At that moment, Sofia’s footsteps sounded on the stair behind us, light and bare. Lamia turned. The tip of the knife blade shone white, like a pale thorn, as if a little piece of noonday sun rested on its tip.
“No!” Sofia shouted behind me.
“Keep her back,” Lamia said. Her voice crackled.
Sofia’s screams grew to a hysterical pitch. Her feet fell in muted thuds against the floor as she tried to kick out of Leandro’s grasp. My own heart beat like a piece of tin beneath a blacksmith’s hammer, and my breath came gasping and shaky.
“Please,” I tried one last time. “Te suplico.”
Lamia took my chin in her hand and shoved my head back so I was forced to look up into her eyes, black and dilated with carefully composed rage. “Here is my mercy, Moor. Remember my face when your world is dark.” Then she pointed the tip of the knife at my open right eye and thrust the white-hot blade into its center.
We are packing up the wagons after a week’s stay in Madrid to buy provisions and fit the horses with fresh tack when the cry goes up from the back of the line.
“God, no. It cannot be. Ojalá que no.” A woman’s voice wavers above the crowded plaza.
And soon other voices echo her prayer, spreading through the crowd all at once like water coming to a boil.
“Madinat al-Zahra,” someone says.
I drop the water bucket I am holding to Pulga’s mouth and fumble blindly for the nearest man’s arm. “What of the palace?” I ask.
“It’s fallen,” the man says. “It’s been razed, and the fires seen burning five whole days from the Córdoban gates.”
A cold chill slaps my body. I cannot stop myself from picturing all my familiar books blackened and shrunk by flames, the deep fountains boiled bare, the gilt ceiling raining molten drops of gold as the roof catches fire.
“Who was it?” I ask. “The Northern lords? Or the Abbasids? Have they sent ships from Baghdad?”
“Neither,” the man says. “Vizier Sanchuelo lost control of his Berbers, and they took it on themselves to destroy the palace city.”
My hands tremble in their grip on his coat. “And the caliph?” I ask.
“Abdicated,” the man answers, and pushes past me to repeat his story for other ears.
I grope my way to the wagon’s tail and sink down beneath it, by the tall wheels. The world spins too quickly around me, and behind my ruined eyes all I can see are tongues of fire spreading like oil over the glossy leaves of the towering hedges, the tapestries ash, carved ivory doors blackened and hanging ajar, boot prints in the soot. I clutch at the braid around my neck like a drowning man.
Is this Your punishment? I ask God. To know I could have stopped this, and yet stand fettered by blindness as my world burns?
“Ishaq?” a woman’s voice says.
For one reeling moment, I think it’s Sofia. But then the wheels of my mind start turning in tandem again, and I realize it’s Mencia. My given name is common enough I’ve told it to her.
“They’ve burned Madinat al-Zahra,” I say.
“Ishaq, get up.” Her strong hand grips me at the elbow. “We have to move. They’re barring the city gates.”
I cling to the back of the wagon as our caravan lurches forward. The watchmen at the gates shout after us that we’ll be safer inside the city walls with the other refugees fled from al Andalus, but I know Lázaro has his reasons for wanting to push on. The horses rise to a canter as we hurry north.
I broke into black consciousness with Adán crouched over me. Pain wormed in every inch of my body. An animal moan rose deep in my throat.
“Softly, brother,” Adán said. “I don’t know if they’re coming back.”
The overlapping criiii of cicadas pulsed in the air. I felt dirt and dry, sparse grass beneath my hands. “Where are we?” I asked.
“The eastern edge of the Rampion lands,” Adán whispered. “I dragged you from the house.”
“Your men… ?” My throat sounded stripped to my own ears.
“No,” Adán said. “I followed you alone.”
“Sofia?”
“I saw four horses galloping from the gate. Two men and two women.” Adán paused. Dirt scraped beneath his feet as he stood. “I’ll send word to the caliph. Our men will catch them before the night is out. They’ll be executed at dawn.”
“No.” I flailed my hand blindly and grasped the hem of his cloak.
Adán knelt beside me again. “No?”
“If they kill them, the Northern lords will take it as cause for open war.” My chest ached. I felt sick. “I have to protect—”
“Brother, they’ve taken your eyes. And your leg….” He stopped, unable to name the other thing they had done to me.
My left eye burned with tears behind its swollen lid. The right stayed dead. “No,” I repeated, trying to sound firm. “I’m to blame. Please, Adán….” My voice broke.
Adán smoothed his hands over my brow. “We’ll wait, then.” He kissed my forehead. “I’ll get my horse.”
“Anadil is by the river,” I said.
Adán paused a beat too long. “Don’t worry. I’ll come back for her.”
He returned a few minutes later, heralded by the faint clop of his stallion’s hooves. He wrapped me in his cloak and heaved me onto the horse’s back. Pain ripped through my leg and side, and nausea rolled over me as my innards shifted, but I clung to the horse’s mane. Adán led the horse quietly past the outer palisades of the Rampion estate, into the open country.
We made our way to a small village along the road to Córdoba, where Adán roused a doctor he knew.
“God have mercy,” the doctor breathed over me when Adán unwrapped the cloak from my shoulders.
Together, he and Adán brought me into his kitchen and laid me on the broad table. The doctor reset the bone in my leg and woke his wife so she could help him make a poultice for my eyes. Afterward, they washed me and prayed over me and wrapped me in a quilt, and for some time, I lost all knowledge of what happened to me.
I woke to the sound of running water, a courtyard fountain. For a moment, I thought I had been allowed passage into Paradise, despite what my life had been. But the high burn raking the marrow of my bones thrust that thought from my mind. I remembered the doctor and raised a hand carefully to my ribs. My whole chest had been wrapped in soft bands of cloth, my wrists in the same where they had rubbed raw against the horse rope. I felt something clutched in my left hand. Sofia’s braid. I tried to open my eyes, but couldn’t.
Someone shifted beside me. “Brother?” Adán said quietly.
“Adán?” I said.
“Yes.” His hand was cool on my forehead.
“Am I going to die?”
“No,” he said.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“You’re safe,” Adán said. “My friend Nasir has given us room in his house. He’ll keep us safe here, keep us hidden.”
“Sofia?”
Adán took my hand in his. “Her whole estate is empty, the doors left open to the dogs.”
I tried to raise myself on my elbows, but the pain flared through me again. I fell back to my pallet with a whimper.
“Rest,” Adán said. “I promise I’ll find her. Te lo juro. Only rest.”
I drifted beneath the surface of a fever. Nightmares plagued me, where Lamia cut open my chest and used my body as a cauldron for poisons, while Sofia lay beside me and held my hand. Adán came and went from the house, gathering news from Córdoba and coming back to whisper to me what he had overheard. My mother and father and sisters were safe at Madinat al-Zahra, so the attempt had been on my life alone, he said, still ignorant of my part in what had happened. My father had detached his own guard to search the countryside for me, in addition to the vizier’s foot soldiers, and they had offered to reward any man who could lead them to me.