All of Jerusalem was spread out before him, the domes of its mosques and churches and the swarming of its many bazaars and suqs all crowded within the wreckage of the old walls. Faint voices called the Muslim faithful to prayer, and somewhere the bell of a Christian church tolled. To the east he could see the Dead Sea and the Jordan. To the west the Mediterranean gleamed. It was hard to believe that any of this would ever change, that he himself would ever grow old. And he felt uncomfortable with his mother’s talk of a long-dead boy.

‘I don’t like it when you say things like that,’ he said.

‘Like what?’

‘Like a poet. “Transient as a breath.” What does that mean?’

Joan sat wrapped in a loose white robe, with a scarf over her head to deflect the sunlight. While Saladin was dusky she was pale, her eyes blue, and the sun burned her easily. Saladin had heard it said that he looked as if he belonged here, but she did not, though the line of her ancestors since Robert the Wolf spanned a century and a half.

She was only thirty, he reminded himself. Her husband, his father, had died young, and she had worn herself out raising Saladin, and defending the family’s wealth and position in Jerusalem. He knew all that. But her earnestness made him impatient. He felt like a slab of muscle, restless and confined.

She sighed. ‘I’m trying to waken your soul, Saladin. Trying to give you a sense of the history in which we’re all embedded.’

‘Who cares about history? You can’t change history, you’re stuck with it. The future is all that matters.’

‘Dear Saladin. You’re just like your father, you know. His brain-pan was as hard as iron too. And he cared nothing for history either. But history shapes all our lives. The great currents of time have brought us here, you and I, to this hill over Jerusalem, far from the birthplaces of our ancestors - of Robert.

‘And what’s more it wasn’t until your father died, and I had to take responsibility for his business affairs, that I learned that all our family’s fortune is based on history - or rather our family’s strange knowledge of it, and of the future. Your father kept that from me. Soon you will need to learn the truth. Saladin understood history, and his place in it, you know,’ she said. ‘I mean the first Saladin the Saracen, your namesake. That was why he spared the Christian population when he took Jerusalem. It was a gesture which will cast a shadow across centuries.’

Saladin didn’t always appreciate bearing the name of a Saracen, even the greatest and most honourable. ‘Can we go back to the city now? You know how hot you get.’