Court of Lions Read online

  ALSO BY JANE JOHNSON

  The Tenth Gift

  The Salt Road

  The Sultan’s Wife

  Pillars of Light

  Copyright © 2017 Jane Johnson

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Johnson, Jane, 1960-, author

  Court of lions / Jane Johnson.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780385682657 (softcover).—ISBN 9780385682664 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PR6060.O357C69 2017   823’.914   C2016-907825-6

                      C2016-907826-4

  This book is a work of historical fiction. Apart from well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover and text design: Kelly Hill

  Cover images: (woman) Bold Bliss/​boldblissblog.com;

  (pomegranate) #b14485031/New York Public Library; (tile) courtesy of the author

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v4.1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by Jane Johnson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Further Reading for Court of Lions

  Acknowledgements

  To Hani and Christina,

  You know why

  Though the shadows of these walls have long

  since gone, the memory of them will live on as

  the final refuge of dreams and art. And then the

  last nightingale to breathe on this earth will build

  its nest and sing its farewell song among the

  glorious ruins of the Alhambra.

  FRANCISCO VILLAESPESA

  Molten silver flows through the pearls, which it

  resembles in its pure, white beauty

  Water and marble seem to be one in appearance, and

  we know not which of the two is flowing.

  Do you not see how the water spills into the basin,

  but the hidden spout hides it immediately?

  It is a lover whose eyes brim over with tears, tears that

  it hides for fear someone will reveal them…

  IBN ZAMRAK

  Dramatis Personae

  KATE’S STORY

  IN SPAIN

  Kate Fordham, Englishwoman working in Granada under the name of Anna Maria Moreno

  Jimena, owner of the Bodega Santa Isabel in Granada

  Juan, Axel, Leena, Giorgio, Kate’s co-workers in the bodega

  Hicham, Moroccan man working in an Internet café

  Dr. Khadija Boutaki, expert in Islamic gardens

  Brahim Boutaki, her husband, a retired zellij worker

  Omar Boutaki, Brahim’s brother, working in restoration at the Alhambra

  Abdou, a ma’allem—master—zellij worker

  Mohamed Boutaki, Omar’s son, a zellij expert from Fez

  IN ENGLAND

  Jess Scott, née Fordham, Kate’s twin sister

  Luke, Kate’s son

  Evan Scott, Jess’s husband

  James Foxley, antiques dealer

  Yusuf, corner-shop assistant

  BLESSINGS’S STORY

  GRANADA IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

  Blessings, child from a desert tribe sold into the Granada court as a companion to

  Prince Abu Abdullah Mohammed (Momo), soon to be Mohammed XII of Granada, known by his enemies as Boabdil

  Abu’l Hasan Ali, sultan of Granada, known also as Moulay Hasan, father to Momo

  Abu Abdullah Muhamed al-Zaghal, his brother, called usually al-Zaghal

  Lalla Aysha the Pious, the Chaste, the sultana, married to Moulay Hasan, mother to Momo

  Rachid, the younger son of Moulay Hasan and Lalla Aysha

  Qasim Abdelmalik, the vizier (chief minister) at the Granada court

  Dr. Ibrahim, court doctor

  Isobel de Solis, war captive, convert to Islam, married to Moulay Hasan and renamed Zoraya, Star of Morning

  La Sabia, the Wise One, her servant

  Ali Attar, pasha of the town of Loja

  Mariam, his daughter, wife to Momo

  Ahmed, the elder son of Momo and Mariam, known also as Alfonso

  Yusuf, the baby son of Momo and Mariam

  Musa Ibn Abu’l Ghrassan, chief of the Banu Serraj (Abencerrages) clan, allied to Lalla Aysha

  CASTILIANS AND ARAGONESE

  Queen Isabella, queen of the conjoined kingdom of Castile and Aragón

  King Ferdinand, her husband and king of the conjoined kingdom of Castile and Aragón

  Don Diego Fernández of Córdoba, the Count of Cabra

  Don Diego, his nephew, a knight

  Don Gonzalo Fernández of Córdoba, known as the Great Captain

  Don Rodrigo Ponce de León, the Marquis of Cádiz and King Ferdinand’s general

  Cristoforo Colombo, also known as Cristóbal Colón and Christopher Columbus, adventurer

  1

  Kate

  GRANADA

  NOW

  Kate didn’t consider herself a vandal. She had never wilfully damaged anything in her life (apart from herself), let alone a World Heritage Site. Intrigued by a plant that resembled a familiar English weed she knew of as the Mother of Thousands or Kenilworth ivy, she had been taking a closer look, and glimpsed something that shouldn’t have been there. Winkling it out, she’d triggered a little cascade of debris.

  She glanced around, hoping no one had seen. The Alhambra palaces, constructed by the medieval Moorish kings of Granada and wrapped around by their majestic gardens, represented to her a sort of perfection: a paradise on earth. To get thrown out would be like getting expelled from Eden. She managed to fiddle the object into her palm and sat back, trying to look innocent.

  No one appeared to have noticed, not even the group of tourists she’d come in with, who were now standing in a knot, poring over a guidebook, then staring across the gorge to the summer palace, their sun visors glinting in the low afternoon light a
nd their Nordic walking poles tucked under their arms. She’d watched them striding purposefully up the hill from the Pomegranate Gate, their poles clacking on the stones, as if they were making their way to Everest Base Camp instead of a sunlit garden in Andalusia.

  Turning slightly away from them, Kate tucked her hair behind her ears to examine what she had found, feeling an unexpected simple pleasure in the act. Her hair had taken its time growing back, as if nervous to be seen out in public, but now it brushed her shoulders. Perhaps it marked the extent to which she was being restored to herself.

  She opened her hand. It was just an old screw of paper, probably a scrap of rubbish crammed into the crack in the wall by a visitor. Habit dictated that she painstakingly unroll it. (She did this with used wrapping paper, peeling off the tape, trying not to tear it. As a child, she had frustrated her family at Christmas by holding up the gift opening with her mildly autistic patience.) Inside the scroll of paper was a layer of coarse white grains, and beneath this was inked a series of symbols.

  Her brain buzzed at a sudden memory: sitting with Jess on a long-ago wet Sunday afternoon with a book on the floor between them.

  They were twins. Non-identical, but if they made the effort, it could be hard for people to tell them apart. They had been taking turns reading to each other, but she had been interrupting Jess, driving her mad with a typical eight-year-old’s questions. “Yes, but what sort of spiders are they? Where did they come from? How did they get to be so big? Are there spiders in our woods that cocoon people and eat them alive?”

  Infuriated, Jess had put the book down flat as if hiding its contents from Kate, who had spied something she had never noticed before: that the pattern on the front cover also ran across the spine and onto the back of the book. And not just any pattern: symbols that looked sort of like an alphabet but were a type of writing she couldn’t quite understand. She had touched the border in wonder. “Look,” she’d said. “Letters!”

  Jess had sighed. “They’re runes, stupid,” she’d declared with almost adult condescension. “It’s another language.” She pointed to a section of the border. “See, there? You must be able to work that out.”

  It was a sort of spiky double B. In a flash of revelation Kate understood how the letters grouped around it made up a name. “It says ‘The Hobbit’!” she squealed. It was a glimpse into a secret world. “What does the rest say?”

  They had spent the remainder of the afternoon transliterating the code and making up messages to each other. Over the years it had become their thing. Different codes, different games. Kate would receive postcards from Jess when she was travelling through Europe on a student rail card in her gap year: a few lines of neat runes, followed by a heart and a J, notes that remained cryptic even when decoded.

  Boys like wolves roam. A lick or a kiss?

  This, with an Italian stamp and a picture of a statue of Romulus and Remus. From Spain, a postcard showing a statue of a mounted hero named Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar in Burgos. C Heston’s steely gaze and auto da fe hair, she translated from Jess’s code. Reader, I swived him.

  Swived was one of their code words, gleaned from reading Chaucer’s tales. The moment Kate had translated that fourth letter she’d burst out laughing and their mother had demanded to know why. Of course she hadn’t told.

  Remembering, Kate smiled as she examined the paper further. The symbols on it resembled Tolkien’s runes: but here, she could find no simple guiding principle, could not even tell if they ran from left to right, right to left, top to bottom. They were a series of tiny markings, as if to save space, or to make the secret they contained even more obscure.

  Perhaps this was a note left for an illicit lover, admitting to jealousy or betrayal or everlasting adoration. But more likely it was just a game, or a shopping list; or her imagination running away with her. A meaningless bit of garbage crammed into this crevice because someone couldn’t be bothered to find a bin to throw it away in. Which was probably what she should do with it.

  But instead, she tucked it into her jeans pocket. Perhaps it was just in a language she didn’t know, like Hebrew or Cyrillic. Maybe she should show it around at the bar and see what anyone there could make of it. They were a cosmopolitan lot. She glanced at her watch. Nearly five o’clock. She was on evenings this week, which was better for tips but played havoc with her sleep. She pushed herself to her feet, grimacing as her knees cracked. Showing your age, Kate. Creaking knees and a watch. No one else at the bar even owned a watch: smart phones had taken over. This thought triggered another: I must phone Jess and Luke.

  The idea of reconnecting to the world should have warmed her, but it was as if a cloud passed across the face of the sun.

  “Anna! Anna Maria, I’m talking to you—did you hear a word I said?”

  Kate looked up with a start from the chalkboard on which she was writing—in Spanish on one side, English on the other—that night’s specials: patatas a lo pobre, poor man’s potatoes; piquillos rellenos, stuffed peppers; boquerónes, Spanish white anchovies. “Sorry, I was a million miles away.” It took her a moment to find a suitable Spanish phrase. “Un millón de millas.”

  Jimena shook her head wearily. “Sometimes it’s as if you’re in another world. When I started working, if I didn’t leap to attention as soon as Paolo called my name, I’d have been out in the gutter, doing trabajo de negros.”

  Black man’s work.

  Jimena’s tales of her hardscrabble life before she clawed her way up to owning the Bodega Santa Isabel were always colourful; her racism, however, was highly unpleasant. Kate bit her tongue and held up the finished chalkboard. “There—is that okay?”

  Jimena ran her eyes over the Spanish text, her thin face as intent as a hawk’s as she concentrated. “Two r’s in chicharrón,” she said, focusing on the single error, handing the tablet back without a word of praise. “And as I was saying, table seven is filthy and the candle on table five needs to be replaced.”

  And she was off to berate someone else.

  Kate watched as she headed for Leena and Giorgio, standing together with their backs foolishly to the bar as they laughed about something, their heads bent in joyful complicity. She wished she could warn them, but seconds later they jolted upright like guilty children, away from the phone they’d been craning over, and in an instant Jimena had it in her hands like some sort of wicked stepmother, confiscated for the rest of the night. Kate fingered the scrap of paper in her jeans pocket, and left it there.

  She moved deftly between the tables, setting chairs and placemats straight, aligning a knife someone had put down askew. She replaced the candle on table five and wiped down the plastic cloth on table seven, going through her paces on automatic. But all the while she was thinking: I must call Jess.

  It had been less than a week since they last spoke, but something was niggling at her. She hoped Luke wasn’t ill. A stabbing pain went through her at the thought of that.

  “Hi, Anna!” Axel called through a cloud of steam. Beside him Juan was peeling and chopping potatoes.

  “Drink later?” he asked.

  “Maybe.” Sometimes they sat out on the back step after service, drinking beer: the two lads were good company, though she did feel old enough to be their mother.

  Axel had blond, blunt Swedish features; Juan was dark and aquiline and Spanish, from Madrid. They were like flip sides of the same coin: in their twenties, working their way from town to town, devouring life as they went. Kate was thirty-nine. She envied them their unmoored lifestyle. Yet here she was, cast away with no anchor, a long, long way from the life she had known. But she did not feel blithe and carefree: far from it. Perhaps that was the difference between thirty-nine and twenty-five.

  Try to live in the moment, Kate, she told herself fiercely. She took a few deep breaths. You only get the one life. “Okay,” she amended. “If we don’t finish too late.”

  The crowd in tonight was varied. The Alhambra, and the city that had grown up around it, attracte
d all sorts of visitors. Youngsters making the rounds of the sights of Europe, too full of narcissism and hormones for its majesty and tragedy to touch their hearts; academics who carried notebooks with them, looking, looking, but never really seeing; couples on honeymoon, come to sigh over the sunsets and the romantic courtyards; seasoned travellers who walked briskly through the gardens, eating the ground away till they could get to the Nasrid palaces and tick off the most famous marvels from their itineraries; batty old women who touched the walls when they thought no one was looking as if they might raise a ghost or two; dark-eyed men from North Africa, glowering at all that was lost, when once they had been kings. They all came in here for tapas, for the deep-red local wine and for cerveza.

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true. When Jimena was front of house, the latter group got turned away with a curt “We have no tables”; unspoken: “for the likes of you”—even though the place was patently empty.

  To say her boss was racist was too simple a statement. It was as if Jimena felt she was the last bastion of Catholic Spain, a holy inquisitor holding back the Moorish hordes. Arabs were not welcome in the bodega under Jimena’s regime and woe betide you if you let one in. “They’re terrorists, all of them. You think they wouldn’t kill you in an instant if they could get away with it? I lost a cousin in the Madrid bombings. It’s what their kind has been doing for centuries. It’s in their blood. They hate us for what we took back from them, and they’re planning all the time how they’re going to get it back, or destroy it if they can’t. They are the enemy. They have always been the enemy. I may not have the power to keep them out of my country, but by God I’ll keep them out of my bar!”

  The first time Kate had heard this tirade—levelled at a newcomer who’d had the temerity to seat a pleasant family of Moroccan tourists—she’d felt something inside her shrivel. Once, she’d have called Jimena to account, but she’d lost that earlier confidence, found it hard to summon the courage. And she hated herself for that.