This news was brought to Ibrahim’s office by a sweating, panicky soldier. Ibrahim summoned Abdul, a captain of the palace guard, and told him to assemble a unit of his troops. Then he ran out of his office, without waiting to see if Abdul and his soldiers followed.

From the emir’s palace, the fastest way to get to the bridge was to cut down to the river and follow the bank, and that was the way Ibrahim headed. Even so it was tough going, for every open space, every street was cluttered with refugees and their belongings. Ibrahim was forced to wade through this throng as through a sea. By the river it was almost as bad, but troops stationed here kept a path cleared along the bank, and once he was in sight of the water Ibrahim was able to make faster progress.

It was a bright spring day, he noted absently. The river water glistened prettily, and the orange trees were in bloom. But this year, the hungry would not leave the fruit on the branches long enough to ripen.

It wasn’t hard to find the source of the trouble. The mob had caught their man at the abutment of the pontoon bridge. Ragged, already bleeding, his head hidden by a hood, the quarry had backed a few paces onto the bridge.

‘Let me scatter them, sir.’ Abdul, a veteran of the sieges of Cordoba and Valencia, was a tough, competent man of about thirty-five, who wore a black patch to hide the empty socket from which a Christian arrow had taken his right eye. ‘A charge will do it.’

Ibrahim trusted Abdul with his life. But Abdul thought in a soldier’s blunt, direct terms. Ibrahim’s job was to see the wider picture. ‘We can’t risk the bridge,’ he said. Seville had only two arteries to the wider Muslim world: the river, which was gradually being blockaded by King Fernando’s fleet, and this pontoon bridge, which linked the city to the suburb of Triana and the Muslim communities beyond. ‘You charge them and they’ll be on that bridge for sure. All it will take is one of those idiots with a torch to start chucking fire around, and we’re all sunk.’

Abdul pursed his lips. ‘Let me guess. You want to go and talk to them.’

Ibrahim grinned at the tough soldier. But he wondered, not for the first time, how it was that he, who had always thought his destiny was to be a warrior, had finished up being a cut-price diplomat. ‘Our job is to keep order, above all, captain. Let’s see if we can do that without breaking any more heads.’

‘And when it goes wrong, my boys will sort it all out and save your arse for you. Again. Sir.’ But Abdul smiled.

‘Fair enough. Wait here.’