Grace nodded. ‘And you do believe he is the figure predicted in Eadgyth’s Testament?’

‘Oh, yes.’

James said, ‘His father was a clothier, you said, friar. What kind of clothier?’

‘A weaver. This man is the son of a weaver. Just as your prophecy says.’

And James remembered the line: the spider’s spawn. The weaver of a web.

Abdul asked, ‘And if I may, what is his name?’

‘His Italian mother called him Cristoforo, his Portuguese wife Cristovao. In his workaday commercial Latin he is Christophorus. We in Spain must, I suppose, call him Cristobal.’

‘Christophorus. Christo ferens,’ said Grace slowly. ‘The Christ-bearer. And the surname?’

Ferron smiled, anticipating her reaction. ‘He will be called Colon here - Colombo in Genoa and Portugal - Columbus in Latin.’

Grace clapped her hands, delighted as a child. ‘Columbus - the Dove! Can it really be as simple as that? The spider-spawn, the Christ-bearer, the Dove - Christopher Columbus!’

But James, shocked, thought there was nothing simple about a four-hundred-year-old prophecy coming true.

Ferron said, ‘Well, it seems that all hinges on this man. Spain is drained by war; the monarchs won’t buy everything that is presented to them. If this man is funded to go west, they will not spend on your engines - as I am coming to believe they must, if the world’s final war is to be won. What we must do, then, is recruit this Dove, this Colon, to our cause. We must make him forget the western Ocean. We must make him long for the engines, and the glorious war to come.’

‘“And the Dove will fly east”,’ James breathed.

The mudejar Abdul was staring intently at Ferron, absorbing every word.

XIV

XIV

Abdul Ibn Ibrahim, a big, heavy-set man, his sailor’s face leathery and creased, would have looked out of place in London, Harry thought, even if it hadn’t been for the turban on his head. He had come to England to tell Harry and Geoffrey what he had learned of this man, this putative Dove, Cristobal Colon.

Colon had joined the court of the Spanish monarchs at Cordoba. ‘The monarchs have turned the capital of the caliphate, a city of scholarship, into an armed camp, the headquarters of their war on the Moors,’ Abdul said bleakly. ‘It is full of weapons shops, everywhere soldiers drink and whore, and in the shadow of the mosque drums beat, horses parade and the armies of the nobles stage mock battles . . .’