A Sultan in Palermo Read Free Page B

journey he had not shown the slightest interest in these old friends. He did not even bother to look at the women as the winds pushed the ship beyond them. He was distracted.
    The older members of the crew, including the cook with greying hair, had travelled with him many times. They knew his moods, understood his passions and respected his obsession to draw a map of the world. They had noticed his sad eyes and distant stare, as if time had lost all meaning. They talked about him to each other. What might be ailing him? Could it be an affair of the heart? The young man with the dark eyes from Noto? Surely he could not still be pining after the houri in Palermo? Not Mayya? They had convinced themselves that only Mayya, the merchant’s daughter could explain the despair in the master’s eyes. Mayya, whom the mapmaker had loved more than any other living creature in this world and wanted to make his wife; Mayya who had betrayed him luxuriously while he was journeying. The Sultan had beckoned and she had followed him willingly first to the royal bedchamber and subsequently to her own set of rooms in the harem of the palace. How the mapmaker had controlled and hidden his grief from the prying eyes of Palermo had become the talk in the coffee shops of the bazaar, but not for long. The bazaar has its own priorities and the broken heart of a young mapmaker did not detain their attention for more than a few hours.
    It was the same Sultan Rujari for whom Muhammad al-Idrisi had written this book. His own title had been simple: ‘Nuz’hat al-mushtaq’ or ‘The Universal Geography’, but Rujari’s old tutor Younis had advised him that since the book would never have been completed without Rujari’s material assistance, a more appropriate title might be ‘al-kitab al-Rujari’ or ‘The Book of Roger’. In the face of such a suggestion from the heart of the palace, what could he do but bow and accept. Idrisi repressed his anger, but the Court eunuchs ensured that every shop-keeper in the Palermo bazaar had news of the title alteration. The bazaar believed, wrongly, that Idrisi had offered the delights of his body to the Sultan. The new title appeared to confirm the slander. And each spiced the story before passing it on to the other and thus the vanity of a ruler became an epic with many layers in which a follower of the Prophet had been deeply humiliated and not for the first time.
    The subject of all this attention began to ask himself whether the trouble he was having with an opening line had now been transcended by the new title. A recurring dream had disturbed his sleep for over a year. It was Sultan Rujari, always in the same multi-coloured satin robe, lying half-naked under a lemon tree weighted down with ripe fruits. Rujari would stand, discard the robe and attempt to seduce a tethered doe, but just at the point when the union between the human and animal worlds was about to be consummated, Muhammad would wake up in a state of complete unrest. He would get out of bed, pace up and down on the cold marble floor muttering, ‘You shouldn’t be in my dreams so often’, and then drink some water slowly to calm his fractured nerves. It was always difficult to resume his sleep. Why did the dream only come when he was in Palermo? Never when he was on the sea or when he went to visit his family in Noto or in the house of his close friend, the physician, Ibrahim bin Hiyya of Djirdjent. Once he had tried to discuss the matter but Ibrahim had laughed, disclaiming any interest in the phenomena of dreams.
    More than once, he thought of paying a visit to Ibn Hammud, the richest silk merchant in the qasr, who, in his spare time, interpreted dreams and calmed the fears of worried men. He was much in demand and once Muhammad got as far as the front of the shop, but he did not enter. His caution had become an insurmountable barrier. It was too dangerous. Ibn Hammud would not be able to keep the dream secret. Indeed, an exaggerated version