But in other ways Seville was quite unlike London. He walked to the site of a grand cathedral, bristling with scaffolding. It would be the largest in the world, it was said. But it had been built on the site of the city’s Moorish mosque, and a surviving muezzin tower still loomed over it; slim and exquisite, the tower would always draw the eye away from the solid pile of the Christian church.

And just over the plaza from the cathedral was an old Moorish fortress-palace which the Moors called the al-qasr al-Mubarak, and the Christians called the Alcazar. James peered curiously through its arched doorways. Though the Moors had been expelled from Seville by the city’s conquerors, later generations of Christian rulers had brought back craftsmen from Granada to work on these buildings, maintaining and even enhancing them.

Seville was not like London, then, where with their forts and cathedrals the conquering Normans had erased any symbol of the old Saxon state. Here the spirit of the Moors lived on in a Christian country.

Perhaps things were going to change, however. Two hundred and thirty years after its conquest Seville was still the southernmost Christian city in Spain. The great tide of Reconquest had stalled. The Christians were distracted by conflicts between their own rival kingdoms, and their vast project to repopulate the occupied country was diluted by the Mortality; where once the Moors had turned the land green, now only Christian sheep grazed. Seville remained a city on the cusp of a great change, James thought. Perhaps it was no wonder that apocalyptic legends had gathered around the place.

But James, in his first walk around this strange, complicated, muddled city, did not see a need for cleansing, but a kind of mixed-up human vitality he rather relished.

Near the Alcazar he came across two girls who sat on a bench, eating oranges they unpeeled with their thumbs. No older than twelve or thirteen, dark, shy-looking, they giggled with each other as they ate, but kept a wary eye on the folk around them. The girls both had yellow crosses stitched to their blouses. They were Jews, then. They had to wear ugly symbols on their clothing, but at least they were here. In England there were no Jewish girls like this, laughing in the sun and eating oranges.

When the girls saw James watching them, they looked away nervously. Embarrassed, annoyed at himself for frightening them, he hurried on.

He made his way back to the river, and walked to a complicated pontoon bridge of seventeen barges.

And across that bridge he glimpsed the brooding pile of the castle of Triana. It was the headquarters of the Inquisition.

IV

IV

Before travelling to York, Harry returned to Oxford for a few days to put his affairs in order.