A Sultan in Palermo (2 page)

‘The Chamberlain informs me that you, too, are a mapmaker.’

Idrisi bowed.

‘When you have finished your work in this library, I wish to be informed of all your discoveries.’

For the next thirteen months Idrisi had abandoned all—lovers, friends, pupils—in search of the truth. The Sultan had given him the freedom of his library and apart from eating and the bodily functions that it necessarily entailed, he spent each day buried in a manuscript. The palace eunuchs often referred to him as Abu Kitab, the father of the book. Later, as a trusted confidant of the Sultan, his enhanced status required a superior title: he was now spoken of as Amir
al-kitab.

Those months in the library had been pure joy. Al-Homa was only the beginning. He would visit Ithaci and the other islands in search of traces. He often wondered whether al-Homa alone had written such beautiful works or whether he had inherited the stories and covered them with his own divine mantle. And how amazing it was to discover that only a few generations after al-Homa’s death, Xenophanes denounced him in language that echoed the theologians of today: ‘Homer has attributed to the gods everything that is disgraceful and blameworthy among men—theft, adultery and deceit.’ And did the story-tellers in Baghdad who compiled the stories of a thousand nights have Odysseus in mind when they created their own tales of Sinbad the sailor? These questions, and even al-Homa, were soon forgotten as other treasures, closer to his preoccupations, began to emerge.

Reading the Arabic translations of Herodotus, Aristotle, Galen, Strabo and Ptolemy was like discovering distant lands familiar from travellers’ tales. His tutors had introduced him to the Greek venerables but he had been too young to really appreciate them. His knowledge remained incomplete till he began to study the texts for himself. Ptolemy’s ideas still echoed in his mind like music from a distant flute.

One day he came across an anonymous manuscript which delighted him. Who was the author of ‘The Library’? He could still remember the first sentence:
Sky was the first who ruled over the whole world.
Here was the story of the gods and how they populated the world and although not as stimulating as Ptolemy or even Strabo, much more exciting. It was here that he read of Hercules’ short visit to Siqilliya.
Sky was the first who ruled over the whole world.
The sentence reverberated. Why should he start
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent ...
just like every other scholar in his world. Why?

During his first year in the library, the Sultan would often summon him to his chambers and question him closely on his reading. Rujari was not a big man, but he had strange swinging gestures and when he became excited his arms swayed like sails in a storm. His open-hearted welcome touched Idrisi.

‘What will you do with all this information, Master Idrisi? You can teach your own children and mine, but will this be enough to satisfy you?’

Idrisi recalled his worried, self-deprecating smile as he confessed his ambition. ‘If the Sultan permits I would like to write a universal geography. I will map the world we know and seek out the lands still unknown to us. This will be useful to our merchants and the commanders of our ships. This great city is the centre of the world. Merchants and travellers stop here before going West or East. They can provide us with much information.’

The Sultan’s pleasure was visible. He sent for the Chamberlain, instructed him to make sure that henceforth the scholar and master Muhammad al-Idrisi was paid the sum of ten
taris
each month by the Diwan and provided with lodgings close to the palace. As the Chamberlain bowed and prepared to leave Rujari had an afterthought.

‘And he will need a ship, ready to sail anywhere at his command. Find him a reliable commander.’

Idrisi fell on his knees and kissed the hands of his benefactor. He was delighted by Rujari’s generosity, but more than a little apprehensive at how it might be perceived outside the palace. His work would proceed without hindrance, but most of his friends might begin to regard him with suspicion. Every Friday night, after the city had gone to sleep, a small group of poets, philosophers and theologians—thirty men in all—met in a small room located at the heart of the Ayn al-Shifa mosque. Till the
mehfil
was disturbed by the morning call of the muezzin it would discuss matters pertaining to the needs of the community of Believers on the island. Till now, they had accepted his presence as one of them, but for how long?

Rujari’s sympathies were not concealed. Like his father, he preferred to ignore the Pope and rely, instead, on the loyalty of his Muslim subjects. They knew that left to himself, Sultan Rujari would not harm them. It was his Barons and Bishops who filled his ears with poison. They were determined to either convert all Believers or drive them off the island. The talk in the bazaars of Palermo, Siracusa and Catania suggested that the English monks, on papal urging, were advising Rujari to clear the woods and valleys of Believers and join the holy crusade against the followers of the false Prophet. According to some, the most detailed plans had been made to burn Noto to the ground and bury the survivors alive. The rumours usually emanated from inside the palace. Any child in Palermo knew that there were no secrets in the palace that had not been penetrated by the eunuchs.

But there were other voices, too, for no single faction dominated the Court. If anything, Rujari was inclined to favour his Muslim advisers. Younis al-Shami, his old tutor from Noto, the scholar and sage who had taught him Arabic, astronomy and algebra, was treated with reverence. He was still at the palace, supervising the tutors responsible for the education of the young princes. The three tutors were young men he had carefully selected, but he was never satisfied with them and often discharged them with a choice curse and took over himself. It made the boys giggle and they would report all this to their father, knowing full well that it would please him. According to palace gossip, Rujari took no major decision without consulting Younis, but gossip, as any eunuch can tell you, is only reliable if the source is pure.

The sun had become too strong for Idrisi. He descended the ladder and returned to his cabin. He sighed as he sat down on the soft cushions that had been specially put down to spare his behind the discomfort of the rough wooden bench nailed to the floor. Once again he stared at the voluminous manuscript lying on the table before him. Yes, the book was complete, except for the first sentence. For several weeks during this voyage—he felt instinctively it would be his last—he had agonised over the first few words. Indecision had numbed his brain. He was so convinced it was the beginning that was troubling him that he did not consider the possibility that it might be the end. He had, after all, been working on this manuscript for almost eleven years. It had become a substitute for everything. For his friend Ibn Hamid whose reproaches still echoed in his head; for his wife Zaynab, who had left him alone in Palermo and returned to her family home in Noto with their two daughters and, above all, for his younger and favourite son, Walid, who had boarded a merchant ship destined for China and, without a word of farewell, had disappeared from their world. If a customs guard had not seen him board the vessel they would not even have known where he had gone. That was fifteen years ago. Nothing had been heard of Walid since that day. Zaynab blamed her husband for having neglected the boy. Idrisi sent her away to his estate in the country.

‘You spend more time with the Sultan in his palace than with your own family. Perhaps he could find you some rooms in the harem.’

As a result, the book had become the repository of all his emotions. But it, too, was about to leave him and, though he did not know it, this was the true reason for his melancholy. Not the opening lines. That was simply a pretext to prolong the parting. The sound of the water gently slapping the ship’s hull was calming, but he knew he could delay no longer. They would soon sight the minarets. He took his finely sharpened pen and dipped it in the inkwell.

If he remained loyal to his intellect, he would break with the old style and suffer in silence the inevitable abuse that would follow. Many of his acquaintances, some of whom he liked, would regard such a choice as a confirmation of their suspicion that he was really a traitor, an apostate who had secretly abandoned the faith and sold himself to the Christian Sultan. He could reply by informing them that his father claimed direct descent from the family of the Prophet. But so did thousands of others, they would reply. Everyone knew the Prophet’s family had not been that large.

Perhaps he should remain faithful to the old tradition and start in the time-honoured fashion by praising the generosity of Allah, the single-minded devotion of his Prophet, the impartiality and equity of the Sultan and so on. That would please all and free him to start work on another book. But why should he and others like him be condemned to eternal repetition? The answer continued to elude him and he began to pace his cabin, concentrating on his inner turmoil. Perhaps, just this once, he would surprise them all. He would start in the name of Satan, who challenged, defied and was punished. The thought made him smile. The waves below seemed to encourage the heresy. They were whispering, ‘Do it. Do it. Do it’ but when he put his ear to the partition to hear them better they became silent and he reverted to his state of indecision. He was angry with his world and with himself.

In the past, the simple act of observing the lines of the coast, reproducing them in his notebook and making sure that the map lying pinned to the table was accurate, was enough to distract him. This was his third complete journey around the island. If only he could have mapped the whole world like this instead of relying on merchants and seafarer tales, which often contradicted each other when describing the shape of China or the lower half of India. Strange how often they picked on different kinds of fruit to describe the same region. A tiny island off China became a lychee or an apple, the bottom half of India a mango or a pear.

There were times when, more than anything else, he wanted to fly, float above the sea like a hawk. Why had Allah not created giant birds that could drag a chariot through the sky? Then he would have gazed on the lands and seas below and refined his maps. It would have been so simple. Or ride a giant hawk as it flew over the continents. Only then could he ensure that his map was a true representation of the world. He knew the contours of this island as well as his own body. Sometimes his imagination bestowed human shapes to the landscape sighted from the sea: occasionally an ancient angry god, but often a woman. Sometimes she watched him, propped on her elbows, and he would smile at her Greek eyes, marvel at her light Damascene hair sparkling with stars and changing colour as it caught the sun. With the movement of the ship came the realisation that she was not really looking at him. Her gaze lay fixed in the direction of Ifriqiya.

He, too, looked away and wondered how long it would be before he encountered another favourite. If his estimates were correct they would reach the northern tip of the island in a day and a half. Last time the sea had become rough, delaying the journey. Three days later he saw her, a beautiful warrior-woman, erect, angry and threatening, unlike the famed sirens in al-Homa’s poem. ‘I’m not an enemy,’ he would whisper as the ship passed by. ‘I’m a maker of maps. I want to preserve, not to destroy.’ She, too, disdained him and, disappointed, he would turn to the waves and complain. But on this latest journey he had not shown the slightest interest in these old friends. He did not even bother to look at the women as the winds pushed the ship beyond them. He was distracted.

The older members of the crew, including the cook with greying hair, had travelled with him many times. They knew his moods, understood his passions and respected his obsession to draw a map of the world. They had noticed his sad eyes and distant stare, as if time had lost all meaning. They talked about him to each other. What might be ailing him? Could it be an affair of the heart? The young man with the dark eyes from Noto? Surely he could not still be pining after the
houri
in Palermo? Not Mayya? They had convinced themselves that only Mayya, the merchant’s daughter could explain the despair in the master’s eyes. Mayya, whom the mapmaker had loved more than any other living creature in this world and wanted to make his wife; Mayya who had betrayed him luxuriously while he was journeying. The Sultan had beckoned and she had followed him willingly first to the royal bedchamber and subsequently to her own set of rooms in the harem of the palace. How the mapmaker had controlled and hidden his grief from the prying eyes of Palermo had become the talk in the coffee shops of the bazaar, but not for long. The bazaar has its own priorities and the broken heart of a young mapmaker did not detain their attention for more than a few hours.

It was the same Sultan Rujari for whom Muhammad al-Idrisi had written this book. His own title had been simple: ‘Nuz’hat al-mushtaq’ or ‘The Universal Geography’, but Rujari’s old tutor Younis had advised him that since the book would never have been completed without Rujari’s material assistance, a more appropriate title might be ‘al-kitab al-Rujari’ or ‘The Book of Roger’. In the face of such a suggestion from the heart of the palace, what could he do but bow and accept. Idrisi repressed his anger, but the Court eunuchs ensured that every shop-keeper in the Palermo bazaar had news of the title alteration. The bazaar believed, wrongly, that Idrisi had offered the delights of his body to the Sultan. The new title appeared to confirm the slander. And each spiced the story before passing it on to the other and thus the vanity of a ruler became an epic with many layers in which a follower of the Prophet had been deeply humiliated and not for the first time.

The subject of all this attention began to ask himself whether the trouble he was having with an opening line had now been transcended by the new title. A recurring dream had disturbed his sleep for over a year. It was Sultan Rujari, always in the same multi-coloured satin robe, lying half-naked under a lemon tree weighted down with ripe fruits. Rujari would stand, discard the robe and attempt to seduce a tethered doe, but just at the point when the union between the human and animal worlds was about to be consummated, Muhammad would wake up in a state of complete unrest. He would get out of bed, pace up and down on the cold marble floor muttering, ‘You shouldn’t be in my dreams so often’, and then drink some water slowly to calm his fractured nerves. It was always difficult to resume his sleep. Why did the dream only come when he was in Palermo? Never when he was on the sea or when he went to visit his family in Noto or in the house of his close friend, the physician, Ibrahim bin Hiyya of Djirdjent. Once he had tried to discuss the matter but Ibrahim had laughed, disclaiming any interest in the phenomena of dreams.