IBN MAYMUN HAD WARNED me that the Sultan was an early riser. He woke before dawn, made his ablutions, and consumed a cup of warm water before riding to the Mukattam Hills on the outskirts of the city. Here the citadel was being built. The Sultan, a keen student of architecture, would often overrule the chief builder. He alone knew that the reason for the new structure was not to defend Cairo against the Franj, but to defend the Sultan against popular insurrection.
The city was known for its turbulence. It had grown fast, and attracted vagabonds and malcontents of every sort. For that reason, Cairo frightened its rulers.
Here, too, the Sultan tested his own skills and those of his steed. Sometimes he would take Afdal, his oldest son, with him. Afdal was but twelve years old, and this was his first extended stay in Cairo. The Sultan would use the time to train the boy in the arts and the politics of war. Dynasties, after all, are made or lost on the battlefield. Saladin had been taught this by his father Ayyub and his uncle Shirkuh.
When the Sultan returned that morning, I was waiting for him. I touched my forehead in silent greeting.
“You have arrived at exactly the right moment, Ibn Yakub,” he said, leaping off his horse. He was flushed and sweaty, with his eyes were shining like those of a child. Happiness and satisfaction were written on his face.
“This augurs well for our work, my friend. I will take a bath and join you for breakfast in the library. We can have an hour alone before the Kadi arrives. Shadhi will show you the way.”
An old Kurdish warrior in his nineties, his beard as white as the mountain snow, took me by the elbow, guiding me gently in the direction of the library. On the way he talked about himself. He had been a retainer with the Sultan’s father long before Yusuf was born, and long before Ayyub and his brother Shirkuh had moved down to the plains of Mesopotamia.
“It was I, Shadhi, who taught your Sultan how to ride and wield a sword when he was not yet eight years old. It was I, Shadhi, who...”
In more normal circumstances, I would have listened intently to the old man, and questioned him in great detail, but that day my thoughts were elsewhere. It was my first visit to the palace, and it would be foolish to deny that I was in a state of great excitement. Suddenly my star had risen. I was about to become a confidant of the most powerful ruler of our world.
I was being taken to the most celebrated private library of our city. The books on philosophy alone numbered over a thousand. Everything was here from Aristotle to Ibn Rushd, from astronomy to geometry. It was here that Ibn Maymun came when he wanted to consult the medical formularies of al-Kindi, Sahlan ibn Kaysan, and Abul Fadl Daud. And, of course, the master himself, al-Razi, the greatest of them all. It was here that Ibn Maymun wanted his own books and manuscripts to be kept after his death.
Entering the library, I was entranced by its magnitude and soon lost in lofty thoughts. These volumes, so exquisitely bound, were the repository of centuries of learning and study. Here was a special section containing books unobtainable elsewhere, works denounced as heretical. Such books, to put it another way, as might help to unlock closed minds. They were only available in the reading rooms of the Dar al-hikma if the reader was prepared to offer the librarian an extremely generous gift. Even then, not everything was possible.
Abul Hassan al-Bakri’s Sirat al-Bakri, for instance, had vanished from the shops and the public libraries. A preacher at al-Azhar had denounced the book, a biography of the Prophet of Islam, as a total fabrication. He had informed the faithful at Friday prayers that al-Bakri was roasting in hell because of his blasphemy.
Here now in front of me lay the offending book. My hands had trembled slightly as I removed it from the shelf and began to read its opening lines. It seemed orthodox enough to me. I was so absorbed that I noticed neither the recumbent form of Shadhi prostrate on a prayer rug in the direction of Mecca, nor the unannounced arrival of the Sultan. He interrupted my private reverie.
“To dream and to know is better than to pray and be ignorant. Do you agree, Ibn Yakub?”
“Forgive me, Your Excellency, I was...”
He signalled that we be seated. Breakfast was being served. The Sultan was preoccupied. I had suddenly become nervous. We ate in silence.
“What is your method of work?”
I was taken by surprise.
“I’m not sure I grasp your meaning, Commander of the Brave.”
He laughed.
“Come now, my friend. Ibn Maymun has told me that you are a scholar of history. He spoke highly of your attempt to compile a history of your own people. Is my question so difficult to answer?”
“I follow the method of the great Tabari. I write in a strictly chronological fashion. I ascertain the veracity of every important fact by speaking to those whose knowledge was gained directly. When I obtain several different versions of a fact, from several narrators, I usually communicate all of these to the reader.”
The Sultan burst out laughing.
“You contradict yourself. How can there be more than one account of a single fact? Surely there can be only one fact. One correct account and several false versions.”
“Your Majesty is talking about facts. I am talking about history.”
He smiled.
“Should we begin?”
I nodded and collected my writing implements.
“Should we start at the beginning?”
“I suppose so,” he muttered, “since you are so wedded to chronology. I mean it would be better to start with my first sight of Cairo, would it not?”
“The beginning, O Sultan. The beginning. Your beginning. Your first memories.”
I was lucky. I was not the eldest son. For that reason not much was expected from me. I was left to myself a great deal, and enjoyed much freedom. My appearance and demeanour did not pose a threat to anyone. I was a very ordinary boy. You see me now as a Sultan, surrounded by all the symbols of power. You are impressed and, possibly, even a bit frightened. You worry that if you exceed certain proprieties your head might roll in the dust. This fear is normal. It is the effect which power has on the Sultan’s subjects. But this same power can transform even the most diminutive personality into a figure of large proportions. Look at me. If you had known me when I was a boy and Shahan Shah was my oldest brother you would never have imagined that I could be the Sultan of Misr, and you would have been right. Fate and history conspired to make me what I am today.
The only person who saw something in me was my paternal grandmother. When I was nine or ten years old, she saw me and a group of my friends trying to kill a snake. As boys we would compete with each other in these foolish things. We would try and grab a snake by its tail and then swing it, before crushing its head on a stone or, as the braver ones among us did, stamping on its head with our feet.
My grandmother, having observed this scene carefully, shouted at me.
“Yusuf! Yusuf ibn Ayyub! Come here at once!”
The other boys ran away, and I walked slowly towards her, expecting a blow around my ears. My grandmother had a legendary temper and, so Shadhi had once told me, she had struck my father across the face when he was a grown man. No one dared to ask the cause of such a public display. My father had left the room and, so they say, mother and son did not speak to each other for a year. In the end, it was my father who apologised.
To my amazement, she hugged me and kissed me in turn on both my eyes.
“You are fearless, boy, but be careful. Some snakes can strike back, even when you have them by the tail.”
I remember laughing with relief. She then told me of a dream she had experienced before I was born.
“You were still inside your mother’s belly. I think you kicked a great deal. Your mother used to complain sometimes that she felt she was going to give birth to a colt. One night I dreamt that a large man-swallowing snake was crawling towards your mother, who was lying uncovered in the sun. Your mother opened her eyes and began to sweat. She wanted to move, but could not lift her body. Slowly the snake crawled towards her. Then suddenly, like the door of a magical cave, her belly opened. An infant walked out, sword in hand, and, with one mighty blow, decapitated the serpent. Then he looked at his mother and walked back into her stomach. You will be a great warrior, my son. It is written in your stars and Allah himself will be your guide.”
My father and uncle laughed at my grandmother and her foolish dreams, but even at that time this interpretation undoubtedly had a positive effect on me. She was the first person to take me seriously.
Her words must have had some effect. After this incident, I noticed that Asad al-Din Shirkuh, my uncle, was beginning to watch me carefully. He took a personal interest in my training as a horseman and sword-fighter. It was he who taught me everything I know of horses. You are aware, are you not, Ibn Yakub, that I know the complete genealogies of all the great horses in our armies? You look surprised. We will talk about horses another day.
If I shut my eyes and think of my earliest memories, the first image that fills my mind is the ruins of the old Greek temples at Baalbek. Their size made one tremble in admiration and awe. The gates leading into the courtyard were still intact. They were truly built for the gods. My father, as representative of the great Sultan Zengi of Mosul, was in charge of the fortress and its defence against the Sultan’s rivals. This was the town where I grew up. The ancients named it Heliopolis, and worshipped Zeus there, and Hermes and Aphrodite.
As children, we used to divide into different groups at the feet of their statues, and hide from each other. There is nothing like a ruin to excite the imagination of a child. There was magic in those old stones. I used to daydream about the old days. Till then the world of the ancients had been a complete puzzle. The worship of idols was the worst heresy for us, something that had been removed from the world by Allah and our Prophet. Yet these temples, and the images of Aphrodite and Hermes in particular, were very pleasing.
We used to think how exciting it would have been if we had lived in those times. We often fought over the gods. I was a partisan of Aphrodite, my older brother, Turan Shah, loved Hermes. As for Zeus, all that remained of his statue was the legs, and they were not very attractive. I think the rest of him had been used to build the fortress in which we now lived.
Shadhi, worried at the corrupting effect of these remnants from the past, would try and scare us away from the ruins. The gods could transform humans into statues or other objects without their losing their minds. He would invent tales of how djinns and demons, and other ungodly creatures, would gather at these sites whenever there was a full moon. All they discussed was how to grab and eat children. Hundreds and thousands of children have been eaten here by the djinns over the centuries, he would tell us in his deep voice. Then, seeing the fright on our faces, he would qualify what he had said. Nothing would harm us, since we were under the protection of Allah and the Prophet.
Shadhi’s stories only added to the attraction. We would ask him about the three gods, and some of the scholars in the library would talk openly of the ancients and of their beliefs. Their gods and goddesses were like humans. They fought and loved, and shared other human emotions. What distinguished them from us was that they did not die. They lived for ever and ever in their own heaven, a place very different from our paradise.
“Are they still in their own heaven now?” I remember asking my grandmother one night.
She was enraged.
“Who has been filling your head with all this nonsense? Your father will have their tongues removed. They were never anything else but statues, foolish boy. People in those times were very stupid. They worshipped idols. In our part of the world it was our own Prophet, may he rest in peace, who finally destroyed the statues and their influence.”
Everything we were told increased our fascination with these things. Nothing could keep us away from them. One night, when the moon was full, the older children, led by my brother, decided to visit the sanctuary of Aphrodite. They were planning to leave me behind, but I heard them whispering and threatened to tell our grandmother. My brother kicked me hard, but realised the danger of not including me.
It was cold that night. Even though we had wrapped ourselves in blankets, my teeth were trembling and the tip of my nose was numb. I think there were six or seven of us. Slowly we crept out of the fortress. We were all frightened, and I remember the complaints when I was compelled to stop twice to water the roots of an old tree. We became more confident as we approached Aphrodite. We had heard nothing except the owls and the barking dogs. No djinns had appeared.
Yet just as we entered the moonlit temple courtyard, we heard strange noises. I nearly died, and clung tightly to Turan Shah. Even he was scared. Slowly we crept towards the noises. There stretched out before us was the bare backside of Shadhi as he heaved forwards and backwards, his black hair waving in the wind. He was copulating like a donkey, and once we realised it was him we could not restrain ourselves. Our laughter swept through the empty yard, striking Shadhi like a dagger. He turned and began to scream abuse at us. We ran. The next day my brother confronted him.
“The djinn had a very familiar arse last night, did it not Shadhi?”
Salah-ud-Din paused and laughed at the memory. As luck would have it, Shadhi entered the library at that moment with a message. Before he could speak, the Sultan’s laughter reached a higher pitch. The bewildered retainer looked at us in turn, and it was with great difficulty that I managed to control my features, though I too was inwardly bursting with laughter.
Shadhi, by way of explanation, was told of the story that had just been recounted. His face went red, and he spoke angrily to Salah al-Din in the Kurdish dialect, and stormed out of the room.
The Sultan laughed again.
“He has threatened revenge. He will tell you tales from my youth in Damascus, which he is sure I have forgotten.”
Our first session was over.
We left the library, the Sultan indicating with a gesture that I should follow him. The corridors and rooms we passed through were furnished in an endless variety of silks and brocades, with mirrors edged in silver and gold. Eunuchs guarded each sanctuary. I had never seen such luxury.
The Sultan left me little time to wonder. He walked quickly, his robe streaming in the wind created by his rapid movements. We entered the audience chamber. Outside stood a Nubian guard, a scimitar by his side. He bowed as we entered. The Sultan sat on a raised platform, covered in purple silks and surrounded by cushions covered in satin and gold brocade.
The Kadi had already arrived at the palace for his daily report and consultations. He was summoned to the chamber. As he entered and bowed, I made as if to leave. To my surprise, the Sultan asked me to remain seated. He wanted me to observe and write down everything of note.
I had often seen the Kadi al-Fadil in the streets of the city, preceded and followed by his guards and retainers, symbols of power and authority. The face of the state. This was the man who presided over the Diwan al-insha, the chancellery of the state, the man who ensured the regular and smooth functioning of Misr. He had served the Fatimid Caliphs and their ministers with the same zeal he now devoted to the man who had overthrown them. He embodied the continuity of the institutions of Misr. The Sultan trusted him as a counsellor and friend, and the Kadi never flinched from offering unwelcome advice. It was also he who drew up official and personal letters, after the Sultan had provided the outlines of what he wished to say.
The Sultan introduced me as his very special and private scribe. I rose and bowed low before the Kadi. He smiled.
“Ibn Maymun has talked much of you, Ibn Yakub. He respects your learning and your skills. That is enough for me.”
I bowed my head in gratitude. Ibn Maymun had warned me that if the Kadi had become possessive of the Sultan, and resented my presence, he could have me removed from this world without much difficulty.
“And my approval, al-Fadil?” inquired the Sultan. “Does that mean nothing at all? I accept that I am not a great thinker or a poet like you, nor am I a philosopher and physician like our good friend, Ibn Maymun. But surely you will admit I am a good judge of men. It was I who picked Ibn Yakub.”
“Your Excellency mocks this humble servant,” replied the Kadi in a slightly bored fashion, as if to say that he was not in the mood for playing games today.
After a few preliminary skirmishes, in which he refused to be further provoked by his master, the Kadi sketched out the main events of the preceding week. This was a routine report on the most trivial aspects of running the state, but it was difficult not to be bewitched by his mastery of the language. Every word was carefully chosen, every sentence finely tuned, and the conclusion rewarded with a couplet. This man was truly impressive. The entire report took up an hour, and not once had the Kadi had occasion to consult a single piece of paper. What a feat of memory!
The Sultan was used to the Kadi’s delivery, and had appeared to shut his eyes for long spells during his chancellor’s exquisite discourse.
“Now I come to an important matter on which I need your decision, Sire. It involves the murder of one of your officers by another.”
The Sultan was wide awake.
“Why was I not informed earlier?”
“The incident of which I speak only happened two days ago. I spent the whole of yesterday in establishing the truth. Now I can report the whole story to you.”
“I’m listening, al-Fadil.”
The Kadi began to speak.