Jonathan Levi - Septimania

“Yes, yes,” Malory said, surprising himself that he had developed the haphazard annoyance of someone with servants. “I know what it means. I just don’t know what it means in this case.”

“Neither do I, my lord,” Settimio said mournfully. “But my instructions are to reply in such a manner. Should the new King of Septimania ask me whether the box is empty, my instructions are to reply Simplex sigillum veri .”

“Your instructions?” Malory asked. “Instructions from whom?”

“From my father,” Settimio answered, “who trained me the way his father trained him.”

“May I ask,” Malory ventured, a little more calmly, “whether previous kings of Septimania have asked the same question?”

“I have direct knowledge,” Settimio said, “of only one prior king, your great-grandfather. The father of your mother’s mother, the most recent king of Septimania.”

“So this is the first time you’ve had to say Simplex sigillum veri ?”

“The first time, my lord, in my knowledge, that any of us Settimios have had to say it. Opening boxes used to be somewhat simpler.”

Malory sat at the desk. He rubbed the back of his scalp against the back of the tapestried armchair, as he had rubbed it so often against the crumbling foam of the Trinity College Senior Common Room sofa. So many things used to be somewhat simpler. Write , they had said back in Cambridge. The simple is the sign of the truth . They had known, all the other kings of Septimania had known what was in the box, or at least hadn’t doubted that there was something, one thing in the box. But for him, the first Quantum King of Septimania, the first one in love with a quantum woman whose position he might know or direction he might know but never the same at once, nothing was simplex . And the Truth?

“You asked me,” Settimio interrupted Malory’s reverie, “how I came upon the knowledge of the history of Septimania.”

“Yes,” Malory said, looking up at Settimio and noticing behind him shelves filled with books — leather-bound folios and quartos, papers held in boards and tied with ribbon, boxes annotated in a faded ink.

“I have spent a great deal of time in the Sanctum Sanctorum,” Settimio said, “preparing for your arrival.”

“Really?” Malory said. “That was very kind of you.”

“Twenty-six years to be exact. Ever since it became clear that your mother intended to raise you outside of Rome and in the English language. And even before then,” Settimio continued, flicking one electric switch after another, “I spent a great deal of time cataloguing the books and manuscripts and scrolls in the Sanctum Sanctorum. There was not a great deal else to do while we waited for a male heir to take possession.” As Settimio flicked the switches, lights turned on in distant passageways. Seven, Malory counted, one leading away from every corner between the seven walls of the room. Lined, as far as he could see from his position at the seven-sided desk, with miles, perhaps, of bookshelves.

“You catalogued all this?” Malory said.

“What might interest you most, mio Principe, ” Settimio said, “as you contemplate whether or not to open the box — although I would not presume to give you advice — is an English translation that was the labor of much of the past twenty-six years. You will forgive my mistakes, I trust.”

With that, Settimio laid a book in front of Malory — a good thousand pages of typescript on whose marbled binder was engraved:

THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE KINGDOM OF SEPTIMANIA

Malory opened the cover. He began to read.

In the first years of the siege of the Franks, when Order still held the innocent hand of Hope, I kept my head down and slaughtered whatever came my way.

“The letter, mio Principe, from the butcher Yehoshua to the King of the Jews in Baghdad requesting that he send a prince to rule the new land of Septimania, as stipulated by the deed of Pepin, the father of Charlemagne. It is the first recorded document to mention the Kingdom of Septimania. I took the liberty of photocopying the original, which I have stored elsewhere, for safekeeping,” he added with the hurried apology that reminded Malory of the librarians at the University Library whose expectations of themselves far outreached those of their clients.

“You did all this?” Malory said. “For me?” He turned a few more pages. There were letters between Ambassadors with their ornate courtesies and catalogues of gifts.

Seven days from the shores of Palestine. It was nothing. We lost only three parrots, and that was due to a faulty latch on the cage of the jackal.

Then Malory came upon something different. A story recounted by a Jew in Baghdad who served in the unusual capacity of Dream Counselor to the Caliph. Haroun al Rashid had a bad dream and called upon his Dream Counselor for interpretation. One thing led to another, and the Counselor introduced Haroun to his grandson, Gan, the sixteen-year-old son of the King of the Jews of Baghdad. Haroun invited Gan to live with him in his palace. His dream — or rather his Dream Counselor — had convinced Haroun that his own safety rested on the safety of this young boy. He not only took Gan under his wing but showered him with all the comforts and delights that were his daily milk and honey.

“ In the name of Suleiyman, son of David, I swear ,” the young Gan wrote.

Paradise.

A fucking paradise is what it was.

Shami apples and Omani peaches for breakfast.

Mutton rubbed with limes from Egypt and stuffed with myrtle berries and Damascene nenuphars.

Dates from Al Ahsa.

Soap-cakes and lemon-loaves and Zaynab’s combs and Kazi’s tidbits and more wine every evening than my mother ever placed on our table for all our Purims combined.

And served by …

In sixteen years of sitting at the feet of my father and my grandfather and learning Torah and Talmud and the histories of the people of Abraham and the stories of philosophers and travelers who had journeyed to places where the birds of the trees and the insects of the ground and the air and the fish of the deep and their cousins who crawl on land and the animals of the plains and the forests and the frozen wastelands of the north and the humans draped in skins and the ones who run all day naked as on the day they were cut from their mother’s cords — in all the stories of all the places of the Earth where the light of the Sun and the Moon colors every living thing in every shade of color, I had never heard of sirens as gut-squeezingly ripe as the ones who brought me my breakfast in the morning and my supper in the evening, who drew my bath and wiped me dry. Yemeni houris and Syrian nymphs, Babylonian naiads and purple-haired Khazars from the savage ravines of the Caucasus, with throats like antelopes and navels that would hold an ounce of olive oil, half a dozen purple-veined grapes, or a featherweight of frankincense from the caravans of the Sudan. Solomon sang of a Sheba as black as the tents of Kadar, with eyes like doves and breasts like gazelles that feed among the lilies. My Grandpa Benyamin, Master of the Caliph’s Dreams, told me that imagination is the daytime seed from which grows the Tree of Fantasy. I have never been to Kadar, have never seen a gazelle among the lilies, have never met the Queen of Sheba. Yet I am sure that the dreams primed by my dark-nippled companions were as vivid as any of Solomon or my savior Haroun al Rashid and need no interpretation.

“This boy,” Malory looked up to Settimio, who continued to stand, “this Gan is the Gan who sailed across the Mediterranean?”

“ Certo, mio Principe. He married Aldana, the daughter of Charlemagne, produced an heir, who produced generation upon generation of heirs to the Kingdom of Septimania, down to you yourself, mio Principe .”