Treasonous Love

Ibrahim al-Manzur found the younger man, not much older than a boy, in his courtyard at an hour when the hammers of the smith’s forge were still working late into the night. What grew between them began over a cup of wine, and in the broken tongues of three different languages.

Ibrahim, known as The Wolf was the General of the armies, Warden of the northern marches, came in from the stables and discovered a stranger in clothes no loom in al-Andalus could have woven. He spoke in a tongue that echoed strangely against the mosaic tiles. The boy knew a little battlefield Latin, some academic Classical Arabic, and reached for Occitan when those failed. Between the three imperfect tongues they raised a wobbling bridge of understanding and appreciation.

Where are you from?

How did you arrive?

Are you armed?

Do you have a master?

The last question made the boy go pale, but he answered it all the same.

“I don’t have one,” he said in stilted Latin.

“A man without a master either is a lord, or deserves to be thrown in a ditch,” Ibrahim replied. Ibrahim looked at the soft hands and the strange shoes and decided the boy was neither.

His shoes were a thing the Wolf had never seen. They were as white as bone, laced through eyelets of foreign metal, the sole held on with some pale gum that left no print on the tile, and whenever the boy shifted his weight, there was the faint sweetness of a substance not yet invented in any kingdom Ibrahim had visited.

The boy belonged to a category of man that had not existed before. That made the boy interesting. And interesting things, in the Wolf's experience, were things to be kept.

“Drink,” Ibrahim insisted, “and tell me your name.” The wine was richer than anything the boy had tasted before.

The boy took a drink, and a small drop rolled down his chin.Ibrahim leaned over and wiped it away with a calloused thumb, which he then licked.

The boy stared blankly as he watched Ibrahim do this, then with a shudder, he said, “my name is Elias. Elias Larson.”

“Elias. Come here, little bird,” Ibrahim purred.

The boy paused while taking another sip. “I’m afraid, Ibrahim,” he said.

Ibrahim leaned in closer, landing a drunken kiss on the boy’s lips. “Good. You’re paying attention,” he said, before landing another kiss.

***

Ibrahim would not let his latest acquisition go without a more formal claim. In the gem quarter Ibrahim tossed a coin without asking the price and had a garnet ring slid onto the Elias' finger. Ibrahim kissed Elias’ hand.

“Now you are properly mine,” Ibrahim remarked, “but stones can be lost.”

“I won’t…” Elias started, before Ibrahim gripped his shoulder and guided him deeper into the heat and the hammering of the forge where the air went thick with the smell of iron.

Once in the forge, where a smith drew a small branding iron with a looping arabesque from the coals. Its tip was a looping arabesque, the same figure carved into the cedar doors of Ibrahim's chambers which Elias had seen the night before.

The boy understood then the ring had been a prelude.

“Oh my god it hurts!” Elias screamed when the iron met his skin, his tongue the one that did not belong to the new country.

Ibrahim held him by the back of the neck like a man steadying an unbroken horse.

“It’s a small moment of fire, and then we will belong to each other forever.”

“But why? I was already…” Elias choked on the smell of his own burning flesh.

Ibrahim tightened his grip. “This is a gift, little bird. Do you think I do this for all of my conquests?”

The boy learned to trust the Wolf. Not because of a desire to trust him, but because Ibrahim had been the one constant since he arrived in al-Andalus and landed in the courtyard of a nobleman. The Wolf never lied about what he was. He branded the boy and did not pretend the brand was for the boy's good; he called him a jewel and said plainly that a jewel can be stolen.

Ibrahim visited the wound every evening and traced its raised edges with a meditative thumb as he applied the healing salve. He offered no apology and the Elias expected none. Their relationship deepened against all sense.

Elias reached for the hem of the silk sheets as Ibrahim kissed him again, rolling it between his own thumb and forefinger. The gesture was the one thing in the world that belonged entirely to him, while he had come to belong to a warlord.

* * *

Abd al-Rahman III, Emir of al-Andalus, had cold eyes the color of blue glass. He had heard of Ibrahim’s new love from a courtier, and became enraged.

“Summon them to court,” he ordered. “let me lay eyes on them and decide to bless them or separate them.”

As ordered by the Emir, Ibrahim brought Elias to court to meet his emir. Upon announcement of their arrival by the chamberlain, the Emir leaned forward on his throne.

“My Sun,” Ibrahim addressed the Emir with the honorific he had come to be called by the nobility, “I bring you Elias Larson from beyond the sea.”

“Step forward, Elias Larson from beyond the sea,” the Emir commanded in Arabic.

Elias did as commanded, kneeling before the throne. “My dear emir,” Elias said, “The Visigoth King your ancestors defeated made way for your great emirate to thrive.”

“What do you know about the Visigoths, young man?”

“I know that the pagan threat is no more, grace be to Allah.”

“Do you mock me?” al-Rahman pounded his fist angrily. “My grandfather defeated the Visigoths in 112,” he shouted using the Hijri calendar.

Elias laughed. “I mean no disrespect, Emir, but it was the year 92.” Elias looked up at the Emir, making eye contact.

The Emir paused before rising from his throne applauding. “Indeed. You are correct, boy. No one has ever had the substance with which to challenge me before.” The Emir descended the dais and approached Elias, taking his chin and lifting his gaze higher. “Stand up, boy.”

Elias did as commanded, and turned his gaze to meet the Emir’s, but said nothing.

“You are truly interesting, Elias Larson.” The Emir turned to face his court. “The boy shall stay here in the palace with me, to be my… ‘advisor.’

Ibrahim stepped forward to object.

“Enough, Wolf!” The Emir held his hand up. “Your protests hold no bearing in my decision. The boy belongs to me now.”

Ibrahim stood at the edge of the council watching in silence as the boy he had found passed into another man's keeping, together with his garnet ring and fresh brand. The change in possession broke Ibrahim’s warrior heart. He had not stopped wanting the boy who fell from the sky and into his arms. But he let none of it read in his expression. The Emir would see it if he did; and a possessive emir had a way of making jealous lovers disappear. So the Wolf carried his love for the boy in silence.

***

The Sun sent no captain to deliver the message, only a note scrawled onto the vellum in his own hand.

Come and read to me.

Elias went. After three months of living in the palace going to the Emir when summoned had become something Elias desired, rather than an act of obedience to a monarch. He chose not to question his feelings.

The Emir’s private chamber sat above the gardens of Madinat al-Zahra, and the fountain in its courtyard never fell silent. Abd al-Rahman III reclined on a low divan with a codex open across one knee. He did not look up when the boy came in.

“You hold a book too far from the lamp,” the Emir said. “You will ruin the eyes I pay a physician to keep.”

“I read better in poor light. It forces me to know the word before I can see it.”

“A scholar’s vanity.” He patted the cushion beside him, and the boy sat.

Slaves in al-Andalus were not permitted to sit at the side of the Commander of the Faithful, and both of them knew it. Though he was marked as one by Ibrahim, Elias was not a slave. “Read me the passage on the Visigothic succession. The one where you corrected me before the whole council. And make the face you turn when you are being merciful to a fool.”

“I make no faces, my Emir.”

“Oh. But you do, my boy.” The Emir’s mouth moved into something that was not quite a smile. “It is the only thing about you that has never learned to lie. Now. Read to me.”

Elias read, and the Emir listened the way he did to every utterance that crossed the boy’s lips, as though the words were a treaty he meant to find the flaw in. Then Elias finished reading.

“Ibrahim branded you like a steer at a fair,” the Emir said. “but I took his marble to a better workshop. Do you know the difference between the Wolf and me, Qamar al-Bait?”

It was the first time the Emir had used the name to Elias’ face. Moon of the House. It settled on the boy with the weight of the brand but with none of its fire.

“Tell me,” the boy said.

“The Wolf wished to own a body.” The Emir set the codex aside and took the boy’s hand, turning it until the garnet caught the lamp. “I wish to own what the body is for. He gave you a stone that can be worked off a sleeping man’s finger. I will give you a name the chroniclers cannot lift. When I am dust, Elias, men will read what the two of us built and never know which one held the pen. That is the only immortality worth the trouble of dying for.”

The boy had a different name for his Emir for him then, there in the fading light of the lamp as it burned through its oil. The name was never spoken before the court. It belonged in the dark. The Emir closed his eyes as though the sound of it cost him something, and for the length of the night he consented not only to rule an Emirate, but to be loved by the boy who fell from the sky.

***

Ibrahim had come with a dispatch from the marches and stopped at the threshold. He watched as the boy he had found in his courtyard gave himself to another man, then delivered the dispatch in a level voice. He bowed and withdrew. And the wanting he carried out of that room was the same wanting he had carried since that first night as the hammers of the smith’s forge banged out a rhythm.

* * *

“Whose throat keeps you awake, General?” Lubna asked Ibrahim under the lamplight of the House of Wisdom, weighing a dried cutting between her alchemist’s fingers.

“The realm’s,” Ibrahim said. “When the Sun sets, the court will tear his favorites to pieces. The foreign creature first.”

“And under you?”

“Under me, the creature is kept.”

The Wolf ordered the Nerium oleander from Lubna. She prepared the dram anyway, and without question, using an exact measure to prepare the dose, and folded it into a pomegranate mash.

* * *

Ibrahim kept the watch at the Emir’s bedside, sending the physicians off to their rest, himself holding the cup to the lips of the man he had served since before Elias was born.

“You are a poor nurse, old friend,” the Emir murmured one night, his voice gone thin. “But a faithful one.”

“I have always kept watch for you,” Ibrahim said, and it was the truest thing he ever told him.

The Sun died in the early morning. The Wolf’s hand a span from his on the coverlet. Elias was not in the room. Ibrahim had sent him to rest in the harem. He told him it was because he needed to sleep, but he did it so the boy would not have to watch his Emir slip away.

The Wolf had only ever claimed his ordinary nature. He didn’t do it for the throne which, by morning when the clerk came, he no longer wanted. The Sun had looked at the boy and seen the same buried instrument the Wolf had seen, but refused to acknowledge. The Emir acknowledged it under a wax seal before the magistrate, naming Elias as his successor. The Wolf could carry on being unloved; he had carried an empty heart for decades already. So he poisoned a dying man’s wine for the sin of having better eyes.

* * *

The boy found the truth as easily as he found a book in the stacks of a library. The mind the dead man had built in him would not let the symptoms lie down beside the fraudulent diagnosis. He read the physicians’ notes and the kitchen ledgers, and traced the warmed wine back along the chain of hands until it ended at a scholar of the House of Wisdom; one who had drawn cuttings from the garden.

He did not have Lubna tortured. He sat with her one night talking. Manipulating her so she would confess to the crime.

“I’m not asking whether you did it,” he said. “I am asking who carried the poison to my dead Emir.”

She regarded him as she had once regarded a faulty translation. “You were always the quickest in the room. You know the answer, or the question would not be so pointed.”

“Say it.”

“He kept the watch,” she said. “He held the cup.”

* * *

Elias stood on the balcony of the Madinat al-Zahra wearing the black khil’a and a silver circlet on his brow. At his coronation, he had declared Cordoba to be a caliphate, one to rival that in Baghdad. Inside the heavy sleeves his thumb worked a fold of silk against the weave, the one gesture that had outlived every century he had fallen through.

“Ibrahim al-Manzur” he said, and the square went still. “General of the armies. Warden of the borders. You poisoned the Commander of the Faithful while you kept his watch. There is no betrayal beneath this one. It is the floor.”

The Wolf said nothing. His jaw worked beneath the trimmed beard and went still. Then Ibrahim looked at him. Once. He held the boy’s eyes across the four thousand faces in the crowd. The look bore everything he had carried since that fateful night in the courtyard – the broken Latin, the garnet ring, the arabesque he had burned into his shoulder, the throne he had killed for, and the truth that he had committed a betrayal – not in spite of love, but because of it.

It was a confession, the only one the Wolf would make, offered in the one language he trusted the boy to read. And the boy read everything.

But he misread it. Instead of love he saw defiance. He saw the Wolf – who had branded him – chained and condemned. Elias met the look with the steadiness Abd al-Rahman III had trained into him, and he did not look away. A Caliph who flinches tells four thousand men to test him.

Ibrahim knelt without being forced, the slow kneeling of a man who had spent his life on his feet and meant to meet the ground on his own terms. He bowed his thick neck. The blade fell with a wet, heavy sound. Ibrahim’s giant frame settled into the boards with the finality of a mountain sliding into the sea. The boy did not look away. He owed the Wolf that much.

* * *

Long after, when the Elias was old, just, and feared by all, a new servant dressing him for a feast saw beneath the indigo the pale raised arabesque of a brand in the shape of a house that no longer stood. He did not ask. And the Caliph, feeling the cloth pass over his brand thought of the man who had found him in a courtyard, who called him little bird, and believed, to the last hour of his long life, that the man had died hating him.