Opposing them was Hernando de Talavera, once Isabel’s confessor and still the court’s principal theologian, and his party of sea captains, geographers and astronomers, and a few clerics. While de Marchena had always supported Colon, Talavera had opposed his case just as steadfastly since he had first presented it six long years ago. Over the years, as Colon refused to give up and disappear, Talavera had grown steadily more exasperated, and was now quite determined Colon would never get his ships.

And, sitting in the front row of courtiers, there was Diego Ferron, who campaigned for Colon to become, not an admiral of the Ocean Sea, but a general of the final war with Islam, leading forces equipped with Grace’s Engines of God. Ferron had Moorish attendants with him: a slim, dark woman wearing a jewelled veil, and a servant girl who sat silently at his feet, face covered by her veil, even her eyes invisible. It seemed strange to Harry that this man who was arguing for the violent destruction of Islam should have Muslim servants, but these were the last days of Granada, and Boabdil, cornered and compromised, was lavish in his gifts of people as well as objects to the court of the monarchs.

Harry stared at Ferron, but he would not look back. After Agnes’s destruction of the engines there was only hatred between the two camps, he thought, a hatred that could surely only end with the destruction of one or other of them - and, perhaps, of Agnes.

Now a shiver of excitement ran around the crowded room. Harry looked around.

A man strode boldly into the room. He was dressed in a long black robe like a monk’s habit, and he carried a bundle of maps and books under his arm. He was tall, and his swept-back hair was almost pure white, with at the temples traces of a vanishing russet red. His brow was broad, and his imposing face was dominated by a strong nose; his skin was somewhat freckled, a sea-farer’s face, and his eyes were grey-green - the colour of the ocean, Harry thought. He looked like a Roman senator, a revenant from a grander age than this. Yet there was anxiety in his sea-green eyes as he fumbled to lay out his charts and books on a table before de Santangel. Some of the courtiers even laughed. And, Harry thought, looking at that shock of white hair, though he was only just forty years old he was already growing old in the pursuit of his single dream.

In all the long years Harry had been tracking his career, this was the first time he had seen the man in the flesh. This was Cristobal Colon, Christophorus Columbus, a man who seemed to Harry to have been made flesh from the flimsy fragments of prophecies and augurs written down centuries before he had been born. A man about whom history pivoted.