Walking in from the Christian army camp they passed a complex of buildings, arched roofs and domes, sheltering in the lee of the smashed city walls. It turned out to be a bathhouse; a marshy, steamy stink lingered in the air around it. The baths were working; on a squat tower the donkey patiently turned its wheel, watched by a Moorish boy with a switch, drawing up river-water to be fed via a slender aqueduct into the baths. Today the men who filed through its rooms were Christian soldiers, but the women who went with them were all Moorish. James wondered how many of them had a choice.

James and Grace made their way over the bridge across the gorge. The bridge was battered, but it had survived the bombardment. The gorge’s walls loomed above them, and James peered up curiously. The limestone was cracked vertically and horizontally, heaped up in tremendous blocks as big as houses.

They clambered up steep cobbled paths into the city itself. Squeezed onto its table-top of rock and hemmed in by its walls, Ronda was cramped and crammed. The bombards’ shot had created great splashes of shattered stone, as if immense raindrops had fallen from the sky. There was a prevailing stink of rot and raw sewage, even a week after the water supply had been restored. Soldiers worked, picking through the rubble, searching for bodies, pocketing anything worth stealing. No Moors were about. The soldiers said that everybody was either dead, fled or hiding.

With Grace leading the way they cut through the centre of the town, heading for the cliffs on the north-western side. The warren of streets was studded with fine houses, mosques and bazaars.

They came at last to the western boundary of the city, where the town simply came to an abrupt end, for the plateau on which it had been built fell away in columnar limestone cliffs. James looked down over a flood plain, a land of farms and orchards through which a river snaked lazily. It was all so far below him it was like staring down at a vast map. But much of the land was brown or black, the crops and trees burned out, and sluggish threads of smoke rose to pollute the heavy air.

And as he reached the very edge of the cliff James stepped into an updraught of warm air, blowing strongly from the ground below. Down there in the valley a breeze was blowing, but when it reached the vertical cliff face the moving air, with nowhere else to go, washed upwards in an unending invisible stream to ruffle the cloak of a curious English friar. For a heartbeat he was able to lose himself in simple wonder at this unexpected physical phenomenon, a fragment of the rich beauty of God’s creation.

Then Grace plucked at his arm. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you heard the cheering? There she is . . .’