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This is how it begins. The camera slowly pans over Old Cordoba, in all its courtly splendor. A glittering jewel under the clear, warm skies of Al Andalus... The sultan's palace.... The royal menagerie... ladies haggling in the marketplace.. The Fountains of Omar... The Street of the Butterfly Vendors, each featuring a certain splendid breed, fluttering like captured blossoms, tethered to the shopkeeper's horizontal bar by almost invisible threads of 'dry' (non sticky) spiders' silk.
I walk with my brother, Hannan, eighteen months my junior, yet otherwise very much like me. Perhaps I am a bit more filled out. Two young aristocrats, for in our land, under the rule of the benevolent Abd Al Rahman III Caliph of Spain, known as Al Andalus in Classical Arabic, opportunity is open to every Muslim, Jew and Christian who accepts the truth of things. I've been to the palace with my father, an adviser and member of the counsel, not as grand as the great Hasdai, another member of The Faith of Israel, but esteemed just the same. Upon my last birthday the prince, close to me in years, presented me with a gift, two beautiful Arabian stallions, one white, one auburn. I named them Sha-Har (dawn) and Ha-Shki-ah (TheSundown).... What sublime pleasure it is to race them over the hills out beyond Medina Al Zahara. That's what they called the palace. It means City of Radiance and as one who knows, I can vouch that it was the Versailles (if my French is right) of its time.
Tonight we have a dinner at the villa. Our father keeps one here in the capital and another farther south in Granada. Some nights you can hear the Roma tribesmen dancing to rapid melodies played on ouds 'round their fires. We had a barbary ape, a tailless monkey actually, named Udo. I think it was a Berber name. Who knows? Once, when the cat had kittens, he ate one. Ravi the gardner killed him with a shovel. Why I remember that, who knows? Memory is a quite inconstant thing.
The dinner marks my departure. Tomorrow I travel to the Ocitane where I'll study ecclesiastic law at the Academy of the esteemed Rashi. He's a renowned vintner as well as a ranking rabbi and Biblical scholar. Sends casks to the Frankish court in Paris. Speaks Provencal, Hoch Deutsch, Piedmontese and Arabic as well as Aramaic and Hebrew. I hear the son of the Exilarch (pretender to the Throne of David) studies there. The south of France, at least culturally, if not politically, will be a whole new thing to me..
I am Jonathon ben Macabi and tonight I write this thing. Billy, the mortal who curates my record, is already sleeping. Life in the time of pestilence tires him. In a way it tires me too. The mortal world suffers. It's hard for me to remember that. Night-folk (vampires) don't die... not like that anyway..
So what else did I do that day with my brother?... Ah, yes... we went to the Frankish Quarter to taste some 'white meat,' a term Jews and Muslims used when referring to pork.. the silly experiences young men lust after....
How was I to know I'd soon be kidnapped into darkness and privy to much rarer delights. Traveling can be lethal... Perspective changes everything...
With that the rapid music reaches a crescendo and stops (see video up above)... This is how I see the edgy cable or streaming version of my life. This is how I see LA CIENCIA VAMPIRISMO.. This is how I tell MY tale...
Jarring chord
We focus on the pensive face of Jonathon in shadow....
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