“The western gate in front of Yehoshua’s slaughterhouse was the best-traveled entrance into and exit out of the city, facing Toulouse and Carcassonne and the paths through the mountains to Sepharad. It was the first stop for the shepherds, the final stop for the soldiers of the Muslim Caliph of Cordoba who ruled Narbonne. There were many times that Yehoshua fried a last supper of sheep’s liver with fermented apple for the quartermaster and his whore, as his father loaded the army wagon with the hindquarters and tripe that were permitted the Muslims and their soldiers but not the Jewish people. Yehoshua became rich, within the limits of Jewish wealth. He married, fathered three girls and a boy. His father died. He became richer still.
“His son Moses was born the day the Caliph of Cordoba ordered the gates of Narbonne closed. It was in the 4513th year since the creation of the world according to Yehoshua’s Jewish calculator, which the Caliph calculated as 133 years from the flight of his Prophet from Mecca to Medinah, and Pepin the King of the Franks reckoned at 752 after the death of his God. This same Pepin also reckoned Narbonne would make a good seaport for his kingdom. For a while, the soldiers of the Caliph dissuaded this Frankish inclination, and the family of the Jewish farmer Solomon Ben David, who in the summer grazed his cattle along the salt marshes to a distance of several leagues to the west and in the winter fed them only apples in the belief that the wisdom of the Tree of Knowledge would filter through the several stomachs and udders of his cattle into the Jews of Narbonne, was able to bring its animals to Yehoshua’s slaughterhouse. But within a few months, it became clear to the Caliph of Cordoba that Pepin had designs upon his city and that closed gates saved lives. The family of Solomon Ben David brought his herd into Narbonne, where he bedded down fifty head of cattle and twice that number of sheep and goats in pens attached to Yehoshua’s house that he had erected and stocked with apples and grain with the foresight of someone who believes that all adversity is temporary.
“Even when Pepin’s soldiers surrounded the city and it became clear that the Franks were not going away soon, Yehoshua managed to provide the Jews of Narbonne with fresh kosher meat and still leave enough fertile livestock to replenish the supply. Ibn Suleiman at the eastern gate did the same for his Muslims.
“In the second year of the siege, Yehoshua’s son Moses began to accompany his father on his rounds.
“In the third year, as the Franks torched the fields around Narbonne and the grain, and even the apples gave way to rot and evaporation, Solomon Ben David looked the other way, and Yehoshua began to slaughter the younger animals. In the fourth year, in the words of Yehoshua, there was nothing left but coitus. But so joyless were those unions, so empty of the essential juice of life, that they produced no babies, only wormlike spirits that slithered along the cracks in the earth then found their ways out the gutters or through the air past the wretched Moors. By the fifth year, Yehoshua’s family was eating rats. By the sixth year, Solomon Ben David was dead. “As the shochet, the ritual butcher for the Jews of Narbonne, Yehoshua had long been familiar with death. Not his son. From the time he could talk, Moses asked why the animals had to die. There was nothing accusatory in his questions. More a desire to learn all the angles, all the curves, all the possible rationales so he could separate out the excuses for death in a search for something that Yehoshua never had time to ponder — the truth. Moses knew enough, six years into the siege and his own brief life, to hold his tongue on the mornings when he woke to find strangers whispering in the dawn shadows, or on the nights when other shadows came to purchase half a dozen gas-filled bladders that Yehoshua larded with small stones and nails for use as bombs against the Franks. By the age of six, Moses had already figured out that humans shared a common ancestor with cattle. Putting the combustible bladders of dead villagers to use against the enemy was only an admission of the universal goal of survival.
“As the seventh year shone upon a changed Narbonne, Yehoshua — his wife, his daughters, his sons — found themselves thigh high in the filth and decay of siege. The little food that managed to bribe its way past the sentries never went out as shit, in fear that the Franks might use it as fuel or pile it up against the outer walls of Narbonne to weaken or surmount them. Before the siege, there had been two thousand Jews in Narbonne and five times that number of Muslims. By the seventh year, only one quarter of the population remained.
“And then the morning came when Yehoshua rose and Moses did not. Yehoshua let his dead son lie, told his wife and daughters not to disturb him. By then, his wife’s movements were limited and her thoughts shifted only when Yehoshua could barter his bomb-making skills for a cup of flour or a fistful of radish greens and pour a spoonful of the gruel into her devastated mouth. Two nights later, Moses’s belly began to swell with a stench more familiar to her nose than all the other perfumes of death. Yehoshua began to wrap him methodically with sharp little things that found their way into his empty mangers on dark nights. It was then that his wife rose from the straw. She didn’t have the strength to yell with the force of protest. But her eyes reflected Yehoshua’s own pain, magnified his own doubt, and generated a new thought. In its clarity, its crystalline purity, the message was simple. Enough. Thou shalt not turn the corpse of thy son into a weapon. It was time to stop making money from death. It was time to sell the living. It was time to sell the Muslims to the Franks.
“And that is how it came to pass, in the seventh year of the siege, in the years 4520, 140, and 759, respectively, that the trust of Ibn Suleiman and the Muslims of Narbonne and all the shadowy figures who had passed over the years through Yehoshua’s slaughterhouse was butchered in one night of betrayal, one moonless opening of the western gate to the Frankish soldiers, one hour of soundless slaughter — for how can a starving people, even Muslims, inured by religion to fasting, scream? But Yehoshua’s people, the Jews, his wife, his daughters, were spared.”
“But Septimania?” Isaac remonstrated. “Why should I care about your bomb-making butcher, your Judas of a Jew? I asked about Septimania.”
I winced, but in the dark Isaac noticed nothing. Methodically I packed a fresh pipe with tobacco, lit it with the candle Isaac’s mother had brought to the garden, and continued.
“The next morning, Yehoshua found himself in the presence of the son of the Frankish King Pepin. Charles was merely a prince at the time, a few years older than Yehoshua’s poor, dead son Moses, and a decade away from his future baptism as Charlemagne, Carlo Magno, Charles the Great. And it was to be another forty years until Pope Leo III crowned Charles Holy Roman Emperor in the Basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome. But on this particular morning, in exchange for his treachery, in thanks for delivering Narbonne to the Franks and ridding the kingdom of the Moors, the young King Charles gave Yehoshua a gift. The King promised the Jews royal deeds to Narbonne, and to the cities of Béziers, Elne, Agde, Lodève, Maguelonne, and Nîmes.”
“Seven cities!” Isaac said.
“Yes,” I said. “This, Isaac, is the Septimania of which I spoke. The Jewish Kingdom of Septimania arose from Yehoshua’s betrayal.”
“Hmm,” Isaac said. “Couldn’t have been much of a kingdom if Charlemagne gave it to the Jews. Certainly I’ve never read of it in any of the histories.”
“There are kingdoms that exist just outside the periphery of our vision,” I replied, “as surely as there are more heavenly bodies in the sky than have been seen by Signor Galileo’s cannocchiale. And there are rulers who guide the affairs of men and women with a wisdom as clear and invisible as the Laws of Nature.”