Subh stood over him, glaring, a pitiless mother. ‘You’ve worn yourself out, and for nothing. I told you so, but would you listen to me? Now look at you - fainting like an old woman, in this hour of our family’s greatest crisis.’

‘The family.’ His own voice sounded distant to Ibrahim. ‘What does the family matter? It hasn’t been like this before. Even in Cordoba. There Muslims still live under Christian rule, as once Christians lived under our rule.’

‘Things have changed,’ Subh said. ‘Look at them, Ibrahim. Look at them with those hateful crosses stitched to their shoulders.’

‘They won’t even know how the city works. The city is its people, its history . . . This is unthinkable.’

‘And yet such things are being thought,’ said the doctor. ‘You are a sane man, Ibrahim, in a world of the mad. And we men of sanity must cope with the consequences of the decisions of the others. Come, my friend. Stand with me now. In the coming days, the city will ask one last service of you.’

‘Yes. One last service.’

‘And,’ Subh said, glaring at the Christians, ‘the family has one great goal to achieve before we abandon this place, as we were forced out of Cordoba.’

Ibrahim knew she meant the Codex, supposedly lost under the floor of the mosque. She was scheming over trifles in this moment of catastrophe for a whole civilisation. He thought she was as insane as the Christians. And yet he must cope with her as well as the city’s calamity.

He struggled to rise, leaning on Ibn Shaprut.

XXX

XXX

Fernando set a deadline of one month for the evacuation. He told the emir bluntly that he wished to celebrate Christmas Day in Seville’s great mosque, reconsecrated as a Christian cathedral.

And in that last month, Ibrahim worked harder even than in the worst days of the siege, as he helped to organise the abandonment of a great city.