A Yearning Rebuked

The dye stung where the razor had nicked the Emir, Abd al-Rahman III. He remained still in spite of it, shutting his eyes with a grimace while the servant worked the black paste through his beard. The grey vanished stroke by stroke. The red hair his mother had gifted him also diappeared. He had not let a soul in Córdoba see his natural color in twenty years.

His chamberlain read to him while the servant worked. A border tax, and a marriage among the Banu Qasi. Abdul, as he was known, was to bless it. Or forbid it. Whichever suited his fancy in the moment. Abdul gave the chamberlain half his attention, which was all that most mornings asked of him. Then the chamberlain read out a name. Ibrahim al-Manzur.

Abdul opened his eyes. “Again?”

The chamberlain found his place and read the name once more. Ibrahim al-Manzur, the Chief of the Armies, was showing off his latest marvel in the souk. It was a young man, as pale as a Galician, and with a voice that spoke like a scholar. Others pressed in to hear him the way they pressed in to hear a beautiful singer.

“Pale,” Abdul said.

“So they say, my lord.”

He kept the yearning rising up from his belly locked behind his teeth, where he kept everything he felt. He had come to the throne young, over the bodies of his own kin, with men on all sides measuring him for a coffin of his own. In the first year he had learned that a prince who shows his hunger for anything teaches others at the table how to poison him. Abdul said nothing more of the pale marvel that morning.

He let three days go by. On the fourth he sent for Ibrahim, and asked for the marvel to come with him.

Ibrahim came oiled and bowing, wearing the rehearsed protests of a man asked to give up treasure he had meant to keep for himself. Two guards brought his marvel in behind him. Abdul had spent years teaching himself not to lean towards anything. In this moment, however, he leaned forward, pulled towards Ibrahim's marvel by the yearning still trapped behind his teeth.

The marvel, a young man approximately 25 years of age, was thin as one recently broken would appear. As he knelt on the floor next to Ibrahim, he kept his eyes on the marble between his knees, his shoulders rounded with the lesson of what standing straight had cost him. A blow had yellowed one cheekbone and healed. Rope had ridden his wrists and left them chafed. Abdul read the marks on the young man’s body the way he read the visage of a liar. Ibrahim had been rough with something fine. That was all the marks told him, because that was all he asked of them.

“They tell me you show a degree of learning,” Abdul said.

The young man said nothing. He kept his gaze on the floor, and the quiet held so long that Abdul took it for the proper awe one of his position would possess when presented before the Emir of al-Andalus. It pleased him. A loud marvel was a souk trick, but this one had the stillness of the real thing. He let the quiet prolonge before turning to the morning's business.

A poet was waiting to recite his latest works for the Emir. Abdul waved him up. He delivered his polished prose with poise and confidence:

His gardens envy him with their roses,

that blush to be outshone when he walks among them.

The great river slows to carry his name, unbroken, to the sea,

while the lionheads at his fountains turn their carved heads

to watch him pass.

And what the ancients sang, let it now be sung of him:

God grants the crown to many; but to one man He grants insight;

the sight that sees the gathering of crowds halted at the rind.

The court murmured its pleasure, and Abdul inclined his head to take the compliment.

“That verse is satire.”

The words came up off the floor in an Arabic so clean it halted all breathing in the hall. Every head turned to look at the source.

The young man brought to the Court by Ibrahim didn’t move, not even to lift his eyes. But he had issued the correction as easily as blood spills from a cut.

“Forgive him, my lord…” Ibrahim began, the color going out of his oiled face.

“Be quiet.” Abdul did not look at his Chief of the Armies. He looked only at the young man.

“Go on.”

"Your poet borrowed the line to praise you, my lord."

Elias kept his eyes on the marble between his feet, and the words came level and unhurried, each one set down in the old high Arabic like a coin laid on a table.

"It belongs to a two-hundred-year-old ode made for an eastern prince who took his throne by having his elder brother blinded. Since a blind man cannot rule, the crown passed to the sighted prince.”

The hall disquieted.

"The poet gave that prince a single perfect line. He had a hundred words for a wise king but used only one: that the prince was a man of ‘insight.’ The inner sight by which a ruler sees the deeper truth where others see only its surface. It was the highest praise that can be given. But ‘insight’ derives from ‘sight.’

For the first time something moved beneath the young man’s level voice.

"He set the one virtue built out of the eye into a verse for a prince who had his own brother's eyes put out. The passing decades wore down the veiled insult, so that it is recited as a blessing."

Gasps set in throughout the Emir's Court. The poet turned grey.

Abdul sat back. Something turned over in his chest as it had the day he learned of Ibrahim’s marvel speaking in the souk. Every soul who had come before him always came to flatter. He had grown so good at tasting lies under the sweetness that he had stopped believing another flavor was possible. And here, hauled from the General’s pen and beaten until it knew better, was a young man that had dared to open his mouth in the lion's own house and tell the truth at the cost of his life, because it could not bear false flattery. Abdul had bought many things in the past. But never had he acquired a mind that would sooner break than lie.

And now, he wanted it.

“What is your name?”

“Elias.”

“Ibrahim,” Abdul's voice did not shift, which told the court the matter was already closed. “He is mine, now.”

*****

In the weeks after, Abdul kept Elias near his side like a falconer keeps his bird, half for the company and half to prove the reach of his own hand. He had the young man washed and fed. In the evenings that followed he called him in to read, and to turn the strange slant of his thinking into the Emir's own tongue.

Elias knew things no scholar in al-Andalus knew. Things they couldn't know. He spoke of far away peoples as if he had walked their roads, and of the fall of kingdoms with the ease of a man recalling his own street. Asked once how an empire ends, he said without thinking that it ends the way a man does – certain to the last hour that it will not. And every little while he would go still inside a sentence and look at Abdul from somewhere far away. Abdul called the distance shyness, or the slow thaw of a captive learning trust, and let it be. He did not ask what stood on the far side of that look. He did not want an answer that might cost him what he desired. What might cost his yearning to be sated.

He courted the young man the only way he knew how, which was to arrange for him to have whatever he wanted. He sent verses, and a robe the color of a pomegranate. He sat nearer in the lamplight than a master needs to sit, and watched the flame move on Elias’ pale face. He felt the old poems rise in him unbidden. He had chanted those lines as a young man and never once meant them. But for Elias, he did.

He took Elias to his bed on a night when the last call to prayer still hung in the dark air. He had pictured it many times, and in his imagination it was always a surrender – the falcon come at last to the hand of his master.

Elias came to him quiet and let himself be drawn down into the silk sheets of the divan, and turned his grave pale face up into the lamplight, so that for a moment Abdul hung above him the way the moon hangs above its own reflection in still waters, each gazing at the other across a reflection that neither can break.

“You have nothing to fear from me,” Abdul said, the palm of his hand pressed to Elias' cheek.

Elias looked up at him for a long while before saying anything. "I know," he said. Then, lower, as though the words had caught him unprepared: "That is the strange part."

Abdul held still, the way a man holds still for a wild animal that has come, against all sense, to feed from his open hand.

"Tell me," he said.

"I have been afraid since the day I came to your land." The evenness had gone out of Elias' voice, as he looked away, his gaze fixing in the distance before looking back at Abdul.

“But you… you are the most dangerous man in al-Andalus, and you are the only thing in it that has not frightened me."

Abdul ran his fingers gently through Elias’ hair. "Where do you go, when you leave me in the middle of a sentence and look at the wall as though it were a window?"

Elias was quiet for a moment. "Home. I go home. Though it is not a place I could walk you to. It is very far, and I do not think I will see it again." Something moved across Elias’ pale face. "You would not believe me if I told you how far."

"I have a long night, Elias, and nothing I would rather spend it on than hearing your words drip as honey from your tongue."

"Another night," Elias said, and the corner of his mouth came near to a smile. "First tell me about the red you hide under the dye."

Abdul went still. No one in twenty years had dared to ask. He looked down at this young man who read the malice under a dead poet's praise and, it seemed, could see the color under the Emir’s dyed beard.

He leaned down, kissing Elias on the nape of his neck, and then whispered into Elias’ ear. “I’ll tell you in the morning when I am washed clean. Then you can see the hair my mother gave me.”

Abdul shifted his kiss to Elias' lips, pressing tenderly, as his hands began to shift.

Then the door to his chambers opened abruptly.

Cold air from the corridor breezed over them before a hand twisted into the Emir’s hair wrenching his head back. Then the blade went deep into his back just below the shoulder blade, and turned.

No guard had stopped the intruder because the palace guards answered to the Chief of the Armies, and the Chief of the Armies had let himself in.

Abdul's strength left him all at once. He came down onto Elias like a wave crashing helplessly onto the shore, his whole weight settling onto the chest of the young man he had meant to keep, their faces a hand apart in the failing light.

Above them stood Ibrahim holding a bloodied dagger in his hand.

"You were never his," he said, as he rolled the Emir's body off the divan and lifted his marvel up onto his feet.

Elias turned back to look at the dead Emir on the floor, then back into the firey eyes of the General. He was uncertain of the future that lay ahead, biting back the yearning to go back home, as far away as it was.