“One and the same sometimes,” Sofia said quietly. She looked away, and then turned back with wide eyes. “But she would never turn them to their darker ends. Nor I. You must believe me.”
I combed my fingers through a section of her hair. “I trust your word,” I said.
“We have many books. This is but one.”
“I trust you,” I repeated. I kissed her brow and rested my head against hers. The rising sun stung bright in the corner of my eye, and my heart went heavy. “I must go, but will you let me come again?”
She let out a breath. “You want to?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“What you’ve seen here.” Sofia tilted her head back to the ceiling, not looking at me. “What I’ve heard of you.”
I rubbed my thumb over the smooth ovals of her fingernails, unsure how to answer. I looked up. “And what they say of me, that’s all there is?”
Sofia looked at me. Her lashes were wet. “No, I suppose not.” She brushed a hand beneath her eye and tried to smile. “I would you didn’t have to go.”
“Nor I.” I twined one of her smaller braids around my thumb. “May I….” I started to ask.
“Only if you let me… ,” she said, and reached down to the woven sewing basket at her bedside to retrieve a pair of silver shears. She cut the thin braid from her hair and wrapped it around my palm, then folded my fingers over it and reached up to cut a lock from my head as well.
She kissed the thick black curl. “Come soon,” she said.
I lowered my feet from the window, steadied myself on the vines, and found the highest tree limb. I looked back up at her. “I promise.”
“I trust your word.” Sofia echoed me.
I dropped to the ground and then I was off, walking quickly through the orchard, turning back every few feet to catch a last glimpse of her, until finally the branches closed off my view.
I find a place in Lázaro’s caravan with a Jewish mapmaker called Miguel ben Yaakov and his wife, Mencia, traveling north as far as a little town at the foot of the Pyrenees. They promise me a share of their bread and a seat on their wagon tail if I will water and brush down their horses at the end of each day. We ride in the middle of the line, behind the dull thunder of Lázaro’s horses and the armed men guarding them, behind the merchants, who have bought a place near the guards, but before an imam and a cluster of students on horseback.
Dark mutterings surround our campfires at night, talk of unrest in the city we’ve left behind, stories of women raped, a Berber soldier beaten and left for dead by a mob, and the hanging of a student. We douse our fires and huddle in the darkness when hoofbeats roar close along the road.
By day, Mencia dotes on her horses, who she calls Limón and Pulga, and it is not long until she is hovering over me with extra shares of cured beef and sour bread, shaking out an old horse blanket for me at night. When the men in Lázaro’s band help kill a young bull that’s slipped its pen and tried to gore one of the students, she makes sure I have a strip of the meat. Her husband keeps a wary distance. He doesn’t say a word to me, even as his wife turns in the wagon to chatter about everything she sees as we make our way north through the rolling emptiness of La Mancha.
“Look, the city!” she cries when they finally sight Tulaytulah, her warm, firm hand clutching my forearm. She laughs in delight. Mencia reminds me of my mother in the days of my childhood, before the fear and isolated luxury surrounding our family smothered her to nothing, an empty veil, a dried flower between the pages of a book. For Mencia’s sake, I try to remember the city as I saw it when I was a boy of fifteen, its gray battlements cresting a green hill, all the common houses scattered below like so many windfall apples.
I don’t know how I will make it north to Roussillon, once the mapmaker and his wife are gone, or what will become of me once I’m there, but I have miles and miles to mull it over as the cart lumbers north along the old Roman road. I hold Sofia’s braid to my lips and pray for God to pass my message along. I am coming to you, I am coming to you.
On the last day I saw her, I came alone in the gloaming. Adán had grown suspicious of my late-night rides, but I chose a Shabbat evening so he would be forced to stay behind at the palace, not follow me as he had tried the week before. On my way to the house, I snapped a cluster of almond blossoms from a tree for Sophia. The air was heady with oranges, and she sat in her window, singing to herself as she strummed a quitara. Her voice rose lovely over the instrument’s steady thrum, dipping and weaving like a bird in flight. Her brothers had gone to the city for the week and her grandmother was off on one of her rambles, so she let me sing with her as she played.
We made love in the soft, last light of day. After, curled together in her bed, her head resting against my shoulder, I asked what I had been mulling over since the day she pulled me through her bedroom window.
“Sofia?”
“Hmm?” she replied.
“Would you come to court at Madinat al-Zahra? With me, I mean?”
She sat up in bed. “Truly?”
I reached out and fixed a piece of wayward hair behind her ear. “I’ve been thinking, if I were to marry a Christian lady, it might appease the Northern lords and restrain the vizier. It could stop the skirmishes at the border. And it would keep you here.”
“Ishaq, are you asking for my hand in marriage?” She prodded me playfully in the chest.
I kept my face solemn. “I am.”
“You aren’t asking very properly.” She put on a mock-stern face.
I reached over and pulled her on top of me, my hands on her hips. “My Lady Sofia de Rampion, will you consent to be my wife?”
“I will,” she said. She ran her fingers through the hair of my chest absentmindedly. “But Grandmère…. And my brothers won’t be so easily swayed.”
“How could they object to their sister becoming a princess of al Andalus?” I asked, and pulled her close to kiss her. She leaned down to press her mouth to mine.
A scrape sounded outside the door. We froze, her bare thighs around me, my hand on her back. The latch clicked and the door slammed open with a sound like Oriental powder igniting. A dark-haired man in his late twenties, with the same dark eyes as Sofia, pushed his way into her room, followed by a younger, fair-haired man. My eyes flew wide. Leandro and Telo, Sofia’s brothers. I recognized them from the portraits hanging in the manor halls. Leandro, her eldest brother, pulled Sofia from me and pushed her against the wall. I scrambled up, but Telo was on me in the same moment. He hit me hard across the jaw, and I fell back against the bedpost.
“Déjenlo, por favor, déjenlo!” Sofia screamed.
But I was up again, my back to the wall, and Leandro had drawn his longknife.
“Brothers—” I started, my hands raised to show I was unarmed.
“Call us that again and we’ll cut out your tongue,” Leandro said.
“Please,” I said. “I mean no harm. I wish to marry your sister. I—”
“Oh, you mean to marry her?” Leandro advanced with the knife. He shoved me against the wall and held the tapered blade to my throat. “You mean you wish to marry her after you’ve violated her? After you’ve left her unfit for any other man’s bed? Well, by all means. Telo, have you any objections?”
“Don’t,” Sofia began. “Please—”
“Quiet,” Telo said.
“But I asked him—” Sofia said.
Telo slapped her hard across the face. She fell against the wardrobe. Its sharp wood edge sliced her brow and blood streamed from the cut.
I struggled to go to her, but Leandro pushed his forearm into my throat. Telo turned from his sister to me and stalked across the room to where I stood naked, trapped against the wall.