the Walking Drum (1984) (11 page)

It was now more than four hundred years since the Moors had conquered Spain. Their invasion of France had been repelled by Charles Martel. The corrupt empire of the Visigoths had collapsed before the first attack by a small band of Moslems led by Tarik, a veteran soldier. The Visigoth Empire had been a mixture of peoples and languages, many of them inherited from bygone years. The Iberians, Phoenicians, and many others left their mark. The Phoenicians were a Semitic people, settled in many places along the coast, opening trading establishments and sending their ships into the Atlantic. Their ships and those from Carthage, which had once been a Phoenician colony, sailed around Africa, went to the Scilly Isles for tin, sailed the coasts of Brittany and into the North Sea. As each mariner was jealous of his sources for raw materials and trade goods, we shall probably never know the true extent of their voyages.

The Greeks, the Romans, the Vandals, and the Goths had all invaded Spain, and left their mark upon it. Invading armies then, as well as now, left behind them an outbreak of pregnancy, destroying forever the myth of a pure race.

Never did I tire of roaming the streets, one of which, as Duban the soldier had told me, was ten miles long and lighted from end to end. The banks of the Guadalquivir were lined with houses of marble, with mosques and gardens. Water was brought to the city through leaden pipes, so everywhere there were fountains, flowers, trees, and vines.

It was said there were fifty thousand fine dwellings in Cordoba, and as many lesser ones. There were seven hundred mosques where the faithful worshiped, and nine hundred public baths. And this at a time when Christians forbade bathing as a heathen custom, when monks and nuns boasted of their filthiness as evidence of sanctity. One nun of the time boasted that at the age of sixty she had washed no part of her body but her fingertips when going to take the mass.

There were thousands of shops, with streets devoted to workers in metal, leather, and silk; it was said there were one hundred and thirty thousand weavers working with silk or wool.

Upon a side street I discovered a lean, fierce man who taught the art of the scimitar and dagger, and each day I went there to work with him. My long hours at the oar as well as a boyhood of running, wrestling, and climbing rocks had given me uncommon strength and agility. My teacher suggested another, a huge wrestler from India, a man of enormous skill, now growing old. He spoke Arabic fluently, and between bouts we talked much of his native land and those that intervened.

As black-haired as any Arab, my hair was curly and my skin only a little lighter than most of theirs. Now I cultivated a black mustache and could easily have passed for an Arab or Berber. In my new clothing, with my height, I drew attention upon the streets where I spent my time, learning the ways of the city, listening to the bargaining, the gossip, debate, and argument.

As yet I had chosen no school, yet each night I read myself to sleep with the writings of al-Farabi on Aristotle, and I was learning much. Among other things I learned that one could attain to no position unless one was adept at extemporaneous poetry, and poetry of all kinds was appreciated by men in the street as well as by the leaders in the brilliant intellectual and artistic life for which Cordoba was famous.

Knowing no one, I often sat alone in one of the coffeehouses that were springing up in the cities of Moslem Spain. At first, when coffee became known, it was pressed into cakes and sold as a delicacy; later it was made into an infusion and drunk. It was said to be inspiring to the mind, a contribution to thought. The coffeehouses became the haunts of intellectuals and poets.

Coffee was a product of Africa but soon crossed the Red Sea into Arabia. Ibn-Tuwais, with whom I often talked the hours away, had been a friend of a learned man who told him of an ancient time when a ship a day had sailed from the Red Sea ports of Egypt such as Myos Hormus and Berenice, sailing to the faraway cities of India, Ceylon, and China. These vessels often brought cargoes of tea, and this, too, had become a favorite beverage. Unknown in Christian Europe, it had first been used for medicinal purposes, but was now drunk for pleasure.

Neither drink was known in Frankish lands, but seated in the coffeehouses, I drank of each at various times, twirling my mustache and listening with attention to that headier draught, the wine of the intellect, that sweet and bitter juice distilled from the vine of thought and the tree of man's experience.

Averroes, one of the great intellects of Islam, was qadi of Cordoba at the time. Maimonides, a Jew and a great scholar, had lived there and visited from time to time, or so it was said.

The tea and coffee houses were alive with argument, and there were Persians from Jundi Shapur, Greeks from Alexandria, Syrians from Aleppo mingling with Arabs from Damascus and Baghdad.

In one of the coffeehouses I frequented, Abul Kasim Khalaf, known to the Franks as Albucasis, was an occasional visitor. Famous as a surgeon, he was even better known as a poet and wit. The botanist ibn-Beytar was his friend, and many an hour I sat, my back to them, but hungrily gathering every word. In this way my education progressed, but also I was learning more of the Arabic language. From time to time they mentioned books, and these I hastened to find for myself that I might learn from them. Into every aspect of learning I threw myself with all the hunger of the starved.

Each day I lingered in the bazaars, moving from place to place to talk to merchants from foreign lands, and each I asked for news of Kerbouchard. Many knew nothing; others assured me he was dead, but still I could not accept it.

Of Redwan and Aziza I heard nothing, although there was much talk of politics.

Well-supplied with money from the selling of the galley, I purchased fine garments, becoming very much the elegant young man of fashion. I sat many an hour, usually engrossed in some manuscript or book purchased in the street of the booksellers.

And then one day I saw the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

She had come to the coffeehouse with Averroes himself, he whose correct name was ibn-Rushd. They seated themselves opposite me one day when sunshine fell across the door, leaving all within shadowed and still. It was an hour when few were about, the place empty but for them and myself. There were low tables before us, and we sat cross-legged behind them on leather cushions.

A slave brought them tea and sweetmeats, a sweetmeat callednatif. She sat so she faced me, and from time to time she lifted her long dark lashes and looked directly at me, as she could not avoid doing. When she turned to speak to Averroes I glimpsed her beautiful profile and the length of her lashes. She was divinely beautiful, but are there not many divinely beautiful women when one is young and the sap of life flows swiftly in the veins? Yet this one ... she was superb!

"It is good to see you, Valaba," Averroes said.

Valaba? Like her namesake of one hundred years earlier, Valaba had made her home a rendezvous for the brilliant, for the poets, philosophers, and students of science. It was a period of enormous achievement, one of the great eras in the history of science. Not since the Athens of Pericles had there been such intellectual excitement, and the home of Valaba, as well as those of several other such women, had become a focal point for the exchange of ideas.

"When I was in Sicily," she was saying, "Prince William told me of Viking ships that had sailed to an island in the northern seas, and this must be Ultima Thule."

"Ah, yes," Averroes acknowledged, "a Greek named Phytheas is said to have sailed there." She was very beautiful, and he who would be her lover must not be laggard.

Glancing across my cup, I said, "If you will permit? I have visited the place."

Her dark eyes were cool. No doubt many young men had aspired to know her, and to know her better. Well, let them have aspirations. Where they aspired, I would achieve.

Averroes looked up with interest. "Ah? You are a man of the sea?"

"Briefly, and perhaps again. The land of which you speak is not the furthest land. There are lands beyond, and still others beyond those."

"You have been to Thule?"

"Long ago, from the shores of Armorica. Our boats fish in seas beyond the ice land where the seas are thick with fog, and sometimes with floating ice, but teem with fish. When the fog is gone and the skies are clear, one can often see, further to the westward, another land."

"And you were there, too?" In the tone of Valaba was a touch of sarcasm.

"I was there also. It is a land of rocky shores, great forests, and a shore that stretches away to both south and north."

"The Vikings spoke of a green land," Averroes said doubtfully.

"This is another, but of which my people have long known. The Norsemen went there from Greenland and Iceland to get timbers to build their ships, or for masts. Sometimes they landed to dry their fish or to hunt."

"This land has been explored?"

"Who would wish to? It is a land of dense forests and savage men who have nothing to trade but furs or skins. The men who sail there look only for fish."

"You are not an Arab?"

"I am Mathurin Kerbouchard, a traveler and a student."

Averroes smiled. "Are not we all? Travelers and students?" He sipped his tea. "What do you do in Cordoba?"

"I have come to learn, and having found no school, I learn from books."

"You are a poet?" Valaba asked.

"I have not the gift."

Averroes chuckled. "Need that stop you? How many have the gift? There may be a million people in Cordoba, and all of them write poetry, yet not more than three dozen have even a modest gift."

They returned to their conversation, and I, to my reading, for I was beginning the greatCanon of Avicenna, which was in many volumes and more than a million words on the practice of medicine.

When they left my eyes followed them, watching the slim and graceful Valaba. Had she guessed what was in my mind, she would have laughed at me. Which disturbed me none at all.

Who was I, a barbarian from the northern lands, to even know such a woman? I, a landless man, a wanderer, a casual student?

She was cool, aloof, beautiful, and wealthy. She was a young lady with the brains and judgment of men. Yet my time would come.

Ambition was strong within me. I wanted to see, to become, but, most of all, to understand. Much that here was taken for granted was new to me, and I found it best to tread lightly in all conversation unless I wished to make a fool of myself. Yet I was learning, and the ways of the city were becoming my ways.

The wider my knowledge became the more I realized my ignorance. It is only the ignorant who can be positive, only the ignorant who can become fanatics, for the more I learned the more I became aware that there are shadings and relationships in all things.

My Druid discipline had not only trained my memory but conditioned my mind to the quick grasp of ideas, of essential points. Most of what I read, I retained. In knowledge lay not only power but freedom from fear, for generally speaking one only fears what one does not understand.

It was a time when all knowledge lay open to him who would seek it, and a physician was often an astronomer, a geographer, a philosopher, and a mathematician. There were several hundred volumes in the library of ibn-Tuvvais. These books I read from and studied.

Here and there I began to make acquaintances. Mahmoud was such a one. A tall young man of twenty-four, vain of his pointed beard and mustaches. He was much of a dandy, but keen of wit and a ready hand with a blade. We met by chance in the Garden of Abdallah near the Guadalquivir.

It was shadowed and cool. Great trees created islands of shadow on the stone flags, and there I often sat with a glass of golden Jerez at hand and a book before me.

A shadow fell upon my page, and glancing up, I saw Mahmoud for the first time. "Ah? A student and a drinker of wine? Have you no respect for the Koran?"

It was a time for caution, for under the reign of Yusuf there were fanatics in Cordoba. Yet the stranger's eyes seemed friendly.

"If the Prophet had read Avicenna upon a hot day, he might have accepted a glass. Anyway," I added slyly, "he had never tasted the wine of Jerez."

He sat down. "I am Mahmoud, a student of the law, occasionally a drinker of wine."

"And I am Kerbouchard."

There in the shadow of a great tree we talked of what young men talk about when their world is filled with ideas and the excitement of learning. We talked of war and women, of ships, camels, weapons, and Avicenna, of religion and philosophy, of politics and buried treasure, but most of all we talked of Cordoba.

We ate figs, small cakes, and drank wine, talking the sun out of the sky and the moon into it. We talked of the faults of Caesar and the death of Alexander, and he spoke of Fez and Marrakesh and the great desert to the south of those cities.

It was the beginning of a friendship, my first in the land of the Moors.

Of course, there were John of Seville, whose name was often mentioned, and old ibn-Tuwais, whose name was not.

My gold disappeared, and I sold the sapphire. It bought leisure and time to study and roaming the streets at night with Mahmoud, and it bought much else. Startling ideas appeared in a book newly come to Cordoba, a book written at the oasis of Merv by al-Khazini and calledThe Book of the Balance of Wisdom. It was an excellent account of the hydrostatics and mechanics of the time, but it also advanced the theory of gravity, and that air has weight.