My body sings for me to run, to fight, but I am trapped by the darkness around me. I make myself release Lázaro’s shirt sleeve.
Lázaro slumps against the wall with a muted thud. He sighs. “They say her voice is like birdsong painted in honey and her hair is so long you could scale the curtain wall of an alcazar with it. They say her maids must walk behind her to keep it from trailing in the dust.”
Her voice comes back to me all at once, like a basin of cold water emptied over my head. I hear it anew, mixed with the steady tambour of my horse’s hooves over the dusty road by the far side of a shaded tributary. That day, I left Adán and the rest of my men behind at the river mouth to pray and rest through the midday, while I rode out alone into the silent heat of the countryside. When the peaked towers of the Rampion manor came into view over the orange groves surrounding their land, I slowed my horse.
Common wisdom held one should ride slow and quiet when their gabled roof showed above the trees, for then a man was close enough to call the eye of Lamia de Rampion, the matriarch of the family. She was said to be a sahhaar, a bruja, a sorcière come down to us from the North. Since I was a small boy, I had listened in on the stories told at court by lamplight. No one had seen her ride in, but one day in winter, on the eve of a bitter, snapping frost, a drover sighted her in the courtyard before the abandoned Rampion house, straight-backed in her black dress, with two boys at her skirts and a white-swaddled babe in her arms. Ismail Almendrino, whose lands met hers to the south, went up to find what might be her claim on the land. She recited her lineage for him back to the rule of the Visigoth chieftains, saying she was the grandniece of old Osoro de Rampion, who had died childless and left the manor vacant some ten years before my birth. She had come south with her grandchildren, recently orphaned, to reclaim the lands for her grandsons. Almendrino said she spoke Castellano and some Arabic, but her accent was the French of the Pyrenees and her bearing that of one who cradles power in her hands and tongue.
When spring came, the orange groves of the Rampion manor that had stood so long untended bowed heavy with fruit. And it might have gone well for Lamia and her grandchildren, had a boy not been found dead under the orange trees, his tongue blue as from snakebite and a lobe of fruit in his mouth, but no mark upon him. Then the whispers started. Some of the older boys, who had become accustomed to eating from the Rampion trees when the estate stood empty, said Lamia de Rampion had screeched at them and called down devils when she found them filling their pockets with oranges. The drovers told how she walked out alone on nights of great wind and communed with the al-shayatin by the light of a bonfire. The women even took to saying her granddaughter was no blood of hers, but a babe snatched from her mother’s breast and spirited away to give the old woman company. In more savage times, they would have raged to her door with fire and brand, but Ismail Almendrino, who was learned and pious, stayed their hands. Still, the Christians crossed their breasts and spat when Lamia’s servants ventured out to market. And even Almendrino took to hanging blue and white nazar in the trees along the borderline of their lands.
I knew better. I had studied the biology of voles and frogs, mixed black Oriental powder at my tutor’s hands, and understood the forces behind the invisible tug of magnets. Lamia de Rampion was no more a witch than I was a prophet. She was only an old woman who craved solitude and was stingy with her harvest.
I led Anadil down a gentle slope in the riverbank, let out her rein so she could bend her head to drink from the shallows of the slow-moving river, and hitched her to an overhanging branch. I waded across with the thought of gathering fruit from the crude outlying trees to slake my thirst and share with my men. This was the custom in our land—to leave a share of fruit for widows and travelers—and as I say, I paid no heed to this peasant talk of brujería.
But as I pushed myself up onto the opposing bank and stood among the flowering boughs, I heard it. A woman’s voice, arching with the same pure cadence of a vielle, winged over the treetops and fell on my ear. I forgot Anadil and the oranges. It was as if someone had tied a kite string to my heart and now gently wound it in. The song pulled me through the line of trees, nearer the house. The branches parted on a packed dirt courtyard fronting a whitewashed stone manor with a sloped roof. Drought-sick rose bushes needled out from the base of the wall. I stopped below a second-story window, where a thick, ancient olive tree cleaved to the face of the house. A young woman in a fine-cut, blue workaday dress and indigo plackart stiff with silk-embroidered leafy whorls sat at the window with its leaded pane propped open. Lamia’s granddaughter, now grown, near my own age.
Leafy vines overflowed the railed balcony below her. She had put her veil aside and the sun streaked her hair all the subtle golden tones of a shaft of hay. She held a piece of embroidery and a bone needle in her hands, but she stared off over the orchard, toward Córdoba, with its towers and fine domes and minarets hazy in the distance. She sang to herself,
A peasant song, a simple little love song. But it cracked my heart like a quail’s egg. She frowned to herself, then lifted her embroidery to begin her work again.
I smoothed my silk taqiyah and stepped from the trees so she could see me. “Forgive me, Señorita de Rampion?” I called.
Her needle slipped and jabbed her thumb. “Christ’s blood!” she swore. Her embroidery fell from her hands and whisked itself out the window. She grabbed for it, but it fluttered past her reach and lazed to a stop at my feet.
I bent and picked it up. Stitched vines and blooms arabesqued along the borders of her handiwork. “My apologies, lady,” I said, trying to hide a smile at her curse. “I heard you singing. I was riding by and….”
She leaned out over the dark wood casement. Her uncovered hair fell forward into the sun. It reached at least twelve hands below the window ledge, thick, loose braids mixed with undressed locks, shining bright as brass against the deep green vines. My breath caught.
“You’d best keep riding, sir,” she said quietly. “My grandmère is taking her rest. If you wake her, she’ll be none too glad of your company. And my brothers don’t feel kindly to the caliph’s men these days.”
I looked around the peaceful garden. “You object to my visiting, lady?”
She checked behind her as if making sure the door to her closet were shut, and turned back, her brow knitted. “Who are you?”
“Ishaq ibn Hisham, of the Umayyads, son of the caliph of al Andalus.” I bowed. “Although I am called al-Hasan, the Handsome, by the women of the court.”
“In that case, I do not object, my lord,” she said. She allowed herself a small smile, but then a frown clouded her features again. “But, please, if you stay, my kinsmen will forget their courtesy.”
“Your company is worth the risk,” I said. “Your voice….” I fumbled for words, and touched the center of my chest instead.
She blushed and looked at me sideways from under her hair. “My grandmère warned me of men like you. You would win my ear with pretty words.”
“I would win your ear with whatever tender you value.”
She bit her bottom lip. “Do you have any news of the North, then, Ishaq ibn Hisham, son of the Umayyad caliph, sometimes called al-Hasan?”