In one place where they stopped for the night, Marwam paid a farmer a few coins for them to pitch their blankets under the shade of fruit trees. Robert had never seen such fruit, heavy and bright. They were oranges, Moraima told him, an Arabic name for a fruit brought here by the Moors. She clambered up a trunk and picked a couple of samples, and showed him how to remove the thick peel. When he dug in his thumbs he squirted her with zest, and when he bit into the fat segments, juice gushed out and rolled down his chin. The orange was bitter, making his tongue curl, but the flavour was like light in his mouth.

So they ate their oranges, their faces plastered with sticky juice and zest, laughing at each other. It was a simple, wordless moment between the two of them which even the faithless camel driver couldn’t spoil.

V

V

At last the party came to Cordoba.

Approaching the walled kernel of the city, they passed through a hinterland of cultivated country. Farthest out estates sprawled, astonishingly green, with hanging gardens and citrus groves crowding the river banks, and with buildings like blocky jewels shining in the sun. These estates were like the villas of the long-gone Romans, Sihtric said. He called them munyas, country houses.

Then the old roads brought them through suburbs of the city itself, communities of mud-brick houses that jostled by the road. Sihtric said that the city had long outgrown its Roman walls, and many of its necessary functions had been transplanted out here: residential areas, markets, bathhouses, industry, gardens. Most of the buildings inside the city walls were official, such as palaces, a chancery, the mints, prisons.

But the place had seen better days. The travellers passed burned-out buildings, and even some grand estates looked abandoned. These wrecks were nothing to do with the Christian armies but were scars of the wars between Muslims. Cordoba was no longer a capital of anything, not even of its own destiny, for it had been absorbed into the rule of a taifa run out of another Moorish city called Seville.

As they neared the city, vendors of water sacks, meat on sticks, and even bits of sparkling jewellery crowded around the travellers. Beggars too pushed forward, holding up the stumps of severed arms, or stretching open hideous wounds on their faces. Old soldiers, perhaps, or refugees from the cities the Christians had occupied to the north.

At last Cordoba itself loomed before them, a walled forest of minarets and domes and cupolas. They approached a gate in the walls, one of seven. Traffic streamed through it, pedestrians, horses, mules, the camels towering over the rest.