On the other side of the pass, rockslides had buried the old road repeatedly, and each time the road became a mere foot trail, switchbacking at sharp angles across the rockslides. These were hard going, and the Sultana often got off her horse and walked, leading her women with no tolerance for ineptitude or complaint. Indeed she had a sharp tongue when she was annoyed, sharp and scornful.
Ibn Ezra inspected the roads every evening when they stopped, and the rockslides too when they passed them, making drawings of any exposed roadbeds, coping stones or drainage ditches. 'It's classic Roman,' he said one evening by the fire as they ate roast mutton. 'They knitted all the land around the Mediterranean with these roads. I wonder if this was their main route over the Pyrenees. I don't suppose so, it's so far to the west. It will lead us to the western ocean rather than the Mediterranean. But perhaps it's the easiest pass. It's hard to believe this is not the main road, it's so big.'
'Perhaps they're all that way,' said the Sultana.
'Possibly. They may have used things like these carts the people have found, so they needed their roads to be wider than ours. Camels of course need no road at all. Or this may be their main road after all. It may be the road Hannibal used on his way to attack Rome, with his army of Carthaginians and their elephants! I have seen those ruins, north of Tunis. It was a very great city. But Hannibal lost and Carthage lost, and the Romans pulled their city down and sowed salt in the fields, and the Maghrib dried up. No more Carthage.'
'So elephants may have walked this road,' the Sultana said. The Sultan looked down at the track, shaking his head in wonder. These were the kinds of things the two of them liked to know.
Coming down out of the mountains, they found themselves in a colder land. The midday sun cleared the peaks of the Pyrenees, but only just. The land was flat and grey, and often swathed in ground mist. The ocean lay to the west, grey and cold and wild with high surf.
The caravan came to a river that emptied into this western sea, flanked by the ruins of an ancient city. On the outskirts of the ruins stood some modest new buildings, fishermen's shacks they seemed, on each side of a newly built wooden bridge.
'Look how much less skilful we are than the Romans,' Ibn Ezra said, but hurried over to look at the new work anyway.
He came back. 'I believe this was a city called Bayonne. There's an inscription on the remaining bridge tower over there. The maps indicate there was a bigger city to the north, called Bordeaux. Water's Edge.'
The Sultan shook his head. 'We've come far enough. This will do. Over the mountains, but yet only a moderate journey back to al Andalus. That's just what I want. We'll settle here.'
Sultana Katima nodded, and the caravan began the long process of settling in.
Eight. Baraka
In general, they built upstream from the ruins of the ancient town, scavenging stone and beams until very little of the old buildings remained, except for the church, a big stone barn of a structure, stripped of all idols and images. It was not a beautiful structure compared to the mosques of the civilized world, being a rude squat rectangular thing, but it was big, and situated on a prominence overlooking a turn in the river. So after discussion among all the members of the caravan, they decided to make it their grand or Friday mosque.
Modifications began immediately. This project became Bistami's responsibility, and he spent a lot of time with Ibn Ezra, describing what he remembered of the Chishti shrine and the other great buildings of Akbar's empire, poring over Ibn Ezra's drawings to see what might be done to make the old church more mosque like. They settled on a plan to tear the roof off the old structure, which in any case was showing the sky in many places, and to keep the walls as the interior buttressing of a circular or rather egg shaped mosque, with a dome. The Sultana wanted the prayer courtyard to open onto a larger city square, to indicate the all embracing quality of their version of Islam, and Bistami did what he could to oblige her, despite signs that it would rain often in this region, and snow perhaps in the winter. It wasn't important; the place of worship would continue out from the grand mosque into a plaza and then the city at large, and by extension, the whole world.
Ibn Ezra happily designed scaffolding, hods, carts, braces, buttressing, cements and so on, and he determined by the stars and such maps as they had, the direction of Mecca, which would be indicated not only by the usual signs, but also by the orientation of the mosque itself. The rest of the town moved in towards the grand mosque, all the old ruins removed and used for new construction as people settled closer and closer. The scattering of Armenians and Zott who had been living in the ruins before their arrival either joined the community, or moved off to the north.
'We should save room near the mosque for a madressa,' Ibn Ezra said, 'before the town fills this whole district.'
Sultan Mawji thought this was a good idea, and he ordered those who had settled next to the mosque while working on it to move. Some of the workers objected to this, and then refused outright. In a meeting the Sultan lost his temper and threatened this group with expulsion from the town, though the fact was he commanded only a very small personal bodyguard, barely enough to defend himself, in Bistami's opinion. Bistami recalled the giant cavalries of Akbar, the Marnlukes' soldiers; nothing like that here for the Sultan, who now faced a mere dozen or two sullen recalcitrants, and yet could do nothing with them. And the open tradition of the caravan, the feel of it, was in danger.
But Sultana Katima rode up on her Arabian mare, and slid down from it and went to the Sultan's side. She put her hand to his arm, said something just to him. He looked startled, thinking fast. The Sultana shot a fierce glance at the uncooperative squatters, such a bitter rebuke that Bistami shuddered; not for the world would he risk such a glance from her. And indeed the miscreants paled and looked down in shame.
She said, 'Mohammed told us that learning is God's great hope for humanity. The mosque is the heart of learning, the Quran's home. The madressa is an extension of the mosque. It must be so in any Muslim community, to know God more completely. And so it will be here. Of course.'
She then led her husband away from the place, to the palace on the other side of the city's old bridge. In the middle of the night the Sultan's guards returned with swords drawn and pikes at the ready, to rouse the squatters and send them off; but the area was already deserted.
Ibn Ezra nodded with relief when he heard the news. 'In the future we must plan ahead well enough to avoid such scenes,' he said in a low voice to Bistami. 'This incident adds to the reputation of the Sultana, perhaps, in some ways, but at a cost.'
Bistami didn't want to think about it. 'At least now we will have mosque and madressa side by side.'
'They are two parts of the same thing, as the Sultana said. Especially if the study of the sensible world is included in the curriculum of the madressa. I hope so. I can't stand for such a place to be wasted on mere devotionals. God put us in this world to understand it! That is the highest form of devotion to God, as Ibn Sina said.'
This small crisis was soon forgotten, and the new town, named by the Sultana Baraka, that term for grace that Bistami had mentioned to her, took shape as if there could never have been any other plan. The ruins of the old town disappeared under the new city's streets and plazas, gardens and workshops; the architecture and city plan both resembled Malaga, and the other Andalusi coastal cities, but with higher walls, and smaller windows, for the winters here were cold, and a raw wind blew in from the ocean in the autumn and spring. The Sultan's palace was the only structure in the town as open and light as a Mediterranean building; this reminded people of their origins, and showed them that the Sultan lived above the usual demands of nature. Across the bridge from it, the plazas were small, the streets and alleyways narrow, so that a riverside medina or casbah developed that was, as in any Maghribi or Arabian city, a veritable warren of buildings, mostly three storeys tall, with the upper windows facing each other across alleyways so tight that one could, as was said everywhere, pass condiments from window to window across the streets.