Pillars of Light (57 page)

I travelled half the world under the banners of a Christian army to do battle with the Muslim foe, and yet the geometries that have made this cathedral possible were designed by the very people we went to kill. Arab architects dreamed them; Arab masons built them. And somehow a savage and an infidel helped to bring them together.

Gazing up, it seems to me that the vaulted ribs spread high above are like the branches of a tree, delicate yet strong. And suddenly,
with a force that threatens to overwhelm me, I remember lying on a Seville hillside, staring up through interlacing branches and leaves at the effulgence of the sky beyond, the earth hot beneath my back and my senses full of orange blossom and the presence of the man beside me.

The Moor.

That unmistakable profile—long, straight nose, angular cheekbone, hooded eye—he turned his head and looked right back at me. The world stood still. Then he said just one word.

“
Habibi
.”

“What does it mean?” All those years and I’d never asked.

He gave me that liquefying smile. “Beloved. It means beloved.”

Who was he, this enigma made flesh, and where did he come from? When I pressed him I never got a useful answer. “I am from neither east nor west, land nor sea.” It was like a game to him. He did once give me a name I could use for him, but it never fitted how I thought of him. “The Moor” suited him better than any random name.

He died three years ago, just before Reginald’s cathedral was finished.

I say Reginald’s, but the truth of it is that Bishop Reginald never lived to see his grand dream constructed. In the greatest of ironies, he was elected archbishop of Canterbury after the death in Acre of his old rival, Baldwin of Forde. Sadly, he did not enjoy his crowning glory for very long; he was himself dead by the end of that year, buried in his beloved Bath, where it has been claimed that he performed many miraculous cures of the weak and the sick. It has also been claimed that when he died he was wearing a hair shirt beneath his episcopal vestments.

He managed, just before his demise, to secure the see of Bath and Wells for his cousin Savaric, who came back from the war bearing letters purporting to be from King Richard himself, declaring
that Savaric should be elected to that bishopric. And so suddenly the Moor and I found ourselves working for that old fraud once more, now with his hands on all the funds he could ever need to see the great cathedral constructed, especially once he had persuaded King Richard (after helping to secure his release from imprisonment on his return from the Holy Land) to exchange his seat at Bath for that of Glastonbury. Where shortly after he was invested a miraculous find was made, not only of the remains of the hero-king Arthur of the Britons, but also of his wife, Queen Guenevere. And that brought pilgrims flocking from all corners of the kingdom: yet more funds destined for his coffers.

For our part, the Moor and I brought back a dozen masons to help with the project at Wells, collecting them as we travelled back to England: a couple from Jerusalem, from Tunisia and Amalfi, from Cordoba and Cluny. Some were Arabs, others French and Spanish. Muslims, Jews, even a Coptic Christian, they represented our epic journey, and just like the mongrel troupe with whom we had toured the south of England, they were a marvellous miscellany, which was fitting, given the new style of building they had come to create. Not speaking one another’s languages, they spoke instead a new language of architecture: one of squinches and domes, of flying buttresses and ribbed vaults, of colonnades and pointed arches stolen straight out of the heart of Islam. Those arches enabled the masons to build higher than ever before, and for the structure to support as much as three times the weight, to allow thin walls to be punctured by tall windows that would let fountains of light spill into the building.

It was a glorious experiment, Wells, and we made it a glorious reality.

And now the light—so much of it, a torrent, not what you would expect in a great cavern of stone—is hurting my eyes. Or perhaps it’s the memories. Too many memories …

Suddenly I am snuffling and weeping and I cannot stop, and
one of the canons passes me with a sympathetic glance, as if he knows full well that men cannot bear the awe of such a place, that we are too weak and fragile to comprehend its power. If I could, I would run outside, where the world follows its natural order. But there is something I have come to see. And so I dry my eyes on my sleeve and lean on my stick for a moment, and then turn and tap my way back down the nave, counting.

Ah, there it is. You’d never spot it if you didn’t know. If you hadn’t been there that night. But no one else was there: just the two of us by candlelight, when the masons had gone home and the monks were abed. We levered up a couple of the newly laid flagstones and buried the treasure at the foot of one of the pillars. And then the Moor propped a stolen ladder against the pillar and scratched a little cipher just beneath the decorative capital. Even if you were looking for it you could easily miss it, and even if you didn’t you’d probably have no idea what it meant. It’s a set of Arabic numerals—not exactly what you’d expect to find in a Christian cathedral. Shockingly, there has been an enemy in our midst: a foreigner, an infidel, a wolf in the fold.

I think if Reginald had lived, the Moor would have placed that last remnant of the True Cross in his hands; there was a true affection between the two of them, based on their shared dream of beauty. Instead, rather than hand it over to Savaric, who would surely have sold it to the highest bidder, he had brought it here; and here, we had buried it. It was the Moor’s little joke, and the greatest gift in Christendom.

Has it worked miracles from its secret hiding place? Does its magic flow out into the world? Or is it no more than a piece of dead wood, cynically encased in rich gold to add to the pretense? To this day I do not know.

One thing I do know: about four years after we returned from the Holy Land I was sitting with the Moor at the window of an
inn looking out onto the market square at Wells, our hands cupped around beakers of spiced wine, taking in the sights—the busy merchants and wool-sellers, the cider-makers and the costermongers all doing lively trade—when a couple caught my eye. The man tall and lanky, with a shock of hair like a dandelion clock; the woman richly dressed, her hair up in a wimple, a small child toddling at her side. For a moment I thought I was hallucinating a ghost. Then I banged my wine down on the table and ran outside.

“Quickfinger!”

The man turned with a look of guilt and fear, as if he expected a sheriff about to collar him. When his darting eyes settled on me, I saw his face go slack with shock; then he was running at me with his arms wide.

“By ’eck, John Savage! I thought the sea had taken you.”

“I thought the same of you.”

“One of the other ships hauled me in.” He grinned. “I en’t called Pilchard for nowt!”

The woman joined us. I almost didn’t recognize her, and when I did I nearly called her by the name I knew her best by. “Pl—Mary!”

She dimpled at me: she’d put on weight and it suited her, especially in those figured velvets.

“You look as if life’s treating you well,” I said.

She cocked her head at me, then looked past my shoulder at the figure sitting by the window of the inn, looking out at us with his half-moon eyes. “You, too,” she said. “I’m glad, for both of you.” She placed her hand on the child’s head till the lad turned his face up to us. Quickfinger’s features in miniature. He was never going to be handsome, but when he grinned it seemed he already had his father’s mischievous charm. “We called him John,” she said.

It took a moment to sink in. Then I felt absurdly pleased.

Quickfinger leaned in towards me conspiratorially. “That ruby I got out of the True Cross came in reet handy.”

Are there miracles in the world, or just the clever toils of fate? Or maybe simply the wise use of opportunity? In a way it really doesn’t matter: the outcome is still the same.

But just then it was as if the sun had come out and was shining on us all, washing us with golden light that erased the years and all the blood shed and spilled. It made me smile then, as it does now.

END

Pillars of Light
began, as novels sometimes do, with a sudden wild flare of intellectual curiosity and a completely uneducated guess. Following up that hunch led to two years of research and three of writing and revising, a huge amount of work that took me a long way off my usual writing track, which had been closely focused on my adopted country of Morocco. Writing this twelfth-century epic felt at the outset like an impossible task, setting out on a journey into completely unknown territory equipped with only a vague understanding of where I was going, no map and a leaky canteen. I would be crossing ground that many writers had traversed before, but from a completely different direction (as far as I am aware, no one has written a novel about the ordinary people trapped in the notorious Siege of Acre, both inside and outside the walls).

In the end, the book turned out to be not so different from my previous novels in terms of its concerns, though the scope was on a rather more (dauntingly) epic scale. And as with those previous books what started with a quest for knowledge about an obscure subject (the Barbary pirates in
The Tenth Gift
, the desert nomads of the Sahara in
The Salt Road
; and African and European slavery in
The Sultan’s Wife
) in this case soon turned into a story about love and war, the clash of cultures between East and West, and the common humanity and experiences people share no matter what their origins or affiliations.

Many of the characters in my tale are real people: the crusading king Richard the Lionheart and champion of Islam, Salah ad-Din, have been heroes for West and East down the ages. Their lieutenants and allies are also well documented in the chronicles and annals of the time and in hundreds of tales about what we call the crusades (a term not coined until the late sixteenth century, therefore not used in this novel). Lesser known, but equally historical, is the young swimmer Aisa, who carried messages between the besieged city and the Muslim army, and was feted for dying as a martyr, bringing the garrison wages into shore on his body, thus fulfilling his task. The rest of the Najib family, and the other folk who inhabit Acre, are fictional except for Karakush and al-Mashtub. Do not ask me who the Moor is, or whether he is real or fabricated: he is an enigma all his own.

Other fully historical figures in the story include Savaric and Reginald de Bohun; and anyone who has read any history about the building of cathedrals in this time, when Church and State were so much more entwined, will know that the funding for their foundation and erection often stemmed from dubious sources. Much of the funding and recruitment for the Third Crusade depended on just the sort of spiritually and financially manipulative methods as the troupe’s mumming tour: indeed, the Archbishop of Canterbury (the much-disliked Baldwin of Forde) led a similar progress around Wales to drum up support and funds for the enterprise. Richard the Lionheart was so keen to raise the money required to fund the crusade he said he would have sold London itself, if he could have found a buyer.

Reginald de Bohun did indeed found the cathedral at Wells, which represents the first true expression of the Gothic. But he died before seeing his vision translated into reality. It was his venal cousin Savaric who oversaw much of the construction before being succeeded by Bishop Jocelin, with whom the cathedral is more popularly connected.

The seed for
Pillars of Light
—that wild, uneducated guess—came during a rare period of insomnia. I was reading, but had the television on low as background noise. I glimpsed up from the page, not really focusing on the screen. For a moment, as the camera panned across an interior of serried pillars and soaring arches, I thought I was seeing the Great Mosque in Casablanca (the only mosque I, as an infidel woman, have been allowed to enter). Then the voiceover started and I realized it was Salisbury Cathedral.

The program was, it turned out, part of an Open University course about the building of Europe’s majestic cathedrals, the most remarkable achievement of the Middle Ages. I went back to my book. But still the impression of Islamic architecture remained with me, as if superimposed over the images of English Gothic stone, and the seed of an idea took root in my mind. I wondered why I had made such an unlikely leap of imagination. I started to research the origins of cathedral design, not expecting to unearth any significant connection. But I was to be amazed. The more I dug, the more I discovered. There had, it transpires, long been a school of thought that Islamic structures had influenced Christian architecture.

In the early twentieth century French art historian Emile Mâle was convinced that the cathedral at Puy-en-Velay showed a clear influence from Moorish Spain. A few years later, Ahmad Fikry, a student of Henri Focillon, produced a doctoral thesis on the influence of Islamic forms in the French Romanesque, particularly at Puy, noting parallels between the cupolas of the Puy and those in the mosque of Qairouan in Tunisia. Historian Louis Bréhier also noted similarities with the Arab architecture of Spain and believed the architect to have been either a Muslim, or a Mozarabic Christian. But it was the pointed arch which characterizes the Gothic style that makes the case for a link to Islamic architecture most clearly.

The pointed—or ogival—arch had long been used in the orient, in Islamic and even pre-Islamic architecture, linking arcades of tall
pillars to give an effect of geometric uniformity, an elegance that soothed the mind and enabled the supplicant to feel closer to God. Utility and beauty often go hand in hand: the pointed arch is more efficient at distributing the weight of masonry above it, enabling the stonework to span higher and wider gaps, supported by narrower columns. But a direct link between Islamic architecture and Gothic cathedrals remained a controversial theory—in Christian eyes, at least—until very recently. A number of leading academics have started to trace the journey the concept may have taken and to date that journey to the fluid movement of people between the Middle East and Europe during the early medieval crusades. As chance would have it, a friend of mine was taking an advanced degree in Islamic art at around this time, and happened to attend a talk in which the lecturer spoke of the first Western examples of pointed arches being taken from the Arab world, through Europe to England, culminating in Wells, the first cathedral to entirely dispense with the round arch in favour of the pointed arch. This was soon followed by a fine article by expert in Islamic architecture Tom Verde in the June 2012 edition of
Saudi Aramco World
precisely delineating the trajectory of the pointed arch from Syria and the Arab world to the West via the medium of the crusades.