Septimania Read online

  “I was?” Malory asked, less to Settimio than to the Santa Marta that reminded him so strongly of his mother and the Venus that had his grandmother’s hair—and only that, he hoped—and wondered why those two women hadn’t given him a little hint while they were alive that they, and therefore he, were descended from Charlemagne and King David.

  “Holy Roman Emperor and King of the Jews.” Settimio walked out of an opening at the far end of the hub. “But the true genius of Yehoshua and Charlemagne was to befriend the Caliph of Baghdad. The friendship of Haroun al Rashid and the first King of Septimania is said to have been very great, almost biblical in proportion.”

  “The Caliph of Baghdad?” Malory followed through an arch topped by a blackened medallion of another familial Virgin. Could she be Mexican?

  “Welcome to the majlis, mio Principe.”

  The long summers Malory had spent with his mother in the countryside outside Narbonne had been filled with illustrated books—the complete Morte d’Arthur of Thomas Malory with Aubrey Beardsley’s rose-crowned drawings; Richard Halliburton’s Book of Wonders with engravings of the Library of Alexandria, the Colossus at Rhodes, and other long-gone miracles of an ancient human race. And of course he had spent days, weeks, months in the inky harems and casbahs of Richard Burton’s One Thousand and One Nights. But to enter the majlis, as Settimio called it, was to abandon whatever reality his bath and tea and scone had provided him and give himself over to the storybook kingdom that Settimio insisted on calling his home. The walls were tiled, the ceiling honeycombed in a stone crocheted by a sweatshop of djinns. In the center of the room, a fountain of seven bronze lions gargled water into a stone basin.

  “These carpets,” Settimio was saying, “are from the Caspian shores near Tabriz. The tapestries on the far wall were conceived by the magicians of Shiraz on the Persian Gulf and woven with the lost Kashan art of Infinite Knots that makes it impossible for even the restorers from the Vatican Museums to decipher where the rug begins and where the rug ends.”

  “Cor,” Malory said, sitting down because his legs were finding it less easy than his brain to keep up with Settimio’s tour.

  “The bolsters cushioning the walls are from Yemen, the censers from Kazakhstan. And the throne you are sitting on …”

  “Sorry!” Malory jumped up.

  “It is yours, mio Principe, the throne for the King of Septimania. Please …” Settimio took Malory’s elbow lightly and eased him back down. “This throne was carved by a single axe from a single apple tree in the garden of a palace in Baghdad. It was transported to Rome in person by the Caliph Haroun al Rashid as a belated wedding present for Gan and his bride Aldana, the red-haired daughter of Charlemagne, on the occasion of Charlemagne’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in the Year 800.”

  “Not a bedtime story,” Malory said, rubbing his left palm along the armrest.

  “No,” Settimio acknowledged. “Applewood. One tree.”

  “But,” Malory said, standing up, the scientist in him awakening, “how do you know all this? How do you know it’s not just another story cooked up by some younger Scheherazade?”

  “Books, mio Principe. I believe in books.” Settimio smiled, perhaps the first time Malory had seen him smile. “I believe you also know something about books. Would you be so good as to follow me?” Settimio walked to the far end of the majlis, where the niche in the eastern wall curved back between the Catholic vestibule and the Jewish dining room. Malory approached and looked inside.

  “In here?” Malory asked. There was a passageway. A passageway of tile and wood and light—a light that led up, that led down, that led sideways. They walked. They walked some more. The rooms of the villa that Malory had seen felt like they must be mere anterooms, and yet Malory continued to follow Settimio through the passageway up to a wooden door padded in leather.

  “The Sanctum Sanctorum,” Settimio said. “The true wealth of Septimania. The Holy of Holies.”

  The padded leather gave only a hint of how discreetly Septimania veiled its treasure. Settimio opened the door and led Malory into the first room. It was equally modest—a low-ceilinged study, bare except for a seven-sided desk lit by a concentric fixture suspended from a coffered ceiling. The seven books on the seven sides of the desk were anything but simple.

  “On the left,” Settimio said, pointing to one of seven boxes, “is the oldest manuscript in your collection—a Septuagint, dating from the third century BC, the Greek translation by seventy-two rabbis of the forty-six books of the Tanach, what the pope, as you may know, calls the Old Testament. Next to it is a Codex, complete with the New Testament, or at least many of the books of the Codex are still associated with the New Testament. It was commissioned by the Emperor Constantine shortly after his conversion to Christianity and given by Pope Leo III to Charlemagne in the year 800 on the event of his own coronation as Holy Roman Emperor. It is known as the Codex Septimania, although known as such to very few. Next is the first of the five Korans made around 650 AD by the Third Caliph Uthman, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, the oldest Koran in existence, except, according to believers, for the Koran that was made by Mohammed the Prophet and which the Angel Gibreel keeps in his own Sanctum Sanctorum up in Heaven. The following two boxes hold the writings of Buddha in one, the Vedas of the Hindus in the other, including a fragment of the Rigveda that is thought to be over three thousand years old.”

  A choked gurgle came from Malory’s throat. He was pleased that he was even that articulate.

  “The sixth box, at your grandmother’s request, is the oldest version of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica.”

  “Wait a minute,” Malory said, suddenly waking up in a world he knew. “I’ve seen the oldest edition—Newton’s own copy of 1686. It’s back at Trinity College, in the Wren Library, with Newton’s handwritten corrections for the second edition.”

  “You may find,” Settimio said, with a smile of some satisfaction, “that this copy predates the Trinity copy by some twenty years.”

  “Twenty years!” Malory was shocked and then alarmed and then shocked again, like some ten-year-old junior scientist not quite convinced that sticking a fork into an electrical socket is a bad thing. “The manuscript?” he asked somewhat more stupidly, although just saying the words tickled his neck. “You have the original manuscript? From 1666? In Newton’s hand?”

  “You have the manuscript,” Settimio corrected him. “This is all yours, mio Principe.”

  “And the seventh book? The final book?”

  “Is a box,” Settimio said, and waited for some type of reaction.

  “Empty?” Malory asked.

  “Open it and see.”

  “But if I open it …” And Malory was back in the organ loft of St. George’s, Whistler Abbey, with Schrödinger’s cat and Louiza’s Pip and his own indecision.

  “Simplex sigillum veri,” Settimio said.

  “Simplex sigillum veri?”

  “The simple is the sign of the truth.”

  “Yes, yes,” Malory said, surprising himself that he had developed the haphazard annoyance of someone with servants. “I know what it means. I just don’t know what it means in this case.”

  “Neither do I, my lord,” Settimio said mournfully. “But my instructions are to reply in such a manner. Should the new King of Septimania ask me whether the box is empty, my instructions are to reply Simplex sigillum veri.”

  “Your instructions?” Malory asked. “Instructions from whom?”

  “From my father,” Settimio answered, “who trained me the way his father trained him.”

  “May I ask,” Malory ventured, a little more calmly, “whether previous kings of Septimania have asked the same question?”

  “I have direct knowledge,” Settimio said, “of only one prior king, your great-grandfather. The father of your mother’s mother, the most recent king of Septimania.”

  “So this is the first time you’ve had to say Simplex sigillum veri?”

  �
�The first time, my lord, in my knowledge, that any of us Settimios have had to say it. Opening boxes used to be somewhat simpler.”

  Malory sat at the desk. He rubbed the back of his scalp against the back of the tapestried armchair, as he had rubbed it so often against the crumbling foam of the Trinity College Senior Common Room sofa. So many things used to be somewhat simpler. Write, they had said back in Cambridge. The simple is the sign of the truth. They had known, all the other kings of Septimania had known what was in the box, or at least hadn’t doubted that there was something, one thing in the box. But for him, the first Quantum King of Septimania, the first one in love with a quantum woman whose position he might know or direction he might know but never the same at once, nothing was simplex. And the Truth?

  “You asked me,” Settimio interrupted Malory’s reverie, “how I came upon the knowledge of the history of Septimania.”

  “Yes,” Malory said, looking up at Settimio and noticing behind him shelves filled with books—leather-bound folios and quartos, papers held in boards and tied with ribbon, boxes annotated in a faded ink.

  “I have spent a great deal of time in the Sanctum Sanctorum,” Settimio said, “preparing for your arrival.”

  “Really?” Malory said. “That was very kind of you.”

  “Twenty-six years to be exact. Ever since it became clear that your mother intended to raise you outside of Rome and in the English language. And even before then,” Settimio continued, flicking one electric switch after another, “I spent a great deal of time cataloguing the books and manuscripts and scrolls in the Sanctum Sanctorum. There was not a great deal else to do while we waited for a male heir to take possession.” As Settimio flicked the switches, lights turned on in distant passageways. Seven, Malory counted, one leading away from every corner between the seven walls of the room. Lined, as far as he could see from his position at the seven-sided desk, with miles, perhaps, of bookshelves.

  “You catalogued all this?” Malory said.

  “What might interest you most, mio Principe,” Settimio said, “as you contemplate whether or not to open the box—although I would not presume to give you advice—is an English translation that was the labor of much of the past twenty-six years. You will forgive my mistakes, I trust.”

  With that, Settimio laid a book in front of Malory—a good thousand pages of typescript on whose marbled binder was engraved:

  THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE KINGDOM OF SEPTIMANIA

  Malory opened the cover. He began to read.

  In the first years of the siege of the Franks, when Order still held the innocent hand of Hope, I kept my head down and slaughtered whatever came my way.

  “The letter, mio Principe, from the butcher Yehoshua to the King of the Jews in Baghdad requesting that he send a prince to rule the new land of Septimania, as stipulated by the deed of Pepin, the father of Charlemagne. It is the first recorded document to mention the Kingdom of Septimania. I took the liberty of photocopying the original, which I have stored elsewhere, for safekeeping,” he added with the hurried apology that reminded Malory of the librarians at the University Library whose expectations of themselves far outreached those of their clients.

  “You did all this?” Malory said. “For me?” He turned a few more pages. There were letters between Ambassadors with their ornate courtesies and catalogues of gifts.

  Seven days from the shores of Palestine. It was nothing. We lost only three parrots, and that was due to a faulty latch on the cage of the jackal.

  Then Malory came upon something different. A story recounted by a Jew in Baghdad who served in the unusual capacity of Dream Counselor to the Caliph. Haroun al Rashid had a bad dream and called upon his Dream Counselor for interpretation. One thing led to another, and the Counselor introduced Haroun to his grandson, Gan, the sixteen-year-old son of the King of the Jews of Baghdad. Haroun invited Gan to live with him in his palace. His dream—or rather his Dream Counselor—had convinced Haroun that his own safety rested on the safety of this young boy. He not only took Gan under his wing but showered him with all the comforts and delights that were his daily milk and honey.

  “In the name of Suleiyman, son of David, I swear,” the young Gan wrote.

  Paradise.

  A fucking paradise is what it was.

  Shami apples and Omani peaches for breakfast.

  Mutton rubbed with limes from Egypt and stuffed with myrtle berries and Damascene nenuphars.

  Dates from Al Ahsa.

  Soap-cakes and lemon-loaves and Zaynab’s combs and Kazi’s tidbits and more wine every evening than my mother ever placed on our table for all our Purims combined.

  And served by …

  In sixteen years of sitting at the feet of my father and my grandfather and learning Torah and Talmud and the histories of the people of Abraham and the stories of philosophers and travelers who had journeyed to places where the birds of the trees and the insects of the ground and the air and the fish of the deep and their cousins who crawl on land and the animals of the plains and the forests and the frozen wastelands of the north and the humans draped in skins and the ones who run all day naked as on the day they were cut from their mother’s cords—in all the stories of all the places of the Earth where the light of the Sun and the Moon colors every living thing in every shade of color, I had never heard of sirens as gut-squeezingly ripe as the ones who brought me my breakfast in the morning and my supper in the evening, who drew my bath and wiped me dry. Yemeni houris and Syrian nymphs, Babylonian naiads and purple-haired Khazars from the savage ravines of the Caucasus, with throats like antelopes and navels that would hold an ounce of olive oil, half a dozen purple-veined grapes, or a featherweight of frankincense from the caravans of the Sudan. Solomon sang of a Sheba as black as the tents of Kadar, with eyes like doves and breasts like gazelles that feed among the lilies. My Grandpa Benyamin, Master of the Caliph’s Dreams, told me that imagination is the daytime seed from which grows the Tree of Fantasy. I have never been to Kadar, have never seen a gazelle among the lilies, have never met the Queen of Sheba. Yet I am sure that the dreams primed by my dark-nippled companions were as vivid as any of Solomon or my savior Haroun al Rashid and need no interpretation.

  “This boy,” Malory looked up to Settimio, who continued to stand, “this Gan is the Gan who sailed across the Mediterranean?”

  “Certo, mio Principe. He married Aldana, the daughter of Charlemagne, produced an heir, who produced generation upon generation of heirs to the Kingdom of Septimania, down to you yourself, mio Principe.”

  All from a dream, Malory thought. His own dreams—while devoid of Yemeni houris and Syrian nymphs—had been remarkably vivid during the months since he had first met Louiza, full of medieval damsels and organ music. Reading Gan’s entry in the Complete History, Malory thought that, with only a single afternoon’s passion to show for himself, how much more like a sixteen-year-old princeling he was than King of the Jews and Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne alone must have polished off three or four virgins before breakfast, even back in the days before cappuccino. And Haroun—

  “Settimio?”

  “Sì, Principe?”

  “The majlis. That’s quite a room, isn’t it?”

  “Without overwhelming you, Principe, with the size and variety of the rooms within the villas and palaces and office blocks that make up the holdings of Septimania, I would venture to say yes, the majlis is a jewel of the eye and the imagination.”

  “It certainly made me wonder,” Malory said. “I mean, I can understand that Septimania, whatever kind of kingdom it is, has ancient connections back to Charlemagne. Rome makes sense, a villa in Rome makes sense.”

  “I am delighted you approve, Principe.”

  “Okay,” Malory said, “perhaps I don’t know enough yet to make proper sense of anything. But Haroun al Rashid—what did he have to do with Rome? Was the majlis another diplomatic trinket, from one emperor to another?”

  “If you will permit me?” Settimio leaned over
Malory’s shoulder and found a photocopy of a document in the Complete History. The translation was dated 10 September 789. “You will find this fragment from Haroun’s private journal was written a few weeks after Gan’s rhapsody on the Yemeni houris. I trust you will find the translation instructive.”

  Allahu akbar

  Allahu akbar

  The entry began:

  I have traveled South from Baghdad to the Desert of the Ethiop,

  North to the Steppes of the Khazars,

  East to the Poppy Fields of the Indies,

  Last night the elephant turned blue.

  The night before, yellow. This is a voyage of transformation.

  Malory remembered a drafty schoolroom and the story of an elephant, of Charlemagne’s elephant. It was named Abu-something and was a gift from the East, maybe even from Haroun al Rashid. Reading the memoir of Haroun, Malory also thought of Bernini’s elephant in the piazza in front of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The night he arrived in Rome, hadn’t Bernini’s elephant also turned blue?

  “If I am remembered by history,” Malory turned back to Haroun al Rashid’s tale in The Complete History of Septimania:

  it may not be as the wisest of caliphs who ruled in the name of Allah the Almighty. There are many times I have been betrayed by a brother I trusted, cuckolded by a wife I adored, and surprised by an argument or a punch line that others have seen coming from a league or two away. My weakness is known throughout my empire. I am a sucker for a good story. Any beggar, any cripple, any criminal, any heretic can win himself a bowl of soup, a set of crutches, or any of a thousand and one pardons if he can spin a good yarn for Caliph Haroun al Rashid. And if I am remembered, it will be for the box I used to store these stories, as carefully transcribed as the words of Allah in the Holy Koran.

  I hope I may be forgiven for seeking a solution in both an affair of state and an affair of the heart by throwing myself, for the first time I hasten to add, into the center of a tale. By climbing into my own box of stories, by stowing away on the ship sent to bring the spark of my soul, the young Jewish boy Gan, to the shores of Septimania.