And then one day I saw the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
She had come to the coffeehouse with Averroes himself, he whose correct name was ibn-Rushd. They seated themselves opposite me one day when sunshine fell across the door, leaving all within shadowed and still. It was an hour when few were about, the place empty but for them and myself. There were low tables before us, and we sat cross-legged behind them on leather cushions.
A slave brought them tea and sweetmeats, a sweetmeat called natif. She sat so she faced me, and from time to time she lifted her long dark lashes and looked directly at me, as she could not avoid doing. When she turned to speak to Averroes I glimpsed her beautiful profile and the length of her lashes. She was divinely beautiful, but are there not many divinely beautiful women when one is young and the sap of life flows swiftly in the veins? Yet this one … she was superb!
“It is good to see you, Valaba,” Averroes said.
Valaba? Like her namesake of one hundred years earlier, Valaba had made her home a rendezvous for the brilliant, for the poets, philosophers, and students of science. It was a period of enormous achievement, one of the great eras in the history of science. Not since the Athens of Pericles had there been such intellectual excitement, and the home of Valaba, as well as those of several other such women, had become a focal point for the exchange of ideas.
“When I was in Sicily,” she was saying, “Prince William told me of Viking ships that had sailed to an island in the northern seas, and this must be Ultima Thule.”
“Ah, yes,” Averroes acknowledged, “a Greek named Phytheas is said to have sailed there.” She was very beautiful, and he who would be her lover must not be laggard.
Glancing across my cup, I said, “If you will permit? I have visited the place.”
Her dark eyes were cool. No doubt many young men had aspired to know her, and to know her better. Well, let them have aspirations. Where they aspired, I would achieve.
Averroes looked up with interest. “Ah? You are a man of the sea?”
“Briefly, and perhaps again. The land of which you speak is not the furthest land. There are lands beyond, and still others beyond those.”
“You have been to Thule?”
“Long ago, from the shores of Armorica. Our boats fish in seas beyond the ice land where the seas are thick with fog, and sometimes with floating ice, but teem with fish. When the fog is gone and the skies are clear, one can often see, further to the westward, another land.”
“And you were there, too?” In the tone of Valaba was a touch of sarcasm.
“I was there also. It is a land of rocky shores, great forests, and a shore that stretches away to both south and north.”
“The Vikings spoke of a green land,” Averroes said doubtfully.
“This is another, but of which my people have long known. The Norsemen went there from Greenland and Iceland to get timbers to build their ships, or for masts. Sometimes they landed to dry their fish or to hunt.”
“This land has been explored?”
“Who would wish to? It is a land of dense forests and savage men who have nothing to trade but furs or skins. The men who sail there look only for fish.”
“You are not an Arab?”
“I am Mathurin Kerbouchard, a traveler and a student.”
Averroes smiled. “Are not we all? Travelers and students?” He sipped his tea. “What do you do in Córdoba?”
“I have come to learn, and having found no school, I learn from books.”
“You are a poet?” Valaba asked.
“I have not the gift.”
Averroes chuckled. “Need that stop you? How many have the gift? There may be a million people in Córdoba, and all of them write poetry, yet not more than three dozen have even a modest gift.”
They returned to their conversation, and I, to my reading, for I was beginning the great Canon of Avicenna, which was in many volumes and more than a million words on the practice of medicine.
When they left my eyes followed them, watching the slim and graceful Valaba. Had she guessed what was in my mind, she would have laughed at me. Which disturbed me none at all.
Who was I, a barbarian from the northern lands, to even know such a woman? I, a landless man, a wanderer, a casual student?
She was cool, aloof, beautiful, and wealthy. She was a young lady with the brains and judgment of men. Yet my time would come.
Ambition was strong within me. I wanted to see, to become, but, most of all, to understand. Much that here was taken for granted was new to me, and I found it best to tread lightly in all conversation unless I wished to make a fool of myself. Yet I was learning, and the ways of the city were becoming my ways.
The wider my knowledge became the more I realized my ignorance. It is only the ignorant who can be positive, only the ignorant who can become fanatics, for the more I learned the more I became aware that there are shadings and relationships in all things.
My Druid discipline had not only trained my memory but conditioned my mind to the quick grasp of ideas, of essential points. Most of what I read, I retained. In knowledge lay not only power but freedom from fear, for generally speaking one only fears what one does not understand.
It was a time when all knowledge lay open to him who would seek it, and a physician was often an astronomer, a geographer, a philosopher, and a mathematician. There were several hundred volumes in the library of ibn-Tuvvais. These books I read from and studied.
Here and there I began to make acquaintances. Mahmoud was such a one. A tall young man of twenty-four, vain of his pointed beard and mustaches. He was much of a dandy, but keen of wit and a ready hand with a blade. We met by chance in the Garden of Abdallah near the Guadalquivir.
It was shadowed and cool. Great trees created islands of shadow on the stone flags, and there I often sat with a glass of golden Jerez at hand and a book before me.
A shadow fell upon my page, and glancing up, I saw Mahmoud for the first time. “Ah? A student and a drinker of wine? Have you no respect for the Koran?”
It was a time for caution, for under the reign of Yusuf there were fanatics in Córdoba. Yet the stranger’s eyes seemed friendly.
“If the Prophet had read Avicenna upon a hot day, he might have accepted a glass. Anyway,” I added slyly, “he had never tasted the wine of Jerez.”
He sat down. “I am Mahmoud, a student of the law, occasionally a drinker of wine.”
“And I am Kerbouchard.”
There in the shadow of a great tree we talked of what young men talk about when their world is filled with ideas and the excitement of learning. We talked of war and women, of ships, camels, weapons, and Avicenna, of religion and philosophy, of politics and buried treasure, but most of all we talked of Córdoba.
We ate figs, small cakes, and drank wine, talking the sun out of the sky and the moon into it. We talked of the faults of Caesar and the death of Alexander, and he spoke of Fez and Marrakesh and the great desert to the south of those cities.
It was the beginning of a friendship, my first in the land of the Moors.
Of course, there were John of Seville, whose name was often mentioned, and old ibn-Tuwais, whose name was not.
My gold disappeared, and I sold the sapphire. It bought leisure and time to study and roaming the streets at night with Mahmoud, and it bought much else. Startling ideas appeared in a book newly come to Córdoba, a book written at the oasis of Merv by al-Khazini and called The Book of the Balance of Wisdom. It was an excellent account of the hydrostatics and mechanics of the time, but it also advanced the theory of gravity, and that air has weight.
We argued the subject furiously and were becoming quite angry when a girl passed by on a camel. We forgot gravity, and the weight of the air became as nothing.
Mahmoud leaped to his feet. “Did you see her? Did you see how she looked at me?”
“You?” His friend Haroun scoffed. “It was at Kerbouchard she looked! I have noticed this before. All the girls look at Kerbouchard!”
Mahmoud snorted. “That dog of an unbeliever? That stench in the nostrils of humanity? It was at me she looked!”
The camel had stopped in the hot, dusty street nearby. Four soldiers were escort for the girl on the camel, tough, surly-looking men, yet something about her drew my attention, and her eyes were meeting mine over her veil. It was not an illusion, not a vanity.