Harry walked to the ledge. He was on the north side of the Alhambra, and below the wall the land fell away. To the north a glen opened up to reveal a river threading through a quilt of terraces, orchards and gardens. The city itself was laid out before him. The sun was setting now, and its light, low and turned red by the dusty air, painted the domes and towers pink. Looking beyond the city to the south he made out the angular peaks of the Sierra Nevada. In the shadows below the icecaps he saw the sparks of fires; he would learn that these were the fires of ice collectors, who travelled up into the mountains with their mules every afternoon, and clambered back down in the night. Thus the ice of the mountains cooled the palace of the emir all summer. A subtle mist rose from that river to the north, and the sounds seemed enhanced, so that Harry could make out a child’s laughter, the chime of bells, a guitar’s gentle music, and, from the heart of the city, the first wail of a muezzin.

As he stared, wide-eyed as a child, the man on the ledge smiled at him. He was perhaps fifty, with a broad weather-beaten face.

Harry, a little embarrassed, approached him. ‘You’re fishing,’ he said.

‘Indeed I am, with a hook baited with flies. I am angling for swallows. Fishing in the sky,’ said Abdul Ibn Ibrahim, and his grin widened.

IX

IX

Abdul’s office was a pretty room with a fine view, cluttered with scrolls and books and charts and heaps of scribbled-on parchment.

Here Harry and Abdul talked briefly of their lives.

They had little in common, Harry thought. Nearly twice Harry’s age, Abdul lived alone. For most of his life he had made a living at sea, a career recorded in his leathery face. But he was a navigator, perhaps strictly an astronomer, not a sailor or a trader. He showed Harry a trophy of those days. It was an astrolabe, a kind of map of the sky compressed down onto a sheet of brass, exquisitely made. It was descended from gadgets devised to show the faithful the correct direction for prayer.

Harry was intrigued to hear that in his youth, some decades ago, Abdul had served on the mysterious Chinese treasure ships that had once plied the Indian Ocean and beyond; Moorish and Arab navigators had always been prized by the Chinese.

Abdul had done well, and by the age of forty-five had been able to retire, ‘to tend my garden’, he said. But when open hostilities had broken out between the emir and the Christian monarchs he had come to the palace to work for the viziers. ‘For this is a struggle for survival,’ he told Harry.