The Last Emir Read online

  The Last Emir

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Copyright

  Al-Arak – the plain of Alarcos – north of the Guadiana River, central Spain, the border between the Moorish caliphate and the Christian kingdom of Castile

  18 July 1195

  Abu Rāshid Abd al-Azīz ibn al-Ḥasan sat astride his horse, sword gripped tight in mailed fist, eyes narrowed. They had suffered stronger setbacks over the first three hours of the battle than he had ever expected. The Christian knights had charged from the slopes beneath their castle and had smashed into the front lines like some great demon, sending men to heaven in droves, crushing the Berber volunteers and the other mercenary tribes. They had pressed on like an armoured dragon, their cursed cross pennants snapping in the breeze, climbing the lesser slope upon which the command unit of the vizier stood.

  Abd al-Azīz had watched with growing hate and the ever-increasing urge to charge as the powerful infantry of Al-Andalus were smashed and put to flight, and his rage had peaked when the great vizier himself fell to a Christian sword. That the Arabs under Yarmun ibn Riyah had begun to flank and enclose those rabid Christians was little consolation as the infidel tore through the ranks of the Faithful like a blade through wool.

  His eyes continually raked the ranks of friend and foe alike, as they had done for two days while the army rested for the coming conflict. The bastard was not here, not that Abd al-Azīz had expected him to be. His enemy had disappeared from the world of men, and not even this momentous conflict had drawn him out of hiding.

  His irritation and anger reached new heights and he glanced left, along the Almohad line to the Sultan Al-Mansur, who sat with a stoic patience. He almost exploded with pent-up aggression as the flag suddenly dipped, releasing the Almohad lines into the fray. Abd al-Azīz tore his gaze from his sultan and turned it instead upon the enemy.

  Despite their lesser numbers, the Christians had struck hard and achieved much, and even now were committing every man they could to press the attack and finish it. The accursed King of Castile himself rode among them, his red and white banner proudly displayed.

  Abd al-Azīz’s great enemy was not here, but as always had would sate his fury with a sea of Christian blood. He set his eyes upon the figure of the Castilian king and kicked his horse, urging it out ahead of the line. As he rode, he felt the song of the Prophet in his heart and the fiery hatred of his enemy pulsing through his veins.

  He was denied the king, for as the Almohad centre flowed like an all-consuming sea of lava into the tired Christians, the knights of one of their cursed orders – Santiago, he thought – pressed to their left to protect the monarch.

  Abd al-Azīz hit the Christians three heartbeats before any other warrior, such was his speed and the need to kill. His sword swept this way and that, each strike delivered with care and accuracy, each cut aimed to deliver a death blow or incapacity to horse or rider. Blood splashed across him from both left and right, as his victims fell in agony. He lost sight of all but his enemy, surrounded by them, yet untouched, armoured in Allah’s glory.

  Briefly, he caught sight of the king once more and, as he turned in an attempt to push that way, he realised that the Knights of Santiago had not just been protecting the king, they had been angling towards the Sultan Al-Mansur, aiming for the heart of the Almohad force. They were struggling, for they were tired, and the Almohads were every bit the match for them, but in a fiery moment he could see one of the knights suddenly find a space opening up, presenting a visible threat to the sultan. In an instant Abd al-Azīz turned his back on the Christian king and raced after the mail-clad knight, his surcoat of white displaying his red cross in the form of a point-down sword.

  Other knights of his order hurried across to protect that man, and with that Abd al-Azīz realised that the knight was no ordinary warrior, but the master of the order, a king of his own cursed kingdom. Knights tried to stop this violent Almohad horseman, protecting their master’s back as he pressed on to kill the sultan, but they fell like wheat to the blade of Abd al-Azīz. Blood was everywhere now, coating both him and his horse, such that all his garments were now crimson and soaked, even his mail shirt gleaming red. As the last of those priest-knights of the Order of Santiago fell, his neck open like a second mouth and blood spraying up into the air, Abd al-Azīz lifted his sword.

  ‘Allāhu akbar,’ he bellowed, holding aloft a blade so coated in gore that blood ran freely down it and engulfed his fist. This was what he was born for: to make the infidel bleed. The master of Santiago was not two horse lengths away from the sultan when Abd al-Azīz’s blade, unable to effectively threaten the mail of the knight, sank into his horse’s flank.

  The knight’s steed screamed and danced for a moment in pain, unable to bolt in the press of men. The master of Santiago lost his shield as he fought for control of his beast, trying to keep the wounded horse from bucking. His life was forfeit in that moment as Abd al-Azīz brought his sword around once more, droplets of men’s blood flying from it, and struck him levelly in the back of the neck.

  The knight’s armour prevented the blow from carving through flesh, but the sword struck with immense force and the man’s head snapped back in reaction so sharply that it was clear in a trice that his neck was broken. The master jerked and then lolled in his saddle.

  Abd al-Azīz met the gaze of Al-Mansur for a moment, in which the sultan recognised the great debt he owed this horseman of his army, but the warrior of Allah had only a passing care for this. His sultan was safe and of no further interest when there were so many Christians left to kill. He turned once more, realising now that the tide had truly turned in just a few short minutes. The army of Castile was all but surrounded, the sultan’s forces ascendant.

  The day was theirs, but many Christians would yet die before they could reach safety, and Abd al-Azīz vowed to leave as few as possible to flee the field.

  Lifting high his gore-coated sword, he vowed a hundred more corpses in the name of Allah and let forth a great roar of fury, then kicked his horse once more and returned to the fray to kill.

  Rourell, Iberia, the year of Our Lord 1199

  Following the dreadful siege that had brought the Templar house of Rourell to ruin and caused the fall of a number of knights, brothers and sisters, the community had slowly begun to rebuild. Over the autumn and winter the structures had been put right once more, the fields brought back to a reasonable state and work begun on the rebuilding of the burned-out shell of the water mill. The tenants who had not fled, both Moor and Christian, had largely returned with a level of chagrin and recomenced their work, and all had begun to settle.

  But the fact remained that Rourell, domain of the preceptrix Ermengarda, had never been the most popular or respected of Templar houses, even among their own ranks, thanks to the unorthodox nature of its mistress, and attracting new patrons and brethren proved harder than ever. Despite the need to keep every able-bodied person at work, by late wintertime the preceptrix had accepted Brother Balthesar’s proposal, and the two had begun to plan.

 
Winter turned to spring, and spring slowly gave way to summer, and less than a year into his time with the order, Arnau de Vallbona once more found himself preparing for the unknown…

  Chapter One

  Thursday, 3 June 1199

  Arnau stood at the rail of the ship, eyes locked on their destination, which was currently little more than a grey smudge, though coming closer with every passing minute. A thrill of excitement ran through him every time he anticipated the task that lay ahead, yet it remained threaded with overtones of fear and nervousness. If ever there were terra incognita for a man like Arnau, this was it.

  His gaze pulled back from the approaching shoreline, across the white-capped waves and back onto the ship. The vessel, the Marguerite, was a single-masted cog out of Perpignan. She was owned by a French trader who had maintained mercantile links with the island through times calm and volatile, carrying goods from northern Christian lands that were hard to acquire there, and returning each time with a hold full of the island’s apparently excellent citrus fruit to sell on in the markets of Roussillon. Marguerite was an old lady, with the veneer of paint already missing in places and odd boards of slightly different colours where they had been replaced over the years, but the captain assured them that she was still hale and strong. She had certainly weathered the journey well, though it had been far from a difficult voyage anyway.

  There were no other passengers, just Arnau and his companion, the grey-bearded knight Brother Balthesar d’Aixere, though those names had not been spoken since before they reached Perpignan. It seemed wrong somehow to Arnau to have been part of the Templar order for so little time thus far and spent so little of that displaying the order’s symbols. Following that dreadful siege last year, Arnau had settled into monastic life with gusto, though it had been far from a normal time. Every free moment had been spent not in training or in quiet contemplation, wearing a black robe, but with building works and repairs, and tending the graveyard with care, wearing a drab smock. The young sergeant had perhaps changed a little over that year, become stockier and harder with his labours, become more focused and careful in his day-to-day life, but the greatest revelation of his first year in the order had been that in essence he had changed surprisingly little.

  Balthesar, of course, never changed. The old, enigmatic knight had spent much of the winter working away carefully and quietly, recovering from the wound he had taken in the siege, all the while utilising what few moments of time he could find to seeking a way to do more than simply re-mortar the stones of the preceptory.

  Balthesar had maintained his stance that to fully rebuild Rourell, and to attract the brothers they needed to make the place viable, they had to find a great draw to bring the preceptory to prominence. With the division between Christian Iberia and the Moorish lands becoming ever more tense and dangerous in the aftermath of the dreadful battle of Alarcos, even sleepy Rourell, far from the frontier with the Moor, felt the pressure to arm and prepare for the coming days. A sacred relic would be sought to bring in much-needed manpower and funds. Balthesar had spent much time in libraries in Tarragona and Lleida, seeking tantalising hints of relics lost to Moorish control in the days of the conquest. It was not until spring that he settled upon the course they would pursue, and it took more than a month to secure the preceptrix’s permission, the funds required and all they would need for the mission.

  And then, after half a year of wearing the black robe of a Templar sergeant, albeit often overlaid with a beige smock, Arnau was once more garbed in civilian clothes, mounted up and following the old knight out of the preceptory and into the unknown. Balthesar had been unwilling to expound on his plans over the days of preparation, discussing the matter solely with the preceptrix, and it was only on their journey north and east through the Catalan lands that he had gone some way to explaining his ideas and his reasoning for their coming mission.

  Holy relics were sought after by all orders and all branches of the Church. Their very presence in a chapel brought pilgrims, esteem and, inevitably, money. A relic could turn a forgotten hamlet into a thriving city of God – had done so in fact, in places such as Santiago, Montserrat and Chartres. Often rifts and disputes would open up between groups over the ownership of the bones of a martyr, and sometimes such disputes resulted in saints having their bones kept in more than one location simultaneously. Sometimes there were even multiple skulls, which baffled Arnau and yet somehow seemed accepted by the Church. Such relics had been kept in the early days of the Christian world, as they were now – the Emperor Constantine’s mother was famed for collecting relics and taking them back to Rome. The Order of the Temple itself had brought back from the Holy City some of the most fabled relics in the world, which had, at least in part, been part of the strength that had helped drive the order to prominence. Iberia itself had its fair share of relics.

  Then came the Moors, crossing the water from Africa in successive waves of fanatical piety, seeking conquest and control. Their faith did not venerate the same figures, and Christian saints were not accorded appropriate respect under Moorish domination. In their surge across Iberia, the invaders destroyed many relics, and often with great glee. Some were saved by valiant men and carried far to the north where they were kept from heretical hands. Some Moorish lords, though, were more reasonable, and out of respect for what were clearly good men, even if they were Christian, kept relics safe, albeit out of the eye of the public.

  These were the subject of Balthesar’s researches: relics whose fate was not recorded. Trails that only led part of the way. The choice of relic to pursue had been relatively easy to narrow down. He had swept aside most potential relics for a very simple reason: the vast majority of Moorish Iberia now languished under the violent, strict control of the Almohad caliphate. Most certainly any relics that were found by these zealots would have been destroyed, and hunting for them in their domain would be extraordinarily dangerous anyway.

  Balthesar had settled upon the perfect choice, in his opinion. Though the trail was cold, vague and ended abruptly, its location made it a far more attractive proposition than those southern lands of pious hatred. The bones of Saint Stephen, Balthesar claimed, were to be found on the island of Manûrqa. His information was scant, but it seemed that sometime in the fifth century a bishop called Orosius had carried the bones from Africa, bound for Braga in Portugal. According to tantalising sources, the bishop only made it as far as Manûrqa, where he became embroiled in troubles with the local Jewish community and passed from records and, presumably, the living world. One thing was certain: the bones of Saint Stephen, protomartyr, never reached Braga.

  To Arnau, it did not sound like much to go on. In fact, it sounded like a complete fool’s errand, and while he could not deny the value such relics would have for Rourell, it seemed almost farcical to spend valuable time and effort chasing this tiny trail in the hope of securing one.

  Balthesar was of a different opinion. Any time Arnau had voiced his doubt on that ride to Perpignan, during their two weeks there as they secured a ship, and on the voyage from there south, towards Manûrqa, the old knight had simply smiled enigmatically and told his young companion to ‘have faith’.

  What faith, though, Arnau thought bitterly as he glanced at Balthesar and then down at himself. He was not at all keen on the disguise. It was bad enough wearing the clothes of a common labourer, but to be wearing their Moorish equivalent seemed appalling. Eschewing the colourful and interesting garb worn by the better classes of Moor, Balthesar had plumped for the drab grey gandura tunic, with an off-white burnous atop it, capped, literally, with a brown hat called a ghifara.

  Arnau had worried that he would not be able to remember the names of their apparel, but Balthesar had laughed and replied that Arnau was to play mute anyway. Similarly, the old knight had not chosen Moorish names for them. When Arnau had questioned that, Balthesar had shrugged and told him that sometimes names are best avoided and forgotten. They were dressed to be as forgettable as possible.

>   Fortunately their Iberian colouring and beards made them look all the more authentic, and Arnau had been rather surprised at how realistic he looked when Balthesar had found a mirror in Perpignan and they had examined their ensembles. In fact, that short time in the port city had been an eye-opener for the young sergeant on a number of levels. The most impressive shock had come when the old knight, garbed as he was in Moorish attire and earning cold glares from many of the Christians in the port, approached the various ship captains, enquiring of anyone bound for the Balearic Islands. He had adopted such a thick Moorish accent for his Spanish that it was hard to understand, and had repeatedly dropped into what sounded like thoroughly authentic Arabic. When Arnau questioned his apparent facility with the enemy tongue, Balthesar had brushed it aside as unimportant, though his seeming familiarity with all things Moorish only added to Arnau’s suspicion that Balthesar had chosen to seek the bones of Saint Stephen as much for their location as their intrinsic value.

  And here they were now, on board the Marguerite, ostensibly poor Moorish workers seeking passage to the islands and closing on Manûrqa at last. The ship’s sailors were busy with the sail, and at the stern the two men stood alone at the rail, some distance from any listening ear. Glancing around to make sure, Arnau cleared his throat.

  ‘Is Manûrqa part of Mayūrqa, then?’

  The old knight flashed him a hard look. ‘You are far too talkative for a mute.’

  ‘I cannot stay silent all the time. I’m keeping my voice low and we’re far from anyone listening.’

  Balthesar gave him a nod, conceding the point. ‘After a fashion, they are one. It is a separate island and always has been, but it is part of the taifa and ruled from Madina Mayūrqa.’

  Arnau nodded. In the old days, until perhaps half a century ago, the whole of Moorish Iberia – the lands they referred to as Al-Andalus – had consisted of taifas, independent Moorish kingdoms, each ruled by an emir. It had been a good time for the subjects of those lands – at least if the heavy taxation was ignored – who were allowed to worship as they wished, even teach and trade under their Moorish masters. And the fractured nature of the taifas had meant the danger to Christian lands in the north had been vastly reduced. But then the Almohads had come from Africa, rolling across the land in a wave of zealous violence, taking the taifas and disbanding them, forming one great caliphate ruled from Ishbiliyya, which the Christians called Seville. The taifas were all gone now, all consumed by the caliphate before Arnau’s birth. All except one: the island taifa of Mayūrqa had survived, largely due to its sea-girded isolation.