‘No. Don’t think such nonsense. Why, the Christians probably say the same sort of things about us.’

‘Your baby’s fine,’ Ibn Shaprut said, standing up. ‘Nothing a good feed and a bit of sunshine wouldn’t cure.’

She said, ‘But everybody’s left. Where am I to go?’

Ibrahim glanced at Ibn Shaprut. ‘We’ll have to leave soon, like everybody else. You can come with us to Granada. But I can make no guarantees about what you’ll find there, for we have no arrangements ourselves.’

‘Thank you,’ she said earnestly. ‘That’s enough for me. Anything to get away from these Christians—’

‘Leave her.’ The voice was imperious.

Ibrahim turned. Subh stood in the arched entrance to the patio. Even now, as the city was in its death throes, a haze of perfume hung around her.

‘Mother.’

‘You weren’t hard to find, you know. Plodding around town with this sullen doctor, still doing your duty, even now. You’re as pious as a Christian, Ibrahim.’

‘I thought you’d gone. I arranged it—’

‘I know what you arranged. I told you. I’m going nowhere, not until we’ve been to the mosque.’

‘Are you still pursuing that foolishness, even now?’

‘You don’t understand. Things have changed. She’s here.’

Ibrahim was baffled and disbelieving. ‘Who?’

‘Joan. Our cousin of the Outremer. I learned this through Ali Gurdu, who is working with the Christians, and functions as a conduit of information . . . Joan, to whom I wrote about the Engines of God, and who never replied, has now come here. It’s obvious why. I told you I feared I had made her a rival. She wants the Codex for herself.’

Ibrahim remembered the almond-faced woman in the turayya. Could that truly have been his distant cousin from the Outremer, come all this way from lost Jerusalem to dying Seville? How remarkable.

‘And,’ his mother went on, ‘do you know what Ali Gurdu tells me she has done? She has worked her way into the court of King Fernando. She may have warmed the bed of Fernando himself for all I know. And it was she who hatched the idea of forcing the evacuation of the city.’

Ibrahim was baffled. ‘But why would she want this?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? She wants the city cleared, so the mosque will be emptied. And there, in the hours before Fernando’s first mass, she will have her chance to get her hands on the engine designs. My designs.’

‘That’s absurd.’

‘Absurd? The promise of the designs is not absurd. Joan takes it as seriously as I do. Indeed she has travelled from one end of the Mediterranean to the other for the sake of it. I need you to help me thwart her.’