em over, you snake-tongued devil worshipper, or I’ll open your belly!’ He lowered the wicked-looking pike. The merchant’s daughter, a girl of fourteen or so, cried out, ‘Abu! Abu!’ and clutched him.

The militiaman sneered at her and then viciously jabbed the butt of his pike down on her foot, encased in a fine silver-filigree slipper. Nicholas stared in horror as the girl fell to the ground howling, clutching her foot. Her father instantly dropped his bundle of silks and knelt at her side. The militiaman triumphantly seized the bundle and threw it over to his comrade.

‘Your purse too!’ he shouted through the rain and the girl’s agonized screams. ‘A rich man like you, it must weigh heavy!’

Hodge was already gripping Nicholas’s arm, holding him back, knowing his master of old. ‘We’re not even armed,’ he muttered, ‘don’t be a damn fool.’

But Nicholas twisted and was gone. He seized the militiaman’s pikestaff in both hands and shoved it back hard into the fellow’s startled face, knocking his helmet back off his forehead. He shoved it back a second time, a short swift jab. The heavy wooden staff clonked audibly against his skull, and blood spurted from his nose. He reeled. Nicholas whipped the pike clean from his grasp and spun around.

Immediately he was surrounded by a semicircle of half a dozen unwavering pikes, lowered to belly height. Heroes of Malta they might be, but this was suicidal. Hodge raised his face to the rain in despair. Barely a week free men, and they were going to go to jail again. At the very least.

There were a few moments of angry shouting, the pikemen looking ready to run this miscreant through on the spot. A Mussulman sympathizer, friend of the Moors, perhaps he’d like to take ship for Morocco too?

‘Have your cock chopped like a filthy Jew!’ bellowed the sergeant. ‘Maybe we should circumcize you in advance!’ He jabbed towards his groin, then looked around. Some hubbub was spreading through the square.

A rumour had run through the nervous crowd that a general massacre had begun. The Spaniards were intent on slaughtering them all before they even got to the harbourside, taking their last possessions, their daughters for prostitutes and bedroom slaves. Finally, to add to the pandemonium, someone had untethered some horses in a nearby street and tied lighted torches to their tails. Now the poor, terrified beasts came careering into the square with hindquarters smouldering and smoking in the downpour, lips back and teeth bared, rearing and trampling, the air filled with their screams and the evil stench of burnt horsehair. The crowd began to stampede and the pikemen turned away from Nicholas, starting to panic themselves.

Then urgent hands grasped Nicholas and Hodge and pulled them away down a narrow alleyway. Too startled to resist, Nicholas dropped the pike and allowed himself to be led. Moments later they found themselves crossing a tiny, rain-soaked inner courtyard, and bundled through a wooden doorway. They passed down a pitch-dark passageway, those that drew them on knowing the way, then through an archway so low they had to duck, and into a dimly candlelit chamber. They were pushed through heavy curtains at the back, into another still-smaller chamber, also candlelit. It was bare but for a single divan, and the air was full of the sweet smell of sandalwood.

‘Wait here,’ hissed a voice.

And then they were alone.

‘What the bloody hell
now
?’ said Hodge. ‘Once again you have landed us in the middle of a cowpat the size of Shropshire.’

‘That I have,’ said Nicholas, shaking the beads of rain from his cloak, drawing his hood off and sitting down on the edge of the divan with infuriating equanimity. ‘That I have.’

In the candlelight, Hodge actually saw the damn fool
smile
. The smile vanished again. ‘But I could not watch what they were doing.’

‘They were all Moors. The atrocities they have done, the terror they have spread—’

‘Hodge,’ said Nicholas quietly. ‘You know that is not true. Not those merchants and their families. Not that girl, her foot now broken by a Spanish pike.’

‘I bet they supported the uprising anyhow.’

‘Are you surprised?’

Hodge held his gaze and then his eyes dropped. ‘Damn it all,’ he said, ‘but the world’s a mess and a half.’

It must have been half an hour later that the heavy curtain was drawn back and a man stepped lightly into the chamber. He wore a long robe in the Moorish style, and there was a dagger on a thin gold belt round his waist. They stood.

‘Please,’ he said, and indicated the divan again. ‘You are my guests.’

They sat, warily. A boy brought in a beaten copper tray bearing two more candles, and three tiny cups of steaming coffee. They took theirs and held them until the man took the first sip from his own. He smiled. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Drink without fear in your hearts that you will be poisoned.’

The coffee was very hot and sweet.
Hot as hell, sweet as love, and black as the devil
, as the saying had it.

‘So,’ said the man. ‘How is your homeland?’

It was important to show nothing, give nothing away. They were in a very peculiar situation, irony piled upon irony. Threatened by Catholic pikemen, they had now been rescued, it seemed, by Spanish Moors.

‘She flourishes,’ said Nicholas.

‘
Alhamdulillah
, God be praised.’ The Moor smiled. ‘You would like to know of our progress? Assuming the . . . gifts are to be shipped soon?’

Nicholas thought rapidly. They were mistaken for someone else. He said, ‘Tell me of the fugitives first. Out there. Why are you not among them?’

He sighed. ‘Cadiz has not yet been . . . cleansed. These that you
see, the family that you so gallantly and foolishly fought for – and risked all our plans for, I might add – these are fugitives driven down from the Alpujarras.’

‘Where the atrocities have taken place?’

‘What have you heard?’

‘Of churches burned, whole families massacred. Christian priests murdered.’

‘And you too are a Christian. I understand that.’ The man was thoughtful. ‘It is a civil war, and nothing that the worst criminals among my people do has my support. Aben Farax in particular is driven more by hatred of the enemy than by any love of the Prophet. There are men like this in your world too. Yes? Driven more by hatred of the Moor, the Turk and the Saracen than by any love of your Christ?’

Nicholas nodded. ‘We worship different gods. But the devil is always the same, and men commit the same atrocities the world over.’

‘Then let me tell you how it has been for my people in Cadiz. And this has been by no means the worst. In Granada it is worse.

‘Three years ago we were told that we must become true subjects of King Philip, no longer stand apart. We must abandon speaking Arabic, and learn to speak only Castilian Spanish. The language of the Prophet, the language of the Book, was to be
proscribed
. As if a filthy thing.’

‘What did you do?’

‘We did what any oppressed people does. We smiled, and bowed our heads humbly, and agreed. And in secret we did differently, speaking Arabic with ever more love and relish. So that we soon increased our reputation for dishonesty and treachery.’

‘But this is hardly an atrocity.’

‘Listen longer, English friend. We were then ordered to hand over all books in Arabic to Pedro Deza in thirty days, including the Koran. You know of Pedro Deza?’

They shook their heads.

‘Doubtless you will.
Why do you still harbour copies of the Koran?
they said.
You are Christian now
. Of course, of course, we said. We believed the books were to be burned. We were then forbidden to wear any Moorish garments. Women must go in public with their
faces uncovered, in case they posed a danger, or they were really Moorish men in disguise, intent on assassinating Catholic princes and cardinals. Our private family ceremonies, such as betrothals and marriages, must take place with the doors of our houses open on to the street, so that nothing nefarious could take place. What did the Christians take us for? So they could watch us – and the lesser ones, the peasants, jeer at us and even spit at us over our threshold as we gave our daughters away in marriage.

‘Moorish names and surnames were banned. A father could no longer name his son Mohammed, he must call him Jacobo, or Rodolfo. Our bathhouses were closed down, because they said they were nothing but places where we practised our filthy lusts. We were forbidden to own Negro slaves – although as you know, Negroes are made by Allah to be slaves, for they are the accursed sons of Ham.’

Nicholas sipped his coffee.

‘Our madrasas were closed, all our children were to be placed in Christian schools. To save their souls. And so you see, humiliation piled upon humiliation. Eventually a million little humiliations – do they not add up to their own kind of atrocity?’

‘So you rose in revolt?’

The Moor nodded. ‘Though we had no arms, no training, no fortresses and little money. Yet the Turks and the Moroccans promised us much. So we rose in revolt. At first Aben Humeya and Aben Farax led a band of no more then eighty followers. Young men full of blood and fire, and all the recklessness of the young. They had nothing else to look forward to but a life scratching a living herding goats in the Alpujarras, or running a stall in the market square. Why should they not take the golden road to martyrdom and paradise? More and more flocked to join the revolt.

‘We fought from the natural fortresses of the Sierras – though we must not call Spain’s highest mountain Mulhacen now, must we? It is an Arab name. Like the Alhambra. Like algebra and alchemy, and the Christians’ favourite, alcohol, which is forbidden to us. Surely Allah plays jokes upon mankind, to instruct him!’

The Moor smiled, and the smile faded. The boy came back and whispered to him, ‘The four are here for you.’

‘Tell them to wait,’ he said.

Four, thought Nicholas and Hodge. And they had not so much as a dagger between them.

The Moor resumed. ‘One law said that any Muslim, of any age or sex, could receive a hundred lashes if he came near a town. For speaking Arabic you now spent thirty days in chains. Then bitterness and fear erupted in atrocity, and fed more atrocity. Christian villages were attacked by armed bands and put to the sword, though our leader Aben Humeya tried to restrain it. And then the whole Moorish quarter of Albacin, of Granada. Our men sold captive Christian women and children into slavery, under cover of night off the coast, to the Barbary corsairs. In return they received arms and munitions. A few Turkish supplies also came through the coastal blockades.

‘And so for the Spanish, any Moor was now suspect by race, regardless of conduct. In some villages, Moors were hunted down with hunting dogs, for sport. Whole families were slain and buried in mass graves.

‘There were still six hundred thousand Moors within Spain. A great number. But we could not oppose the Spanish army, and it destroyed us. Of course it did. We were only villagers, townsmen, merchants, and with families to protect. We were utterly defeated. Many of our people were herded down from their villages, broken up and divided, some sent on the long march to new settlements in Castile, or concentrated in camps in alien valleys, on the poorest land.

‘A few fanatics still fight on now, in the Sierras and in lonely valleys. But what for? The Morisco people have already begun their long walk into exile. And this is really what Spain wanted all along, I think. What men such as Pedro Deza had long since dreamed of: a pure Spain, white and clean and Christian. That day has nearly come now. Pedro Deza has triumphed.

‘And after all we have suffered, perhaps we are glad, or at least resigned, to be going. Those fugitives you witnessed, out there in the rain. They are not really weeping to go. They are weeping to be driven out in such ignominy, so unjustly robbed of their possessions. Many have lost relatives and loved ones in the wars. But they are not sorry to go. Here is another fine irony, my friends. I am in agreement with Pedro Deza after all. I do not think that we
Muslims and Christians can live in peace side by side. Not for very long. And so, after nearly a thousand years in al-Andalus, we go.

‘Into exile, and betrayed too by the Turk. Constantinople promised us soldiers – none came. Just guns. And already we hear that in Morocco we are further preyed upon and robbed even by our brother Muslims. In Spain we are despised as traitororous
Mohammedans
, but in Morocco, we are thought not true believers, tainted by centuries of living under the infidel. They jeer at us as we step off the ships at Tangier or Ceuta, saying we sold our pigs just before embarking. It gives the Moroccans the excuse they need to practise their most ardent belief of all: cheating and stealing from those who trust them. It is a disgrace to the Faith.