Red Smoking Mirror E-Book

Nick Hunt

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'With Red Smoking Mirror, Nick Hunt has created the love child of JG Ballard and Ursula K Le Guin' - Joanna Pocock, author of Surrender The year is 1521 in the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan. Twenty-nine years earlier, Islamic Spain never fell to the Christians, and Andalus launched a voyage of discovery to the New Maghreb. For two decades the Jewish merchant Eli Ben Abram, who led the first ships across the sea, has maintained a delicate peace in the Moorish enclave of Moctezuma's breathtaking capital, assisted by his Nahua wife Malinala. But the emperor has been acting strangely, sacrifices are increasing at the temples, a mysterious sickness is spreading through the city, and there are rumours of a hostile army crossing the sea… A bravura reimagining of an alternate history, Red Smoking Mirror is a richly written novel of love and fate, of how cultures co-operate and clash, and of how individuals can shape and are shaped by the times they live through.

Leseprobe

In fourteen hundred ninety-twoColumbus sailed the ocean blueHe had three ships and left from SpainHe sailed through sunshine, wind and rain

Anonymous

We eat of the earthThen the earth eats us

Nahua saying

897149213 Knife

We were seven weeks at sea, but I do not like to think of it. In truth I do not remember much but flooded decks and storms at night and a ragged steady howl and the suspicions of the crew and waking up in fear. I sailed in the foremost ship. The other ships came behind. The greasy waves rolled against the hull and broke in cannon-blasts of foam and everything was always slick and I always had the sickness.

At sunrise and at noon and in the afternoon and at sunset and at night the faithful faced towards the east, which was the direction of the home that all of us had left. Their prayers went whitely with the wake. I alone faced to the west, as I am facing still.

We were seven weeks at sea and then came distant flocks of birds, so small I took them for flies at first. Strange, that I would see flies before birds. Then my eyes found their range. There was a pale heap of land resolving itself from the sea, separating from the sky. I watched as it became itself, as nothing became something.

A sailor standing near to me was the first of us to shout, and then the other men were shouting out from ship to ship and some of them were singing. I blocked my ears to the noise. The solemn bunching of the clouds. I knew an uncovering was at hand and I wanted some quiet within me. But then the horses sensed the land and started thumping in their stalls, and from high up on the mast a man cried God is great! The quietness could not endure. So it was that the ships of the caliph crossed the Sea of Darkness.

The gunwale’s weathered wood was cool and wet beneath my hands. My clothing, when it brushed my skin, was so hot it burned. As we met the island’s swell my stomach wallowed with the sickness that had ailed me for days and I hung from the prow, a figurehead, and heaved into the foam. No one saw me retch and spit. They did not regard me. As the anchors rattled down I studied the pale depths below, where silver fish were taking morsels of what I had expelled. This was my first offering to the New Maghreb.

When I raised my eyes again I saw what the others saw, and like them I understood nothing of what it was. The green of trees. The white of sand. The black of rock. The white of surf. And against the surf the swarm of mushrik kanoas, sharp and dark, as they slipped from their coves to meet us.

92715213 House

· One ·

She takes me by the hand and says, The smoke is on the mountain.

It is only cloud, I say.

It is more than cloud, she says.

We have come to the place of willow trees to watch the caravan depart. But the call has not yet come and so we watch the mountain. The mountain stands beyond the lake, its slopes rising bare and blue, the same parched colour as the sky. The lake is dull because the sun has not yet met the water.

We stand together looking up at the far naked peak. A foaming whiteness spews and rolls, clings to the mountain’s sides. My wife has younger eyes than I.

It is smoke, she says again.

Perhaps, I say.

She is seldom wrong.

Do you hear it speak? she says.

We stand together listening. I do not hear the mountain. All I hear is the morning wind, the cry of a bird I cannot name, the gentle lapping of small waves against the floating gardens.

No, I say.

It is sleeping now. But it spoke last night, she says.

My wife goes to the waterside and dips her ankles in. The water’s skin appears to flinch as if it is repulsed. She tweaks the hem of her white dress and steps a little deeper in. Bright bubbles break the surface.

It spoke while you snored, she says, without looking back at me. The water laps her calves, her knees.

Not too far in, I say.

I am mistrustful of the lake as I was mistrustful of the sea. For a man who has drifted far I do not like the water. A mountain does not speak, I say, correcting her as I do with declining frequency these days. A mountain rumbles, booms or roars. It does not possess a voice.

Everything speaks, she says.

Thigh-deep now, her dress held high, she wades along the shallow shore. The floating beds are fulsome with crops before the harvest. Idly, as if thoughtlessly, she snaps off a cob of maiz and proffers me some yellow grains.

When I shake my head she shrugs and casts the maiz on the water.

A mushrik boy is watching us. Bare-footed, with a shaven skull, six or seven years of age, he is lurking in the trees where the road forks to the city gate. He might be hunting rats or water-gods.

I smile and call a greeting.

At first I think I am the cause of the fear on his face. I am used to this. Such fear is innocent. But his eyes are on my wife and the maiz floating on the lake. That wanton, wasted offering.

My wife’s gaze fixes on him.

The child appears caught in fright but my wife speaks a word I do not know, something sharp that releases him, and he vanishes among the trees. The maiz bobs up and down. Ripples slowly spread from it, rolling out across the lake. I feel uneasy watching them, as I do increasingly.

Men are made of maiz, she says.

We are made of dust, I say.

Water glistens on her shins as she wades back onto shore. A slimy stripe of green weed is stuck between her toes. My eyes climb to the peak again, to the cloud-smoke bulging from its snout.

My man of dust, says my wife.

And with that I am joyful.

The rising sun has cleared the hills. Light spills across the valley. The dark lake turns to silver shards, scintillating blindingly, and the ripples from the broken maiz portend nothing more than peace rolling out across the world, its circles ever widening. The two of us are standing here at its very centre.

I am happier here, a foreigner, than I have been anywhere.

We stand together in the light. Her hand joins my hand.

Then from behind us comes the call, a single ululating voice, followed by the clash of drums and the twang of stringed instruments, and then the cries, the groans of beasts, the clattering hooves, the dust, the din.

We turn towards the city gate. The caravan is leaving.

The mushriks say it is the greatest sight in all of Mexica. Six hundred camels swaying through the gate of Tenochtitlan. Out they come in single file, their loads stacked high upon their backs, their lips curled back, their eyelids low, with expressions of great suffering. Red pom-poms bounce around their necks. Green banners fly above them. Twelve cavalrymen ride ahead on shining black and chestnut mares, then a herald with a horn, and behind him strides the first camel, and the second, and the third. One camel-driver hacks and spits. Another plucks an oud. The causeway shudders with the beat as they mount the floating road that connects the city to the shore, where the smoking mountain lies. And beyond the mountain, the high pass that is called the Moor’s First Sigh. And beyond the pass, the brown plains, the verdant coast, the shining sea.

And beyond that, Andalus.

The caravan is bunched up now, the camels loping nose to tail, but once it has crossed the floating road it will elongatefor miles. The dust of its passing can be seen from fifty miles away, they say.

The ugly deer! the mushriks cry.

They call our horses swift deer and our camels ugly deer.

Atop the humps of the ugly deer are balanced tough, sun-hardened men, undulating with their loads, brandishing long whips. Camel-drivers from the sandy deserts of the Old Maghreb, I should think of them as my countrymen, but they are another breed.

Peace be with you, I call, seeing one I recognise. He mutters something back.

At times these men are hostile because of what I am. A dhimmi, a protected person and a person of the book, but not a person of the faith. I am like them but not like them. I do not judge their prejudice. If there is one thing I have learned it is how not to judge.

My wife stands next to me, watching in the way she does. Her expression seems far away but I know she is noting everything. The camel-drivers look at her and then quickly look away.

A charm against the evil eye hangs around one camel’s neck. Around another, a star and moon.

A hooded baggage guard slides past with an arquebus across his knees.

The procession rumbles on and on. The mushriks laugh and stare.

In those swaying camel-bags are bales of the finest cloth, ayate fibre, dried tubaq, quetzal feathers, jaguar skins, ornately worked jade ornaments, obsidian, silver, powdered gold, tortoiseshell, tomatl seeds, balls of uli, amaranth and Mexica’s other wondrous goods.

Yours are coming, says my wife.

She counts the loads as they go past, forty packs on forty beasts, marked with the sigil of my house.

The greatest shipment we have sent. My fortune in xocolatl.

My wife says something in her tongue, a prayer to the Lord of the Nose, god of merchants and travellers, whose symbol is a bunch of reeds.

God protect you, I say to my xocolatl.

Behind the camels come scores of mules roped one behind the next, backs bent beneath their loads. Strong deer, the mushriks call them. And at last some Berbers herding sheep, which are not bound for the sea but for the fertile pastureland between this valley and the coast, where they will graze under guard. They will return as meat and wool for the markets of the city.

The caravan is on the lake. Its head has reached the furthest shore.

Dust hangs in the air behind, collapsing like a blanket.

For twenty years I have watched these caravans leave and return, and it is still a miracle.

It is my miracle.

We turn our backs on the lake and look towards the city gate. It is the Gate of the South, of the Left-Handed Hummingbird. His sullen idol squats above, grimacing like a child. A flaming sun stands over it.

Together we walk beneath.

My wife’s name is Malinala, which means Woman of the Grass. She was born a Nahua slave but has been much elevated.

My name is Eli Ben Abram. I have been elevated too. I was born a dhimmi, a Jew in the Caliphate of Andalus.

We make an unusual coupling as we pass along the streets, through the sunlight and the shade, on bridges over green canals. She in her white dress and me in black with my bleached skullcap, sun-damaged, sweating through my beard. She is young and I am old, between us almost thirty years.

But this is a city, and an age, of unusual couplings.

The air feels disturbed from the passing of the caravan. Everyday city life is filling back in behind. A woman with black shining braids is sprinkling water on the dust, tamping it down with her feet. A man sits in the shade with a heap of spoiled kasava. We pass the Street of the Artisans and the Place of the Obsidian-Polishers, past the vegetable marketplace and the shrine to the Dog-Headed God, darkly stained, alive with flies. A naked child plays near it. Down a long stone avenue I catch a glimpse of some great lord passing in his palanquin, carried by costumed slaves, like a distant feathered bird.

From far away comes music and a smudge of purple smoke.

We come to the Moorish Quarter marked by the Caliph’s Gate, which is an archway made of mud. The archway is a symbol as is so much else. The usual man is standing guard, chewing on some kind of root which makes him salivate green juice. The cobblestones around his boots are splattered with expectorations.

He greets me punctiliously, lowering his scimitar. There is a scrape upon his cheek as if he has been fighting.

All is well? I ask.

Well enough, he answers.

The courtyard, deserted at this time, has not yet flooded with scalding light. The sun will take another hour to clear the steep stone buildings. Butterflies meander over stunted citrus trees in pots. The broken fountain gurgles, its workings gummed with slime. Shoes are lined up by the mosque, beyond which is the synagogue, protected by the caliph’s law.

The caliph’s law reaches even here, across the Sea of Darkness.

I unlock the door to our rooms with the key I wear around my neck. The lock and key I ordered all the way from Qurtubah. The mushriks do not have locks like ours, as they do not have keys like ours. Their locks and keys are invisible. It takes time to understand them.

First I must do the paperwork relating to the caravan. Columns in ledgers must be filled, stamps stamped and seals sealed. I work at my small desk in the corner of the largest room, where the daylight penetrates. Candles are in short supply and expensive here. While I write, Malinala heats the pan to toast the beans.

When the smell reaches me, great happiness arises.

This is the finest hour, while the faithful are at prayer and there is no one to demand that I attend to this or that. No requests, beseechments, emergencies or questions. Just me at my desk and Malinala at the pan, goading the embers into flame. The scrape of the pestle as it grinds. The bubbling of water.

Next to my accounts of trade, and vastly more significant, are the chronicles of my travels in the New Maghreb. Twenty-nine battered tomes, one for every year. Beside them are my lexicons in Arabic and Mayayan, Mayayan and Nahuatl, Nahuatl and Arabic, without which I would not be here. Without which we would not behere.

Malinala stirs the pan and pours in boiling water.

How long? I ask in Nahuatl.

Too long, she says in Arabic.

Just a silly game we have.

This is the finest hour.

Also gathered on my desk are the part-translated codices, the glyphs of flowers, feathers, flames, houses, serpents, spears and rain, the squat, squared pictograms I have copied where I find them. And my notes upon the calendar with its day-counts and its year-counts, its interlocking wheels of time, a system of intricate and immense complexity that I am a poor student of, having no one to teach me.

There are those, both Moor and Mexica, that would call this heresy.

On the high shelf on the wall are the other precious things I own. My Torah and my Qur’an, wrapped in their black velvet. A gold menorah made for me by the Mayayans of Yuqqatan as a parting present years ago. A conch-shell from the Qarib Sea. And an iron chest containing the papers that not even my wife has seen.

How long now? I ask.

Long enough, she says.

I put my pen and ink away and close the balance book. This year’s caravan is gone. For the morning I can rest. By the window is a divan that receives my body now.

My wife brings the steaming cup. The steam is lanced by sunlight.

First I bring it to my nose and slowly, sumptuously inhale. It is like standing at the edge of a sweet, dark cloud.

I bring the cup to my lips and perform the first sip. It scalds. I take one burning gulp.

My heart expands. My blood thumps. Everything seems ringed with light. The dark cloud envelops me. I close my eyes.

The xocolatl does not bring sleep. It brings vigour and energy. It sharpens every sense, unblunts the dullness of the world. But my habit is to recline and let its life course through me.

I allow myself one cup a day. Others indulge more freely. For the Mexica of Tenochtitlan this drink is strictly circumscribed, drunk only at certain festivals or regularly by the priests, the noble lords, the emperor, who has the status of a god. The common folk might pass their lives without so much as smelling it.

They frown upon our appetites. But we are greedy people.

And now the xocolatl beans are packed and shipped across the sea, to be imbibed in lands the mushriks can barely conceive of. In Andalus and the Old Maghreb, the Christian kingdoms of the Franks, in Genoa, Venice, the Levant. And the dirhams flow back west to fill columns in my ledgers.

I think of the swaying camel-bags, in the foothills of the mountains now. Tomorrow they will cross the pass of the Moor’s First Sigh.

I think of perfumed viziers in the great cities of Andalus, sipping xocolatl by fountains or in shaded orange groves. It is rumoured that the caliph himself takes it on occasion.

Malinala hums a wordless tune as she lifts the cup away. She lies down next to me, her head upon my arm.

It is a time of stillness now. After the ascent, the fall.

I forget about the broken maiz and the smoking mountain.

Dhimmi, comes the voice again.

It is the second or third time.

Wake up, dhimmi, the voice repeats. The council has been called.

Opening my eyes, I find that the sunlight has moved across the wall. It must be some time after noon. I feel stunned and bewildered. My arm is dead because my head has crushed the blood out of it.

Malinala is not in sight. My mouth tastes foul and bitter.

In the open doorway stands the silhouette of a man. I recognise him as a middling merchant of tubaq. He lingers there awkwardly, unsure of the etiquette, embarrassed to discover me asleep.

It is starting now, he says.

Though I am already dressed, I ask him for some time to dress. He departs thankfully after making a clumsy bow.

When I stand I find myself still half-caught in a land of dreams but I cannot hold onto them. I have never remembered dreams.

I splash water on my face and run a comb through my beard. I am unaccustomed to sleeping in the daytime.

Malinala? I call.

She is not in the smaller room, or the room in which we sleep.

She must have business somewhere else. It has always been this way.

Something vaguely troubles me, as small things seem to do these days. Perhaps it is my age and the small pains in my bones. Dhimmi. They did not used to call me that, not as a manner of address. They used to call me by my name, as I call them by theirs.

It is not a term of disrespect, but it is not not disrespect.

It does not mean anything. No matter what they call me.

By tradition the merchants’ council does not meet in the Moorish Quarter but above a warehouse in the district of the jade-mongers. The jade-mongers are Zapotecs from a country far to the south, so they are strangers here like us, though we are much more strange. They speak a language of their own that I do not understand and Malinala does not understand, and keep themselves to themselves in guilds that permit no one in, not even the Mexica. The city is strictly zoned according to nation, rank and trade. In this sense it is similar to the cities of Andalus.

That is why we meet there, as foreigners among foreigners. It is by the emperor’s dispensation, as is everything.

The walk to that district takes me through the city’s narrow northern streets, away from the grand public centres of commerce and ceremony. The road is made of mud, not stone. The canals are brown and stagnant. An old woman with blue teeth is grilling fish from the lake beside a pool of effluence, causing me to step around. Oil spits from their charred skins and blind, pale eyes.

The distance is not so great but I wish I had a mule. But we are forbidden from riding deer within the city.

As a dhimmi, I was once forbidden from riding deer in Andalus. But when I came to the New Maghreb many things became possible. The first time I rode a horse was on the island of Qubah, as our delegation went to visit an important chief. I cannot now recall his name. There have been many names.

Two mushrik labourers barge past with bales of rushes on their backs, stooped double as they walk. They do not even see me.

From the dimness of his shop an artisan glances up, alarmed, a hammer and awl poised in his hands. Before him lies a stone mask, its face an unearthly green.

A gang of children follows me, three boys and two girls. The younger girl appears to wander in a kind of daze. Her mouth hangs like an idiot’s. Dust is in her hair. I cannot keep from glancing back to watch her as she stumbles on. Her companions leave her behind. I leave them behind.

The warehouse is for storing grain, which covers the floor in mounded dunes. I am sweating as I climb the stairs. The door is unattended.

The room is spacious, unadorned, with squat pillars around its walls. Dusty sunlight falls like golden soup on those assembled. A few familiar faces nod to me, then turn away. The formalities must be done. The council is in session.

Thirty men are gathered here, some cross-legged, some on stools, some in simple skullcaps and some in turbans of bright cloth, some clean-shaven, some moustached, some with orange-hennaed beards. Small jewels gleam in earlobes. Teaspoons twirl in glasses. Some wear their fortunes on display, others keep their wealth concealed under plainer travelling clothes, but all these men have influence. In the middle of the floor stands Abd al-Wahid Ibn Nasr.

Come, Eli, he says, gesturing to an empty seat.

I glance at the man who called me dhimmi, but he is shuffling papers.

You have not missed much, says Abd al-Wahid. Reports on this morning’s caravan. Market rates, the usual things. One of the kasava sellers has been cheating us again. But we have something bigger to discuss. We have word of Benmessaoud.

There is a stirring in the room but not much more than that. As if a breeze has whispered through and quietly departed.

Some xocolatl is going round, but from its smell, even from here, I can tell that it is badly made. The beans are burnt. Not enough chilli. Too much tlilxochitl-pod. I decline and accept instead a glass of tea from a silver pot with a spout shaped like an elephant’s trunk. The tea falls in a slender stream, bringing mint and sweetness.

Our informants say he crossed the sea a month ago, says Abd al-Wahid. We do not know if he resupplied in Qubah or Yuqqatan. But now it appears that he has sailed much further up the western coast. The Mayayans counted sixteen ships.

He is coming, then, says someone.

He might be coming, says someone else. The New Maghreb is vast enough. Might he not be tempted somewhere else?

All roads lead to Mexica, says Abd al-Wahid.

Abd al-Wahid is dressed in a loose brown robe and a turban of bleached ayate cloth, plain but for a quetzal feather pinned at its centre. His heavy face runs into jowls. He wears a snowy beard. He is a substantial man, both tall and fat at the same time, his body cushioned generously. Of the thirty merchants in this room, he is one of only three who came here in the founding fleet.

The second of them, Mohammed Issa, wears a robe of brilliant green with Mexica patterns around its hem. He is sitting with his eyelids closed. Perhaps he is asleep.

The third of them is the dhimmi who has just poured tea.

All the rest have departed now, some years ago, some decades. Some returned to Andalus with fortunes either lost or made. Some remained in Qubah to act as middlemen. Others travelled west, or north, in search of cities made of gold, or to establish trading posts, and else returned or did not. Others died and were buried here, with their faces towards Makkah.

We must assume he is coming, says Abd al-Wahid. Or at least that he intends to come. The Tlaxcalans will surely direct him here, as they did with us. The question is what he will do when he gets here. And what the emperor will do.

When did you last see the emperor? asks one of the younger merchants.

The question is directed at me. I feel the weight of eyes. I pause to take a sip of tea. Too much sugar. Not enough mint.

I think about Malinala.

Eli? says Abd al-Wahid. When did you last see Moctezuma?

It has been some months, I say. I believe the last time was before the Festival of Rain.

And was he in good health? he asks.

He was not in bad health, I say.

You used to visit more frequently, says a silver merchant from Gharnatah. Why has he not sent for you? Did he grow bored of your company? Did you displease him in some way?

Not as far as I know, I say.

And what did you talk about? he asks.

For the most part, backgammon.

At this there is general laughter.

It is not a joke, I say.

Thank you, Eli, says Abd al-Wahid. The emperor mentioned nothing of a Moorish army crossing the sea?

He did not, I say. But he has spies and messengers like us. Perhaps even the same spies and messengers.

Ha! cries the silver merchant, though no one else reacts.

Abd al-Wahid stalks the room with his big hands clasped behind his back. On his feet are slippers of gold brocade, pointed at the tips. There are rings upon his fingers and a pendant around his neck, a pale green stone that holds the light.

We have a careful balance here, he says, stepping here and there. Benmessaoud will tip the scales.

That goat-fucker, someone says.

There is uproar in the room.

Please, protests Abd al-Wahid, but everyone is talking at once.

Fanatics, illiterates! cries the merchant next to me. Why would the caliph send them here?

They are men of God!

Of gold, more like…

Bandits! Plunderers!

Mohammed Issa opens his eyes and stares around, bewildered.

Peace! bellows Abd al-Wahid. You are worse than drunken Christians!

By degrees the clamour subsides.

I take another sip of tea.

A water-pipe has now appeared, its bowl filled with tubaq leaves. Drinking smoke is not a habit I have ever taken to. The first time I attempted it, it made me cough until I cried. It made me almost as sick as I had been at sea.

But people are drinking smoke these days across the caliphate, they say, even on the steps of the Great Palace at Qurtubah.

The burnt xocolatl is passed one way, the bubbling water-pipe the next. Everyone is chewing sunflower seeds and spitting their husks upon the floor. I see the scene through the eyes of the Mexica.

Through the eyes of Benmessaoud.

We are greedy people.

A fly is circling the room, bumping against the pillars and walls. From outside, from far away, drifts the sound of flutes and drums.

Eli? says Abd al-Wahid.

The weight of eyes again.

Sorry, I did not hear, I say.

We would like you to go to the Black House to converse with the emperor. Try to gauge his state of mind. Find out what he knows, whether he knows anything.

Well, we can try, I say.

If Benmessaoud’s army comes, will he open the gates of the city or will he keep them closed? Will he sink the floating roads?

We will see what we can learn, I say.

And Eli, he says quietly, you should leave your wife at home.

The assembly seems to stir again, touched by another passing breeze.

My wife is my mouth, I say.

At this there are a few coarse laughs from the vulgar-minded in the room.

My voice, I say. She is my voice.

Abd al-Wahid looks sad. You speak Nahuatl well enough, he says. You have your own voice now.

When I step outside, the drifting music of the flutes and drums has ceased.

A hairless dog stands watching me, its ears alert, grotesquely bald, its skin the colour of blue maiz. I give the creature a wide berth, as would a Moor of any faith, and hope it does not follow me. It does not follow me.

On my way back through the streets I see the little girl again. The one who seemed an idiot, wandering behind her friends. She is alone, crouched on the ground, examining a flat stone.

Her posture makes me curious, so I divert towards her.

When I am standing over her I see that she has prised the stone from a nest of black ants, revealing the corridors they have made in the soft brown earth. The ants teem in emergency patterns and the little girl watchesthem.

Her face and arms are marked with livid blotches, pink and puce.

Good sun, I say in Nahuatl. She does not look up.

She is holding what seem to be grains of white rice. As I watch she adds another to the growing pile. They are not grains of rice but the eggs of the ants, which she lifts between finger and thumb while using a small stick to fend the ants away.

What are you doing, child? I ask. Still she does not look at me. But her hand becomes a fist, hiding the eggs from my eyes as if they were a treasure.

Another man is standing guard with the usual man who is standing guard. I have not seen this man before. He is slight, narrow-faced, with a shaven upper lip.

All is well? I ask. I am not in the mood for talk but the question is a courtesy.

All is well, says the usual man. He steps aside to let me pass. The gnawed root protrudes from his teeth like a ravaged bone.

Peace be with you, says the other man.

And with you, I answer.