Red Smoking Mirror by Nick Hunt

Author:Nick Hunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Columbus;1492;Montezuma;Mexico;Aztec;Moctezuma;Cortes;Camilla Townsend;Fifth Sun;conquistador;Laurent Binet;Civilisations
Publisher: Swift Press
Published: 2023-05-25T09:14:50+00:00

And now, because of him, I am back in Qadis. The great port of the caliphate, from which, each day, a hundred ships set sail and a hundred ships return, from every point around the world. Its harbour always full of sails, its sky raucous with gulls. I can see the cobbled lane that runs uphill from the wharf, can see my shoes upon the stones, heel-worn and holey. Before I dreamed to cross the sea. Before I was who I am. Ahead there was a synagogue but before I came to it there was a narrow door, a teahouse where the merchants went to trade their news of distant storms, treasure fleets, Christian pirates, cargos lost and evil winds. I stepped inside there on a whim, having no other place to go.

Was there some hand at my back? No, I do not think so. Did someone mutter in my ear? It was not the voice of God. In a corner there he sat, no angel with a glowing face but just a curly-headed drunk, a Christian, a foreigner, scowling into his wine. I took the table next to him because no one else would sit there.

I shake the memory away, like so many times before. My mind goes to the papers in the iron chest in my quarters. It has been years since I looked at them, those calculations written in his untidy, sloping hand, those fragments of seeming gibberish. They have no purpose now. I should have tossed them in the sea the moment that we came to land, where silver fish and starfish would soon have nibbled them away.

Perhaps I will burn them after all, with that sick child’s lock of hair.

The north side of the marketplace is bounded by the court of games, where the uli-sellers were. They are nowhere to be seen now. Some pine sticks and a green rag is all that is left of them, their stall dismantled and removed.

Gone, says a seller of pots who squats nearby with his wares, when I greet him to enquire. Back to their country in the south. Two nights ago they went away.

Why? I ask. But his face turns dense, in that way I have come to recognise.

No matter. It is a little thing. But it makes me wary.

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