Subh was devastated. ‘By Allah. But that means that Moraima’s child, my distant grandfather, was three-quarters Christian. And by a brute of a crusader like Robert! No, no, it couldn’t be worse. And to think I mocked that fool Alonso for the impurity of his blood!’

Peter said, ‘All this was generations ago.’

She got up and paced, her movements hard, full of anger. ‘You don’t understand what it’s like here, where Christianity rubs up against Islam. We are polarised. I have pinned my entire identity on my descent from the vizier. Nobody has heard of Sihtric, nobody cared about him. But if the vizier’s granddaughter bore the bastard child of a notorious crusader, I am ruined in this city.’

‘No one need know,’ Peter said helplessly.

She laughed at him. ‘Alonso will learn. He can afford better scholars than you, Peter. So that’s that. I must flee Cordoba after all - and we may get a chance to explore Seville sooner than you expected.’ She glanced at the angle of the sun. ‘I have much to do. Scholar, find yourself a servant. Any of them will do. Have a room made up. We should still write to this Joan of the Outremer. Draft something for me, will you? Now you must excuse me. Ashmet? Ashmet!’

She stalked indoors, leaving Peter on the patio with the orange drink, and the dried fruit, and his pack with his notes.

VI

VI

It was a deep shock to Saladin of Jerusalem to learn, from what Brother Thomas related of Peter’s letter to Colchester, that Robert the Wolf, hero of the First Crusade, his family’s saintly forebear, should be tainted by a liaison with Moraima, a Moorish girl.

‘Now maybe you see what he had to run away from,’ Joan said. ‘All the way to the Holy Land—’

‘Don’t talk like that. Robert took the Cross. He didn’t run anywhere.’ Saladin got up, dusted off his leggings, and walked down the hill to the horses.

‘I knew you’d react like this. You really are such a pious prig! But you don’t need to worry,’ his mother said, as she got up more stiffly. ‘He tupped this girl, then left her in al-Andalus. He married your distant ancestress later, and she was a respectable Christian; there can be no blood of Muslim ancestry in you.’ And she added, so softly he wasn’t sure if she had spoken at all, ‘Not from Moraima, anyway . . . Come. We must prepare for the arrival of Brother Thomas.’

VII

VII

So Subh, descendant of a vizier, abandoned Cordoba, once the capital of a caliphate.