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As Zawi pulled up his trousers, Alfonso made one last try. He cried, ‘You will not contradict me, woman! The facts of the case are clear! This girl has been violated.
This girl,
of a line tainted by no Moorish blood or Jewish, a Christian line that has survived since the days of the Gothic kings...’

But nobody was listening. One cobble was actually hurled, bouncing off the mosque wall harmlessly. But the mood for blood was gone, washed away by the sheer power of Subh’s personality. Even the priest walked away.

Subh approached Alfonso. ‘Gothic kings, eh? Well, I,’ she said, ‘am descended from Ahmed Ibn Tufayl, vizier to the emir of Seville, and
that
is no lie. I know the truth about you and your family,
muhtasib.
For centuries you called yourself al-Hafsun. My family worked with yours, in those days. You were
muwallad.
But when the Christian kings returned, you conveniently called yourselves Christian once more. Your blood is no more pure than your slut of a granddaughter.’

And she turned her back on a fuming Alfonso. ‘One of you,’ she called to her hapless relatives, ‘take Zawi home and clean him up. And tell him that if he gets up to this kind of mischief again, especially with a Christian, and
especially
with a granddaughter of that slug Alfonso, I’ll cut off his cock myself.’ She rubbed her hands as if to clean them of dust. ‘Well, that’s that sorted out. Now, what’s next?’She smiled brightly at Peter. ‘What are you waiting for? Come with me.’

He dared do nothing else but follow.

IV

In the patio of her home, Subh served Peter tea flavoured with the zest of an orange, and dried olives and apricots in thick cream.

It was May, and the garden was fresh, the leaves on the trees brilliant green, the roses flowering, the blossom on the pomegranates bright red. Somewhere a nightingale sang. This was a typically Moorish setting, Peter thought, an oasis-garden made by folk who cherished life where they found it.

But Ibrahim stalked about, restless. He seemed very angry that his mother had saved the life of his distant cousin. ‘You lied shamelessly,’ Ibrahim accused her. ‘You knew very well that Zawi slept with that wretched girl. It was written all over him.’

Peter said, ‘But the scars - the girl didn’t recognise them.’

‘He keeps the scars covered up with his sash,’ Ibrahim snapped. ‘Even while making love. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Oh, of course I knew he slept with the whelp,’ Subh said. ‘Why do you think I didn’t question him? For fear he would blurt out the truth, or still worse profess some undying passion for the spread-legged little she-goat, and get himself put down.’

‘And you made an unnecessary enemy of Alfonso in the process.’

‘But he is already my enemy. You see, my son, I believe that to lie is wrong, but to allow a foolish boy to be stoned for a bit of careless lust is more wrong still.’

Ibrahim snapped, ‘Our family has lived in this den of decadence for too long. It has poisoned our blood, which must be cleansed!’ And he stalked off, unsatisfied.

So Peter was left alone with this woman, her languid form draped on a divan. Impossible fantasies ran through his head.

Subh sighed. ‘It is a trial to have a son whose soul is so much purer than mine. A reminder of the time when the holy Almohads ran all our lives, and the Almoravids before them.’

After the fall of Toledo a century and a half earlier, a bruised al-Andalus had fallen under the sway of cultists from across the strait, Almoravids and later Almohads, men of the desert with veiled faces who dressed in skins and stank of their camels, devout, disciplined and cruel. Attitudes hardened on both sides. The popes granted crusading indulgences to knights who fought in Spain, challenging the fundamentalism of the desert warriors.

‘The boy means well, of course. But he simply isn’t pragmatic. Are you pragmatic, scholar? Or are you religious?’

‘Not especially, though I do plenty of work for the religious houses, mostly the Franciscans. My ambition is to be a philosopher, for which I need to find patrons - like yourself, to whom I am eternally grateful.’ Peter’s career was a new sort, unimagined not so long before. Thanks to the injection of scholarship from the conquered regions of al-Andalus there had been an explosion of learning across Christendom, and all over Europe itinerant scholars like Peter were trying to make a living. ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘the task of the scholar is to reconcile all our philosophy with the revealed truth of God.’ That was the official truth, but actually, it seemed to Peter, thanks to the Aristotelian studies of the Moorish scholars, across Christendom the close ties of devotion and scholarship were loosening.

Subh was still thinking about her son. ‘Ibrahim can’t see that the subtext of the little encounter today is my rivalry with Alfonso the Fat, and the long war he is waging to destroy me. That’s why he was trying to have poor Zawi put down - it’s nothing to do with the law, or what Zawi may or may not have actually done. It’s all to get at me.’

‘Why would he wish to do that?’

‘Because I work against him. He offends me, in his hypocrisy, his exploitation of the mudejars,
and
the size of his arse.’

The term ‘mudejar’,
al-mudajjar,
meaning literally ‘the tamed’, referred to Muslims still living in Cordoba, Toledo and other territories reconquered by the Christians. There was work for them to do, as clerks, accountants, lawyers. The more enlightened Christian rulers and wealthy folk even employed mudejar artisans to restore or rebuild their houses and palaces in a Moorish style.

‘And in Cordoba,’ Subh said, ‘Alfonso has spent the six years since the city’s conquest establishing himself as a middle man. Wealthy Christians find it easier to deal with a man who presents himself as a Christian, you see, than with the children of the desert - even though ten years ago “Alfonso” was as Moorish as an Almohad. So Alfonso sells Moorish work at the highest prices, while paying the Moors a pittance, and growing rich himself in the process. Why, he even exploits some of my own family. Can you believe that? He despises me, you see, because I stand up to him.’

‘You were very brave to face down the crowd.’

‘Brave for a woman, you mean?’ She snorted. ‘Well, I have to be strong, for all the men have fled. It was a bad time when Cordoba fell. My husband was already dead, killed fighting the Christians. Then King Fernando laid siege to the city. We capitulated; after six months we had no choice.’ She paused, and her eyes were distant. ‘Best not to speak of those times. That first evening a bishop entered the mosque to “cleanse” it, as they put it, and rededicate it to Christ. And they took away the bells of the church of Saint James, and returned them to Santiago de Compostela from where they had been stolen by al-Mansur, more than two centuries ago. Christians don’t forget, or forgive! - but then,’ she said fiercely, ‘neither do Muslims. When the city gates were opened to the Christians, those who could afford to do so fled south, to Seville or Granada, even across the strait to the Maghrib.’

‘Why did you not flee?’

‘Because,’ she said grandly, ‘those left behind, the marginal and the poor, the toy-makers and the saddlers, the farmers and the potters, good Muslims stranded in a Christian city, have nobody left to stand up for them. And besides I am the descendant of a vizier. As you, in your rummaging in the libraries of Toledo, have proven for me, I hope.’

Her warm look stirred his blood again. But he paused, for he knew that what he had found in Toledo was more complicated than that.

She recognised his hesitation. ‘Don’t tease me, Peter of Toledo. Did you find what I wanted?’

‘Yes. And no.’

She made a gesture like swatting a fly. ‘A typical scholar’s response - infuriating ! Is that all I get for my money?’

‘In the archives I explored in Toledo,’ he said carefully, ‘I found answers to your questions - and more. Some of this will please you. Some of it will not.’

‘Tell me, then. Did you find my ancestor?’

‘Yes.’ In fact that part hadn’t been hard. Even in the fractured age of the
taifas
, the Moors had always been fine record-keepers. ‘Yes, there was a vizier; his existence isn’t just a family tradition. And his name, as you know, was Ahmed Ibn Tufayl. I can prove a direct line of descent, in places through the female line, to you.’

‘Hah! I knew it! Oh, every Muslim in Cordoba claims descent from one royal lineage or another. But I knew we were different - I knew it.’

‘I have some details of his career’ - and Peter patted his bag - ‘but what may interest you more is not how Ibn Tufayl lived, but how he died.’

‘Much of this was written down after his death by his granddaughter, Moraima, who survived him.’

‘My distant grandmother,’ Subh breathed, eyes heartbreakingly wide.

‘Over a hundred years dead.’

Peter summarised for her the story of Sihtric, the priest from England. ‘Who as you know,’ he said cautiously, ‘fathered Moraima by Ibn Tufayl’s daughter.’

She sighed. ‘We’ve learned to live with that, I think.’

‘The question is
why
Sihtric came to Spain. He approached Ibn Tufayl for sponsorship for a project: the development of designs for marvellous weapons called the Engines of God.’

Subh’s eyes widened at that. ‘Weapons?’

‘These designs had a mysterious origin,’ Peter said. ‘Or murky, you might say. They were supposed to be the result of visions, divine or satanic, implanted in the mind of an English monk, now two centuries dead, who—’

Subh waved her hand impatiently. ‘I’ve no time for visions and miracles.
Tell me about these weapons.
Did Sihtric build them? What became of them?’

He told her how Sihtric, with great difficulty, had got as far as a few prototypes. ‘But there was something missing, so Sihtric came to believe. An agent he called
Incendium Dei
- the Fire of God. It was something like Greek Fire, perhaps - though there I’m guessing. It was mentioned in the designs, but nothing the alchemists could crack.’

‘And then what? Get on with it, man!’

‘And then,’ Peter said, ‘a man called Orm Egilsson, English or possibly a Dane, came to Cordoba in search of Sihtric. He brought with him his son, called Robert. Orm had a head full of a prophecy of his own, a “Testament of Eadgyth”, or Edith, something to do with a mysterious figure called the Dove. And he seems to have been determined to put a stop to Sihtric’s work.’

‘Why? No, don’t answer that. Prophecies and visions! Sometimes I think the whole world is gripped by pious madness. Did he stop Sihtric?’

‘In a way. Orm’s arrival upset everything - in particular the relationship between Sihtric and Ibn Tufayl.’

‘So it all went wrong. Then what?’

‘Ibn Tufayl tried to destroy the machines Sihtric had made, and to eliminate the scholars who had worked with him. He wanted it all for himself. He dreamed of being more than a vizier, lady.’

Subh nodded, matter-of-fact. ‘He wouldn’t have been the first. I take it he didn’t achieve his ambition?’

‘No. As they fought he burned himself to death, along with Sihtric and Orm, and the plans for the machines. All this took place in the palace of Madinat az-Zahra.’

Subh looked at him shrewdly. ‘Not all the plans were lost. Or you would not be telling me about this now.’

‘You’re perceptive,’ he said. ‘No, not all of them. Ibn Tufayl doesn’t seem to have been very competent. There are hints of personal weaknesses in the records - I suppose that doesn’t matter. He was certainly not efficient in his elimination of Sihtric’s work. I was able to find traces in the archives. For instance, one young clerk survived the vizier’s cull, and, in bitterness, wrote down all he remembered to thwart the vizier’s purpose. There are similar relics. It’s all very fragmentary - most of it is just the point of view of one junior clerk - but—’

‘You have these fragments?’

‘Some of them. And, more than this - the blaze did not destroy everything. Moraima and Robert escaped. Between them they took away the Codex of the Engines of God - the original designs brought by Sihtric to Spain.’

‘And what did they do with them?’

‘The two of them fell out. They could not agree. The plans were buried - but what was buried was fire-damaged and not complete. One comer had been torn away by Robert, perhaps intentionally, perhaps not. This fragment contained the secret of God’s Fire. Possibly - it is said. And it may be that Robert took away another treasure, another prophecy entirely, called the “Testament of al-Hafredi”. I know little about that. But as for the rest of the engine designs, a man called Ibn Hafsun buried them for Moraima.’ He thought it over. ‘I suppose he may have been an ancestor of your Alonso the Fat.’

‘How ironic that would be,’ Subh said drily. ‘And where did he bury the plans?’

Peter hesitated. ‘Under the floor of the great mosque in Seville. In fact I have seen a fragment of memoir by Ibn Hafsun, in which he specifies exactly where the Codex can be found.’

Subh laughed. ‘Now you’re being absurd. Peter of Toledo, you must know that in a country where war has washed back and forth ever since Tariq crossed the strait, there are legends of buried treasure under every rock.’

‘But it may be worth looking,’ Peter said softly.

‘You have an adventurous soul, for a scholar. And these sketches, the fragmentary plans you say you already have—’

‘I’m no engineer. But I believe they could be developed into workable designs.’ He said this with pride, and a certain longing, for it was a project he would find fascinating to pursue if he got the chance.

She clapped her hands, almost girlish. ‘Oh, how marvellous. But you’re telling me that even if I could get to Seville, even if we manage to dig up the mosque and find these plans - even if! - they will remain incomplete.’

‘Because of the fragment taken by Robert, yes. But I have some news about that too. I was able to trace this Robert, son of Orm, and the family who followed him.’