Philippa Gregory: The Constant Princess

“No, we don’t retreat,” Isabella of Spain ruled.

The generals, called to a makeshift meeting under a singed awning, batted away the flies that were swarming around the camp, feasting off the wreckage.

“Your Majesty, we have lost for this season,” one of the generals said gently to her. “It is not a matter of pride nor of willingness. We have no tents, we have no shelter, we have been destroyed by ill luck. We will have to go back and provision ourselves once more, set the siege again. Your husband”—he nodded to the dark, handsome man who stood slightly to one side of the group, listening—“he knows this. We all know this. We will set the siege again, they will not defeat us. But a good general knows when he has to retreat.”

Every man nodded. Common sense dictated that nothing could be done but release the Moors of Granada from their siege for this season. The battle would keep. It had been coming for seven centuries. Each year had seen generations of Christian kings increase their lands at the cost of the Moors. Every battle had pushed back the time-honored Moorish rule of al Andalus a little farther to the south. Another year would make no difference. The little girl, her back against a damp tent post that smelled of wet embers, watched her mother’s serene expression. It never changed.

“Indeed it is a matter of pride,” she corrected him. “We are fighting an enemy who understands pride better than any other. If we crawl away in our singed clothes, with our burned carpets rolled up under our arms, they will laugh themselves to al-Yanna, to their paradise. I cannot permit it. But more than all of this: it is God’s will that we fight the Moors, it is God’s will that we go forwards. It is not God’s will that we go back. So we must go forwards.”

The child’s father turned his head with a quizzical smile, but he did not dissent. When the generals looked to him, he made a small gesture with his hand. “The queen is right,” he said. “The queen is always right.”

“But we have no tents, we have no camp!”

He directed the question to her. “What do you think?”

“We shall build one,” she decided.

“Your Majesty, we have laid waste to the countryside for miles all around. I daresay we could not sew so much as a kamiz for the Princess of Wales. There is no cloth. There is no canvas. There are no watercourses, no crops in the field. We have broken the canals and plowed up the crops. We have laid them waste; but it is we that are destroyed.”

“So we build in stone. I take it we have stone?”

The king turned a brief laugh into clearing his throat. “We are surrounded by a plain of arid rocks, my love,” he said. “One thing we do have is stone.”

“Then we will build; not a camp but a city of stone.”

“It cannot be done!”

She turned to her husband. “It will be done,” she said. “It is God’s will and mine.”

He nodded. “It will be done.” He gave her a quick, private smile. “It is my duty to see that God’s will is done; and my pleasure to enforce yours.”

The army, defeated by fire, turned instead to the elements of earth and water. They toiled like slaves in the heat of the sun and the chill of the evenings. They worked the fields like peasants where they had thought they would triumphantly advance. Everyone—cavalry officers, generals, the great lords of the country, the cousins of kings—was expected to toil in the heat of the sun and lie on hard, cold ground at night. The Moors, watching from the high, impenetrable battlements of the red fort on the hill above Granada, conceded that the Christians had courage. No one could say that they were not determined. And equally, everyone knew that they were doomed. No force could take the red fort at Granada; it had never fallen in two centuries. It was placed high on a cliff, overlooking a plain that was itself a wide, bleached bowl. It could not be surprised by a hidden attack. The cliff of red rock that towered up from the plain became imperceptibly the walls of red stone of the castle, rising high and higher; no scaling ladders could reach the top, no party could climb the sheer face.

Perhaps it could be betrayed by a traitor; but what fool could be found who would abandon the steady, serene power of the Moors, with all the known world behind them, with an undeniable faith to support them, to join the rabid madness of the Christian army whose kings owned only a few mountainous acres of Europe and who were hopelessly divided? Who would want to leave al-Yanna, the garden, which was the image of paradise itself, inside the walls of the most beautiful palace in Spain, the most beautiful palace in Europe, for the rugged anarchy of the castles and fortresses of Castile and Aragon?

Reinforcements would come for the Moors from Africa; they had kin and allies from Morocco to Senegal. Support would come for them from Baghdad, from Constantinople. Granada might look small compared with the conquests that Ferdinand and Isabella had made, but standing behind Granada was the greatest empire in the world—the empire of the Prophet, praise be his name.

But, amazingly, day after day, week after week, slowly, fighting the heat of the spring days and the coldness of the nights, the Christians did the impossible. First there was a chapel built in the round like a mosque, since the local builders could do that most quickly; then, a small house, flat-roofed inside an Arabic courtyard, for King Ferdinand, Queen Isabella, and the royal family: the Infante, their precious son and heir, the three older girls, Isabel, María, Juana, and Catalina the baby. The queen asked for nothing more than a roof and walls; she had been at war for years, she did not expect luxury. Then there were a dozen stone hovels around them where the greatest lords reluctantly took some shelter. Then, because the queen was a hard woman, there were stables for the horses and secure stores for the gunpowder and the precious explosives for which she had pawned her own jewels to buy from Venice; then, and only then, were built barracks and kitchens, stores and halls. Then there was a little town, built in stone where once there had been a little camp. No one thought it could be done; but, bravo! it was done. They called it Santa Fe, and Isabella had triumphed over misfortune once again. The doomed siege of Granada by the determined, foolish Christian kings would continue.

Catalina, Princess of Wales, came upon one of the great lords of the Spanish camp in whispered conference with his friends. “What are you doing, Don Hernando?” she asked with all the precocious confidence of a five-year-old who had never been far from her mother’s side, whose father could deny her very little.

“Nothing, Infanta,” Hernando Pérez del Pulgar said with a smile that told her that she could ask again.

“You are.”

“It’s a secret.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Oh! Princess! You would tell. It is such a great secret! Too big a secret for a little girl.”

“I won’t! I really won’t! I truly won’t!” She thought. “I promise upon Wales.”

“On Wales! On your own country?”

“On England?”

“On England? Your inheritance?”

She nodded. “On Wales and on England, and on Spain itself.”

“Well, then. If you make such a sacred promise, I will tell you. Swear that you won’t tell your mother?”

She nodded, her blue eyes wide.

“We are going to get into the Alhambra. I know a gate, a little postern gate, that is not well guarded, where we can force an entry. We are going to go in, and guess what?”

She shook her head vigorously, her auburn plait swinging beneath her veil like a puppy’s plump tail.

“We are going to say our prayers in their mosque. And I am going to leave an Ave Maria stabbed to the floor with my dagger. What d’you think of that?”