IN THE GARDEN OF THE CALIPH

Trafford Publishing

Chapter One

But the day was too brimming with sunshine and blue skies for boring chores. Today was a time for laughing and dreaming. Lucia had something delightful in her pocket to share with Raya.

It was April, 1050, in Al Andalus, Spain, and the air was filled with the fragrance of jasmine and honeysuckle. From over the wall came the perfume of Cordoba, the scent of hundreds of orange blossoms. While much of Europe lived in dirt and ignorance, the great cities of Al Andalus, Cordoba, Toledo, and Grenada, blossomed with beautiful buildings, wonderful poetry, and scholars probing the mysteries of science and the wisdom of the Greeks and Romans. Three groups of people had made this possible, the Muslim Moors, the Jews, and the Mozarabs, Arabic-speaking Christians.

Lucia crept past the marble well and the fountain sending sprays of jeweled water into the air and back into the green tiled basin. In a sunny corner, Rebecca, the servant girl, hung laundry. Lucia put a finger to her lips. Rebecca giggled. Rebecca was fifteen and Lucia twelve. Sometimes Lucia thought of her as a big sister, but more often, because Rebecca was so shy, she thought of her as a little sister. Rebecca was not actually a servant. An orphan who had lost her parents in a smallpox epidemic, she had been given shelter by Professor ibn Mendes.

Carefully, Lucia opened the gate in the wall, slipped through to the outside and closed it again, sliding the iron latch slowly, not to make the slightest grating sound. She wandered down the cobblestone road under the shade of huge leaning eucalyptus trees and date palms, crackling their leaves. Two-story brick houses nestled behind courtyards filled with flowering plants in pots. In addition to the perfume of flowers, there were other earthy smells, horse manure from the stables where horses chuffed into their feed pails, and runnels of waste water moving down a groove in the road. Although the houses of Cordoba had pipes to carry away waste water and there were aqueducts leading to the river, some waste water flowed in the streets.

This was the Juderia, the section of the city populated mainly by Jews, who wanted to live near the synagogue. It was in the very center of Cordoba.

Lucia turned a corner and came out onto a wide square lined with shops. She edged to the side of the road to avoid horses pulling carts filled with merchandise, clattering chariots and the slap of the bare feet of men carrying litters in which fashionable ladies listlessly fanned themselves. There was the clang of the ironmonger and the sizzle of the blacksmith's iron. From the huge clay ovens at the bakery came the aroma of baking bread. Meat, mainly lamb, hung from hooks at the butcher's. There were cloaks for sale, and boots, and sandals, the fine woolen cloth that came from the sheep who roamed the hills outside the city and silk cloth woven from the silk produced by the silkworms that lived in the mulberry trees. There were bins of almonds, figs, grapes, apples, pomegranates, artichokes and olives from the groves that surrounded the city. From everywhere came the hoarse shouts of merchants, urging passersby to try their wares and the high-pitched voices of haggling customers.

Lucia walked quickly in the midst of all this noise. Hot and a little tired, she sat down for a moment on a stone bench under a plane tree. At the end of the square she could see the great synagogue, built in Moorish style, with arches and columns. Across from the synagogue was the Hebrew Academy, where Lucia's father taught and where she went to school and bearded scholars pored over the holy books.

Her gaze idly moved to the slope, a mass of red-tiled roofs, that led down to the silver ribbon of the Guadalquivir River. Boats of every size crowded the river, coming and going from the ocean. The heat and the smells made her sleepy. With eyes half-closed she was drawn, as always, to the blue hills of the west.

That was where the royal city of Madinat al-Zahra, lay in ruins, destroyed forty years earlier by Berbers and a mob angered by the last Caliph's extravagance. Now it was peaceful in Cordoba. A king, called a taifa, elected by the people, ruled instead of the magnificent Caliph. But Lucia longed for Madinat-al-Zahra and for its hidden secret, the Caliph's wonderful garden, called Rustafa ... Some day she would see it.

She got up and continued walking, still in a dream of a wonderful fragrant garden and birds of marvelous plumage and the mysterious pool of the Caliph, with its swirling blue water. Something called her there. In the midst of that garden would be the clue to her future.

Suddenly, coming from just behind her she heard a shrill, exasperatingly familiar voice.

"Wait for me!"

"Oh, no!" she sighed.

He came running on chubby legs, his round little face red with effort, his sleep-tumbled black curls up like question marks all over his head.

"Abraham!" Lucia groaned. "Why aren't you sleeping?"

She could escape her mother, but never Abraham, her five year old brother. He stuck to her like a thistle plant. Grabbing her hand with his pudgy, rather dirty fingers, he stuck out his tongue. "Why aren't you sleeping?"

"I don't need as much sleep as you do." She stamped her foot. "Does Mama know where you are?"

"She knows I'm always with you."

"You're like one of the leeches they put on sick people to take out the bad blood."

Abraham sniffled. "Am not!"

"Go home." Lucia turned and tried to walk away from him.

"You don't love me!" he squealed. Passersby stared at Lucia. Such a shame to be mean to a little boy.

She grabbed his hand. "I love you," she hissed. "Now be quiet."

Abraham put on his trusting good little boy look. "Where are we going?"

"I was going to visit Raya without a nuisance little brother," she snapped.

They turned a corner and entered the Moslem section, which looked exactly like the Juderia, with brick or stone houses, whitewashed walls and tiled roofs and everywhere, fragrant flowers. In the distance, the huge golden dome of the Great Mosque gleamed under the blue sky.

"Do you think Aunt Fatima will have sweetmeats?" Abraham asked anxiously.

"All you ever think about is food. No wonder you're such a fat thing."

Abraham's face crumpled with the beginning of tears once more.

"No, no," she said hastily. "You are just a delicious little dumpling."

She smoothed his hair. It was strange that he looked so different from her. Abraham was stocky and dark, like their father's family and Lucia, tall for twelve, and slim, had light brown hair and grey eyes, like their mother. The Jews of Spain, the Sephardim, were mostly dark like their Arab neighbors, but their ancestors had come from many countries, some with the Romans, others from lands like Persia, and had mixed with other races.

With Abraham trotting along beside her, Lucia reached a stone house with a heavy dark door and a knocker in the shape of a lion. She let Abraham lift it and thump loudly against the door.

The door was opened by a plump Arab woman wearing a loose green silk robe. Large golden earrings dangled from her ears. She had curly black hair,...