Aliena went back to her lodgings and lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. The baby grizzled but for once she ignored him. She was exhausted, disappointed, and homesick. It was not fair: she had trailed him all the way to Compostela, but he had gone somewhere else!
Since he had not gone back to the Pyrenees, and as there was nothing to the west of Compostela but a strip of coastline and an ocean that reached to the end of the world, Jack must have gone farther south. She would have to set off again, on her gray mare, with her baby in her arms, into the heart of Spain.
She wondered how far from home she would have to go before her pilgrimage came to an end.
Jack spent Christmas Day with his friend Raschid Alharoun in Toledo. Raschid was a baptized Saracen who had made a fortune importing spices from the East, especially pepper. They met at midday mass in the great cathedral and then strolled back, in the warm winter sunshine, through the narrow streets and the fragrant bazaar to the wealthy quarter.
Raschid’s house was made of dazzling white stone and built around a courtyard with a fountain. The shady arcades of the courtyard reminded Jack of the cloisters at Kingsbridge Priory. In England they gave protection from wind and rain, but here their purpose was to deflect the heat of the sun.
Raschid and his guests sat on floor cushions and dined off a low table. The men were waited on by the wives and daughters, and various servant girls whose place in the household was somewhat dubious: as a Christian, Raschid could have only one wife, but Jack suspected that he had quietly overlooked the Church’s disapproval of concubines.
The women were the greatest attraction of Raschid’s hospitable house. They were all beautiful. His wife was a statuesque, graceful woman with smooth dark-brown skin, lustrous black hair, and liquid brown eyes, and his daughters were slimmer versions of the same type. There were three of them. The eldest was engaged to be married to another dinner guest, the son of a silk merchant in the city. “My Raya is the perfect daughter,” Raschid said as she went around the table with a bowl of scented water for the guests to dip their hands in. “She is attentive, obedient and beautiful. Josef is a lucky man.” The fiancé bowed his head in acknowledgment of his good fortune.
The second daughter was proud, even haughty. She appeared to resent the praise lavished on her sister. She looked down at Jack while she poured some kind of drink into his goblet from a copper jug. “What is it?” he said.
“Peppermint cordial,” she said disdainfully. She disliked waiting on him, for she was the daughter of a great man, and he was a penniless vagabond.
It was the third daughter, Aysha, whom Jack liked most. In the three months he had been here he had got to know her quite well. She was fifteen or sixteen years old, small and lively, always grinning. Although she was three or four years younger than he, she did not seem juvenile. She had a lively, questioning intelligence. She asked him endless questions about England and the different way of life there. She often made fun of Toledo society manners—the snobbery of the Arabs, the fastidiousness of the Jews, and the bad taste of the newly rich Christians—and she sometimes had Jack in fits of laughter. Although she was the youngest, she seemed the least innocent of the three: something about the way she looked at Jack, as she leaned over him to place a dish of spicy prawns on the table, unmistakably revealed a licentious streak. She caught his eye and said “Peppermint cordial” in a perfect imitation of her sister’s snooty manner, and Jack giggled. When he was with Aysha he could often forget Aliena for hours at a time.
But when he was away from this house, Aliena was on his mind as much as if he had left her only yesterday. His memories of her were painfully vivid, although he had not seen her for more than a year. He could recall any of her expressions at will: laughing, thoughtful, suspicious, anxious, pleased, astonished, and—clearest of all—passionate. He had forgotten nothing about her body, and he could still see the curve of her breast, feel the soft skin on the inside of her thigh, taste her kiss, and smell the scent of her arousal. He often longed for her.
To cure himself of his fruitless desire he sometimes imagined what Aliena must be doing. In his mind’s eye he would see her pulling Alfred’s boots off at the end of the day, sitting down to eat with him, kissing him, making love to him, and giving her breast to a baby boy who looked just like Alfred. These visions tortured him but did not stop him from longing for her.
Today, Christmas Day, Aliena would roast a swan and re-dress it with its feathers for the table, and there would be posset to drink, made of ale, eggs, milk, and nutmeg. The food in front of Jack could not have been more different. There were mouth-watering dishes of strangely spiced lamb, rice mixed with nuts, and salads dressed with lemon juice and olive oil. It had taken Jack awhile to get used to Spanish cooking. They never served the great joints of beef, legs of pork and haunches of venison without which no feast was complete in England; nor did they consume thick slabs of bread. They did not have the lush pastures for grazing vast herds of cattle or the rich soil on which to grow fields of waving wheat. They made up for the relatively small quantities of meat by imaginative ways of cooking it with all kinds of spices, and in place of the ubiquitous bread of the English they had a wide variety of vegetables and fruits.
Jack was living with a small group of English clerics in Toledo. They were part of an international community of scholars that included Jews, Muslims and Arab Christians. The Englishmen were occupied translating works of mathematics from Arabic into Latin, so they could be read by Christians. There was an atmosphere of feverish excitement among them as they discovered and explored the treasure-house of Arab learning, and they had casually welcomed Jack as a student: they admitted into their circle anyone who understood what they were doing and shared their enthusiasm for it. They were like peasants who have labored for years to scratch a crop out of poor soil and then suddenly move to a rich alluvial valley. Jack had abandoned building to study mathematics. He had not yet needed to work for money: the clerics casually gave him a bed and any meals he wanted, and they would have provided him with a new robe and sandals if he had needed them.
Raschid was one of their sponsors. As an international trader he was multilingual and cosmopolitan in his attitudes. At home he spoke Castilian, the language of Christian Spain, rather than Mozarabic. His family also all spoke French, the language of the Normans, who were important traders. Although he was a man of commerce, he had a powerful intellect and a wide-ranging curiosity. He loved to talk to scholars about their theories. He had taken a liking to Jack immediately, and Jack dined at his house several times a week.
Now, as they began to eat, Raschid asked Jack: “What have the philosophers taught us this week?”
“I’ve been reading Euclid.” Euclid’sElements of Geometryhad been one of the first books translated.
“Euclid is a funny name for an Arab,” said Ismail, Raschid’s brother.
“He was Greek,” Jack explained. “He lived before the birth of Christ. His work was lost by the Romans but preserved by the Egyptians—so it comes to us in Arabic.”
“And now Englishmen are translating it into Latin!” Raschid said. “This amuses me.”
“But what have you learned?” said Josef, the fiancé of Raya.
Jack hesitated. It was hard to explain. He tried to make it practical. “My stepfather, the builder, taught me how to perform certain operations in geometry: how to divide a line exactly in half, how to draw a right angle, and how to draw one square inside another so that the smaller is half the area of the larger.”
“What is the purpose of such skills?” Josef interrupted. There was a note of scorn in his voice. He saw Jack as something of an upstart, and was jealous of the attention Raschid paid to Jack’s conversation.
“Those operations are essential in planning buildings,” Jack replied pleasantly, pretending not to notice Josef’s tone. “Take a look at this courtyard. The area of the covered arcades around the edges is exactly the same as the open area in the middle. Most small courtyards are built like that, including the cloisters of monasteries. It’s because these proportions are most pleasing. If the middle is bigger, it looks like a marketplace, and if it’s smaller, it just looks as if there’s a hole in the roof. But to get it exactly right, the builder has to be able to draw the open part in the middle so that it’s precisely half the area of the whole thing.”
“I never knew that!” Raschid said triumphantly. He liked nothing better than to learn something new.
“Euclid explains why these techniques work,” Jack went on. “For example, the two parts of the divided line are equal because they form corresponding sides of congruent triangles.”
“Congruent?” Raschid queried.
“It means exactly alike.”
“Ah—now I see.”
However, no one else did, Jack could tell.
