Septimania Read online

  I expect the reader will understand that, from the beginning, neither Gan, nor his grandfather Benyamin, nor my Vizier Ja’afar had any inkling of my plan. A box, after all, is not such a large thing to smuggle onto a ship, particularly one already laden with dozens of trunks of jewels and carpets and exotic fruits and even an elephant that I fancied might entertain the great King Charles to the west. The evening before the journey, I bade Gan a sad farewell and retired to my rooms with strict instructions not to disturb my melancholy. Gan, his grandfather Benyamin, his mother, sisters, and the entire Jewish community of Baghdad were wrapped in a shroud of dockside mourning. No one expected to see Gan return to Baghdad. Neither did anyone expect to see me return to the port, climb into the chest and restore its lid. Therefore, nobody did.

  The first day at sea brought a tranquility I hadn’t known since the death of my father marked the beginning of a life ruled, in truth, by the calendar that man uses to stumble after the relentless plan of Allah. By the second day, I felt my mind float free from the second guesses and anxieties of leaving Baghdad so precipitously unprepared for my absence. By the third, I felt the tingle of fantasy—not the sensation that excites me every time I feel myself in the presence of a master storyteller, but the anticipation of the birth of my own imagination. So that by the fourth night, when I climbed out of my chest to walk in the fresh air of the deck, while all the crew, save the pilot, slept below, I was not surprised to discover that the elephant I had ordered aboard the ship as a gift to the Frankish king, my prize elephant, had turned blue.

  Nor was I surprised, on subsequent nights, to feel the tears of Gan in the mist of the sea spray, to hear the song of the pilot on the bridge take the voice of the innumerable unintelligible tongues of the dreams of his sailors, or to see the elephant’s leathery coat change from blue to green and eventually red, through the seven shades of the spectrum. The tears, the moans, the trumpets of rainbow exuberance from the elephant, not only transported me from the lazy throne of a listener to the uncertain crouch of an actor, but bolstered my conviction that I had acted well. I was not, as I suspected many of Gan’s family believed, chopping down the apple tree of Eden. I was preserving that tree, preserving my friend, by transplanting, exporting, marketing, managing, grafting him onto a Frankish trunk that—from what I could tell in the tone of the letters and the weight of the presents—was at least as well-rooted and powerful as mine.

  We made port on the morning of our seventh day at sea. The chest in which I lay curled as a baby in the womb was transported with adequate care, from what my senses told me, to the unventilated back stall of a Jewish butcher. I would have waited until nightfall, once again, to open the lid and free myself. But the story itself took control of my destiny.

  “I thought I might find you here,” Gan said, opening the chest with less surprise in the discovery than mine in being discovered.

  “You did?” I looked up at him, an unusual angle.

  “It was,” Gan said, “one of two possibilities.”

  At the time, I was too stiff with astonishment and inexperienced confusion to wonder about the other possibility. I had very literally thrown myself onto a ship of which I was not the captain and onto a shore of which I was not the King. I had climbed into the box a mere Caliph and climbed out a human being. Possibility, at that moment, seemed infinite.

  “Quick,” I said to Gan, “find me some clothes, some disguise.” It would have been unwise, of course, to let anyone else in on the secret of the contents of my box. Even the most selfless Charlemagne would have to be a fool not to capitalize on the potential ransom of a captive Caliph. But so many of the storytellers who came searching for my favor had dressed me up in one disguise or another in order to place me more centrally in their tales, that my imagination immediately leapt to this hackneyed recourse. I looked around the stalls, but the racks of tools and pens of fodder were strangely bare of fancy dress.

  “My friend and former master,” Gan said, steadying me with a hand as I climbed out of the chest. “You are already clothed. No one in this country has the slightest idea what you look like. The only disguise you need is a good story.” With the patience of a true prince, Gan told me what I had, of course, known back in Baghdad. None of the Franks expected to see the Caliph Haroun al Rashid. Therefore, none would see the Caliph Haroun al Rashid.

  “I will introduce you as the Ambassador,” Gan said. “Ambassador from the Caliph of Baghdad. As the Ambassador from your own court,” Gan proceeded, and I could see the story taking on weight and flesh, “you will be welcomed into every home that welcomes me. We are, in fact, expected for dinner, upstairs in the home of the shochet Yehoshua.”

  “Twenty-four hours off the boat and already you know the butcher?” I asked, although I was not unhappy at the thought of a meal after a fast of a day and a half.

  “Yehoshua is a very wise man,” Gan said. “He has read none of the books I have brought with me—he is not, in fact, a reader by inclination nor ability. But he is wiser, perhaps, than both of us put together. You understand the price of maintaining power. He has learned the price of attaining it. And it has worn canyons of a measureless depth. In his face and in his soul.”

  “And what is that price?”

  “Sacrifice.”

  “The shochet, in the days of the Temple, lived up to his elbows in the business of sacrifice. The unlettered shochet could not read the rules of sacrifice, the ones written by Moses for the use of those of us who crossed over to the Promised Land. But when, every week, you sacrifice half a dozen cows, thirty or forty sheep and goats, hundreds of chickens and assorted birds of the wild, who has time to read? You learn from your father, the way he learned from his father before him.”

  We were sitting at table, just the three of us. Yehoshua had shown no surprise when Gan ushered me forward as the Ambassador from Baghdad. He spoke a fluent Arabic, tinged, of course, with the Moorish accent of our distant cousins who had once been his neighbors. There was a woman of sorts who appeared with an extra plate and knife, an extra cup. Yehoshua pointed to our seats, sang the prayers over the bread and the wine, and then began the explanation of his craft. It sounded to my ears like he was making excuses, excuses for his betrayal of his Muslim neighbors twenty years before in Narbonne. But that could be the fault of the Moorish accent.

  “The first father,” I said, “of course was Ibrahim. The father of Ishmael.”

  “And Isaac,” Yehoshua added, before I could be so dull as to forget. “Yes, he was the first shochet, ready to slit the throat of his own son,”—Yehoshua smiled benevolently over at me—“no matter what his name. Thankfully, the Lord chose that moment to inform Abraham that the days of human sacrifice were over, that slicing the throat of your first born was not only no longer required, but no longer acceptable in polite company. From Abraham, the path led to Isaac and Jacob and Levi and, after Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem, to the descendants of Levi and their divinely measured knives. After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, when our people went into exile, even animal sacrifice began to look bad.”

  “Perhaps to your people,” I sniffed. Gan winked at me in memory of the sheep we had sacrificed before he sailed, before we sailed from Baghdad. There were whole eggs, and handfuls of raisins, and even a brace of quail stuffed inside. I had given him the eyeball of a lamb, wrapped in rice that tasted of cardamom and anise. How could he forget?

  As if in answer, the woman entered the room, a full leg of mutton on a wooden platter. Yehoshua took up his knife.

  “With what shall I approach the Lord,” he asked, addressing the leg as much as us, his guests.

  “Do homage to God on high?

  Shall I approach Him with burnt offerings?

  With calves a year old?

  Would the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams?

  With myriads of streams of oil?

  Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression?

  The fruit of my body for my sins?” />
  Gan treated the prayer as a real question and gave a real answer and a glance in my direction. “Study and good deeds have replaced sacrifice, don’t you think?”

  “I wouldn’t know about study,” the shochet said, and began to carve the lamb.

  Gan said, “You knew enough to save the Jews of Narbonne.”

  “Please!” Yehoshua stopped carving but gripped the knife as tightly as his guilt. “I don’t think I will ever be forgiven for my good deeds.”

  I touched the arm of Yehoshua, the arm of the hand holding the knife. “If you are not willing to be a sacrificer, then you are doomed to be the sacrificed.”

  “That is the other possibility,” he said, and returned to his carving.

  At that moment the woman returned to the room and hurried over to Yehoshua. The shochet smiled, but I had already guessed the origin of the new tightness in his lips, the tension in his cheeks. I had heard the sound, as muffled as it was, of three pairs of boots approaching the door of the Jew.

  “My son,” Yehoshua said, standing. “We have a visitor. I am afraid we must interrupt our supper to entertain him. I am also afraid,” he said, turning to me, “that you must excuse us.”

  “Do not worry,” I said, holding up my hand. “I will be content down in the stables and will await your call.” I smiled at Gan, who had not yet guessed that the visitor was the Frankish King. Years of wrapping myself up in cloaks and capes and touring the city of Baghdad on similarly quiet afternoons accompanied only by my equally disguised Vizier Ja’afar had accustomed me to the tricks of monarchs.

  And so I descended a ladder at the far end of the shochet’s bedroom, directly into a stable that smelled of hay and elephant, where my crate and dozens of others sat ruminating in the shadows of late summer. I expected a half hour’s leisure, a chance to lie at my ease in the straw and let my imagination wander like a lazy peasant at the hour when the sun announces the end of work but the moon has failed to prod him homewards. What I didn’t expect was the sight of a young girl, perched on the edge of my crate.

  “Salaam alaikum,” she said, clearly amused by her superior knowledge of my language. But the red hair that wouldn’t be stifled by her woolen cape reminded me of Ja’afar’s stories of the daughter of Charlemagne.

  “Wa alaikum salaam, Princess,” I saluted her back.

  “How do you know who I am?” she asked, clearly ruffled.

  “The story of your birth is famous in our court,” I replied, with as much of an avuncular smile as I could muster.

  “My Uncle Roland,” the girl said, “told me that your court was famous for its storytellers.”

  “He was a gentleman,” I answered, disguising my pride as best I could. “I know he was closer than a brother to your father. The Caliph was pained to hear of his death.”

  “On the day that I was born,” Aldana continued, “an ambassador from your Caliph arrived at Marseilles, where my father had come to join my mother in anticipation of my birth. My Uncle Roland told me that on the anniversary of my first week of life, my father carried me from my mother’s chamber into the monastery of St. Guillaume, where your ambassador was resident. It had not been a happy week, or so said Roland. I had cried more than smiled, and agitated more than slept. None thought I would survive the week. Some, Roland told me, prayed that I would get on to Heaven as quickly as possible and allow them to regain their wits. Nevertheless, my father carried me in to the Ambassador. One look at his turban and my wails redoubled, so that all Marseilles could hear me. But then your Ambassador reached over to my father and took me from his arms and onto his lap and began to tell me a story.”

  The Story of the Crying Princess was one I knew well, that Ja’afar had told me many times. Of how first he, as my father’s Ambassador, took this red-haired and red-faced infant onto his lap and quieted her sobs by reciting the Story of Khalifah the Fisherman. No sooner had he finished, however, than the baby’s wails resumed at twice the volume. And so the Treasurer, my uncle Aziz, took the baby onto his lap and told her the Story of the Hunchback. Once again the girl quieted, bewitched either by our Arabic tongue, the story itself, or a desire that one day, she too might become part of a story. But it shortly became clear that Charlemagne, his Queen, his court, his army, and the population of Marseilles and its environs, would make our entire embassy, ten strong, recite all night and into the next days and weeks as long as this infant daughter wailed at the finish of each story, crying for another. Ja’afar and my uncle and all the rest had sailed from Baghdad across the sea, so it seemed, to become a chorus of Scheherazades, doomed to death should the music of their stories ever cease.

  “I no longer cry,” the Princess said. But I could see liquid anxiety at the rims of her eyes. She had been brought like a sacrificial lamb to the stable of the shochet and left alone while her future was weighed above.

  “And after today,” I said, “you shall have further cause for rejoicing. Your father has come to marry you to our young Prince.”

  “I heard he was a Jew,” Aldana said.

  “Not just any Jew,” I cautioned her.

  “Are there different types?” she asked.

  “There are even types that contain other types,” I said.

  “Like crates that contain other crates?” She leaped off the side of mine with a lightness of step and a quickness of mind that made me look again at that shock of red hair peering from under her cape.

  “I know what you want,” I laughed.

  “And that is?” she laughed back.

  “You want a story, greedy girl.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, suddenly aware that it was not entirely appropriate for the daughter of Charlemagne to flirt in a stable with the Ambassador of the Caliph of Baghdad, like a milkmaid with a blacksmith.

  “Do you remember the Tale of Judar the Son of Omar?” I asked.

  “I was only a few days old …” she protested.

  “Do you remember?” I pressed her.

  “Of course I remember!” She lifted her pale chin upwind, scenting the air of mid-September, deciding direction.

  “So you remember how Judar, the poor fisherman went casting his net in the Lake of Karoon?” I asked.

  “And how the three brothers, the Three Moors came to him, one after the other on three successive days, with instructions to bind their arms and legs behind them and throw them into the lake?” she answered.

  “Very good!” I congratulated her. “So you remember how the first two Moors drowned, but the third survived and brought Judar with him back to the Maghreb …”

  “Because the Moor knew that only Judar the Son of Omar could open the Treasure of Al-Shammardal that lay below the sea, the treasure that had been stolen from the great magician, the father of the Moor, by the Red and the Black Princes, and that had already cost the lives of his father and two of his brothers.” Her eyes were glistening even brighter with the excitement of the story than with fear of her upcoming betrothal. I knew, with a mixture of both anticipation and sadness, that all I needed do was spin out the story and she would do with me what the girl in the chest did with Shahryar and his brother. And that the remorse I would feel at falling in love with the Princess and allowing her to fall in love with me would be worse than the punishment of any djinni. So I cut the story short.

  “Do you remember,” I asked her, “what present the Moor gave to Judar in return for his help?”

  “The Bag,” the Princess answered immediately. “The Magic Saddle Bag. All Judar had to do was to ask the djinni hidden inside the Bag for any dish to eat—chicken with prunes, lamb with steamed rice and dates, pheasant in a sauce of tamarind and honey eggs—and the dish would come out on a silver plate, steaming hot and ready to eat.”

  “A silly choice, perhaps,” I added carelessly.

  “Silly?” she said. “I cannot imagine a better gift!”

  “Then you will be very happy,” I said. “Your Jewish Prince is just such a Magic Bag.”

  “I don’t un
derstand,” she said. Indeed, my shift in direction had pulled the carpet out from below her feet and left her struggling for balance. Little did I know how my glib metaphor would also unbalance me. During my seven-day sea crossing, even as the elephant changed from blue to green to red, a truth cast a clear, steady light through my own milky waters: the Jewish Prince is, in fact, the perfect gift. Gan contains my stories, all my stories. All the stories I have imagined, all the stories I might imagine, and even the ones I cannot. He is not only the garden, he is the apple tree. He is the fruit and he is the leaf and he is the seed. He is the Pip. I was giving away this Pip to a girl who would rather have the axe. And I was the double loser.

  “Aldana!” a voice called from the stair.

  “Coming!” she called back but made no move to go.

  “Go now,” I said. “Insha’allah one day I shall return to ask what you have learned.”

  “Please,” she said, “I need to know the answer to one question. Now.”

  “Yes?”

  “If I reach my hand into the bag and ask for a dish from Baghdad …”

  I am the one who is leaving and returning to Baghdad.

  I am the axe.

  I have uprooted him from the garden.

  I uprooted the tree from the garden.

  Why?

  For a Frankish king who sent me nothing I did not have already?

  To graft my Prince to this red-haired Princess, this crying baby who softens only at the sound of a Muslim voice and a good story? To uproot this Princess, to show her that a single bag can hold many dishes, many gods, many men?

  Before I grafted her to myself?

  I uproot my own heart. I carry it back onto the ship bound for Baghdad lest my right hand awake like a djinni of my own creation and slice my own self into a thousand pieces. I leave behind an elephant, turning all shades of the rainbow, large enough to move mountains, small enough to fit in the Bag of Judar the Son of Omar.