Behind the window of a lodging house the most favoured sentinel of the Church in Rome was watching the growing palisade of books with a feeling of satisfaction. Ximenes de Cisneros had always believed that the heathen could only be eliminated as a force if their culture was completely erased. This meant the systematic destruction of all their books. Oral traditions would survive for a while, till the Inquisition plucked away the offending tongues. If not himself, then someone else would have had to organize this necessary bonfire — somebody who understood that the future had to be secured through firmness and discipline and not through love and education, as those imbecile Dominicans endlessly proclaimed. What had they ever achieved?
Ximenes was exultant. He had been chosen as the instrument of the Almighty. Others might have carried out this task, but none so methodically as he. A sneer curled his lip. What else could be expected from a clergy whose abbots, only a few hundred years ago, were named Mohammed, Umar, Uthman and so on? Ximenes was proud of his purity. The childhood jibes he had endured were false. He had no Jewish ancestors. No mongrel blood stained his veins.
A soldier had been posted just in front of the prelate’s window. Ximenes stared at him and nodded, the signal was passed to the torch-bearers, and the fire was lit. For half a second there was total silence. Then a loud wail rent the December night, followed by cries of: ‘There is only one Allah and he is Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet.’
At a distance from Cisneros a group was chanting, but he could not hear the words. Not that he would have understood them anyway, since the language of the verses was Arabic. The fire was rising higher and higher. The sky itself seemed to have become a flaming abyss, a spectrum of sparks that floated in the air as the delicately coloured calligraphy burnt itself out. It was as if the stars were raining down their sorrow.
Slowly, in a daze, the crowds began to walk away till a beggar stripped himself bare and began to climb on to the fire. ‘What is the point of life without our books of learning?’ he cried through scorching lungs. ‘They must pay. They will pay for what they have done to us today.’
He fainted. The flames enveloped him. Tears were being shed in silence and hate, but tears could not quench the fires lit that day. The people walked away.
The square is mute. Here and there, old fires still smoulder. Ximenes is walking through the ashes, a crooked smile on his face as he plans the next steps. He is thinking aloud.
‘Whatever revenge they may plan in the depths of their grief, it will be useless. We have won. Tonight was our real victory.’
More than anybody else in the Peninsula, more even than the dread figure of Isabella, Ximenes understands the power of ideas. He kicks to ashes a stack of burnt parchments. Over the embers of one tragedy lurks the shadow of another.
Chapter 1
‘IF THINGS GO ON like this,’ Ama was saying in a voice garbled by a gap-toothed mouth, ‘nothing will be left of us except a fragrant memory.’
His concentration disrupted, Yazid frowned and looked up from the chess-cloth. He was at the other end of the courtyard, engaged in a desperate attempt to master the stratagems of chess. His sisters, Hind and Kulthum, were both accomplished strategists. They were away in Gharnata with the rest of the family. Yazid wanted to surprise them with an unorthodox opening move when they returned.
He had tried to interest Ama in the game, but the old woman had cackled at the thought and refused. Yazid could not understand her rejection. Was not chess infinitely superior to the beads she was always fingering? Then why did this elementary fact always escape her?
Reluctantly, he began to put away the chess pieces. How extraordinary they are, he thought, as he carefully replaced them in their little home. They had been especially commissioned by his father. Juan the carpenter had been instructed to carve them in time for his tenth birthday last month, in the year 905 A.H., which was 1500, according to the Christian calendar.
Juan’s family had been in the service of the Banu Hudayl for centuries. In AD 932 the head of the Hudayl clan, Hamza bin Hudayl, had fled Dimashk and brought his family and followers to the western outposts of Islam. He had settled on the slopes of the foothills some twenty miles from Gharnata. Here he had built the village that became known as al-Hudayl. It rose on high ground and could be seen from afar. Mountain streams surrounded it, and turned in springtime into torrents of molten snow. On the outskirts of the village the children of Hamza cultivated the land and planted orchards. After Hamza had been dead for almost fifty years, his descendants built themselves a palace. Around it lay farmed land, vineyards, and almond, orange, pomegranate and mulberry orchards that gave the appearance of children clustering about their mother.
Almost every piece of furniture, except of course for the spoils looted by Ibn Farid during the wars, had been carefully crafted by Juan’s ancestors. The carpenter, like everyone else in the village, was aware of Yazid’s status in the family. The boy was a universal favourite. And so he determined to produce a set of chess statuettes which would outlast them all. In the event Juan had surpassed his own wildest ambitions.
The Moors had been assigned the colour white. Their Queen was a noble beauty with a mantilla, her spouse a red-bearded monarch with blue eyes, his body covered in a flowing Arab robe bedecked with rare gems. The castles were replicas of the tower house which dominated the entrance to the palatial mansion of the Banu Hudayl. The knights were representations of Yazid’s great-grandfather, the warrior Ibn Farid, whose legendary adventures in love and war dominated the culture of this particular family. The white bishops were modelled on the turbaned Imam of the village mosque. The pawns bore an uncanny resemblance to Yazid.
The Christians were not merely black; they had been carved as monsters. The black Queen’s eyes shone with evil, in brutal contrast with the miniature madonna hanging round her neck. Her lips were painted the colour of blood. A ring on her finger displayed a painted skull. The King had been carved with a portable crown that could be easily lifted, and as if this symbolism was not sufficient, the iconoclastic carpenter had provided the monarch with a tiny pair of horns. This unique vision of Ferdinand and Isabella was surrounded by equally grotesque figures. The knights raised blood-stained hands. The two bishops were sculpted in the shape of Satan; both were clutching daggers, while whip-like tails protruded from behind. Juan had never set eyes on Ximenes de Cisneros, otherwise there can be little doubt that the Archbishop’s burning eyes and hooked nose would have provided an ideal caricature. The pawns had all been rendered as monks, complete with cowls, hungry looks and pot-bellies; creatures of the Inquisition in search of prey.
Everyone who saw the finished product agreed that Juan’s work was a masterpiece. Yazid’s father, Umar, was troubled. He knew that if ever a spy of the Inquisition caught sight of the chess-set, the carpenter would be tortured to death. But Juan was adamant: the child must be given the present. The carpenter’s father had been charged with apostasy by the Inquisition some six years ago while visiting relatives in Tulaytula. He had later died in prison from the deep wounds sustained by his pride during torture by the monks. As a finale, fingers had been snapped off each hand. The old carpenter had lost the urge to live. Young Juan was bent on revenge. The design of the chess-set was only a beginning.
Yazid’s name had been inscribed on the base of each figure and he had grown as closely attached to his chess pieces as if they were living creatures. His favourite, however, was Isabella, the black Queen. He was both frightened and fascinated by her. In time, she became his confessor, someone to whom he would entrust all his worries, but only when he was sure that they were alone. Once he had finished packing the chess-set he looked again at the old woman and sighed.