‘Really.’ Saladin got up abruptly. ‘I’ve got things to do. Find me when you’d like your tour of the walls, Brother Thomas. Mother.’ He nodded to Joan, and walked out.

‘I would apologise,’ Joan sighed. ‘But he’s always like this.’

‘I sense he has a good heart.’

‘And a strong soul,’ she said. ‘He’ll do what’s right.’ She glanced again at her letter from Cordoba. ‘Although I pray we will all find the way to do that.’

IX

IX

Heading south-west along the bank of the Guadalquivir, Subh’s caravan slowly moved out of the hinterland of Cordoba, with its sprawling farms and market gardens and groves of orange trees. The country broadened to an immense plain, the horizon obscured by a ghostly heat shimmer. It was an arid, open, severe land, littered with ruined forts like the hulks of wrecked ships.

Peter imagined it must be easy enough to get lost out here, on a land as vast and flat and featureless as an ocean. But not long after leaving the city they passed another mule train going the other way. The muleteers greeted each other noisily. In this sea of sand the muleteers were the navigators and the captains, stitching together the country with their endless journeying. And the muleteers sang, wailing muezzin-like melodies with earthy words in a rough Arabic. The songs were not so much long as open-ended, as one driver after another added a verse to an already complicated saga. So compelling were the choruses, so simple the melodies, that it was impossible not to join in, and the steady rhythm of the songs chimed with the pounding of the mules’ hooves.

Peter, fanciful, found himself admiring the stoical simplicity of such a life. He envied the muleteers their sinewy strength, their obvious comfort on the rolling backs of their mules. To be bound into such a monkish routine, to learn to be able to do at least one thing exceptionally well, would itself be a kind of devotion. But he knew he could not bear such an elemental existence, not when there were cities full of books waiting to be read, a universe of philosophies to be contemplated.

And he was not so naïve as to idealise the muleteers’ life. They were all heavily armed, with knives, swords and cudgels, and none of the caravans was small enough to be vulnerable to attack by the pirates of this desert sea. The shifting frontier line between Christendom and Islam made this a dangerous country to travel, and it was well known that refugees from the lost Moorish cities, always streaming south, were easy targets for killers, rapists and thieves. Subh had taken care to plan against such a calamity for her party.