Septimania Read online

  “From his father, the young Yehoshua had learned the laws of kashrut, how to slaughter animals in the manner the Jews called kosher. His father taught him about the rope around the hind hooves, the quick slice at the throat. His father taught him to measure a knife, to balance a cleaver, to check the lungs for scarring, to separate the permitted organs and reserve the kidneys and intestines for the Franks, to name the joints, the cuts, the sirloins, the brisket. The profession of shochet went back in Yehoshua’s family to the Temple of Solomon, when butcher and priest were the same man, holy and filthy all in one.

  “From his mother, Yehoshua learned to wash away the blood and the shit. From his uncle, he learned explosions, the gases that expand the unpunctured abdomens of frightened animals. He learned that the bladder of a stillborn lamb made the sharpest sounding bombs. Even louder were the discarded udders of a dairy cow that had milked her last.

  “The explosions scared his sisters and annoyed his mother on the airless Sabbath afternoons when the smell of the shore, salt mixing with the rotting bodies of forbidden crustaceans, rose over the walls of Narbonne along with the adolescent laughter of Yehoshua’s Muslim and Jewish friends, all ringing on the same pitch, musically indistinguishable.

  “From the Frankish children in the distant countryside, he learned a song:

  Butcher kills the cattle,

  Butcher kills the flocks,

  Butcher, Butcher keep your knife

  Away from Christian cocks.

  “From the dogs he learned survival.

  “The western gate in front of Yehoshua’s slaughterhouse was the best-traveled entrance into and exit out of the city, facing Toulouse and Carcassonne and the paths through the mountains to Sepharad. It was the first stop for the shepherds, the final stop for the soldiers of the Muslim Caliph of Cordoba who ruled Narbonne. There were many times that Yehoshua fried a last supper of sheep’s liver with fermented apple for the quartermaster and his whore, as his father loaded the army wagon with the hindquarters and tripe that were permitted the Muslims and their soldiers but not the Jewish people. Yehoshua became rich, within the limits of Jewish wealth. He married, fathered three girls and a boy. His father died. He became richer still.

  “His son Moses was born the day the Caliph of Cordoba ordered the gates of Narbonne closed. It was in the 4513th year since the creation of the world according to Yehoshua’s Jewish calculator, which the Caliph calculated as 133 years from the flight of his Prophet from Mecca to Medinah, and Pepin the King of the Franks reckoned at 752 after the death of his God. This same Pepin also reckoned Narbonne would make a good seaport for his kingdom. For a while, the soldiers of the Caliph dissuaded this Frankish inclination, and the family of the Jewish farmer Solomon Ben David, who in the summer grazed his cattle along the salt marshes to a distance of several leagues to the west and in the winter fed them only apples in the belief that the wisdom of the Tree of Knowledge would filter through the several stomachs and udders of his cattle into the Jews of Narbonne, was able to bring its animals to Yehoshua’s slaughterhouse. But within a few months, it became clear to the Caliph of Cordoba that Pepin had designs upon his city and that closed gates saved lives. The family of Solomon Ben David brought his herd into Narbonne, where he bedded down fifty head of cattle and twice that number of sheep and goats in pens attached to Yehoshua’s house that he had erected and stocked with apples and grain with the foresight of someone who believes that all adversity is temporary.

  “Even when Pepin’s soldiers surrounded the city and it became clear that the Franks were not going away soon, Yehoshua managed to provide the Jews of Narbonne with fresh kosher meat and still leave enough fertile livestock to replenish the supply. Ibn Suleiman at the eastern gate did the same for his Muslims.

  “In the second year of the siege, Yehoshua’s son Moses began to accompany his father on his rounds.

  “In the third year, as the Franks torched the fields around Narbonne and the grain, and even the apples gave way to rot and evaporation, Solomon Ben David looked the other way, and Yehoshua began to slaughter the younger animals. In the fourth year, in the words of Yehoshua, there was nothing left but coitus. But so joyless were those unions, so empty of the essential juice of life, that they produced no babies, only wormlike spirits that slithered along the cracks in the earth then found their ways out the gutters or through the air past the wretched Moors. By the fifth year, Yehoshua’s family was eating rats. By the sixth year, Solomon Ben David was dead. “As the shochet, the ritual butcher for the Jews of Narbonne, Yehoshua had long been familiar with death. Not his son. From the time he could talk, Moses asked why the animals had to die. There was nothing accusatory in his questions. More a desire to learn all the angles, all the curves, all the possible rationales so he could separate out the excuses for death in a search for something that Yehoshua never had time to ponder—the truth. Moses knew enough, six years into the siege and his own brief life, to hold his tongue on the mornings when he woke to find strangers whispering in the dawn shadows, or on the nights when other shadows came to purchase half a dozen gas-filled bladders that Yehoshua larded with small stones and nails for use as bombs against the Franks. By the age of six, Moses had already figured out that humans shared a common ancestor with cattle. Putting the combustible bladders of dead villagers to use against the enemy was only an admission of the universal goal of survival.

  “As the seventh year shone upon a changed Narbonne, Yehoshua—his wife, his daughters, his sons—found themselves thigh high in the filth and decay of siege. The little food that managed to bribe its way past the sentries never went out as shit, in fear that the Franks might use it as fuel or pile it up against the outer walls of Narbonne to weaken or surmount them. Before the siege, there had been two thousand Jews in Narbonne and five times that number of Muslims. By the seventh year, only one quarter of the population remained.

  “And then the morning came when Yehoshua rose and Moses did not. Yehoshua let his dead son lie, told his wife and daughters not to disturb him. By then, his wife’s movements were limited and her thoughts shifted only when Yehoshua could barter his bomb-making skills for a cup of flour or a fistful of radish greens and pour a spoonful of the gruel into her devastated mouth. Two nights later, Moses’s belly began to swell with a stench more familiar to her nose than all the other perfumes of death. Yehoshua began to wrap him methodically with sharp little things that found their way into his empty mangers on dark nights. It was then that his wife rose from the straw. She didn’t have the strength to yell with the force of protest. But her eyes reflected Yehoshua’s own pain, magnified his own doubt, and generated a new thought. In its clarity, its crystalline purity, the message was simple. Enough. Thou shalt not turn the corpse of thy son into a weapon. It was time to stop making money from death. It was time to sell the living. It was time to sell the Muslims to the Franks.

  “And that is how it came to pass, in the seventh year of the siege, in the years 4520, 140, and 759, respectively, that the trust of Ibn Suleiman and the Muslims of Narbonne and all the shadowy figures who had passed over the years through Yehoshua’s slaughterhouse was butchered in one night of betrayal, one moonless opening of the western gate to the Frankish soldiers, one hour of soundless slaughter—for how can a starving people, even Muslims, inured by religion to fasting, scream? But Yehoshua’s people, the Jews, his wife, his daughters, were spared.”

  “But Septimania?” Isaac remonstrated. “Why should I care about your bomb-making butcher, your Judas of a Jew? I asked about Septimania.”

  I winced, but in the dark Isaac noticed nothing. Methodically I packed a fresh pipe with tobacco, lit it with the candle Isaac’s mother had brought to the garden, and continued.

  “The next morning, Yehoshua found himself in the presence of the son of the Frankish King Pepin. Charles was merely a prince at the time, a few years older than Yehoshua’s poor, dead son Moses, and a decade away from his future baptism as Charlemagne, Carlo Magno, Charles the Great.
And it was to be another forty years until Pope Leo III crowned Charles Holy Roman Emperor in the Basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome. But on this particular morning, in exchange for his treachery, in thanks for delivering Narbonne to the Franks and ridding the kingdom of the Moors, the young King Charles gave Yehoshua a gift. The King promised the Jews royal deeds to Narbonne, and to the cities of Béziers, Elne, Agde, Lodève, Maguelonne, and Nîmes.”

  “Seven cities!” Isaac said.

  “Yes,” I said. “This, Isaac, is the Septimania of which I spoke. The Jewish Kingdom of Septimania arose from Yehoshua’s betrayal.”

  “Hmm,” Isaac said. “Couldn’t have been much of a kingdom if Charlemagne gave it to the Jews. Certainly I’ve never read of it in any of the histories.”

  “There are kingdoms that exist just outside the periphery of our vision,” I replied, “as surely as there are more heavenly bodies in the sky than have been seen by Signor Galileo’s cannocchiale. And there are rulers who guide the affairs of men and women with a wisdom as clear and invisible as the Laws of Nature.”

  “As the Laws of Nature?” Isaac laughed. “Who was this invisible King of Septimania who was such a force of Nature?”

  “Charles and Yehoshua agreed that the kingdom of the seven cities of Septimania would be ruled over by a Jewish prince. He would be the ally of the Franks, but an independent king over an independent people.”

  “An interesting definition of independence,” Isaac scoffed.

  “More interesting than your independence from God?” I shot back. “Or from your mother?”

  “Or from you?” Isaac smiled. “Prithee continue.”

  “When the sun next rose,” I went on, “three days later than required by Jewish law, Yehoshua buried his son. In the afternoon, he sent a letter to Baghdad.”

  “Why Baghdad?” Isaac laughed. “And with what form of post? I thought your Jews of Narbonne had eaten all the carrier pigeons?”

  Isaac’s mother looked over at me at every mention of the word Jew. Cromwell had only recently invited the Jews to return to England after an absence of three hundred years and replenish the nation’s war-torn coffers with continental gold. The few other Jews I had encountered in Cambridge trod lightly on the strange soil. While God may have feared Isaac’s mother more than she feared Him, clearly she was nervous about my effect on her son.

  “Baghdad in those days,” I continued, “was ruled by Haroun al Rashid, Caliph of all the Persians, from a palace that was known more for its gardens than its wars, and for its dedication to science more than its application to the law.”

  “Haroun al Rashid?” Isaac asked. “I’ve heard that name before.”

  “Perhaps as the hero of many of the Thousand and One Nights, the tales the young and inventive Scheherazade told her husband Prince Shahryar on her wedding night and for three years of nights following to keep him from hacking her in two, the way he had divided his adulterous first queen and her paramour.”

  “Yes! That’s it!” Isaac said. “Sinbad, the Magic Bag of Judar. There was a time when I read more than mathematics and dreamed of more than stars.”

  “One night,” I continued, “Haroun al Rashid dreams that he orders the palace gardeners to find him the sharpest axe in all the city of Baghdad. Armed with this handle of summer ash and this blade of winter steel, the Caliph marches into the garden, determined to cut down every standing tree, from fig to cherry, from oak to walnut. One by one, he hacks and hews, until the garden is nothing but kindling and dust. All that remains is an apple tree, a tree as unremarkable as the one supporting our backs, a beardless sapling with its promise still to come. In his dream, Haroun grips the handle and raises the axe above his head and prepares to strike. Suddenly an old man appears before him. Snatching the axe from Haroun, the old man lifts it above his own head—as King Shahyar would over his faithless queen—and hurls it at the noble brow of the Caliph with such force that blood spurts all over his face and beard and flows down onto his ivory robes.

  “Haroun al Rashid recognizes the old man as a djinni of the wood, a sacred forester, and falls upon his knees praying for mercy and swearing to nurse the sapling, to water it himself, to prune its branches, that it might shoot up into a leafy tree. No sooner has the oath left his mouth, than the Caliph awakes. Touching his brow, he sees that there is, indeed, blood on his face. Haroun is certain, with the absolute certainty of a Caliph, that the dream was far from ordinary.

  “Even though it is the middle of the night, Haroun rings for a servant and summons a Jew named Benyamin, known for his skill in interpreting dreams. Benyamin asks for ink and quill and transcribes the dream of the Caliph. He calculates the value of each word according to the Jewish system of gematriya, assigning a number to each letter of the alphabet, a sum for every word, and then makes a complex analysis of the sentences and the formula of the dream as a whole. But while he is calculating, searching for the number whose abstract power will unlock the secret of the Caliph’s dream, Benyamin is thinking of his grandson, a remarkable boy of fifteen years, who is also susceptible to bad dreams.”

  “They both have my sympathies.” Isaac puffed once, twice.

  “The grandson,” I continued, “was the son of the King of the Jews in Exile. What the Hebrews of Baghdad called Resh Galuta, the Exilarch. It had been several hundred years since the Babylonians drove the Jews out of the land of Israel. They had settled more or less comfortably in Persia, where the rulers, pagan and Muslim alike, gave them free rein in matters ranging from the preparation of food to the celebration of death. King of the Jews was a hereditary title that traced its ancestry, as did Jesus Christ himself, back to King David, the musician and adulterer.”

  “Very good!” Isaac handed me the pipe and smiled. “David was always one of my favorites.”

  “‘My Prince,’ Benyamin explains to Haroun, ‘in the house of the Exilarch my daughter lives with her husband and her son. One day, insha’allah, my grandson, now the youngest of the princely house of David, will follow the path of his father and become King of the Jews himself. But my daughter worries. I myself worry that this sapling already has enemies among your people, among my people, among people we cannot yet imagine, who are sharpening their axes, waiting for the right moment to chop him down.’

  “‘Enemies?’ the Caliph asks. ‘What enemies? You are as an uncle to me.’

  “‘My Lord,’ Benyamin answers. ‘This very night, before your guards came to my door and requested my presence at the palace, my grandson awoke from a troubled sleep and ran to my bed.’

  “‘Another bad dream?’ Haroun asks.

  “‘The very same dream that Your Excellency related to me,’ Benyamin answers and bows low.

  “‘This boy, your grandson,’ the Caliph asks, clearly moved. ‘What do they call him?’

  “‘Your highness,’ Benyamin answers. ‘They call him by a name whose gematriya equals the sum total of your dream. They call him Gan. Which in Hebrew, as you know, means garden.’

  “Immediately, without making his own calculations, Haroun al Rashid orders his guards to bring Gan to the palace. Over the course of days and weeks, the lad distinguishes himself before the Caliph and his grandfather with his learning and displays extraordinary powers of intellect and courtesy. One afternoon, though stung by a wasp while in the presence of the Caliph, Gan forbears to drive it away by so much as the movement of a finger, in deference to his royal master. The Caliph showers gifts upon the boy. Then and there he installs him above and beyond his own father—though Gan has yet to attain his sixteenth year—as King of the Jews in captivity, as the Exilarch.”

  “While his father was still alive?” Isaac says, passing me the pipe for the briefest of moments. “A rather Republican concept.”

  “Yet even as Haroun al Rashid is setting the seven-jeweled crown upon the youngster’s head,” I continue, without relinquishing the pipe, “a messenger arrives in Baghdad from the South of France.”

  “The letter from your Jewi
sh butcher!” Isaac shouts. Unamused, his mother shuffles back into the cottage.

  “The letter comes with the seal of Prince Charles and his father King Pepin. They ask Haroun to send them a king for their new kingdom, a gardener to tend their garden a thousand miles away.”

  “Gan!” Isaac smiles.

  “Precisely,” I smile back. “Haroun al Rashid turns pale at the request and touches his forehead. His dream, his young sapling, stands before him in the full light of day. He knows that to cut the tree means disaster. Yet Haroun’s sense of diplomacy and politics shake his certainty. And so he prepares to go …”

  “To Septimania?”

  “Ah! Now you are curious.” I offer the pipe back to Isaac, but he is in the full flow of the distraction I intended. He is the one, I have no doubt. “Shall we make the journey?”

  1/5

  UON GIORNO, DOTTORE.”

  Malory opened one eye. A shaft of pre-dawn light. A grizzled buzz cut, a twisted nose, a tortured breath. One friar, a Roman friar, backed by stone and shadow—Fra Mario, was that his name? Malory closed his eye. Through one ear he heard the shuffle of feet in the cloister, the polyphony of baritone virgins.

  “È tempo,” Fra Mario said. More chanting, more shuffling. Tempo for what? But the Roman friar was gone.

  THE VICAR HADN’T SAID MUCH AT THE GRAVESIDE.

  “I am merely a messenger,” he said, wiping his hands with a handkerchief that mixed the scent of lavender with the fenny pong of the loam that covered his grandmother’s remains. “Mrs. Emery, you may know, was not technically a member of the parish.”

  “Yes,” Malory said, with surprise at his own anti-clerical passion.