The Crown of Valencia Read online

“He’s an adolescent. He’s obsessed.”

  “I miss my little Turito.” She shook her head, running a strong hand through her thick, cropped hair, my own son responsible for a few of the rich gray highlights. Laura and Deb had been there for me, as surrogate parents when I needed a break, as loving aunts and solid friends. They had helped me find a house and get back on my feet. For the first few weeks after my return Laura had blasted me pretty good, yelling and crying that she thought I was dead, but she finally forgave me. When anyone asked where Anna was I said I didn’t know.

  I shifted in my saddle. “I never thought I’d be this kind of mother, but I vacuumed his room last week and found a Playboy under his bed.”

  “No! A Playboy?” She looked straight ahead, voice low. “So, did you look at the pictures?”

  “No, just read the articles.” Sputtering with laughter, we nearly unseated ourselves. Wiping my eyes, I finally regained my composure.

  “I wish you were paying as much attention to sex as Arturo is.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said.

  “I’m serious, Kate. It’s been eight years, but you haven’t moved on, you haven’t let go of Elena.” While that first year I hadn’t told Laura and Deb where or how I’d met Elena, I had to share my loss with someone because I’d suddenly start crying for no reason. A few times the words, “When I traveled nine centuries back in time,” had stood poised on the tip of my tongue, ready to set my secret free, but when I’d look into Laura’s square, concerned face, I couldn’t. She would think I’d lost my mind. Time travel was fantasy, pure and simple.

  Arturo had stopped, waiting for us. “I’m bored. Can we go home?”

  Laura and I exchanged glances. “Arturo, what’s the matter?”

  He just pressed his lips together and shook his head. Damn. I hated the adolescent walls that had suddenly appeared these last few months. Some friends assured me the walls would come down as he matured, but others said that sometimes, with boys, the walls never came down. I didn’t know if I could bear that.

  “It’s letdown,” Laura offered to Arturo. “You’ve been pushing for that new black belt for months. Now that it’s over, you’re crashing.”

  Arturo shrugged, body caved in with defeat. I preferred an angry son to a melancholy one and knew just the trick. “Well,” I said, reaching into the pack around my waist, sifting through granola bars and gum. “I have some entertainment.” I pulled out the sheathed dagger Elena had given me at the Aljafería, its Moorish beauty undiminished by nine hundred years.

  “Mom, no,” Arturo groaned.

  “Okay, how about that dead oak tree over there? It’s what—twenty feet away?” The three -foot-wide trunk would make a great target, so I unsheathed the small dagger, running my fingers over the design etched in the blade, pearls spilling from an oyster shell.

  “Mom, weapons are so violent. Didn’t you listen to anything Master Kim said?”

  “That knot about six feet up looks like a good target.” I pointed my horse in the right direction.

  “One dollar says you miss,” Laura said.

  “Miss the knot?”

  “No, miss the tree.”

  Arturo boiled in his saddle, furious he couldn’t control my knife-throwing hobby. He’d pleaded with me to put up a privacy fence around our small backyard so the neighbors couldn’t see. “Tae Kwon Do is all the weapon you need. You have more control and more power if you use your own body, your own strength.”

  I pinched the cool blade between my fingers and raised myself slightly out of the saddle. “You’re right. Tae Kwon Do is a great tool. But what if you aren’t close enough to your adversary to use it?”

  “You close the gap and then use it,” came his practiced reply.

  “With this dagger, I can defend myself from twenty feet away.” I took aim. The dagger spun furiously, arched perfectly, and crashed somewhere in the bushes next to the tree.

  “You owe me a buck,” Laura cried, booming laugh echoing through the trees.

  Grumbling, I slid off my horse and searched through the brambles, surprised at my rising panic. “Where did it land? Over here?” I ignored the sharp thorns tearing at my sleeves. “Where is it?”

  “Mom, calm down.” Arturo reached my side, eyes wide at my hysteria. “We’ll find it.” We kicked aside rustling dead leaves, threw aside fallen branches as I grew more frantic.

  “I can’t lose that dagger. I can’t.”

  Arturo scooped something out of the leaves. “Here it is, Mom. I found it.” Furious at my trembling, I accepted the dagger gratefully and brushed it off on my jeans. “Mom, you’re gonna scalp some poor squirrel with that thing some day and the SPCA’s gonna get you.”

  I smiled weakly, appreciating his efforts to distract me, then reached through his ‘wall’ for a quick hug. When I let him go, I caught Laura’s glare over his head. She was right. It was time to let go of Elena. Arturo needed a mom fully engaged in the world, not one who clung desperately to the only two reminders she had of a lost love—a necklace and a Moorish dagger.

  *

  Our Duañez hearth was still crowded with laughing men and women even though we’d eaten hours ago and the ale was nearly gone. As I shared a private laugh with Marta over her husband’s latest dysfunction, I felt Elena’s gaze, looked across the room, and nearly dropped my mug. A flush spread through me, warming my ankles, my thighs, my belly, even the insides of my wrists, to feel such naked desire directed right at me. Others saw Luis ogling his wife, so one by one, chuckling, with amorous ideas of their own, the couples left until we were alone.

  She moved slowly, shooting me that hungry look the whole time, straightening the shelves, adjusting a chair, sweeping crumbs from the table, so by the time she approached I could scarcely breathe. “We should go to bed,” I murmured.

  “No time,” she whispered hoarsely. “We would never make it.” Within seconds my clothing was heaped off to one side, and Elena laid me back on the sheepskin before the hearth. I gasped at the silky softness of the brushed fleece caressing the backs of my knees, my thighs, the small of my back.

  The honey pot still sat warming by the fire. Elena pulled it closer and removed the lid. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Elena? Oh, my god.”

  My eyes flew open. Teak bedroom set. Copy of El Greco’s painting of Toledo. Photos of Arturo. I was still here. In the present. With a groan, I rubbed my eyes. No wonder I’d not found anyone else—Elena kept reaching for me from the past.

  I stared at the El Greco. Turbulent ebony-blue clouds roiled over the walled city, darker art than I usually preferred, but something about the print had reached out to me. I assumed it was because it represented the turbulence of Spain. I relaxed my focus, almost crossing my eyes, and saw another possible explanation. The valleys around Toledo came together in a dark, mysterious Y, and the hills were rounded thighs pressed together.

  I shook my head, so lonely I could eroticize anything, then checked the clock. Eleven p.m. I must have fallen asleep the instant I lay down; my bed light still burned, and the unopened book still lay across my chest. I picked up the slim red volume, wishing I was reading an easy mystery or some other mind candy, but for my Advanced Latin class in Medieval Texts, I was reading Poema de Mio Cid in Latin, Poem of My Lord. Written about one hundred years after Rodrigo’s death, the poem was so historically inaccurate we studied it as literature, not as history. I’d finished the first section, “Poem of the Exile,” and was ready to move on to “Poem of the Marriage.”

  But when I opened the book, I cried out and sat up. I recognized nothing. “What the—?” Arabic letters danced across the pages, lovely, but not a written language I knew. I checked the cover, also in Arabic. I searched my bedside table, but found no Poema, so I marched down to Arturo’s room. Light shone under his door, and I was almost too angry to knock, but I did.

  “Where is it?”

  My brooding son looked up from his Stephen King novel. “What are you talking about?”
r />   I waved the slender book at him. “You took Poema de Mio Cid and replaced it with some Arabic thing I can’t read. Very funny.”

  “Mom, have you been drinking?” He rubbed his tousled hair.

  “Of course not.” I stood over his bed, hands on my hips. “No more jokes. Where is it?”

  He frowned, shadows from his reading lamp flickering over his pale face. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Honest.”

  I was about to erupt, then remembered Arturo took the Tae Kwon Do principle of honesty very seriously. “You don’t know anything about this?”

  He shook his head, stifling a yawn.

  “Turn out your light,” I scolded, but kissed him on his forehead.

  “Mom, I’m too old to kiss.”

  “Hush.” Back in my own room I examined the book more closely. Inside the back cover was an old manila pocket for the library’s checkout card, the system before computers. Yesterday I’d stuck a grocery list in an identical pocket of the Poema. Sure enough, I pulled the list from the pocket of the Arabic text.

  “Very weird.” The woven cover was torn in two places, same as the Poema. I checked my watch. Probably too late, but I called Yassir from my art class anyway.

  “I never sleep before midnight,” came the thick, Arabic accent. “What do you need, O Talented One?”

  “If I sent you a photo of some Arabic writing right now, could you translate it and call me back?”

  “I live to serve. Must it be an accurate translation, or might I have some fun?”

  “Cute. Call me when you have something.” I hung up and snapped a few photos with my phone, then zipped them off to Yassir.

  It didn’t take him long.

  “Very odd, what you’ve sent me. The title is Islam’s Crown of Valencia. Is this a novel?” Yassir asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “This material is not history, but fiction. It speaks of a young calif named al-Rashid who took permanent control of Valencia in 1094, and how the worldwide Muslim domination of the world began at that moment.”

  “That never happened. Rodrigo Díaz captured Valencia in 1094.”

  “Precisely.”

  I thanked Yassir and returned to bed. Maybe it would make sense in the morning, but right now, exhausted and lonely, I didn’t know what to think, so I pulled the covers up to my chin and finished my dream.

  Chapter Eight

  Tuesday morning Arturo still glowered over his Cheerios.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  I sat down beside him, touching his arm. “Who am I?”

  “The amnesia’s back, huh?”

  I growled softly. “I’m your mother.”

  “Nice to meet you.” His scowl faded as he chuckled at his own wit.

  “As your mother, don’t you think I’ve learned to recognize when something is really upsetting you?” He had shared everything in his life with me, but the stubbornness and silence had set in when he turned thirteen.

  He studied his empty bowl. “I suppose.”

  “Something’s been upsetting you since Saturday afternoon when you were over at Mark’s, and I want to know what it is.”

  “Can Vanessa and I go on a date by ourselves to the spring dance?”

  “We’ve discussed this. No dates until you’re fifteen.”

  “That’s barbaric, Mom. Medieval.”

  “I know. I want to keep you a child as long as I can.” Nothing like the direct approach. “Why don’t you want to go with the others?”

  He looked up, opened his mouth, then shut it with relief as the rumbling school bus headed down our block. “Gotta go.” He grabbed his pack and was gone.

  Frustrated, I put the dishes away and headed for work. But between Arturo and my strange Arabic book, I couldn’t concentrate. Both my assistants could handle emergencies, so at noon I pleaded a headache and took the afternoon off, feeling just a touch guilty.

  I headed for the university and the part of the library where I’d prowled the stacks during my medieval history classes, then climbed the last flight of stairs and found my favorite section. The first few years after I’d left Elena, I’d been a walking wounded, but taking those classes, sitting on the library floor soaking up details about the tenth through the twelfth centuries somehow reassured me I hadn’t dreamt it all. Rodrigo Díaz, King Alfonso, al-Mu’tamin, and al-Musta’in had all been real. Even though I never found any mention of Luis or Elena Navarro, reading about the others made her feel real as well.

  I grabbed an armful of Spanish history texts and settled into a quiet alcove. None of the indexes listed the Poema de Mio Cid, yet I had seen it listed before. King Alfonso VI was barely mentioned. The largest book had something under The Great Caliph of Valencia, but that section was in Arabic. I skimmed through the whole book, confused to find random paragraphs and whole pages in the cursive, flowing Arabic, others in English. After struggling through books for a few hours, my head hurt and I looked at my watch, thinking Professor Kalleberg, my patient history teacher, might still be in his office. I replaced the books, then hurried across campus, grateful for the green foliage brightening the campus. I waited outside Kalleberg’s open office door while he talked with a student; then after the student left, I knocked on the door jam.

  “Kate Vincent! My eleventh century fanatic. Come in!” Professor Kalleberg, a towering man with bony knuckles and long arms, clasped my hand and led me to a chair. He seemed tired, as if weighed down by too much history, too many details. The deep creases in his pale cheeks had always reminded me of Lincoln, but now they were deeper than ever.

  I explained about the strange Arabic book and the texts in the library. Face grim, Professor Kalleberg rose and shut his door, then collapsed in his chair, swiveling nervously. “You’re not the first to notice. The academic community is in an uproar because this is happening everywhere, to everything. Someone, or some group, is messing with thousands of books, literally changing history.” He pulled two books off a cluttered, dusty shelf behind him. “Look, the history of Ireland is half in English, half in Arabic. The facts before 1100 are all correct, but after that, the facts have been altered.” He flipped open the other book. “Instead of the Crusades, when Christian knights fought to spread Christianity into Muslim lands and take Jerusalem, this ancient text, written about 1105, speaks of a great battle in what is today Germany that the Muslims won. It’s almost as if we’re reading an alternate history, one in which Islam predominates, not Christianity.”

  Suspicion flowered in the pit of my belly.

  No. Impossible.

  But within minutes that suspicion made a speedy transition from tiny seed, to struggling stalk, to a tree heavy with certainty. “How could that be?” I asked.

  “No one knows. Some suspect a radical Islamic group, trying to inflate the glory of Islam, but it makes no sense. Why mess with our books? And how can they?” He stopped, then leaned forward, knuckles white as he squeezed lean fingers together. “Kate, they have access to everything. In my files I have photocopies of medieval texts. Some of those texts are now in Arabic. I can’t even read them. Salaam al-Houlaki and the rest of the Arabic Department are going mad from all the translation requests.”

  “Why hasn’t the press picked up on this?”

  He smoothed back his pale, thinning hair. “It’s too crazy. What are they going to say, that someone is magically changing thousands of texts all over the world? It’s impossible.” He spread his hands toward the texts he’d shown me. “But it’s happening.”

  I let my head drop forward. Even as I’d admonished Anna years ago not to mess with history, I hadn’t actually believed one person could make that much difference. But she’d done something. I reached into my memory for the day Anna had argued with Carlos at the Aljafería, the day before I fell back in time almost nine years ago. She’d insisted Spain would have been a greater country if the Moors had not been driven out but had remained in power. What if that had been
her purpose all along in going back in time—to do something, anything, that would tip the balance of power toward the Moors? But what could one woman do? What did she do?

  Professor Kalleberg reached for another book. “And look at this map drawn about 1250. Clearly Arabic rulers control most of Africa, most of Europe, and half of Asia. In reality, they should only be in North Africa, the Middle East, around the Mediterranean to Turkey, and over here in Spain. In fact, by 1250 the Spanish Christians had taken back most of Andalusia, leaving only Granada for the Moors.”

  I sat on my hands so the agitated professor wouldn’t notice their trembling. The past unfolded before me—Anna had come back in time and taken up with King Alfonso, making me think she was on his side, on history’s side. She’d even reassured me she had no intention of changing history, but only wanted to watch it unfold. Yeah, right. I suddenly understood her look of satisfaction eight years ago when I’d insisted on returning to the future. She didn’t want me to hang around and get in her way.

  Professor Kalleberg and I sat in silence, each caught in our own web of horror. At one point I looked up, considered the professor’s lean face, kind gray eyes, and opened my mouth. I shut it again. What on earth could I say? That time travel is possible and my ex-lover is back in the eleventh century messing around with history?

  “So,” I finally croaked out. “What are people doing about this?”

  His sagging shoulders drew my own down. “Watching, Kate, just watching. The nightmare has started to affect late twelfth century texts. We can’t fight an enemy we can’t see.”

  I cursed my cowardice. All I had to do was explain the whole thing. He knew me to be a serious student. He’d believe me. What would Arturo think if he knew I was such a coward? What would Elena think?

  I buried my face in my hands, breathing deeply. The fear gripping my chest was worse than the terror I felt the night I had come out to my parents. But like then, I knew if I could just get the first word out, the rest would follow. He had to believe me.