“Yehoshua is a very wise man,” Gan said. “He has read none of the books I have brought with me — he is not, in fact, a reader by inclination nor ability. But he is wiser, perhaps, than both of us put together. You understand the price of maintaining power. He has learned the price of attaining it. And it has worn canyons of a measureless depth. In his face and in his soul.”
“And what is that price?”
“Sacrifice.”
“The shochet, in the days of the Temple, lived up to his elbows in the business of sacrifice. The unlettered shochet could not read the rules of sacrifice, the ones written by Moses for the use of those of us who crossed over to the Promised Land. But when, every week, you sacrifice half a dozen cows, thirty or forty sheep and goats, hundreds of chickens and assorted birds of the wild, who has time to read? You learn from your father, the way he learned from his father before him.”
We were sitting at table, just the three of us. Yehoshua had shown no surprise when Gan ushered me forward as the Ambassador from Baghdad. He spoke a fluent Arabic, tinged, of course, with the Moorish accent of our distant cousins who had once been his neighbors. There was a woman of sorts who appeared with an extra plate and knife, an extra cup. Yehoshua pointed to our seats, sang the prayers over the bread and the wine, and then began the explanation of his craft. It sounded to my ears like he was making excuses, excuses for his betrayal of his Muslim neighbors twenty years before in Narbonne. But that could be the fault of the Moorish accent.
“The first father,” I said, “of course was Ibrahim. The father of Ishmael.”
“And Isaac,” Yehoshua added, before I could be so dull as to forget. “Yes, he was the first shochet, ready to slit the throat of his own son,”—Yehoshua smiled benevolently over at me—“no matter what his name. Thankfully, the Lord chose that moment to inform Abraham that the days of human sacrifice were over, that slicing the throat of your first born was not only no longer required, but no longer acceptable in polite company. From Abraham, the path led to Isaac and Jacob and Levi and, after Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem, to the descendants of Levi and their divinely measured knives. After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, when our people went into exile, even animal sacrifice began to look bad.”
“Perhaps to your people,” I sniffed. Gan winked at me in memory of the sheep we had sacrificed before he sailed, before we sailed from Baghdad. There were whole eggs, and handfuls of raisins, and even a brace of quail stuffed inside. I had given him the eyeball of a lamb, wrapped in rice that tasted of cardamom and anise. How could he forget?
As if in answer, the woman entered the room, a full leg of mutton on a wooden platter. Yehoshua took up his knife.
“With what shall I approach the Lord,” he asked, addressing the leg as much as us, his guests.
“Do homage to God on high?
Shall I approach Him with burnt offerings?
With calves a year old?
Would the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams?
With myriads of streams of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression?
The fruit of my body for my sins?”
Gan treated the prayer as a real question and gave a real answer and a glance in my direction. “Study and good deeds have replaced sacrifice, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know about study,” the shochet said, and began to carve the lamb.
Gan said, “You knew enough to save the Jews of Narbonne.”
“Please!” Yehoshua stopped carving but gripped the knife as tightly as his guilt. “I don’t think I will ever be forgiven for my good deeds.”
I touched the arm of Yehoshua, the arm of the hand holding the knife. “If you are not willing to be a sacrificer, then you are doomed to be the sacrificed.”
“That is the other possibility,” he said, and returned to his carving.
At that moment the woman returned to the room and hurried over to Yehoshua. The shochet smiled, but I had already guessed the origin of the new tightness in his lips, the tension in his cheeks. I had heard the sound, as muffled as it was, of three pairs of boots approaching the door of the Jew.
“My son,” Yehoshua said, standing. “We have a visitor. I am afraid we must interrupt our supper to entertain him. I am also afraid,” he said, turning to me, “that you must excuse us.”
“Do not worry,” I said, holding up my hand. “I will be content down in the stables and will await your call.” I smiled at Gan, who had not yet guessed that the visitor was the Frankish King. Years of wrapping myself up in cloaks and capes and touring the city of Baghdad on similarly quiet afternoons accompanied only by my equally disguised Vizier Ja’afar had accustomed me to the tricks of monarchs.
And so I descended a ladder at the far end of the shochet’s bedroom, directly into a stable that smelled of hay and elephant, where my crate and dozens of others sat ruminating in the shadows of late summer. I expected a half hour’s leisure, a chance to lie at my ease in the straw and let my imagination wander like a lazy peasant at the hour when the sun announces the end of work but the moon has failed to prod him homewards. What I didn’t expect was the sight of a young girl, perched on the edge of my crate.
“Salaam alaikum,” she said, clearly amused by her superior knowledge of my language. But the red hair that wouldn’t be stifled by her woolen cape reminded me of Ja’afar’s stories of the daughter of Charlemagne.
“Wa alaikum salaam, Princess,” I saluted her back.
“How do you know who I am?” she asked, clearly ruffled.
“The story of your birth is famous in our court,” I replied, with as much of an avuncular smile as I could muster.
“My Uncle Roland,” the girl said, “told me that your court was famous for its storytellers.”
“He was a gentleman,” I answered, disguising my pride as best I could. “I know he was closer than a brother to your father. The Caliph was pained to hear of his death.”
“On the day that I was born,” Aldana continued, “an ambassador from your Caliph arrived at Marseilles, where my father had come to join my mother in anticipation of my birth. My Uncle Roland told me that on the anniversary of my first week of life, my father carried me from my mother’s chamber into the monastery of St. Guillaume, where your ambassador was resident. It had not been a happy week, or so said Roland. I had cried more than smiled, and agitated more than slept. None thought I would survive the week. Some, Roland told me, prayed that I would get on to Heaven as quickly as possible and allow them to regain their wits. Nevertheless, my father carried me in to the Ambassador. One look at his turban and my wails redoubled, so that all Marseilles could hear me. But then your Ambassador reached over to my father and took me from his arms and onto his lap and began to tell me a story.”
The Story of the Crying Princess was one I knew well, that Ja’afar had told me many times. Of how first he, as my father’s Ambassador, took this red-haired and red-faced infant onto his lap and quieted her sobs by reciting the Story of Khalifah the Fisherman. No sooner had he finished, however, than the baby’s wails resumed at twice the volume. And so the Treasurer, my uncle Aziz, took the baby onto his lap and told her the Story of the Hunchback. Once again the girl quieted, bewitched either by our Arabic tongue, the story itself, or a desire that one day, she too might become part of a story. But it shortly became clear that Charlemagne, his Queen, his court, his army, and the population of Marseilles and its environs, would make our entire embassy, ten strong, recite all night and into the next days and weeks as long as this infant daughter wailed at the finish of each story, crying for another. Ja’afar and my uncle and all the rest had sailed from Baghdad across the sea, so it seemed, to become a chorus of Scheherazades, doomed to death should the music of their stories ever cease.