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She shook her head. ‘My parents took what we had. My grandmother had a few coins, but when she was dying I spent the last of those on a bit of water.’

‘Yet you must eat,’ Ibrahim said. ‘Yet you must drink. How did you pay him?’

She glanced at Ali Gurdu, and looked down at her baby, clearly ashamed.

‘Well, I think that’s clear enough,’ Ibrahim said, not bothering to hide his disgust. ‘Food for sex, Ali Gurdu? Is that the game?’

Ali Gurdu looked defiant. ‘You could call it pity. I mean, look at her. Skin and bone. Who would want her?’ He slammed one fat fist into another. ‘But it’s still theft, that’s the top and bottom of it. So what are you going to do about it, “vizier to the vizier”?’

Ibrahim’s thirst raged, though there were hours to endure before his next sip of his water ration. He felt fouled by this grubby case, like so many others he had had to deal with.

It was all the fault of the Christians. The Castilians had lain siege around the city in the spring, when King Fernando had assembled a fleet of ships from the coastal waters, forced his way up the Guadalquivir and rammed the pontoon bridge. Thus, after years of pressure, Fernando had at last bottled the city up. As spring gave way to the usual ferocious summer, disease, famine, and worst of all drought had afflicted the city. Fernando seemed content to wait it out, even as his own men dropped of drought and fever. Once there had been rumours of a relieving force coming from Granada. But that
taifa’s
ruler Muhammad Abu Alahmar, concerned above all to secure his own position, submitted to King Fernando and actually
joined in
the siege against his fellow Muslims in Seville.

Sometimes Ibrahim wondered grimly how it would be if the siege never lifted. Would Ibrahim and those like him be forced to administer the death of an entire city, down to the last man, the last child, the last dog and cat?

But meanwhile, today, he had Ali Gurdu and this child-mother Obona to deal with. He glanced at Ibn Shaprut’s stern face, seeking guidance.

‘Here is my decision. Ali Gurdu, you have a certain usefulness. Men like you, with your grafting and your greed, actually enforce the rationing. You’re dribbling out your stock, bit by bit. If you gave it all away there would be a riot, it would be gone in a day, and we’d be a lot worse off.’

‘You need me, do you?’ Ali Gurdu scoffed.

‘But there are limits. We are not like the Christians. We are civilised people, despite the emergency. And if I find you step beyond those limits again, I will impound whatever stock you have left, and I will punish you as I see fit.’ He leaned forward. ‘Have a care, Ali Gurdu. It will be a different story for men like you when the siege is lifted.’

But Ibrahim thought the worst irony was that if the Christians did take the city, Ali Gurdu might have made himself wealthy enough from the misery of others to be able to buy his way to safety.

‘And,’ Ali Gurdu said, ‘what of her?’

Ibrahim glanced at the wretched girl. ‘How would it help anybody if this child was punished?’

‘She is a thief!’

Ibrahim said to the girl, ‘Well, he’s right. You must pay this man back.’

‘How can I do that?’

‘Catch a rat,’ Ibrahim said. ‘And don’t go to him again, next time you’re hungry. Try these people. They are kinder.’ He took his wooden pen and scribbled an address on a scrap of old paper and gave it to her. ‘Now get out of my sight, both of you.’

He scratched his pen across the case notes and put the parchment aside. Then he stood, stretched, and glanced out of the window at a sky like an oven. He longed for the blessed cool of evening - at least nature lifted its siege, once a day. But Ibrahim’s own long day was not done yet.

‘Right. That’s that. Who’s next?’

On the parched plain before the walls of Seville, Saladin woke inside his leather tent.

Hanse had died during the night. It had been the fever, of course. Hanse had fallen asleep coughing and puking. Now he was a shapeless, unmoving lump under his sweat-sodden cloak.

And Saladin had slept in a tent with a dead man. With a sudden terror he pushed his way out into the open air, panting.

The sun was still low, but Saladin could already feel its heat on his face. The camp of the Christian army stretched away all around him. Horses wandered apathetically between the rows of tents, and cross-bearing pennants hung limply over a land long stripped of anything edible.

Inside Seville, the muezzins were calling. The pinkish light of day, scattered through the dust rising from the desiccated landscape, reflected from the city walls.

Near the tent, Michael sat cross-legged before the remnants of the night’s fire, resting his back on a heap of weapons and chain-mail coats. He was sipping a cup of water and eating dry rice. ‘This isn’t so bad for soldiering,’ Michael said in his coarse shopkeeper’s Latin. ‘Not so bad.’

Saladin sat heavily beside him. ‘What do you mean, not so bad? Hanse’s
dead.
Is that his rice?’

Michael grinned and finished off the food. ‘Well, he won’t be needing it, will he?’

Saladin reached for the flask that contained the last of yesterday’s water. There was hardly any left. He felt unreasonably resentful that a third of it had been wasted on a man now dead.

They sat without speaking.

When he had taken the Cross - he wore it proudly on his sleeve even now - and volunteered for Fernando’s army, Saladin had joined a company formed from many nations, Christian warriors drawn here from across Europe by the Pope’s granting of crusader indulgences - that and the chance to liven up your life by cracking a few Muslim heads. Hanse and Michael were typical, Hanse, blond and a bit frail, from the Low Countries, Michael from England.

It had been curious for Saladin to come up against the Moorish armies, the elite warriors with their quilted light armour, the hard-eyed horsemen from the desert. They were not much like the Saracen troops he had witnessed in the Outremer. Brother Thomas had told him that the Moors of Spain had absorbed the traditions of those who went before them; there were echoes of the post-Roman Visigoths in their cavalry and their colour.

But there had been no serious fighting for months, not since the spring when the siege had been set. There had been deaths among Fernando’s forces, a steady stream of fatalities from drought, accident, and especially the plagues that coursed through the polyglot army. It didn’t matter much to the generals, Michael said. There were always more volunteers willing to come and join an army on the brink of victory, trickling here from across Spain, indeed across Christendom. And a smart general always factored in the likelihood of losing a proportion of his army to disease. You planned for it, said Michael.

It wasn’t really a surprise that Hanse was the first of the three of them to succumb, for he had fried in the Spanish sun. Michael, though, had darkened, his face turning leathery. Saladin wondered if he had a bit of Trojan blood in him, for it was said that it had been Trojans who were the first to colonise England.

‘He had been talking of joining King Louis,’ Michael said now. ‘Hanse, I mean.’ King Louis of France was generally believed to be the most pious and accomplished crusader king since Richard the Lionheart. ‘Louis is sailing about now, for Cyprus, then on to Egypt.’

‘He should have gone,’ Saladin said. ‘Better than this, sitting around in your own filth for month after month.’

‘Maybe. Well, the poor bastard has missed out.’

‘On what?’

‘The city, when we get into it. They know some tricks, these Saracen women.’

‘They are Moors, not Saracens.’

‘The emir’s whores are the best, if you can get hold of one the other lads haven’t been up first. They’ll know some tricks.’ He laughed lazily. ‘If the emir hasn’t eaten his women by now. Try to find a whore without a bite taken out of her tits, ha ha!’

‘I thought you said Moors eat babies.’

‘Everybody knows that. But they’ll have scoffed them all down by now, mate.’

Michael had never, in fact, met a Muslim in his life, save for a few mudejar farmers who had fled at the advance of the Christian army south from Cordoba. He knew nothing of Islam save the name. And yet here he was participating in a world-wide war against it.

Saladin had learned not to express such thoughts. He had had a difficult enough time being accepted by these western Christians without coming across as a Moorish sympathiser.

Their sergeant came by. He was a blunt-spoken Englishman called George, whose father had once fought with Richard the Lionheart, or so he claimed. He carried a big water flask, and an armed soldier watched his back to make sure none was stolen. ‘Daily ration for you two arseholes,’ he said, pouring the water out into their own flask. He glanced around. ‘Where’s the other arsehole? Pulling his cock?’

‘He’s dead,’ Saladin said. ‘He’s a dead arsehole.’

‘What, the sickness?’

‘I think so.’

‘Fair enough. Take him over there.’ He pointed to a site near the base of the city walls where units of the army were gathering.

‘Why?’ Saladin asked.

‘New orders. Captain says we’re to catapult any dead arseholes over the wall. Let the Moors get the benefit of it.’

Michael laughed. ‘They’ll probably eat him. Poor old Hanse. He came a long way to be eaten by a starving Saracen whore.’

‘Just do it,’ the sergeant said, and he moved on.

It took the two of them to shift Hanse out of the tent, Michael at his shoulders, Saladin at his feet. Hanse’s guts had emptied before he died. His tunic was crusted with vomit, and pale shit dribbled out of his trousers when they lifted him. What a waste of water, Saladin thought. He tried not to touch Hanse’s flesh, or the shit.

‘This isn’t so bad,’ Michael said, grunting as he worked.

XXV

Each day, in the middle of the afternoon, Subh visited Ibrahim at the palace. They were in a city under siege; Ibrahim wanted to be sure his mother was safe, and insisted on seeing her daily. As he was too busy to go to her, she came to him.

Today he found her with Peter, sitting in a well-appointed room that opened onto a broad patio. It was cool in the oven heat of the city. Save only for the loss of the fountain’s trickling sound - the fountains had all been dry for months - the room was as it had been for centuries, and the light reflected from the carved stonework washed over Subh’s cream-softened skin. She didn’t look as if she had been affected by the long months of the siege at all. ‘Such a beautiful place,’ she said. ‘What do you think will happen if the Christians do take the city, Ibrahim? Will they smash up this place? Will all this be lost?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Ibrahim said. ‘They’re Christians, but not utter barbarians. I hear Fernando is already employing mudejar artisans. Perhaps they will continue to use the palace. They may renovate it, even extend it. Where else in Seville is fit for a king?’

Peter nodded. ‘It’s more beautiful than anything Christians could build.’

Ibrahim was faintly revolted by the way he disparaged his own culture. In the six years since he had met her Peter had truly become a creature of Subh, subsumed by her more powerful personality.

‘But the Christians may disapprove of our decadence,’ Subh said. ‘They can be stern, these Christians. And we like our luxuries! Speaking of which, you should treat yourself a little more, Ibrahim. You look like a ghost. I told you, you should ignore your own silly rules and eat what you need.’

‘I can’t break the rationing I myself administer.’

She snorted. ‘The common herd can die off and nobody will miss them.
You
are important, and deserve keeping alive.’

‘As you are important, I suppose, Mother,’ he said. ‘And this Christian whelp of yours.’

Peter was indignant. ‘I resent that. I don’t have to be here. I could just walk out and surrender to Fernando’s forces. I only need take my turban off to look like a Christian again.’

‘Then why are you here?’

Peter smiled. ‘How could I leave when the project is so close to fruition?’

‘Ah. Your mysterious engines.’

‘We have some news about that, Ibrahim,’ Subh said. ‘Something to distract you from your grubbing around in this city of the dead and dying.’

Ibrahim glared. ‘I’m too busy for riddles. Just tell me what you mean.’

‘The thunder-mouth,’ the scholar said, ‘is ready. My men are hauling it up onto the walls even now. You need to come and see it, Ibrahim.’

Ibrahim was unimpressed, and no doubt it showed in his face.

Subh snapped, ‘You disapprove. How typical of you. What if we are saved through
my
vision, Ibrahim, you toiler, you ant? How will that make you feel?’ She turned away from him.

‘Just come and see it,’ Peter urged gently.

Saladin was astonished when plump old Thomas Busshe came riding down from Cordoba to see him in the camp.

‘You want to be careful, brother,’ Michael said to Thomas, laughing. ’Fernando’s soldiers will eat that mule for you if you don’t keep an eye on it. And if the Saracens get hold of you they’ll eat
you.’

Thomas glanced at him, gasping with exertion. ‘My son, in Seville they are Moors, not Saracens.’

‘Same thing.’ Michael went back to stirring the thick broth of root vegetables, rice and unidentifiable meat that bubbled slowly in the pot on the fire.

Thomas sat on the ground beside Saladin with a thump that sent dust flying up from his mule-blanket. His habit, heavy wool that was completely unsuitable for the climate, was caked with dust and mud and sweat.

‘You made a hazardous journey, brother,’ Saladin said, offering him his water cup. ‘The country is not yet subdued. And this, after all, is a siege.’

‘So I was advised. But your mother in Cordoba insisted I come to see you.’ He accepted a sip of water gratefully.