The Order of Love

I

Hear now what was given, and what was withheld, on the morning two prisoners walked up the steps of the platform below the Great Mosque of Córdoba.

After nine days of detention, Lubna had begun to admire her interrogators. They had been most patient with her in a way she had not anticipated. They began the process not with a hot iron, but with a conversation. It had been long, courteous, and almost scholarly, with questions focusing on the apothecary’s garden and the cataloguing of plants and their derivatives, conducted by a man whose Arabic was good enough that Lubna, at first, mistook him for a scholarly colleague.

By the third day, she came to understand that the courtesy was itself the instrument of inquiry. And by the fifth day, she had understood that the instrument was working. By the seventh she had begun to answer questions she had not been asked, volunteering information that a scholar in a long argument begins to anticipate, so they supply it preemptively to prevent more questions. The rhythm of the exchange became more important than the secret it she was meant to protect. This is the oldest principle of interrogation, and Lubna, who had read about it in the Kitab al-Hiyal, the Book of Ingenious Devices, recognizing it at the moment she could no longer stop it.

First, she told them about the oleander. It had been the compound found in the residues of the Emir’s goblet, and believed to be the cause of his death. A tincture of Nerium oleander prepared with honey and pomegranate molasses to mask the bitter flavor of the poison, calibrated to a dose that would not register in the physicians' tests until the heart had already stopped. The Emir had been forty-eight on the day he died. The compound had been designed to look like a heart attack that a man his age might statistically succumb to. However, there was one key element she had not yet given her interrogators. A detail so obsequious that, once revealed, it would make the treachery even more unfathomable.

That detail would not be revealed until the ninth day. It would be the name of that hand that wielded the poison. God knew that the surrender of this information would arrive out of exhaustion rather than from betrayal. The heart that has been used as an instrument does not always know it has been used as such.

The Wolf, Ibrahim al-Mansur, the Emir’s Chief Minister of the Armies, had taken his watch in the Emir's chamber on the seventeenth night of Sha’ban, just as he had taken it a hundred nights before then. The Emir trusted him implicitly. He even allowed Ibrahim to sleep with his concubines. After thirty years of service, since Ibrahim was nineteen years old and had ridden a horse to death to ferry a message that saved the Emirate from a Berber uprising, Ibrahim had earned his place as the Emir’s right hand. But, Ibrahim weighed those thirty years against the Emir’s throne and judged them to be lacking. He needed more.

He had taken the small glass vial from his sleeve, uncorked it, and measured three drops into the cup of pomegranate water that he had been placing at the Emir's bedside. He stayed in the chamber until the Emir drank it. Then he watched his Emir die.

Lubna had given him the oleander in good faith. She had given him many things in good faith. The oleander was, by her own internal accounting, neither the first nor the heaviest. She had given him her bed before she had given him the compound. She had given him, before either of those, the conviction that she was loved by him, and the conviction that she would, in time, become queen.

The scribe wrote it all down. The seal applied. Lubna returned to her cell. She slept for the first time in nine days. It is said that once in her sleep she cried out to Allah. And maybe she dreamed of the apothecary garden, and the lemon tree at its eastern wall where she used to sit while reading books about herbalism, the cat that lived under it would stay at her side and allow her to pet it. No one had thought to feed the cat in her absence.

II

It was a Tuesday the day the Sun rose following Lubna’s confession. The last days of Ramadan were soon coming. The fast had become a ritual of mourning for the dead Emir. His reign had ended, and a new one was about to begin.

The city woke as it does, with the ovens of the eastern quarter lit before the call to prayer, because bakers and God do, indeed, keep different hours. The water-sellers descended to the Guadalquivir with their leather skins. The fishermen on the river already had their nets in the water.

In the cell beneath the western wing of the palace, Ibrahim al-Andalusi was being given water. He took it, drinking slowly. Interrogation hadn’t broken him the way it did Lubna. He had been asked questions and had refused them with the courtesy of a soldier addressing an officer. The interrogators had accepted his refusal because the confession had already obtained from a different source. From Lubna. Ibrahim assumed this would happen. He knew Lubna lacked the fortitude to withstand interrogation, or seduction.

Then his thoughts turned to Elias, the Emir’s favorite concubine. The Wolf had found him first, and loved him from the moment of his arrival in Córdoba. Then the Emir brought him to the council, seating the young man at the Emir's left hand. During that day in court, Elias corrected with a deference so careful it bordered on insult, a date in the Visigoth chronicle that the council's senior historian had gotten wrong. The Wolf understood in the moment of that correction and its precise certainty, that his love for Elias was anchored in his precision, and for the way the boy had quickly learned the court's language faster than the Emir's own children. Ibrahim had loved him without permitting the love to surface. And now he regretted not making a declaration sooner.

Hear now a truth that the chroniclers will not preserve, because the chroniclers preserve only what can be sealed with wax and filed with the qadi. Ibrahim planned the conspiracy by convincing Lubna that they would take the throne together, and she believed him. Taking the throne had been, in Ibrahim's calculation, the only structure under which Elias could be permitted to live. As Ibrahim's adopted ward, the Qamar al-Bait, the Moon of the House as Elias had come to be called, would be preserved, renamed, and in time – after enough years had softened the question of his origins – perhaps given a household of his own. This had been the Emir’s plan for Elias. The Wolf had loved the boy enough to murder the man who loved that boy differently, in order to keep the boy alive.

Consider, O hearer of this tale, the intentions of a man who plants poison in the cup of one he has served for thirty years. He had not counted on the Emir designating Elias as his heir even before the blood lineage of the throne. The designation had been issued in the third month of the lunar year, in a sealed instrument deposited with the Chief Justice. News of it had reached Ibrahim three days before the seventeenth of Ramadan while attending prayer in the Great Mosque. Ibrahim administered the oleander anyway. He told himself at the time that, this was because the conspiracy with Lubna was already in motion. The chroniclers will record him as a traitor. But he was more than that. He was a man who could not tolerate that another man had loved Elias, and only declared his love first.

III

In the upper apartments of the Madinat-al-Zahra, the royal palace, Elias was being dressed by his servant in the royal robes of the Umayyad Empire. His crown was made of silver. And for the boy, now a Caliph, he hadn’t been able to sleep. After the traitors’ sentences would be rendered, he might find himself able to close his eyes. As he stood there with the servant fixing his robes, he thought about the man who had taught him the difference between an order and a request. Thirteen days had passed since the Emir’s death. And at the coronation, Elias gave the order that declared Cordoba a Caliphate rivaling that of Baghdad.

In his thoughts the dead Emir was never called by his formal name – Abd al-Rahman III. He had never used the formal name in private. Instead, he had used the diminutive – Abdul – which the Emir had permitted him to do alone among the household, and only after the second year together had passed. The diminutive was now the only word that entered his mind. An affectionate way to remember the man who loved him. It was as a wound that was also a doorway. But that doorway opened only onto a room that was vacated, leaving only a member of what had resided there.

IV

The execution platform was built to a height that allowed for thousands of citizens to see the spectacle of what was happening without permitting them to interfere. The stonemasons of Córdoba had refined the techniques for this manner of construction over three centuries. For the people of Córdoba, such executions had become a form of entertainment.

They brought Ibrahim up the steps first. He climbed without assistance. The guards on either side of him were performing a ceremony for the public. He had been the Chief Minister of the Armies for fifteen years. The men holding his elbows had been trained by him, and now they were responsible for carrying out his execution. They knew the difference between escorting a prisoner and accompanying a condemned officer of the Court. They had chosen, without consultation, the second. To be loyal to the new Caliph instead of a condemned traitor.

When they brought Lubna up, Ibrahim didn’t look at her. Lubna, had spent the morning preparing herself for the look he would give her, and rehearsing the look she would return to him. But now, she was now obliged to kneel beside a man whose refusal to acknowledge her was the first piece of wisdom the Lord had delivered since her arrest. She did not fully understand it, but instead filed it away for a later re-examination; in the habit of a scholar. Then she realized that, the moment for doing so would be in Heaven, not on Earth. Thereupon, she shifted her gaze to the boy on the balcony.

She saw a young man who had built a case against her on evidence he could not, in the deepest chamber of his conscience, certify as conclusive. Elias had chosen authority over uncertainty, because authority was the only inheritance his predecessor had left him, and authority was all that he knew how to wield. She saw the precise quality that had made the old Emir choose him over Ibrahim. She hadn’t sensed this side of his character. Then Elias met her gaze, and he did not flinch.

Ibrahim looked at Elias once. He looked at him in the moment after the criminal charges were read and before the order to execute was given. The look held for perhaps two heartbeats. What was in it – whether an apology, an instruction, or the unspeakable truth that a man on a platform cannot say aloud to the very boy who had placed him there – was only for God to hold, not for this teller to publish. There is adab even in stories. Some matters belong to the moment of dying, but dying belongs to no one.

What can be said is that Elias did not understand the looks he was given by the condemned. He could only register them. He returned those looks with a steadiness he had learned from the man he had called Abdul, and which served him now as it had served his teacher. He believed, as he returned the gaze, that he was looking at a soldier accepting judgment; at a man who had loved him for four years and was about to die without being permitted to say he did so very love the boy who was now giving the order for his demise.

V

The executioners raised their blade. What came next is described in no chronicle of the Caliphate, because what blades do to bodies on platforms is known by every person in every century, and the description of it has never improved any understanding of mortality. The work of this telling is not to perform the killing but to record how the killing rearranged the order of love.

Lubna had loved Ibrahim. Ibrahim had used her, but he did not love her. Ibrahim had loved Elias. But Elias did not love him. Elias had loved Abdul. And now, Abdul was dead.

This is the shape of ishq, all-consuming love, in a world from which the Beloved has been withdrawn. It is a chain of lovers, each ignorant of the love directed at them, each turned toward an object that will not return the attention. The chroniclers will preserve the names, the charges, the dates of the sentences passed, but they will not preserve the nuance; the chain of unreciprocated love passes time, but delivers no finality. It survives only in the space between two people and in the choices they have made together.

Elias, the new Caliph, ordained by the imams of the Great Mosque, stood very still. He had already grieved the death of one man. He would not grieve the death of the man who loved him, or of the woman who had been his friend. He turned to his attendant, and took his hand before being led off the balcony.

An apprentice scribe came to the apothecary's garden to read from a codex Lubna had been working on. There he found the cat that had not eaten in ten days. It was thin, but alive. The scribe sat on the bench under the lemon tree and fed the cat a piece of dried mackerel from his lunch. The cat ate it, and asked for more.

God witnessed this creation’s small meal taken under the fragrant blossoms on the morning two of His servants returned to Him. He smiled, for all was as it was supposed to be. The Order of Love had been restored.

But these are different stories.